The Woman in Silk

by R. J. Gadney

  “Because it’s gone.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Someone’s taken it.”

  “Who?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  “Those two?”

  “Maybe.”

  “For God’s sake. You must call the police.”

  “Think so? They’ll never get through the snow. Anyway, I’ve no proof they took it.”

  Eyes wide, she sat immobile, frozen like a forest creature. “I’m scared, Hal.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m frightened of what I can’t see. Frightened of what’s going to happen to us … Can’t we go downstairs, make some coffee?”

  “No. We should stay here. Near Sumiko and Yukio. We don’t want to risk encountering the others.”

  She looked defeated. “Don’t leave me, Hal.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “Sure they won’t come in here?”

  He shivered. “I’m not sure of anything.”

  “Anyway, there’s two of us. The bed’s warm. Lock the door.”

  “It hasn’t got a lock.”

  His fingertips felt gently around every one of those IEDs in Helmand, cautiously, tenderly. Her waist. Her curves. Her erection. Her hips. Across the mounds. Into the shadows of valleys he couldn’t see.

  Maybe it’s the risk involved … Something induces the rush of adrenalin—I’m an addict. I’m addicted to fear. Maybe that’s my good luck.

  Two and a half hours later there was a beating on the door.

  58

  She didn’t stir in his arms when he turned his head to check the time. The clock on his bedside table said 3:25.

  Neither did she wake when he left the bed and opened the door to find Sumiko in her pajamas staring at him wide-eyed with fear.

  “I’ve been looking for you. I don’t like that noise,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. It’s only the wind.”

  She shivered. “That noise,” she said. “Listen—”

  “What is it?”

  Yukio moaned: “Mommy? I’m frightened.”

  “Come here.”

  Yukio ran to her mother’s open arms. “It’s horrible.”

  “It’s nothing to be frightened of,” Hal said.

  “Listen. The tolling bell.”

  “It’s stopped.”

  “Was I dreaming?” Sumiko said.

  “Perhaps. You two stay put,” he said. “Try and sleep.”

  “I’ll stay with Yukio,” she said.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.” He stroked her forehead. “Sweet dreams.”

  “You too,” said Sumiko.

  He watched her close the door.

  He couldn’t sleep.

  The Great Bell was tolling; irregularly reverberating: rocking slowly; the steel clapper swinging against the rim.

  Tuneless persistent thudding: muffled summons to the unfaithful: mocking the early hours of Christmas Eve: enticing him to discover what preternatural imbalance in the mechanism had occurred.

  59

  Shortly after four in the morning he went to his own room, dressed hurriedly in cold-weather clothes, took a flashlight and picklock with him and headed for the stairs down to the Great Hall.

  From there it only was a short walk through the cold dark passages to the northern entrance of the Bell Tower.

  The doors stood part open. Beside them was a painted notice, red on white:

  DANGER. UNSAFE STRUCTURE. DO NOT PASS THIS POINT.

  The tower was constructed in brickwork, cast iron and limestone cladding. Its foundations were sunk to a considerable depth. Narrow flights of stairs spiraled to the top.

  Cold mist exaggerated the otherworldliness of the strange sound from the rim of the bell high above him.

  He tilted his head back and peered into the motionless veils of whitish gloom, watching the beam of his flashlight swallowed by the murk. He heard a distant thump overhead; the faintest rattle, perhaps a chain; a slight and distressing almost human screeching, and began to climb the spiral staircase.

  A voice above him chanted: “And behold, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been butchered in the shed, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.”

  His gloved hand felt wet against the iced surface of the curving mahogany handrail.

  Round-and-round. Twisting. Rotating. Step-after-step, up-and-up, one-after-another. The onset of dizziness forced him to lose his balance.

  “And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying: Come and see.”

  He gripped the handrail fiercely.

  His father was singing:

  And when ye come, and all the flow’rs are dying

  If I am dead, as dead I well may be

  in time to the sound of his shoes on the stone steps:

  —gedung … gedung … gedung.

  His fingertips tingled.

  Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying

  And kneel and say an “Ave” there for me.

  Thin layers of ice fractured and splintered beneath his feet.

  His breathing grew labored, his mind closer to panic. He was drawn to peer over the banisters into the abyss hidden beneath the layer of mist.

  He felt a ringing sensation in his ears; he was losing his sense of balance, the control of his equilibrium. His head was dizzy: The Towers’ walls were spinning counterclockwise.

  He sat down heavily on a stair and gasped for breath.

  He had no idea how long he’d been climbing the spiral staircase: he could only guess that by now he must have completed three-quarters of the climb.

  Bent low, steadying himself against the handrails, he climbed on slowly.

  —gedung … gedung

  Narrow vertical windows let in a bluish light from the snowbound landscape. The faint light blended with the brightness of the flashlight as he reached the top of the spiral staircase.

  There, above him, surrounded by a network of warped timber planks that had once been repairmen’s scaffolding, hung the bell, glistening and squat. Its clapper, pendulous and weighty.

  The clapper seemed to have been wrapped in cloth sheets for preservation. It bulged and he saw what his mind told him to believe: hanging branches. Only they were metal and rusted. The branches became tangled wires. The branches were twisted remnants of an old TV aerial.

  He refused to believe the repugnant disfigurement staring him in the face. His eyes contracted involuntarily; the crushing pain squeezed out tears. His blood heaved up from inside his chest and heart and he felt a tightness in his arteries.

  He was staring into dead and bulging eyes with broken blood vessels. Into ears filled with blood.

  Not for a single moment can you afford to think of the victim as a person.

  Tears and rage can’t be allowed to get the better of you. If the terrible wounds scare you then fear will gnaw your heart. If it gets to your heart and head you will weep in the watch hours of the night and see visions.

  He was looking—not seeing: he was looking at a corpse.

  60

  It had been trussed in industrial tape, electric cable wires; then wrapped in cotton shrouds. One leg was taped to the body. Yet another, like an insect’s, hung loose. The monstrous thing was held in place by the lengths of TV aerial poles, the rods serving as splints. It was tied to the clapper dangling from the bell: hanging directly above the drop to the floor below shrouded in those veils of mist.

  Inch by inch, he clambered up the creaking scaffold, testing the doubtful strength of each precarious bending plank, adjusting his balance, praying the whole structure wouldn’t suddenly collapse and send him hurtling to the floor far below.

  Settling his flashlight on a ledge, he reached out to touch the shrouded brownish bundle.

  A single length of rope was tied beneath i
ts scrawny neck. But the face was out of his immediate vision; he tried to turn it toward him, very gently swiveling the thing around. It clanked the bell’s rim and produced a deathly ding-dong-clang.

  He couldn’t see the face. Or maybe his conscious mind was jamming his signals of recognition.

  His fingers reached out to touch the waxy translucence of the facial skin: he looked into a sunken eye. The cornea was milky white, like cloudy marble; only slivers of its eyeball were visible, as if it had rolled up backward inside the head.

  The lopsided mouth hung open, fixed in a silent scream; its scabrous lips parched, small brownish pointed teeth protruding like a rat’s, the grotesque bloodied opening emanating bacterial and fecal odors.

  Beginning to loosen the clumsy knots, prying them apart with the picklock, he realized the corpse was giving off slight warmth. Death could have occurred only a few hours before.

  Rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body muscles, begins between two and four hours after death. The corpse’s neck and jaw were already rigid. After some eight to twelve hours the whole process of rigor mortis would be complete. Complete rigor then starts to disappear between eighteen to thirty-six hours later. After forty-eight to sixty hours it’s gone. Back to normal dead.

  He slid his hands beneath the legs; without rigor, they were warm. Death must have taken place less than three hours before: at about the time, say, he and Sophie began to make love.

  He succeeded in heaving the corpse near enough to the edge of the scaffold, allowing him to rest it on a timber platform projecting into the darkness and to continue cutting and jerking aside the industrial tape.

  Gradually, he settled its weight on the platform and drew it free from its constraints; tearing the shrouds as he jerked the lengths of tape away.

  As he did so, the clapper swung away from him, creaking for a second as it swung; then hammered the bell to produce a boom. The report caused the scaffold to shudder and vibrate and go on vibrating.

  He hung on for dear life: one arm straining over a wooden rail; his other around the dead bundle which swung and tilted away from him like some elongated ghoul in a daemonic dance of death.

  The clanging faded and he prepared for the descent. His mind was seized, not by the proximity of the hideous load he was raising, trying to balance its weight across his shoulders—No. The bundle was light enough, its spine arched.

  No. It wasn’t the strain this fireman’s lift imposed: it was its smell.

  You can’t imagine the smell of the freshly dead. You never forget it. People don’t tell you how your loved ones smell in death. You smell it; or you don’t. It’s the smell of terror, sheer terror, virginal, unadulterated terror.

  Up to this very moment, in the early hours of Christmas Eve, up the Bell Tower, his brain and all his senses had in part refused to tell him what he was seeing and smelling. No. No. I am in the wrong place. The barrier of fear bore a notice:

  BLOCKED

  His neck stiffened violently. Something was stabbing his olfactory nerves.

  His sense of smell said:

  ANSWER

  What am I smelling?

  LAVENDER

  The swaddling clothes around the corpse smelled of lavender.

  At the end of the dangling arm a sharp object was stabbing the side of his ribcage.

  A platinum and diamond cocktail watch with blue steel hands.

  He lowered himself, sat for a moment on a stair, and shone the flashlight at the tiny wrist.

  His mother’s ruby and fourteen-diamond cluster ring made by Cartier.

  The gemstone: a 3.96-carat maroon-red Burmese star ruby.

  He heard moans and realized they were his own—

  “Is anybody there? Is anybody there? Your mother is the dog.”

  Step after step

  down

  and

  down

  probing the darkness with the tips of his cold-

  weather boots

  brick sediment and rat shit

  The combination of probing, edging downward, telling himself to keep control of himself, the cold, iced slime, the extreme nervous tension: all of it made him retch.

  He looked at his hands and saw them shaking with distressing violence. I can’t bloody keep them still.

  Then he dropped the flashlight.

  And heard it roll down the stairs.

  There was a second’s silence before it struck the floor below and a fierce light blinded him.

  The doors to the Bell Tower must have been opened, sucking in the cutting wind.

  Still his heart lurched and pounded in his ribcage to the beat of his descending steps—gedung-gedung-gedung.

  His forehead seemed to swell, the veins tightening unendurably; and he felt again that vertiginous dizziness and the sudden impulse to lash out with his fists; but the strength in his arms and hands was exhausted. His thoughts in turmoil, he couldn’t understand what was happening to him.

  The darkness concealed shadowy figures watching him.

  He fell to his knees like a prizefighter in the ring unable to withstand further punishment and felt himself losing consciousness.

  He sensed spectral faces looking down at him. Powerful hands seized his wrists.

  Firm hands lifted the weight from his shoulders without tenderness.

  61

  The needle found the vastus lateralis muscle on the outer edge of his thigh between the knee and hip bone.

  As the chaos and the panic lessened somewhat I turned my mind to the collection of forensic evidence from the bloodstained clothing, the collection of body parts and smashed equipment to establish the trail of evidence leading to the hated bomb-makers, the shit-faced owners of the workshops and the evil little explosives smugglers.

  The hand gripped him around the neck, the bone of the forearm tightening against his larynx.

  “There-there,” the voice said softly. “Didn’t hurt, did it?”

  62

  The nurse said:

  “Demons and souls in fire in clouds of smoke. Like they’d been struck by a bomb in the desert. Crying out in pain. Like animals. Dead dogs and cats.

  “So Mother had me cradle and cuddle Priscilla in her lap. Like she was Jesus. And she says there needs to be another death, another hanging from the bell. The Bell Tower being a place of execution.

  “It’s prophesied.

  “It’s Holy Writ.

  “There’ll be a sacrifice to rid the demons here.”

  63

  The clock by his bedside said 9:00. Twenty minutes after sunrise.

  He awoke painfully aware of nagging anxiety. The comfort of the bed was skin deep, its protective warmth inadequate.

  The walls of the room seemed to have tilted. In the mirror the landscape was reflected like a mirage. Long blue shadows fell across the snowy moorland hollows and rises of the snowdrifts.

  The wind sent powdered snow streaming from the small summits, sucking them from the shadows for darker shadows to swallow. Garish, like an illustration from a winter package holiday brochure, the sunrise had been tarted up with Pentel colors, smeared with lavender and rouged; the snow land as barren as the Helmand landscape, the frozen heather harboring creatures unseen.

  His eyes cleared and he saw Sumiko smile.

  “How are you feeling?”

  The events of a few hours before began to unfurl in his mind. “What did they do with my mother?”

  “Sorry?”

  “My mother—where is she?”

  “It was Akitoki. He’d gone completely mad.”

  “Where’s the body?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Haven’t they told you what happened?”

  “Yes, of course. They found you in the Bell Tower. You could have died. Why did you go there?”

  “Why I went there doesn’t matter. I found my mother’s body—they murdered her.”

  “You’re imagining things. Please. They found you. You, no one else. No one else was there.”<
br />
  “Who found me—was it Francesca?”

  “Francesca and Sister Teresa along with a man from the village, MacCullum.”

  “MacCullum, what’s MacCullum doing here?”

  “They needed to take you to hospital. You’re not well, Hal. MacCullum’s the only person who could get out here through the snow to ferry you to the hospital in Carlisle. Then Sister Vale decided it would better you stay here. With me.”

  He pushed aside the bedclothes and sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed. “MacCullum too, eh? Those bastards killed my mother.”

  “Hal. Calm down. You’re hallucinating. You haven’t been taking your medication.”

  “Where’s Sophie?”

  “Downstairs. There’s a meeting in an hour.”

  “What meeting?”

  “With your solicitor and some other people. Thank God you didn’t injure yourself. They thought—”

  She stopped abruptly, caught her breath, thinking better of what she was about to say.

  “They thought—thought what?”

  “You’d tried to commit suicide.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t want to believe you tried to kill yourself.”

  “What the hell are they talking about? They’re trying to scare you.”

  “They don’t have to try.”

  “I’m getting rid of them.”

  “And go back to Headley Court?”

  “Headley Court’s one thing. They are another. As soon as I can fix it they’re out of here.”

  “There’s the meeting. They need you there.”

  “You’ve spoken to Sophie?”

  “We introduced ourselves. You’re right; she’s a good person. Very fond of you.”

  “She told you about what happened in the Bell Tower?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Listen, Sumiko, you must believe me.” He fought back tears. “They must have kept my mother here … a living skeleton … a demented, pitiful soul.”