The Woman in Silk

by R. J. Gadney

  She put her arms around him. “You’re exhausted, Hal.” She kissed his cheek. “You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

  He stared at her in silence.

  “Now,” she said, “if you do what I tell you, there are lots of things we have to talk about. And—”

  “And what?”

  “I have a special Christmas present for you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tomorrow. Christmas Day.”

  “I’ll do what you tell me, Sumiko. Leave the practicalities to me. Only, I won’t go on about it now—but did Sophie tell you everything that happened in the night?”

  “Why should she?”

  “She must know the truth.”

  “If she does, she feels no need to tell me about it.”

  “Please go and fetch her.”

  “Now?”

  “Please fetch Sophie. Tell her I insist she see me. It’s urgent.” He got up unsteadily. “Don’t say anything about what I’ve told you … about my mother.”

  “Be careful, Hal. They gave you a very powerful sedative.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m becoming immune to powerful bloody sedatives. What I’m not immune to is my own people destroying themselves. Fetch Sophie. And hurry.”

  64

  “I was there at the crematorium,” Sophie said. “I was there when we scattered her ashes in the Moster Lees churchyard over your father’s grave. The Vicar was there. Ryker and Betsy MacCullum. Warren. Teresa, Francesca, the Schmidt-Kingsleys. Dr. Mackle and his wife along with WPC MacQuillan.”

  “We saw her in the cellars, Sophie.”

  “We saw a spirit. A body-out-of-body.”

  “There’s no such thing. Listen to me—in the early hours of this morning I carried the dog’s corpse down the spiral staircase of the Bell Tower. It was wearing my mother’s jewelry.”

  “There were no witnesses, Hal.”

  “Other than the nurses and, I daresay, MacCullum too. So what was the needle Francesca stuck in me?”

  “She was trying to relieve your panic.”

  “If you have all the bloody answers, you tell me. Where’s my mother’s body?”

  “I’ve told you. She was cremated. Fact.”

  “And common sense says she wasn’t in the coffin.”

  “Then who was—one of MacCullum’s dead pigs? I’m telling you … her ashes were scattered in the churchyard.”

  “Who handled the formalities?”

  “If you really want to know, I did. I had all the necessary personal details.”

  “Like what?”

  “National Insurance number, NHS number et cetera. Dr. Mackle as GP knew about it. We had the Will. MacCullum made the funeral arrangements. We registered the death. A postmortem wasn’t required. We got the green form. Permission for the body to be cremated. She was receiving her state pension so we had to submit the BD8 form for social security purposes. And we dealt with the bank and insurance broker. That’s about the sum of it. It was left to Teresa to inform you as and when she felt appropriate. And, Hal, it was expected.”

  His mind was fogged. “Unexpected.”

  “What’s been unexpected?”

  “The missing jewelry. It’s on her corpse.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Yes. And I heard my father.”

  “If you say so, Hal.”

  “How do you explain the jewelry?”

  “You tell me.”

  “What else is missing?”

  “Apart from the jewelry, according to the inventories, true enough, quite a few other things are missing. Actually, a couple of eighteenth-century ormolu-mounted bow models of tawny owls. A pair, same period, of Meissen white porcelain herons for the Japanese Palace. A seventeenth-century fragment of a William and Mary Mortlake tapestry. A possible Van Dyck of Samson and Delilah. An 1890 Tiffany silver, copper and niello loving cup. More besides …”

  “Worth what in total?”

  “Hard to say. In all, give or take half a million. The problem is that your mother gave a lot of stuff to charities. UNICEF. Oxfam. Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat International. Spiritual centers in India, mainly to a Mr. Mouthful—” She read out loud from her notebook. “Mr. Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha when he’s at home in Ahmedabad or Amdavad, Gujarat. Though mostly her dealings were with a man from a North London Gujarati travel agency.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Teresa told me. To be fair, she tried to stop your mother parting with even more valuable items. Apparently Priscilla would hear nothing of it and started sending very sizeable sums of cash through the regular post.”

  “Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you. Anyhow, I needed to double-check before this meeting.”

  “Who’ll be there?”

  “Warren and a man called Stefan Nielsen. An auctioneer.”

  “Well, well. Whose idea is this?”

  “Warren’s. He thinks Nielsen will have some helpful advice to offer.”

  “Good,” said Hal. “Because I’ve more or less made a decision to loosen the bonds.”

  “You what?”

  “You mean how—by selling up.”

  “What—leave?”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re going to auction it off?” She searched his face for some further clue to his confused thinking. Finding none, she asked: “When did you decide?”

  “I don’t know. It must have been at the back of my mind for months, years even.”

  “There has to be a reason to have tipped you over the edge.”

  “Perhaps there is. Perhaps there isn’t. Perhaps at last I know I want to leave. Sir Glendower built this. Other Stirlings kept it going. Still more Stirlings achieved various degrees of insanity here. I will be the one to say enough’s enough. If he’s any use, the man Nielsen can be the one to say going-going-gone.”

  “And then what? What will you do with the rest of your life?”

  “Begin it, Sophie, begin it.”

  —and deny the solemn promise I made you, Mother, that I would live here throughout my lifetime. And he heard the voice saying: “ … the person or persons responsible for The Towers’ sale will become insane, be struck down, committed to eternal damnation and hell-fire.”

  Sophie continued: “I’ve asked Schadzi and Minti to bring working clothes and help me continue the work of listing things. I don’t think you should suffer anymore visits to the cellars. I went down there again early this morning.”

  “Did you see those—?”

  “No,” she interrupted, “I didn’t.” She took a folder from her briefcase. “Have a look at these … notes for books your father planned to write. Sorry about the smell—chloroform, death, and God knows what else …”

  Hal glanced at the papers:

  EMBALMING PRACTICES IN 19TH & 20TH C. ENGLAND.

  Perfection of long-term structural preservation of organs and tissues to ensure minimal shrinkage or distortion.

  THE HAUNTING OF THE TOWERS

  “The epigraph’s from Jung,” she said. “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

  He sifted through piles of illustrations of vampire bats.

  “Even the pipistrelles have left the Bell Tower.”

  There was a self-portrait made from dead spiders, clearly the work of a madman; the account of a visit to an inmate of Broadmoor lunatic asylum; a man confined for life for eating his wife. A monochrome watercolor of his mother made with his father’s own blood and semen. Anatomical drawings his father had made of his own penis, both erect and flaccid. Each signed Stirling.

  “It’s repulsive.”

  “I wonder …” said Sophie. “Specters, evidence of obsession—madness surround the deranged man’s death—I wonder … whether he might literally have scared himself to death?”

  Like father like son, thought Hal.

  “The nurses told me how
worried they are about you.”

  “They can worry about sod-all and those damned séances.”

  “And I can walk out any time I like. You can’t. Because, if what you say is true about your mother, you have to tell the police. You’re caught between a rock and a hard place. If the police begin a murder investigation, who the hell is going to buy this pile? No one. Not in a month of Sundays. And its reputation as an asylum for the living dead is grisly. No one in his right mind will buy it. And anyone in his wrong mind won’t have the money. To coin a phrase—you’re buggered.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Me? Do what you’re doing already. Get your strength back. Enjoy being with Sumiko who, by the way, is as intelligent as she’s beautiful—and obviously adores you.”

  “And you?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “No. As a matter of fact it isn’t. The rest can wait. Meanwhile get a grip on The Towers. Get it sorted, Hal. That’s what I’m here to help you with. To finish the job.”

  “What do we do with Teresa and Francesca?”

  “What do you do? Do you by any chance keep a written record of what they do—what goes on?”

  “No.”

  “Then make one. Write down in detail what happened last night. To be frank, if you don’t mind me saying so, I think there’s only one chance in a hundred that your version of events is true. But write it down.”

  “I leave the writing to you.”

  “As you wish. Remember—I’ve made an enemy of them. So have you. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. To the rest of the world they’re sweetness and light. When it comes to us, they’re the enemy. Quite how dangerous they are remains to be seen.”

  65

  There remained his long-term plans, however sketchy, for Sumiko to live at The Towers with him; a happy fantasy, perhaps still realizable, from which he derived considerable strength.

  He reflected that the rest of the world would dismiss the record of the night’s events as the raving of a madman.

  At its worst, Teresa and Francesca had, in so many words, increased the pressure on him at the point where his sensibilities were most vulnerable. They were conducting a vicious form of aversion therapy, anti-counseling. His mother’s spirit, some dead not living ghost, was fired up to torture him to death. If she failed to possess him in this world she was making sure she would in the next.

  Like long-term patients in the bin, the others seemed to be enjoying troubled peace of mind; each in their own way trapped by the joyous threat of the Cumbrian Christmas Day tomorrow.

  Midnight mass at the church in Moster Lees.

  Presents around the tree in the morning.

  Traditional Cumbrian Christmas Lunch. (Inmates Menu: Thornby Moor Blue Whinnow Cheese. Cumbrian Christmas Vegetable Broth. Cumbrian Turkey with trimmings piled high. Cumbrian Christmas Gin-soaked Damson Pudding.)

  The Queen’s Christmas TV message, not that Cumbria would get a mention.

  Wintry sun filtered through the windows of The Towers, bringing temporary relief from the horrors cowering unseen within its depths.

  He had no abhorrence of danger, only in its absolute effect—in terror. He told himself not to let tears and rage get the better of him. If the phantoms terrified him, these viruses of the supernatural, then fear would gnaw at his heart. As he put it: “If it gets to your heart and head you will weep in the watch hours of the night and see visions.”

  Certainly, in choosing a Christmas present for Sophie, a prize item from the first-floor gallery, he discovered a fleeting sense of pleasure.

  He knew she would love the delicacy and innocence of the small early-twentieth-century signed print of a young girl by Kate Lilley as much as he did. No. 1 from an edition of four.

  No. 2 he set aside for Sumiko.

  No. 3 for Yukio.

  No. 4 he kept for himself.

  66

  He took an instant dislike to the auctioneer, Nielsen. Ruddy, pot-bellied and bespectacled, Nielsen sported an unsubtle pepper-and-salt toupee. To quit his smoking habit he had a dummy cigarette nipped between his thumb and forefinger, the little finger of his right hand extended in the air as if he were holding a precious teacup.

  They were seated in a semi-circle facing the Library’s fireplace. Warren and Sophie occupied what Nielsen enthusiastically described as “a very desirable nineteenth-century antique oak-framed French settee” to one side. Hal sat opposite, next to Nielsen on “an early nineteenth-century Biedermeier burr walnut settee. Rather plush.”

  Teresa was at a sideboard with a thermos flask of coffee, cream and hot milk; taking an age to pour the coffee, fiddling with a nest of mahogany coffee tables, stringing out her service to overhear as much as possible of the discussion.

  Nielsen was keen to hear out Warren’s “update of the situation.” The latter outlined the “new tasks” faced by Sophie. He spoke warmly of Minti and Schadzi. At Sophie’s request they’d be joining The Towers’ staff as “supernumeraries in the near future.”

  Hal noticed Nielsen stretching his jaw and tightening the greasy knot of his dark- and light-green and white diagonally striped Old Shirburnian tie.

  Warren was saying: “We’re not here, Hal, to try and persuade you to change your mind about The Towers’ future; rather, we thought we’d put down a few strategic markers. Yes? Hence Stefan’s visit.”

  “Captain Stirling,” said Nielsen. “It’s a privilege to be here to give you the benefit of my advice. I gather entre nous that sale isn’t actually an option you’d welcome?”

  “I’m open to any ideas to save The Towers.”

  “Oh, absolutely. Ab-sol-ewt-lair. One always goes the extra mile to meet the major clients’ objective.”

  “Give us your considered view of the present country house market for the next twelve months,” Warren said.

  “Between ourselves,” said Nielsen, “the mega end will continue to be in short supply. Talking The Towers is talking crème de la crème. Top-end par excellence. Think Russians. Pop stars. Chinese. The yuan’s twenty-two to the UK pound. Our Shanghai branch can’t get its hands on UK domestic properties fast enough. We’re taking a go-get entrepreneurial approach to delivering value—”

  Hal cut in: “Are you perhaps suggesting a silent auction?”

  “I’d need notice of that question. But it has appeal. Absolutely.”

  “At what price?”

  “Good day, fair wind. Could be looking at between fifty and a hundred.”

  “Fifty and a hundred what?”

  “Million pounds.”

  Cloud cuckoo figure.

  “A little more than one thought,” said Warren.

  “Maybe more,” said Nielsen. “I’m giving you the no-strings ballpark figure.”

  Hal could see Teresa’s reflection in the fireplace. She was standing motionless, silhouetted against the window, holding up the coffee thermos.

  “It only needs two major players to increase the bidding,” continued Nielsen. “We’re talking History. Look about. Family pedigree. Parkland. Farmland. Fine art and furniture. Books and manuscripts. Japanese art, Chinese art. Clocks. Collectables. Silver, rugs and carpets, garden statuary and architectural items. The whole shebang. Week-long sale. Country Life, quality press and TV coverage.”

  Cloud cuckoo.

  “What makes you so confident?” said Hal.

  “Gut feeling. Think spring. Not winter. The Towers—cleaned, painted, fixed, clutter removed. Bluebells, daffodils and apple blossom have greater pulling power than pretty Japanese ladies playing in the snow.”

  “What do you think, Hal?” Warren asked.

  “I like the optimism.”

  “I remember old Beaumont,” said Nielsen, grinning with regret. “The Memory Man. Beaumont used to say he’d come back to haunt The Towers here. Right here. You don’t want ghosts scaring off the bidders. Keep an eye out for Beaumont. The People’s Republic of China believes in ghosts
. That’s official. One point three billion Chinese. A ghost for every Chink. Imagine. List as long as a Chinese menu.”

  Hal looked at his watch deliberately and Nielsen seemed to read the gesture. “Confucius he say: ‘Respect ghosts and gods, but keep away from them.’ Wise, very wise. No fools the Chinks—”

  Hal interrupted: “What’s your commission?”

  “Seven and a half percent of the purchase price. Plus expenses. Plus jolly old VAT. Cheap at the price. Though we’re always open to negotiation.”

  “So am I,” said Hal.

  Nielsen got to his feet. “Absolutely. Anything I can do to help, call me. Twenty-four-seven.” He stooped forward with the solemnity of the courtier to shake Hal by the hand. “Selling one’s home is finally a personal matter. Especially property like this. With its million living memories, private and personal, like most things in life that matter to a gentleman.”

  His handshake was limp, his palm cold and moist, and Hal was reminded of something the pharmacist had said about things that matter to a gentleman.

  “The happy ghosts of Christmas past,” Nielsen added, sucking on his bogus cigarette. “The Ghosts of Christmas Past. Robert Louis Stevenson, isn’t it, Captain?”

  “Dickens,” Hal muttered. “A Christmas Carol.”

  “I’ll show you to the door, Stefan,” Warren offered.

  “Allow me,” said Teresa.

  Nielsen gave her a knowing smile. “Sister Vale, one of life’s little treasures. Where would we be without Teresa?”

  She held out an ashtray for him to dispose of his dummy cigarette but Nielsen palmed it into his jacket pocket. “Dear Sister Vale, you should know by now it’s everlasting. Like love.” He carefully adjusted his nautical Breton cap to avoid skewing the set of his toupee. “Happy Christmas one and all,” he added with the auctioneer’s impatience to get on with the sale of another lot.

  By giving his vast and cuckoo-land estimation of The Tower’s worth, Nielsen had shot himself in the foot. His firm, a provincial outfit, had few if any of the resources required to handle what might or might not be a major auction.