Death Notes (A Phineas Fox Mystery)

by Sarah Rayne

  The old-fashioned lock turned smoothly, and the door swung open silently. It’s all right, thought Bea. There’s no one here. The house is empty. It’s been empty for two years.

  She stepped inside.

  Jessica Cullen had been interested at first when the aunts talked about the English lady, Beatrice Drury.

  They were having supper, and Aunt Nuala said she had been surprised to hear that Mrs Drury was coming back to Kilcarne.

  ‘There must be so many sad memories for her. Her poor child and her husband killed here.’

  Aunt Morna agreed. She said Mrs Drury must be intending to stay for some time, because the electricity people had been asked to switch on the power at the cottage.

  ‘Although she’ll probably find herself with a series of hiccupping power cuts for the first week, because Tromloy’s electricity was always a law unto itself.’

  Tromloy. Jessica looked up, startled, because the word had dropped into her mind like a black, dense stone falling into a deep pool. Tromloy. One of the brief, shutter-flash images darted across her mind – low ceilings and the scent of wood smoke and peat … Firelight on rows of books, lighting up an old fire screen made by someone who had lived long, long ago – a screen with old photographs in it … And there was someone in that room who was huddled over and crying bitterly …

  But people who saw things that were not there were sometimes mad, so Jessica pushed the images away, and asked, a bit timidly, what Tromloy was.

  There was an odd moment of silence, and Aunt Morna glanced uneasily at Uncle Tormod who was eating his supper in silence, his Bible propped up against the mustard pot. Then, in what Jessica thought of as too careful a voice, Aunt Morna said, ‘It’s that old cottage just outside the village.’

  ‘Part of an old estate that once stood there,’ said Aunt Nuala, briskly. ‘Kilcarne Manor, it was. Tormod, have you the salt, please?’

  ‘Tromloy’s a bit off the road, Jess,’ said Aunt Morna. ‘So you might not have noticed it. There’s a narrow track leading up to it, although it’s very overgrown by now.’

  ‘Still, I believe Mrs Drury always spoke of it as a serene house.’

  Serene, thought Jessica. That means quiet. It means safe. The flicker of memory came again, but then Uncle Tormod came up out of the Book of Job to frown at the aunts, and say it did not become them to speculate about their neighbours or criticize the condition of their houses. He who sowed discord among his brethren was one of the things the Lord hateth, said Tormod sternly. His eyes showed angry red flecks for a moment, and the aunts exchanged worried looks.

  Uncle Tormod was Nuala and Morna’s older brother, which meant he was Jess’s uncle, although it was difficult to think of him by that name, because ‘uncle’ was a warm, cosy kind of word. Tormod Cullen was not warm or cosy in the least. He was humourless and severe, but Jessica tried to think this might be because he could only walk about with a stick, and if he went out he had to be pushed in a wheelchair, which was enough to make anyone humourless and severe.

  But the anger faded from Tormod’s face and he only said, quite mildly, that none of them should listen to gossip of any kind – Jessica was particularly to mind that, please – and now someone might kindly serve him another spoonful of vegetables.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Nuala quickly, as Jessica reached for the dish. ‘That tureen’s a bit heavy for you, Jessica.’

  The aunts were always stopping Jess from lifting heavy or awkwardly shaped objects, and helping her with things she did not need help with. When she went out with her sketchbook, Aunt Nuala always wanted to sharpen pencils for her. It was as if they did not think she was capable, and sometimes it felt a bit smothering. But tonight Jessica’s mind was filled up with Tromloy, so she let Aunt Nuala pick up the large vegetable dish and spoon vegetables on to Uncle Tormod’s plate. She said to Tormod that she would not listen to gossip, and did not say she would rather be off in the fields with her sketching things.

  The aunts did not really understand about drawing or how you could lose yourself in making a picture, but Donal had given Jess sketching things as a birthday present, and anything Donal did was right. They doted on Donal, who was the son of a distant cousin. They told everyone about the work he did in his parish, whether people wanted to know or not, and how pleased the bishop was with him.

  Uncle Tormod said they thought more of Donal than they did of him. Sometimes, when Donal came to stay, Tormod said they were neglecting him and he might as well go into the workhouse and have done, for all the looking-after he got in his own home. When Aunt Morna told him that there were no such things as workhouses any longer and he was living in another century, Tormod brandished his stick at her and recited chunks of the Old Testament at the top of his voice, with what Aunt Nuala thought were bits of Shakespeare thrown in for good measure. Afterwards he demanded to be wheeled over to the church, where they all had to pray for forgiveness, and the aunts put in an extra request for God not to send Tormod another stroke. As Nuala said afterwards, another stroke might be fatal, which would mean they were left on their own, and what would they do then?

  The aunts were frightened of Tormod dying and leaving them on their own. Jessica understood that, not especially because she was frightened of Uncle Tormod dying or of being alone, but because she found the world in general frightening and often confusing. She thought there might once have been a time when she was not frightened of anything, but it had been a long time ago. She thought something bad had happened – something that had twisted everything out of shape in her mind – but she could never quite remember what the bad thing had been.

  But tonight, listening to the aunts talking about Mrs Drury and Tromloy, she had had the feeling that Tromloy might have something to do with the out-of-shape world. And with that other faint, thin memory – the memory of hands reaching for her – hands with hard, horrid fingers like mutton bones that must be resisted at all costs …

  FOUR

  As soon as Beatrice stepped inside Tromloy, the memories came scudding out of the dimness, strong and insistent and hurting. She pushed them away and went into the long, low-ceilinged sitting room that opened off the hall. Even in the uncertain light she could see the familiar furniture – the button-back sofa, the bookshelves that lined the walls on each side of the hearth. There was even the lingering scent of wood smoke on the air.

  The small transom at the top of the main window was partly open – had Niall left it open that last day? Had it been open for two years? A fold of curtain had caught in it, and it stirred gently in the soft evening wind. Immensely relieved to find such a prosaic explanation for the flicker of movement she had seen earlier, Bea closed the window, and went into the kitchen to fill the kettle for a cup of tea. The water ran a bit rustily at first as it always did, then came clear. She filled the kettle, and plugged it in, deliberately not looking at the faint pink stain on the kitchen table, from where she had spilled a glass of wine because Niall was making her laugh about something or other. It had never quite scrubbed out, that stain.

  She left the kettle to boil and went out to the car. The box of groceries was set on the kitchen table, and she carried her case upstairs, pausing outside the room that had been Abigail’s. The door was closed, but Beatrice laid her hand against its surface for a moment, as if she might be able to draw something of Abi from out of the room. Ridiculous, of course.

  She went along to the bedroom that had been hers and Niall’s, past the faint outline of the longcase clock that used to stand against the wall. Niall had taken it to a clock-maker in Galway, to have its chiming mechanism repaired. Bea had forgotten about it until now. Was it still in the Galway workshop?

  As she unpacked her case, Tromloy’s gentle familiarity was already closing around her. This is what I wanted, thought Beatrice, gratefully, and realized she was even smiling at hearing the soft creakings and rustlings that were part of this house. But as she hung up things in the wardrobe, unease began to seep into her mind. Something
within the sounds was different. There was something inside the house that was not part of its normal sounds – or was it something that had once been part of Tromloy but ought no longer to be? The sounds were falling into a recognizable pattern – a soft, steady creaking, almost rhythmic. There would be a perfectly ordinary, unmenacing explanation, of course, but her heart began to race and she felt as if every nerve in her body was being scraped raw.

  The sounds were coming from Abigail’s room.

  For several seconds, Beatrice’s mind spiralled crazily out of the realms of the mundane and into the stratosphere of pure joy. The thought of having just one more glimpse of her lost, lovely girl – and it would not matter if that glimpse were only a ten-second one – filled her up like light. But even as the emotion was reaching its zenith, common sense was pulling her back, because of course it was not Abi she was hearing; it was nothing to do with Abi. The darting movement she had seen when she arrived nudged against her mind, but that had been downstairs, and she had identified its cause. These sounds would be a trapped bird, or a rattling window-frame, or even a clanking bit of pipework.

  Whatever it was, it would have to be checked. Bea went out to the landing and looked along it, towards the stairs. Then her heart, already skittering nervously, leapt with real fear, because the door of Abigail’s room – unquestionably closed earlier – was three-quarters open. She could see the bed with the heaped-up green and bronze cushions, and she could see the bookshelves behind it, and on the wall the old framed photograph of some long-ago actor standing on a stage. Against the hearth was the old fire screen, and facing it was the Victorian rocking chair that Bea and Niall had found in an antiques shop in Galway.

  It was the chair that was making the sounds. It was moving slightly – rocking gently as it always did when someone who had been sitting in it had just stood up. Beatrice stood very still, trying to make sense of this, knowing that of course there would be an ordinary explanation, just as there had been an ordinary explanation for that movement seen downstairs earlier – the movement that had been nothing more sinister than an open window and a flapping curtain.

  But there were no windows open here, nothing that could have disturbed the chair, and there was something wrong about the room. For pity’s sake, thought Bea exasperatedly, it’s been two years – you won’t be remembering every detail! But everything about Abi’s bedroom was printed on her mind down to the tiniest detail. She knew the furniture, the book titles and the books’ exact positions on the shelves; she knew the way the curtains fell, with the faint splash of paint always turned inwards to hide it … She knew the way the old wardrobe in the corner cast its shadow on the carpet …

  The wardrobe’s shadow. That was what was wrong – dreadfully and frighteningly wrong. It was not the solid oblong it ought to be – it formed a very specific shape. Or was it just the way the shadows twisted in the half-light? Or a coat hanging from the wardrobe itself? She waited for her mind to make sense of what she was seeing, waiting for the little pulse of nervous fear to disperse and for her brain to say, Stupid! Didn’t you realize what you were really seeing? But it did not, and Bea took a step towards the wardrobe. At once the shadow moved, and in that instant Bea had no doubt about what she was seeing. A man-shaped shadow. A shadow cast by someone standing in the narrow space between the wardrobe and the window wall. Someone who had just pressed back against the wall in an attempt to avoid being seen.

  For several dreadful seconds sheer terror held Bea helpless. Then some reflex or some instinct – or maybe just panic – kicked in, and she was outside the room before she was aware of having moved, slamming the door on Abi’s room, and going down the stairs in a frantic slithering tumble. She retained enough clarity of mind to snatch up her bag containing the phone, then she wrenched open the front door and half fell through it.

  The darkness came at her like a wall, but Bea plunged into it gratefully because it was a hiding place, and ran along the broken path that had never been relaid or repaired, praying not to trip on the uneven ground.

  She had almost reached the car when she heard soft footsteps coming through the darkness. He – it had to be a ‘he’ didn’t it? – had come out of the house, and he was coming towards her. Bea dived around to the other side of the car, and crouched down. Could she get the door open and drive away before he reached her? The interior light would come on when the door was opened, but the engine was warm and it would fire immediately, and she could be bouncing the car down the lane and out of his reach. If she had the ignition keys ready the minute she was inside—

  She could not have the ignition keys ready at all, and she could not bounce the car anywhere, because the keys were not in her bag. There was a brief, infuriating memory of throwing them down on the kitchen table earlier, and leaving them there. But the phone was in her bag, and it was 999 for emergencies in Ireland, like in England, wasn’t it? Would he hear her make the phone call? Would he see the light from the keypad? She crouched down, reaching into the side pocket for the phone, trying to switch it on while it was still inside, but her hands were shaking so much she could not find the On switch.

  There was a crunch of footsteps close by and Bea gasped and looked up. He was standing on the other side of the car, looking down at her over the bonnet. She flinched, one hand going up in the classic defence gesture, then a man’s voice said, quietly and unthreateningly, ‘Please don’t be frightened. I don’t mean to hurt you. I’m going away now.’

  The words were gentle and slightly blurred. The voice was hesitant and there was even almost a pleading note to it. It was the last kind of voice Bea had been expecting to hear, and for several incredible seconds she forgot about the need to summon help. Psychopaths probably sounded gentle and polite before they set about butchering their victims, but he did not sound like a psychopath …

  She said, with a sharpness that surprised her, ‘I’ve called the police – the Garda – they’ll be here within minutes.’

  She had no idea if he would believe her, but at once he said, ‘There’s no need for that. I really am very sorry to have frightened you so much.’ His voice was still soft and it was also somehow careful, and this time Bea thought she could detect something un-English in it. ‘I didn’t know you were coming, and when I heard you arrive, I hid in that room. I hoped I could get outside without you knowing.’ He seemed to hesitate, then he said, ‘That house has helped me. That’s why I’ve been going there sometimes, while it’s been empty. It’s gentle. Friendly.’

  Tromloy, working its charm … Bea said, ‘You’ve been in the house before?’ and thought this had to be the most bizarre conversation she had ever had.

  ‘I have, but I won’t do so again,’ he said. ‘Not now. You have my promise.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘There’s a broken window catch on a downstairs window.’

  Before Bea could say anything else, he was walking away, going towards the path. She drew in a deep, shaky breath, and snatched her phone from her bag because it no longer mattered if he heard or saw. The keypad lit up, and the man turned, as if the sudden tiny radiance had caught his attention. For a split-second the minuscule light fell across his face. He turned away at once, but in that brief moment Beatrice had seen the scarred skin, puckered and ridged. Then he put up a hand to turn up the collar of his coat, in an instinctive concealing gesture, and with an unwilling wrench of pity Bea saw his hand was scarred in the same way. There could not possibly be any connection, of course, but the words of the newspaper article came strongly into her mind.

  … sustained injuries in the attempt … Hands and face badly burned … He was still being treated at University Hospital, Galway at the time of the inquest …

  For a moment the moonlight showed up the intruder’s hair as well – thick, and grey like the cloth of an expensive coat. Bea had the brief impression that once it had been dark, but that something had drained all its colour.

  But he was going away. He was being as go
od as his word. Beatrice leaned back against the side of the car, then, with an inexplicable sense of reluctance and almost of guilt, managed to tap out the three nines that would bring the Garda.

  Walking down the hillside, away from Tromloy, it was easy to melt into the darkness. There had, after all, been years of doing exactly that. Two years to be precise. You simply thought yourself into being a shadow – what the Gothic novelists probably called a ‘creature of the night’ – and eventually you became that shadow creature. It was almost a form of method acting.

  Until tonight it had been easy enough to enter Tromloy through the window with the loose catch, and later to push it back in place so that no one would notice. Not that anyone would notice, because no one ever came out here. Except the man who sought for forgiveness from a dead girl. I failed you, Abigail Drury. I should have saved you that day – you and your father – and I failed. And because of that, you both died a bad death. You’re the one who draws me back to Tromloy, over and over again, Abigail. That’s probably the behaviour of an obsessive or a compulsive or something, but if I can’t allow myself one obsession, it’s a sad old life. I can never forgive myself for letting you die, Abigail. That woman – your mother – she’ll never forgive me, either.

  It had seemed almost impossible that Beatrice Drury would return to Tromloy. But tonight she had, and there had been a deep sense of loss in walking away, knowing it would never again be possible to enter the house like a shadow and be greeted by the scents of wood smoke and old timbers. No longer possible to reach in that uncertain, fumbling way for the spirit of a dead girl, who ought not to have died, who ought to have been saved … The nightmare of what had happened had not faded – the images were as vivid as ever they had been.

  There could be no returning to Tromloy. A promise had been made to a woman with haunted eyes. She had clearly been frightened, but she had seemed to accept a stranger’s promise. It was a promise that had been made in good faith and it could not be broken.