‘I’ll drop our Dickie here last – he’ll be in front, carrying the briefcase. He’ll pick the back-door lock, wedge the door with the briefcase so it don’t slam shut on you, give you a quick double-whistle, and go on to the outhouse. Now, in the outhouse, Dickie, go through them suitcases. It’s only papers out of them we want, right? Don’t go light-fingered on me, right? And I’ll stay in the car, by the front gate, and keep a good look-out. An’ if I toot me horn three times sharp, you get out of there as fast as your little legs will carry you – down the garden and over the wall an’ into the Park. You should be able to lose the fuzz among the trees, or if you can’t, get together an’ act the courting couple. Nothing puts the fuzz off like courting couples – the fuzz is a mass of sexual frustration brought on by working shifts an’ too much overtime . . .’
Good old Mossy, I thought. Whatever happens, he’s in the clear. Innocently sitting in a parked car is no crime . . . Still, it was good of him to oblige, particularly with Dickie, a thin cadaverous youth with the air of an apprentice bullfighter, till he opened his mouth and spoke a few words of broad Cockney.
‘Right, then.’ Mossy gently started the engine and rolled away down Belvoir Road, keeping the revs down to be as silent as possible. There was just the hiss of tyres on the wet lamplit road.
I dropped off first, feeling the touch of rain on the back of my neck. Looking ahead, I saw the car stop again for just a moment, and the white flash of Hermione’s mack under a street-lamp. There was a strong impulse to hurry, to catch her up and ask pointlessly what was going on. Then I saw the flash of Mossy’s brake-lights, as he parked. Somewhere in front, Dickie must be fiddling with the back-door lock of Abbeywalk.
I nipped in sharp through the gateway and under the trees; and bumped straight into Hermione. Before we’d got our breath back, there came Dickie’s low whistle.
‘Let’s go arm-in-arm,’ whispered Hermione. ‘Practise being a courting couple.’ She giggled, but it was the giggle of nerves.
So we went, arm-in-arm, snuggling together against . . . what?
There was the open door, with the black briefcase jammed half-way through it, glinting in a stray ray of a distant street-lamp. Hermione slipped through. As I followed, my foot caught the briefcase and kicked it right across the floor. I snatched at the door behind me just in time. It was on the point of closing; it nipped my fingers painfully. As she went across to grope for the briefcase, her feet echoed hollowly on the floor-boards, and somehow I sensed cellars below.
‘Upstairs first,’ said Hermione. I followed her out of the scullery door, by the light of her torch. Through a large, empty kitchen, where a tap dripped like an off-beat clock, into a hall with filthy black-and-white tiles.
It was at this point that all fear left me. I felt a great surge of confidence. Almost as if I was among friends. C’mon, I tried to warn myself. Wise up. This is a dreadful house; people have died here, maybe been killed.
But it was no use. My confidence rose in great waves. I was invincible; I was the master of my soul; master of the universe. Of course, I should have grabbed Hermione and run then. But all I did was follow her.
I watched her climb the staircase, by the light of her torch and mine. I saw, so clearly, the beauty of her long, slender legs, the smoothness of the calf-muscles, moving as soft as cream under the black nylon stockings. From the dead-straight seams I knew she must be wearing stockings, and not tights. Somewhere, under the concealing folds of that raincoat, there must be opulent patches of white flesh. I began to want to see those patches, very much. And I could see no reason why I should not see those patches, very soon. What was there to stop me? We were alone . . .
On the landing, Hermione turned. She said, harshly, triumphantly, ‘This will show the bastards!’
‘Which bastards?’ I said, without interest. Under her open coat, I could see her skirt, and under her skirt, the luscious near-flatness of her belly. I should soon sample that, now, too.
‘The bastards at the City Toy Museum. They’ve kept me in my place for long enough. Just because I’m young. And a woman. When we solve this, they’ll have to notice me. I want the deputy-director’s job. They’ll have to sack him. He’s away ill half the time. I’m not having him standing in my way.’
She turned to carry on up the stairs. Her raincoat swung back, displaying the small sharp points of her breasts. On, blind Hermione, you think you’re going on to fame and glory. You don’t know what you are walking into. Somewhere ahead, there will be a bed. Maybe an unmade bed, or just a bare urine-stained mattress. So much the better, proud, beautiful Hermione. I will roll you not in the luxury you are used to, but in the staleness of sweat and filth and dust and dead flies. Then you will realize the world is not about the City Toy Museum, and your own great glory . . . but she was running on.
‘I can soon get rid of the Director, too. I know quite a lot of things about him, that our trustees don’t know. Things he’s sold at a profit, that he should have kept for the Museum. The affair he had with that little whore in the Dolls’ Department. Oh, they won’t give him time to clear his desk, once I tell them . . .’
How surprised you will be, Hermione, when I leap on you. The incredulity on your face, as I begin to tear your clothes . . . oh, you’ll fight and claw. But I’m strong, strong. I shall enjoy it more if you fight. There will be more chance to hurt you . . .
‘Of course, I shan’t stay long, once they give me the Directorship. Just a couple of years, to make a name. Then I shall go on to America. An exchange visit; meet some big American scholar who wants an affair . . . they’re a randy lot, always trying to touch you up, on the sly, at conferences . . .’
All this time, she was opening doors and shining her torch into empty rooms. Rooms with dirty mattresses thrown askew, with torn half-posters on the walls and the bodies of long-dead rats in corners. Taking no more notice of them than I was.
Oh, Hermione, how I shall explore you! How I shall explore your fear, your pleadings, the delicious point when you at last give up hope.
We had reached the last attic.
‘Nothing here,’ she said, with little interest, automatically. ‘Let’s try the cellars . . .’
I looked from her to the unmade bed . . . but no, it would be better in the cellars; darker, filthier. Somewhere to bury the poor bloody rag of her body, when I was finally done with her.
So, in mock obedience, I began to follow her downstairs again. Could I, could I, when I had reduced her to a bloody rag of a woman, remake her, make her perfect and happy again, so I could tear her to bits all over again? As many times as I wished, till the world’s end. How would her blood taste, on my fingers . . . ?
Somewhere, far away, as we reached the first floor landing again, came three toots of a car-horn. They meant nothing to me. It might have been some pointless lost night-bird calling.
‘Men are pathetic,’ she called back at me, from the bottom stair. ‘Their brains are between their legs. Their whole being is between their legs . . .’
Oh, no, Hermione, foolish Hermione, dead Hermione, my brains are in my fingers too. That’s right, my poor love, go to the cellar door, open it, descend . . .
Again came the three toots of a car-horn. More urgent now. What was there, in the world out there, to be urgent about? Poor pathetic piffling people . . .
At that moment, an alien figure of utter fury leapt on to me. Strong, invincible though I was, he was so much stronger . . . he almost picked me up bodily, and carried me to the back door. Threw me down the back steps, shouting meaningless gibberish.
‘Run, you silly effer, run!’
I landed painfully on my knees. Suddenly, I was Morgan again: little, hurting, and quite terrified of being caught by the police. I leapt to my feet, stared around me wildly.
The flying figure in a white raincoat cannoned into me and we both fell down again. A dark figure with a briefcase in its hand took off like a rocket down th
e wilderness of the back garden. Dickie, as if all the devils in hell were after him.
‘Run, Morgan, run.’ It was Hermione’s ordinary voice; she sounded as terrified of being caught by the police as I was. We got up and blundered down the dark obstacles of the garden. I held my hands as a stirrup for her foot, and almost threw her over the garden wall. Then we were running for the cover of the Park trees . . .
‘I would have thought, Mr Morgan,’ said Sergeant Crittenden heavily, ‘that if you two had wanted to go in for that kind of thing, you would have found somewhere more comfortable. Your place, sir? Or her place, here? Seems a very nice little hideaway for a spot of fornication between consenting adults.’
He glanced around Hermione’s living-room with interest.
They had let us go from the police station an hour ago. But here was Crittenden, bright as a bird. Obviously his turn for the night shift, this week.
‘It’s the lure of the open air, on a lovely night,’ said Hermione coolly. ‘And, I suppose, the risk of being caught. A feeling of illicitness gives an edge, sergeant. Guy de Maupassant wrote a short story on the topic, once . . .’
‘I am very well aware, madam, that de Maupassant wrote a short story on the topic. I read it, in the French original, when I was in the sixth form.’
In other words, don’t come the culture vulture with me, madam. He went on, ‘You hadn’t . . . been doing further investigations, madam?’
‘At the Pond, sergeant? No, not after dark. I’m not that keen.’
‘I didn’t mean at the Pond, madam. I meant at the premises known as Abbeywalk in Belvoir Road . . .’
‘I’m not quite sure where that is, sergeant.’ Oh, what a lovely cool distant liar the girl was.
‘I find that strange, madam. Considering I have a report of a lady and gentleman having a row on the doorstep of Abbeywalk, the previous evening. The lady, apparently, was all for gaining admittance, the gentleman was violently trying to dissuade her. Their descriptions, well, it might have been you and Mr Morgan, madam. Though the gentleman reeked of brandy, which is not like Mr Morgan.’
‘Nothing to say about that, Sergeant. Except that having a row on a doorstep is not a crime,’ she said.
‘We seem to have had a run of non-crimes round Abbeywalk, recently. One Mossy Hughes, sitting in a parked car outside the premises. We got him for sounding his horn after dark, and while stationary . . . he should get all of a twenty-pound fine for that, with his record. And another gentleman, name of Dickie Warren, found leaving Wheatstone Park with a briefcase full of ancient correspondence that did not belong to him. Does that ring any kind of bell, madam?’
Hermione had the grace to drop her head.
‘I should take this all very seriously, except that Abbeywalk, on examination, proved to be securely locked up, with no sign of an entry having been forced. And the fact that there is not one thing in Abbeywalk worth even a junk-merchant stealing.’
‘You seem very interested in Abbeywalk, sergeant? Considering. Hardly seems worth police time.’ I felt I had to keep my end up, even if I did feel like death. But it was so unreal, this piddling talk of petty crime, when an hour ago I might have been standing with my hands thick with Hermione’s blood . . .
‘It may interest you to know, Mr Morgan, that we have been through the contents of Mr Dickie Warren’s briefcase, for which he cannot account. We found letters addressed to ten people, at the Abbeywalk address. Seven of them are on the National Police Computer as missing persons . . .’
We were both silent. We could find nothing to say. A dread was coming over me again. Dreads had been coming over me ever since the two constables caught us.
‘Abbeywalk smells nasty to me, Mr Morgan. The nastiest thing I’ve smelt since I was on the Dennis Nilsen case. Remember the Nilsen case, Mr Morgan? Young boys murdered and cut up and flushed down the toilet? Well, that’s how Abbeywalk smells. And that’s before you include those suicides in the Pond. Of people who lived there . . .’
Again, we were silent. He got up to go; said, standing in the doorway, ‘If there’s one thing I hate more than criminals, it’s the members of the public who won’t help. Because it’s not convenient. It’s people like you who pay me to be a policeman, and do your dirty work for you. And then you hamper me in doing it. Seems like you’re wasting your own hard-earned money . . .’
He said it with such disgust.
‘Would you like a supper-drink, before we go to bed?’ asked Hermione. Her face was deathly; there were big shadows under her eyes. Then she said, ‘Hell, I don’t want to go to bed. I don’t dare shut my eyes. Tonight, in that house, I was planning to do all kinds of horrible things . . . that weren’t me at all.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘You told me about them. At the City Toy Museum.’
‘I was wishing people ill – iller. I was wishing people dead.’
‘I know. And I was planning to rape and murder you. And bring you back to life so I could rape and murder you all over again.’ Without warning, I began retching, and finally was sick on her best rug. I must say she was very kind; she didn’t nag; she held my head and wiped me down afterwards. I felt very cold and shivery, and she put the gas fire on.
‘What was it, Morgan? Are we both going mad?’
‘We’re sane enough now,’ I said bitterly. ‘I’d be sane enough now, even if I’d murdered you. And I was just waiting to do it. Once you were down the cellar. If Mossy hadn’t tooted his horn, if Dickie hadn’t hauled us out, you’d be dead now . . .’
‘I didn’t reckon you for that kind of man . . .’
‘As the feminists say: all men are rapists . . .’ I had this need to grovel, to sick it up, to cleanse myself. My father always said confession was good for the soul.
‘I knew you fancied me. But . . . rape? Murder? Really?’
‘I wanted to lay you – take you down a peg.’
‘That’s hardly murder, Morgan!’
‘No,’ I said wretchedly.
‘I’d had some nasty thoughts about people at the Museum. But I’d never have done anything about it. Not in a month of Sundays.’
‘I suppose that’s what keeps us on the rails. Timidity. Respectability. Fear of consequences. But somehow, tonight, I didn’t feel there would be any consequences. I felt invincible. Full of power. It seems so . . . pathetic, now.’
‘That’s how J. Montague Wheeler must have felt. Full of power.’
‘A rag-and-bone man, who suddenly made a lot of money . . . What’s inside that house, Hermione?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s down in the cellar. I could feel it.’
‘Offering unlimited power? To do evil?’
‘The name . . . Abbeywalk. Was there ever an abbey round here. A medieval abbey? Or is the name just a romantic fantasy?’
‘Oh, there was a medieval Abbey of Wheatstone. Its coat of arms is still the coat of arms of the Borough. They boast about it in their handbook. All gone now. Except some reckon the Wheatstone Pond was their fish-ponds . . .’
‘Suppose the monks . . . no, that’s just silly.’
‘Go on. It’s all ridiculous anyway, in this day and age.’
‘Suppose the monks . . . were exorcists? Medieval priests practised exorcism. Suppose they were called upon to deal with something dreadful. And they couldn’t destroy it or cast it out. Suppose all they could do was bring it back with them and keep it under lock and key, safe . . . with a binding prayer or spell or something. Maybe they kept it alive to investigate it, muck about with it. Then, when the Abbey was dissolved by Henry the Eighth, they had to go, and leave it behind.
‘Nobody came; nobody built on the site. Houses go up all round in the nineteenth century, but nobody wants to build on the actual site. And then this rag-and-bone man comes along, mooching around for things to steal . . . and he rents the waste land . . . with a few old buildings on it . . . and quite soon he has all the money in the world . . . to buy the land and build the house. And then
he vanishes. But it remains behind in the house. And people come to live there. And people vanish . . .’
I said stupidly, like you always do, ‘For God’s sake, Hermione, this is the twentieth century.’
‘Maybe we’ve found a gap in the twentieth century. A black hole that people fall into. And there’s no reason in the world why people shouldn’t go on falling into it. Poor people who don’t have anybody who cares about them . . . people at the end of their tether. There’s always somebody wanting a cheap bed-sitter . . .’
‘Stop it. I want to sleep tonight. This is pure speculation!’
‘That thing nearly killed me tonight, Morgan. And what would it have done to you? Don’t you want to know what nearly destroyed you? What destroyed Tony Tanner and Margie Duff?
‘And the Wheatstone Pond, Morgan! It’s downhill from that house. Stuff must be draining down into it, all the time. Stuff that set those two firemen fighting each other, that turned my students so stroppy. Stuff that the pumps are still pumping into the drainage system . . .’
‘Stuff from what? This is crazy!’
‘It fits all the facts, doesn’t it?’
The trouble was, I couldn’t find fault with her argument. It was a crude working hypothesis. All the facts did fit. For the moment.
In its own way, it was a kind of dreadful relief. We knew the worst now; or the worst our minds could visualize. All the other facts in our mind, from years gone by, moved over and jiggled about to make room for it. It fell into place; it was.
And with that fitting-in came a humble, dreadful weariness. I knew we should go to sleep when we went to bed. We would sleep in a world where the thing existed. We would wake up to a world where it existed . . .
‘Tomorrow,’ said Hermione, ‘we go and see the house agent.’
The house agent had his office in a quite different part of London. A palatial place, with an all-glass front. Built during the boom, maybe. Now, in the slump, his windows were still full of houses for sale; but several desks behind were empty, with idle phones and dust-covers over the word processors.
Spectral Shadows Page 19
