‘More likely your excellent sherry and wine,’ I mumbled, for I felt quite strongly affected now.
‘Oh dear me.’ Uncle Tolly took my arm. ‘Allow me.’ He helped me up the last steps and on to a big, square, oak-floored corridor. The side facing us had windows from floor to ceiling and Uncle Tolly drew my attention to it. ‘There is a fine view of the cemetery on a good day.’ The left and right sides had four doors, each painted different pastel colours. ‘Yours is the pink room,’ he told me. ‘I do hope it is to your liking.’
He opened the first door on the right and stood back.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It is lovely.’ And indeed it was. There was a double bed with a floral counterpane and crisp white sheets, and the walls were papered with intertwined rose patterns. It was so clever how they flickered.
‘I feel…’
He tightened his grip to steady me as the room swung towards us.
‘You will be all right.’ The rest of his words were lost in the roar and rush of black air and the nothingness that followed my fall.
12
The Pier and the Smoke
ON MANY SUMMER holidays we went to Southport. It was only fourteen miles away but still a great treat; even the train journey from Parbold was a cause for some excitement.
We always stayed at the Clifton Hotel, overlooking the promenade and beyond that to the sea. From my bedroom window I could watch the pleasure steamers dock at the end of the pier and the visitors disembark in their best summer clothes and make their way into town.
One year we went in the company of Major Gregory and his son, Barney, who was three years older than me. I had adored Barney ever since he had rescued Jumble, a mongrel puppy, for me from the canal, and I would follow Barney for miles on the endless golden beach and rolling sand dunes. Despite our age difference he always allowed me to join in his games and defended me when other boys mocked.
Bernard Gregory had been a close friend of my father’s since they were cadets together at Sandhurst. When I was very small I had mispronounced his name and he had been so amused that he adopted ‘Groggy’ as his nickname.
Mrs Gregory did not come. She was at home with her daughter, Daisy, who was suffering from a nervous stomach.
On the second evening we all went to a show at the Pavilion. There were singers and dancers, acrobats and jugglers, and we were all having a wonderful time until the magician came along. He began entertainingly enough, taking biscuits from behind volunteers’ ears and producing a puppy from inside a newspaper, but then he made himself disappear. He walked round the back of his table of tricks and vanished. I still do not know how he did it and I am not sure I want to – some things should always be magical – but suddenly there was a flash and a puff and the whole stage began to fill with yellow smoke.
The audience roared in amusement and applauded, but all I could hear were the wild frothing squeals of pigs and as the magician reappeared, running through the acrid fumes, I scrambled out of my seat, clambered over two indignant old ladies and fled.
I was gasping for breath when I made it through the foyer and on to the foot of the pier, and the seagulls’ shrieks did nothing to calm me down. I put my hands over my ears but that never does any good. And then I felt a hand on my arm.
‘It is all right, Marchy,’ Barney said. ‘It was only a trick.’
‘I know.’ How could I explain? At least I saw that he was not mocking me as most boys of his age would have. Barney was always protective of me and his little sister, Daisy. She was a proper girl, though, and never joined in our rough-and-tumble games.
‘Thank you for caring for her, Barney,’ my father said. He was probably less blithe about scrambling over people’s knees and had taken a while to join us.
‘I shall always care for March,’ Barney vowed as a seagull swooped just over our heads. ‘When we are old enough, I shall ask you for her hand.’
My father chuckled and patted Barney on the back. ‘You go in and enjoy the rest of the show.’
I leaned against the railings, watching the ponies pull the shrimping wagons out into the ruffled sea.
‘I am sorry,’ my father said at last. The wind blew his hair back and mine over my face. ‘I should never have taken you to that demonstration. I thought they would just fall asleep.’ His shoulders dropped. ‘That is what I was led to believe.’
From the corner of my eye I saw Barney go inside.
‘Perhaps having me there helped you to see how horrid it was,’ I said. ‘I am glad if it did.’
‘Damned fool,’ he grunted and I knew he meant himself.
He was a wise man and foolish, and the finest man I knew.
*
The next day I was taken to meet the magician. He was a kindly soul and gave me two bottles of the liquid that he used to make the smoke.
‘Play with zem when you get ’ome,’ he invited me in an unconvincing French accent. ‘It will ’elp you be not afraid.’
I took the bottles back to The Grange and hid them in the cellar, terrified that they would explode and fill the house with fumes. My father said he would get rid of them.
13
Solid Shadows and White Slave Traffickers
SOMETHING BUMPED.
I did not open my eyes at first. The bed was so comfortable and the pillows so soft. But where was I? Not in my childhood bedroom at the top of Parbold Hill where the mattress sagged in the middle and the boards creaked like a ship when I shifted, and I had left it, I remembered, after my father died. Not in 125 Gower Street where the mattress was hard and the throb of the city never ceased. Not in India under mosquito netting with the suffocating heat and the bugle blowing reveille.
I opened my eyes. A flame ran along the top of a broad wick in the smoky glass chimney of an oil lamp and I did not recognize the room, but the paper seemed familiar with its bright pink roses and criss-crossing lines of leaves. I lay and studied it and tried to remember.
I was thirsty and there was a washstand against the wall with a floral jug. I struggled to sit up but my limbs were weak and numb, and so I rolled to the side and managed to swing my legs over the edge. How much had I had to drink? Had I had anything to drink? I managed to push myself up and waited for the room to stop spinning in all three dimensions. It took a long time and I thought at one stage that I would vomit.
It was then I realized that I had been lying on top of the eiderdown. I did not remember getting undressed. Was I was still fully clothed with my boots on?
How cross my father had been when I did that after a ladies’ night in the officers’ mess. We were supposed to be ruling India by dint of our moral superiority. What kind of example was I setting the natives who so loved and admired us? But I had learned enough Hindi to know what lay behind the bows and smiles of those we so benevolently oppressed.
Cautiously I lowered my feet to the ground and realized that they were bare and that I had my nightdress on.
First and foremost I needed to slake my thirst. I hauled myself to a standing position, leaning heavily on the side table, nearly tipping it over with my weight and only just managing to catch the lamp as it slid towards the edge. I let go, stumbled three steps forward and grabbed a solid shadow that had loomed before me – a wardrobe. My sight was very blurred.
For a moment I forgot where I was going, but my thirst reminded me and I let go of my security and launched myself at the washstand, tumbling to my knees on the fringe of the rug just in front of it, and it flashed through my head that I was in church.
I was not sure I could get up without tipping the stand and so I reached, both hands in supplication, bringing them together until they closed on the jug. I put it on the floor but, sweeping over the cool marble top, could not find a mug. I raised the jug to my lips and tilted it. The rush of icy water over my face, into my open eyes and up my nose shocked me into choking consciousness.
I clambered to my feet. My nightdress was soaked. I took a hand towel off the hook on the side of the stand
and mopped myself down as best I could. I felt a little steadier now and tipped the jug again, but more carefully, to take a long drink. The water was dusty and lay chilly in my stomach, but I felt awake enough to wonder exactly where I was. A strange bedroom was as far as I got.
I remembered tales of white-slave traffickers kidnapping girls to sell to wealthy desert sheikhs or Turkish sultans, and made an unstable rush for the door. To my relief it was not locked and, peeping out into the moonlit corridor, nobody appeared to be guarding me.
I took a breath and somebody screamed. I leaned against the doorpost, my mind tossed about and the corridor going dark as a cloud drifted over the moon, and then another scream and a voice shrill with terror.
‘No… Oh no… Please, no.’ And a wail of such anguish that I put my hands over my ears and cried out for pity, but I should have known better than to hope for that.
14
The Howls and the Porcelain Handle
THE HOWLS STOPPED and, as my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I saw a light creep weakly from under a door next to the end window on the opposite side of the corridor.
Please God, let this be a dream – mine or that of the person who made those terrible sounds.
I was just beginning to tell myself that I had imagined it when another scream cut my hopes to shreds. And, as I made my way towards the light, it was apparent that I was getting closer to the source of screams.
I came to the door but I did not want to open it. I knocked. ‘Are you all right in there?’
I thought I heard a whimper and pressed my ear to the woodwork. A harsh exhalation.
‘Have you been having a nightmare?’
Please say yes. Please open the door and say you are sorry to have disturbed me, whoever you are.
But then I heard another cry, long and shuddering. I put my hand to the porcelain handle and turned it. If only my guardian had been with me. He was a small man but strong and I had never seen him show any sign of fear. I pushed on the door, half-wishing it would be bolted, but it swung open two or three inches.
‘Are you all right?’
Another whimper.
‘I am coming in. Do not be afraid.’
I think I said those last words more to myself than the occupant of the room.
‘Uncle Tolly,’ I remembered as I stumbled in.
15
The Taste of Murder
THE ROOM WAS lit by a single gas mantle on the wall turned very low. For some reason it fascinated me, that blue-centred, deep yellow glow, not exactly pushing the night back but oozing into it until the colours leached away. I did not want to take my eyes off it and see what lay before me.
I felt the wooden shaft in my hand suddenly heavy and the sweat trickle down my breast, and my heart pounded up my neck through my ears and into my head, not drowning out but magnifying the cries.
I raised the axe and the man on the bed whimpered as it fell. I felt it judder in my hand and up my arm and felt the splatter on my face.
He was clutching a soaked sheet in his fist – as if it could protect him – and holding it to his mouth. His skull was split wide like a pomegranate after a thunderstorm, revealing the bright red seeds of his mind. I could have reached in and touched the glistening flesh within.
There was so much blood on him and on me, my arms and my nightdress, and on the walls, blacker even than the shadows. I looked at my hands, sticky with spilled life, and opened my fingers, and the axe fell heavily on to the floor and stood on its head for a long time before it toppled jerkily and more slowly than is possible, hanging, almost stopping before it landed on the floor, the impact reaching my ears in dull parcels of sound.
The man shot up… or rather the bed he lay on shot up… or rather the floor as I hit it with my shoulder. It did not hurt, though I fell like a pole, but it knocked the wind out of me. The sound boomed across the room. I curled up my legs and lay still, hugging my knees and knowing that, even if I awoke, the taste of what was happening would never leave me.
16
The Hanging Hand
SOMETHING JUMPED INSIDE me. Had I been asleep? I realized that I was wet. Something to do with a jug? My nightdress clung to me. I grabbed the end of the bed and got on to all fours like when I used to give Maudy donkey rides on my back. I savoured the memory and rose to my knees, and then it slammed into me. Uncle Tolly, his skull cracked open so wide that I could see his brain, the rippling ridges and deep meandering valleys of his mind.
He was crumpled back on the bed, half-sitting in his striped sodden nightgown, drawn back against the corner of the splattered walls, clutching the curtain in his right hand. His mouth was agape with terror and his front teeth had been smashed, presumably by the same blow that chopped off his nose and shattered his lower jaw. The top of his face looked odd, intact but hanging awkwardly. And the wetness on me and on the rucked sheets was the blood of his life.
I have seen death a hundred times and never let it destroy my judgement. What is different?
His left hand dangled by the skin from his gashed wrist. Presumably he had raised it in a hopeless attempt to defend himself.
Now I remember. It is me that makes it different.
The axe had been in my hand when Uncle Tolly cowered back. I felt the heavy metal head fall. It was no dream. The proof lay hacked before me.
17
The First Mrs Rochester
I FORCED MYSELF to think. First I needed to get dressed. But I was covered in blood. I took the water jug from his washstand and made my way back to the room I had woken up in. I was still a bit unsteady and sploshed water on my feet. Who had undressed me and put me in my nightgown and to bed? Surely not Uncle Tolly? But there had only been the two of us in the main body of the house and the servants were locked out – or so he had told me.
I untied my gown at the neck and pulled it over my head, smearing the warm stickiness over my face. I dropped it on the Turkish rug and stepped out of it, a crumpled ring of black cotton. I poured the whole jug of water over myself, trickling it over my forehead, my shoulders, all down myself, seeing the clearness turn red and splash on to the bare boards and drip between them and through a knothole, rising as marsh mist around my ankles.
I dried myself on a towel that had been folded on a blanket box at the foot of the bed. It was stained when I had finished and I was still wet. I ripped the sheet off my bed and rubbed myself with that.
My clothes were in the wardrobe, hanging like flayed skins, and I did not want to touch them but they were soft when I did. I put them on and caught a glimpse of myself in a cheval mirror – the first Mrs Rochester newly escaped from her prison – staring eyes and wild-haired. I wrenched my hair back and tied it up, but the reflection’s hair still hung like kelp in a rock pool. I reached inside to rake it away. Her eye oozed cream and her lips were rotted into a black-toothed snarl.
‘Murderess,’ she hissed.
I leaped away and tried to calm myself. Her hair was tied up when I steeled myself to look again.
Concentrate.
Five long, slow breaths and I stepped back into the corridor. Dawn was seeping through the big windows at the end. There were pigs in the garden. I did not need to look to see them snuffling in the earth.
The end door on my side was saffron. It had two bolts. I drew them back and it opened outwards to reveal a narrow flight of uncarpeted stairs going up to what must be the attic.
‘You!’ A mad woman hurtled down, dress in flames, knife raised in clenched fist. I yelped and cowered but there was no one, only a dead moth on the fourth step up, and no footprints in the thick dust. That mattered but I could not think why. I closed up and re-bolted the door. The paintwork was unmarked.
The pigs were still grunting outside.
One by one I went through the rooms. The blue first. It was very like mine but decorated in cornflowers, wafting in the wallpaper when I blew on it. I searched in the wardrobe and under the bed. There was no one. I went through the other four – al
l empty – before I braced myself to revisit Uncle Tolly’s room. The door was still ajar and I pushed it fully open. I had an insane hope that he would just be sleeping but I smelled the death, sweet and cloying, even before I entered, and he was still there, mutilated, with his butchered face and gashed head and severed left hand. His right hand on the sill clutched the curtain.
The blood glistened and oozed down him, but it did not flow from his wounds. I knew there was no point but I made myself take his right wrist. It was still warm but not a thread of life beat through it. I put it in his lap.
There was a little copper lever on the wall near the door. I pulled it up but nothing happened.
The axe lay on the floor, long-handled, its blade caked in clots, a sliver of skin and strings of hair that matched the dead man’s. The wardrobe was packed tight with everything from tweeds to tails, one dusty brown and six highly polished black pairs of shoes lined neatly on the base with their toes facing outwards. I went on my haunches beside the glistening pool and reached across it to lift the sheet and peer under the bed – an unused chamber pot but nothing else. The pool shimmered and I knew that if I slithered into it I would sink, thrashing in my own death struggle, drowning in the gore I had spilled. I edged away.
There was a key on a hook, brass with a latticework on the handle that reminded me of the carpet beater we used when we spring-cleaned The Grange. I took it, went back into the corridor, shut the door and locked it.
‘For the love of God, help me!’ Uncle Tolly’s plea sliced through the wood between us. ‘Oh my dear God, March, please help me.’
Death Descends On Saturn Villa (The Gower Street Detective Series) Page 5
