“I have no wish to denigrate either your or your father’s achievements. He was a remarkable man, by all accounts. But you must understand, I am engaged in no philanthropic endeavour. My object is profit, pure and simple. Do you think that a mean and unworthy end, Miss Carson?”
I sought a diplomatic answer. “It’s a necessary one, Mr Thorne.”
Again that faint vestige of a smile. “I have known poverty, Miss Carson, and lifted myself from it, through no effort but my own. Any man could have done as much; it is merely a matter of will. I confess, therefore, that I have scant sympathy for those unwilling to do likewise – those who wallow in the mire of their degradation, expecting the industrious to pull them out.”
What reply, if any, did he expect? I had no idea, and so remained silent. He went on.
“I have, as a result, a somewhat harsh reputation hereabouts – one I have, I’m sure, done much to earn. My late wife was a boon companion to me, from the very beginning, in my endeavour. Among many other duties, she filled the place that I have now engaged you to fill. I tell you this in honesty, Miss Carson. I have no doubt that your intelligence and aptitude are equal to the position, only whether your stomach is.”
“I am in need of work, Mr Thorne,” I said at last. “You have engaged me as your secretary, and not your conscience.”
Again that shadow-smile. “Good. In any case, you have earned yourself a good measure of credit as regards the life to come. It can do you no ill to now address the needs of the present one. Yes, I think you will do, Miss Carson. That will be all for now.” He perched a pair of spectacles on his nose, reaching for a book. “We shall begin tomorrow morning, at five o’clock sharp. Good evening to you.”
He opened the book and began to read. Realising I was dismissed – purely in a temporary sense, to my relief – I returned to my rooms.
Later, Kellett brought me a cold supper. I was glad to be spared dining with him and the other servants; I had little desire for their company, least of all that of Kellett himself.
For all its magnificence, Springcross House was a cold place, where affection and kindness had no home. Kellett and the rest were of a piece with it; so, it seemed, was my new employer. Or perhaps not; he was not unhandsome, despite his years, and there was that faint, amused smile...
I chided myself for reading too many romances. I might still hope to find a husband at my time of life, but I should get nowhere by setting my cap at a man like Arodias Thorne. I resolved myself, therefore, to make my first object that of my employer: the amassing of wealth in sufficient quantity to ensure I would not want in later years, even if I must spend them alone. Needs must – Mr Muddock, Mrs Rhodes – when the Devil drives.
Chapter Three
The Fire on the Hill
17th – 18th October 2016
THE ALARM ON Alice’s mobile phone began beeping at 5.30 am. Grunting, she stirred, rolled over in the bed and surveyed the empty room.
She picked up the mobile and switched it off. Her handbag and a plastic bottle of water sat beside it; she picked them up and sat on the edge of the bed, bare toes brushing the floor.
She took the packet of Citalopram out of the handbag, popped one of the antidepressant tablets into her hand and washed it down with a gulp of water. Then she got up, pulled on last night’s clothes and went downstairs.
The house was cold. She’d have to put the central heating on. In the kitchen she made coffee; she’d have to go out shortly, get some toast or cereal. She could have just gone straight out, but resisted the urge; she was dressed in last night’s clothes, unwashed, bed-hair still sticking up all awry. She’d look like a madwoman, and these days she felt like one too much of the time. Or on the edge of becoming one, anyway. It was all too easy, when you lived alone and weren’t working, to slip into behaviour others might mistake for mental illness. Easy to forget to wash or change your clothes, or to hold conversations with your now-ex-husband or your dead daughter.
Alice sucked in a sharp breath, then let it out slowly. The thought of Emily, when it came suddenly and unexpectedly, still caused almost physical pain.
She sat in the front room, cupping the mug in her hands for warmth, and sipped her coffee, then went up and ran the shower. It coughed and spat but finally ran hot enough. She’d forgotten to unpack the shower gel and shampoo the night before, but Mum had laid out a bar of thick, creamy white soap in the bathroom sink. That would do. There was a thick towel on the radiator too. The kind of thing she’d forgotten to think about any more, but that Mum would remember. Alice’s eyes misted; she stepped into the shower and let the hot water rinse the tears away.
After the shower, scrubbed pink and clean, she donned new layers of protection: clean clothes and make-up. When she was done, she studied herself in the mirror and nodded, deciding the impression of a woman who wasn’t unhinged by grief was convincing enough.
SHE BOUGHT BREAD, cereal, bacon, more milk, orange juice. She ate breakfast, drank coffee, then went into the downstairs bedroom and opened the first of the crates.
Crate by crate, as the day wore on, she unpacked; it filled the gaping spaces of time, stopped her thinking about Andrew, about Emily, about what the hell she was meant to do now. She stopped to grill bacon and make a sandwich, drank coffee until her teeth were clenched and she was juddering. She ventured out again to buy some decaff. And the unpacking went on.
Around two o’clock, she Skyped Teddy, out in Spain. He looked different, but in a good way; he was slimmer, his skin bronzed, and if his grey hair was a little whiter, it was a very nice shade of silver that went well with the new tan.
“So, my dear,” he said. “Come on, tell old Teddy. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Yes? Really?” He raised his eyebrows.
“I’m fine,” she said. “As you well as you can expect. You know, I’m not singing Hosanna and doing the Happy Dance every morning, if that’s what you mean.”
“Perish the thought,” said Teddy. “The very image is the stuff of nightmares.”
“Oh piss off, you old queen,” she said. “How are you and Stefan, anyway?”
“Oh, very well.” Teddy smiled. “Retirement’s suiting me down to the ground. It’s a whole new lease of life.”
She smiled back. “I suppose sea, sun, sand and sangria will do that for you.”
“Not having a fucking day job will do it even more,” he assured her. “I feel like a man twenty years younger. Unfortunately, Stefan’s threatened to cut off my balls if I get one.”
Alice spluttered and put her coffee down. “You bastard, you nearly owed me a new laptop there.”
“I’ve told you before, you shouldn’t drink while Skyping.”
“I bloody miss you, Teddy.”
“I know. I can brighten a room just by leaving it. So remind me again, darling heart, where are you now?”
“Manchester.”
“Dear Lord,” Teddy shuddered theatrically. “The horror, the horror.”
“Have you ever even been north of Watford?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “I’ve never been to that city near Chernobyl either – the one they evacuated?”
“Pripyat?”
“Quite. I’ve never been there, but I know more than enough to be quite certain that a) I wouldn’t like it, b) I will miss no vital life experiences by not going and c) the natives would probably fucking eat me.”
“There aren’t any natives in Pripyat. It’s abandoned.”
“Don’t you bloody believe it, darling. It’s probably populated by a horde of hideous Soviet-era mutants who aren’t aware that the Berlin Wall’s come down and that the Red Flag no longer flies in Moscow. Great hairy flesh-eating brutes with the physiques of gorillas.”
“I’d have thought that’d be right up your street.”
“Shows how little you know of me. I prefer a rather more refined dancing partner. Seriously, though, Manchester sounds good for you. It’s near your
parents, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that can’t be bad. I’m sure being near your family –”
“What’s left of my family.”
“Alice –”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. I’m getting gloomy and maudlin.”
“Must be something in the water. Look, for goodness sake, take care of yourself, and get in touch with me if you need to talk. I love you very dearly, my girl,” he added gruffly. “Lord knows why.”
“Love you too,” said Alice. Her eyes stung and she blinked hard so as not to start crying in front of him. “Look, I’d better go.”
“All right, then. Look after yourself, chick.”
“You too.”
The dongle linking her laptop to the internet had almost run out; she’d rung Virgin, arranged for them to connect her, but that would take days. The internet was her link to the wider world, to the distraction she so badly needed to stop her thinking. She’d buy a new dongle tomorrow, maybe two. In the meantime, the television and DVD player were unpacked, so she set them up, turned all the lights on and watched films, one after the other, as the afternoon outside grew dim.
And that was the first day, she thought.
AT ABOUT EIGHT o’clock, she paused the film she was watching. There’d been something. Sounds. Voices, she was sure. Next door, maybe. A television. But when she listened, she heard nothing.
Kids, perhaps, outside. There’d been something about the sounds that had made her think of children.
She switched the film on again. Something flickered in her peripheral vision; something small and dark and child-sized, with a pale blur of a face.
No. Alice dug her fingers into the arm of the settee until they threatened to punch through the leather. No; there was no-one there.
But there were those sounds again. She pressed the pause button, and this time the noises didn’t go away when the film fell silent. She wished she hadn’t done that, because she could hear them now, quite clearly. Not clearly enough to make out every word, but she could tell what they were and where they were coming from. They were whispers – the whispers of children, she was sure of it – and they were coming from outside the front room door, from the hallway of her house.
That couldn’t be right. Alice sat paralysed; they must be on the pavement outside, talking. Probably running around in witch and ghost costumes, rehearsing their trick-or-treat routines for Halloween. But the sound wasn’t coming from that direction; it was coming from just behind the living room door.
Children had got in, and not sweet, gentle-natured children, like Emily had been. Feral; that was the phrase, wasn’t it? Feral children. Coined by the kind of newspapers she most despised, but even so – children weren’t born knowing right from wrong, that a world existed beyond their selfish need. And if they weren’t taught it, they could be little monsters – cruel, vicious, satanically demanding. They wanted something and so it was theirs by right; breaking into a house would be nothing to such a child. And if someone else had the temerity to be living there, to put themselves, by the bare fact of their existence, between them and their object –
Christ; one noise in the night and she was turning into a rabid fascist, seeing danger everywhere. But that didn’t change the fact of the whispers, still coming from the hallway.
What could she use to protect herself with? She almost sobbed in relief when she saw something she’d forgotten about – a wooden chair-leg, lying in a corner. The chair had been there when she’d moved in, broken and falling apart. The leg had fallen off as Dad had picked it up to carry outside and Alice had toed it into a corner, out of the way. And then, thankfully, forgotten about it.
She snatched it up, brushed away the dust that clung to the haft, and advanced on the door, hefting it in both hands. The whispers grew louder.
Does she know?
Will she help?
Help who? Him or us?
She gripped the door handle, so tightly her knuckles whitened; her arm drew back, ready to sweep her make-do cudgel down.
She’ll help him. It’s why she’s here. Can’t have that. So we’re going to have to –
Alice yanked the door wide and lunged through it, a snarl in her throat ready to become a furious shriek. But the hallway was empty. She spun to her left, brandishing the chair-leg at the stairs, but they were empty too.
The house was silent, but for a faint buzz from the television. Alice gripped the chair-leg tighter, then turned on the upstairs lights and went up.
She checked each room, one by one. In her attic bedroom she was momentarily afraid to look at her reflection in the window, remembering what she’d seen – thought she’d seen – the night before, but the glass only showed her herself, standing in an empty room.
Alice breathed out and went back downstairs, but left the lights on. And when she went to bed that night she took the chair-leg with her, keeping it close under the duvet.
THE SECOND DAY began at the same time; Alice drank coffee, ate toast, showered, dressed and completed the last remaining unpacking. The empty crates she stacked in the downstairs bedroom. She might need them again and it wasn’t as if she couldn’t spare the space.
That job done, she ventured out. The sky was a dull grey, but there was no wind and the air was mild. Locking the door, she walked up the cobbled street to the edge where it dropped away. There’d been a storm back in the nineteen-twenties or thereabouts, she remembered being told, and part of the Brow had collapsed, turning a section of hillside into ‘the Fall,’ an almost sheer face that dropped straight to Browton Vale. From further up ahead, where the dual carriageway on Radcliffe New Road ran around the edge of the Vale, came the sound of heavy traffic.
The Vale was thick with rowan, oak and beech; over the years, they’d even sprouted in the steep slope of the Fall, so that they flanked the wooden steps that Alice climbed down. The way was thickly carpeted with fallen leaves: brown, red, russet and gold. After that she was on a muddy, well-trodden footpath that wound through the woodlands.
She followed it as it bent around heaps of overgrown rubble, stubs of walls, the gaping holes of what had been foundations. Houses, caught in the landslip. Leaves, twigs, the bristly casings of fallen beech nuts, all crunched underfoot; two grey squirrels chased across the path and shot up a thick oak’s trunk, spiralling round it as they climbed. The woods smelled of damp earth, rotten leaves.
Autumn had always been her favourite time of year, and yet its beauty was so bound up with death and decay.
The path forked. One way led down to the river Irwell; the waterway wound and hooked its way over the miles from its source near Bacup in Lancashire, marking out the boundary between the cities of Manchester and Salford before weaving into, and through, the latter. Alice could hear the shallow water chuckling over the stones. The other path rose higher, led deeper into the woods; she followed that.
Soon she was walking through drifts of leaves so thick that it was an effort to kick them skywards in great, billowing showers of colour and rot. The rich smell of leaf-mould, woody and damp, enfolded her. Something about it took her back to her childhood – the good parts, the safe parts. Walking with Mum while Dad was out at work. The air not cold enough to numb or cause pain, but just enough to make the warmth of coming home, of a mug of drinking chocolate or a bowl of oxtail soup, a real thing, a pleasure that counted.
Alice smiled, pushed her hands into her coat pockets and walked on. Her breath was a pale ghost in the damp air, vanishing almost as soon as it left her mouth. A crow cawed; another squirrel skittered through the leaves, stopped nearby and studied her with bright button eyes, paws raised and twitching above its white bib before darting off. Specks of rain fell in her face, but only a few, only intermittent; nowhere near enough to justify turning back. She glimpsed another walker through the trees – not in any detail, just a flash of the red coat they were wearing – and called out a greeting, but there was no answer.
The path sloped
down. Tree branches met and meshed above her, making a tunnel of mossy trunks on either side and russet leaves above and below, with green grass and light at the end. Still smiling, Alice went down. Part of her would be sorry to get clear of the woods, but it would be nice to see the river. She peered through the trees, but couldn’t see any sign of the red coat, or even the path they might have been taking. Perhaps they hadn’t been on a path; perhaps they’d been slipping behind a convenient tree-trunk to answer the call of nature. Alice giggled to herself; that would be just the kind of timing she’d done so well. She’d met John that way, at university.
She let herself think of John, just for a moment. Lazy Saturday mornings in bed together, her small hand spread on his chest while he slept, marvelling how its whiteness stood out against his skin. Cheap pub lunches on a Sunday. Sharing books in the library. The weekend she’d gone home with him to meet his parents. They’d been tall and handsome and dressed immaculately, as if for the Sunday service at the local Baptist church.
His Dad had been called Elijah; he’d had a neat moustache and touches of grey at his temples. His mother was Dorothea, and her laugh had been musical. Both his parents had spoken with a light Jamaican lilt, in stark contrast to John’s own Manchester accent. They’d been good people, although she’d never felt they’d been quite sure of her.
It was time to stop thinking of John. Follow a story too far along its length, it always ends in sorrow. Best to stop now. All of a sudden the trees felt cloying, their looming presence oppressive; she strode faster, clear of them, onto the open ground, into light and clear, fresh air with just a hint of the river’s yeasty scent.
She walked across open heath towards the river, trying to determine what had changed. Because something had, beyond doubt. Something felt different.
She stared down the river. Yes, something had changed. There’d been a footbridge over the river, and further down, two tower blocks. She’d seen them from the Brow before coming down the steps, but now they were gone. In their place she could see only rolling heath and running water.
The Feast of All Souls Page 3
