by Sarah Rayne
The light from Liam’s torch played thinly over the ground as they walked cautiously forward, several times disturbing little clouds of darting insects that rose up.
‘Like will o’ the wisps,’ said Liam.
‘Ignis fatuus,’ said Michael, softly. ‘The foolish fire. Odd how the old English folklore stays around, isn’t it?’
‘In Ireland they’ll tell you that will o’ the wisps meddle with none but the guilty,’ said Liam. He paused, and then said, ‘None but the murderers and the cheaters of widows and children,’ and this time there was something in his voice that made Francesca turn her head to look at him.
‘I think,’ said Michael, ‘that we’ve got quite enough to worry about, without encountering creatures from ancient myths.’
But Fran thought he glanced uneasily over his shoulder as he said this, as if he suspected someone might be following them, and this was such a disturbing idea that she said, ‘Is that the studio over there?’
‘It is. Studio Twelve.’ Liam’s voice had regained its lightness. ‘The one your friend asked to see, Francesca. I’ll spare you the ghost stories: I suppose you both know what happened here, but it was a long time ago, and as somebody once said, it was in another country—’
‘And besides, the wench is dead.’ Francesca completed the quote almost on a reflex, and then wished she had not.
‘Exactly,’ said Liam rather dryly. ‘Can one of you hold the torch, while I unlock the door. Thanks.’
It had not been possible to live in the same house as Trixie without picking up quite a lot about this place; Fran had rather liked hearing about it, although after a while she had found it vaguely troubling, and she had wanted to say, ‘Please leave this whole thing alone! Can’t you see that you’re prising open a fragment of the past, and don’t you know that there are some pasts that ought never to be disturbed?’ The same impulse seized her now, and she found herself wanting to stop Liam unlocking the door. But of course they must unlock the door. This was not about ghosts, it was about Trixie; it was about discovering what had happened to her.
As Liam pushed the door inwards Francesca had the sudden impression that Ashwood’s history and its memories – all the quarrels and rivalries and all the jealousies and adulteries – had been piled in a jumbled heap against the inside of the door, and that opening the door had brought them tumbling out to lie in an untidy tangle on the ground. But as Liam led the way across a big square hall and into the main part of the studio, she saw that far from the place being peopled by the ghosts of old romances and faded renunciations, it was simply a sad dusty warehouse, covered in the dust and dirt of years. There was a sense of scuttling black beetles and cockroaches, but there was nothing very menacing about it. (Or is there? said a voice inside her mind. Are you sure about that?)
‘There’s an appalling smell of damp,’ said Michael, hesitating in the doorway. ‘Or cats. Or something. Are you sure the place is weathertight, Devlin?’
‘No.’
‘We’ll have to look round, won’t we?’ said Fran, and heard with irritation that her voice sounded a bit uncertain. ‘Properly, I mean?’
‘I’m afraid so. But there’s a light switch just inside the door and it’ll be a whole lot better if we can see what we’re doing. Wait now till I find it—’
There was a click, and a solitary light flared overhead. ‘That’s better,’ said Liam. ‘Francesca, shall you stay here by the door, while Sallis and I explore?’
‘I’ll explore with you.’ Just as Fran had not liked the silent twilight outside, she was not liking this vast place with the huge dust-sheeted shapes under which anything might be crouching, and she was not liking, either, the sense that eyes were watching from the pools of thick darkness beyond the single pallid light. Perfectly ridiculous, of course. And yet…
And yet, walking between and around the mounds of stored furniture and scenery was an eerie experience. Fran could not rid herself of the feeling that they were brushing against sealed-away sections of Ashwood’s history, or tiptoeing past invisible doors behind which might lie all the make-believe worlds that had been spun here. Worlds where cities were made of canvas and plywood – where walls flew apart and where people flew into love and into tempers. Over there was an elaborate chaise-longue that might have graced Cleopatra’s barge, or a Turkish seraglio, or Elizabeth Barratt’s sickroom. And the remnant of stonework propped against it was clearly only plasterboard and paint, but once it might have formed a battlement on a Norman castle, or a wishing-well, or a raven-infested midnight tower…
Or, said a small voice Fran had not known she possessed, the lid of Alraune’s grave, wherever that might be…
And of all thoughts to have, this was surely the most outrageously ridiculous of them all, although if you could not spin a few ghostly fantasies in a place such as this – a place where people had sacked cities and seduced lovers and killed enemies all on the same afternoon! – then where could you spin them? Yes, but it was disturbing the way her mind had thrown up that reference to Alraune…
(‘A ghost-child.’ Trixie had said. ‘That’s what most people believe now…’ she had said. ‘Alraune’s name was surrounded with myths and moonshine but I’m convinced that once there was a real child…’)
Once there was a real child…Francesca pulled her mind back to the present. Liam was moving ahead, shining the torch into the corners, occasionally making a comment about, Jesus God, would you look at the state of this place, but Michael was silent and Fran had the impression that he was disliking this very strongly indeed. She felt guilty at having more or less dragged him into the whole situation, because none of it was his concern.
Whoever had covered up the old furniture and the tag-ends of scenery had not done so very thoroughly or very neatly. Here and there bits of a table or a chair showed under the edges of the dust-sheets, or a spray of marlin-spikes or a fake tree lay untidily across the floor. Perhaps, when Ashwood was silent and dark, the abandoned film props crawled out to reassemble in the groupings they had known when Ashwood was alive and filled with people and lights and life. Like the ghost stories where toys came to life and moved around a nursery while the children were sleeping. Perhaps the entrance of Francesca and the two men had taken the props by surprise so that they had not had enough time to scuttle back under cover.
Fran shivered and wrapped her scarf more securely around her shoulders, tucking a fold across her mouth, because the stench in here was making her feel slightly sick. Damp, Michael had said. Or cats.
One of the chairs seemed to have got itself completely out of its dust-sheet, and it was standing by itself, half in and half out of a pool of deep shadow. Like the last reel of a werewolf film where the wolf is caught in mid-metamorphosis just as the silver bullet hits it. It had once been a rather elaborate chair: you could still see the carvings along the wooden arms and the remains of beading on the edges of the seat.
Someone had thrown a length of dark brown fabric over this half-and-half chair – perhaps an old curtain – and had flung down some shoes as well. The uncertain light striated the fabric so that if you looked at it for long enough, it began to seem like a pair of corduroy trousers…
A cold horror closed over Francesca, and words started to dance dizzily through her mind: words that repeated themselves maddeningly in her brain, saying over and over that something dreadful had happened here – you do understand that, don’t you, Fran? It’s something that’s all part of the stench that’s been making you feel sick, except that you’re not going to be sick, you’re absolutely not…But you do understand that someone has done a terrible thing in this place? And then there was her own inner voice was saying weakly that, yes, she did know that, of course she did…A terrible thing…
But her mind was somehow stuck, like a car with the gears jammed, and she was unable to move beyond these conventional words and phrases. Something dreadful had happened. An outrage. In a moment she would be able to identify what it was, this outrage, th
is thing that was so very dreadful, and then she would know what should be done about it.
She was aware that Michael had taken her arm as if to move her away from the outrage, and as if from a distance she thought how odd that she should know it was Michael without needing to turn her head to look at him. But she could not spare any attention for this, because she was still trying to unglue her mind from the stuck-in-one-gear state.
But she was seeing now that somebody was sitting in the elaborate upright chair. Yes, that was what she was seeing, and that was one of the things that was so very wrong, because nobody would sit here in the dark like this. And there was something hideously wrong about the head of the person in the chair, although it seemed to have the face of a person Fran knew. Was it the eyes that were wrong? There seemed to be thick dark ribbons hanging down from the eyes: ribbons that were plastered flat against the cheeks…
The eyes.
The frozen paralysis began to dissolve and Francesca’s mind started to move again, jerkily and painfully, but enough for her to recall some of the grislier things Trixie had said about Ashwood, and some of the old newspaper headlines she had shown to Fran. They were all flickering on to Fran’s mind like vagrant images on a scarred screen in an old movie theatre…‘Von Wolff’s victims both mutilated and left for dead…’ ‘Macabre and vicious injuries…’ ‘The eyes, the EYES…’
She drew in a deep shuddering breath, and her mind snapped properly free so that she knew and understood what she was seeing. The flung-down fabric really was a pair of corduroy trousers – it was a pair exactly like the ones Trixie often wore – and the shoes that were lying higgledy-piggledy under the chair were Trixie’s shoes. Sensible flat-heeled shoes they were, with good leather uppers: Trixie always said she could not be doing with fancy flimsy shoes.
Trixie. Dear God, it was Trixie who was sitting grotesquely upright in the chair, her hands lying submissively along the wooden arms. Brusque, kind Trixie, who had been piecing together an old scandal so that she could eventually put the letters MA after her name, and be able to teach at a higher level than the present sullen fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds. Trixie, who had doggedly tracked down people who might provide links back to that tragic old scandal – and who had probably annoyed several of them in the process, because she often did manage to annoy people, poor old Trixie, poor old thing.
Her head with the dreadful dark tracks beneath each eye was turned towards the door, as if watching for someone to come in and find her. But she could not be watching for anything because she was dead, and even if she had not been dead, she could not have seen anything, because—
Because someone had re-created Ashwood’s brutal legend exactly. Some time between Monday night and today, someone had stabbed Trixie through the eyes, first the right and then the left, using a skewer. Francesca knew this, because she could see the skewer that Trixie’s murderer had used, sticking out of the left eye.
The entire studio began to blur, and Fran backed away, banging into the sheeted mounds, making stupid ineffectual movements with her hands as if to push away the sight of the terrible thing sitting in the chair.
‘For Jesus Christ’s sake get her out,’ said Liam’s voice angrily, and Fran heard her own voice saying she was all right, but she had better have some air—
And then, blessedly, she was outside, with the night coldness on her face, and Michael was telling her to take slow deep breaths, and his arm was around her, which was a good thing really, because Fran thought she might have fallen over otherwise.
‘I’m sorry – didn’t mean to make a scene. I really will be perfectly all right in a minute—’
‘I know you will. Devlin’s phoning police and ambulances, and in a minute I’ll get you somewhere where you can have a drop of brandy or something.’ He paused. ‘Francesca, I’m so sorry you had to see that.’
Fran managed to straighten up at last, and discovered that the world had at least stopped spinning. ‘Michael, she – she was dead, wasn’t she?’
He understood at once. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, she was dead.’
But neither of them said there was no means of knowing whether Trixie had still been alive when her murderer left her here, or how long it might have taken her to die in the dark and lonely studio.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Edmund thought it could be assumed that somebody somewhere would miss Trixie Smith reasonably soon, and that inquiries would be put in hand. He wondered how long it would take for people to work backwards to the visit to Ashwood Studios. A week, perhaps? Yes, a week seemed a reasonable length of time. On this basis, he set himself to expect a call by the weekend, and he thought it would be interesting to see if his psychology had been sound and if the crime was put down to someone with a fixation on that old case.
But whatever the police decided, once they had found Trixie, they would presumably want to talk to Edmund himself. His fingerprints would be on the main door of Studio Twelve, of course, and the forensic people might find one or two of his hairs – you had only to read a detective novel nowadays or watch a television police drama to know all about that particular tripwire! But that would be perfectly in order because he had openly been inside the place. He went over everything he had done, and he knew he had not left any evidence at Ashwood that might damn him.
He had not left any evidence in Deborah Fane’s house that might damn him either, but he was not going to take any chances on that count. It was a big old house and it had belonged to the family for a good many years, and Edmund could not be absolutely sure that there were no dangerous fragments of the past still tucked into any of its corners. After the funeral he had cleared out all of the cupboards and desks, conscientiously labelling everything as he went. The missing share certificates and title deeds had finally turned up, and he had placed them in a folder which he had taken to the bank.
But despite his care there could still be unexpected notes or photographs in chimney nooks or crannies – or old letters folded up to wedge rattling windows, or newspaper cuttings lining kitchen drawers…So early on Friday morning he dictated several lengthy reports to his secretary to keep her busy for the rest of the day (you could not trust these girls not to sneak off to the hairdresser or spend hours gossiping on the phone to friends), and drove out to the house to make one final check before probate was granted and the keys irretrievably handed to CHARTH.
As he went methodically through the rooms, paying careful attention to the backs of drawers and little tucked-away cubbyholes, he wondered if Michael Sallis’s charity would sell the house and invest the proceeds, or whether they would let their yobs actually live in it. Well, it was nothing to do with Edmund what they did with the place, and he would not want to live here himself – there were too many memories. But even though it was a bit remote for some people’s tastes – right at the end of that bumpy unmade lane – it was a good big house with good big gardens and when Edmund thought about the price it might have realized, he could not find it in his heart to regret putting Deborah Fane out of the way.
He ended up in the main bedroom at the front of the house. It was very quiet everywhere and the soft autumn sunshine came gently in through the deep bay window, lying across the slightly worn carpet. There were fade marks on the old-fashioned mahogany wardrobe where the sun had touched it every day for goodness-knew how many years. Deborah Fane’s clothes were folded in boxes and a couple of suitcases, ready for a local charity to collect, but Edmund went through the boxes, feeling inside coat pockets and linings and examining the zipped compartments of the handbags. Nothing. He straightened up and crossed to the deep bay window for one last check of the tallboy and the dressing-table. And there, lying flat on the bottom of a small shallow drawer at the dressing-table’s centre – the filigree key so flimsy it could be snapped off with a fingernail – was the long brown envelope.
It was so faded that it was almost indistinguishable from its background, and it was not really surprising that Edmund had no
t noticed it earlier. It was probably nothing of much importance, but…
But as he lifted the envelope out, he was aware of his skin starting to prickle with nervous tension. It’ll be nothing, he thought. It’s an old envelope, but it’ll contain an ancient seed catalogue or a forgotten bank statement or something of the kind. But his hands were shaking and he suddenly knew that whatever was inside the envelope was very important indeed. He took several deep breaths and then, moving with extreme care, he slid the contents out.
The quiet bedroom began to disintegrate into splinters of whirling, too-bright sunlight like a fragmented looking-glass, and Edmund reached out blindly to the dressing-table’s edge to stop himself from falling headlong into the tumbling maelstrom of light and dancing dust-motes. He had no idea how long he sat like that, clutching on to the solid wood, waiting for the room to stop spinning – it was as if time had slipped its moorings or as if Edmund himself had stepped completely outside of time – but when finally he was able to release his grip he was trembling and out of breath as if he had been running too fast, and he had to wipe sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief.
He stared down at the single sheet of paper in his hand and felt cold and sick at how he had so nearly missed this.
The surface of the paper was faintly yellow and the edges were splitting, and it was sad, it was so infinitely sad to be looking at this tiny, fragile shred of the past…Edmund ran his fingers lightly over the brittle surface of the paper, which was brown-spotted with age, the ink so faded that the writing was almost indecipherable.
But it was not so faded that he could not read almost all of it. The headings were in German, but it was easy enough to translate.
Certificate of Birth, said the heading in black ornate lettering. And underneath: Date of birth: 10th December, 1940. Place of Birth, Poland. Mother, Lucretia von Wolff. Father, unknown.
