Roots of Evil

by Sarah Rayne

  And so, taking it all in all, it looked as if there was no one prepared to shoulder the responsibility for Trixie’s things. Fran thought she would make a start on Friday afternoon, go along to Quondam Films on Saturday as requested, and finish the sorting out on Sunday. It would be a bit of a nuisance to have to break off midway through the weekend, although she was intrigued by the prospect of seeing Alraune.

  She had consigned the dogs to the care of the RSPCA with stern instructions that they must be found a good home, and the home must be for all three of them together. Trixie would never forgive Fran if her beloved dogs were split up, and Fran thought there was enough to contend with as it was, without risking being haunted by a peevish and accusatory ghost, purely because the ghost’s dogs had not been found sufficiently luxurious homes.

  The actual sorting out was not as time-consuming as she had feared, and by Sunday lunchtime she was more than halfway through. As she worked, she thought about yesterday’s viewing of Alraune. She had found it disturbing but rather moving.

  Trixie had not been very tidy, but at least she had not been a magpie keeping bundles of old letters or postcards, or even photographs. There were a few photographs though, mostly pushed haphazardly into a couple of large manilla envelopes on top of a wardrobe. Fran, who rather liked old photos, even when they were of other people’s families or friends, put these to one side thinking she would look through them later, although it was rather sad if Trixie had had so few stored-away memories of her life. On the whole it was probably better not to surround yourself with sentimental fragments, but it meant a lot of the romance of the past got lost. It was not so many years since you could practically piece together entire lives from faded letters, or construct long-ago love affairs from theatre programmes and dance programmes or scratched gramophone records.

  But she could not see today’s teenagers squirrelling away posters from pop concerts or print-outs of text messages. This strengthened her resolve to destroy everything from that disastrous marriage: Marcus’s letters and some theatre tickets, and the hotel bill from where they had spent their first romantic weekend, when they had not got out of bed until it was time to go home. Some romance, thought Fran cynically, and with the idea of forcing Marcus and his perfidy out of her mind, she worked doggedly on, making an inventory of furniture and the contents of drawers and cupboards. If you had no family, did you simply become just a typed list of saucepans and crockery and cretonne-covered chairs?

  By mid-afternoon she had finished, and she stood in Trixie’s bedroom, conscious of aching back and neck muscles, and feeling unpleasantly grubby, and also very hungry. People deserted by cheating husbands were supposed to lose their appetites and dwindle to mere shadows of their former selves, but Fran was not a die-away Victorian heroine or a twenty-first-century stick-thin model, and she was not going to stop eating just because she was getting divorced. And she had been carting boxes and books and clothes back and forth ever since breakfast and she had missed lunch.

  She tipped the contents of some tinned soup into a saucepan to heat, and switched on the grill to make toast to go with it. While the grill was heating up, she looked through the photographs she had brought downstairs, trying to allot relationships to the faces. The slightly countrified woman standing in front of a nice old stone cottage might be Trixie’s mother, and the little group with 1950s hairstyles could be aunts. Were the dates right? Yes, near enough. There were one or two shots of a sturdy, somewhat belligerent-looking child whom Fran recognized after a moment as being Trixie herself. These had mostly been taken in gardens or on what looked like holidays on the coast.

  But other than this there was not very much of interest. Fran turned over the last photograph in the envelope, thinking she would just label the whole thing as ‘Photographs’ and include it in the inventory for the unknown elderly aunt.

  The last photograph was a postcard-size black-and-white shot taken against the background of some unidentifiable city. It showed a three-quarters view of a child around eight or nine years old, wearing a corduroy jacket. The child had deepset eyes and dark hair that flopped forward and there was something about the eyes that Francesca found slightly chilling. I wouldn’t like to meet you in a dark alley on a moonless night, thought Fran, and then took in the writing on the white strip along the bottom and instantly felt as if a giant, invisible hand had slammed into her stomach.

  On the bottom of the photograph was written a single name and a date.

  Alraune. 1949.

  Francesca sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at the enigmatic face of the dark-eyed child, occasionally putting out a hand to touch the photograph’s surface, as if she could somehow absorb the past through her fingertips, or as if buried within the images might be a key that would unlock the past.

  Eventually she took a square of glass from a framed print Trixie had had of a Tyrolean snow-scene, and laid it carefully over the photograph. At this point the smell of burning reminded her that the grill was still switched on and was blasting toast-flavoured heat into the kitchen, and she hastily switched it off. She was no longer in the least bit hungry, which was ridiculous, because Alraune – the child, the ghost, the legend – could have nothing whatsoever to do with her. You don’t affect me in the least, said Fran silently to Alraune’s enigmatic stare.

  But the kitchen suddenly seemed cold and unfriendly, and Fran repressed a shiver and glanced uneasily towards the garden door. The top half was glass, so that she could see the outline of the thick laurel hedge between this house and the neighbour’s, and also the tubs of winter pansies that Trixie had planted because they made a nice splash of colour when everything else had died down and the dogs did not try to bury bones under them.

  It had started to rain, and the thick old laurel hedge that Trixie had never got round to trimming this autumn was tapping gently against the window. Fran got up to draw the curtains across the darkening afternoon and flipped the blind down over the upper part of the garden door. The kitchen immediately felt friendlier and safer. But you don’t feel at all friendly or safe, she said to Alraune’s photograph. And where on earth did Trixie get you, I wonder? Were you just part of her research into Ashwood? Or did you instigate the entire project? Meeting the child’s uncompromising stare, Francesca was inclined to think the latter might be more likely, because if ever a face would print itself on your mind…

  It was already almost six o’clock, and although she had never felt less like food, if she ate something it might stop her from thinking about ghosts and imagining them peering in through the windows. She was about to turn the gas up to heat the soup when she heard something outside that was certainly not the rain or the wayward laurel hedge and that was too substantial for a ghost. Footsteps. Footsteps coming down the gravel drive, moving slowly, as if the owner either was not sure of his or her welcome, or did not want to be heard.

  Fran stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring out into the half-lit hall and the old-fashioned Victorian stained-glass panels of the door. Silence. No one there after all. And then a dark shape – unmistakably that of a man – stepped into the porch and a hand came up to lift the door-knocker.

  This time Fran’s heart leapt into her throat, even though logic was already pointing out that it was most likely someone from school wanting to know if there was any news about Trixie’s killer, poor old Trixie, or even the Deputy Head inquiring how the packing up of Trixie’s things was going. But before she went out to answer the knock, some instinct made Fran snatch up a teatowel and drop it over Alraune’s photograph.

  ‘I could have thought up an excuse about you having left something at Quondam yesterday and that I was returning it,’ said the man standing on the step. ‘But I won’t bother with that. The truth is that I wanted to see you again.’

  His coat collar was turned up against the cold and his hair was lightly misted with the rain. But his eyes were the same: grey and clear and fringed with black lashes, and the smile was the same as well;
outwardly reserved but with that faint promise of something that was not reserved at all.

  ‘Hello, Michael,’ said Francesca. ‘Come in.’

  It was as easy to be with him as it had been at Deborah Fane’s house, or at Quondam’s offices yesterday. There was no awkwardness; it was like meeting up with an old and trusted friend; one with whom you were always on the same wavelength even when you had not met for years. Francesca thought this was probably something to do with that appalling experience inside Ashwood, and then she glanced at Michael again and thought it was nothing to do with that.

  He sat at the kitchen table while Fran made coffee, and talked a bit about yesterday’s film, and asked how she had coped with the police interviews.

  ‘Reasonably well. The police were more courteous than I expected. I had to make a statement and give them as much information as I could about Trixie. Which wasn’t so very much when it came down to it. You?’

  ‘Much the same. Questions about when and where and how, and can anyone verify that, sir. In the main, nobody could verify anything about my movements,’ said Michael. ‘I live on my own.’

  So he was not married or, from the sound of it, linked up to anyone. Francesca found this slightly surprising. With his looks he must have had opportunities, to say the very least. Yes, but there was that reserve; that would make it quite difficult to get close to him. She suddenly wanted to find out if she could do so. This would be nothing more than curiosity, though.

  The kitchen was rather old-fashioned – Trixie had thought it a waste of good money to spend out on streamlined appliances when the old ones were still perfectly serviceable, and could not see the point of papering walls or painting doors every five minutes when the dogs scratched things to shreds as soon as your back was turned – but in an odd way the outdated background suited Michael. Fran, studying him covertly over her coffee mug, thought he did not entirely belong in the hard-edged world of high technology or fast foods or computer-generated music in supermarkets. She remembered that her original impression had been of someone whose spiritual home was an Oxford common-room, but seeing him again she revised this and set him instead against the background of an old house – not an especially quaint or inglenook-picturesque place, just a fairly old house with a good many books that had been well read, and perhaps a nice untidiness of music and old programmes of plays or exhibitions seen and enjoyed, and maybe notes for a book he would never get round to writing…

  And then she remembered that his work took him into the world of homeless teenagers and concrete-block skyscraper flats, and into the twilit realms of drugs and crime and sullen or violent adolescents, and her opinion of him received another shake, like a child’s kaleidoscope rearranging the colours and the patterns, although she was not sure precisely how the colours and patterns would fall.

  She was just wondering how he would take it if she offered to make an omelette for them to share – it was coming up to seven o’clock – when Michael said, ‘You’ve probably already got some kind of commitment for tonight – I know teachers are always having to attend parent meetings and things – but if not, I noticed an Italian restaurant just along the road. It looked quite good. If you can eat pasta and feel like some company for a couple of hours—’

  It was nicely done. He had made the suggestion in a casual way, at the same time presenting her with a polite get-out which would not make either of them feel awkward. Fran said at once that she loved pasta. ‘And the only thing I was going to do this evening was pack away some more of Trixie’s things.’

  ‘Do I need to ring up to book a table?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. They get quite busy during the week because the food’s good, but Sunday evenings are usually fairly quiet. How about if I just rinse these coffee cups and then dash upstairs for a quick wash.’ She could scramble into something a bit more respectable than the ancient jeans and dust-streaked shirt she was wearing, although there was no need to say this.

  ‘All right.’

  He carried his cup to the sink, and Fran turned on the taps and without thinking reached for the teatowel covering the photograph.

  Michael saw the photograph at once, and he saw the slanting writing under it, and he flinched visibly as if someone had suddenly shone a too-bright light into his face, or as if he had received a blow. Francesca, still holding the teatowel, turned to stare at him. When he finally spoke, his voice was strained and harsh and so different from his normal voice that it was as if a stranger had taken his place.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  Fran said carefully, ‘It was among Trixie’s things. I found it this afternoon. I’m not sure what to do with it – I’m not even sure if I ought to do anything with it at all.’ When he did not speak, she said, ‘Trixie talked quite a bit about Lucretia von Wolff and Alraune while she was putting together her research, so I got very familiar with the stories. But I thought a lot of them were journalists’ exaggeration. Until I saw that photo I never really thought Alraune existed.’

  Michael said very softly, ‘Alraune did exist.’ His eyes were still on the photograph.

  Fran had no idea what to say. But because he was still looking shaken, and because clearly they could not pretend that nothing had happened, she said, ‘I don’t know why it was in Trixie’s things. I don’t think it’s anything to do with her family.’

  ‘No.’

  The frozen look had not gone from his face, and Fran suddenly wanted to reach out to take his hand in hers. To dispel such a ridiculous idea she said, ‘I suppose it’s something of a find, isn’t it? I mean – to anyone interested in Lucretia von Wolff’s life it would probably be worth quite a lot.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Fran had no idea what was behind all this, but clearly something was behind it, and so by way of edging nearer to the heart of the matter she said, ‘Uh – Michael, I’m not sure how much you know about Lucretia von Wolff—’

  ‘Quite a lot,’ he said. ‘I know quite a lot about Lucretia.’ He paused and then, almost as if he was bracing himself to plunge neck-deep into icy water, he said, ‘Lucretia von Wolff was my grandmother. I knew her very well indeed.’

  The kaleidoscope received another shake, and this time the coloured patterns fell in entirely different, wholly incredible shapes. His grandmother, thought Fran. That can’t possibly be true. He can’t expect me to believe that.

  She said, ‘But – you can’t have known Lucretia. She died fifty-odd years ago. She died at Ashwood – she killed herself to escape being charged with the double murder. That’s the legend – it’s one of the famous murders of its time.’

  ‘Lucretia didn’t die at Ashwood that day,’ said Michael. ‘And when I was eight years old I ran away to her house and lived with her for the next ten years.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Francesca ended up making the omelettes after all, since Michael’s astonishing revelation seemed effectively to put an end to any idea of going out and attempting to eat anything even approaching a normal civilized meal.

  But when he said, rather ruefully, ‘Sorry, Francesca, I didn’t mean to explode a bombshell – there’s no reason why we can’t still go out to eat,’ Fran said at once that of course they could not go out; if Michael thought she was going to discuss Lucretia von Wolff and Alraune with waiters and other diners eavesdropping on their conversation, he had better think again.

  ‘Are we going to discuss Lucretia and Alraune?’

  ‘Well, not if you’d hate it and not anything that’s private, of course. Can you eat omelettes?’

  He made a brief gesture, half defeat, half acceptance, and said, ‘Yes, of course I can eat omelettes.’ And then, as Fran reached into the fridge for eggs and cheese, he said, ‘Where d’you keep the plates and cutlery? I’ll lay the table.’

  ‘In that drawer. Thanks. D’you mind eating in here? The dining-room’s a bit gloomy.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Michael, setting out knives and forks on the table. ‘But tel
ling your life story is the ultimate in ego-trips. Like telling your dreams.’

  ‘You’re forgetting I’ve lived with Lucretia’s life story – and with Alraune – ever since Trixie started her thesis,’ said Fran. Clearly he could not be asked about the running away part, but it should be acceptable to ask about Lucretia and about the years with her. Do I believe him, I wonder? More to the point, Do I trust him, because after all, I don’t really know anything about him. I suppose I could phone CHARTH tomorrow and verify that he works for them, but that wouldn’t tell me anything about his childhood. Surely he can’t have lived with Lucretia. She died years ago. If this is some kind of hoax, it’s a very elaborate one, though – unless he’s mad, of course, I suppose that’s a possibility. But she glanced at him again, and knew it was not even a remote possibility. He was unmistakably sane. And so when you have eliminated the impossible, my dear Watson, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  She discovered that he was looking at her. ‘You’re finding it difficult to accept,’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes. Did you really live with her? With Lucretia?’

  ‘I did. For ten years. In a nice old house on the edge of the Lincolnshire fens, on the outskirts of a little market town, where she lived a perfectly conventional life. Women’s Guild and shopping and library reading groups. She did quite a lot of charity work – that’s how I got involved in CHARTH – and she had a good many friends locally, although I’ll swear that not one of them had the smallest suspicion of who she really was. Which was how she wanted it. Oh, and she loved music.’

  ‘Conrad’s influence,’ said Fran, remembering the film music yesterday at Quondam, and feeling that she was reaching back to grasp a handful of the past.

  ‘Yes, I think so. She used to take me to concerts in Lincoln and Norwich or Cambridge – and gorgeous choral stuff in Ely Cathedral at Christmas and Easter. I had never heard music or singing like that before and it knocked me for six – in fact at one stage it nearly swept me into a religious vocation.’