The Devil`s Feather

by Minette Walters

  Peter drew his own conclusions about what might have happened—“You don’t warn people off by feeding them grapes for three days”—and returned later with a printout of the Istanbul protocol. Jess left the whole subject alone, and talked weasels and crows until I stopped answering the door. I was prepared to accept that Peter might let drowning slip during one of their conversations—in fact I expected it—but there was no way either of them could have known of Alan’s theory.

  I stopped on the landing and shrugged Jess’s hand off my arm. “OK. What’s going on? Have you been talking to Alan Collins?”

  She didn’t bother to lie. “Only your mother…but I’ve read Alan Collins’s emails. She forwarded them to me this morning…along with the ones you wrote to him.”

  “She had no right,” I said angrily, “and you shouldn’t have read them. They weren’t addressed to you.”

  “Well, I have,” she said without heat, “so there’s nothing to be done unless you want to sue me. Your mother didn’t do it to hurt you.”

  “How did she get hold of you?”

  “Rang directory inquiries. You gave her my name, apparently, and told her I had a farm down the road from Barton House. It wasn’t that difficult.”

  “You never answer your phone,” I said suspiciously, “and you never return messages.”

  “I did this time. She kept phoning till I answered.” Jess held my gaze for a moment. “I thought it was you at first because she called herself Marianne. The pitch of your voice is pretty similar but she’s got a stronger accent.”

  “Is she here?”

  “No. That’s why she sent me the emails. To explain why I’m having to do this, and not her. She’s frightened of leading this bastard to your front door.”

  “Do what?”

  “Tell you what an arse you’re being…persuade you to stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Her mouth twisted. “I told her I wasn’t much of a talker, but she wouldn’t listen. She doesn’t give up easily, does she? She was ready to give me your whole bloody life story if I hadn’t said I’d be coming anyway—” Jess broke off abruptly. “Your mother gave me a list of things to say. She said you’d want to hear them.”

  “Let me guess,” I said dryly. “My father’s deeply hurt, my mother can’t cope with his mood swings and needs me to start phoning again, they hate the hotel…What else? Oh, yes, I’m their only child and all their love and hopes are vested in me.”

  Jess felt in her pocket and took out a piece of paper. “Nothing so corny,” she answered, unfolding it and running her finger down the page. “Your dad’s gone back to the flat. Your mother thinks he’s trying to prove something re demons. He refuses to discuss it and won’t say if the police know. Just keeps telling her Japera was a mistake and he doesn’t want a repeat. He’s moved your mother to a different hotel and banned her from calling him. He’s left the laptop with her, and she wants you to email or phone. She’s given me the number of her new hotel.” She looked up. “That’s it. She said you’d understand the references to demons and Japera.”

  Angrily, I snatched the page from Jess’s hand. “I knew I shouldn’t have told anyone. It was all OK, as long as no one knew. What the hell does he think he’s doing?”

  Jess took a step back. “The way your mother described him, he’ll be setting traps…which is what you should be doing.”

  “He doesn’t have a chance,” I hissed. “He’ll be sixty-five in November.”

  “At least he’s trying.”

  If that was her best shot, the conversation wasn’t going to last very long. “I tried, Jess. I told Alan Collins. And this”—I shook the piece of paper—“is the result. My father trying to prove he isn’t a coward. He’s ashamed because he thinks he gave up the farm too easily…so he’s salvaging some pride by behaving like a jerk.”

  She shrugged. “It runs in the family then. That’s pretty much what you’re doing, isn’t it? Being ashamed and behaving like a jerk, except there’s not much sign of pride.”

  “That’s not going to make me do what you want,” I snapped.

  “Who gives a shit? You’re not my responsibility.” She set off down the stairs. “I’ll be taking my phone off the hook, so if you don’t want your mother calling the police when she can’t get through, you’d better contact her.”

  I think she half-expected me to plead with her to stay, because she paused on the bottom step to look up at me, but when I didn’t say anything she disappeared through the baize door. I didn’t need to say anything. I knew she’d come back.

  I DECIDED to speak to my father first, since my mother would ask me to do it anyway. I’d have preferred to dodge any conversation with him that evening because it would certainly develop into a shouting match, but I felt responsible for his being there. Nevertheless, I was so paranoid about my landline registering as the last call that I dialled 141 first to withhold it, and only remembered that withheld numbers were being blocked when I heard the message telling me so. I tried his mobile but it wasn’t responding.

  My choice was to redial his landline without 141 or use my mobile, but there were too many hairs bristling on the back of my neck to take the first option. It wasn’t that I expected MacKenzie to be in the flat—I didn’t—rather that Sod’s Law predicted my number would still be registering when he broke in and took a punt on 1471. At least if I used my mobile, there’d be no exchange code and nothing to show I was phoning from Dorset.

  My second choice was to rebuild Jess’s pyramid in the back bedroom, which I’d dismantled when I’d had broadband installed, or climb into the attic. I chose the attic as the least onerous option, and went in search of the hooked pole that released the latch on the trapdoor. I found it behind the door in the nearest bedroom, and when I picked it up I realized what a good weapon it would make. It was a homemade construction of two hefty wooden rods, designed to come apart in the middle for storage. The top half was capped by the hook and the bottom by a two-inch screw.

  Jess would have said they weren’t heavy enough, but they started me thinking about what else was in the house—the axe in the woodshed; rakes, spades and forks in the toolshed; a hammer in the scullery; empty wine bottles that could be turned into razor sharp clubs. I can’t explain why none of this had occurred to me before, except that my plan had always been to leave through the nearest exit and find a place to hide.

  Peter put it down to MacKenzie’s manipulation of my “fight or flight” response. In simple terms, I’d been conditioned to submit rather than rebel, but that doesn’t explain why one of my recurring dreams was an intensely physical one where I bludgeoned MacKenzie to death. The desire to kill him was always there.

  Perhaps fear has to be taken one step at a time. Perhaps the mind needs to heal before it can switch from one automatic response to another. Perhaps we all need to suffer the contempt of a Jess Derbyshire before we remember that fighting is possible. Who can say? I do know that I had a new sense of purpose as I climbed the ladder to the attic.

  The roof space ran the entire length of the house. I found a light switch beside the trapdoor which lit a series of bulbs that hung from the rafters. Half of the filaments had blown but there were enough still working to lift the gloom. A pathway of planks had been laid across the joists to make access easier, but I still had to navigate my way past two chimney-stacks before I found a decent signal. The whole place was filthy and draped with cobwebs, and from the odd skittering near the eaves I guessed I had bats and mice for company.

  In the event, it was a wasted exercise. There was no answer from the flat or from Dad’s mobile. Rather than leave messages, I fished Jess’s piece of paper from my pocket and called the number of my mother’s new hotel, but when I asked to be put through to Marianne Burns’s room I was told she’d checked out.

  “Are you sure?” I asked in surprise. “She was definitely there this morning. I was given this number to call.”

  “One moment.” There was a pause. “Yes, I can confirm Mrs. Marianne B
urns paid her account at three o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Did she say where she was going…leave a number for me to call?”

  “May I ask what your name is, madam?”

  “Connie…Connie Burns. I’m her daughter.”

  “I’ll check for you.” Another pause. “I’m sorry, Ms. Burns. There are no messages and no forwarding address. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No…yes,” I corrected immediately. “Did anyone come to collect her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “We’re a big hotel, Ms. Burns. Guests come and go all the time. We don’t keep track of their movements.”

  “Then can you check if there was a phone call to her room? And if so, is there any way of finding out where it came from? I don’t understand why she left.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said again with pseudo-regret. “We can’t divulge private information about our guests. Would you like me to make a note that you called in case your mother returns?”

  I thanked him and rang off, then redialled the flat and my father’s mobile. I left messages on both phones, just saying, “Please call me,” and for good measure sent a text to his mobile: “Where are you? What’s happening? Mum has checked out. Am worried. C.” I hoped he’d remember to call the landline, but as I climbed down the loft ladder, I placed my mobile on the frame of the trapdoor opening. There was enough of a signal for it to ring, although I wasn’t optimistic about reaching it before the messaging service kicked in. It was worth a try, however.

  Of course I assumed MacKenzie was involved in some way—I was too paranoid not to—although I didn’t understand why that should have resulted in my mother leaving her hotel. How could he know where she was unless my father told him? I had enough faith in Dad to believe he’d sacrifice every fingernail before he put my mother in danger. And why would MacKenzie ask the question anyway? Why bother with my mother when it was me he wanted? It didn’t make sense.

  I kept telling myself the more likely explanation was that Mum had staged her own little mutiny and decided to go back to the flat. But in that case why weren’t they answering the phone? I stood irresolutely on the landing, wondering what to do. Wait a couple of hours in case they’d gone out for a meal? Try to contact Alan? Call the local police and ask them to check the flat? Even Alan wouldn’t take me seriously. Only a madwoman reports her parents missing after half an hour’s attempt to locate them.

  Despite being convinced my mobile would ring the minute I was out of earshot, I went downstairs to see if my mother had emailed. She hadn’t. There was nothing new from her since Thursday afternoon. I played the answerphone in case I’d missed a call but the only messages were those I’d already heard. On the off-chance that she’d decided to return to their previous hotel, I phoned there, only to be told Mr. and Mrs. Burns had left the previous morning. I even tried my father’s office, while knowing that no one would answer at eight o’clock on a Saturday night.

  It’s said that our minds can process fifty thousand thoughts a day. I’ve no idea if this is true, or how thoughts can be counted, but I do know that trying to pre-guess events within a knowledge vacuum creates intolerable anxiety. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell yourself that “no news” is “good news,” your brain will always assume the worst. And in the end your instinct goes with what you know to be true.

  Shit happens.

  Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16–19/05/04”

  …I think there were three dogs and I guessed they were Alsatians because that was the breed I saw in the office with MacKenzie at the Baghdad academy. I could feel their breath against the tops of my thighs when they stood around me, so they were the right size for Alsatians. On a couple of occasions he encouraged them to lick me and I heard the camcorder running

  (can’t deal with that at the moment)

  …So much depended on MacKenzie being able to control them. So much depended on him being willing to control them. I don’t know if he was clever enough to understand the psychology of that, or if he’d learnt the technique from the torturers and murderers he’d worked with, but I was ready to do anything rather than face those dogs. It’s why I came to love the crate. Being in a cage offered safety in a way that nothing else did…

  14

  IN THE DYING days of apartheid I wrote a piece on South African gold-miners with silicosis and emphysema. Statistics suggested that more blacks contracted the diseases because they worked deeper in the mines and had a higher exposure to silica dust after blasting, but it was surprisingly hard to find long-term black sufferers although I interviewed a number of elderly white men with the complaints.

  When I asked a doctor why whites seemed to survive longer with respiratory problems—expecting to be told they had access to better medication—he explained it in terms of exertion. “The more demands anyone makes on his body, the more oxygen he needs. If a black with emphysema could sit in a chair all day, and be waited on hand and foot by a maid, he’d survive just as long. When a man can’t breathe, it kills him just to get up and cook a meal.”

  I thought of that doctor as I waded through treacle, trying to gather weapons together. He should have added that failing to cook a meal will also kill you since any engine will seize up without fuel. On my trip to retrieve the axe, I succumbed to the double whammy of uncontrollable anxiety fluttering in my chest and a two-stone weight loss in three months, and folded wearily onto a pile of logs in the woodshed. It was laughable to think about whirling an axe at MacKenzie when I barely had the energy to carry it back to the house.

  Ahead of me, fifty metres across the grass, was the fishpond where Jess had found Lily. I stared at it for several minutes as something to focus on and, because Lily was less alarming to think about than MacKenzie, I began wondering about her again. What had taken her there on a cold winter’s night? Peter had said there was no logic to Alzheimer’s wandering—she may have been acting out a memory or following an imperative to feed the long-dead fish—and had slipped and fallen. It could have happened anywhere.

  For once, Jess agreed with him. “If Madeleine had been around, I wouldn’t have put it past her to give Lily a push—solve all her problems in one fell swoop—but she wasn’t.” She shrugged. “There used to be fish in the pond but I don’t remember Lily ever feeding them. Maybe she just wanted to see if they were still there.”

  Because I was sitting in the woodshed, it occurred to me that Lily might have come out to collect logs for the fire. Whatever Peter said about logic, it was the obvious thing to do on a cold night, and the pond would have proved an easy distraction because it was so close. I still didn’t understand why she hadn’t moved herself into the kitchen. The Aga threw out more warmth than any of the fires and required no effort to keep it burning as long as there was oil in the tank. Why hadn’t an instinct for survival triumphed over snobbery and dementia?

  I even wondered if some forgotten memory had prompted her to look for water in the well beneath me. It was dismantled and long-redundant, covered over by the wooden planks that the logs sat on, and I only knew it was there because Jess had told me. She said it was her grandmother’s job to draw the water and heat it for the family’s baths before the house was put on a mains supply. Could Lily’s dementia have taken her back fifty years and sent her outside to look for bathwater?

  Fate has a strange way of propelling us forward. I was very close at that moment to unravelling Lily’s riddle, even closer when thoughts of hot baths reminded me that I hadn’t checked the oil since I arrived. It seemed a good time to do it, as the door was just behind me. Perhaps, too, I was curious to see if Jess had returned the scullery keys to the hook behind the tank. Propping the axe against the door jamb, I unlatched the door and pulled it open.

  The sun was touching the distant horizon but there was still enough light to show the tank inside the outhouse, though not enough to read the gauge. I felt around for a switch, and in the p
rocess dislodged a sheaf of flimsy papers that were fixed to a wooden upright by a drawing-pin. They fluttered apart as they fell, but when I finally located a switch and was able to gather them up again, I saw they were receipts of some sort from the oil supplier. I couldn’t believe they were important since one was dated 1995, but as the drawing-pin had vanished, I tucked them into my pocket to take back into the house.

  Having satisfied myself that the gauge was registering over half full and there were no keys on the hook behind the tank, I killed the bulb again. But either my eyes had trouble readjusting or night had fallen during the few minutes I was inside. I realized suddenly how little I could actually see. With no artificial light anywhere, not even in the house because the sun had still been shining when I left it, the garden was a place of stygian shadow.

  With shaking hands I recovered the axe and turned towards the path. As I did so the overhead lamp came on in the kitchen, and I saw Jess walk past the window. My immediate feeling was relief, until I saw the gleam of her dogs’ pale coats in the backwash of light and realized they were between me and the house. With nowhere else to go, I stepped back and felt for the outhouse latch again.

  Mastiffs can move with extraordinary speed. They covered the ground long before I had the door open. I doubt I’d have been able to use the axe if they’d attacked me—I wouldn’t have had time—but I raised it to shoulder height in preparation. Faced with a visible threat, my brain persuaded me to show some courage for the first time in weeks.

  “Get down!” I growled. “NOW! Or I’ll beat your fucking brains out.”

  Perhaps eyes are the key. Perhaps they saw real intent in mine because, amazingly, they dropped to their bellies in front of me. Jess claimed afterwards that it’s what she’d trained them to do, but their obedience was so immediate that I lowered the axe. I’d have accepted an indefinite stand-off if one of them hadn’t started inching towards me.