by Sarah Rayne
The agents were instantly responsive and immediately sympathetic, and several sets of details describing suitable properties were sent to her. She used her real name for the arrangements, because there would be a tenancy agreement to be signed and a cheque to be written for the rent, but all the correspondence went to the service flat. It was not very likely that some small office in Northumberland would connect her with Ingram’s or the Hampstead manslaughter case when eventually it came to court, and it did not really matter if they did. It did not really matter if the family found out where she was either, because they would assume that it was part of her roving commission. But it would be preferable to preserve as much anonymity as possible.
From the sheaf of holiday houses available on long autumn and winter lets, she chose the four-square, greystone October House in Blackmere, a village five or six miles from Thornacre. It had been built around the turn of the century, and the rooms were described as spacious. Thalia thought estate agents had to comply with a fairly stringent code of practice nowadays, so spacious probably meant exactly what it suggested. So far so good. There was a large garden and no other properties nearby. The village centre was a couple of miles down the road, where there was a small general store, a pub and a garage. A church, doctor and dentist and a small supermarket were in Thornacre village.
October House was fully furnished down to bed linen and crockery. There was a modern cooker, freezer, fridge and washing machine, and the agent had added a note explaining that there was someone in the village who would come up twice a week if required, for cleaning and some cooking. The charge for this was amazingly low in comparison with London charges. Best of all, the house was owned by a man who baked pots and ceramics for tourists and designed original china for the pottery manufacturers in the Midlands. He had recently left for America on a six-month lecture tour, which was why the house was available. The old coach house at the rear had been converted to a pottery where the man normally worked, and there was a kiln and a couple of firing ovens; providing certain safeguards and restrictions were agreed to, the tenant could have the use of the coach house. The agent knew the house fairly well – they had let it a couple of times before under similar circumstances – and he thought that the coach house would do very well for a photographic studio.
Thalia signed a six-month lease by post and left for Blackmere village and October House ten days later. It sounded a remote district, but in the later stages of her plan remoteness would be very necessary indeed.
The house was absolutely right.
It stood in grounds of about an acre and it was shielded from the road by tall old trees. There was a long drive, fringed with laurel and laburnum, and a gravel turning circle in front of the house. Even though there was probably a fair bit of traffic, the house was so far back from the road that you would never hear it. You wouldn’t see cars or passers-by, and they would not see you.
There were two large, high-ceilinged sitting rooms, one on each side of the hall, both with deep bay windows overlooking the front gardens. At the back of the house was a small breakfast room and a kitchen. The kitchen still had the original stone flags and a built-in range and ceiling rafters, but the potter had brought it up to date with modern cooking facilities and a central work counter with a cool ceramic surface. There was a microwave cooker as well, and a large fridge. In one corner stood a large deepfreeze, switched on and purring. Thalia smiled and stood for a moment with her eyes on it.
The potter’s studio was at the rear; the drive led all the way round, and it was on the left, partly hidden by more laburnum bushes: a long low building, not built of greystone like the house, but of old red brick, mellow with age. It was possible to see the ghost shape of the old coach-house door and make out where it had been bricked up to make a conventional door.
She saw at once the room that would be Edmund’s, and she spent a great many hours there. It was the largest bedroom, and it would have been the master bedroom in the days when October House had a master. The potter probably used it when he was at home, and he, or someone else, had papered it in cool blue and green, with chintz curtains and a matching, chintz-covered window seat. There was a huge oak wardrobe and chest of drawers, fragrant with the scent of old, well-polished wood. The windows were latticed and there was a pear tree outside. In autumn the ripening pears would perfume the room, and in spring there would be a froth of blossom. Edmund should sleep in here, with the scent of the pears and the rose-perfumed sheets. There would be a bowl of dried lavender on the rosewood table beneath the window, and the morning sun would slant through the panes, showing up the spill of melted honey on the pillow that was Edmund’s hair. This room would be the shrine, and the coach house would be the temple that would see his renaissance. Renaissance meant the rebirth and resurgence of art and literature and learning under the influence of classical models. The use of the word like this, in connection with Edmund, pleased her.
There was a series of small attic rooms, one leading out of the other, mostly windowless. At some stage in the house’s history someone had fitted a stout lock and a bolt to them. Thalia smiled again. Yes, the house was exactly and completely right.
She would do all she could to become part of the scenery here. Unremarkable and unremarked. A recently bereaved lady, staying in this part of England to recuperate from a tragedy, here to collate research for a project for Ingram’s Books, and to be near a favourite niece who tragically had been consigned to Thornacre. She would give herself a month, two at the outside.
And then she would begin her real work.
Chapter Twenty-one
Dan was immersed in work when he was jerked back to reality by the sound of the letter box clattering and something largeish dropping on the mat. It would be a circular or a trial size of shampoo or washing powder. It might be a seed catalogue for the ground floor flat, delivered to the wrong number. Likeliest of all was that it was a bill, in which case it could wait. He carried on working.
His original idea had been to end the book with Rosamund waking. He had thought this was how the story did end: the awakening of the princess to the prince’s embrace, preferably within that marvellous frame of Tchaikovsky’s inspired ballet music, and a general epithalamium with all the characters clasping hands and good triumphing over evil. Even the Wicked Godmother and the Good Fairy usually took their bows together.
But according to both Perrault and Basile, the real trials of Sleeping Beauty – Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant – did not start until after she was woken, when she was confronted with the villainess of the piece. Dan worked steadily on, mesmerised by the swelling horror of the legend.
The prince’s mother had set herself to seek the princess out and, upon finding her, to kill her. Several of the sources made much of her bloodthirsty nature, and most referred to her scouring the countryside to find the princess. All described her bitter fury at losing her beloved son to the whey-faced little cat who had done nothing for the last hundred years but sleep.
Perrault described the villainess’s luring of the princess to a house deep in the woods ‘that she might with greater ease put in execution her horrible desires’, and referred to the house’s lonely situation. According to Basile, when the ogreish-inclined lady found the princess, she channelled her anger on to the whey-faced cat’s twins, born to her and the prince exactly nine months after the famous kiss.
Twins. Dan stared at this on the page. The princess had given birth to twins. Which means that I was right all along about her being woken by a prick.
It was all to the good. Adam Cadence could buckle swash with the best, and when it came to hacking his way through thorns and briars he was unrivalled. But Dan had never thought he was of the calibre to be satisfied with a chaste peck on the lips when finally he reached fair Rosamund’s virginal couch.
Dan leaned back, stretching his arms to ease his protesting neck and shoulder muscles, and considered the next twist of the plot. It was becoming increasingly plain that R
osamund was going to have to emerge from her drugged unconsciousness and face any number of tribulations before she could go hand in hand into the sunset with her prince, and this was something that would have to be carefully thought out. The overly melodramatic would have to be diligently avoided, never mind the downright comic. Dan’s mind instantly went to all those other heroines who had opened their eyes from entranced slumbers and been faced not with the swashbuckling hero but with the villain of the piece, or even – heaven forfend! – the jester. Rosamund might still have a few trials to face that Dan had not bargained for, but she was certainly not going to be confronted with an ass-headed Bottom, or a frog prince or some freakish hunchback dwarf. In fact if Rosamund’s creator was going to remain faithful to the original version, it looked as if Margot would have to travel in extreme secrecy to Rosamund’s bleak asylum and encamp at the gates, there to make plans for what Perrault called the execution of her horrible desires.
Dan glanced at the clock. Two p.m. No wonder he felt hungry. It would be easier to cope with Margot’s horrible desires on a full stomach. He wandered into the kitchen, and absent-mindedly heated a tin of soup and cut a hefty cheese sandwich. The post might as well be investigated at the same time.
On the mat lay a large manila envelope, probably a circular, and a preview copy of Women in Business with his article about Thalia Caudle on page five. The features editor had scribbled a note on a compliment slip, saying how good they thought it looked, and how they hoped to use him for future work. The cheque had been sent to his agent in the same post. This was all very satisfactory.
Dan boiled the kettle for coffee and propped himself on the kitchen table to drink it while he read the article through. It did not sound at all bad. There had not been too much mangling by the sub-editor, and somebody had got hold of a decent photograph of Thalia, seated at her desk with a smudgy view of Regent’s Park just discernible through the window behind her. She looked exactly how the readers of Women in Business liked people to look, and she sounded exactly how they liked career women to sound. Intelligent and understated and well dressed, but with a recognisable vein of ordinariness, so that readers could think: that might be me. I could do that.
At the end of the article was a brief paragraph inserted by the features editor, explaining that since the interview with Ms Caudle, she had left London for a time to gather material for Ingram’s planned new imprint dealing with ballads and folk songs. She had undertaken a roving commission and she might be gone for as long as six months.
Dan laid the magazine down, his mind tumbling. It was important to keep a sense of proportion about this, and it was vital not to leap to any conclusions. Dan was not, he absolutely was not going to assume that Thalia had gone to Northumberland to put into execution her horrible desires with greater ease. Remember that Thalia isn’t Margot, Daniel. Keep remembering it.
In any case, short of breaking into the Great Portland Street flat and ransacking it for clues, there was no way of finding out where Thalia really was. And whatever else Dan was going to do, he was not going to start house breaking.
He opened the second letter, and found that it was not a circular or a bill after all; it was the response to his request for a sight of Royston Ingram’s will. It contained a neatly stapled photocopy of what appeared to be the whole document. Dan carried it back to his desk and spread it out.
It was a relatively brief document, considering the position Royston had held, and assuming that by today’s standards – by Dan’s standards anyway – he had been fairly well off. Dan read it as he ate the cheese sandwich, skimming the paragraphs dealing with disposal of real estate, sums left to various charities and the small legacies for various long-serving staff at Ingram’s. Real estate appeared to refer to immovable property, and could be buildings or just land.
Several times the phrase ‘as laid down in the Articles of Association of Ingram’s Books’ occurred, usually in relation to the disposal of Royston’s financial interests in the company. The term ‘settled estates’ was used as well, and Dan took this to indicate a kind of entail; in other words, Royston had been free to dispose of his personal property more or less as he liked, but the Ingram shares were controlled by the Articles. There was something called net personalty, which appeared to be anything other than land and property that was not freehold, and which Dan supposed could amount to anything from a thousand pounds to a few hundred thousand. The term ‘valuation as at date of death’ was also spattered liberally throughout the document. He read on, his heart beating fast. At any minute he was going to find out how near the danger was to Imogen.
And then it was there. Towards the end of the final page was the paragraph he had been searching for. It was wrapped up in legal jargon but the intention was perfectly plain.
In the event of Royston and Eloise Ingram dying before Imogen reached the age of eighteen, Thalia was appointed as Imogen’s guardian, to administer her interests in Ingram’s and act as the governing board’s chairman. Eighteen. Dan stared at this, and only then realised how strongly he had assumed that the period of guardianship would be until Imogen was twenty-one, which would have meant she was safe for two or three years yet.
He read on and discovered that if Imogen died or was declared unfit to manage her own affairs, Thalia Caudle continued to rule Ingram’s.
He broke into Thalia’s flat the next day. He chose the middle of the afternoon, which was a time when people might be thought to be safely about their own lawful occasions and not thinking about catching housebreakers. He wore gloves and an anonymous dark jacket, and he took the underground to Oxford Circus and walked up Regent Street. A taxi, or even a bus, might be traceable, but if you could not go unnoticed on the Central Line you could not go unnoticed anywhere.
Getting past the door intercom had bothered him quite a lot; it was the kind where you pressed a particular button for an individual flat, and the individual flat-owner then opened the door electronically from within. This meant that pretending to sell double glazing or being a spurious man-to-check-the-meters was out. Double-glazing salesmen were a joke anyway nowadays. But he had thought up a couple of fairly credible reasons for requesting entry.
He pressed the first of the three buttons for the floor below the Ingram flat. No response. He pressed the second button and a voice answered. Dan announced himself as having a delivery of flowers for the first. ‘Only there’s no one in.’
‘Flowers!’ said a pleased-sounding female voice. ‘Oh, how nice for her.’
If there had not been a ‘her’ in the picture, Dan had been ready to enter into arguments about wrong addresses, or to go on to other flats. But it was all right. ‘Who are they from?’ asked the unknown voice.
‘No idea. Just to deliver to Number Four this afternoon. P’raps she’s got a secret admirer. I could leave them in the lobby.’
‘Oh yes, do that, will you?’ said the voice. ‘She’ll be home about seven. I’ll make sure she knows. I’ll open the main doors for you now.’
‘Right you are.’
Dan felt so guilty about raising the hopes of the unknown Number Four that as he crossed the lobby, he almost wondered whether to send flowers to her on his own account. But half a dozen trip-wires stretched across his path at once, one of these being that flower orders could be traced, and another that Number Four might have a jealous lover or husband. And when it was eventually discovered that the Ingram flat had been broken into, searching inquiries would be made. Sorry, Number Four.
Getting inside had been so easy that Dan began to feel suspicious. Probably there was a hidden security camera or an electronic eye somewhere, and at any minute he would be caught and hauled off to justice. But he was unchallenged as he went up to the flat where Thalia Caudle had dined him, seduced him, and left the grisly contents of the freezer for him to discover.
The door to the Ingram flat had several small panes of glass let into the frame. Dan had remembered this and had reasoned that they could be broken with mi
nimum disruption. He had brought a small but heavy-headed hammer. He studied the door and the lock carefully. The glass was the swirly, bottle-bottomed kind and fairly thick. Dan eyed it doubtfully, wondering now whether it really would break sufficiently to let him reach inside and release the lock. He had no idea what he would do if the lock was some kind of double-treble security arrangement or something needing a code, or if he came up against a thread of thin wire woven into the glass which needed wire-cutters to get through. He also had no idea whether there was an interior burglar alarm. He glanced up and down the corridor. There was a fire escape at the far end of the hall. If he unwittingly set off an alarm system, could he be down the fire escape and into the street before anyone came running? He thought he could.
In films people picked locks with credit cards, but Dan had never been able to understand how they did it. He could not see how this one could possibly be opened other than with its designated key. It would have to be the glass. He looked about him again. There was a silent, deserted air about the entire floor, and the chances were that most of these flats were not occupied during the day. But there had been the female voice on the floor below and she might hear him. There were three other flats on this floor, and for all Dan knew there were any number of people inside them who might hear him as well.
None of it could be helped. He had got this far, and he was blowed if he was going to duck out now. He took a deep breath and brought the hammer smashing down on the pane of glass surrounding the lock. The sound was appallingly loud in the enclosed space and Dan’s heart came up into his mouth. But nobody came running to find out what was happening, and no ear-splitting alarm bells rang.
