Taryn lost her temper. ‘I’m not guilty about anything!’
It was a reflex disavowal, a hangover from her teenaged impatience with him. But of course she was guilty. And used to it—the queasy discomfort that came and went like regular flare-ups of a chronic illness. On the nights when she’d lie awake counting the flashes of the tiny light on the smoke alarm, she’d remind herself that was it all done. Webber and the Muleskinner. Done, and in the past. She’d had seven years of that—the remorse that wouldn’t ever recede.
And now the silent phone calls.
‘I should go,’ said her father.
‘Yes,’ Taryn agreed. Then she had pity on him and thanked him for coming, and asked if he’d come again tomorrow, but to text first, in case she had tests. ‘Or they discharge me.’
He squeezed her fingertips and went out.
A minute after that the neurologist arrived with more questions, and tests for some abnormality that wasn’t just reported by the patient herself.
Taryn woke to find two people in her room.
A small woman with cheekbones as sharp as adze heads was sitting in the chair beside her bed. She wore a crisp trouser suit and had cornrow braids. The man standing against the light of the window had black hair, black jeans and a black leather jacket.
There was a strip of sunlight on the room’s windowsill. It was the morning of new day, Taryn’s third in hospital.
The woman turned to the man. ‘She’s awake.’
He came over, blocking the light.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Rosemary Hemms,’ said the woman. ‘And this is Detective Inspector Jacob Berger.’
Berger took out his badge and held it up. ‘We’ve met, Ms Cornick,’ he said. ‘Seven years ago when I came with my former boss to speak to you and your former husband about the death of Timothy Webber.’ Berger sat himself on the edge of Taryn’s bed, leaned forward and met her eyes. His were blue. Cold as the March wind, thought the book-haunted Taryn.
‘We’re here to talk to you about your silent phone calls,’ Hemms said. She looked concerned. Sympathetic.
Taryn heaved herself into a sitting position. She put her elbow on her IV line and gave the cannula a painful tug. Berger came to her aid. He took her weight for a moment and arranged the pillow behind her.
‘Get off!’ said Taryn.
Berger’s spectacular widow’s peak bristled.
‘I haven’t reported any calls,’ Taryn said. She was close to tears.
Twice a day for ten days now her phone would ring and there’d be a silent presence at the other end, a presence to which she’d said the usual things, like, ‘If you have something to say, just say it.’ But she hadn’t threatened to call the police. She knew she wasn’t just imagining the calls, because sometimes he wouldn’t hang up before the beep, and her voicemail would record a hungry, hissing gap, or a moment of muffled street noise. The calls were real and verifiable, unlike what she was now thinking of as her figurative silent phone calls. Those arrived like a self-annihilating post-hypnotic trigger and caused her to do things she wasn’t aware she was doing, like get up in the night to gorge herself on raw mincemeat.
‘You told your friend Carol about the calls, she told your father. He sees the calls as a possible contributing cause of your troubles. It was he who called us.’
‘Surely you don’t expect me to believe someone sent a detective inspector about nuisance calls?’
Berger told Taryn that her father had got in touch with his old boss, the detective who had led the investigations into both her sister’s and Timothy Webber’s deaths. ‘This detective inspector was someone Mr Cornick knew and trusted. But she’s retiring at the end of the month, so she called me.’
Taryn concentrated on Berger. ‘How is this connected to my illness?’
‘Well, as it turns out, that’s an interesting question,’ said Hemms. She looked excited. Then she glanced at Berger and dampened it down some.
He said, ‘We had a talk with your doctor and he’s extended his brief. He’s having your blood tested for exotic toxins.’
‘Just in case,’ said Hemms.
‘Someone else will be in to speak to you about that,’ said Berger.
‘A doctor?’
They didn’t respond to her question. Instead Berger said, ‘We know you’re still getting the phone calls. We know that someone rings you at the same time every morning and evening from public phones, progressing gradually up the country. The first call came from a payphone by the harbour at Chepstow—a spot very near where Webber died. The latest came from a phone outside Salisbury Cathedral. There are nearly two weeks between the first and last call. Two weeks and one hundred plus kilometres, as if whoever is making the calls is travelling on foot.’
‘Are you monitoring my phone? I didn’t give permission for that. It wasn’t me who put in a complaint, it was my father, without my knowledge or say-so.’
Hemms looked uncomfortable. Berger did not. He said, ‘We aren’t monitoring your calls.’
Taryn fumbled one hand free of the bedding to helplessly slap at the air before their dark bodies. ‘You need my permission,’ she said. ‘Or a court order. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Hemms leaned in. ‘But, as Berger says, we aren’t monitoring your calls. Look—is someone threatening you, Taryn?’
Berger added, with heavy insinuation, ‘Do you know of any reason that someone might threaten you?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve been in the papers,’ Berger said. ‘And on the radio. You’ve stepped into the light.’
‘Are you saying I’ve attracted the wrong kind of attention? Do you suppose it’s some troll wanting to debate the evil deeds of the book-burning emperor Qin Shi Huang?’
‘What else could it be?’ Berger held her gaze and smiled.
Taryn reached for the call button. ‘I’m tired now.’
Hemms got up, decisively clicked her pen and put her notebook back in her jacket.
Berger touched Taryn’s hand. The hand that still had a cannula under tape, in a halo of bruising. His touch was light, but hurt her. He said, ‘I think you know who he is. This person playing “statues” with you—creeping up while your back is turned.’
Taryn squeezed her eyes shut. Blood beat in her ears. She broke out in a sweat.
‘Taryn?’
Taryn opened her eyes and looked at the nurse, who pushed up her sleeve and strapped a blood pressure cuff around her arm. ‘The monitors don’t always give the most accurate readings. Sometimes it’s better to double-check using old-fashioned methods.’ The nurse met Taryn’s eyes in a quick, complicit glance.
The detectives were waiting by the window.
Taryn said, as feebly as she could, ‘DS Hemms, DI Berger, I’m afraid I can’t help you.’
‘She needs rest,’ said the nurse, clear and firm.
When they had gone the nurse removed the BP cuff and gave Taryn a dimpled smile. ‘Your blood pressure is fine. But the old-fashioned way does provide a nice bit of theatre.’
The second call Taryn had to take was for an interview with Radio New Zealand. A pre-record, thank goodness.
The interviewer had read her book and didn’t feel the need to preface her appreciation with surprise. People’s expressions of surprise about how much they’d enjoyed Taryn’s work always made her feel she should apologise: ‘I’m sorry for having given you a moment’s doubt.’
Despite the cogent questions, Taryn couldn’t get over the feeling she was talking to a child. It was the interviewer’s accent. The woman kept saying ‘box’ instead of ‘books’. The mispronunciation seemed a lack of polish. Taryn had certain expectations of the hosts of radio programmes dedicated to the arts, one of them being that they could pronounce the word ‘books’.
‘But isn’t it true that libraries have only comparatively recently been about box?’ said the interviewer.
Taryn shivered.
They finished up after ten minu
tes of lacklustre talk. Taryn knew she’d just set herself up for more difficulty. A flat interview meant not as much buzz. It meant fewer sales, fewer readers, less support from the Australasian branch of her primary publisher.
She reclined her bed and dimmed her light. She lay feeling as if she were shrinking from the inside out, flesh from her bones, skin from her hospital gown and chilly bedsheets. She thought about Princes Gate. Or, rather, she simply ached to go back there. But anything she might look for was long gone. Grandfather and grandmother, the punt in the reeds on the lake shore, Grandma’s cats, the catastrophically leaky roof and green-streaked walls, the solid cold of the upstairs rooms with their smell of sour rugs and old board games. Beatrice. And Taryn herself, before events and errors without remedy.
Lightning flashed. Taryn looked out the window and saw only building windows and the parabola of lamps along the rail line and overpass. The lightning came again, a discharge not in the sky over the city, but inside her head. A blue-white flash. And with it came the voice. The eerie, merry voice. ‘Box!’ it cried, and coruscated. ‘Show me the box!’
4
The Library at Princes Gate
Taryn was curled up on cushions piled in the bay window. The day was dull, and for the past hour she had bent ever closer to her book while tilting its pages to the light.
Of the many stories Taryn had read about only children—lonely onlys, or plucky girls with odd ways of reasoning; about orphans in attics, or hidden demigods with the weight of the world on their shoulders—this book was the best. The girl in the book was the same age as Taryn, who was ten, and at the beginning the girl was doing the same thing she was, sitting on a window seat, in a fine old house, reading, while outside it rained and rained. Before Taryn got very far in, she pulled the curtains closed, exiling herself from the warm room, the library lamps and the fire her grandfather had laid, one of coal heaped over the white bricks that Taryn’s Kiwi grandmother called ‘little Lucifers’, though the packet read ‘Strike-a-Fire’.
Wind joined the rain. Raindrops blew right in under the portico to hit the window, forming glassy freckles on its dust-powdered surface. It was the kind of weather that made Taryn think the sun was shining nowhere, though her parents were probably right now sitting on a restaurant terrace above the sea in Antibes, drinking pink wine. Her father would be eyeing up anyone ‘with a bit of vivacity’ as he put it, from behind dark glasses to be sure, but always transparent to Taryn whenever she was around to monitor him. Taryn’s father’s looking didn’t always lead to anything, but he was forever perusing the menu.
Taryn was cold behind the curtain. It was cold in her book too, in the locked room where the girl had been sent to think on her ingratitude. Taryn understood that the Red Room’s cold was worse than that of her grandfather’s house, though Princes Gate’s upper floors were now only waterproof in four bedrooms.
Any moment now a ghost would appear. And a ghost would mean the whole story would be friendlier to wild girls than stuffy adults.
Taryn raised her eyes from the page to savour the moment before the ghost arrived and changed the story. She saw the wind sweeping yellow leaves into the angle between the terrace and wall. She screwed up her eyes. How did one perform ‘passionate weeping’? She could ask her father, but then he might demonstrate rather than explain, and that was always embarrassing.
Then the curtain was pulled back and Taryn was discovered—not by John Reed, Jane Eyre’s bullying cousin, but by her sister. Beatrice climbed onto the window seat and pinched the curtains closed. She met Taryn’s eyes and put a finger to her lips.
Who were they hiding from? Grandma was at her veterinary practice, and Grandfather had taken a few of his many dozen notebooks away to the kitchen to review a chapter of his history of this house, leaving the girls the library.
The library was Princes Gate’s most distinguished room. It was carpeted in old silk rugs pinned down by heavy oak furniture. Its shelves had sliding library ladders. There were glass-front cabinets full of faded butterflies, giant shells and withered pufferfish. The huge globe labelled in gilt lettering no longer swivelled—hadn’t since, years ago, a schoolfriend of their mother had rolled it down the lawn and into the lake. There were deep shelves full of scroll cases. And, of course, there were the books, many of them leather-bound classics, some welcoming to young readers, like Kidnapped and Ivanhoe, Black Arrow and Jane Eyre.
Grandfather could get a little peace if, on their visits, he ceded the girls his library. He didn’t mind disobliging himself, or the man he liked to call, in a lavish way, his secretary.
Jason Battle, a local youngster who’d read history at Oxford, was employed two days a week, bringing some order to the small museum in the nearby market town of Alnwinton. On the other days he helped Grandfather with the family history. Battle had been present now for several of the sisters’ visits. Grandfather’s history was going slowly, partly because he enjoyed Battle’s company. Taryn liked Battle for his eagerness, his knowledgeability, and that he fitted in with everything else in the country. He drove an old Land Rover and wore green wellingtons eight months out of twelve, and socks indoors. Battle could look at a Roman coin and tell you what emperor it was, or explain how the ancient Britons built their palisades of thorns.
Beatrice did not like Battle, who stammered whenever he spoke to her and made a clumsy show of getting out of her way. He’d gather up his sliding piles of papers and rush off, making Bea feel inconvenient and exceptional. Bea tried to explain her discomfort to Taryn, who, once it was explained, began to see the problem too.
Beatrice was beautiful, but only fourteen, a girl who liked books and playing with the cats in the cattery above her grandmother’s surgery. She wasn’t ready to be admired, or discompose anyone. She’d rather not be noticed at all.
This visit was worse. For a start it kept raining and there was no getting out of the house. For the first days of their holiday Taryn and Bea put on their anoraks and walked up and down the gallery on the third floor, gazing at the rectangular marks on the wallpaper where ancestral portraits once hung until they’d had to be moved because the copper frame of the skylight corroded and rainwater came in and streaked the walls acid green. Bea would now and then pause before one of these phantom paintings to tell a story.
‘This is Sir Secundus Northover, who dammed a brook to make the lake, and built the folly on the island. He was an authority on Arthurian legends. He liked to dress up as the Lady of the Lake and play the harp on misty nights. He was sadly found drowned, clad in a white robe, white fur tippet and jewelled slippers.’
Taryn would stare at the discoloured wallpaper, see the imaginary Sir Secundus and want to know more. But Beatrice would just smile and move onto the next shadowy square.
Mid-morning Battle would arrive at the house, his Land Rover knocking and pinging. Bea would go to the windows to watch him come stumping in. Taryn would peer at her sister’s tight face and know Bea wouldn’t follow her downstairs until Battle had shut himself away with Grandfather. Or, if he appeared close to lunchtime, Bea would skip lunch, saying she wasn’t hungry. If Grandma was home, she would put down her cutlery and head upstairs, only to reappear several minutes later without Bea. She’d say nothing, glare at Grandfather, and eat her cold soup.
This last week things with Battle had worsened. He’d stopped gulping, stammering and dropping things. Instead it seemed he’d decided to give up washing. He began to emanate a stink, at first dank like standing water, then rank and goaty. He stank, but he was still shaving and his clothes looked clean. Taryn held her breath and tried not to giggle whenever she encountered him. Bea continued to melt away after a cool ‘Good morning’. She didn’t stay long enough to notice how Battle had altered. He no longer watched Bea. His eyes now passed blindly over everything, as if he were in pain or running a fever. He still paid attention to Grandfather, sometimes barely polite, like a bored kid in class, and sometimes with febrile expectancy.
That day Gr
andfather had said at lunch, ‘Jason and I won’t work in the library again until the weather has cleared and you girls can take your games outdoors.’ Battle put his coffee mug on the kitchen table and folded his hands in his lap. It was a gesture of schooled patience. It looked to Taryn like something she’d do when trying hard to convince everyone she was behaving herself. She also registered that Grandfather might have said she and Bea played games to remind Battle that Bea was just a girl, something Grandfather had been doing, like this, sidelong, since the early days of this visit. A week ago Battle might have blushed, because he had started to see the self-consciousness Bea suffered due to his untoward admiration. But Battle didn’t blush; he only watched Grandfather in a way that reminded Taryn of one of those films where a prisoner is always keeping an eye on what the prison guard is doing with his keys.
Taryn heaved a sigh. Grandma and Grandfather looked at her; Battle did not. Taryn wished that these comparisons she always made were more help in understanding things. What was the point of noticing things and understanding so little?
Bea climbed behind the curtains and put her finger to her lips. The rain rattled on the window like rice coming to a boil. Taryn couldn’t hear anything else. She opened her mouth to ask, ‘What is it?’ But her sister scowled and shook her head.
Bea had been at the big table, poring over a local map, learning the names of vanished woods and checking the diminished boundaries of those still standing. It was Bea’s whispered recitation of Lode Wood, Lower West Wood, Higher West Wood, St Cynog’s Wood, Princes Gate Wood, Lower Field Wood which drove Taryn to the window seat.
Taryn returned her sister’s scowl and only mouthed her question. Then she heard something, one word—her grandfather’s indignant ‘my’.
Grandfather was a frugal man who made do with mended things and always looked for ways to save. But he was generous, and the house, land and chattels remained ‘ours’ in his speech to the family and often also to the other old families of the neighbourhood. Anyone who earned Grandfather’s stern ‘my’ must somehow have pushed him.
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