Panic Room

by Robert Goddard

  I pick it up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Blake?’ The voice is male, American, flat and slightly husky.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘French. Don knows who I am.’

  ‘Well, d’you—’

  ‘Tell him this from me, Blake. We know about the panic room. We spoke with Dale. You met him earlier, didn’t you? Nice kid. Not accustomed to being questioned the way I question people, though. Shook him up a mite. Anyhow, now we know the room’s there … we want to know what’s in it. And we expect Don to find out for us. Got that?’

  ‘I—’

  The line’s dead. French has hung up.

  Don walks into the room and looks across at me. He frowns. He can probably read the alarm in my eyes. ‘I heard the phone,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Who’s French, Don?’

  ‘Ah.’ His expression tightens. ‘Well …’

  ‘Seems he knows about the panic room. Squeezed the details out of Dale, so he said. Is he the kind of man who could do that?’

  Don nods miserably. ‘Yeah. He is.’

  ‘And he knows you?’

  ‘We met. This morning. At Church Cove.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me anything about that.’

  ‘I, er … didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘No? Well, I’m worried now.’

  ‘Sorry. I should have …’ His voice tails away. He walks slowly round to where I’m standing and looks directly at me. ‘Sorry.’ And to be fair to him, he looks it.

  EIGHT

  DON SLEPT POORLY. The house had minor ticks and creaks, as was only to be expected, but every one of them made him believe for a second that something had stirred in the master bedroom. His strained wrist felt more painful every time he woke and his brain exhausted itself thinking of ways to extricate Blake – and him – from the coils of intrigue surrounding Jack Harkness.

  Eventually, just as dawn was breaking, he fell into a sudden, deep slumber. It was as if a tired man walking for miles had stepped into an uncovered well. He went down a long way.

  When he surfaced, the morning was well advanced. He was aware he had dreamt of his father, which was unusual. They had been walking somewhere in the countryside, the North Downs maybe. Don was a child. Patch was with them. He had arrived as a puppy when Don was five. Patch was fully grown in the dream, though. He ran away into a wood and Don went after him. But look as long and hard as he liked, he could not find him.

  As soon as the dream had faded and Don made to get out of bed, he realized his wrist was much worse. He could hardly bend it without wincing. Moving the fingers on that hand hurt like hell as well. He stumbled into the bathroom and confronted a far from refreshed face in the mirror. The wrist was so painful he had to wash and shave one-handed. He managed to cut himself twice in the process.

  He found himself going into the master bedroom to check nothing had changed in the dressing-room closet – nothing had – before he went down to the kitchen. There he tried to coax the espresso machine into life. The Financial Times had already arrived – the fat weekend edition. Don turned the pages with his left hand, looking for a mention of Harkness, while the machine warmed up. There was none, which was either good news or bad, though he could not decide which.

  A deal of steaming and gurgling announced the delivery of a cup of coffee. Don tried instinctively to pick it up with his right hand, only to spill most of it. ‘Bloody hell,’ he grumbled.

  Suddenly, he was transported in time and space to the fetid, meanly furnished flat in Honor Oak where his father had died. Don had been summoned there one summer’s day in 1995 by a neighbour, complaining about a plague of flies and a bad smell. Don had a spare key. He knew what he was going to find before he went in, though he prayed he was wrong. The old man had been going downhill for quite a while. The failed business ventures, the cheap supermarket vodka and the creeping certainty that his luck would never turn again had left him with no way out. Yes, Don knew what he was going to find.

  Except that he did not know. The physical reality of a lonely death, undiscovered for many days, was something he was unprepared for. The wreckage of his father’s body was a terrible sight, decomposing, rotting, almost melting, crawling with maggots. And then there was the smell – the clinging stench of decay – that invaded Don’s nostrils. Flies buzzed round his head as he stared down in horror and revulsion at all that remained of the once handsome, debonair, man-about-town Rex Challenor.

  Don was a phlegmatic manager of his own memories. He was not often caught out by them. But he was caught out by them now.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Don turned to find Blake gazing at him from the doorway with a concerned expression on her face. There was freshness and energy in her eyes. She had obviously had a much better night than he had, despite all he had told her about French and the sinister Zlenko.

  ‘You don’t look so great, Don,’ she said, which he suspected was a considerable understatement.

  ‘I cut myself shaving.’ He held up his right hand. ‘Can’t seem to use this at all.’

  She walked over and peered at his wrist. ‘It isn’t swollen.’

  ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

  She frowned at him. ‘What’s in that cup?’

  ‘It was coffee. But, er … I spilt it.’

  ‘I’ll make you some more.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She went over to the machine and set it brewing again. Don slumped down at the table. He could not shake off the memory of his father. A foul smell seemed to waft briefly past him and he suddenly felt so sick he rushed back to the sink, where just as suddenly the sensation faded. His wrist throbbed.

  ‘You didn’t stay up drinking, did you, Don?’ Blake asked.

  ‘No.’ He shambled back to the table. ‘This is no hangover.’

  ‘It’s something, though.’

  The machine delivered a second cup of coffee. Blake plonked it in front of Don and sat down opposite him.

  ‘When I came in, you looked …’ She shrugged. ‘I dunno. You looked … wounded.’

  ‘That’ll be the wrist.’

  ‘Wounded inside, I mean.’

  He summoned some kind of smile. ‘A few gloomy thoughts, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you going to be able to drive with your wrist like that?’

  The question had not yet occurred to Don. As he considered it and tried painfully to straighten his fingers, he realized driving – certainly all the way back to London – would be next to impossible. ‘Could be tricky,’ he said drily.

  She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘When did it start playing up?’

  ‘I jarred it somehow climbing up on those rocks in the cove. No … hold on.’ Don turned the point over in his mind. ‘Actually, it was sore before then. I noticed it … when we drove into Mullion.’

  ‘On the way back from Helston, then?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘That’s not what I’d call it.’

  ‘I think I know what the trouble is.’

  ‘OK, Nurse, what is it?’

  She shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

  ‘Try me. I’m desperate.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Really. Like you said, I can’t drive one-handed. And I need to get myself – and you – a long way away from here. Today, preferably.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’ll be possible, Don.’

  ‘You know about French and his Russian chum now, Blake. It’s important we put some distance between you and this house.’

  ‘You reckon running away from a guy like French will work?’

  Don sighed. ‘Have you got a better suggestion?’

  ‘Not sure about better. But there’s a woman we should talk to, here in Mullion, before we do anything else.’

  ‘Who is she? And why haven’t you mentioned her before?’

  ‘Maris Hemsley. And I didn’t think of h
er. Till this happened.’ Blake nodded towards Don’s wrist.

  He made a face. ‘I don’t need the services of a local quack.’

  ‘That’s all right, then.’ She smiled. ‘’Cos you’re not going to get ’em.’

  I met Maris because she bought a three-legged table I’d made and commissioned me to make a couple of chairs. I seriously liked it when she used that word. ‘Commissioned’. It sounded professional, like I was doing something properly commercial. Plus selling the table so soon after it went on display in the gallery at Trelowarren meant they were keen to stock more of my stuff. She was a stroke of good luck just when I needed it, right after I’d had to move out of Andrew’s place.

  I knew Maris was some kind of historian. You could tell that from the books on her shelves. Retired from Exeter University, so she told me. Historian and anthropologist, she emphasized to explain why a lot of the books were about folklore and pagan religions. I guess that’s why I asked her if she knew anything about Wynsum Fry. I could tell at once the name hit a nerve. She kind of froze.

  She got me to tell her everything that had happened between me and Fry and Andrew before she told me her own story. She’d bought her cottage as a weekend place originally, back in the late 1970s, somewhere to come down to from Exeter.

  Right from the start, apparently, she began hearing stories about local people, farming folk mostly, going to a white witch – seer, fortune-teller, whatever – to predict the future and help solve their problems. Illnesses. Miscarriages. Money troubles. Sickness in a herd. Blight on a crop. They didn’t go to their doctor, their accountant or their vet. They went to Calensa Fry.

  Calensa was Wynsum’s grandmother. She raised her and Jory after their mother deserted them. Maris was fascinated by how her brand of witchcraft could survive in the twentieth century. She thought it could be the basis for a book: a proper academic study of the subject.

  According to the people Maris talked to, Calensa Fry was a dewitcher on top of everything else: someone you went to if you thought you were bewitched; someone who could lift the spell that had been cast on you by another witch. It sounded crazy when Maris first told me about it. I couldn’t get my head round the idea that people actually believed in that kind of crap. But I’d seen Andrew with Wynsum Fry and I knew if people wanted to believe something badly enough … they did.

  Maris cooked up a story that she was bewitched: experiencing a series of inexplicable accidents. She persuaded a local farmer’s wife to introduce her to Calensa Fry. They met. Calensa quizzed her about enemies. She did some card-reading. That was all Maris could remember about the session, though she was sure there’d been more to it. When she went to see Calensa again, she took a tape recorder, hidden in her handbag. As before, she came away unable to remember much. And when she played back the tape, there was nothing on it, just white noise.

  Then things turned seriously weird. Accidents started happening – the kind she’d made up as her cover story for seeing Calensa. The brakes on her car failed. A heavy book fell off a high shelf, knocking her clean out. She slipped over walking on the harbour wall at Mullion Cove and fell in the sea. An angler dived in and pulled her out.

  Maris was frightened stiff by the end of all that. She reckoned Calensa had rumbled her as a fake client and put a real spell on her as a punishment. She burnt the tapes, even though they were blank. She sent Calensa a letter confessing she’d been looking for material for a book but was now dropping the idea.

  The accidents stopped. Dead. Calensa was satisfied, I guess. Ironically, she contacted Maris then, offering to help her with her research – for a fee. She’d made her point. And Maris had taken it.

  I tell Don all this, but he doesn’t seem to see the connection with him, though it’s obvious to me. I don’t push it. I’ll let Maris make it plain to him. I phone her and ask if I can bring a friend to meet her. She knows me. She agrees straight away. ‘Come for coffee.’ I think she already senses it isn’t a social call.

  Don makes a bit of a fuss. He’s all for taking himself – and me – away from Wortalleth West right away. The fact he can’t drive is a problem he’s reluctant to face up to. When he does, he suggests I drive. I guess that shows just how worried he is. I nix the idea, by saying I can’t drive. Not strictly true, but never mind. He runs out of objections to walking into Mullion for coffee with Maris. We set off, along the coast path round Angrouse Cliff.

  The weather’s clear and warm again. It’s unusual for it to be stuck like this. No wind. No rain. Just the blue sky, a faint breeze and skylarks singing. Not Lizard weather at all. The cliffs are brilliant with thrift and campion and tormentil. Gwennap Head lies like a giant basking whale on the other side of Mount’s Bay. I can’t quite convince myself, in all this peace and beauty, that we’re in any kind of actual danger.

  I start trying to reason my way – our way – out of it. ‘French gave you a week, didn’t he, Don? So time’s on our side.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say he was necessarily a man of his word,’ Don pants in reply. ‘He didn’t know about the panic room when I spoke to him.’

  ‘But he’s looking for money, isn’t he? Money Harkness has supposedly stolen. That’ll be the smart white-collar kind of theft. Figures on spreadsheets. Megabucks in tax-haven bank accounts.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  ‘So, he doesn’t need a panic room at Wortalleth West to store it in, does he? It’s not like he’s got a load of gold bars to stash away. Cornwall isn’t a tax haven.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Don admits. ‘But I didn’t tell French about the panic room when I could have. He had to hear about it from Dale. So, he’ll be even more suspicious of me than he was. And you heard him. He wants to know what’s in the room.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just blow it open?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he can’t risk drawing attention to himself – and who he’s working for. He also said there were other leads he had to follow up. Maybe he’s left the area.’

  ‘I’d like to believe that.’

  ‘Me too. But I still think the best thing we can do is get the hell out.’

  Don’s probably right. I know that. But I’ve had practice in getting the hell out of somewhere. That’s how I finished up here, on the very edge of England. If you always give in to fear, when do you stop being frightened?

  I realize in that instant, as I gaze out across the blue water, into the nothingness of the ocean, that I hate French as well as fear him. I hate him because I fear him.

  Maris Hemsley was a tall, thin, erect woman of seventy or so, with grey hair, keen eyes and a fine-boned face. She had a brisk, efficient air to her, talking quickly and moving fast as if needing to cram as much thought and activity into her day as possible.

  Her cottage was small and whitewashed, set back from the cliff above Polurrian Cove, screened by bushy growths of gorse and broom. She shared it with an enthusiastically friendly Sealyham terrier and a vast hoard of books. Don did not really understand why Blake had taken him to meet Maris, but he assumed he would find out soon enough.

  Blake went into the kitchen to help, leaving Don slumped in an armchair in the airy, light-filled lounge with Dandy the terrier. He stared vacantly at the phalanx of books with titles like Religion and the Decline of Magic and The Symbology of Early Modern Spiritism. For someone who had supposedly had her fingers burnt in a long-ago encounter with Wynsum Fry’s grandmother, Maris Hemsley appeared reluctant to give up her interest in the subject of magic and superstition.

  She and Blake were soon back, with a pot of coffee and a plate of biscuits. Maris managed a light but expert interrogation of Don while pouring the coffee. What did he do for a living? What had brought him to Mullion? He did not resist. With Blake’s eyes resting on him, he felt almost obliged to be candid.

  ‘I gather you’ve met Wynsum Fry,’ Maris said once she had gleaned as much as she wanted to about him.

  ‘Yeah. And you’re the expert on the Frys, according to Blake.’ />
  ‘As much of an expert as you can be, I suppose.’ She eyed Don with an analytical sharpness. ‘You met Wynsum yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah. In Helston.’

  ‘She did a card-reading for you?’

  ‘No. I turned her down.’

  ‘How did she react to that?’

  ‘Like I was a disappointment to her.’

  ‘Oh, you would have been. Anyone associated with Wortalleth West – and therefore Harkness – is of great interest to her. She’d have hoped to draw something out of you.’

  ‘Because she’s convinced Harkness murdered her brother?’

  Maris nodded. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I made it clear I didn’t believe in the occult.’

  ‘That won’t have pleased her.’

  ‘His right wrist is giving him grief,’ Blake put in. ‘Since an hour or so after meeting Fry.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Don. ‘That’s got—’

  ‘Did she touch you?’ Maris cut in.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Did Wynsum Fry touch you?’

  ‘Er, yeah. We, er, shook hands.’

  ‘Show me how.’ Maris extended her right hand.

  Don sat forward and extended his own right hand to meet hers. Maris took it lightly.

  ‘Like this?’ she queried.

  ‘No. Er, she put her other hand on top of mine as well.’

  Maris rested her left hand on top of Don’s right. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Yeah.’ A small amount of pressure made him suck in his breath.

  ‘Does that hurt?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Don held himself stiffly. ‘Quite a bit.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Maris let go. ‘Can you move your fingers?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘So, it’ll be difficult to drive, I imagine.’

  Don glanced sharply at Blake. ‘Difficult’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘Meaning you can’t very easily leave Mullion.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? Wynsum Fry has done this to you, Don. There’s not a doubt of it in my mind. It’s her way – and she does have her ways – of ensuring she keeps you where she wants you.’