by David Hodges
‘Come on, Auntie, no dawdling,’ George said, prodding her forwards none too gently. ‘Lots to see, you know.’
The old woman stared across the overgrown garden at the ruin facing them as she stumbled along ahead of her captor. She could feel her flesh start to creep as her gaze took in the broken guttering, part-boarded windows and ugly attic room – George’s old room – which had been added to the original structure by her late father. It seemed to be crouching there on the flat roof between the tall chimney stacks like some grotesque abomination, its single window peering at her over the stone gargoyles projecting from the crumbling walls in a kind of malevolent greeting.
‘Memories coming back, Auntie?’ George sneered, prodding her in the back again. ‘All those happy times?’
‘Why don’t you just kill me and get this over with?’ Iris said tremulously over her shoulder. ‘I am going to die soon anyway and I’m not afraid to meet my Maker.’
‘Oh no,’ George mocked. ‘Not before the grand tour. We have to have that first.’
‘I think the police will be here well before then.’
George shook her head. ‘Hardly, Auntie. They will be homing in on Talbot Court even as we speak and they know nothing about this place anyway, so we have it all to ourselves. Now, isn’t that romantic?’
*
Hayden grabbed Kate by the wrist as she thrust the key in the car’s ignition.
‘Aren’t you going to let control know about Down End House before we do anything?’ he said as she started the engine.
She shook her head irritably. ‘We’d only be told to wait for back-up and there isn’t time for that. We’re not even sure George has gone there in the first place.’
‘Whether she has or not,’ he persisted, ‘strikes me that it would be better to wait for back-up anyway. This woman is dangerous.’
‘No way,’ she retorted, prizing her hand free of his grip with her other hand and slamming the car into gear. ‘I’m not having Iris Naylor’s death on my conscience.’
‘Why would it be on your conscience any more than anyone else’s? What happens to Iris Naylor is not just down to you.’
‘No?’ she threw back at him in a tone laced with emotion. ‘Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, this whole mess is down to me. It was down to me that Georgina Lupin was able to sneak into the bungalow in the first place. It was down to me that Jenny Grey died. It was down to me that Lupin was able to snatch a vulnerable woman we were supposed to be protecting from under our very noses because I was not where I should have been. And it’s down to me now to make things right.’
‘You won’t do that by going off at half-cock, like some hare-brained maverick.’
She flared instantly. ‘Is that so? Well, if you don’t like it, you can always get out and walk back to the nick, as I told you once before. I didn’t want you with me in the first place.’
He winced. ‘Hey, steady on, old girl,’ he protested hastily, ‘I was just pointing out that—’
‘Well, don’t!’ she snarled, pulling away with a familiar torturous squeal of tyres. ‘I don’t need advice from a two-timing arsehole like you!’
Her foul mood persisted over the next few miles and it was this that may have led to her loss of concentration. The farmer had no doubt intended to make an early morning start when he drove his Ford tractor out of the gateway on to the road. Dawn was breaking by then and, as he could see enough to drive, he hadn’t bothered with lights, even though to others his tractor had only fractionally more substance than a heavy shadow. He should have looked first anyway, of course, but perhaps the early start itself had led to his own loss of concentration. In any event, he happened to choose to pull out on to the road at exactly the wrong moment. Kate saw the tractor all too late and, though her police training and quick reactions enabled her to take immediate evasive action to avoid a direct collision, the CID car still ploughed through the low hedge on the opposite side of the lane, coming to rest with its wheels embedded in a sea of glutinous mud and steam pouring from its fractured radiator.
CHAPTER 27
Down End House was clearly marked for demolition and the Victorian building looked distinctly sinister in the gathering dawn. There were notices nailed everywhere warning ‘Danger. Keep Out’, and most of the windows and doors appeared to have been boarded up. Getting into the house did not present a problem, however, for someone had earlier smashed the padlock and ripped off the battens securing the front door.
George emitted a short, humourless laugh as she pushed Iris ahead into the hallway, training the torch she had produced on a low door set in the panelling under the main staircase.
‘Nostalgia starting to get to you, is it, Auntie?’ she said, jerking the door open to reveal a flight of narrow stone stairs plunging steeply into near Stygian darkness. ‘Let’s see if we can give it some stimulus, eh?’
Distorted shadows opened up before the torch in the cellar beneath, the powerful beam touching on bits of furniture, rolls of carpet and a pile of old books.
Iris shuddered, shrinking back instinctively from its evil-smelling gloom, but George pressed against her, holding her there in a cruel vice-like grip.
‘This is where I was dumped as a punishment, remember?’ she hissed close to her ear. ‘Stripped naked, beaten, and locked in here alone to face all the monsters you said lived in this awful place.’
The torch homed in on an even blacker hole within a circle of bricks in the far corner.
‘See the well?’ George breathed. ‘You told me the monsters lived at the bottom of it, ready to devour me because of my wicked ways. Can you imagine what that was like for a small child? What terrors that child endured, waiting for those monsters to appear from the depths, dreading what form they might take and screaming all the time to be let out?’
‘I … I’m so sorry,’ the old woman whispered. ‘I really am.’
‘Are you, Auntie, are you honestly?’ George sneered. ‘Well, that must be all right then. After all, forgiveness is what Christianity is all about, isn’t it? You say sorry and I absolve you of all blame. What is it you Christians call it? Turning the other cheek, that’s it. It’s so simple when you think about it. Pity it doesn’t work for me, though. Now, let’s move closer to the well, to see if any of the monsters are at home, shall we?’
*
Neither Kate nor Hayden stirred for several long seconds after the crash. They just sat there in a state of shock, staring unseeing through the spiderweb cracks in the windscreen at the steam rising in the early dawn light from under the CID car’s buckled bonnet. Kate was the first to move, jerking suddenly out of her dazed state and fumbling with her seatbelt.
As it clinked open, she turned quickly in her seat to check on Hayden, who had released his own seatbelt and was sitting there, prodding his chest tenderly with the fingers of one hand.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
‘Bruised my ribcage, I think,’ he replied, then snapped on the interior light and stared at her keenly, noting the blood trickling down her face from a deep cut in her forehead where her head had struck the door pillar. ‘What about you? You’re bleeding.’
She seemed aware of her injury for the first time and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, wincing at the sudden stab of pain from the open wound and staring at the blood on the back of her hand with a scowl.
‘I’ll live,’ she snapped. ‘Where’s that bloody tractor?’
He peered through his side window over the hedge. ‘Scarpered by the look of it,’ he retorted. ‘Probably never even saw us.’
She put her shoulder against her door and burst it open. ‘We have to get going,’ she said. ‘We’re wasting time.’
‘Get going?’ he echoed. ‘Like where and how? This car’s a write-off.’
She climbed unsteadily out of the vehicle, holding on to the door frame for support, and almost threw up in the mud into which her shoes had sunk.
‘Down End House.’
He gaped
at her. ‘You’ve got to be joking? That job’s out the window now. We’re going nowhere.’
‘But the village can only be just down the road,’ she retorted. ‘Maybe ten minutes on foot.’
He stared at her in total disbelief. ‘Are you mad?’ he exclaimed. ‘We’ve totalled the CID car, we’re both injured and suffering from shock, and anyway, we can’t just abandon a police vehicle and walk away from the scene of an accident. Call up control, as we should have done before. Let them handle things – there’s nothing more we can do to help Iris Naylor.’
‘Balls!’ she grated, stumbling away from the car towards the gap in the hedge. ‘You call up control. I’m going to finish what I started.’
Grabbing the door handle, he wrestled with the lock, but it seemed to have jammed and even when he put his shoulder against the door, it refused to budge.
‘Kate,’ he shouted through the still-open driver’s door. ‘Don’t be a fool!’
But she had already reached the lane and disappeared behind a line of trees, leaving him desperately trying to crawl over the gearstick and centre consul in an effort to get out of the car on the driver’s side.
*
‘You never liked wells, did you, Auntie?’ George said softly, pushing the old woman ahead of her to the wall encircling the black pit. ‘I remember Father saying how you had a phobia about them. Imagine falling down one full of all the monsters you used to talk about, eh? I wonder how deep this one is …?’
Producing a coin from her pocket, she leaned past Iris while still holding on to one skinny wrist tightly with her other hand, and flicked the coin into the gaping mouth. ‘Listen!’ she ordered.
For a few seconds there was nothing and then a soft but definite ‘plop’ from far below.
‘Long way down, isn’t it?’ she said, smirking as she felt the thin frame she was pressed against shaking fitfully.
‘Have a closer look,’ she went on and suddenly thrust her aunt forward so forcibly that, but for the hand gripping her wrist, she would have pitched the old woman right over into the depths.
‘Whoops!’ George mocked. ‘Nearly lost you that time, didn’t I? But don’t worry, Auntie, I’m not going to punish you that way. No one would ever know what had happened to you then, would they? It would defeat the whole purpose of what I’d planned to do. Oh no, I’ve got something much better and more public in store for you.’
The main staircase to the upper floor was uncarpeted, though the beam of the torch in George’s hand caught the occasional glint of nails with bits of carpet still attached. There were ragged holes in places too where the wood had rotted, and some sections of the bannister rails were no longer in evidence.
‘Careful now,’ George said, shining the torch past her as she prodded her aunt forward with her other hand. ‘Don’t want you falling through and breaking your neck, do we? That would spoil all the fun.’
Upstairs, open doorways yawned at them and Iris jumped when a bat flew out of one room in a panic, grazing the top of her head.
George obviously knew exactly where she was going and she continued prodding her captive forward until they were at the end of the corridor and standing before a half-open door partially shielding another bare, though much narrower, ascending staircase.
George reached past her to pull the door wide. ‘Up you go, Auntie,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll know where you are now, surely?’
There was another door at the top of the staircase and George once more reached past her to pull it open.
Like the rest of the house, the tiny room beyond was devoid of furnishings of any sort, but unlike the rest of the house Iris had previously viewed from the outside, there was no boarding across the single window and it was immediately apparent that there was no glass there either. It had been knocked out completely and jagged shards were clearly visible on the floor below the low sill. In the strengthening grey light streaming into the room, the torch had become superfluous and time-faded, handwritten religious texts were visible on every wall, with a part-obliterated list of the Ten Commandments above the missing window.
‘You must remember this room, Auntie?’ George said. ‘It was my attic bedroom – or cell, as I liked to call it – where I was confined most days and forced to sit at my little wooden desk, trying to memorize texts from the Holy Bible. You all used to test me on it, didn’t you? And when I got something wrong, I had to be punished – because as a girl wanting to be a boy, I was unclean, wasn’t I? What was it Father called me? Oh yes, “an aberration and an affront to the Almighty”, that was it.’
‘The devil had turned you and we needed to drive his demon out to … to bring you back on the right path,’ Iris stammered. ‘It was God’s will.’
George glared at her. ‘God had nothing to do with it, nor had the devil,’ she hissed with vicious force. ‘What you did to me all those years was not done in the name of God, but to satisfy your own sadistic desire to punish an innocent child you believed to have brought shame on the family name just by being different. But enough,’ and the sneer was back in her voice. ‘We are now almost at the end of the grand tour and this is the best part of it.’
*
Kate could feel a burning pain in her chest as she stumbled along the lane, but she pushed on regardless, soon passing darkened cottages and a shuttered, uninviting-looking inn. She cast quick, panicky glances about her in an effort to pick out Down End House. She had no idea exactly where the place was and the address the Reverend Glover had produced from the church register had simply given the name of the property – no street or anything else. She reached the outer limits of the village before she found what she was looking for, a dilapidated sign leaning out of a hedge and pointing up an even narrower lane to her left, bearing the faint, barely discernible name of Down End House.
Her throat was dry and her legs shaking from her exertions by the time she got to the end of the lane, following a high brick wall. When the austere Victorian house with its Gothic facade and totally out-of-place Edwardian-style conservatory finally materialized on the far side of an unkempt garden, she was forced to stand for a moment, drawing in ragged gasps of the cold, dank air before she could go any further. She saw the marked police Ford Transit as she stood there holding on to one of the gateposts. It was parked in the middle of the driveway, just beyond the open gate. Her heart gave a sickening lurch and she found her fingernails digging into the soft wood of the post as the gravity of the challenge she had single-handedly taken on now dawned on her.
She was not given much time to think about it either. The scream that punctured the stillness of the air was only faint, but it cut into her like a knife. As she started through the gateway, she caught sight of two figures on the roof of the house, dangerously close to the low wall bordering the edge, one of whom appeared to be backing away from the other.
CHAPTER 28
‘So, what do you think I’ve got planned for you, Auntie?’ George gloated.
Iris simply stared at the floor, her eyes dull and lifeless. She was no longer trembling and it seemed that her tears had completely dried up. It was as if, in the final numbing throes of shock, she didn’t care anymore.
Her silence was greeted with a frown of feigned disappointment.
‘Come on now, I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble here. The moment I got out of Larchfield – even before I went back to Talbot Court – I came here to set things up. You could at least show some interest.’
There was still no response and George sighed. ‘Do you know,’ she went on, ‘I actually cut my hand knocking out that window so we would be able to climb through it on to the roof and I took my life in my hands demolishing one of the stone gargoyles – all just for you. You’re so ungrateful.’
Very slowly Iris raised her head, a hint of life back in her eyes and her gaze now focused directly on her tormentor’s face.
‘Just do what you have to do,’ came the low, weary reply. ‘I know you’re going to kill me anyway, so get on with
it. I’ve already said I’m not afraid to die.’
‘No, of course you’re not,’ George patronized, ‘but you should be really proud of the efforts I’ve made on your behalf to give you such a spectacular send-off.’ She tugged a dark-coloured bottle from the pocket of her coat. ‘Look, I’ve even brought along some sherry, so we could have a last drink together before you go – just like the old days. You know, a sort of toast for the dying.’
There was no response and George returned the bottle to her pocket with a manufactured sigh.
‘Ah well, we can talk about that again in a minute and anyway, you might be more interested in this.’
She slipped her hand inside her coat and produced a sealed envelope, which she waved in front of her captive’s nose.
‘My confession, Auntie – for the police, you understand. A testimony that should justify my actions and exonerate me from all blame. It will be left for them to read after you have joined your Maker and I have disappeared … I thought I might go to Ireland, you know. Spend my last weeks or days in some wilderness location. Dying, you see, is a very personal thing and I have no intention of waiting for the Grim Reaper to take me. I shall end it all on a day and method of my own choosing. Cheat the Reaper, as well as the authorities, but ensure through this letter that my name will be written into the annals of criminal history for evermore. Brilliant, eh?’
‘You will burn in the fires of hell,’ Iris whispered.
There was a high-pitched, unbalanced laugh as George returned the envelope to her pocket.
‘Maybe I will, maybe I will, but it will be with a smile on my face for what I will have done to you.’
George waved an arm towards the window. ‘Did you see the gargoyles when I first brought you here? Well, you may or may not have noticed that one of them is missing. That’s because I removed it with a hammer. Took me a while and I had to proceed very carefully too, because each of those heads is supported by an iron spike, and I needed this one to be left in place to accommodate your head after it has parted company with the rest of you. With me so far?’