by Sarah Rayne
Donna was only a minute getting the hat which she had deliberately left behind. She locked the car and checked the alarm, because her father would ask if she had done so. She put the keys in the pocket of her jeans–the keys were crucial to the plan–and glanced at her watch. Five past two.
She took a deep breath and went back into Twygrist’s ancient darkness.
As the three of them walked across the old floor, little creakings and groanings seemed to come from deep within the old mill. Donna’s mother said she had not thought to look for the kiln room when they came before. Presumably there must be stairs leading down. What did they both think?
‘What’s over there?’ said Donna, pointing towards the waterwheel. ‘Where’s the torch–no, shine it over there. No, behind the actual wheel.’
Maria Robards said excitedly, ‘It’s a door.’
‘And it’s propped open,’ said Donna, moving the torch again. Her heart beat faster. There had been the possibility that the vague village talk she had heard had been wrong or misleading, and that Twygrist did not have any underground levels at all. Or the kiln room might no longer be accessible. But it was all right, and her plan was unfolding with almost mathematical precision. Her heartbeat increased; it was no longer fear but excitement that drove her.
‘There are steps leading down,’ said Donna’s father. ‘Shine the torch a bit more to the right. That’s better. Maria, if you’re definitely going down there, we’ll have to be careful. It might be dangerous.’
‘Nonsense, if one of us stays at the top of the stairs…’
Really, thought Donna, her mother might almost have been reading from the script. She said, ‘I’ll stay. Going into filthy underground rooms isn’t my idea of fun.’
‘We’ll leave you the smaller torch,’ said Maria. ‘You’ll want some light. And we’ll keep calling out so you know we’re all right.’
Donna did not care if they recited the entire works of Shakespeare or sang hymns. She did not care if they left her in the pitch dark or with enough light to illuminate the whole of Cheshire. She just wanted them to go down the bloody steps and towards the kiln room. In a don’t-care voice, she said, ‘OK.’
‘Ready, Jim?’
‘If we must, we must,’ he said. ‘I’d better go first, to test the weight of the stairs, though. The wood’s probably rotten.’
‘They’re stone steps,’ said Donna’s mother. ‘Stone doesn’t rot.’
‘No, but it crumbles.’
Donna sat cross-legged at the head of the stairs, leaning her back against the stone wall, rather unpleasantly aware of the silent waterwheel directly behind and above her and of the chasm beneath it. She flicked the torch’s beam beneath the wheel, pointing it straight down, and caught the black glint of water, with patches of grease lying on the surface and amorphous shapes within. Horrid. She brought the torch hurriedly back up.
Now that she was on her own on this floor, she could hear the rhythmic beating of the memorial clock. She glanced round, trying to work out where the clock was. That wall to the left? So the clock was actually quite near. It was somehow very eerie to think of the clock in this lonely darkness, steadily ticking its way through the hours and the months and the years.
It sounded as if her parents had reached the foot of the stone steps. Maria’s voice floated up to Donna, calling out that they had reached the bottom without mishap, and there were some brick-lined tunnels in front of them. Imagine not finding all this on those other trips, she said. They were setting off into the tunnels now–was Donna all right?
Donna shouted back that she was all right. Had they expected the ghost of the old miller to come lurching in and smother her with a flour bag?
‘Your voices are getting a bit faint, so I’ll come part way down the steps, so I can hear you better,’ she said.
‘Well, be careful. They’re very worn at the centre, and there isn’t anything to hold on to. Don’t slip and break your ankle.’
‘I wish you’d stop fussing,’ said Donna, and directing the torch onto the ground, she began to descend the steps to Twygrist’s subterrenean rooms.
The tunnels were wider than she had expected, in fact they were more like small rooms leading out of one another. She tried to fix the position of the walls in her mind so she would not crash into them or trip over the bits of discarded machinery and alert her parents, then she switched off her torch. At once the darkness reared up, like a solid black wall, but it would have to be coped with. Her mother and father must not suspect she was creeping along the tunnels towards them. After a moment her eyes began to adjust, and she saw that it was not pitch dark; a trickle of light from her mother’s torch came back along the tunnels.
Donna hesitated. Am I really going to do this? Don came strongly into her mind, and she knew it had to be done.
She could hear her parents–her mother was saying surely they must be nearly at the kiln room by now. Her sharp heels clacked loudly in the enclosed space, and Donna, who was wearing trainers, thought only her mother would come into a place like this wearing shoes with two-inch heels.
As she went silently forwards, she had the feeling that Twygrist was coming alive all round her, and that its dark and ancient heart was beating in exact synchronization with the unseen clock overhead. She began to time her footsteps to match the ticking so that the sound would be smothered.
The tunnel-rooms were not as labyrinthine as they had seemed, and were exactly as Donna had hoped: a series of stone and brick rooms opening out of one another, protecting the rest of the mill from the kiln-room fires.
She heard her mother’s heels halt, and Maria said, ‘This must be the kiln room. D’you see, Jim, those are iron doors.’
Another wave of thankfulness engulfed Donna, and she edged nearer.
‘Steel,’ her father was saying. ‘Good God, they’re heavy. For goodness’ sake stay clear of them–they’re pretty antiquated, but the hinges are still in place. They’d swing shut and trap you before you knew what was happening. Stay here–just shine the torch inside.’ His tone said, let’s see what it is you want to see, and then let’s for Christ’s sake get out of this dismal place.
‘That’s the fireplace,’ said Donna’s mother after a moment, and Donna tensed her muscles. In another two seconds she would move. ‘It’s quite big, isn’t it? And there’s the chimney breast going upwards.’
‘The drying floor must be directly over that chimney,’ said Donna’s father, sounding interested despite himself. ‘They’d spread the damp grain over it, and the heat of the fire would have dried it before it was milled.’
‘I don’t remember seeing that.’
‘I noticed it last time we were here,’ said Donna’s father. ‘On the side of the mill. It looked as if it had been concreted over, though. That’s probably why the air’s so stale down here.’
‘I don’t see the stone Donna talked about, do you? Unless it’s set into that wall—’
The unsuitable heels clattered across the floor, and there was a sigh of exasperation from Donna’s father–the enclosed rooms picked the sigh up quite clearly and sent it hissing back to where Donna was standing. Was this the moment? She tiptoed a couple of steps further along, hardly daring to breathe, placing her feet down slowly and carefully so that there would be no sound. If either of her parents heard her–if they turned round and saw her there–the plan would fail.
But they did not turn round and they did not hear her. They were examining the walls flanking the ancient kiln, shining the torch with ridiculous solemnity. Donna could have laughed aloud to see how pedantic they were being, trying to find a stupid, non-existent memorial stone.
She waited until they were at the furthest point from the door, and then set her own torch on the ground, making sure it would not roll away. OK, now for it.
Taking a deep breath, she ran forward, grabbed the edges of the thick steel door with both hands and threw her whole weight behind it. For the space of three heartbeats she thought it
was not going to budge and panic threatened to engulf her, but then the massive door gave a teeth-scraping moan of protest, and moved away from the wall, gathering momentum as it did so.
The two people inside the room swung round at the sound, the torch fell from Maria Robards’ hands and rolled into a corner. Incredibly it did not shatter, and its triangle of brilliance lit up the scene like a stage set. Donna had a final sight of her parents’ faces, white with shock, their eyes suddenly huge with horror, their mouths forming round Os of fear. They both cried out, and then the door slammed home, cutting off all sound.
For several minutes Donna shook so badly she could not move. She knew she must get away from this place, but she sank to the floor, hugging her knees, her heart pounding as if she had been running hard.
After a while she managed to shine her torch onto her wristwatch. She felt as if she had lived through several hours, but incredibly it was only just on half past two. She must drive back to Charity Cottage, hoping not to be seen, and slip up to her bedroom. She had no exact idea how long it would take her mother and father to die, but if the room was airtight they could not last very long. Say two days. That meant she would have to delay the inevitable police search for at least that time. Could she lay false trails by saying they might have driven over to the other side of Amberwood? Yes, she could.
The shaking had stopped, and she stood up and placed the flat of her hands against the steel doors, pressing her ear to the surface. The doors remained immoveable, and there was no sound whatsoever from beyond them. I’m not sorry for what I’ve just done, said Donna silently to the two people imprisoned in the kiln room. You deserved this for trying to separate me from Don.
She picked up the torch and retraced her steps along the underground rooms and back up the stone steps. It was still only twenty minutes to three. By three o’clock she was back at the cottage, careful to park the car exactly where it had been parked all morning so it did not look as if it had been driven anywhere. She looked out of the kitchen window, and saw that Don was in the same place, sprawled on the grass, either listening to the Walkman, or asleep. Donna went into her bedroom; the curtains were drawn against the afternoon sunshine. She rumpled the bed so it would look as if she had been lying down with her headache.
At quarter past four she went downstairs, and saw it was clouding over. By half past it was starting to rain, and Don came in from the garden. They had a cup of tea, and by five o’clock they began to wonder what had happened to their parents, and what they had better do about looking for them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘Was it just for that–for a bizarre fuck–that I did what I did that day at Twygrist?’
In the enclosed confines of the car parked outside the night club, Donna’s angry words lay on the air like acid, and the car seemed to seethe with violent emotions.
‘Was it just for a bizarre fuck…’ ‘Don’t pretend. You know perfectly well what I did…What I did…WHAT I DID…’ The words seemed to burn into the darkness, and the echoes sizzled and spun around Donna’s head, along with the knowledge that he had not known, that if only she had not said that…
But horrified comprehension flared in Don’s eyes, in a voice of such loathing that Donna flinched, he said, ‘Oh Christ, Donna, you killed them, didn’t you? You shut them into that room. You’re a murderess.’
He turned away from her, slumping down in the passenger seat, not looking at anything, and after a moment Donna switched on the car’s ignition.
They were almost home when he said, ‘You’re a monster, Donna.’ He half turned in his seat and stared at her. ‘What makes you think I won’t tell the police?’
‘What makes you think they’d believe you?’ said Donna at once. ‘I covered my tracks very well, Don. No one suspected the truth then, and no one would suspect it now. A tragic accident, that was the verdict.’ As he hesitated, she said in a softer voice, ‘Our parents were going to separate us–you knew that. And I couldn’t bear it. So I killed them. I did it for us. For you.’
‘That’s the really monstrous part,’ said Don. ‘That’s the part I don’t think I can bear,’ and although Donna had not taken her eyes off the road she knew he was looking at her. She took one hand off the steering wheel and reached for him, but he brushed her away angrily.
‘Get off me. I can’t stand you touching me.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
When they reached the flat he went blindly into his own bedroom, and banged the door against her. Donna heard him flinging open cupboards and drawers.
It was after two a.m. when he left the flat, not speaking to her, simply walking straight through the door and slamming it behind him. Donna flew to the window and watched him walk along the road, his shoulders hunched against the thin drizzling rain that had started to fall, his head down.
She had absolutely no idea where he would go, and although once she would have followed him, tonight she did not dare. She could only hope he would come home in the morning.
He did not come home in the morning. Donna sat helplessly in the flat, jumping every time there was any sound from outside, willing the phone to ring, and staring through the window to the street below, praying that at any minute he would walk down the street.
At four o’clock she left the flat for the pretentious but expensive French bistro where she had managed to work her way up to being restaurant manager. Don would certainly be home when she got back, and the evening stint of duty would help to fill in the hours of waiting.
The bistro was not the glitziest job in the world, but Donna quite liked it. She enjoyed wearing a sharp black suit and white silk shirt, moving around the softly lit restaurant and adjoining wine bar, overseeing people who thought it part of their epicurean experience to be dealt with by a cut-glass accent. The salary Jean-Pierre paid was not immense, but it was not bad because the hours were regarded as antisocial. Donna did not mind the erratic hours, because they could often be adjusted to give her free time when she wanted it.
It was midnight before she got back to the flat. She put her key into the lock eagerly, convinced Don would be there. But the place was empty and silent, and it remained that way for three more nightmare days. It was not until the morning of the fourth day that Don appeared, a bit pale, a bit quieter than usual. Donna tried to ask him where he had been and whether he was all right, but he shrugged her off in the way he had shrugged her off after their parents’ death. She supposed he had been staying with one of the friends she did not know–the people he went to clubs and parties with.
A week later a letter addressed to D. Robards arrived. Donna opened it–not prying, just making a mistake–and saw to her horror that it was a hospital appointment card. It set out a list of day clinic sessions arranged for Don at the psychiatric department of the nearby infirmary.
Don was furious. He said she ought to have realized the letter was not for her, snatched it out of her hand and stormed out of the room. But after a time he came back, and when Donna questioned him again he shrugged and said, well yes, all right, she might as well know; there had been a bit of a drama on the night of their row. And if she really wanted the sordid details—
‘Yes, I do want them,’ said Donna, beating down a mounting fear.
‘Very well then,’ said Don. ‘Before I left the flat that night, I took the bottle of sleeping pills from your bedroom drawer—’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, so I could sleep somewhere for hours and hours. Somebody’s sofa–anywhere–I didn’t much care. I just wanted to sleep and not dream of anything—’
But he had walked along by the river, the moonlight had been reflected on the dark surface of the water, and he thought how marvellous it would be to just walk into the water and let it take you along until you merged with the moonlight. Donna would know how it was–you got hold of an idea, an image, and the next thing y
ou knew, it had sort of taken you over.
‘No,’ said Donna bluntly. ‘I don’t know at all. What I do know is that you were very drunk that night. What actually happened?’
What had actually happened, said Don, was that as he watched the river and the moonlight, the idea of dying had started to seem immensely alluring–he did not seem to hear Donna’s half-stifled cry at this. It was a romantic image, he said. Did Donna not think there was a dark romance about dying young? Elegies and gravestones and always being young in people’s memories. He gave Donna his vivid blue stare, and she looked at him helplessly and had absolutely no idea how much to believe of all this stuff about moonlit deaths.
She asked if he had been serious about wanting to die, speaking brusquely because she was afraid of the answer, but Don said, well, no, on reflection, he did not think he had. Not really.
‘I’m very pleased to hear it,’ said Donna, relaxing a little, but her mind had gone back to that night outside the club, and for the first time she recognized the emotion that had filled up the car: it had been sexual arousal, harsh and raw and unmistakable. Don had hated her that night, but he had also been violently aroused by knowing what she had done. And if he had really been serious about committing suicide–if all that rubbish about rivers and dying young had not just been a smokescreen –it had not been the discovery that his sister was a double murderer that had triggered it. It had been self-loathing at his own reaction.
Anyway, said Don, in the end he had taken most of the sleeping pills, and washed them down with half a bottle of vodka. Somebody had found him–he did not remember who–and he had been taken to A&E.
The letter Donna had opened–all right, he would believe it had been a genuine mistake–was a note about the follow-up appointments at the psychiatric day clinic. It was nothing heavy, he was not about to be committed to a mental hospital or anything like that; it was just that the doctor had thought it would be a good idea for him to talk to one of the psychiatrists for an hour or so each week. Just to sort things out in his mind.