by Sarah Rayne
Selina could see it as well. It was like a thick lip, near the very top of the tower. After a few moments, during which her eyes were adjusting to the brilliance of the sunset, she was able to make out other things on the ledge. Black shapes with beating wings against the sky.
‘Birds,’ said one of the smaller children, with a shiver. ‘Large birds.’
‘Birds of prey,’ said Douglas, half to himself, and then Selina understood what happened to the dead people who were brought out here.
They were left on the ledge near the tower’s top so that the birds of prey could eat them. It was the ogre’s castle after all, and the birds were really ogres.
And inside the tower were the tattered remains of all the humans that the birds had torn apart with their beaks and claws in order to eat them.
The birds gathering on the Round Tower at Inchcape were not the same as the birds in Alwar, of course. Selina knew that. She knew that this was not a tower where dead people were brought so that they could be eaten.
But there was the feeling here that there had been in Alwar: the feeling that inside the tower there might be an ogre who liked the taste of humans, and who chanted the rhyme that went Fee-fi-fo-fum, I-smell-the-blood-of-an-Englishman, and the part about grinding people’s bones to make bread.
When Selina came to Teind House, the aunts had looked out some of their own childhood story books for Poor Elspeth’s girl, and among these had been the fairy tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Andersen, most of them illustrated with the brilliant grisly perception of Arthur Rackham, or Doré. As Selina walked towards the tower on that autumn afternoon, she was remembering the books so vividly that she could feel the thick linen of the old paper and smell the mustiness of the pages…
Selina was allowed to look at the books on Sundays as a special treat after tea. They had to be treated very carefully because they were old and valuable, and Selina had to say thank you, and pretend to enjoy them. She did say thank you, and she took the books into the dining room which still smelt of Sunday dinner. The dining room was not very comfortable, but at least the aunts could not see how slowly Selina turned the pages when she was coming to the story about the giant and Jack who killed him, because she hated seeing the picture of the castle which looked exactly like the tower at Alwar, and reading the rhyme about fee-fi-fo-fum. In Great-aunt Rosa’s book the giant added a bit about having liver and lights for supper tonight. It was difficult to know if it would be worse to have your bones ground up for bread, or to have your liver eaten for supper.
But stories about ogres and giants were for babies; it was important to remember they did not really exist, and so Selina, her heart beating uncomfortably fast, went across the grass and right up to the tower.
Close to, it was not as bad as she had feared. It was actually quite sad, as if people had once used it for quite ordinary things, and it had liked that. But now that it was just an old ruin nobody took any notice of it, and it had got sadder and sadder with the years. Forlorn. Yes, that was the word.
The tower at Alwar had not been forlorn. It had been frightening and greedy, and there had been a bad smell from it–a smell that made you think of squelched bones and chewed-up bits of flesh, where the birds of prey had spat out the bits of bone and gristle that they did not like.
But Inchcape’s Round Tower smelt of dust and dirt, and loneliness. There was a neat little door set into the bricks. Selina thought it would be locked, but when she pushed it it gave at her touch, scraping on the stone floor, the hinges screeching loudly, but opening quite easily. It was dark inside, but there was a trickle of light where the bricks had crumbled, and she could see a little round room, the floor thickly covered in dust, with a stone stairway at the centre that wound up and up into the blackness of the tower’s top.
The floor was strewn with small bones, and for a truly dreadful moment Selina thought that it was the ogre’s castle after all, just as it had been in Alwar, and these were the remains of the people he had eaten. But she waited for her eyes to get used to the dimness, which was something you had to do in dark places, and she saw that the bones were too small to be people: they were tiny, pitiful remnants, and she understood that they were the bones of birds who had become trapped in here and died from fear at not being able to get out.
Selina stepped inside. The smell of dirt and decay closed round her, and the bones crunched under her feet. She did not mind about the bones, because she could pretend that they were the bones of the birds who had been in the tower at Alwar. She could pretend she was killing them for what they had done to her mother and father. She stomped about a bit, feeling the light dried-out skeletons splinter like glass under her shoes. Good. Horrid greedy things, they deserved to be crunched.
It would not be very difficult to make a shrine here. It would not be necessary to go up the stairs, but this little round room would have to be swept out and dusted a bit: you could not have a dusty floor when you were making a shrine. Anyone knew that. Selina thought she could smuggle out a dustpan and brush and a bucket of water and some washing soda.
The room had a little ledge where photographs could be put, and flowers. Yes, it would make a good shrine, this room, and once it had been made mother and father would rest and Selina would not have to force herself to stay awake so as not to see them hiding in her bedroom.
The best part was that nobody would find the shrine, because nobody ever came to the tower. People looked at it from outside because it was interesting and historic, but most of them avoided it. Children thought it was haunted and grown-ups thought it was dangerous. It was a pity that the door could not be locked, but it might be wedged shut. And Selina could save some of the birds’ bone-dust and sprinkle it just inside the door. She would jump over it when she came here herself, but anyone else coming here would not know to do that and they would leave footprints in the dust. So if there were ever footprints there, it would mean the shrine had been desecrated.
In Alwar people who desecrated shrines were called outcasts. Quite often they were killed, and everyone said it served them right because shrine desecrators deserved to die.
CHAPTER SIX
Stupid people who made their lives shrines to the dead deserved to be killed.
Mary could not remember when the idea of killing her parents had first come to her: all she knew was that one day she had looked down into the deepest part of her mind and seen the idea of murder lying curled up in a corner. It was an ugly idea to have in your mind–it was a wizened, hunched-over shape. But once you had seen it, it was no longer possible to ignore it. Sometimes Mary thought the dark ugly idea had been quietly growing there for years–ever since she could think thoughts and dream dreams–but at other times she thought it had only come there when she was much older.
For a long time she tried to pretend it did not exist, but really she knew it was there, getting stronger and bigger, tenaciously clinging on to her mind. When she finally looked at it properly she was surprised to find that it no longer seemed ugly at all. It seemed familiar and sensible and comforting. Kill mother and father. Send them to where they wanted to be most of all, which was with the child who had died all those years ago and whose memory had stopped them from loving Mary.
Thinking these thoughts made the idea uncurl a little, so that Mary could see down into its heart. She could see that killing her parents would be an excellent punishment for all the years of making her feel second best. If they were dead, Mary would be an orphan. Pitied. Poor child, people would say; both her parents gone. What a tragedy. It would be very good to have all that sympathy and attention. Her sister had had it for years and years and it was time Mary had a turn. Yes, killing them was the right thing to do. But how should it be done?
Lying on her bed, the faded photograph of her sister watching her from the dressing table–‘So sweet that Mary wants Christabel’s likeness in her room,’ Leila Maskelyne had said–Mary considered the matter carefully. It ought to be an appropriate murder. Some
thing that would show her mother and father what she thought of them. Something to do with the years they had spent in Alwar? The murder-embryo unfolded a little more; it flexed its claws, and the plan slid into Mary’s mind, neat and whole, the edges buffed smooth.
When you have been forced all your life to listen to tales of India; when you have had stories of violence and rioting, and sagas of religious quarrels, drummed into you since you were old enough to understand; and when you have absorbed the customs of Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs, you do not have to look far for a murder method.
If William and Leila were so bound up with the dark sub-continent that was India, they should die in a way that would be understood–and approved–by its people.
In India, Mary’s father had worked for a government department, dealing with something called auditing of public services. It sounded utterly boring to Mary, but it meant that William knew about things like how much the government was spending on the development of the country, and on hospitals and schools. It meant he had been quite important and that he was paid quite a lot of money.
‘Your father was a very important man in India,’ Mary’s mother sometimes said. ‘But after the Tragedy I had to come home–the doctors said so; they said I couldn’t possibly stay in that place–and of course your father came back with me, there was never any question of his staying on alone. They gave him a pension. An insult to offer us money–and the money was hardly more than a pittance–but we took it out of politeness.’
What the pittance had meant, in practical terms, was that when Mary was born her parents had been able to buy a house in the country–not a huge house, but a nice old redbrick with ivy on its walls, and shady gardens, in a village in Berkshire. William did some work from home, which was called consultancy, or sometimes worked for a few weeks in offices whose books had to be audited, and Leila helped with one or two local charities. It was something to do. There were WI committees and modest dinner or lunch parties. Mary went to a small private school for girls in the next village. Life went on, said Mary’s mother, bravely.
(But there were still all those nights when Mary could hear, through the bedroom wall, her parents trying to make another baby. ‘One day, William, we’ll have her back, our lovely girl. Come into the bed with me, William…’)
The house was quite old, and there were some rather tumbledown outbuildings–what had been a small stable block and an old buttery. Leila said, oh dear, wouldn’t they have made splendid hide-and-seek places for children, but William said they were an eyesore and he would see about getting them pulled down one of these days.
One of the outhouses had been a wash-house, in the days when people did not have automatic washing machines and dryers, and washing was done separately. It was a stone-floored room with a deep, square, old-fashioned sink and a huge copper boiler, nastily crusted with green verdigris around the waste pipes. The sink smelt of clogged-up drains and sour dish cloths, and there were black beetles and spiders inside the boiler. It was not a place where people wanted to go, but it was far enough from the house and far enough from neighbours for sounds not to carry. Mary inspected it carefully, walking all round it, examining the door and the window and the floor. She took a transistor radio in there one day and tested the range to see how much sound carried. With the door shut, hardly at all.
Yes, this should be the Murder House.
Leila Maskelyne regularly took sleeping pills, which the local doctor prescribed for her. It had been years since she had been able to fall asleep naturally. ‘Without my pills I should never get a good night’s sleep,’ she said.
The pills were kept in her bedside cabinet, along with aspirin and indigestion mixture and the contraceptives that father sometimes used. Mary knew about those by now; some of the girls at school had started experimenting with boyfriends, and the upper fourth, most of whom were fourteen, had been given a sex talk by a nursing sister from the local women’s clinic. Most of the class had scuffled and giggled embarrassedly, but Mary had listened carefully because of understanding about what her parents were doing to get her sister reborn. It was actually a bit revolting to think of father doing that.
She waited until mother got a new bottle of sleeping pills, and then tipped out a dozen and crushed them between two sheets of baking paper in the bathroom with the door locked. Six each. Would it be enough? Or too much? The label said you could take two, with a third one four hours later. So six each ought to be about right.
It was easy to tip the white powder into father’s mid-evening cup of coffee and mother’s mid-evening cup of tea, half quantities each. Making the night-time drink was one of Mary’s weekend tasks when there was no school the next day and she could stay up until ten o’clock. Usually she hated doing it, but tonight she made properly filtered coffee for father and mother’s favourite Earl Grey tea, and even set the cups on a little tray with a plate of biscuits.
‘That’s my good girl,’ said father, looking up from the evening paper, which he was reading. Mother looked up approvingly from her knitting and smiled.
The pills did not take long to work. It was barely fifteen minutes before Mary, pretending to listen to Radio Luxembourg in her room, heard a crash of china–one of them dropping a cup, that would be. She waited a little longer and then went tiptoeing down to the sitting room, her heart beating furiously with nervous excitement.
But it was all right; they were both knocked out by the pills. Mother had fallen sideways in her chair, her legs sprawling so that you could see her underwear. Pink petticoat and knickers, for God’s sake! She looked stupid and ugly and a dribble of saliva ran out of the corner of her mouth. Horrid!
Father’s head had fallen back and his glasses had slipped to one side. His mouth was open so that you could see the fillings in his teeth, and he was snoring. Mary stood looking at them both for a long time, not because she was afraid of the next part, but because this was starting to be so violently exciting that she wanted to hold on to the feeling. Remember it. Remember how this feels. Curiously, she had the feeling that Christabel was with her now, and that Christabel was urging her on.
Do it, Christabel was saying in Mary’s ear. Stupid selfish creatures, both of them…Kill them, Mary, and you’ll be free, and I’ll be free as well…
Christabel needed to be free? For a moment Mary had not understood this, but then the whispery voice had said, Of course I need to be free! I’m the prisoner of those stupid maudlin memories just as much as you are! I’m the angel-child, the virtuous perfect prodigy… Was there a note of impatience in Christabel’s voice there? I’m the one who should be set free, you silly bitch… said Christabel in Mary’s ear. Yes, the impatience and the scorn were unquestionably there, and Christabel’s strength was filling her up, and she could do it, she could do anything…
Moving slowly, like a swimmer moving through water, Mary reached for one of mother’s knitting needles. They were steel needles because mother had been knitting a thick winter jumper and they would not break or bend under the weight of the heavy wool.
They did not break or bend when Mary stood behind father’s chair and pushed his head forward a little, and then drove the point of the needle hard into his neck, at the place where it joined the skull. There was a bad moment when the needle hit something hard–bone? gristle?–and Mary was afraid she would have to take it out and try it a bit higher up. But it only stuck for a second or two and then it slid deep in–deep, deep into father’s skull, mushing up his brain and stabbing through all the nerves in the spinal cord. There was another bad moment when she thought he was going to wake up–he seemed to grunt and his whole body jerked as if he were a puppet and strings had been pulled. His hands flailed, and a wet sound came from his throat, and then he flopped forward and Mary came round the chair to look at him from the front, to see what he looked like now that he was dead.
He did not look much different, but he was definitely dead. People said you could always tell, instantly, if somebody was dead, and Mary
saw what they meant. It was as if a light had been switched off inside. There was some blood on his neck where the steel needle had gone in, and he had dribbled some sick out of his mouth–that would have been the wet choking sound.
Getting him out to the wash-house might have been awkward, but there was a small, lightweight wheelbarrow in the potting shed, and it was the easiest thing in the world to tip father forward out of his chair so that he fell into it. His hands flopped over the sides, and his legs splayed out. Mary saw that his trousers were wet at the crotch, which was pretty disgusting. It had run down the inside of his leg and puddled into his shoe. It was a small indignity, but it pleased Mary to see it, because when his body was found, people would know what he had done while he was dying.
Christabel was with her as she trundled the wheelbarrow through the house and across the little paved area at the back, and round to the wash-house. It was quite heavy, but it was not very difficult. Christabel watched from the shadows, and when Mary glanced up she could see that Christabel was smiling.
Do it, Mary, do it, DO IT…
Without Christabel’s strength Mary might not have been able to tip father’s body out, and prop it up against the rusting boiler, and then make the return journey for mother. But it was all right. She managed it, and the strength was still coursing through her body and firing her mind and it was all going to work out exactly as she had planned.
The next part was a bit tricky, because the essence of the murder–the echoing of an Indian wife’s death–was that mother must not be dead. She must die with William’s body, just as the widows in India died, flinging themselves onto the burning funeral pyres of their dead husbands. And so Mary had to work quietly now, in case Leila roused from her drugged slumber. It was a bit disconcerting to see the rim of white under her mother’s eyelids, but Mary thought that drugged people did look like that.