Tower of Silence

by Sarah Rayne

Mary Maskelyne was seated quite near to Joanna. At first she had said no, she did not want to join in, she had had enough of being talked to and talked at in Broadacre. But then she had changed her mind, and laconically said OK, if they liked, she would come along to make up the numbers, making it sound as if she was conferring a favour. Patrick had instantly thought, Arrogant bitch! and then had been horrified at this swift, instinctive reaction, because although you could not actually like all the people you treated, you should manage a degree of tolerance.

  And normally he did not care if these odd, driftwood creatures were arrogant, just as he did not care if they were aggressive or whining or even downright dangerous. Like the child-beaters and the paedophiles, most of whom were victims of beating or sexual abuse themselves.

  But Maskelyne–no, call her Mary for God’s sake Patrick, let’s at least try to humanise her a bit!–had a curious effect on him. He sought for an analogy. Like pine needles sliding pricklingly under your bare skin on a hot afternoon in a forest. No, stronger than that. Into his mind slid an old proverb–Chaucer, was it? Or maybe it was one of the old Scottish legends his father had taught him. Beware of three things, ran the ancient saying: the tongue of the snake, the fletch of the archer, and the smile of the Saxon.

  The smile of the Saxon…

  Maskelyne had taken a seat at the end, nearest to the table, and Patrick watched her covertly, struck, as he had been from the outset, by the difference between the defiant fourteen-year-old of the file photographs from over thirty years ago, all blazing eyes and mutinous lips, and the quiet woman of today. She was dressed plainly and unobtrusively in a dark skirt and sweater, and her hair was cut quite short, and streaked with grey. Most of the time her eyes were downcast as if she was shy of meeting anyone’s direct regard, and when she spoke she did so softly and unemphatically, with not much trace of any accent, so that you would be hard put to know what part of the country she came from, and from what stratum of society. Put amongst the odd, sometimes-sinister, sometimes-pitiful inhabitants of Moy, she ought to have been unremarkable.

  Except that no woman who had killed twice before her fifteenth birthday, and twice more in the next five years–both times while held in a high-security unit–could possibly be unremarkable.

  The pine-needles-beneath-the-skin feeling increased.

  But it was not until the talk was nearly over that Patrick realised what was disturbing him so much about Mary Maskelyne. It was quite simply that her absorption was not with what Joanna was saying: it was with Joanna herself.

  Mary had not expected this writer woman, this Joanna Savile, to affect her so strongly. She had meant to listen to the talk, and store away any snippets of information that might help her to set about writing the book that would take her back into the headlines.

  (Extraordinary account of Mary Maskelyne’s life…the reviews would say. Scalding glimpses of a monumental miscarriage of justice…)

  What she had not been prepared for was her own reaction to Joanna. The instant Joanna came into the room, Mary felt a shutter-flash of memory flicking upwards for a moment. Like lightning flaring and briefly illuminating a darkened landscape before blackness closed down once more. She had stared at Joanna and felt a sudden lurch of half panic, half excitement. Something to do with the way she looked? No, something to do with the queer sense of familiarity. I’ve never seen you in my life, but I think I know you…From a dream, from a nightmare, from another life, or a different time…?

  And then her mind said Ingrid! and the vagrant memory clicked into place. Ingrid. Joanna did not resemble Ingrid in looks–Ingrid had been much fairer and more squarely built, but there was something about the way Joanna entered the rather drab room–something about the way she looked round at everyone as if she was interested and eager to find out about them all–that brought Ingrid back, sharply and painfully.

  Because Ingrid used to look at people with exactly that air of pleased expectancy. She used to tilt her head in the same way, as if she might be listening to them on a deeper level than ordinary hearing. It was the way she had looked at and listened to Mary in Broadacre, not so much interested in what Mary had done in the past as in what she had become in the present.

  Mary sat quietly in her chair in the half-circle, watching and listening to Joanna Savile. She had thought they were all safely buried, those old memories, those Ingrid-memories, but here they were pushing their way up to the surface, nearly thirty years on.

  Broadacre was where Mary had been taken after the Young Offenders’ Hostel, and Broadacre had been the absolute pits. Christabel had whispered that they would have to find a way to get out of this place, or, if that was not possible, they would have to find a way to make it bearable. Mary had clung to this thought, just as she had clung to Christabel’s strength. There would be a way to make Broadacre, this place of clanging doors that shut inexorably at eight o’clock every night, bearable.

  In the YOH you had to know whom not to offend, otherwise you might get beaten up in the lavatories, and you had to know the people who dealt in drugs so that you could avoid them and their sly offers of coke or heroin. Drugs were smuggled in from outside and people bought and sold them with furtive desperation, and there was a subtle hierarchy that you had to respect.

  But if Broadacre had a drug culture, Mary never found out about it. Far worse than the complex drug syndicates were the barred windows and the bleak soulless rooms and the dormitories with rows of iron-framed beds. There were no individual rooms at Broadacre except the isolation rooms, and the only concessions to privacy you got in the dormitories were skimpy curtains that were supposed to close round your bed, but did not quite meet so that you were always on display.

  It was a place where people screamed as Mary had screamed in the YOH, and where people beat their hands on locked doors for hours upon hours, and it was a place where injections were given not just to stop inmates from screaming, but to prevent them from attacking the attendants and the doctors.

  On Mary’s first night everybody had seemed to be busy on some ploy or other, watching television or playing table tennis in the recreation room where vacant-eyed people sat blankly in corners.

  Mary had not known what she was supposed to do or where she was supposed to be, and she was certainly not going to ask one of the cold-eyed attendants, snooty bitches. In the end she had gone to the dormitory, and a young man had followed her. He sat on the edge of her bed, asking her about herself; he had been pleasant and nicely spoken, and she had thought he was one of the orderlies. But after about ten minutes he had suddenly pushed her down on the bed, and leapt onto her and tried to tear all her clothes off. His hands had been clumsy, the nails jagged so that they had scratched her skin, and his breath had been hot and smelly. He had unzipped his trousers and Mary had felt the hard bulge of his erection pushing against her–like a hot thick stick! Horrid!–and it had seemed a very long time before the attendants came running in and dragged him off.

  Ingrid had been one of the attendants. That had been the first time Mary had seen her. She had come back to the dormitory after it was all over, bringing a mug of hot milk and two aspirin tablets for Mary. She seemed genuinely sorry about what had happened; she said Mary must have found the experience horrid and terrifying, and imagine it happening on her first night at Broadacre, as well. But there would not be a repeat performance, Mary could be sure of that, said Ingrid. She put her arms round Mary and hugged her.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ she said, stepping back. ‘You’re so very young—How old are you, Mary?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Eighteen.’ An odd look had come into Ingrid’s eyes, as if she were calculating something. But she only said, ‘God, you’re not much more than a child. Don’t tell anyone I hugged you just now, will you? But you’re so pretty I couldn’t help it.’

  You’re so pretty…Mary had stored these words away, to be taken out and looked at later, when it was dark and everyone was asleep. Her parents had never
said that she was pretty, although perhaps if she was in a school concert or a gym display, or going to a schoolfriend’s birthday party, Leila might say, ‘You look very pretty, Mary,’ always adding in that dress, or in your gym outfit. Implying that Mary needed a party dress or a smart gym outfit to look halfway decent.

  And ‘I enjoyed the singing,’ William might say, after the concert was over. But he never said, You sang well, Mary.

  And then would come the hurtful comparisons. ‘Your sister had a dress just that colour,’ Leila would say. ‘Do you remember it, William? Only it was a softer green than Mary’s. Oh, and she had little velvet bows on it–emerald shade–and there was a velvet bow for her hair. She wore the dress on her sixth birthday–we gave her a tea party in the gardens at Alwar. She looked like a little princess.’

  Mary had not been given parties in gardens, or had velvet bows added to her dress, and she had never been anybody’s princess.

  In the early years in the Young Offenders’ Hostel she had certainly never been called pretty. Sulky, said the warders and the slab-faced matron. Mutinous. ‘Miss Sullen’, matron called her. Matron was an old bag, everyone agreed on that, and she had a way of calling people out in front of everyone–usually at dinner-time in the long, wooden-floored refectory–and saying insulting and humiliating things. She had names for most people: Mary was ‘Miss Sullen’, or ‘Madam Sulky Drawers’. She had an ugly grating voice and an even uglier Midlands accent, which she tried to cover up in front of the doctors, or if health workers or NHS inspectors came round.

  But she ran the hostel firmly and efficiently, and people who were not patients admired her. Doctors and the lay workers and the office staff often said, Oh, isn’t she selfless! And she never spares herself, you know. There was talk of her being given an MBE in the New Year’s Honours, and after that the old bat went around simpering and hunching one shoulder when anyone asked her about it, and saying, Oh my goodness me, ai don’t know how these rumours get around, ai don’t reely. Ai don’t expect to be rewarded for just doing mai job.

  When matron fell down a flight of stone steps, splitting her head open like an egg on the concrete floor below, everyone was shocked. There was an inquest, and the coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death, and said it was sad that matron had not lived long enough to receive her MBE from the Queen.

  After it was all over, the new matron told Mary and two of the other girls to scrub the hall floor thoroughly, because there was an unpleasant stain where matron’s brains had spilled out, and people did not want to be reminded of the accident.

  But everybody agreed that it was a great tragedy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When Great-aunt Rosa died, falling down the stairs at Teind House, everybody agreed that it was a great tragedy.

  Selina was told she would have to be a very, very brave girl, and not cry for Great-aunt Rosa. People all died in the end, said Great-aunt Flora, and some of them died when you did not expect it. But you had to accept it, and remember that what it really meant was that they were with Jesus in heaven.

  What it actually meant in this case was that there was a great deal of crying (by Aunt Flora), and tetchy grumbling (by Great-uncle Matthew), and a lot of scurrying about and taking photographs by policemen, who had to make sure that the fall had been accidental.

  ‘Not,’ said Great-uncle Matthew crossly, ‘that anyone really thinks otherwise, but there it is: one knows these people have to do their jobs. Flora, I’ll take luncheon in my study quietly, I believe. I don’t mind a tray, just this once.’

  Between sorting out Great-uncle Matthew’s trays (he had supper as well as lunch in his study in the end), and making cups of tea for the police officers, and telephoning people to tell them what had happened, Aunt Flora cried. She cried on and off for most of the day. Selina helped with the tea-making and Great-uncle Matthew’s trays, but she did not cry because secretly she was glad that Aunt Rosa was dead. When the flurry died down a bit she went up to her room, and sat on the window seat and stared out over the orchard. The window was a big one, but it was made up of lots of tiny panes of glass. The glass felt cold and a bit damp when she leaned her face against it, and the room felt cold as well because Great-uncle Matthew did not believe in heating in people’s bedrooms. Selina had hated the cold, stuffy bedroom at first, but she had discovered that you could keep pretty warm by putting your dressing gown on over your day clothes, and wrapping the bolster round your feet. That way you could curl up on the window seat and read or draw, and nobody knew where you were.

  She could see the Round Tower just beyond the tops of the trees. If Aunt Rosa had not poked and pried inside the tower, she might still be alive. But she had been a quizzy old witch, that Rosa; she had followed Selina out to the tower one afternoon, and she had seen the beautiful shrine that Selina had made before Selina could hide it. She had not even heard Aunt Rosa come creeeping and snooping up on her, and the first she had known was when she turned round to see the horrid old creature standing in the doorway, her arms folded, staring round the room, her thin lips clamped tightly together.

  Aunt Rosa had been angry and shocked, and she would not listen when Selina had tried to explain that the shrine was secret and sacred, and also hugely important.

  Wicked heathenism, Aunt Rosa had said, and her thin nose had quivered so that Selina had suddenly realised that Aunt Rosa looked exactly like the picture of the witch in the story about Hansel and Gretel. She had tried to explain that a memorial in Inchcape church was not enough for her parents, and she told Aunt Rosa about the patet, and the worrying possibility of her mother and father’s still being sinful and not, as a result, being allowed to go over the old and holy Bridge into paradise. Aunt Rosa had not understood, and (Selina did not realise this until much later) she had not wanted to understand. She had said it was pagan rubbish, and Selina ought to think shame on herself for talking like that, a great girl of eight and three months. There must be no more of it, was that understood?

  ‘Yes, Aunt Rosa.’

  As for heaven, said Aunt Rosa briskly, most certainly Poor Elspeth and very likely That Man as well would have gone straight to heaven. Why on earth should they not? And when it came to honouring their memories–well, Selina would do better to say her prayers every night, and put her mind to her schoolwork and her household tasks. That was the way to honour the dead, and there was to be no more of this nonsense about ghosts hiding in the bedroom and pleading for help, said Aunt Rosa briskly, her witchy mouth prim and tight so that you could see the rows of little wrinkles round it, like a drawstring purse. This pagan shrine or whatever Selina called it, was to be removed and everything tidied neatly away, was that quite clear?

  ‘Oh yes, Aunt Rosa,’ said Selina.

  Dismantling the shrine was heart-breakingly easy. Taking to pieces the carefully arranged photographs and books and cuttings felt like breaking up the final bits of father and mother. Mother’s evening stole was already cobweb-thin with age, and the page with father’s newspaper article about Mr Nehru was dry and brittle. But it all had to be done; Aunt Rosa would certainly check that Selina had done it.

  She put all the things in the bottom of her wardrobe, and tried to think that mother and father would have long since taken the three steps of Humata, Hukhta, and Hvarshta that would get them across the old and holy Bridge into paradise, and that it would not matter about the shrine’s being destroyed.

  But she knew that it did matter. She thought that something had been broken: a promise, a link, something invisible but vital. And it was Aunt Rosa’s fault. Yes, that was something to think about very carefully.

  It was necessary to stay awake for quite a long time that night, to see if anything happened. Selina heard Aunt Rosa come to bed, and then Aunt Flora, a bit anxious and twittery because there was so much to remember when you retired for the night. There was her library book and her reading glasses, and her pills that had to be taken last thing, and the woolly scarf she liked to use as a bedjacket.
She was a bit like the white rabbit in Alice, Aunt Flora, only she was plumper and wore spectacles which Selina did not think the white rabbit had done, and also she was woollier on account of the mufflers round her neck. She wore little soft slippers that went pitter-pat on the bare old floorboards.

  Great-uncle Matthew came up to bed half an hour later. Selina heard him go round the house, making sure everywhere was locked up, tapping the barometer to see what kind of weather they would have tomorrow, winding up the clocks as he went. He always did it in exactly the same order every night.

  And then the house was quiet, with the familiar, slightly creaky quiet that it sank into every night. Selina knew the house’s noises by this time: she knew that the floorboards always creaked ten minutes after Great-uncle Matthew had come up them, so that you might think that a burglar was creeping up the stairs. She knew the sound the roof timbers made after dark and how the range in the scullery clunked a bit as it cooled down. Normally these were all unremarkable, rather friendly noises, but tonight they did not feel friendly at all. Selina lay on her left side so that she could watch the door and the deep old wardrobe in the little alcove just inside it. If the ghosts came they would come out of the dark puddles of shadow made by the wardrobe’s bulk.

  Great-uncle Matthew had not pulled the chain in the bathroom firmly enough tonight; Selina could hear the tank filling up in the growly clanking way it had if you did not give the chain a good sharp tug. When she first came to Teind House she had thought that there was something hiding inside the thick old lead pipes that connected into the cistern and were wrapped in bits of Great-aunt Flora’s wintergreen to stop them from freezing in cold weather. For weeks she had been terrified to go into the cold bathroom after dark in case the lid of the cistern was suddenly lifted from inside, and mad eyes, half hidden by wet matted hair, glared out.

  The rusty coughing sound was only the water going reluctantly into the cistern, of course. Selina knew that now. Or–did she? What if, just for tonight, it was something else? What if it was really something huddled in the corner of her bedroom, slowly and thickly choking on its own blood, coughing its life away and unable to call for help because its throat had been torn away…?