by Sarah Rayne
And yes, Joanna would certainly have heard the echoes inside Teind House.
There was nothing in the least suspicious to be found inside any of the rooms, and if Joanna had left any clues for Krzystof to find they had long since been cleared away. Krzystof, his heart beating guiltily, peered into all of the bedrooms and opened cupboard doors, and found nothing, except evidence of Miss March’s conscientious housekeeping.
That left the laptop. Emily had said, on that first morning, that she did not think Joanna would have gone away and left the laptop behind, and she was perfectly right, of course. Joanna might just conceivably leave the other things behind, but she would never, not if she was eloping with the richest lover in five continents, not if hell froze and Armageddon was imminent, have left Teind House without taking the laptop with her.
He set it on the bed and lifted the cover, his hands unsteady. He flipped the boot-up key, and the screen flickered into life, and he scanned the file headings. After a moment, he keyed into the folder that Joanna had labelled ‘Preliminary Notes’.
If looking through Joanna’s clothes had felt intrusive, this was a million times worse. It was like eavesdropping on her innermost thoughts. I’m sorry, my love, said Krzystof silently to his wife’s photograph. But if this is the way of finding out what happened to you, it’s got to be done.
The notes were short and a bit scrappy, but the theme was more or less formed, and he saw at once that Joanna had abandoned her usual format of murder/inquiry/suspects/detective. It looked as if she had even abandoned her beloved Inspector Jack Tallent, whose private life was a complexity of slinky females, and his sidekick the stolid Sergeant Prinkworth, who had no private life outside the Metropolitan Police Force at all.
Instead she seemed to be drafting a synopsis for a rather dark, rather brooding story with, at its centre, a flawed and haunted heroine who had suffered some kind of loss or tragedy in her life, and must uncover the truth about that loss and confront the ghosts who clawed at her mind before she could find some peace. This was puzzling, because so far as Krzystof knew Joanna had a contract to deliver a new Jack Tallent book in six months’ time.
But here, in what seemed to be a draft for the opening chapter, she had written: Never having been told the truth was a great part of the problem, because the truth festered beneath the pretence, and any child would have sensed something out of kilter within the family. Most children would probably have sensed, as well, that there were parts of the past that had been sealed away, and might have come to see those years as dark forbidden chasms which must never be approached for fear of falling over the rim. ‘There are some eyes that can eat your soul,’ one of the younger and more fanciful of the aunts said once, and the phrase, in all its surreal horror, stuck. It was the stuff that nightmares were made on, and in the end it was pointless because the secrecy defeated and distorted its own ends…
It was a reasonable opening, with a hook in the first sentence to snag the reader’s imagination and draw him or her in. What slightly puzzled Krzystof was that it read as if Joanna was planning a ‘dark journey to the centre of the soul’ type of book, and while she would probably make a competent job of it–if the use of the word ‘competent’ was not to damn with faint praise–it was by no means her usual style. Krzystof read on.
For a child to have stumbled on that small, largely incomprehensible fragment of the story was at best unfortunate, at worst, damaging. The trouble was that there was no one who could be asked for the truth–there was no one who could be approached, and even if there had been it was doubtful if the truth would have been told. And so the barely understood secret became woven into childhood nightmares and childhood fears, and in the end it called the poor mangled ghosts out of their uneasy resting places…At times, the pretence spilled over into ordinary life…
There was a rough synopsis of events–Joanna seemed to be intending her heroine to tell her story from early childhood onwards, describing key incidents along the way. There were scrappy references to whispers and to the pursed-lipped conversations of older family members when she was six and seven–there was a note about the child listening unseen to a conversation at some family gathering, which she had not, at the time, understood, but which, Krzystof supposed, was intended to indicate to the reader a little of what lay ahead.
There are some eyes that can eat your soul…Yes, a child, overhearing that, would interpret it literally; not understanding that it was intended to convey a specific character trait or one of the hungers that sometimes erodes the human psyche.
He scrolled the screen down. There was the discovery of a scrapbook of press cuttings when the heroine was ten; Krzystof understood that this would be the girl’s stumbling on the fragment of the old tragedy, whatever the tragedy might be. He considered it doubtfully, because this finding of old newspaper articles smacked of the ‘device’, the too-slick, too-convenient trick to further a plot or engineer a situation. It was not like Joanna to make use of that. But perhaps in the context—She’s arguing out her plot, thought Krzystof. She’s talking into the computer to see if she can reach a credible story.
The notes ended abruptly, with the heroine deciding to ferret out the truth about her family’s past. No, it was not Joanna’s normal stuff by a very long way, in fact it was verging on Gothic romance. Krzystof exited the file and logged off thoughtfully, closing the laptop’s lid and putting it back in place.
It was interesting and vaguely thought-provoking, but it did not seem to provide any clue to Joanna’s state of mind before she disappeared, or to what might have happened to her.
Or did it? As Krzystof donned a jacket and hunted for his car keys, something was tugging at the back of his mind, and he had the feeling that there had been something in the roughed-out notes that he had missed. Some kind of sub-text that he should have been able to read.
But even if he was right about that, would it have led him to where Joanna was now?
He drove away from Teind House, his mind still sorting through what he had read, but he could not fasten onto anything of any significance. The best thing to do was to put the whole thing to one side and see if his subconscious could make something of it. He concentrated on looking for the Stornforth sign, which was three-quarters hidden from view by an overhanging tree. He had missed it on his first journey, and had had to retrace his steps. No, here it was. Sharp turn right.
He glimpsed the Round Tower’s brooding shape in the driving mirror as he turned. Mary Maskelyne had mentioned the tower: she had said Joanna had seemed interested in it. That was probably true. Joanna would have been attracted by the place; she would have absorbed its faintly eerie atmosphere delightedly through every one of her senses and she would probably have tracked down a few local legends about it.
Would she have latched onto the tower as a base for a plot? Had it been at the heart of that curious, uncharacteristic synopsis? It would be quite atmospheric to have a murder in a place like that, of course. Mystery writers were always looking for unusual venues where corpses could take up residence.
But this line of thought brought Krzystof back to the curious fact that Joanna, who had made her name by writing jigsaw-puzzle whodunnits, and who was committed to delivering a new Jack Tallent novel in time for publication next November, seemed to have been setting out not a straightforward detective story, but something quite different.
An introverted child who believed that there were people with eyes that could eat your soul, who suspected that there were dark chasms within her family, and that within those chasms were the mangled ghosts of the past.
He drove on towards Stornforth, his mind working.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Selina had a very pleasant and very useful morning in Stornforth.
First, there had been the library, where she had been received with flattering deference. The McAvoy papers, said the librarian, producing the box for Selina and Lorna Laughlin to sift, were regarded as an extremely good source for students of
the area. They were always happy to make them available to genuine enquirers.
The McAvoy papers. Great-uncle Matthew would have liked to hear his work called by so scholarly a name. He would have been pleased to think of the fruits of his work filed in the library’s reference section, labelled and docketed in such seemly fashion, and even, it seemed, now destined for immortality on computer.
Lorna Laughlin was pleased with the results of their morning’s work. They had found some interesting snippets of little-known legends about Inchcape which the children could trace back–things like the ancient record of Henry the Minstrel–‘Blind Harry’–visiting Inchcape’s monastery and being paid the sum of two shillings for singing to the community on Twelfth Night in 1485. Great-uncle Matthew, conscientious as always, had added a note to say that the entry for this payment could be seen in the monastery rolls which were preserved in the museum.
And there was the tale of how the famous Stone of Destiny–the Lia Fail–had come through Stornforth on its way to Scone in AD 840, nearly five hundred years before the English stole it and took it to Westminster Abbey. Lorna thought this would be a very good inclusion in the project, since it would bring in several aspects of history. Great-uncle Matthew, a stickler for accuracy, had pointed out the improbability of the Stone’s ever having rested at Stornforth, but even he had gone on to note down the prophecy supposedly affixed to the Stone, and translated by Sir Walter Scott as,
Unless the fates be faulty grown
And prophet’s voice be vain
Where’er is found this sacred stone
The Scottish race shall reign.
‘Nice,’ Lorna said, pleased. ‘The brats can take in some seventeenth-and eighteenth-century border ballads along the way; in fact we might even make it the basis for a little end-of-term play. I’ll bet Emily Frost would help with that. She’s amazingly good with the children, and she was reading history at Durham until her mother died.’
This came as something of a shock to Selina, who had been assuming that Emily had simply left school the instant it was legally permissible and had drifted around doing nothing ever since. It was rather upsetting to find she had so misjudged the child; she would try to find a tactful way of making it up to her. But Lorna’s idea about the children’s play was a good one, and Selina offered to help in any way she could. Costumes, perhaps; she had always been a reasonable needlewoman.
They did stay out for lunch, so it was as well Selina had mentioned the possibility to Krzystof Kent. Lorna insisted on taking them to the Stornforth Arms, where Selina had something called Coronation Chicken which sounded fairly traditional, and turned out to be chicken pieces in a tomato-flavoured sauce, flanked with a jacket potato and some sprigs of broccoli. There was apple tart and ice-cream to follow, and then a cup of coffee. It was nice to be out like this, watching all the people coming and going, although it was a pity the Stornforth Arms played pop music so loudly all the time.
It was quite late when they set off again, and they were a little delayed by Selina’s having left her umbrella in the Stornforth Arms and having to go back for it. And then Lorna took a wrong turning which was something to do with a new one-way system and delayed them even more, since it involved driving round Stornforth three times more than they had expected, and then taking a road that wound around the northern outskirts.
‘Magical mystery tour,’ said Lorna, frowning at the road-signs. ‘I do wish they’d give you better warning when they change the road systems. Oh, wait though, isn’t that the road that goes out to the old infirmary? Yes, it is. Oh good, then I know where I am now.’ She swung the car ruthlessly into a different lane, and said, ‘Now we’re on our way home.’
‘Now we’re on our way home,’ Great-uncle Matthew used to say, on the rare occasions when Selina was allowed to accompany him into Stornforth. This was not something that happened very often, but after both the aunts were dead and Selina had left school, there were sometimes calls to be made at the various stores in Stornforth which delivered provisions to Inchcape.
Selina kept an inventory of the store cupboards because Aunt Flora had said it was the correct way to run a house. Even though the interfering old trout was dead it did not mean that Selina had to disobey her training, and three or four times a year she went into Stornforth with Great-uncle Matthew when he attended his hospital governors’ meetings. He was very conscientious about the meetings, and arranged his activities around the dates because he said people depended on him.
They did not drive to the little market town because Great-uncle Matthew had never learned to drive and did not approve of cars anyway, so they caught a bumbly country bus that left Inchcape at half past eleven, and rattled and bounced across the moors and finally disgorged its passengers at Stornforth bus station forty-five minutes later. Uncle Matthew usually waited for a lift from one of the other governors which he had arranged beforehand, and Selina was free to sample the muted delights of Stornforth’s hectic metropolis by herself. These consisted of a cup of tea and a poached egg on toast at the little coffee shop near the bus station, which Great-uncle Matthew said was ample nourishment at lunchtime, and then the delivery of the quarterly order for what Aunt Flora had called dried goods to Mr Mackenzie, whose shop smelt pleasantly of tea and coffee beans and raisins, and who had huge tubs containing flour and sugar and sago and pudding rice.
Twice a year a visit to O’Donnell’s drapery was incorporated into the expedition as well. O’Donnell’s smelt of bales of cloth that prickled Selina’s eyes, and it was where she bought new tea cloths or sheets for the house, and knitting wool and patterns for her winter jumpers, and sometimes a new summer outfit. It was nice to go into the shops like this, and it was always a busy day when the orders were delivered to Teind House the following week, what with waiting for Mackenzie’s van to come. Mr Mackenzie’s nephew drove the van and helped to carry the things in; he was learning the business from the bottom up and one day he would be Neil Mackenzie of Mackenzie’s. Selina always gave him a cup of coffee, and they talked while he drank it; he told her how he was learning about profit-and-loss accounts, and how to distinguish between good quality tea and what used to be called floor-sweepings, and how he hoped to go to Kenya next year, to see the coffee plantations. Next time she was in the shop he would show her the different coffee beans and how they were ground up in a little machine.
Great-uncle Matthew thought it was a waste of milk and sugar to be feeding tradesmen cups of coffee, and he was annoyed when, one month, Selina washed her hair on the night before Neil Mackenzie’s visit and he could not get into the bathroom to pare his corns, but Selina went on making the coffee and hearing about the profit-and-loss and the coffee beans.
Great-uncle Matthew did not come with Selina to Mackenzie’s or O’Donnell’s, of course. He went straight off to the hospital, where he had his lunch with the other governors, which would be considerably more than poached egg on toast. But he did not like going in shops, although he occasionally bought shirts and collars at Stornforth’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters, and twice a year he went to the wine merchants. He would not permit Selina to buy alcohol, just as he had never permitted the aunts to buy it. He made a lengthy business of choosing sherry and port, sampling the wine merchant’s stock in the tiny taster glasses provided, and tsk-ing over the shocking way prices went up every year.
Selina was just seventeen when she discovered that Great-uncle Matthew had been sampling other things than wine on his monthly visits to Stornforth.
It happened by the purest chance, and if it had not been for Selina’s having turned her ankle on a bit of uneven paving stone, and being helped to hobble into a chemist’s shop in Malt Street by a concerned passer-by, she might never have known about the tall thin house standing in the alley.
The chemist’s shop was not Timothy White’s in Market Street, which was where Selina usually bought aspirin and bismuth and the senna pods without which Great-uncle Matthew’s life, viscerally speaking, would have b
een unendurable. It was a small, rather dark little place with huge glass bottles filled with coloured water taking up the windows, and a dusty sign saying that prescriptions were dispensed here. But the chemist was helpful and concerned; he applied arnica to the ankle and bound it with a crêpe bandage, and after a little while Selina tested it and thought she could walk as far as the bus station. She had done all her errands, and she was due to meet her uncle, she said. It would not do to be late.
‘If you turn left as you go out of my shop and keep going along Malt Street,’ said the chemist, ‘and then go through Farthing Alley, you’ll come to the bus station in five minutes. It’ll be a sight quicker than going all round through Market Street.’
Selina had not known about this short cut. She thanked the chemist for his kindness, and wondered if she was expected to pay for the arnica and the crêpe bandage. It was a situation where the wrong thing might easily offend. So she said, ‘While I’m here, could I buy some really nice men’s shaving soap? For a Christmas present.’ The soap would do for the vicar; Selina never knew what to buy for him.
The chemist was pleased at the request. He helped Selina to choose a box of gentlemen’s soap called Spruce which smelt like a pine forest in winter, and wrapped it up in a neat little parcel for her. When Selina paid for it the arnica and the bandage were not mentioned, so she thought she had balanced things out nicely.