No! Holly shook her head violently. She was stressed and overtired—who wouldn’t be, after the day she’d had? But that was no reason to let herself get sucked into the twilight zone of Una Maggott’s paranoid fantasies. Firmly she considered the situation. Andrew McNish, faithless lover, con-man and spoon thief, had left this room on his own two feet. That was a given. So how had he lost his phone—and lost it right in front of the door?
Holly had known the phone to slip from Andrew’s pocket when he was sitting down. It had happened in a taxi once, and a couple of times the phone had made a brief escape into the cushions of the sofa he sat on to watch TV. But she couldn’t imagine Andrew sitting on the floor, especially moments before doing a midnight flit.
It happened somehow. Reconstruct the scene . . . It was as if the ghost of O’Brien had whispered in her ear.
Holly went to the windows and closed the curtains. The room dimmed dramatically. At night, it would have been completely dark.
Right, Holly thought. I am Andrew, packed and ready to leave. I’ve got a dozen stolen antique teaspoons in my bag and two hundred stolen dollars in my wallet. My phone is in my right hip pocket, switched off or at least turned to ‘silent’. It’s very late. The house is quiet. Okay, time to go . . .
She pressed the phone to her right hip, picked up an imaginary bag and crept to the door. By the time she got there, she was right in character. The door rose in front of her, dark except for the faint light from the corridor glimmering through the keyhole. She stretched out her hand to the doorknob and found she was holding her breath. If anyone saw her sneaking out of the room with a bag, the jig would be well and truly up. She hesitated, then impulsively crouched, leaned forward, and pressed her eye to the keyhole.
She saw a slab of empty corridor, the door of the linen store and the door of room number 2 beside it. She relaxed her fingers and let the phone drop. It landed on the rug with only the tiniest of sounds, well within the arc of the opening door.
Holly collected it and stood up, marvelling at how perfectly the reconstruction had worked. The horrible mental picture of a limp, dead Andrew being dragged away had vanished as if it had never been. In its place was the tacky but far more believable image of a furtive Andrew with his eye pressed to a keyhole, checking out his escape route. She could almost feel the ghost of O’Brien patting her on the back.
Briskly deciding that enough was enough, she left the room. Her feeling of being in control seemed to communicate itself to the key, which inexplicably turned at the first twist of her wrist.
On impulse she knocked softly on the door of room 3, next door, as she passed it. Receiving no answer, she quietly twisted the doorknob and looked in. The room was empty except for several strategically placed plastic buckets on the dusty floor. The ceiling was sagging and heavily water-stained. So Andrew had had no next-door neighbour on Tuesday night. That would have made him feel safer. Quietly Holly closed the door again.
The sound of rubber soles squeaking on polished boards and an exuberant female voice belting out ‘Mamma Mia’ were drifting through the half-open door of room 4, but Holly wasn’t tempted to pop her head in to say goodbye as she passed. Since the incident of the air-freshener, she’d rather gone off Sheena.
She reached the head of the stairs and hesitated. There was grim silence behind the door marked 5. Room 7, where Dulcie’s son apparently lurked, and rooms 6 and 8 on the other side of the corridor—Eric’s and Lily’s rooms, presumably— were just as quiet. At the very end of the corridor, beside room 7, a narrow staircase led up to the attic.
Holly told herself firmly that there was no need to investigate further. She had done what she had wanted to do, and what she had promised. That was enough. She ran down the stairs, ignoring their wooden shrieks, and was not surprised to see Una Maggott’s door snap open as she reached the entrance hall. The woman had obviously been listening out for her return.
‘Well?’ Una whispered avidly as Holly entered her room, closing the door behind her. ‘You found something, didn’t you? I can see it in your face. Was it—blood?’
She had the folder from the desk on her lap. She was patting and stroking it unconsciously, as if it were a religious relic.
Holly shook her head, very glad that she had done the search properly and had no need to prevaricate. ‘There were no bloodstains, Ms Maggott. No signs of violence at all.’
The older woman’s face convulsed. She spun her chair around and sped away from Holly, stopping a hair’s breadth from the python’s cage. She sat there panting, her shoulders heaving.
Holly felt a stab of pity. Then the chair spun round again and her heart sank. Una’s trembling lips had firmed and the fanatical gleam had returned to her small grey eyes.
‘Then they didn’t use a knife,’ she said. ‘Andrew was strangled. Or poisoned. Poisoned, yes! That would fit! Did you find the red mug? The mug with Andrew written on it?’
‘No,’ Holly said. ‘There was no mug.’
Una gripped the arms of her chair. ‘You mean you found nothing in that room?’ she asked dangerously. ‘No clues at all ?’
Reluctantly, keeping her eyes fixed on the woman’s face so as to screen out the python coiling in the background, Holly held out the mobile phone.
Una’s eyes widened. She zoomed forward and snatched the phone. ‘It’s his!’ she hissed. ‘Andrew’s! That proves it— proves he never left!’
‘Well, no, not really,’ Holly said. ‘It was behind the door. He could have dropped it, you see, when he—’
‘And the mug! You saw with your own eyes that it wasn’t there! But it should have been, you see? I gave Andrew that mug as a welcome gift, when he first came here. He always used it. He took it upstairs with him on Tuesday night. I saw him do it! But now the mug’s gone. It’s disappeared!’
‘Maybe he took it with him,’ Holly said lamely, though she couldn’t imagine Andrew McNish wanting a red pottery mug—even one with his name on it.
‘His tea was drugged,’ Una Maggott announced, her voice ringing with conviction. ‘They drugged him and strangled or smothered him. Then they took the mug away—hid it—in case the dregs were analysed—’
‘Ms Maggott, I have to go now,’ Holly broke in. Suddenly she couldn’t deal with this. She had to get away. The woman was irrational—completely obsessed.
Maggott’s tirade stopped abruptly. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘Oh, of course you do, of course you do,’ she mumbled. ‘Yes. It’s getting late. Eric will be getting edgy. Presumably you’ll be able to find your own way here tomorrow?’
Without waiting for an answer, she took the folder from her lap and thrust it into Holly’s unwilling hands. ‘I wrote a statement for the police,’ she said. ‘It was wasted on them— they barely looked at it—but everything’s in there. What time will I expect you in the morning?’
‘Ah, well, I’m not completely sure,’ Holly temporised, feeling terrible. She had no idea what she’d be doing tomorrow, but one thing she did know. She was never, ever going to set foot in this house again.
‘Be as early as you can,’ said Una Maggott. ‘I’m depending on you.’
11
The trip back to Mealey Marshes began tensely. Eric brooded over the wheel in silence, glancing frequently at the rear-vision mirror. The light had faded, but he was still wearing his sunglasses. Holly refused to worry about it. Presumably Eric was used to semi-darkness, and anyway most obstacles would probably just bounce off the hearse. It seemed to be built like a tank. The main thing was, she had got away from the madhouse in Horsetrough Lane. The relief was incredible.
But as the bush-lined kilometres slipped by, she found herself sinking into a more dismal mood. She’d set off for Medlow Bath full of excitement and purpose. Now she had to face the fact that she was back where she started—penniless, jobless, homeless, and with no idea where Andrew was. She had learned nothing from this afternoon’s adventure except that he was even more of a
skunk than she’d thought.
She was roused from her reverie by the hearse slowing and the sound of the indicator blinking. She realised that they had reached the Mealey Marshes turnoff. And suddenly she decided to have one more try at getting some information. If Eric snubbed her, so be it.
‘Eric, I know you didn’t like Ms Maggott calling me in,’ she said abruptly. ‘But it was her decision, not mine.’
For a long moment she thought Eric wasn’t going to answer. Then the sulky lips unsealed themselves.
‘I don’t like folks ripping the old girl off,’ Eric said, staring straight ahead.
‘I’m not ripping her off,’ Holly snapped. ‘I didn’t take a cent from her!’
Eric glanced at her. The sunglasses hid his eyes. She couldn’t tell if he believed her or not. She felt like showing him her empty wallet to prove her point, but decided that would be undignified.
‘The only reason I agreed to go to the house in the first place was because I thought Andrew McNish was still there,’ she said. ‘It’s him I want. We have . . . some business to settle.’
Eric considered this, then seemed to relax slightly. He breathed out and nodded, tapping the wheel.
Holly pursued her advantage. ‘Do you have any idea where he might have gone after he left?’ she asked.
‘If I did I’d have gone after the smarmy prick and dragged him back by the seat of his pants so she could see he was alive and kicking,’ Eric muttered, Elvis drawl totally absent. ‘If you think I like being called a murderer you’re dead wrong.’
‘Sheena says he left because things got too hot for him after that dinner party on Tuesday night,’ Holly persisted. ‘But he had Ms Maggott on side. She seems absolutely certain he’s her brother—half-brother. So you can’t help wondering why . . .’ She trailed off invitingly.
Eric shrugged. ‘He was getting a lot of flak. Dulcie and the lawyer were going on about DNA tests and false pretences and that, making out they were going to get the old girl signed off for being senile and they’d see him in court. Lily was spitting chips, saying he was a plague on the house and she was going to put a curse on him . . .’
‘Curse?’
‘Yeah, well, Lily’s into curses. She cuts Miz M’s hair, and helps Sheena in the house and all that—or she’s supposed to—and she makes jewellery for the markets, but she’s a witch in her spare time.’
‘A witch?’
‘She’s in this co-vern,’ said Eric, sliding smoothly back into Elvis mode. ‘Her ma and both her aunties are in it too. They dance round at full moon, and chant and cast spells an’ all.’ He smiled tolerantly, adjusting his sequinned collar. ‘I think they just like dressing up, really,’ he added, with no apparent sense of irony. ‘But I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of them. They have these rituals. You never know.’
A coven! Were there many witches in the mountains? Abigail Honour would know. Holly resolved to ask her over dinner.
At the thought of food, her stomach gurgled. She pressed it in with both hands and willed it to be silent.
‘Still,’ Eric said, ‘Allnut hasn’t died or come down with leprosy, so there’s probably nothing in it.’
‘Who’s—?’
‘Cliff Allnut. Miz M’s lawyer. Lily hates his guts. He was the one who told Miz M about the co-vern, see. Lily had kept it quiet—and her weirdo mum and aunties as well— but Stiff Cliff nosed it all out somehow. He’s got a lot of contacts up here, and he’s a churchy as well. Miz M didn’t thank him, but she went right off Lily after that.’
He smirked. He was obviously about as fond of Lily as Sheena was.
‘I had a word with McNish myself, as a matter of fact,’ he said, returning abruptly to his point. ‘I told him my old man was from Sicily and had a few friends in the ce-ment business. He didn’t like that much.’
‘I can imagine.’ Holly regarded her companion’s shadowed profile thoughtfully.
‘So he took off,’ said Eric, as the hearse slid through the Mealey Marshes underpass. ‘That proves he was a con artist. But the old girl won’t believe it. She just can’t face it that he did her down.’
He sighed, and abruptly became confidential. ‘When she first came I thought she was normal. A bit bossy and up herself, but you’d expect that. She’d worked in France for thirty years for some hot-shot finance guy before the accident put her in the chair, and you know what the Frogs are like. But after a while I realised she was going the same way as Ol’ Maggott.’
‘Losing her marbles, you mean?’ said Holly. Possibly she could have phrased it more tactfully, but she wasn’t in the mood.
‘Heading that way. She’s about the age the old bloke was when he started to go loopy, by all accounts, and I know the signs.’
He adjusted his sunglasses. ‘She gets crazes on things, just like he used to. She gets in a fever, say, about getting the yard back the way it was when she was a kid. Doesn’t matter the house needs work and the roof leaks, all she cares about is getting Ol’ Maggott’s pyramids and o-belisks and stuff pulled down and new grass put in.
‘Well,’ Holly began, ‘I can understand—’
‘But before this grass she’s been carrying on about is even laid she’s bored with the yard. She’s decided half of the stuff in the house is rubbish, and she doesn’t want coffins in the place and all that. So then we’ve got secondhand dealers and moving guys crawling all over the place for weeks.’
‘Coffins?’
‘There were only a few,’ Eric said defensively. ‘Ol’ Mag-gott held on to them after he sold the business, because he’d made them himself. He was great at woodwork. A real craftsman, you know?’
‘I’m sure.’ Holly shifted uneasily. Was it a sign of madness to want to get rid of a coffin collection?
‘Some nights he’d get me up in the attic to try them out, show me how comfortable they were, and all,’ said Eric, his eyes full of memories. ‘He was buried in one of them. He’d picked it out before he went.’
‘Right.’
‘But Miz M got rid of the ones that were left—and a whole lot of other stuff too. The old boy’s embalming kit, the spider collection, the train set, the armour, the bear trap, the old dentist’s chair . . . She’d have got rid of Cleopatra as well, but Ol’ Maggott had left Cleo to me so she couldn’t.’
‘Cleopatra?’
‘The python.’
‘Oh. I didn’t realise the snake was—’
‘Mine, yeah. That’s part of the deal,’ Eric said vaguely. ‘Then she gets all het up about the rats. Ol’ Maggott used to breed them for Cleo and they were always getting away, so the walls are full of them. Well, Miz M suddenly decides she can’t stand it and for a while the rat guy’s her best friend.’
‘That doesn’t really sound unreasonable to me,’ Holly said cautiously. On the contrary, she thought, shuddering at the image of teeming rats. White rats, she supposed. White rats with little pink eyes . . .
Eric shook his head. ‘It sounds all right, but it’s the way she goes on that’s screwy. She gets in a fever, you know? Gets ob-sessed, then loses interest, just like Ol’ Maggott. Like, by the time the rat guy’s out the door, Lily’s been a couple of times to cut her hair, and she’s seen these earrings Lily makes out of gumnuts and feathers and stuff, and she’s got a bee in her bonnet about being a patron of the arts.’
He snorted. ‘Next thing, Lily’s moved in to the best room in the house—the one McNish had when he came— and she’s swanning around the place thinking she’s set for life. And no sooner has Allnut knocked that one on the head than Miz M sees a picture of some loser in the paper, decides he’s her long-lost brother, boots Lily into the crummy little room next to mine and puts the loser into the good one. Now she’s into murder, and you’ve seen what that’s like.’
He glowered, hunching over the wheel. ‘It wouldn’t matter if she wasn’t loaded. If she was like her old man and didn’t have a bean Dulcie and co wouldn’t give a stuff about what she did. They’d just go
away and leave us alone. Then she’d forget about McNish, and go on to something else. But the way things are, nothing’s going to settle her down except hard evidence that McNish is still alive.’
‘The police might trace the teaspoons,’ Holly said, thinking aloud.
Eric shook his head. ‘It’d be a miracle. And even if they did turn up, Miz M wouldn’t believe it was McNish who’d nicked them. She says one of us took them to frame him. Says he was too smart to have left the cupboard door half open so any fool could see they were gone first thing.’
Holly frowned. That made sense, actually. She couldn’t imagine Andrew making a mistake like that either.
Eric glanced at her again, hesitated, then seemed to make a decision.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘No one knows this—not even Sheena. But the old girl’s rings have gone, too.’
‘What?’
‘They were her mother’s. One’s an engagement ring—an emerald big enough to choke a horse, with six diamonds round it in a circle. The other one’s two emeralds and three diamonds in a line—an e-ternity ring, the old girl called it. They were made to go together. The bands both have “Forever” en-graved on the inside.’
‘They sound very valuable,’ Holly said faintly.
‘Worth a packet,’ Eric agreed. ‘Ol’ Maggott was a great one for jewellery. The wife who bled him dry and then took off—the one who’s supposed to have been McNish’s mother—they say she used to get around so loaded down with stuff that she jingled like a Christmas tree.’
‘But Ms Maggott’s rings . . .’ Holly prompted.
‘Yeah, well, the old girl didn’t wear them anymore. They’d got too small for her. She kept them in a little bag hanging behind the snake tank, stuck on with masking tape. I saw them there dozens of times, when I went in to clean the tank, and they aren’t there now.’
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