Death Notes (A Phineas Fox Mystery)

by Sarah Rayne

  Once she thought Donal hesitated, as if unsure where he was, and Jess managed to say, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re almost there. It’s not far, in fact if the plans are accurate—’

  ‘What plans? Donal, please let me go. I promise I’ll never say anything.’

  He did not seem to hear the last part of this. He said, ‘The plans of the old Kilcarne Mainéar. The ones Father Sullivan has. You really can be unbelievably stupid at times, can’t you? Don’t you know anything about the place where you live? I’ve seen those plans, and they show the layout of the manor and all the small buildings around it. In the finest detail. The buildings have all gone now, of course – well, except for Tromloy – but once upon a time—’ He broke off, and gave a small, satisfied nod. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘It’s here, exactly where the plans said. Exactly where I thought it would be. And this is where you’re going, Jessica.’

  Jess stared in horror at the small trapdoor set deep into the ground. There was a ring handle, and although the wood was almost rotten, beneath it was something black and hard – something that looked as if would never rot away.

  Donal did not let go of her hand, but he kicked at the weeds that had grown across the trapdoor.

  ‘It was part of the scullery wing of the manor,’ he said. ‘It’s the old ice pit – where the cook would store blocks of ice, wrapped in straw, for the cold desserts at their grand parties. There’s a metal lining under the actual trap, to keep the place cold.’ He turned to look at her. ‘And for the next few hours it’s going to be your prison.’

  As Jessica stared at him, sick with fear and panic, he said, ‘I’ll come back for you, of course. At least – I’ll come back for you this time. But if there has to be a second time, then I won’t. And make no mistake about this, Jessica, this is a place where no one will ever find you.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Jessica. ‘Someone does know about that day. When you raped me. I did tell, after all.’

  ‘Who?’ Then, as she hesitated, frantically searching her mind for a name Donal would believe, he said, ‘It’s Beatrice Drury, isn’t it? You told her while you were there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jess, desperately. ‘Yes, I did tell her. So you see, if you throw me into that place – if I’m missing – she’ll guess it might be your fault. She’ll tell the Garda, and they’ll arrest you – at least, they’ll question you. And they’ll search everywhere for me.’

  He stared at her for a moment, and Jess held his look. Inside, she was thinking, I’m sorry to be telling this lie, Bea, but it can’t matter, and if Donal thinks you know, he won’t dare do anything to me.

  But Donal said, very softly, ‘You bitch. I knew it. As soon as I heard you were at Tromloy, I was afraid you’d told her.’ He kicked against the ring handle with his foot, to lift it from its embedded position. It did not move, and Jessica felt a lurch of hope that Donal’s plan was not going to work. But he kicked it again, much harder, and this time, with a dreadful creaking sound, as if old, cracked bones were trying to move, the ring handle came free. Donal reached down with his left hand and pulled at the trapdoor. It resisted, but then it came up, clanging back on to the ground. Ancient, sour breath gusted out, and Jessica flinched, but Donal seized her from behind, pinioning her arms to her sides, and forcing her towards the yawning blackness. Jessica struggled and kicked out, but he was holding her too tightly. She drew in breath to scream properly, but Donal was already clamping one hand over her mouth. As he forced her to the edge of the ice pit, Jessica sobbed and fought for all she was worth, not really believing he meant any of this. He could not possibly mean to put her in that black underground cavern; he would just be giving her a warning to keep quiet, in the way that small burn on her hand in Tromloy had been a warning two years ago.

  But Donal did mean it. He pushed her on to the black rim, then gave her a vicious push, sending her tumbling forward. The mist-shrouded morning whirled around Jessica and she struggled in panic to keep her balance, but the push had been too strong. With a sickening jolting feeling, she fell into the yawning blackness.

  She hit solid ground almost at once, the impact knocking the breath out of her. Cold dankness, foul smelling and thick, was all around her, but there was still a square of light overhead, from the open trapdoor. Jessica struggled to her feet, and saw the pit was not in fact so very deep after all. If she stood on tiptoe she might just about reach the edge and grasp it to pull herself out. Out to where Donal would be waiting for her, to throw her back down? She hesitated, and his head and shoulders appeared in the opening above her.

  ‘Three hours,’ he said. ‘That’ll be long enough for the aunts to believe we’ve been into Galway and had lunch. I’ll be back for you then, and we’ll go home as if nothing’s happened. But until I do come back, think about what it would be like if you were down there for ever. I can make sure Beatrice Drury doesn’t squeal, and that’s what I’m going to do now, while you’re down there. But after that, if ever you tell anyone else what I did to you that day, by God, Jess, I’ll shut you down there again, and that time I won’t come back to let you out. I mean it.’

  The wizened creak of the old hinges came again, and the trapdoor crashed down. The light shut off and Jessica was in the worst and densest darkness she had ever known.

  Three hours, he had said. How far could that be trusted? Was there any other way she could get out? But the blackness was so absolute it was like a wall in front of her eyes – it was like being blind. Even so, she tried again to reach up to the trapdoor. If she could just feel the outline of it, she might manage to dislodge it. Her fingers brushed against hard-packed earth and roots – horrid! – then there was the feeling of the black steel sheet that lined the underside of the pit’s lid. But even by stretching up as high as she could, she could make no impression on the trapdoor, because it was designed to lift outwards, not to drop down. After what felt like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, Jess gave up, and sat down in a frightened huddle, wrapping her arms around her bent knees in an effort to keep warm.

  Three hours. All right, somehow she would get through those hours. She would not think about what might be all around her – or about what creatures might slither or scuttle in a place like this. Probably it was too cold for most of them anyway. Her eyes were starting to ache from staring into the blackness. Once she thought that coloured lights, like the shredded strings of a rainbow, were floating past her, and she made a grabbing movement to try to trap them. Stupid. There was nothing there.

  Three hours. She would do what she always did when she was frightened or unhappy – she would pull around her the poetry and the stories. All the poetry she had ever learned at school, paragraphs from favourite books. She would see in her mind her bookshelves in her bedroom at home, and look along them, as if she could pull one of the books out.

  Bookshelves … Abigail Drury’s bedroom had bookshelves. Jessica could remember them from when Bea Drury had taken her there. She could remember, as well, that she had recognized the books – not just as titles she had read somewhere, but as the actual book she had read, right down to a splodge of paint on the cover of one, right down to the inscriptions in some of them.

  Jessica pushed away the horrid darkness and the thought of three hours still to be got through – although probably it was only about two now – and concentrated on Abigail’s books. There had been a volume of Shakespeare’s speeches and sonnets, and inside it was written: ‘To Abigail, with the promise that one day we’ll ride together in Mab’s empty hazel-nut chariot, and that we’ll pluck the wings from painted butterflies to fan the moonbeams … From Dad, with love.’ She could see the writing quite clearly in her mind.

  Next to the sonnets was a book of Irish poetry – W. B. Yeats. She remembered that one particularly, because they had been studying Yeats’s work at school. Inside, in the same writing, it said, ‘One day we will go to the Lake Isle of Innisfree – and you’ll see for yourself that midnight’s all a-glimmer, t
hat noon’s a purple glow, and that the evening is full of the linnet’s wings … All my love, always, Abi, darling … Dad.’

  Jessica could even remember how she had felt sad to think of those two people being dead. It helped in the cold, dark ice pit to think about the unknown Abigail, whose father had known about Queen Mab’s hazel-nut chariot, and the purple glow over Innisfree and who had wanted his daughter to see those magical things for herself.

  She had been chanting the Queen Mab speech to herself the day she met Bea Drury.

  ‘Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut

  ‘Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

  ‘Time out of mind the fairies’ coachmakers.’

  Time out of mind … Her mind felt as if it was slipping out of time now. That was only the darkness, though, and being so frightened. Or was it? Think Jessica. Don’t notice the darkness, think about Abigail Drury and her bedroom. When did you read her books? It must have been after that day in Tromloy with Donal. What had happened after that day?

  And then, from out of nowhere, came a single piece of knowledge, startling in its clarity and stunning in its certainty.

  Soon after that day with Donal she had started to be ill.

  She had started to be sick.

  The sickness had become a regular occurrence; it had happened almost every morning, and it meant Jessica missed school on quite a number of days. Delayed shock, said the aunts, as Jess retched miserably over the lavatory each morning. And not to be wondered at. Aunt Nuala, her kind face creased with worry, said, a bit too quickly, that people were often sick after a shock, it was well known. They sent a note to the nuns at Jess’s school, explaining about her seeing the dreadful car crash. Jessica would make up any work she missed, they said, and the nuns, distressed to think of one of their girls witnessing such a dreadful event, were sympathetic. They sent notes on the lessons Jess had missed, and Jess worked on these at home.

  The aunts were starting to watch her by then. They had either written or phoned Donal, who had apparently been reassuring, and said they were to leave Jessica to recover in her own good time and God’s.

  ‘And he’s sent some herbal tea for you, Jess,’ said Aunt Nuala. ‘One of his parishioners makes it. You just pour hot water on to it, and it’s very soothing.’

  The herbal tea tasted horrible, but Jess drank it obediently. Easter came and went, and she stopped being sick. But other things were happening. Skirt bands started to be tight. Her breasts, which had been small and light, felt swollen and tender.

  Aunt Morna drove into Galway to buy new, larger-sized skirts. She wanted Jess to go with her, but Jessica would not. Both the aunts suggested timidly that she went along to see the doctor, just for a general check-up – they would come with her. Jess said she was quite all right and she did not need to see a doctor. When they tried to insist, she cried and shut herself in her room.

  After that, they left her alone, until the day near the end of May when they confronted her with considerable awkwardness and embarrassment. Faced with direct questions, Jessica gave in, and finally admitted that the monthly bleeding which, for her, had begun a year and a half earlier, had not happened for the past four months.

  The memories, once started, unrolled with increasing speed, cascading around Jessica as she sat huddled and shivering in the cold, bad-smelling ice pit of the vanished Kilcarne Manor.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Jess had known, of course, long before the aunts began to suspect, that she was probably going to have a baby as a result of what Donal had done to her. But every morning she woke up hoping that this would be the day when she would discover she had been wrong – that the monthly bleeding, usually a bit of a nuisance, at times vaguely uncomfortable, would appear. But the days and then the weeks slid by and it did not, and panic swept regularly over Jess in sickening waves.

  She had no idea what to do. People in Kilcarne did not get pregnant without being married, or at the very least being engaged, and they certainly did not get pregnant when they were only thirteen. She was terrified of anyone knowing, even a doctor, because it might mean the truth would come out. No one would believe you, Donal had said. They might even shut you away. And then had come that meaningful look at the fire burning in the hearth, and the hard insistent hands pushing her too close to the heat. And the words about how unpleasant things could happen.

  Jessica tried to push the memory away. She tried to think herself into a world where Donal’s threats could not reach her. When she could reach that world – and it became easier after the first few attempts – she could walk through forests and meadows and draw and paint everything she saw. It was a world where hands did not force her on to a sofa, or where someone did not sob uncontrollably and pray for forgiveness on his knees while she was bleeding on to her handkerchief.

  Once or twice she was aware of a feeling of disappointment, because presumably that was the being-in-love act that people raved over and that songs were written about. But all it had seemed to be was the pain of having a thick hard stick thrust into you and jabbing into your body over and over.

  ‘Yes, there was a man,’ said Jessica, eventually forced into admitting this to the aunts, trying to give them a story that would be believable and that would not be dangerous. ‘He was near Tromloy. And he forced me to—’ She shivered, and huddled back in the chair.

  Morna and Nuala looked at each other in horror, but Jessica saw that they had already half guessed the truth.

  ‘He raped you.’ Aunt Morna whispered the word, but it still lay on the air like a bruise.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know who he was,’ said Jessica, in a hard, desperate voice, because it was vital they did not find out the truth. Never tell, Jessica … Because all kinds of unpleasant things can happen to foolish girls who talk too much …

  ‘It was like being in a nightmare,’ said Jess. ‘It was a blur of … of pain and being terrified. Then afterwards I ran away, and I fell down the track because it was all iced over, and then there was the car crash. But I can’t remember anything else.’

  ‘And now,’ said Aunt Nuala, her face white, her eyes wide with horror, ‘and now you’re having a baby. You are, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I wish I was dead. Leave me alone.’

  She ran up to her bedroom and slammed the door, throwing herself on the bed and sobbing. But later, she heard the aunts talking, trying to think what to do. It was almost inevitable that they should light on the tramp, and blame him.

  ‘Donal saw him,’ said Nuala. ‘He was out there at Tromloy that day. Donal told us, remember. That’ll be who did that to her, the black-hearted villain.’

  ‘He’d attacked her before Donal got there,’ agreed Morna. ‘Capable of anything in God’s world or the devil’s, that’s what he told Donal. That’s the next best thing to a confession in my mind.’

  Jessica hated letting them think it had been the tramp, but she was afraid that if she said it was not, they would go on asking questions. Then Donal would get involved, and he would think Jess had talked after all. Also, people were saying the tramp had left the district, and no one had ever known his name, so it could not really hurt him if the aunts blamed him.

  The aunts wanted her to see the doctor, and they wanted to report the attack to the Garda, or talk to Father Sullivan. Jessica refused, and started crying again. This time she cried so hard she made herself sick, which sent them into a new panic.

  ‘Jess, you must see the doctor, you really must.’

  ‘I won’t. If you try to make me I’ll run away. I mean it.’ She had no idea where she would run to, but she did mean it.

  They were dreadfully upset at this. Aunt Nuala said all over again that Jessica was so like her mother, their dear, dead Catriona, and they could not bear to think of losing her as they had lost Catriona. Aunt Morna said they would find a way of dealing with things, and Jess must trust them. Jess had no idea if she could trust them or not. She had no idea how it could be dealt with, a
nd she did not think Aunt Morna had, either.

  Uncle Tormod had to know. Jess had to be there when they told him – she did not know if this was because there might be questions to be answered, or whether they were frightened to face Tormod on their own. When she refused and shut herself in her bedroom, Aunt Nuala cried and begged her to come with them, so in the end Jess gave in.

  She sat in a miserable huddle while Morna and Nuala explained as well as they could what had happened – at least, what they believed had happened – and what it seemed was going to happen now.

  Tormod listened, his lips thinning, his face hardening into a dreadful stony mask. The aunts talked too much from sheer nervousness; Nuala, embarrassed and stumbling over her words, said apologetically that they were not entirely sure of all the facts, and Morna instantly supported this, saying Mother had never explained the exact mechanics of pregnancy to them. Mother, said Morna, would have been shocked to her toes to think of young girls being told before marriage about the practicalities of pregnancy and how it came about. Why, said Morna, it was questionable whether Mother had even understood those details herself. Shockingly old-fashioned all of it, of course, and when people said Kilcarne had never really moved out of the mid-twentieth century, they were probably right.

  When they finally stammered themselves into silence, Tormod leaned forward, and his face was no longer a stone mask, it was flooded with ugly, angry crimson. Red flecks showed in his eyes, and Jessica thought it was as if something had flung a lump of blood in his face, and some of the specks of the blood had clung to his eyes.

  In a terrible hissing, hating voice, Tormod said, ‘Like mother, like daughter.’

  The aunts flinched as if he had struck them. Catriona was hardly ever mentioned, but on the rare occasion when the aunts said anything about her, they always told how it had been the worst day of their lives when Catriona ran away. ‘But then,’ Nuala always said, ‘we had you, Jess. Catriona was lost for ever – dead in childbirth – but the doctors told us she had wanted us to have you – her dying wish – and you made it better for us.’