The House of the Wicked (a psychological thriller combining mystery, murder, crime and suspense)

by D. M. Mitchell

  “I had lost a good deal of money at the gaming table and taken far more liquor than was good for me,” he continued. “The place was busy with the usual sorts of people, and I’m afraid I was a little taken with the atmosphere. There were a couple of young women with whom I was intrigued, for I thought at first glance they would be tolerable models for my latest rural piece. They had…” he struggled for words, pointed to his cheek, “…weathered, expressive faces for ones so young. I engaged them in conversation, bought them drinks, but in the end I decided against them and sat down to a game of cards. One of them, the smallest and in truth the prettiest, called Marie – not her real name of course – lingered around me like an irritating little moth and would not leave me in spite of my increasing abruptness with her. She was a queer sort, but you know the type, as in Paris. Poor, unfortunate creatures that are driven by their masters to sell themselves at every turn or feel staves about their shoulders. But I told her that I needed her not, in any form, and to throw her charms on someone else.”

  He stared as if picturing the scene unfolding before him. Drew in a trembling breath. “Go one,” urged Denning.

  “Eventually I rose from the table, informed my temporary companions that I would take some air and return with a clear head to recoup some of my losses. I took a stroll down the lane there to the edge of the forest, and I stood in the warm moonlight for a while. I was disturbed in my thoughts by Marie, who had followed me. In her desperation she presented herself to me again, but once more I refused. I took pity on her and offered her a few francs to buy a drink but she swiped it from my hand and cursed me for the impotent foreigner I was. I said I could not help her and went back inside, joining another game at the table and thinking no more of it.

  “The game ended quickly, my companions drifted off and I decided on a last drink before heading home. I had risen to leave when a fellow, breathless and plainly so disturbed that he could scarce speak, rushed into the place and declared that he had happened on Marie who was lying on the ground in the forest and quite dead. At first I did not believe what I heard, for it had not seemed all that long since I had left her, but of course it might have been longer. It is so difficult to remember as it is all becoming a blur. The few of us that were left rushed outside to see and we found and gathered round the corpse of that pitiable, ill-fated girl.”

  “You are certain she was dead?” Denning asked. “She may have been lying in a faint or senseless with drink.”

  Wilkinson’s face was deathly pale, his expression grave. “I shall not forget the sight as long as I live, Stephen. Her dress was…” He made a hand motion to indicate it had been lifted to her waist. “It looked like she had first been raped and then her throat had been cut.”

  Denning gasped. “Oh my Lord! That is terrible! And you did not notify anyone?”

  Slowly he shook his head. “I drifted off into the night, whist their attention was on the body of the woman. So did the rest, the place soon as dead as if no one had ever been there. Stephen, don’t you see, they would think that I had committed that horrible crime for I fear I was the last to be seen with her. I did not dare stay to answer those charges. I ran all the way back, through the forest, and that’s how you found me.”

  “But we must tell the gendarmes at once!” He rose but Wilkinson whipped out a hand and grabbed him by the wrist, as if he were afraid Denning would march that very moment out of the door.

  “They will blame me! They will build up all the facts and come to the wrong conclusion; they must not know I was there. I fear for my life, Stephen. If they should come here asking questions you must tell them I was here with you, all evening. Yes, that’s right; we did not leave this room.”

  He shook his head. “I cannot lie, Terrance! You were seen there, played cards at the table with others.”

  “But they do not know me. There were many others there. People were drunk, did not see straight or will not be able to remember clearly. We are all nameless who frequent that vile place. Stephen, I beg of you; please help your friend! You must stick with the story that I was here all along, for both our sakes!”

  “Both our sakes?”

  Wilkinson was almost deranged with emotion, and tears were beginning to fall from his lids. His grip was determined, desperate, like a man clinging for his life to a cliff face. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Of course I believe you!” said Denning. “You are not capable of such a thing.” He paused, put his fingers to his forehead as if to massage his thoughts. “But they are likely to find the real murderer soon, for there are sure to be some witnesses.”

  “Yes! Yes! That’s true, they will find him soon enough!” He looked imploringly at Denning. “Please, Stephen…”

  He studied the sky outside, it promised to be a beautiful day, so unlike the past few. Not the kind of day on which you expect to be drawn into something like this. “And this Marie, she is of a certain kind,” he said. “They open themselves up to many such atrocities.”

  “It happens all the time to such women. It is their lot in life.”

  There was a knocking at the door and both men stared at it. Denning made a move towards it and Wilkinson gripped his arm all the harder to bring him to a halt. “Please, I beg of you… Remember our story.”

  “I…” he faltered, then pulled free his sleeve and opened the door. The two gendarmes were standing outside. They explained that they were asking questions of everyone in the hotel, for there had been a most regrettable murder in the vicinity. Denning invited them in, offered them a seat but the taller of the two, the one who’d talked to Madame Guillou, refused for both of them. The other readjusted the rifle at his shoulder, his sharp black moustache glistening.

  The gendarme removed his kepi and put it under his arm, began by asking them their names, which he took down in a notebook, and then if they knew of a place called Monsieur Jacques, to which they both answered yes. When questioned if they had been there on the night of the murder Denning hesitated. Both officers locked their eyes on him and he felt himself getting quite nervous and hot around the neck.

  “We have never been there, even though we have heard it spoken of,” said Wilkinson calmly. “I understand the English are not looked upon favourably, as you may vouch, in such a place as Monsieur Jacques. A magnet for all manner of crimes, I am told, and therefore it is wise to avoid them. We were, in fact, both here, all evening. Is that not so, Stephen?”

  Again he hesitated for what to him seemed an age as he struggled to know how to respond. “Yes!” he blurted. “Of course we were.” He noticed a tiny fleck of spittle fly from his lips. “Terrance and I were planning today’s painting expedition for which, as you can see, we are all packed to go.” He pointed out the easel and cases of materials that Wilkinson had prepared for the day’s outing.

  “Murder, you say? What a terrible thing,” Wilkinson said. “Who was the unfortunate victim?”

  “A young woman of the street named Marie,” the gendarme replied crisply and without feeling. His dark blue tunic gave him a shadowy appearance.

  “Do you have a suspect?”

  The man studied Wilkinson intently. “I cannot disclose that, monsieur,” he said. He turned to Denning. “You artists, you like to paint the field workers?” He said it with just a sliver of amusement.

  “We try to capture what their poor lives entail, yes.”

  “Poor lives,” he repeated, chewing long on the words “Did you ever paint the poor lives of the street girls?” Now all amusement vanished.

  Denning squirmed. He felt like he was on trial and wished to God he’d had the strength of character to tell the truth when he had the chance. “It is an area that has not attracted my attention,” he said.

  The man put his kepi back on. “It is an area that has attracted someone’s attention. That is for certain.” His gaze wandered over the room, settled briefly on the two men and then he bade them a stiff goodbye.

  When the door was closed on them Denning
released a long, hard breath and sat down heavily. “Oh God!” he said. “That was – that was frightful!”

  “Thank you, Stephen,” said Wilkinson. “I knew you would not let me down. I owe you a great deal.”

  He could not look him in the face.

  They heard no more from the authorities, though the death of the prostitute named Marie was the subject of energetic speculation for a day or two before people lost interest and it was soon forgotten.

  But Denning could not forget. He was plagued by a swarm of biting doubts. Wilkinson soon recovered completely and behaved as if nothing had happened, but it was Denning who was haunted by the young woman’s death and suffered many a fractured night’s sleep because of it. The image of Wilkinson on that night, so hysterical, covered in mud, snagged at his mind like a thorn. He began to question why he had agreed to lying. Why he had so easily dismissed the poor woman because of her regrettable profession. Why he should be the one caught up in such hateful things.

  Then, just as Denning was beginning to shake away all those lingering uncertainties, he went to see Wilkinson a few days later. He knocked at his door but as was his custom did not wait for an answer and stepped right in. He found him bending by the fireplace, a large fire burning in the grate in spite of the warm day. He was shoving some material into the flames with a poker. Denning saw a crumpled shirt. On the sleeve he noticed dark splashes of red. It looked like blood. The shirt quickly took light and was soon being consumed.

  “Those marks. Did you cut yourself, Terrance?”

  Wilkinson did not seem the least perturbed. “I hang onto too many old, worn out and marked clothes,” Wilkinson explained. “I ruin so many things because of my careless splashing of paint, and so now I vow to order a whole new wardrobe to replace them!”

  His smile reminded Denning of one of those vulgar Punch puppets.

  * * * *

  Thus he lay in the night with only a wasteland of troubled memories for company. He could think of nothing but energy-sapping scenes from his life that played out before him in endless, excruciating circles like a dog chasing its tail, till he was exhausted by it. He wondered if every young man could draw on such a vast reserve of misgiving and self-recrimination for such a short life; or whether they were all as prone as he to inadvertently adding to it in spite of themselves, a further course of rancid dishes to be served up and picked over on future sleepless nights.

  The wind grew in strength till it howled around the eaves of the old cottage. Its dried wooden bones shifted and creaked in the night and the door rattled on its hinges.

  Though his eyes felt as annoying as sores he could not find sleep. To shut out the cold draughts that seeped in through unseen cracks he’d first tried sleeping with the curtains drawn in front of the bed, but for a man of the city where comforting lamplight had filtered through gauzy curtains the darkness was too complete, too solid, so he whipped them open. Faint moonlight dripped in from the small window, until the moon was obscured by the clouds, when it fell as dark in the corners of the room as surely as if he’d drawn the blanket closed. The fire threw out a feeble russet glow and barely held back the encroaching shadows, but the light did little to ease his troubled mind.

  Denning could not get the story of the dead Connoch woman out of his head, pictured her lying there on the floor before the fire. She and the murdered French woman from Pont Aven became a single ghastly mound of white, blood-spattered female flesh. At times he fancied he saw something squirm on the rug, but chided himself for being such a fool over harmless shadows being shivered by a few lingering flames flickering over exhausted coals. Then his thoughts would go to the matted black dog outside, waiting – on guard – amidst its accumulation of tiny bones and limpet shells. He even thought he caught the high note of its wheezing old lungs within the symphony played by the wind.

  In the end he rose from his bed and lodged the back of the pine-railed chair against the door handle. To stop the infernal rattle, he told himself. But somewhere deep inside was the nagging fact there was no lock on the door. He re-lit the old lamp, smelling stomach-churning fish oil as he did so, and shovelled another few lumps of coal onto the fire. It is so cold and cheerless in here, he thought.

  But still he could not sleep. He swore he heard a scratching at the door, yet heard it no more. He gave a start when he heard a mournful sigh rise from the floor, but it was merely the fire settling in the grate. The keening wind rolled something down the cobbled road outside. The door gave a violent lurch and the chair clattered noisily to the floor.

  He sat upright as if launched by a spring. “Fool!” he said aloud, if only to hear his own voice. “You have had one brandy too many!”

  He lay back down but his mind was filled with an image of Wilkinson’s face that he could not shake away, bearing that same frightful expression as on that awful night in Pont Aven.

  Over time he had accepted that Wilkinson was indeed innocent of the woman’s death, as he had believed on the night, and that his own part in the events quite legitimate, given the circumstances. No harm done. Best forget it. His misgivings faded so that he scarce thought on it. But Wilkinson’s appearance at his studio had stirred up a whole cloud of doubts that he believed had long ago drifted to form the seldom disturbed sediments of his unwanted past. He did not know whether he now experienced guilt or shame, or anger at the inconvenience of it all. Whatever it was, that and the gruesome little tale Kenver had left him with as his parting gift were conspiring to keep him fully awake.

  But there had been at least one shining beacon in the day, and that had been Jenna Hendra. He did his best to let his mind’s eye focus on that particular light. In a little while his disquiet shuffled off to sulk in a dark corner and he lay watching the tiny puffs of fire dancing like spirits over the coals, seeing her face implanted there.

  On impulse he thought about the book she had given him, wondered whether the smell of her perfume lingered on the leather binding, and he flicked back the bedcovers to seek it out. He picked it off the table where he’d left it, held it close to his nose but was disappointed. It was the same dry, musty smell of his father’s study. The lamplight picked out the fading gold letters on the spine:

  Mackenzie’s Complete Almanac of Cornish Folk Tales 1809

  He idly flicked through the pages till he found the chapter Jenna had told him about.

  * * * *

  The plaintive sound of a solitary fiddle scratched the air, rising and falling with the wind, a tune both jaunty and melancholy. He headed towards it, passing under the looming, empty arches of the crumbling monastery. A mat of ivy lay across its decaying stone, leaves silvered by the moon, the agitated air fingering through them and causing them to sing like crickets in long summer grass. Ahead, against the backdrop of the featureless wood, a number of small fires twinkled. The music became louder as he left the ruins behind and approached the campfires, the notes more distinct, and he heard laughter, a murmur of voices.

  Before each campfire were huddled small groups of people, at their backs makeshift shelters and tents, some no more than large sheets of canvas or sailcloth strung between the limbs of trees. The smell of smoke drifted over to him, and along with it the smell of cooked food, which caused his empty stomach to contract painfully.

  They did not pay him heed as he entered their temporary camp. He observed men, women and children, each going about their own business – eating, sleeping, talking, laughing, drinking or simply staring into the embers of their fires. The branches overhead rocked and clattered against each other in the wind, but down here at the roots of the trees its efforts were limited to the odd-trembling of leaves and flames that burst energetically sending a flurry of sparks skywards.

  Jowan Connoch found himself an unoccupied spot at the base of an elm, and shrugged his bundle to the mossy floor. By a campfire opposite, a man glanced up from his plate of food, the fire casting a long shadow of his nose that striped his face; he briefly studied the young man and then resumed
the ladling of steaming potato to his lips. Two more shared his fire – a woman and another man.

  Jowan unrolled a blanket and set it on the ground. He sat cross-legged on it and took out a piece of cheese and a chunk of bread, which he broke carefully in two, stowing one half away into his bag and nibbling at the other, washing it down with a measured sip of water from a bottle. As he chewed he removed the small bag he was given by the sailor in Liverpool. Stared at it.

  “Do you not have a shelter?”

  It was the man opposite, by the fire.

  “And what business is it of yours?” he returned, putting away the bag.

  The man shrugged. “It is none of my business, true; but it’s threatening rain, is all. You need shelter or you’ll catch your death.”

  “Thank you for your advice.” He turned away.

  “No fire?”

  “Are you to question me all night?”

  He shrugged again. “It’s not going to be warm, is all.”

  He didn’t respond. Carried on eating. The man turned to his companions, held a short discussion and then addressed Jowan again.

  “You’re welcome to share our fire, till you get sorted,” he said, pointing needlessly at it. Jowan eyed him from under shadowed brows. “And share a bite to eat? Not much, but warms a man through.”

  Jowan could not resist the cooked food. He picked up his meagre belongings, scraped up his blanket and went over to sit by the fire. The man held out his hand to shake; it was warm from holding his plate. The smell of stew bubbling in a pan suspended over the fire was overwhelming. He shook the man’s hand.