‘You warned us, General Kirk. You said that evil forces were at work against us and you were right. But we are still not afraid, sir. We have been given grace, you see; the power of faith.’ His left cheek twitched as he smiled and Marcus could see two completely separate individuals in the ravaged face: an old, broken man and the personality that had built a financial empire out of nothing.
‘One woman . . . one evil creature has worked against us, but we do not fear her, gentlemen. We are not a religious body, but we do not mourn either, because we accept the resurrection of the soul. Everybody should do that if they hope to remain sane.’ The words came dragging out like the tick of a clock that was running down. ‘Our friends are not dead, they have merely walked out of one room and into another. You are an old man like me, General Kirk. Surely you believe that. You do not imagine your soul will die merely because the body rots.’
‘Stop it, Michael.’ The tall woman laid a hand on his arm. ‘You are very tired indeed and you don’t know what you are saying. I want you to go and lie down for an hour. Yes, that is an order, Michael.’ She spoke as if to a child and, like a child, Fawnlee nodded and then walked wearily away.
‘Please forgive him, General. I am not a psychologist but I think over-compensation is the term for my friend’s condition. His mind is so stunned by what has happened that parts of it have rejected reality for the time being.’ A breeze had started to blow and Laura Rose pushed back a strand of grey hair.
‘Many of the others are like that too; even Eric Yeats, Sir Marcus. They are preserving their sanity by pretence. They refuse to admit that their friends are no longer with them, that the little boy was tortured to death. In my view it is a good thing that they do so.’
‘Perhaps, Dr Rose, but I have something to ask you.’ Kirk frowned as the children’s laughter grew clearer on the breeze. ‘The Chief Constable sent us here as emissaries. It is obvious that Anna Harb will be caught before long, probably within hours or even minutes, but surely it would be wise to let him station men inside the grounds. They would naturally be in plain clothes and the children could be told they were workmen.’
‘There is no need for that, General Kirk. All the children will be kept in groups from now on and well protected.’ She gave a slightly embarrassed smile and opened her handbag for him to see a small automatic lying between a purse and a powder compact. ‘I have never used one of these things but the mechanism has been explained to me. Grace Alison has one too and we are not afraid of one woman.’
‘I see.’ There were two deep furrows below Kirk’s mouth. Fawnlee was not the only person in a state of shock, he thought, and the notion of these two old ladies arming themselves with pistols gave him no comfort at all. Something hellish was at work against the society she served but, though Dr Rose appeared to speak sanely, she too had obviously been driven into a dream world.
But perhaps she was right in one thing. Perhaps Anna Harb really was working on her own and his long years in an intelligence service had made him think in terms of groups and unable to visualize such cunning and hatred in one individual. Perhaps the police were correct in still believing that the earlier deaths were accident or suicide. If they were discounted, there was nothing to support his theories about an organization and Anna Harb was a solitary figure, though an extremely sinister one. A woman with experience in sabotage, a known murderess, a maniac who had said that her child was an evil thing which had to be destroyed. She was also known to have practised black magic and Sidney Molson appeared to have been killed ritually. Could there be a history of Voodoo or some similar cult in her past?
‘I said that I would like to show you around, General.’ Laura Rose’s voice interrupted his ponderings and Kirk nodded and followed her and Marcus across the square. The morning sky was clear and bright overhead, but a flock of gulls flying inland seemed to herald bad weather and he tightened his coat around him.
‘Please do not let the children know that anything is wrong, gentlemen. They think that Sidney has gone away for a holiday and know nothing about the launch.’ Dr Rose pointed across the playing field. The boys were hard at work building the bonfire and two adults were helping them: Eric Yeats and a man whose face Kirk recognized from the pages of the Financial Times and company prospectuses. Somehow the roles appeared to have been reversed and the old people were under orders from their charges. A dark bullet-headed boy of about nine was directing operations and giving his instructions in a high, excited voice.
‘No, no, Uncle Eric, don’t lay it sideways. The timbers must be stacked upright if the fire is to burn properly.’
Mary Valley really was a strange child, Kirk thought, remembering how she had tugged Mrs Alison’s arm to take her off to help with the guy. Marcus’s friend Haynes had said she was terrified of fire in any form, but Mary was clearly looking forward to this one. Child psychology was quite out of his province, though, and it was the psychology of Anna Harb that mattered at this moment. Kirk shivered and adjusted his muffler as he stared out to sea. The forecast of the birds was proving correct and a belt of cloud lay heavy over the horizon like a promise that the worst was yet to come.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Please come home soon, Mark. I know I thought a change would do you good, but I’ve been so lonely without you. Goodbye, darling.’ Tania Levin reluctantly replaced the telephone and crossed over to her bedroom window. Because it was Saturday, many people were holding their Guy Fawkes parties early and she could see a bonfire blazing in the next-door garden and rockets arching over the rooftops towards the setting sun.
It all sounds so crazy, she thought. Quite unbelievable. Nothing that Marcus had told her or what she had learned from the newspapers, radio or television made any sense at all. One single woman was supposed to have been responsible for everything; the earlier deaths, the well-planned destruction of the launch, and the ritual murder of the child. One woman was said to be holding Bala in a state of terror, and so far troops, police and local volunteers who knew the country had failed to find her though the island was small and sparsely populated.
‘Completely incredible.’ Tania looked into the dressing-table mirror and spoke aloud to her reflection in Russian. ‘Anna Harb cannot be the only one. There must be an organization at work against the Fellowship. But why? For what reason?’ Like Kirk, Tania had been trained in an intelligence service and automatically thought in terms of group action.
‘Charles’s theories are ridiculous, though. To imagine that a number of deranged parents wish to destroy the Fellowship because they consider it has stolen their children and alienated them. To suggest that the motive may be financial gain. That is slightly more feasible, but still very unlikely indeed. Who are these dispossessed heirs who employed an insane killer to reinstate them? If there was any truth in that, the police would have examined the beneficiaries and made them talk long ago.’ Tania’s knowledge of police interrogation came from men with more realistic views than those generally held in Western circles.
Yet there was a slight possibility that that theory might hold water, if the motives lay in the future and not in the past. Tania lit a cigarette and pondered on one of the maxims of her former chief, Gregor Petrov. ‘Shear the sheep in public and the goats will not stray.’ Was intimidation the key word, perhaps? A rich man or woman might think twice about willing a fortune to the Fellowship if he or she knew what happened to those that did.
‘No, no, no.’ Tania frowned at herself in the glass. ‘That also is too incredible to be considered.’ Yet the murders had taken place, the computer reading had been confirmed and some force, either Anna Harb working on her own or an organization she belonged to, obviously intended to destroy the Van Traylen Fellowship.
‘How would Gregor have tackled the problem?’ She thought of him with deep affection. Petrov had retired long ago and now passed his time pottering about a flower garden in the Crimea. But for over a quarter of a century he had been a departmental boss of the Soviet I
ntelligence Service, surviving Stalin and Beria and weathering every political purge and change of leadership by a mixture of charm, cunning and utter ruthlessness. When a problem perplexed him, Petrov often quoted another maxim which he had stolen from Sherlock Holmes: ‘Consider everything and discard everything which is not fact. What remains must be the truth, however unlikely it appears.’
‘Well, the events that happened on Bala are facts,’ Tania said to the mirror. ‘The Dormobile was rented by Anna Harb, the launch did blow up, that poor little boy was tortured to death. But what about the earlier deaths? Mrs Van Traylen herself, the old colonel and the rest of them? The police had not considered the possibility of murder in a single instance and they are not facts. You would have dismissed them, wouldn’t you, Gregor? You would have started to consider the case from the moment Mary Valley was admitted to Saint Bede’s and examined by Peter Haynes.’
From down the street a clock started to strike the hour and she switched on her radio for the news from Station Charlotte. The announcer had a heavy cold and his voice sounded thick and slurred through the tiny loudspeaker of the transistor. She heard of the successful launching of an American moon probe, further financial squabbles in the Common Market, a cough and a splutter, an apology and . . . ‘There is still no trace of Mrs Anna Harb who is wanted in connection with the murder of Dr Peter Haynes at Saint Bede’s Hospital in West London last week. A police spokesman stated that the woman is almost certainly on the Island of Bala, though it appears doubtful whether she is still alive. Questions were asked about her in the House of Commons today. In reply to the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Ivor Mudd, the Home Secretary, stated amid shouts of “Resign” that well over a thousand men drawn from police reinforcements from the mainland and members of the armed forces were engaged in searching the island for Mrs Harb. But their efforts were being severely hampered by crowds of morbid sightseers who had flocked on to Bala and acts of hooliganism were taking place there. Until the woman was apprehended, the ferry service from Torar to Lochern would be restricted to local inhabitants and persons on official business.
‘The go-slow at Liverpool docks is now in its third week and . . .’
Over a thousand men! Tania turned off the set. It hardly seemed possible; men with helicopters and radios and dogs to help them. People with friends may remain undetected in cities for long periods, but surely not alone and in open country with that kind of force hunting them. Either the woman was being hidden by someone, or Marcus was correct in saying she was probably dead, lying broken in a crevice or swallowed by a bog.
Back to the beginning . . . back to Haynes. Tania watched another salvo of rockets soar into the darkening sky. For three years, Anna Harb had made no move against her child. It was only after Haynes came on the scene that Mary’s troubles began.
Everything had pivoted on Haynes at first. He was the one person who credited the coach driver’s story that a little girl had burned his face and caused the accident. Tania glanced at the glowing tip of her cigarette. Haynes had been so worried about Mary Valley’s condition that he had risked infecting her with a dangerous culture so that she would have to be detained in hospital. He had also risked allowing Anna Harb, whom he knew to be a criminal lunatic, to visit the child and paid for it with his life.
Tania’s hand fondled the bulge of her stomach. She was seven months pregnant and the thought of what happened in that gay, cosy room filled her with nausea. By all accounts, Harb had appeared quite normal when she arrived at Saint Bede’s. What had caused the sudden change? What had been said or done to produce the maniac violence; the hatpin slashing out into Haynes’s forehead; the child’s screams as she was dragged to the well of the stairs; the woman raving just before Marcus reached them and the handbag swung out: ‘The soul that should not have been born’?
Tania turned and gave a slightly nervous glance towards the books beside her bed. She had been brought up as an enforced materialist, and since coming to England inquiry into the occult had fascinated her. The bedside lamp lit up the covers of The Cult of the Werewolf, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Devil in Western Europe. Anna Harb had practised as a clairvoyant and claimed to have the second sight; that was fact. She had tried to impart that power to her daughter; that was known from the magistrate’s findings which had removed Mary from her care. Could that be a clue to the woman’s motives, if not her whereabouts? Had Harb feared that Haynes had pried too deeply into Mary’s mind and was about to reveal the things she had hidden there?
Perhaps the whereabouts too? Tania stubbed out the cigarette which had burned almost down to her fingers. People with secret beliefs and practices usually have special means of recognizing each other; by signs, by handshakes, by a certain way of speaking; even by an aura as sexual perverts are claimed to do.
It might be something like that. She glanced at a library book she had obtained that morning, The Legacy of Bala. It was mainly concerned with the island’s scenery and natural history but a chapter was devoted to a folklore that went far back beyond Christian times to the old gods—Thor and Odin and Freyr. The author claimed that those deities had been secretly worshipped on Bala at least as recently as the turn of the century. Anna Harb was concerned with the occult. Was it possible she had arrived there alone but found co-religionists to shelter her?
‘No, no, no, Comrade Valina.’ Tania rapped the dressing-table and mimicked Gregor Petrov’s gruff barks of annoyance. ‘Facts, facts, facts, little Tania. In this department we do not deal with suppositions. Give me one definite fact or keep your mouth closed.’
But whatever Gregor had taught her, Tania knew that there were few pertinent facts available and everything should be considered. Marcus had heard the recording of Mary Valley’s voice while she was under the narcotic and surely there would be written notes as well. Haynes must have put down a full description of the case and it would almost certainly have included an account of his first meeting with Anna Harb. During that interview, might not the woman have let slip that she was a member of some society which liked to keep its secrets well hidden. If that was the case, Haynes’s notes might prove that the solution of her vanishing act would not be found on Bala, but less than five miles away.
‘Sorry, Gregor, my dear.’ Tania smiled as she opened the wardrobe and took out a coat. ‘Like your acquaintance, Charles Kirk, I am only following a hunch and you would be very angry with me. All the same you are not my boss any more so get on and cultivate your garden.’ She walked over to the telephone and the directory which would give her the address of Peter Haynes.
The flat was in a middle-aged block built shortly before the war and, judging by the few lights in its windows, was mainly tenanted by business people who needed a bed in London but returned to the country at the week-ends. There was an anonymous, indifferent atmosphere about the place, a feeling of ‘come and go and we couldn’t care less’, and this was to Tania’s advantage because the hall porter didn’t even look up from his newspaper as she walked past his desk to the stairs. To him, tenants were probably mere numbers and names to be disregarded as long as the rent was paid on time and no complaints made.
Number 16. Peter Haynes’s flat and her luck still held. She had feared that the door might have a mortice lock, but there was only a cheap spring device and plenty of space between the frame and the warped door. The strip of stiff plastic she had brought with her slipped easily through the gap, found the tongue of the lock and, with hardly any pressure the light spring was pushed back. Tania stepped into the unlighted hall, closing the door quietly behind her, and then paused as she smelt a tang of stale pipe smoke, heard a chair creak and saw that she was not alone. The lights were on in the sitting-room opposite and a huge, hunched figure was bent over a table with the ribbons of an eye shade around its massive forehead.
‘You’re back with them already, Alfie?’ The man glanced at his watch. ‘Good lad. Less than an hour from door to door. Keep up this display of speed and strict attention to
duty and in time you may become even as I am.’ He chuckled and raised a glass. Half a bottle of rum lay at his side and the table was littered with papers.
‘I am afraid I am not Alfie, Mr Forest.’ Tania had hoped to shock this unwelcome intruder, but she was disappointed. John Forest merely looked up mildly, turned the desk light towards her and smiled.
‘No, I can see that, my dear Lady Levin. Alfie is a male child of sixteen and is undersized for his age. He also suffers badly from acne, poor lad.’ Forest eyed Tania’s ample figure with open appreciation and then saw the strip of plastic she still held and chuckled again, his jowl joggling up and down like a turkey’s.
‘Tch, tch, dear lady. A spot of housebreaking, eh, and by the most common method that television advertises. I’ve never really believed that it worked in practice. Your good gentleman, Sir Marcus, would be shocked to learn of such conduct.’
‘How did you get in, Mr Forest?’ Tania did not share Kirk’s dislike of Forest. She was not particularly fond of him, but sometimes found him amusing. ‘And what are you doing here anyway? I thought you had been injured and were still in hospital in Scotland.’
‘I was injured, my dear. Gravely injured.’ A flabby hand pointed to a strip of sticking plaster beneath the eye shade. ‘I was stunned, concussed, hurled bleeding to the deck of the ferry boat like the proverbial stuck pig and like to die. But duty is a strict mistress and she has called me away from my bed of pain at Torar. While Sir Marcus, General Kirk and all the rest of the Uncle Tom Cobbleighs are busily pursuing ghosts on Bala, I felt that my talents would be better employed down here.
‘But how rude of me. Let me offer you some liquid refreshment.’ Forest pulled himself heavily out of the chair and lumbered across the room. ‘The late Dr Haynes—sorry, Mr Haynes; the poor fellow was only a bachelor of medicine—has left us comfortably provided for. Would a gin and tonic be to your liking? Excellent.’ He opened a cupboard and poured out a generous measure.
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