‘As to your first question, I got in by the simple expedient of a five-pound note which will naturally be put down to expenses. Hall porters are not wealthy men and the old boy downstairs was only too delighted to lend me his pass key. Cheers.’ Forest had handed her the glass and raised his own.
‘And now, dear lady, may I ask what brings you here?’
‘A hunch, Mr Forest, nothing more.’ Tania sat down facing him. ‘I’ll try to explain, but please don’t laugh at me because I only have a vague suspicion.’ Tania told him about the theory she had considered in her bedroom and at every sentence she waited for him to shake his head or smile because it sounded quite absurd when repeated to another person.
‘I see. You considered that Harb belonged to some league practising black magic and may have found friends and protectors on Bala.’ Forest did shake his head when she had finished, but he didn’t smile. His face was serious and thoughtful and he stared down at the rum as if some secret might be hidden in the amber liquid.
‘Not at all a bad notion; quite as feasible as anything old Kirk managed to dream up and parts of it can possibly be substantiated.
‘But before I put my cards on the table, may we make it Tania and John? If we are to collaborate it would be much more pleasant.
‘Thank you, Tania.’ He beamed at her nod and then squinted down at the papers before him.
‘Great minds think alike, as they say, and it is clear to me that the Harb woman is either dead or will be captured in the very near future. Bala is crawling with reporters and neither her arrest nor the discovery of her body would make a major scoop. The early part of the story might however, and that is why I returned to London. Like you I was curious about the occult side of Madame Harb’s career and what had caused the child’s mental disturbance. Why was Peter Haynes the only person to notice it while the orphanage doctor stated the girl was perfectly normal? Could the answer lie in something that happened before the coach accident? From Haynes’s notes we know that Anna Harb went to the hotel to see her daughter and the child failed to recognize her. Could that be only partly true? Did Mary in fact recognize her mother but was so frightened of her that her conscious mind rejected the knowledge?’ Forest picked up his pipe, not lighting it, but turning the bowl round in his fingers as if the feel of the wood helped him to concentrate.
‘What had been done to Mary, John?’ Once again Tania felt a sudden spasm of nausea. ‘What methods did that woman use on her to . . . ?’
‘To plant occult powers in her brain.’ Tania had broken off for loss of a word and Forest smiled; a small, grey smile that looked quite out of place in his fat, jovial face. ‘God knows, Tania. But the point is this: it seems clear to me that she may have succeeded.
‘No, Haynes did not even consider the possibility. I have been through his notes very carefully and there is nothing in them to support our theories, I’m afraid.’ The chair creaked under his weight as Forest leaned forward over a sheet of typescript.
‘Haynes was just a practical, unimaginative man of science, though a very worried one. He was so concerned about Mary’s condition, which he describes as a memory lesion which would lead to physical schizophrenia in early puberty, that he was ready to go to any lengths to achieve a cure. He knew the risks he was taking in bringing Anna Harb to Saint Bede’s, but they were calculated risks because he felt that the shock of their meeting might bring the child’s illness to the surface. As we know all too well, he was completely wrong. It was the mother, not the child, who received the shock and that is why an army of men are hunting her down at this moment.
‘Excuse me, though. That must be my young assistant.’ There was a knock on the outer door and Forest walked off to answer it. Tania heard a laugh, a short mutter of conversation and when he returned he had a thick folder under his arm.
‘Now, let’s look at the early facts for a little, Tania.’ He laid the file on the table and rummaged through it as he talked. ‘A mentally deranged woman with claims of possessing occult powers who attempted to pass those powers on to her daughter. That child is later removed from her care and handed over to the Van Traylen Fellowship where she becomes the special favourite of Mrs Van Traylen and was staying at her house when Helen Van Traylen killed herself. Then, almost exactly a year later, we have the accident to the coach, Mary’s admission to the hospital and Haynes’s fears that she was mentally disturbed. Finally Anna Harb’s visit to Mary, the death of Haynes and her attempt to kill or abduct Mary whom she described as “The soul that should not have been born.”’ Forest had found the section he was looking for at last and he pushed the rest of the papers to one side.
‘Peter Haynes may have been a cold-blooded scientist, Tania, but he made one rather odd statement about Mary. He said that she appeared to be remembering something she could not possibly have experienced. It was that which really aroused my interest in his notes before you arrived like a thief in the night.’ He gave another sad smile and walked over to a tape-recorder across the room. ‘It also gave me a possible clue to what happened in the room to drive Anna Harb berserk. Did she realize that she had trained her daughter too well and produced a monster perhaps?’ Forest had been rewinding a roll of tape and he motioned Tania across to him.
‘That was the office file on the Van Traylen Fellowship which arrived just now, my dear. It contains a short biography of each of the society’s guardians, but there is only one of these which need concern us, I fancy. While I am looking through it, I’d like you to listen to this tape which Haynes made of Mary Valley’s reactions under narco-analysis.’ He switched on the set and returned to the table.
‘You are beginning to wake up, aren’t you, Mary?’ Peter Haynes sounded gentle, but also commanding. ‘I want you to listen to me very carefully indeed, Mary. Last time after I put you to sleep you woke up and told me about somebody named Vincent. What happened to Vincent, Mary?’
‘He died, sir. Vincent died long ago at Harmer Flats and I don’t want to talk about him.’ The child’s voice had a whine and a sob in it. ‘Please don’t make me think about Vincent.’
‘You must think about Vincent, Mary. I want to help you and you are going to tell me everything. You say that he died at a place called Harmer Flats. How did he die?’
‘He burned . . . screaming . . . with the steers pushing him back . . . trampling his body . . . but still alive in the fire.’ The words were punctuated by short gasps and so low that Tania could hardly hear them.
‘And where were you, Mary? Did you see Vincent die?’
‘Of course. I was there with him. I loved Vincent but I killed him too because it was my idea. We had to destroy the accounts before the auditors were due. A million dollars they would have found we owed in Federal tax and it seemed so simple . . . so very simple till the wind veered round to the north. No, let me sleep again. I don’t want to talk about hell fire any more.’
‘You must talk, Mary. You must let me help you.’ Haynes spoke very slowly and Tania could almost feel him willing the child to talk. ‘How did you start the fire?’
‘We used kerosene, of course. The office building was mainly wood and it burned like a torch. And then the wind changed and the steers stampeded.’ There was a long pause and when the voice returned it sounded resigned and Tania knew that Haynes must have broken through Mary’s resistance.
‘The wind swung round to the north, didn’t it, my darling? It sent the flames right across the knocking pens and the plant itself caught fire. Then the steers broke out of the stockade and came towards us. I can still see them, hear them, even smell them in the smoke. Do you remember how red the horns looked, Vincent?’ There was a child’s scream, a woman’s cry and then a grunting, bellowing sound that was not human at all.
‘So you died, my darling, darling Vincent. You held them back till I had time to reach the truck and you died for me, my own darling. They gored you and trampled you and they threw you alive into the fire.’ An old voice came whispering out from t
he tape-recorder and Tania felt a sudden stab of pain and looked down to see that her nails had dug deeply into the palms of her hands.
‘You gave me my life, Vincent, and I swore I would always keep it safe for you. It was so cool in the truck at first. We used it to carry the pay rolls and the door was armoured; two-inch steel. Very slowly the heat came and then faster and faster till my body started to melt and I saw the door glow red. Yes, as red as a cherry the steel was and my body melted. Where are you, darling? Why don’t the men come to help me?’ An old woman broke off in a fit of sobbing and then the child’s voice returned.
‘Let me go home now please, sir. I want to go back to my friends and be safe with Auntie Alison and Uncle Michael and the others. Please don’t send me back into the fire . . . into hell again.’
‘Very soon you will go home, Mary.’ There was a scraping sound as if Haynes had drawn his chair closer to the cot. ‘But you must finish the story first. Who were the men who should have come to help you?’
‘My men, our men, of course. Frank and Sean and Jesse; all of them. You saved my life at the end, Jesse, but you were still too late. I covered my face when I fell, but look at what happened to me. Look at my feet and my breasts and my poor, poor arms.’
‘All right, Mary.’ Haynes’s voice was merely tired and the air of command had left it. ‘That’s all you can take for the present, so sleep well, my dear.’ There was a click and then complete silence, except for the whirr of the tape running on to the end of the spool.
‘Well, I’ve heard it, John.’ Tania switched off the tape-recorder and walked over to the table. She felt drained of strength as if her body were a torn rag doll from which the sawdust stuffing was running out.
‘That was not merely a nightmare or a story she had read or heard told to her. That child was actually experiencing something that had happened to her.’
‘No, not to her personally, Tania.’ Forest was staring dully at a sheet of newsprint and a photograph laid in front of him. ‘Until a few moments ago I was a sceptic, Tania. I believed in the possibilities of clairvoyance and in extrasensory perception, but only in the possibilities. Not for one moment would I have admitted of such a thing as supernatural possession; that the spirits of the dead may enter into the living. Now, I am not sure. I am not sure about anything any more. I fear the supernatural and I don’t like this, Tania.’ He pushed the cutting and the photograph across to her and leaned far back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling.
‘I’ve seen her before.’ Tania studied the picture. Helen Van Traylen had been middle-aged when it was taken and she was still strikingly beautiful. She wore the same elbow-length gloves that Marcus had noticed in the other photograph.
‘U.S. HORROR.’ The newspaper clipping was so faded that Tania had to hold it under the lamp, ‘MILLIONAIRE BURNED TO DEATH AS CATTLE STAMPEDE. NARROW ESCAPE OF SOCIETY HOSTESS.’
‘Very strange, isn’t it, Tania?’ Forest was refilling his glass as he spoke. ‘Haynes states that on the surface Mary Valley appears quite normal. It is only when she imagines she is unobserved, asleep or under drugs, that the condition is apparent. Only then does the obsession with heat and a dream of flames and pain and stampeded cattle and a man called Vincent take place.’ His hand reached out and tilted Tania’s face towards his own.
‘Vincent has a surname, too. It was Van Traylen and he died during a fire which occurred in a meat-canning factory at a town called Harmer Flats in the American Middle West. His widow’s name was Helen and she always wore long gloves to conceal the scars of her escape.
‘I don’t like it, my dear. I’ve always gone by facts and definite evidence and I’ve never written a story about the occult in my life. This is absurd, hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo and the three-headed devil howling on top of a ruined church.’
‘But we have facts, John, three of them.’ Tania drew back before the reek of rum on his breath. ‘We know that Mary’s mother claims to have occult powers and tried to pass them on to her daughter. We know that Mary was Mrs Van Traylen’s special favourite and was in the house when the woman killed herself. I have just listened to the third fact and this confirms it.’ She looked down at the date on the newspaper clipping.
‘Possession is the only explanation there can be. How else could a small child relive something that happened to a dead woman more than thirty years ago?’
Chapter Fifteen
‘Tania darling, please listen to me. You must put this notion out of your mind.’ Tania had telephoned him back a few minutes ago and Marcus was sitting behind the porter’s desk of the Ben Deargh Hotel and shouting to make himself heard. The Home Secretary’s ban on tourist traffic to Bala had come too late and every hostelry on the island was crammed to overflowing. There were the eager and public-spirited who had come to help, the merely curious and the openly morbid who hoped to witness a bloodthirsty climax. All these people had flocked over from the mainland and conditions at Lochern were chaotic. The Ben Deargh itself resembled a refugee camp, with camp beds in the corridors, and the entrance hall was like a railway booking office during the rush hour.
‘You must remember that you are seven months pregnant, Tania, and have far too much imagination at any time. You’ve also been reading little except books on psychic research for the last year and they have obviously gone to your head. Please try and relax, my sweet. I realize you’re distressed and have had to wait several hours to get in touch with me. But the military have taken over the exchange and it’s a wonder you got a line at all. Tania, can you hear me?
‘Damnation.’ The telephone was silent and Marcus pressed the rest up and down impatiently. He was very anxious indeed about his wife and he cursed himself for leaving her in the first place.
‘Operator, I was talking to a London number. 176 7832 and we’ve been cut off. Would you reconnect me, please?
‘Yes, I do realize that all your lines are busy, but I am a doctor of medicine and this is urgent. Please, operator.
‘Thank you. I’ll hold on then.’ Marcus edged himself still farther into the corner as two well-dressed, middle-aged women who should have known better started to hammer on the counter in the vain hope of finding accommodation.
Why did that blasted fellow Forest have to distress Tania with such an idea? he thought. She was a strong, healthy woman, but she might be in for a bad attack of pre-natal tension if this went on. He’d take the first available plane back to London and put an end to such notions at once.
And what a notion it was! The mind of a dead woman possessing a child and making her relive a terrifying experience which had happened years ago. Absurd, utterly untenable, and also revolting. As his many enemies said, Forest had been writing sensational muck for so long that he’d believe anything. He not only wrote clichés; he lived them.
‘No, madam, I am not one of the hotel servants.’ Marcus scowled up with a jerk as one of the women prodded him painfully on the shoulder with her umbrella. ‘I am sorry your former accommodation was so uncomfortable that you had to give it up, but can assure you that there is not a bed to be found here. My advice is that you catch the last ferry back to the mainland. It leaves at seven o’clock.
‘Thank you, operator. Yes, I’m still holding.’ Through the open doors Marcus heard a rattle like machine-gun fire and watched a helicopter come wheeling over the opposite buildings and land in the square. The sun had set long ago and aircraft would be useless in the dark. In Marcus’s own mind the whole search was of purely academic interest now. He and Kirk had spoken to the colonel of the marine commandos and he had been quite certain of that. With the exception of one small area, due to be beaten in the morning, the whole of Bala had been covered. There was little chance of Harb having managed to double back to the mainland and no chance at all of her being hidden by the local population, whatever Tania and Forest might dream up. The driver of the police car must have been correct in saying that her body was deep in the earth or out to sea.
But why had the
authorities allowed civilians to pour on to Bala and create this state of chaos and hysteria? Marcus winced as one of the women found a bell and started to ring it loudly, while from outside the noise of the helicopter was replaced by a roar of motor cycles and a dozen youths in leather jackets shot across the square. The Van Traylen people were not the only ones who were suffering now. At this moment, a perfectly inoffensive gipsy woman was lying critically ill in the Cottage Hospital, having been beaten and kicked and slashed by a party of thugs who had mistaken, or claimed to have mistaken her for Anna Harb. There were some less seriously injured in the hospital too: the victims of a pitched battle between soldiers and two teenage gangs from Glasgow who had united against them.
‘Madam, will you please stop ringing that blasted bell? I have no idea where the receptionist is, but I am sure she is being run off her feet. I have also told you that there are no vacant rooms in this hotel and you will have to sleep in the open, if you miss that ferry. For your further information I have heard the weather forecast which stated the night will be wet and cold.
‘Operator? Of course I’m here. You can only allow us two minutes? Very well, but please put me through at once.
‘Is that you, darling?’ There was a series of clicks and squeals and then he heard his wife’s voice. ‘Tania, they are going to cut us off for good in a couple of minutes so please listen carefully. I don’t want you to be alone tonight, so get Mrs McDoggart to sleep in. Better still ring Georgie Brown or the Stonehams and ask if they can put you up. I’m going to catch the next boat to the mainland and get on the first plane to London. I should be back with you some time in the morning.
‘No, darling, please put that possession theory right out of your mind. I saw Mary Valley myself yesterday afternoon and I talked to the orphanage doctor. The child was badly shocked by the coach accident and that’s all there is to that. Poor Peter Haynes made an absurd diagnosis and the little girl is quite normal.
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