The Devil's Dice

by Roz Watkins

  Whilst I was full of pity for this poor man who’d lost two children, I had to get the information from him as quickly as possible. ‘Is there Huntington’s in your family?’ I said.

  He raised his head slowly and frowned at me, the folds in his face deepening. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Did you know Peter had a daughter?’

  ‘What?’ He took a cotton handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. ‘Has she…?’

  ‘Has she got Huntington’s? I don’t know. She’s only fifteen, and she’s gone missing.’

  ‘Oh no, no. My mother’s right. This is a curse.’

  ‘Did Peter know? What about Mark? And Beth?’

  ‘What do you mean she’s gone missing?’

  ‘We’re looking for her. Did Peter know about the Huntington’s?’

  He spoke quietly into his chin. ‘He realised about a year ago. I thought it kindest not to tell them when they were young. You don’t understand unless you’ve lived with it.’

  ‘You kept it from them?’

  ‘You think I don’t feel terrible?’ Laurence grasped a chunk of his fleshy stomach. ‘Why do you think I’m like this? It’s a punishment. My guilt embodied.’

  ‘So, your sons and daughter didn’t know until recently?’ I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Laurence. Keeping a secret that big. It was as if his body had expanded to cope with the magnitude of the deception.

  ‘I thought they could have at least half a normal life, without this horrific sword of Damocles hanging over them. How do you tell your children they have a fifty percent chance of a ghastly premature death, just like their mother?’

  ‘But didn’t aunts and uncles die too? They must have noticed lots of illness in the family?’

  ‘Lily was an only child. They knew her father had died young but it wasn’t unusual in that generation. It was a small family. Luckily, they never asked to do a family tree.’

  ‘But what if they’d had children? Without knowing?’

  ‘I kept meaning to tell them… It was never the right time. They all seemed happy. I was going to tell them if ever they talked about having children. But none of them did. Who’s this girl? I can’t bear it.’

  ‘She’s Felix’s daughter. Only it seems she may actually be Peter’s daughter.’

  He let out a tiny puff of breath that seemed to contain a lifetime of sadness. ‘My God. Is she showing signs?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He put his head in his hands and let out a low groan, like an animal in pain.

  ‘Did you know Kate’s pregnant?’ I said gently.

  ‘Oh, it’s too much. My mother… she was rambling. I thought she was confused. Does Kate know?’

  ‘She’s disappeared.’

  Laurence sank deeper in his seat, his folds of fat spreading as if they were melting. ‘I’ve messed up everything,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘I thought it was for the best. I just wanted them to have normal lives for a while, after losing their mother. And it was different a few years ago. People were ashamed, discriminated against. You know it used to be called the Witchcraft disease, and even when I was a child, they were talking about compulsory sterilisation.’

  Witchcraft. The young woman in Piers’s diary who was accused of being a witch. The sister who turned against her was married to the accuser. The supposed witch must have had the disease, and her sister must have had it too, but showed signs later. She’d passed it on to some of her eight children, who’d passed it on to the subsequent sufferers under the ‘curse’. Poor Piers Hamilton must have had it too. No wonder his carving didn’t work. And the man who’d sketched the images of the Grim Reaper. He’d probably had it too, and committed suicide.

  ‘The Grim Reaper… and the curse… it was all about this.’

  ‘Look, if I’d told them, they might not have been able to get life insurance, mortgages – even getting a job can be hard. And most people who know they’re at risk don’t want to find out if they’ll get it. So, I figured people prefer not to know.’

  I had read this. Most people who knew they had a fifty percent chance of having the disease chose not to take the test. Laurence had a point. But he should have told us last week.

  ‘So, you knew exactly what your mother was talking about with the curse,’ I said. ‘That’s why you didn’t want me to talk to her.’

  ‘Mark asked me not to say anything. It would give the life insurance company an excuse not to pay out. Mark said he and Kate have started a charity to help sick people. He said she was going to put the insurance money towards it. It was a huge amount of money – I wanted it to go to them.’

  ‘This could be relevant to Peter’s death. And possibly Beth’s too. We’ve been conducting this whole investigation in the dark.’

  ‘I just did as Mark asked. What does it matter anyway? They’re both dead now.’

  *

  The gravel outside Mark Hamilton’s house had turned to a river bed. A wide ribbon of water flowed past his house and towards his barn. I parked in the shallowest spot and battled my way against the wind to the door.

  ‘Mark!’ I hammered on the rain-soaked wood. The dogs were throwing themselves against the living room window on my left, but I couldn’t hear any in the hall behind the front door. There was no sign of Mark. I hammered again. The dogs’ barks reached frenzied levels. Where the hell was he?

  I tried the door handle and it turned. I gave the door a shove and pushed my way into the hallway, which was dusty and smelt of damp. I peered through the glass living room door. It was being battered by a wall of dogs. No sign of Mark. Christ, was he dead too? I smacked the glass with the palm of my hand.

  A door at the far end of the living room swung open and Mark appeared, wearing leggings and a jumper that looked like it belonged to a tramp. He shuffled over and opened the door. The dogs charged through and a Saint Bernard knocked me to the floor. Mark stood silently and watched while I scrabbled up.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said, although he probably should have been saying that to me.

  ‘Why are you in my house?’

  I brushed dust and hair from my trousers. ‘Did you know Rosie Carstairs has gone missing?’

  He froze, his face blank. Then he spoke in a coarse voice, like something heavy being dragged over gravel. ‘Yes. You’d better come into the kitchen.’

  We trailed through to the slightly warmer kitchen, and Mark pulled the solid, Georgian door closed behind us. I found myself a chair with just a few magazines and no cats on it. I shoved the magazines on the table and sat down. In a corner of the room sat a tin bucket, into which drips fell noisily from the ceiling.

  ‘Sorry about the attire.’ He plonked himself on a chair, on top of a small stack of British Medical Journals. A tortoiseshell cat crawled onto his knee. ‘I’m not having a great day. Losing all your siblings can do that to you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. And sorry to disturb you.’

  He stroked the cat meditatively, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  ‘You need to help us find Rosie,’ I said. ‘I know about the Huntington’s. Does she have the juvenile form? Did she find out?’

  ‘I barely even know Rosie.’

  ‘But you know she might be Peter’s daughter.’

  ‘Yes. I do know she might be Peter’s daughter. In fact, judging by the symptoms she’s been having, I’d say she’s almost certainly Peter’s daughter. And what an almighty fuck-up that is.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Why are you so desperate to find her? What’s the point? All these police swarming all over the countryside, and appeals to the cretinous public. Rosie’s doomed anyway. There are no happy endings for her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Rosie’s fucked.’ I winced as if he’d slapped me. ‘The only blessing is she won’t reproduce, and this torment will die out, at least in our family.’

  I instinctively shuffled back in my chair, pu
tting an extra inch between us. What had happened to him? Where was the kind man I’d met before? ‘Do you know where she is? Do you think she’s in trouble?’

  ‘She’s in trouble all right.’

  ‘Do you know where she might be?’

  He sighed. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Mark, did you know Kate’s pregnant?’

  He looked at me, his eyes black and a muscle twitching in his cheek. ‘No. She can’t be.’

  ‘It’s probably very early days.’

  Mark carefully lifted the cat from his knee and placed her on the table. He stood, walked to the far side of the room, and bashed his head against the exposed stone wall. Hard. And then again. I jumped from my chair and rushed over to him.

  ‘Mark! Stop, please.’

  He turned to me, clutching his stomach. ‘When will this end? I thought she’d been spared.’

  ‘Do you know where Kate is?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s gone missing too.’

  All the life went out of him. He returned to the chair and the cat jumped back on his knee. A red dribble oozed down his face.

  I sat back down, wishing I had a cat to stroke too. ‘Kate didn’t know about the Huntington’s?’

  ‘No. I told her on Thursday, because of Rosie. I didn’t know she was… Oh God. Peter swore they weren’t trying for kids. I mean, he was taking those bloody drugs from his client. He thought they were helping. Jesus, why wasn’t he more careful? For fuck’s sake. Poor Kate. She’ll be devastated. She’ll have to take the test. She’ll have gone on a walk in the Peaks to think, and then she’ll go to the mill.’

  One of Mark’s dogs, a Jack Russell, tried to crawl onto his knee, obviously not noticing the cat. Mark sat oblivious while the cat hissed and smacked the dog hard across its nose. The dog whined and skulked away. The cat gave it a smug look and cleaned her face with a front paw.

  ‘You mean she’ll have gone to her holiday home?’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Mark said. ‘People think life’s so fucking sacred. What’s sacred about turning into a demented, angry monster, who can’t move or talk or even swallow, who eventually dies of suffocation?’ A vein pulsed in his neck. ‘Life’s not sacred. Life’s an evolutionary bloody accident.’

  I stared at him, not even sure what point he was making now.

  ‘God,’ he spat. ‘They think there’s a benevolent God. More like a sick fuck. Let’s do it on the throw of a dice. You? Oh, we’ll give you a normal life. You? Let’s go for horrific illness in middle age, and premature death after excruciating suffering. You? Oh, let’s add a bit of spice and kick it off at age fourteen, just when you should be brimming with health and have your whole life ahead of you.’

  I looked into the black centres of his eyes. What could I say? Nothing could make this any better. ‘I’m really sorry about your family.’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks. It’s life. You’re not religious are you?’ He gave a humourless laugh.

  ‘No.’ I remembered Carrie in the weeks before she died – her body so thin it could snap, her wispy hair just beginning to grow back because there wasn’t any point in chemo any more. ‘No,’ I repeated. ‘If I thought someone had created this world deliberately, I don’t think I could live with my fury. So, no. No benevolent gods in my little construction of reality.’

  Mark looked at me as if inspecting an exhibit in a museum. ‘Good. We have to find Kate.’ He wiped a smear of blood from his forehead. ‘She can’t take the pregnancy to term if it’s got Huntington’s. This suffering’s gone on for enough generations. It has to end.’

  ‘The police think she killed Peter and now she’s possibly taken Rosie.’

  ‘I thought you were the police?’

  I didn’t answer and he just gave a slight nod. ‘Kate didn’t kill him. She loved him, and she didn’t know he had HD. I kept telling him to say something to her. He promised over and over, but he could never make himself do it. That’s what we argued about before he died.’

  ‘Do you think he killed himself?’ I asked.

  One of the magazines I’d moved from my chair was familiar. The Godly business woman again. She was everywhere.

  ‘Isn’t that religious?’ I nodded towards the magazine.

  ‘Oh. Yes. One of the receptionists at work gave it to me. How hilarious is that? She thinks she’s going to save me. I told her it was too damn late for that. Anyway, thought I’d have a look. Know thine enemy and all that, but it’s incoherent.’

  ‘Which receptionist gave it to you?’

  ‘Oh, the main one, Vivian. Chuck it on the floor.’ He leant over, picked up the magazine and dropped it onto a clump of dog hair on the terracotta floor tiles. ‘No, he didn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t have done it at this stage. He was still deluding himself he could find a magic cure. There was plenty of torment for both him and Kate to go through before he got to that point. People always think they’ll just have a few more days or a few more weeks. Unless they have to go to Dignitas, of course, because no one’s got the guts to help them in this country. Then they’re forced to go too early.’

  ‘He was reading Stoic philosophy though?’

  ‘I took that as a positive sign. I gather he was spending time sitting in that cave smoking weed and reading Epictetus. I must die, but must I die groaning? He could have done worse.’

  ‘Did he have the test for HD?’ I asked. ‘Without it getting onto his medical records?’

  ‘We all did. Privately and secretly. It’s the best way.’

  I looked straight into Mark’s eyes. He didn’t tell me his result.

  ‘Beth had the gene too,’ he said. ‘She’ll have killed herself. She was brave like that, different from Peter. Why do you think so many of our family end up going over that cliff? It’s not about the house. It’s just that the house stayed in our family.’

  No, the curse wasn’t about the house. Beth had known that. No wonder she’d been so keen to shut Kate up. She hadn’t wanted anyone to realise what the curse was really about, for fear of losing Peter’s life insurance.

  ‘I know about Tithonus,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Your mum told me. They suspended you.’

  I glanced up. ‘You knew I was suspended? Why are you even talking to me?’

  ‘Thought I owed you that much in the circumstances. I know you tried not to get us into trouble.’ Mark smiled, his earlier venom gone. ‘Sorry I ranted on at you.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘There’s some terrible things going on. Mark, if the test shows the baby has HD…’

  ‘The foetus. The rule is that Kate would be required to terminate.’

  Chapter 38

  My mobile rang as I drove away from Mark’s house. I snatched it illegally to my ear. Olivia’s voice, fast-paced and panicky. ‘I was looking again at her Twitter feed and she tweeted this weird thing, just before she disappeared. I think it might mean something.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘I am both Theseus and the Minotaur.’

  ‘Theseus and the Minotaur? As in the Greek myth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am both?’

  Her voice was high pitched. ‘Yes, yes, what does it mean?’

  ‘Do you have any idea? Didn’t you say she was into Greek myths?’

  ‘Yes, she is. But I don’t know what it means.’

  ‘Okay. Let me look into it. Speak soon.’

  I ended the call before she could ask me anything awkward, and called Jai.

  ‘For God’s sake, Meg, what are you doing?’

  ‘Have you found her?’

  A momentary pause. ‘No.’

  I told him about my conversation with Olivia.

  ‘Why did she call you?’

  ‘Her choice.’

  ‘Do you know what it means?’ Jai said. ‘Why all the Greeks? We’ve had Tithonus, Epictetus, now Theseus.’

  ‘I’m just thinking…’

  ‘You’re not on this case, remember.’<
br />
  I winced. ‘Yeah, well, have the rest of you even heard of Theseus?’

  ‘Yes, actually. The Minotaur in the Labyrinth.’

  I swerved to avoid a vast puddle that had appeared in the road.

  ‘Jai. I think I know where she is.’

  *

  Jai reluctantly agreed to pass my suggestion on to Richard. They would have looked at her Twitter feed anyway, but it might not have meant anything to them. I also suggested they look for Kate in her holiday home. I didn’t know the address, but there couldn’t be many converted windmills near Bakewell. I was desperate to get started, but didn’t know exactly where the start was, and of course I couldn’t go in to the Station. I drove home with my fingers clenched and my breath coming in short bursts.

  I let myself in and hobbled through to the kitchen, slipping on the dusty hall floor. My laptop sat on the kitchen table. I wrenched the lid open and started searching. Surely there’d be a caving site with details. But there was nothing. Increasingly frantic, I sifted through pages and pages of results, my clammy fingers slipping on the keyboard.

  The reactive sergeant would know. The tattooed one. Ben Pearson. I pictured him telling me about it in the quarry, and then the next day, telling me about the girl who’d hanged herself. It seemed like years ago, when I’d first heard about the noose in the Labyrinth.

  Where teenagers go to commit suicide. Deep inside the Labyrinth. But where was it?

  I grabbed the phone. Of course I didn’t have his number, and had to go via numerous layers of mouth-breathers to get through to him, but eventually there was his voice.

  ‘Pearson.’

  ‘Oh, thank God.’

  I explained, without burdening him with the suspension thing, and asked him where the Labyrinth was.

  I could sense a trace of anxiety thrumming down the phone line. ‘Why?’

  ‘We think a girl’s gone in there. It’s urgent. Please.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’ll be terrifying in there at this time of year. And it’ll flood if these rains continue.’

  ‘Yes, we want to get her out. Where is it?’ If he’d been in front of me, I would have shaken him.

  ‘The landmark that people know is above it,’ he said. ‘It’s called The Devil’s Dice – a load of square-shaped rocks that look like they’ve been chucked out of a spaceship. You’ll find reference to that if you google.’