Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  And then, just as quickly, it dissipated like smoke beneath her touch. Above her head an apocalyptic peal of thunder sounded, and the house trembled.

  Mark’s furled umbrella slipped from its position against the banisters and fell down into the hall. Its metal tip shot under the back of Joan’s necklace, catching it, the handle yanking the chain down hard. Joan was wearing new high heels that slipped on the tiled floor and pulled her over. As she fell, the umbrella, now caught in the necklace, twisted as she landed on it, tightening the chain into a noose. The metal jewel settings sliced into her soft neck, neatly severing her carotid artery. She frantically tried to pull herself upright, but the umbrella twisted like a garrote and the jewels bit deeper. Her blood pooled in a scarlet mirror across the floor. For a brief moment she saw Andrew reflected, then she died.

  Olivia Bayer

  ‘Well, I continued working upstairs,’ Mark told the sceptical policeman who was covertly checking his pupils to see if he’d been taking drugs.

  ‘You mean to tell me that your mother was struggling to catch her breath just one floor below and you didn’t hear a thing?’

  ‘No, I had my headphones on. I didn’t know anything about it until I went downstairs to get a drink.’

  ‘And how much later was that?’

  ‘I don’t know, twenty minutes, half an hour.’

  ‘And you didn’t even get up close to check on her?’

  ‘Why would I? There was blood everywhere. I could clearly see she was dead.’ He knew that the image of his mother lying on the black and white tiles in a nimbus of her own blood would stay with him forever.

  The officers who quizzed Mark after his mother’s death were quick to rule him out of any involvement in what the forensics team termed a bizarre accident, because his computer log showed that he was at his terminal during the time of death, and it was clear that Joan Bayer had died alone. Mark’s story perfectly matched the sequence of events, but the officers agreed that they had never heard of anyone dying in such a bizarre manner.

  From this date on, Mark’s father stopped speaking to his son. Mark moved out a few days after the funeral, and rented a tumbledown flatshare in Whitechapel. The strange story of the Bayer family deaths had been kept out of the press until now, but this latest addition to the roll-call of the deceased received its first passing mention in the tabloids.

  Mark had now begun to believe that some kind of embodiment of evil was hunting down his relatives, but although he tried to talk about it, none of the surviving family members were prepared to listen to him. Reading up about wills on the internet, he was shocked to discover how many inheritance settlements caused the breakdown of family relationships. Eventually he was forced to reach the only logical conclusion—that this terrible chain of events was simply the kind of bad luck that followed the sudden loss of a family patriarch.

  Mark was now seriously broke, and because he had lately been preoccupied, he lost the support of his only freelance client. He was on the verge of asking his brother Ben for a loan from the money he had been left, but at the last minute decided not to request any assistance. He could not explain why he decided on this. He simply couldn’t help feeling that everything Andrew left to his family had been irrevocably tainted.

  Olivia, Uncle Andrew’s twenty-one-year-old daughter from his first marriage, was a loner. She rarely spoke to any other members of the family. She loved the sea and lived in Brixham, Devon. As a consequence, her father had left her his twenty-two-foot Fletcher speedboat. She took it out even on the coldest days, roaring along the blue coastline for an hour at first light if the tides were favourable.

  One morning, Olivia inexplicably failed to pump the petrol fumes from the tanks and nearly turned the boat into a fireball that would have killed her instantly. She was an experienced mariner. It seemed so unlike her to make such a mistake.

  Shaken by her own neglectfulness, she pumped out the tank and set off at speed, forgetting to untie the aft rope from its mooring capstan. Twenty yards out, the Fletcher slammed to a jarring halt, catapulting her backwards into the freezing water, and the racing propeller blade bounced down, ploughing into her screaming face, mincing it into fish-chum. By the time the harbour rescue team pulled her out, there was nothing left above the ragged stump of her neck.

  Olivia Bayer’s father had also left her money, and this was now inherited by Catherine, Uncle Andrew’s second wife. There were just four descendants of the Bayer family left alive: Mark and his brother Ben, their father Warren and Catherine.

  Warren Bayer

  Mark had taken to meeting up regularly with Lycus Gerolstein, his uncle’s lawyer, because they shared a morbid curiosity about the family’s ill-fortune. As winter dragged on, they sat together in the little coffee shop on Wardour Street, trying to come to terms with each new twist of fate.

  ‘I’ve done some more digging,’ said Lycus one morning, opening his briefcase and pulling out a sheaf of papers. ‘As you know, your uncle was admitted to the Harley Street Clinic on three separate occasions. Each time, he had been suffering from blackouts and memory loss. During the recovery periods he temporarily lost the power of speech. The dates on each of the codicils match these periods. It’s my belief that your uncle was in no fit state to sign anything. He wouldn’t have known what he was doing.’

  ‘Then why were the revisions accepted?’

  ‘We had no choice. His signature was on each of them, which made them legally binding documents. You understand, of course, that I am required to remain in a neutral position throughout this process.’

  ‘Do you know who else was present when the codicils were signed?’

  ‘His second wife, Catherine, was there on the first occasion. Gabriel, his brother, was certainly present two months later, when your uncle was admitted once more.’ Lycus hesitated.

  ‘And the third?’ prompted Mark.

  ‘Your father,’ said Lycus with an air of apology. ‘Warren went to the hospital with Andrew and stayed there overnight with him.’

  Warren Bayer was late for the meeting at his head office in Clerkenwell. The tube platform at Angel was uncomfortably crowded, but he had not been able to find a taxi in the rain. As he watched the red dot-matrix board revise the train arrival times, he touched the diamond skull-head cufflinks Andrew had left him. Lately he had been burying himself in his work, trying to forget the tragedy that surrounded him. It was easier to place his grief at the death of his wife to one side than it was not to hate his own son for being in the house and doing nothing as she lay dying.

  Just a few short months ago they had all lived in a state of distant equilibrium, but now the ruptures were tearing them all apart. Every action was subject to examination, every phone call a reason for suspicion. He hated the way he found himself behaving. It was just so damnably un-English.

  Warren checked his watch. He was going to be late. The atmosphere on the platform seemed dense and stifling. A buffet of warm air announced the arrival of the train.

  He studied the travel poster opposite, a fierce sienna photograph of a Middle Eastern desert. He looked hard at the centre of the poster. A blackish-green spot was appearing, as if mold was starting to come through from the wall behind. The black pattern grew, forming itself into the vague shape of a man. He looked around to see if anyone else was noticing the phenomenon forming on the poster, but the other passengers were going about their business as usual.

  Fascinated, Warren failed to hear the announcement that the next train would not stop. He looked back at the expanding shape, and it seemed for a moment that Andrew was there, calling to him, trying to tell him something, if he could only get a little nearer…

  The sound of the arriving train rose in his ears, and there was Andrew in his shiny midnight blue suit and white straw hat, stepping from the poster, desperately trying to communicate. In shock, Warren raised out his hands and stretched forward just as the hurtling underground train hit him, shattering both his wrists, splintering bone, t
earing sinew and muscle.

  He was spun around and cartwheeled in between the platform and the train, his severed hands with their cuffs and cufflinks still intact, sparkling in the shadows beneath the platform like forbidden treasures.

  Catherine Bayer

  Mark was seized by panic. Only three descendants were left alive. He tried to follow the chain of events that took place after the discovery of his uncle’s illness, convinced that something had happened to ignite this contagion of damnation, but found nothing. At his father’s service, he talked to his brother.

  ‘Ben, you must promise me something,’ he said as they left the crematorium, a pleasant London park filled with clipped English trees and a great many bare rose beds neatly arranged like ledgers. ‘You mustn’t spend any of the money Uncle Andrew left you.’

  ‘Don’t start getting weird on me,’ said Ben impatiently. ‘It’s not cursed, okay? Our parents died because they were messed up and distracted. I’m sure if either of them had been thinking clearly, they’d have survived. Shit like this happens to families all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Our mother was killed by her necklace. Dad’s hands were severed. Christ, even you should be able to see that these weren’t accidents!’

  ‘I agree, it’s kind of creepy, but any explanation you try to come up with would have to be a whole lot creepier.’

  ‘How do you explain what happened to the rest of the family? You think they were all distracted? What if there really was an explanation for everything that has happened?’

  ‘Like what? The old man secretly hated them all and cursed his belongings? If you believe that, you’re as nuts as the rest of them.’ Ben tried to pull away but Mark held him back.

  ‘Think what you like. I’m just asking you not to spend the money for now. Not until I’ve figured this out.’

  Mark walked away from his brother. He had always been close with Ben, but even they were being forced apart.

  Catherine, Uncle Andrew’s second wife, had chosen to stay away from this latest funeral. She was having problems of her own; she was becoming increasingly angry with her Russian builders. They worked hard, but they had a habit of leaving every door and window open. She had hired them to renovate the great neo-Georgian Buckinghamshire house Andrew had left her, and spent her days trying to keep out the wind and rain as the workmen walked mud through the hall. Now she could hear something slamming around upstairs, and knew they had left one of the windows wide again.

  There was an icy draught coming from the main bedroom. She threw back the door and saw the problem: they had exited onto the scaffolding and left the place open to the elements. She went to the window and looked out, trying to see if she could see them. It was almost dark, and the scaffolds stretched off into tarpaulin-draped shadows.

  The wind had risen. The tarpaulins banged and rattled like the billowing sails of a ship. The weather forecast had warned of gales. Her workmen had clearly finished for the night. How could they be so thoughtless? She reached up to close the window and saw the figure standing outside on the planked terrace, peering in at her. Its fierce eyes glowed in the dark. He was shouting something, but the noise of the wind was snatching his words away.

  Catherine was too startled to move.

  She was still staring at the shadow-form of her dead husband when the gale lifted the tarps and rolled the scaffolding pole from where it had been carelessly left on the walkway. The steel tube swung down, flipped over and shot through the window, punching a hole through Catherine’s chest, hurling her to the far side of the room in a spray of glass, wood and blood. She remained there, skewered through the heart, as the figure broke up and dissipated into the turbulent night air.

  Lycus Gerolstein

  ‘Something has been bothering me for days,’ said Mark as they sat at their usual places in the little coffee shop. ‘You were supposed to have lunch with my uncle on the day he died. What were you meeting about?’

  ‘I told you,’ said Lycus patiently. ‘Andrew wasn’t happy with his current investment portfolio and was thinking of changing his accountant. He wanted my advice.’

  ‘You could have done that in London. Bit of an odd coincidence, wasn’t it, you both being in Monaco?’

  ‘Not really. I have a number of clients based there, and your uncle enjoyed driving along the Savaric cliffs. It crossed my mind that he might be keeping a mistress there.’

  Mark thought for a minute. Something was scratching away at the back of his brain. ‘Could I see the original will?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Lycus. ‘It’s at my house. I thought I should keep it there, away from the rest of your family.’

  ‘There’s only two of us left alive now,’ Mark reminded him. His heart was beating hard in his chest. He did not want the lawyer to see how anxious he was.

  ‘Tell you what, why don’t you come down tomorrow evening?’ Lycus suggested. ‘I can show it to you then.’

  The following afternoon, Mark made his way to London Bridge and caught a train to Sevenoaks. He found Lycus Gerolstein’s house set back on a densely wooded hill near the station. The lawyer had never married and lived alone.

  ‘Come in, it’s a frightful night,’ said Lycus, holding the door wide. ‘It feels like these storms will never end. I thought you might cancel. Actually I’m very glad you could make it, because there’s something I’ve been meaning to discuss with you.’

  Mark settled himself in a deep sofa in the firelit lounge while Lycus poured some wine. ‘You know, you’re going to be a very rich young man soon,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘How would that be possible?’ Mark suspected that his parents had left him money, but since his uncle’s death the subject of inheritance had become objectionable to him.

  ‘Catherine Bayer died intestate. Without a will, the house she had inherited from your uncle passes to you.’

  ‘Surely it would go to the children from her previous marriage?’

  ‘No. Andrew specified that in the event of his wife’s death you should inherit their house.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why would he do that? He deliberately kept me out of his original will.’

  ‘Perhaps he had a change of heart.’

  Mark sensed that the lawyer was lying. He felt sure that Lycus would have discussed the possibility with him earlier. ‘Why are you only telling me this now?’

  ‘I already explained that I’m not allowed to take sides. I’m afraid that meant restricting information to interested parties. Don’t you see, if your family had known exactly what was in the codicils, they might have acted against each other?’

  ‘You’re talking about premeditated murder, Lycus. No, I can’t allow myself to believe that. I want to see the original will.’

  Lycus sighed and rose to his feet. ‘Very well. Follow me.’ He led the way upstairs, into a narrow extension that seemed older than the rest of the house. ‘This is all that’s left of an earlier building. 1720. Mind your head on the beams.’

  Lycus led the way to a large room with a vaulted wooden ceiling. At one end a wood fire crackled in a large stone grate. ‘This single room constitutes the whole of the original house,’ he explained. ‘This is where your uncle and I kept our collection. I’ve never shown this to anyone else.’

  The lawyer’s study was lined with beechwood museum cases. Mark approached one and peered inside. African, English and Spanish masks stared sightlessly back at him.

  ‘They belonged to devil worshippers,’ Lycus explained. ‘No matter what each race believes in, one thing is constant to every creed. There’s always a devil.’

  ‘I suppose that’s because we’re all afraid of dying,’ said Mark. ‘We need to believe in someone who will allow us to strike a bargain.’

  Lycus looked pleased. ‘You’re exactly right,’ he said. ‘It’s human nature to seek an escape clause. The structure of every religion requires a mirror image. Every deity needs its opposite.’

  Mark studied the carved fe
tish idols, their screaming faces and twisted wooden limbs. ‘Quite a hobby.’

  ‘Your uncle and I shared the same interests. We wondered if it was possible that the objects men made, the items they worshipped with, the things they owned, could become imbued with their spirits. Ever since priests first sold nails from Christ’s cross, such items have had totemic value. They’ve always been in demand. Here we are.’

  Lycus opened a glass-topped case and withdrew an envelope. ‘Your uncle’s will, and its codicils.’

  He slid out the vellum within and spread the pages across the glass. Mark stared at his uncle’s signature, as delicate as a spiderweb. Beneath it was a line that read: Signature of Beneficiary.

  Above the signature of Andrew Bayer it said: Signature of Notary Official. In the space beside it, Lycus Gerolstein had written his name.

  He checked all the documents, the first will and the three codicils. In each case, Lycus Gerolstein had signed his name.

  ‘You were there,’ said Mark, looking up. ‘You were the officiating witness for all of these.’

  ‘Well, I had to be, otherwise the document would not have held any legal power.’

  ‘So you always knew who had tried to coerce my uncle into changing his will.’

  ‘I told you before, Mark, it is a requirement of my profession to remain non-partisan. I knew that almost every member of your family had tried to persuade Andrew to change his mind. Each of them had patiently waited for him to become enfeebled before persuading him to sign. When your uncle recovered, he remembered little of what he had done. I had to tell him. By the time he was healing from his third attack, the bequests were in a hopeless mess once more. I wanted to spare you that knowledge.’

  Lycus moved to a cabinet and withdrew a shallow walnut box, carrying it as if he was transporting an item of immense worth and fragility. Lifting the lid, he took out an ornately carved fountain pen and handed it to Mark. It was surprisingly heavy.