The Minotaur

by Barbara Vine

  ‘No, Shashtin,’ he said, and, ‘not you.’

  I asked him why not but when I got another ‘no’ I obeyed him. I was afraid he might lie down on the frost-whitened paving and begin to scream or curl himself up behind a bush. Indoors again, I thought of telling Mrs Cosway. Once I wouldn't have hesitated but now, in my subdued state, prepared to do or leave undone a great deal in the cause of avoiding a row, I decided against it. The consequences would be noisy and furious and would change nothing.

  His walk was far shorter than usual. He was back after half an hour. It was very cold outside. A white mist had descended on the garden and hung there, utterly still. The drawing room was the warmest place in the house, with a big coal fire burning, an electric heater on and two oil stoves in corners of the room. As she sometimes did, Mrs Cosway was taking her afternoon rest on the sofa and had covered herself with a blanket in Black Watch tartan, the kind of thing which had been put over one's knees in the days before cars had heaters. When I went into the room to check that John was warm enough, I found her sleeping deeply and John for once without the eiderdown in which he usually wrapped himself. It was covering his armchair but not himself and he had evidently just slipped it off because, for the first time I ever remembered, he was too warm. At only four, it was already dusk, the mist darkening, giving a claustrophobic feel to the house as if going outside would be impossible, as if the thick grey stuff would press against the doors, forcing you back. As usual, the curtains were wide open – Mrs Cosway resisted all attempts to close them and keep the heat in – showing nothing outside but an almost opaque screen of fog.

  So that Ida could knit and Winifred read her book, Anglicans in the Nineteenth Century, all the lights were on and these were reflected in the bulbous side of the Roman vase, curved yellow shapes on its green translucency. Mrs Cosway slept, Winifred turned another page, Ida finished a row and began on the next one. The wool she was using was thick and ash-grey and the finished work, hanging down past her knees, looked like a scarf, but the paper pattern on her lap had a picture on it of a pretty woman wearing a red jumper. Everyone was round the fire. John was gazing at the vase, as rapt as someone watching a long-desired television programme, the world absent, other people nowhere.

  The phone rang at about a quarter past four. I was on my feet, so I went towards the door to answer it, but Winifred almost pushed me aside in her effort to get there first.

  ‘I'll get it, Kerstin.’

  It can't be, I thought, not today, she can't go to him today, but I wasn't tempted to listen. I was tired of it and I went upstairs. To my bedroom to read Disraeli's Sybil in front of the heater Ella had sneaked in, telling me ‘not to say a word to Mother’.

  Ella was in her own room, with a similar heater, or she had been when I passed her door, for I could hear the murmur of her radio. Sybil I found very heavy-going and I have never read beyond the third chapter. In the circumstances, I don't think I would have if it had been the most exciting book in the world. Its title, an innocuous if not very attractive English Christian name, has the same effect on me as ‘Tamara’, on the rare occasions I have heard either of them since. I don't shiver but the name gives me pause in whatever I am doing and for a moment holds me still.

  Before the noises came from downstairs, a few minutes before, I heard Ella's door open and her feet tap down those uncarpeted stairs. I had been sitting by the window but moved away. An icy breath could be-felt between glass and window bars even though outside it was still and windless. With no Mrs Cosway to hinder me, I drew the thin curtains and sat on the bed. I expected at any moment to hear the front door open and close, the Hillman start up and Winifred drive away for her last time alone with Felix. But there was silence, as thick and heavy as it can only be in winter.

  The worst sound in the world broke that silence, not a scream but rather a long-drawn-out cry between a groan and a howl. No words, nothing human about it except that I knew it was human, the sound the tortured must make or those who have received the ultimate bad news. I got off the bed and listened to what followed it, a jumble of voices, all of them on the edge of terror, no words distinguishable. The door to Ella's room was wide open but the room was empty. I came to the top of the stairs. The sounds had died now to groans and a kind of soft wailing.

  I was dreadfully afraid. What I would have liked to do was throw a blanket round me and plunge out into the fog, run down the hill to people who were cheerful and ordinary and who chattered and laughed. But I had to go down. I descended slowly, feeling the blood drain out of my face, feeling my hands begin to shake. Ella was in the hall, as white-faced as I must have been, her eyes huge and staring. The drawing-room door was closed. I opened it and saw what I had come down to see. I went in first, she following me. At the sight which met me I thought I would fall but somehow I stood my ground.

  Blood was everywhere. The room itself was so dingy, every colour muted, its browns and fawns and pinks dulled, and the blood was so bright, splashed on the muddy carpet, sprayed scarlet on clothes and skin. John lay on the floor, his arms upraised as if to clutch at someone to hold and clasp against himself, an impossible happening. The wailing, horribly pathetic and sad, came from him. On the sofa, Mrs Cosway crouched as if she had been standing up on its cushions but had lost her balance. Like a record stuck in a certain groove, she was repeating over and over, ‘What have you done? What have you done?’

  Unbelievably, Ida crawled on the carpet, picking up bloody shards of green glass, her hands covered in blood, tears streaming down her face. A hundred or more fragments of green glass, some of them bloodied, were scattered about, and among them, between Ida and her mother, lay Winifred. I looked at her and at her head and face and then I looked away, covering my mouth. I shut my eyes, opened them and, determined not to retch, dropped on to my knees and felt for a pulse in her neck and at her wrist. There was nothing. She had her coat on, a scarf round her neck.

  ‘Is she dead?’ This was Mrs Cosway and her voice was a squeak.

  ‘Yes.’ I wanted to tell her to get down from there but I couldn't. ‘She's dead.’

  ‘John did it.’ This was Ida, lifting her head, her voice on the edge of becoming a scream, her raised hand full of broken glass. ‘He did it. He picked up the vase and did it.’

  ‘He went for her,’ Mrs Cosway said. ‘I don't know why.’ She looked down at her son, now rolling silently on the carpet. It was then that I noticed that his hands were clean and free of blood. ‘I suppose it's what mad people do.’

  I said I was going to phone the police. It was too late for an ambulance. In the icy dining room I found Ella was already on the phone, showing more coolness and nerve than I would have expected from her. Blood was on her pink sweater and on the phone receiver where she had touched it. It was then that I remembered Mrs Cosway accusing John of pushing her when she fell downstairs. She was doing it again now.

  ‘They're coming,’ Ella said in a lifeless tone.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I didn't see. I'd come down, it was so cold upstairs, and I came in here to look at the wedding presents. I hadn't really looked at them before. I came out after a bit and there was Winifred in the hall putting her coat on. She went into the drawing room but left the door open. I heard her tell Mother and Ida she was going out to see June. I couldn't stand it, Kerstin. I went in and I said, “She's not, she's going to Felix Dunsford. Ask her if she's not.” I didn't wait to hear what happened. I was shaking all over.’

  I told her she would have to tell the police all that.

  ‘I'm going to have some brandy. D‘you want some?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  She looked at her bloodstained hands. ‘Do you know what I keep thinking, Kerstin? I keep thinking he won't want to know us now, not any of us, not after this.’

  This shocked me. I thought I was beyond being astonished by anything the Cosways did but obviously this wasn't so. To keep myself from shouting at her I went back into the drawing room. My
hands and my voice shaking by then, my legs unsteady, I saw Mrs Cosway on the floor, creeping towards Winifred's body. Her hands were bloody but I couldn't see if the skin was broken. Ida's was and badly, a sliver of glass dangling from a cut on her thumb. She had abandoned her task of picking up the glass, a housewife even at the edge of doom, and was back in the chair where she had been before I went upstairs. Sobbing and moaning, she stared at her wounded hands as the blood dripped on to her grey knitting.

  When she saw me she managed to speak. Her voice came out in a thin hoarse squeak. ‘Someone had better tell Eric what John has done.’

  ‘That can keep for half an hour.’ Mrs Cosway knelt over Winifred's body, ignoring John.

  He rolled himself up when he saw me, got on to his knees and seemed about to hide behind the sofa. Something deflected him, perhaps the confrontation at his own level with Winifred. All expression had been wiped from his face. He got to his feet, lumbered slowly out of the room and down the passage. I went after him but I was too late. He went into the library and I heard him turn the key in the lock. He must have kept it about him ever since it appeared to be missing, perhaps in his dressing-gown pocket with the plaster and the ballpoint, the dice, the bottle and all the rest.

  I had become tongue-tied. Instead of going back into the drawing room I sat down on one of the upright chairs which were ranged against the walls in the hall. A fire had been lit the day before in the great old fireplace but the remains never cleared away. I sat there, looking at the ashes. An icy draught was blowing down that wide-open chimney, so strong that the lightly poised harp quivered. Ella had told me that if you stood on the hearth and looked up the chimney on moonlit nights and positioned yourself correctly you could see the moon up there in a square of sky. I closed my eyes, willing my hands to stop shaking. I kept saying to myself, it's not true, John has done nothing, and then that I wished I had left when I said I would and gone home.

  The police were slow in coming. This was due to the fog. It took them three-quarters of an hour to get to Lydstep. There were two of them and later many more but just two at first. I don't remember their names because I never wrote them down and it is thirty-five years ago but I know they were ordinary, quite common names, Wilson and Smith and Brown and Johnson or others of that sort, the sort thousands of English people have, just as thousands of Swedes are called Andersson and Svensson. The middle-aged one was a chief inspector, I think, and the young one was a sergeant, or that may have been later. And there was a doctor, a pathologist, I think. But I don't know. What they looked like I have also quite forgotten. I let them into the house and took them to the drawing room.

  Mrs Cosway was quite calm by this time, chillingly so. Without waiting to be asked, she said to the older policeman, ‘My son did this. He is mentally ill, he is schizophrenic.’

  ‘I see.’ The older one was kneeling down, looking at Winifred. ‘You saw this?’

  ‘Of course. We were here.’

  ‘You were here, madam?’ he said to Ida.

  She nodded. ‘My brother killed her with that thing.’

  ‘Yes, why he had to destroy a priceless vase,’ said Mrs Cosway, ‘I never will know.’

  The sergeant gave her the sort of look I once did when she said something more than usually outrageous. He said, ‘Is there some other room we can go to?’ And then, ‘Where is Mr Cosway now?’

  That was the first time I had ever heard John called that. It seemed to make him into a different person and lift him out of the two roles, child and murderer, imposed on him. I told them he had locked himself in the library and went with them down the passage. I knelt down by the library door and looked through the keyhole. The key was in the lock. Poking it through wouldn't have retrieved it from this side for the bottom of the doors were flush to the wooden flange at their foot. The older policeman told the sergeant to break the doors down but he could see this was impossible, they were heavy and made of oak.

  Ella had joined us by then. ‘Some of the keys fit more than one door,’ she said. ‘We could try others in the lock.’

  She and I went into the dining room. Ida and Mrs Cosway were sitting on opposite sides of the table, not looking at each other but past each other at opposite walls. I hadn't noticed till then that they both had blood splashes on their clothes but nowhere on their skin. There was a powerful smell of the carbolic soap Ida used in the kitchen. They had washed their hands and Mrs Cosway's showed cuts to her thumbs and fingertips and palms. No one spoke. I looked in the sideboard drawer. The left-hand division of it was full of keys, some with labels tied on them with string, and among them was a small white tablet of Largactil. The drawer must have been slightly open when John threw away the pill Ida was trying to give him. Ella picked out possible keys, maybe ten or twelve of them, and we had started back when Mrs Cosway spoke.

  ‘When they have got him out of there they must take him away. We cannot live in this house with a homicidal maniac.’

  ‘Oh, Mother.’

  Ida had made her usual rejoinder to shocking remarks from that source and Mrs Cosway hers to this reproof, ‘Oh, Mother, nothing.’

  After the key John had used had been pushed through the lock, Ella tried one after another of those we had brought from the dining room. Almost the last one she tried – it was labelled bedroom five – unlocked the door. I saw the interior of the library with new eyes, the policemen's eyes, the way I had seen it the first time I went in there. They were even more astonished by it than I had been. At least I knew from the first that a library and a labyrinth both existed in this place. They stepped over the threshold to be faced by a wall of books and were led by Ella along tortuous passages, expressionless marble faces looming above their heads, every turning leading to more laden shelves, every narrow defile apparently a dead end until a side passage suddenly opened where it had seemed there was only paper and vellum and that smell of ancient printer's ink. The sergeant's face showed half-angry bewilderment as the last angle was past and we were all crowded together in the central space. John was there but no one went near him.

  Someone – Ida, I suppose – had replaced all the books he had pulled off the shelves last time he was there. He was sitting on the floor, his back propped against Longinus's plinth, and he had been writing or drawing something in a notebook. The two strange men he had never seen before disquieted him, that was obvious from his expression, but he didn't speak. He put the notebook and pencil on the floor and got to his feet. There was blood on him, but not much, and it was on his clothes, not his skin. His hands were intact, not a cut to be seen. His eyes moved from one policeman to the other, to me, to Ella, then, quite quickly for the slow mover he usually was, he stepped into the passage behind him and was gone. He had disappeared into that part of the library where I had never ventured, a wilderness of bends and angles, all lined with the ten thousand books Zorah had told me were in there.

  ‘Can you get him to come out?’ The sergeant addressed Ella in an exasperated voice.

  ‘I shouldn't think so. You mustn't touch him, you see. He goes mad if he's touched.’

  ‘He's mad already,’ said the chief inspector.

  No one attempted to follow John. I picked up the notebook he had been writing in. It was clean of blood, unmarked by anything but the pencil he had used. He had been drawing and proving the theorem of Pythagoras.

  Looking at it, Ella said, ‘He used to do that a lot when things were bad for him and he was troubled. Pythagoras comforted him.’

  The policemen were uninterested. Conferring, they seemed to decide to send for ‘people who can deal with this sort of thing’, and asked Ella if they could use the phone. What Mrs Cosway thought of their summoning what people usually call ‘men in white coats' I don't know, but she must have overheard them. Still half-disbelieving it had happened, I had a desperate desire to run away, to go anywhere out of this dreadful place, and I said to the sergeant, he being the more approachable of the two, ‘I should go to Windrose and tell Mr Dawson. The
y were to be married tomorrow.’

  ‘We'll do that,’ he said. ‘We'd prefer you to stay here.’

  With my chance of even a brief escape gone, I went back into the dining room, where Mrs Cosway told me to make everyone tea. Her outburst about homicidal maniacs seemed to have restored her for she looked much better. Though she had addressed me, Ida got up. Ida always did get up when anything needed doing. It was as well she did for though I could make good coffee, the brewing of tea defeated me. I could never quite appreciate the need for the water to be on the boil and can't really to this day. Her hands bandaged in dishcloths, Ida made the tea while I set out cups and poured milk for those who wanted it.

  Everyone had their tea and had begun drinking it when the people who had come for John arrived. I heard the van they came in but I didn't see them. Their going into the library seemed to me like a kind of desecration. By that time I was close to thinking of it as John's place, somewhere he might have spent the greater part of his time if this had been allowed, almost have lived in there among the ten thousand books, pulling those he disliked off the shelves, reading his Euclid, solving his number puzzles, and been happy. Only it hadn't been allowed.

  They hunted the poor Minotaur and brought him out. I saw none of this. Ida told me. Whether they charged him with Winifred's murder before they took him away, I don't know. Of this sort of procedure I know nothing. I believe the inspector left the house a bewildered man. Apparently, he expected insanity, as he called it, and mathematical ability to be mutually exclusive. In other words, if someone was mentally disturbed he must also be stupid. Anything else he couldn't understand but he didn't dismiss it, he was genuinely puzzled.