Steven nodded slightly. ‘I think it’s … very probably a motive …’
‘And how do you suppose Leon Worrell knew all about you and Robert and Tom Dole?’
‘What he said about having “effects” of Robert’s – I did wonder, if Robert had written down some of – what we did – in a diary, a letter.’
‘Or could he have prised the information out of Robert in person? Are we back to my grand theory? If we accept Leon’s “jealousy”. Did he abduct Robert, hold him? Has he been the man behind all this, the great vendetta?’
Steven’s head had slumped again, voice distant. ‘It’s maybe the one explanation that fits …’
‘You think? A cabal, against Robert and his loved ones, organised by a carpenter, in league with a beggar, abetted by a sculptor … If the facts take us that far down a hole, Steven, why stop?’
Steve was spent, finished, aching for his bed. But I stood, paced the space before him, if myself uncertain where I was headed next.
‘Y’know, a little boy I operated on once told me he’d been watching me – while I did the procedure. Gave me not a bad account of what my hands had done to him while he was out cold. Six years old, he couldn’t have read it in a book … So was his mind hovering over me that day? There’s no person apart from a body, right?’
‘I don’t— can’t follow you, Grey …’
‘I’ve met Leon Worrell. Met Darren Carver. Met Killian MacCabe, thought I knew the man. Robert Forrest? Thought I knew him of old. But now I wonder. And one thing about all these men – I hear them in my head, and it’s like what I hear – is one man. Behind it all.’
Steven muttered something that I had to ask him to repeat, louder. ‘Vessels for a spirit’ were his words. He was smiling thinly, exhausted, I knew, but I looked at him keenly now.
‘Steven, do you give any credence to the idea of reincarnation?’
He rubbed at his face. ‘You mean, like the “cretinous Buddhists”? No, Grey, no. I sometimes wish, though. Just please don’t say you’re thinking—’
‘Indulge me. If we were thinking, what would you say? Give me your professional opinion, on reincarnation. Psychiatry’s view.’
I had given him no choice. He sighed, looked limply aside. ‘You mean parapsychology. Nothing that’s reputable. Some cases that could suggest some sort of “life before life” – little kids recalling former lives in some detail, realities they couldn’t have been aware of … who they were, where they lived, what they did. But it’s voodoo, Grey. Voodoo. And only ever kids – people taking seriously the jabberings of kids. No, what you have in mind, if I read you right, is “possession”.’
‘All right. Possession, then. Do we consider a man could be “possessed” by another?’
‘A spirit.’
‘Call it a consciousness. We believe that when the body dies, consciousness dies, with the brain – evaporates. Right? But could it relocate? Migrate, into the air? Or into some other host?’
‘By what process, Grey?’
‘If we say – consciousness lives in sub-atomic levels of our brain, in quantum processes? That data could … persist, after the body’s death, couldn’t it? Be dispersed, but seek a home, get itself tangled up into some other organism. That’s not out of this world, is it?’
Steven, head in hand, let me suffer a long silence. ‘What I think is we’re both very, very tired. What I think is, Leon has— got Robert. Got him or had him. That’s what makes sense, with the facts. You’re right, Grey, you’ve been right all along …’
He hadn’t satisfied me, I let him see that. ‘Then the police should be told as much, yes? As much as they need of what links Leon and Robert. If not the whole truth …’
Steven nodded, red-eyed, resignedly. I lowered my voice.
‘You needn’t be afraid of me, Steven, what I might do. You’re afraid of enough as it is. There’ll be a reckoning, in time, for what you and Robert did. Not tomorrow, though.’
‘Tomorrow’s today,’ he murmured, gesturing to the clock on the wall. On that note we were done with each other.
September 27th
A few hours ago I woke with a start, went out to the half-landing of the upper stairway. Edmond awaited me, standing stiff like a valet.
‘He’s coming,’ Edmond whispered, then stepped aside, gesturing behind him – to where an intruder stood on the half-landing below, staring up at us, teeth gleaming through the moonlit gloom.
Livy was at my shoulder. Edmond was gone.
‘Do you see him?’ I muttered, my heart thumping.
‘Of course I see him!’ Livy cried.
The intruder began to mount the stairs. I lashed out but couldn’t lay a finger on him. I am used to the sluggish wading sensation of dreams, but here I was drastically woozy, listing, giving this ghoul free rein to destroy my life, rape and kill my wife. Only then came the blood-freezing thought – was Cal already done for, down the stairs? Then I managed to wake myself.
Nothing looks right to me today, sounds right or feels right. I’ve just read Steven’s note. Livy called to alert me he had gone – must simply have packed and slipped out of the house while she was shifting about in the eyrie room for an hour or so. He claims to need ‘some time apart, room to breathe away from the madness’; asks that I ‘please leave him to it, and please keep my word’ – a needless, offensive, demoralised request. He pledges to return within a week. He is unable to stop himself suggesting that I, too, ‘need to order my thoughts and reflect how this business has distracted me’.
There is no order to be made from my thoughts – though Steven in his own sorry way has contributed to the obfuscation, its strain on me, plus all the strain I have taken for him.
In the early hours, finally, I called Hagen, who in turn alerted Thames Valley, and a sergeant was at my door by first light. Steven sat by me as I’d instructed, and we gave together our fanciful tale of how some anonymous man had telephoned me, claiming to have information about Robert, asking for money, to meet me in secret – a meeting to which I brought Steven, who there recognised Leon Worrell, who in turn made what we both felt was a confession to the killing of Eloise Keaton.
In fact, the investigation already knew for sure that Worrell had returned to London, while physical evidence has established to the team’s satisfaction that the Jaguar XJ with Ms Keaton inside was set alight and pushed down that woodland slope by Worrell. Moreover, their own suspicions in respect of motive are indeed related to Robert. Still, they were grateful for my and Steven’s time and information.
They can make of it what they will. I no longer know what I believe. Livy tells me I’m driving myself and all of us to perdition. She’s not wrong. Out of respect to beloved others, I must put this business behind me. Above all, I want nothing more to happen.
September 29th
Home again, released to the bosom of my family – amazing, this medical science of ours. The widow-to-be and my son together put their shoulders to the task of helping me walk from Outpatients, my steps being so tentative. Calder, God love him, had brought ‘the Forrest cane’, but I was disinclined. We made it home, I made it as far as the baggy blue, felt I could have slept there for years. The house is cold, really time to resuscitate the boiler. Will it feel like home again? Can anywhere? ‘The world is not my home,’ my father used to sing. Suddenly it’s like the ground under my feet is barely there. I have had a shock, the sort from which I’m not sure I’ll recover. Not completely. No end of a lesson … I will have to be careful now, so careful.
‘A wake-up call’, the cardiac specialist called it as he held forth by my bed. Yes. In fact I felt it knocking, its intimations, days, weeks ago. Yet I thought myself hardier, believed it was a reckoning for tomorrow, and tomorrow … And I refuse to believe it was meant to happen this way. It wouldn’t, had I not seen and heard things no one should.
None of that within the specialist’s remit, of course. With his consummate grave blandness, talk of ‘ruptured cholesterol pl
aque’, ‘stenosis in the left anterior descending’, ‘sudden and near complete occlusion’ … I feared he might take up a pointer, show me the chart. Instead I waved an enervated hand. “The “widow-maker”?’
‘Not quite,’ he smiled. ‘Or you’d be dead.’
Certainly the emergency team found me dying. I owe my life to that porter. I was in UCH four and a half minutes later, a minute more would have counted hard against me. My heart stopped but I was revived, catheter inserted, the artery unblocked by a stent.
Such wonder I knew on waking! And how many people wished most urgently to speak with me … I struggled to explain to Livy and Cal the circumstances by which a stranger had summoned an ambulance for me, also police, from a mansion block in Fitzrovia. I promised a better story as soon as I had the time to construct it. And then DI Hagen was there, quite beatific, surprisingly unquestioning – serene, even. From Detective Franklin, I understand, it is Case Closed now, the zipper right up the middle of the body-bag. But Hagen, he must be more curious about what’s been uncovered – that mirror, the stains, the unexplained absence of ‘Mrs Ragnari’ – how any of this came to be in that apartment, which, it turns out, is owned (but has long since been left unused) by the sixth Marquess of Ravenscourt, a dissolute character by reputation, resident in Manhattan. Apparently Ravenscourt denies he ever gave Mrs Ragnari keys or permission to lodge. The porter is equally certain they spoke and it had been arranged. They can’t both be right.
And me? I just can’t tell them everything I saw, saw and heard, because I wouldn’t have believed it on any other testimony. They would tell me I was still seeing that warm light, unearthly and beckoning, at the end of the tunnel … Or else plain out of my mind. But I am sane. I must also be accurate, for my sanity’s sake.
Two nights ago, a thousand years ago – I called on George and Muriel Garrison as arranged, 7pm in the flat on Weymouth Street. ‘I still feel human,’ he told me. But he looked dreadfully jaundiced. I didn’t believe we would have a drink. Of course we had several brandies, he urged me to smoke. We listened to the music Muriel plays for his spirits: Beethoven’s 3rd and 5th, plus a little Jacques Brel. In the repose of the armchair it even felt good to talk – to remember someone before they are gone. Then he asked about Robert: ‘I remember him well.’
‘Me too,’ I said, feeling a certain emotional crumbling. But it turned out George knew nothing of recent events. And I chose not to enlighten him. A couple of hours passed, by which time the rain was pelting down heavily outside, foul stuff to contemplate heading into. I shook George’s hand, thanked him, wished him a good night’s rest, knowing I’d not see him again.
I wrapped up, stepped out, thought I would flag a cab, considered on what corner of the street I should set myself. Then, fifty yards ahead through the wet mist and the blear of lamps, I saw a figure hastening over the road en route to Queen Anne Street. And my pulse leapt, because I had seen this man, seen him move – prowl – just so purposefully nights before.
I shifted myself with such speed as I could, after the vanished figure, rounding one corner in time to see him turning the next. I kept up the pursuit, Leon never looked back, was in an almighty hurry. By now, after this street and that street, my steps were sure – I knew where I was headed – the logic of the Conspiracy, no?
I was stood under a street lamp in time to see him pound up the stone steps, through the double doors of the mansion block. As soon as he was in I dashed across, intending to hit every buzzer on the intercom if I had to. Instead a couple in evening dress were trooping across the foyer, enjoyably immersed in each other. I held the door for them, accepted their smiling thanks, wished them a pleasant evening.
I mounted the stairs to the sixth floor, crept down the corridor to the familiar door of apartment 6F, turned the doorknob – the door swung open. Then I trod on tiptoe into the gloom of an entrance hall. All inside was silent, shadowy, as if deserted. I flared up my Zippo, throwing shadows onto the wall, stepped to my left into a darkened reception room.
The place felt aged, decrepit, every inch the pied-à-terre of an aristocrat bachelor careless by nature or else on his uppers: off-white walls, high ceilings, tall damask velvet curtains, an odour of dust and moth-eaten fabric. Covers were drawn over all over the furniture. I spotted a curious black stain eating one corner of the ceiling. In the fireplace much matter was reduced to cinder.
It was while crouched at the hearth that I heard fleeting footfalls in the hall, and the creak of the door. I moved as fast as I could, but it was a lost cause, my shouts echoed down an empty corridor. I lumbered all the way back to the stairwell but heard only the faintest click of heels across the marble floor below, then the clunking slam of the main door. Again I shouted, a useless echo.
My heart was thumping in its cavity now. I took out my phone, called Hagen’s mobile, left a message. As I turned back to the Ragnari apartment I thought I could hear the porter’s voice calling up from ground, but I pressed on into 6F.
This time I took an alternative doorway through which Mrs Ragnari, presumably, had slipped in order to flee; found a bedroom with a bare mattress, no curtains, ancient wardrobe. I flung it open, and the door came off its hinge. Empty inside. Drawers, empty. Next door the kitchen held nothing but one plate and one cup in a cupboard. Desertion, no life, indeed nothing lived in. I peered into a white-tiled bathroom: a claw-foot tub stained high with a ring of scum gave off a powerful sulphuric reek. My suspicions prickled, my stomach felt hollow.
I retraced my steps, entered the rear reception room through double doors in the partition wall. This room was identical to its twin but for two significant items. Robert’s antique mirror – unmistakably that same one, eight-foot high, free-standing, ornate surround – lorded over the dark space. And at the mirror’s foot lay the sprawled body of a man, motionless, a slick of black blood emanated from about the head.
With care I turned him over by his shoulders, waved my Zippo close, identified Leon Worrell, somehow more lifeless than even his injury would have suggested. A scalpel was rolled up in his fist, the right external carotid had been sliced open exactly. But the arrangement of the body was all wrong to my eye – I didn’t accept the wound as self-inflicted.
From my crouch I looked again at the mirror, marvelling still at how it could have been transported from Robert’s closet. I went closer to examine the frame, couldn’t avoid peering into the glass – saw my flushed, fearful face behind the stain of my breath – a crimson glow behind me on the ceiling …
And then in a piercing instant I saw it – I know I did – the reflection of someone, something, in the corner of the room behind me, deep in the grasp of an armchair, indescribably foul.
I turned and it was gone. Only shadows, an empty chair. But a terror had reared up in me – suddenly vertiginous, physically disabling, a cold flush right across my skin. And with it, I heard slurred, evil, discordant noise strike up between my ears – first dimly, then rising to a din, like the mood music of all my recent nightmares. My hands were frigid, shaking, the extremities no longer obeying orders. I felt a grip like ice on my neck; I could hardly swallow.
Then there was a voice amid that din, and in my panic I couldn’t understand if it was in my head or emanating from the walls, which seemed to pulse outward. Numbness invaded my left forearm, climbed up it. A spasm gripped my oesophagus so strong it was if a fist were being forced down the windpipe. I felt myself topple, my head hit the hard floor.
And from recumbent I watched those shadows in the corner of the room resolve once again into the shape of a man, a shape that slunk headfirst to the floor and padded to my side, like some jackal, until it was breathing hot in my ear – a humanoid growl, first guttural, then full-throated.
What the Presence said: ‘Poor little big strong man, get on your knees, on your belly, bow your head, little fool, we have business with you. Die now, die later, but you will die, and sooner than you think, fool. Get up and run now, run if you can, your house is curse
d, the child is gone, all that you love is on fire …’
I didn’t wake again until the lights were ablaze all around me. ‘A wake-up call’, yes. I was awakened. To what?
20
Dr Hartford’s Journal
A mermaid’s tail
September 29th
They tend to call it ‘stark’ and ‘bleak’ out here at the edge of England, a disturbed place, a desert, wasteland even. But I find it sits well with me. A place where a man might vanish – a commonplace yearning, I’ve come to believe.
This morning’s sunrise was of the purest pastels. I’d long believed that aloneness encouraged ‘night-thoughts’, but my sleep was dreamless, as it’s been since I came. Autumn has faded in, and I needed logs for the stove from day one, so I got up and out as early as was feasible, made the trek along the coast to the nearest general store at Greatstone. There, a worryingly birdlike lady pressed the parish newsletter on me, urgently commending a short essay therein on passages in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans – an essay of which, it transpired, she was the author, and began to quote verbatim. ‘For the woman which hath a husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth,’ she cried unto me, as if she’d written that part too. ‘But if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law …’ Liking this not one bit, I managed to escape.
Either I’m a lightning rod for the local eccentrics, or everyone here is strange. Or else the strange one is me – that stranger, out by the shore. Last night, as the fire ebbed, somewhat the worse for red wine I went and fetched the mask, strapped it onto my face, stared at my black, blank reflection in the mirror awhile, feeling myself a little demented, or at least imagining how that could feel.
The morbidity of it finally brought me to my senses. Knowing I needed air I decided to hazard a drink at The Ship, and there misjudged a friendly loan of a bloke’s newspaper, whereupon I got his life story and philosophy rather than the headlines I’d wanted. He works at the nature reserve, came to Dungeness expressly in order to catch many and varied species of moth in light-traps, and keep detailed logs of his discoveries. Much did I learn as I sat there, of the Death’s-Head Hawk and Pale-Shouldered Cloud, the Flame Brocade and Marbled Grey, the Beautiful Gothic and Brimstone.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 22