Something Wicked

by David Roberts

  She tried to control her fear by telling herself that an English water rat would be quite different from the disgustingly fat, fearless predators she had come across in the trenches. She made herself think of Ratty in The Wind in the Willows – ‘messing about on the river’. Was that what she was doing? She stiffened. Oh God! She felt wet fur against her ear. She tried to shake her head but she could hardly move. She wanted desperately to stretch but the ropes that bound her would not give way – in fact, perhaps because of the wet, they seemed tighter than ever. Every joint, every bone in her body was telling her that her blood had stopped flowing. She remembered reading somewhere that, if one was tied up for a long time, the pain became excruciating and then, at last, the pain gave way to numbness and that was the time to worry.

  It was only then that she started screaming.

  She must have lost consciousness again. An age seemed to have passed but it might only have been a few minutes. She wished she could see her watch but there was absolutely no light even if she had been able to loosen her arms. She was so cold and the pain in her arms and legs was almost unbearable. She felt she must die soon. She must have slipped into unconsciousness once more because, when she came to, she noted – with a detached, almost scientific interest – that her fingers were quite numb and she could not move or feel them. A languor overcame her. Nothing seemed to hurt now – except the cold – and she knew this was dangerous. She struggled to keep awake. She had not known that cold could hurt so much. She tried to imagine blazing fires or Spain in high summer but it seemed only to make it worse.

  She told herself she must hang on. She knew they would come looking for her and if she was unconscious . . . unable to call out, they might never find her. She tried to roll on to her other side but there did not seem to be room even to do this and she sank back in despair. She managed a smile. To think that she had been fearful of dying from tuberculosis! Anything would be preferable than to die this way. To see the light, to breathe fresh air, to be warm! She would give five years of her life – no, ten – to die in the open air. She wondered what the doctor would say about her predicament. She imagined Dr Tomlinson telling Edward in his rather pompous voice, as though she was not there, that the treatment for TB did not involve being frozen and half-drowned in a concrete dungeon.

  She screamed again but, to her own ears, her cries seemed even weaker and she doubted they could penetrate the thick walls that entombed her. When she stopped screaming she lay still, ready to welcome death as the only practical escape from her suffering.

  16

  As Roderick Black moored the Hornet against the stone wall, Guy jumped out and helped Edward to scramble after him. It took only a few minutes to search the Temple. There was no one on the roof – just the Janus statue lying forlornly on its side waiting to be lifted back on to its pedestal. Edward was beginning to think that Verity was either imprisoned in the untamed part of the island or, more likely, somewhere else altogether when Mr Black remembered the cellar.

  Guy bounded down the steps only to find the door locked.

  ‘We’ll have to break it down. No one uses the cellar. It floods from time to time so it can’t even be used as a storeroom,’ Roderick Black said. He saw Edward’s look and added rather sheepishly that – when he and Stille had decided to make the island their poste restante – they had explored it thoroughly.

  ‘Look at the keyhole,’ Guy called excitedly. ‘There’s oil on it. Someone has opened the door very recently.’

  They looked round for something to use as a battering ram and chose the bench on which Edward had first sat contemplating the beauty of the temple and its mysterious statue. They swung it several times against the door and, on the third attempt, the lock split open and Guy pushed his way through.

  ‘Nothing here,’ he called. ‘Wait a minute, there seems to be another door at the back.’

  ‘Verity, are you there?’ Edward shouted, his voice cracking with anxiety. There was no answer so Guy rattled the door and shouted. Seizing the remains of the bench, he swung it against the door which opened but not very far. Something seemed to be wedged against it. As Guy pushed his way in, Edward held his breath. He had invested so much in his hunch that Harry had brought her here. What if he was wrong? Where would they look next?

  With a cry of excitement, which quickly turned to dismay, Guy bent over something on the floor. ‘She’s here but she’s hardly breathing. Quickly, out of the way, you two. I’ll carry her into the open.’

  Edward’s stomach lurched as he saw Verity for the first time. She was wet, deathly pale, and the ropes which bound her were cruelly tight. ‘Is there a knife on the Hornet?’ he asked. ‘We need to cut her free.’

  ‘There may be,’ Roderick Black called as he ran to the launch. He returned triumphantly with a penknife and a picnic rug and Guy started sawing at the ropes. It seemed to take an unconscionable time to cut through them but at last one and then the others fell away.

  ‘We must massage her legs and arms and then wrap her in the rug,’ Edward said.

  ‘She’s not looking good,’ Guy said with some alarm. ‘She’s very cold – and look at her face. It seems to have been rubbed raw. What a swine that man must have been to leave her to rot in a place like this.’

  Edward was unable to say anything as he rubbed the weals left by the ropes. As her blood began to flow, the pain was so acute that it roused Verity from her stupor. Her eyelids fluttered and then her eyes opened.

  She saw Edward’s anxious face leaning over her and smiled. ‘I knew you’d come for me,’ she whispered.

  ‘I would have killed him without any hesitation, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But did you hate him?’

  ‘We were friends once. He could have been the best of us but he lacked something . . .’

  ‘Moral fibre?’ Kay laughed. She and Edward were having a cigarette outside Verity’s hospital room.

  ‘Yes, that certainly,’ he answered gravely. ‘But it was more that he was reckless to the point of madness. It was almost as if he wanted to risk and die risking. He was a gambler forever raising the stakes and his bluff was never called. He told me once that he found it all too easy. He was terminally bored.’

  ‘He had read a lot. Do you remember the night of the Phyllis Court dance? He kept quoting bits of Shakespeare in my ear. It was one of the things that put me off.’

  Edward smiled. ‘Yes, Verity doesn’t like it when I quote Shakespeare at her.’ He hesitated. ‘Did you . . .? I mean – if you don’t mind my asking – did you . . .?’

  ‘Did I sleep with him?’ Kay grinned at him. ‘No, I didn’t. He asked me to. He said he had a private place, a grotto . . . Oh! I wonder if he meant Temple Island? Anyway, he went a little too fast, even for me. Were the Happy Valley women rather . . . how shall I put it? – rather more willing . . .?’

  ‘I think they were. Harry always had it too easy. His charm was legendary but perhaps it had worn a little thin lately. Maybe he wasn’t quite the Lothario he had once been.’

  They were silent for a minute or two as they dragged on their cigarettes. Edward was exhausted – ‘done in’ as he put it to Kay – but he absolutely refused to go back to Turton House until Verity was given the all clear and then it would only be for a night. He hated the place now and would either return to London or stay in a hotel close to the hospital.

  ‘So Helen Moody won Wimbledon,’ he said in an effort to make conversation.

  ‘Yes, for the eighth time! I think I may give up. She beat Helen Jacobs 6–4, 6–0. I ask you! What hope is there for ordinary mortals?’

  ‘That was what Harry never had – something to aim for. He could have been good at so many things but he could never settle on any particular one. He wasn’t a fool, not by any means, but . . .’ Edward hesitated, trying to find a way of summing up what had gone so wrong for his friend. ‘He liked Walt Whitman,’ he said at last. ‘If he were ever to have a gravestone, I think I would put on it that two-line
poem of his.

  ‘The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

  Now voyager sail forth to seek and find.’

  ‘Only he never did find what he was looking for,’ Kay said wryly.

  ‘No, he never did,’ Edward agreed.

  The doctor came out of Verity’s room and looked disapprovingly at their cigarettes which they hurriedly extinguished.

  ‘How is she?’ Edward demanded.

  ‘As well as can be expected. She’s asking for you.’ Without a word, Edward pushed past him. ‘Just five minutes,’ the doctor called after him.

  One morning, two months later, Edward went to pick Verity up from the clinic. While he waited for her to finish packing, he had a quick word with Leonard Bladon. He wanted to find out whether she was better or whether he was going to have to console her as she faced long months in a Swiss sanatorium. To his dismay, the doctor was tight-lipped.

  ‘She’s better, Corinth, no doubt about it, but only the X-rays will show if the lesions have healed. I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait and see. Her incarceration on Temple Island should have killed her but,’ Dr Bladon rubbed his chin as though puzzled by the vagaries of nature, ‘she doesn’t seem to have suffered any long-term ill effects. No one would prescribe being almost killed in an aeroplane or drowned in the Thames for someone with TB but there we are . . .! Miss Browne is not a normal patient. She’s rather tougher than she looks.’

  ‘Her morale is good,’ Edward responded rather defensively, as though it was his fault that Verity had so nearly been a murder victim.

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Corinth,’ Dr Bladon offered magnanimously. ‘It’s the nature of the beast, if you will excuse the expression. Miss Browne is a remarkable woman – courageous and determined. If disease is – as some doctors think – partly in the mind, then she will beat it. And your help is absolutely indispensable. I mean it,’ he added gravely, seeing Edward’s shrug of self-deprecation. ‘You are her rock and her foundation. She loves you and she wants to marry you and get on with her job. Those are the two ambitions which drive her.’ Edward was somewhat taken aback by his frankness. ‘She told me so herself during one of our little chats,’ he explained.

  Verity was taking everything with her as, whatever happened, there was no going back to the clinic. She had rested for almost three months – it had been the most difficult thing she had ever undertaken – and, if that hadn’t done the trick and her disease was still ‘eating her up’, as she envisaged it, she knew she would have to take another road.

  It was good to be driving through the countryside. Although it was early autumn, summer lingered on and the leaves were still on the trees. Fenton had been left to bring the heavy baggage by train so they were unencumbered. They decided not to hurry and about midday stopped at a village pub. Edward ordered a pint of the local brew while Verity had ginger beer. The landlord provided bread and cheese which they ate in the garden under apple trees laden with fruit and buzzing with wasps.

  They avoided discussing Verity’s medical prognosis and talked instead about their friends and, inevitably, about the growing international crisis.

  ‘There’s talk of the Prime Minister going to meet Hitler to try and sort things out once and for all,’ Edward said.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t go,’ Verity remarked. ‘Hitler will bamboozle the old man. He’s the sort of ordinary Englishman who can’t understand that the lunatics have taken over and are running the world like an asylum.’

  ‘It’s the last hope for peace although I confess I’m very torn. On the one hand, any agreement Mr Chamberlain makes with Hitler will involve betraying the Czechs. On the other hand, if Hitler agrees to something now and then reneges – as he undoubtedly would – then I think people will at last understand what we are up against.’

  ‘They ought to have understood that two years ago!’ Verity protested.

  ‘True – but we have to be realistic. The great majority of our countrymen are not interested in foreign affairs. They think foreigners are all as bad as each other and that we ought to stay out of any European quarrel. If they remember any history from their schooldays, it is Pitt paying other people to fight the French.’

  ‘But in the end we had to create an army to fight Napoleon.’

  ‘That’s true but we – as a nation – didn’t like it. The Royal Navy . . . that was what we liked to spend our money on. Our ships – “wooden walls” – that keep us free from Continental disease.’

  ‘But now aeroplanes have made ships vulnerable.’

  ‘Aeroplanes and submarines.’

  ‘But do you think that, in the end, the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus will understand that we have no alternative except to fight?’

  ‘I’m sure of it, V. As a nation, we are slow to anger. We have to have it proved to us that there is no alternative. Any prime minister who goes to war without just cause and without taking the people with him would never be forgiven.’

  ‘And will we win?’

  ‘If the Americans come in on our side and the Russians keep out of it – then we might win.’

  ‘And if the Americans don’t come in on our side?’

  ‘Then, I don’t see how we can win.’

  They sat in silence, thinking about the horror that was to come.

  ‘And Harry . . .’ Verity said at last. ‘There are a few things I still don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t have all the answers but ask away.’

  ‘Well, I can see he was a womanizer and totally unscrupulous but what made him a murderer?’

  ‘Boredom . . . and perhaps an arrogance born of never having properly loved anyone and everything coming too easily. To be Victorian about it, he wasn’t brought up properly. No one loved him enough as a child to show him the difference between right and wrong.’

  ‘You think that’s it – not having enough love as a child?’ Verity said disbelievingly.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m not Sigmund Freud. Maybe something in his brain was missing. To put it scientifically, perhaps he had a screw loose.’

  Verity giggled. ‘Oh God! I’m sorry. It’s not a laughing matter.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Edward said grimly. ‘I shall never forget what he did to poor Eric Silver. He was never afraid – that was part of the problem. If you don’t fear the consequences of what you do, then you think you can do anything.’

  ‘I think I see what you mean. So he convinced himself that Christobel Redfern – another man’s wife – was the love of his life?’

  ‘Yes, and when he killed her in that car accident in Kenya, he transferred the blame to me. He was unable to take responsibility for his own actions.’

  ‘But why kill Herold?’

  ‘Because of Gwyneth’s death on the Eiger which was either the result of Herold’s incompetence or bad luck or because Herold had discovered about her affair with Harry. Harry convinced himself that she had loved him and was on the point of running away with him. Maybe she was. I don’t know . . . nobody does.’

  ‘You think Herold might have killed his wife if he had found out that she was about to run off with Harry?’

  ‘It’s possible but would he have written the book about her?’

  ‘He might have, to tell the story he wanted the world to believe – that he wanted to believe. It was an act of homage to a loyal, loving wife – not to a woman who was about to leave him.’

  ‘I told you, V, I don’t have all the answers.’

  ‘And then he fell for Isabella, Hermione Totteridge’s niece. Why did he always have to go after other men’s wives?’

  ‘Who can say? It must have been part of his character. He always wanted the toy that belonged to the other child and taking it made him feel powerful.’

  ‘So you think he seduced Isabella and then killed her husband in the belief that she would be grateful.’

  ‘Yes, but she was heartbroken and consumed with guilt. Once Peter Lamming was dead, she realized how much she had loved him.
So she rejected Harry and returned to England to devote herself to her husband’s memory.’

  ‘It might explain the excessive mourning and her need for a gravestone even though there was no body beneath it.’

  ‘I believe so, V. Harry followed her to England after she wrote to tell him that she had confessed to Hermione what had really happened to Lamming. Foolishly, she mentioned that her aunt had urged her to go to the police.’

  ‘How do you know what she said to Hermione? Are you just guessing?’

  ‘I can’t be sure but Violet Booth told me that Isabella returned from a visit to Henley in much better spirits and said Hermione had been helpful. How did she put it? – That Isabella had seemed to have got “a lot off her chest”.’

  ‘But she soon relapsed?’

  ‘Yes, I think because she couldn’t bring herself to go to the police. After all, what could they have done? Unsubstantiated accusations about someone in Kenya who was alleged to have committed a crime on the other side of the world . . .? They would have put her down as a hysteric.’

  ‘But Harry didn’t kill her?’

  ‘No, although I’m sure he thought she had betrayed him, but, before he arrived in England, she died, as the Victorians say, of a broken heart. At least that’s what Dr Booth believes and I agree with him. She lost the will to live and when she got appendicitis – something any normal person could have recovered from – she turned her face to the wall, as they say.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell the Booths what had happened to Peter? After all, she was closer to them than Hermione. They had brought her up.’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly because she didn’t want to burden them. Perhaps she thought Hermione was tougher or something may have prompted her to talk about it even though she had meant to keep things to herself.’