But her fear didn’t last. Whatever shock or pain the cross might have given her seemed to be outweighed by her resolve to possess me.
In the next instant I felt a great tug at the hilt of the sword, saw it, felt it move, upwards through my tightly clenching fingers. I gripped tighter, holding on. Still she pulled at it and I felt searing pain in my circled palms as the dull edge of the sword was drawn through them.
I was struggling to hold on, and struggling to ignore the burning in my hands. All I wanted to do was let go, to put an end to the pain, but I mustn’t, I couldn’t; and all I could do was watch as the sword hilt moved slowly, surely, agonisingly upwards, higher, higher, higher . . .
And then it came back to me, all at once, what Rogers had said: that a ghost, a haunting spirit often lingered in a place because the soul was unaware that the physical body was no longer living. And with the remembrance I yelled out:
“You’re dead. Dead. You’re dead!”
The sword’s moving ceased.
I said again, whispering, not relaxing my hold: “You’re dead. You must . . . go away from here.”
Still no shifting of the sword. I got more courage.
“You must go where you belong. You’re dead, Helen—dead.”
And then the sword moved again. A strong, sudden jerk that took me by surprise and almost pulled me off balance. Still I held on.
It had seemed for a few moments there that she had given in, was retreating. But then, when I had spoken those last words to her she had surged in power again. How . . . ?
And then I realised. Yes. I had called her Helen. I had told Rogers, too, that her name was Helen. Helen, I had said. Helen . . . When all the time I was surrounded by reminders of her first name. I said clearly, evenly, my voice low:
“Rose . . .”
There was a moment of absolute stillness. The sword gave one final violent twist, faltered and stopped.
“Yes!” I almost shouted it. “It’s Rose. It’s Rose!” I should have told Rogers that—that her first name was Rose. “Rose!” I shouted. I felt suddenly invincible.
“Rose,” I whispered from my new-found strength, “you are dead . . . Dead . . . Dead . . . Dead . . . Dead . . .”
“No . . .” It was a whispered, plaintive sound, “No . . .”
“Yes! dead! You are dead, Rose, Dead . . . Rose . . .”
I heard birds singing. I followed the line of my aching arms and saw that my hands were held out before me clutching the antique sword. How long I’d been standing there I had no idea. The scent of roses was no longer in the room. She was gone, too.
From behind me I heard a groan. Turning, lowering the sword, I saw Rogers struggling to get up, lifting a hand to his bruised forehead. I knelt beside him.
“Are you all right?”
“I—I think so . . . yes . . .”
“Come on . . .” With my blistered hands I supported him and slowly, painfully he got to his feet. He stood there looking dazed, stunned, and I watched as memory returned, sparking fear into his eyes. He took a step back.
“Oh, God—Oh, God——”
“It’s all right . . .” I took his arm. “It’s all right. There’s nothing more to be afraid of.”
He groaned. The fear was still there.
“I didn’t have a chance,” he said. “She—she came for me almost as soon as I got in the place. I didn’t—didn’t have a chance . . .”
“It’s all right,” I soothed him. “She can’t hurt us now. She’s gone.” I added with relief, and a touch of pride: “I did it. I sent her away.”
He nodded dully. After a while he asked:
“What will you do now?”
“I’ll bring Shelagh back and we’ll pack up our things and leave. And after that we’ll never return.”
31
No, he said to my suggestion, he didn’t need any doctor. I didn’t insist. He sat quietly in the car waiting till I’d finished doing what had to be done and then together we set off. I offered to drive, but he said it wasn’t necessary; apart from a slight headache, he said, he felt perfectly okay.
He hardly spoke as we headed back to London. He offered no more information about what had happened in the cottage, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. It was done with.
Whilst in the cottage I had found, lying on the hall mat, an unstamped envelope. Opening it up I saw that it was a letter from Pitkin. In my rush to get Shelagh away from the danger I had forgotten all about him and the dresser. In the note he asked me to let him know when he could come and collect it; he had tried to phone us, he said, but our telephone was out of order . . . I put the note in my pocket. I’d call him later on . . .
In the city, after our near-silent journey, Rogers headed straight for my hotel. “No, drop me anywhere,” I told him, “I’ll get a taxi,” but he said it was no trouble and I didn’t put up any further protests.
Outside the hotel he stopped. No, he wouldn’t come in for a drink, he said, thanks all the same. As he reached out to shake my hand he hesitated, seeing the angry scorch marks, the blisters there. Then without comment he gently shook my hand, cupping my palm so as not to hurt.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t much help . . .”
I was sorry—for him; his lesson had been a painful one. And frightening. I shrugged, tried a smile. “You did what you could. And I’m grateful. And anyway, the result is the important thing. It’s over, that’s the thing that matters. You did far more than you think.”
When he had gone I went into the quiet of the hotel lounge where Shelagh sat waiting for me. She asked me, a little anxiously, how it had gone. Of course, she meant the meeting with my father.
“Oh, all right. We sorted out what needed to be sorted out.”
“And it’s finished?”
“Yes . . . finished.”
With my words, in a great flood of relief, I put my arms around her, holding her tight to me so that she gave a little cry of surprise. A short grey-haired man sitting in a chair opposite looked at us over his rimless glasses, but I wasn’t fazed. I couldn’t be, not now. In my mind the words kept repeating over and over: It’s finished, it’s finished . . . There were certainly many whys, hows, whats and whens still to be answered, but even so, they were questions I would learn to live with. The important thing for me, at that moment, was my knowledge that the worst—the threatening horror of it all—was finished. No, the opprobrious glance from the little grey-haired man couldn’t touch me at all. How could it? Shelagh was safe from harm, and so was I.
“Come on,” I said to her, “let’s leave everything here. We’ll get a quick snack and get back to the cottage.” The cottage, I had said—not home. I could never call it “home” again; that was something I knew it could never be.
“Are we staying there after all—tonight?”
“No.” I knew it would be safe to but I didn’t want to. I shook my head, put my hand up to her cheek. “We’ve got our room here for tonight. We’ll just go back and get our things and give Bill Carmichael his car back. Also I have to see Mr. Jennersen at the bank and fix up with Mr. Pitkin about the dresser.”
“Okay.” She lifted her fingers, pressed my hand. I winced. She asked, looking at my palm: “What have you been doing to yourself?”
I wasn’t prepared for her question. “. . . Car trouble,” I said.
“Ah . . .” She nodded, looked again at my hand. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s all right now.” I dismissed it. “It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.” It didn’t.
There had been an accident on the motorway and we got held up for a while. It was getting late and I could see I wasn’t going to get back in time to see Jennersen. But we kept going. At the gate of the cottage I dropped Shelagh off so that she could make a start with the packing. “On my way back,” I told her, “I’ll call in and see if Jean can come up and lend a hand. Anyway, I want to have a last word with her about looking after the place till it’s sold.”
The
bank was closed. Going by my watch it had been closed for ten minutes. I knocked ineffectually on its fortress doors for a few minutes then gave up. Ah, well, I’d have to write to him; it couldn’t be helped.
Bill Carmichael was there at the garage, though. Would he still be open in a couple of hours? I asked him; I had a few little trips to run in the car before I could bring it back and settle my bill.
“I’ll wait for you, anyway,” he said.
“And will there be somebody who can drive us to the station?”
“I’ll do it.”
On the way back to Gerrard’s Hill I stopped off at the Timpsons’ little house and asked Jean if she could come up and give us any help we might need with the clearing up. She was happy to, though I found, when we arrived at the cottage, that Shelagh had already made good headway. Her own cases were nearly done, she told me, and soon she’d make a start on mine.
“Let me do it,” Jean said, and headed for the cellar to fetch up my empty suitcases. When she was gone Shelagh said, indicating the sword with its broken fastenings, “What happened there?” I’d rehung Sad Margaret’s sampler, wiped the smear of Rogers’ blood from the wall and cleared up the flowers and broken china; but I hadn’t been able to do anything about the sword. I didn’t know what to say. As far as Shelagh knew I hadn’t been in the cottage since we had left together from London. But she saved me herself from trying to find an answer. She lifted the sword, whistled and put it down again. “My God, the weight of it. I’m surprised it stayed up as long as it did.”
Jean Timpson came to the door carrying my cases. “I’ll go on upstairs and make a start,” she said. “You can get on with whatever else you have to do. I’ll manage all right.”
“Good,” I said. “I want to go down to the cemetery.”
She started to turn away, then stopped.
“Oh—Oh, I—I washed your jeans.” She avoided my eyes completely. “I’ll pack them with the rest of your things . . .” It was the expression on her face that reminded me; she meant the jeans I’d been wearing when I jumped into the pond after her. And with that memory I couldn’t look at her.
“The stuff you had in the pockets—” she nodded towards the mantelpiece, “—I put it all up there.”
She went away then and I scooped up the loose change, the dried-out notes and my cheap, throw-away lighter—which surprisingly still worked. Shelagh followed me to the kitchen where I went to get scissors.
“Shall I go with you to the cemetery?” she asked.
“Of course. Why not?”
She picked up her bag while I got together some brown paper. In the garden I cut a large bunch of cornflowers and wrapped them up. Shelagh, taking the scissors from me, cut a perfect white rose—just beginning to open—and pinned it to my lapel. “There . . .” She patted my chest and stood back to admire her handiwork. “Now you look perfect.” I didn’t want the rose—I didn’t like its associations, but I smiled and said nothing.
When we got to the churchyard gates she said, putting a hand on mine:
“You go in on your own.”
“Why?”
“You’ll want to be alone with him for a while. I’ll stay here.”
“Okay.”
The last time I had been to the cemetery was just the day before, Sunday—when Reese had stopped me from going near the grave, when the place had been swarming with onlookers and officials. I approached the grave now with dread, very much afraid of seeing any signs of the violation that had taken place.
And the signs were there, of course. They were visible in the newly-turned look of the soil, the different positioning of the flower vases—though whoever had cleared up afterwards had tried to make a thorough job of it; even the flowers had been put back, albeit they were wilting.
I threw the dying flowers away and carefully arranged the fresh ones. And then I just stood there, looking down. It was very likely, more than very likely, I thought, that I would never stand there again. Never would I come back to Hillingham.
And that meant that I would probably never find out the truth of what lay behind Helen’s death. I would never know, one way or the other, whether or not Colin had been in some way responsible for her violent end. Well, so be it, I said to myself; that was a question I must learn to live with. And I would be able to. Somewhere in the more hidden-away recesses of my mind there would be a place for such a question; some place where its nagging would be less noticeable . . .
I looked at my watch. I must go. I would call and see Pitkin, and then Shelagh and I would leave. Goodbye, Hillingham; goodbye, Gerrard’s Hill Cottage. Forever.
Stooping, I said a whispered word of goodbye to my brother—for Helen I had no words at all—and then turned away.
As I did so a tall, fair-haired man in blue denims came striding along between the graves. He was holding a small wreath. He walked in my direction, looking straight at me, coming towards me.
He stopped just a few feet away. To my surprise I saw that he was looking at me with disdain. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything he said:
“Aren’t you tired of putting on the act?”
I stared at him in amazement. “What do you mean? Who are you?”
“Oh, my God!” He gave a humourless laugh and put a hand to his forehead in a gesture of hopelessness. “Is that how you manage to keep going—by having this rather convenient amnesia? Or have you flipped out completely?”
His voice—I had heard it before; that same tone, similar words.
“It was you,” I said. “It was you who phoned me.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you pretending you didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know. And I still have no idea who you are. I can remember your—slanderous accusations.”
“Tough,” he said shortly, shrugging it off. “I’m sure you’ll learn to live with them. The way you’ve learned”—here he gestured to the grave—“to live with that.” He glared at me and I saw hatred in his eyes, and then, with a brief “Excuse me”, he brushed past me and crouched over the earth. I watched him as he gently laid the wreath beside the cornflowers. I couldn’t see his face but I heard the faint sound of a choked-backed sob and realised that he was fighting tears. Someone else who had loved Helen . . .
Neither of us moved for a while, then I said quietly: “I’m not Colin.”
He turned to me and I saw disbelief and puzzlement in his eyes, along with the tears.
“Colin was my twin brother,” I said.
He stood up and I took a couple of steps towards him. I saw his eyes flash down to take in my limp, my built-up shoe. Then up to my face again.
“Yes,” he said then, “you are different,” and continued to study me. He nodded. “Yes, yes, I can see.”
A little silence went by. He said, with difficulty:
“I’ve got nothing against you. It’s got nothing to do with you; it only concerns him, your brother.” He paused. “Are you staying here with him?”
“I’m staying at the cottage, yes.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t he there now? Where is he?”
I pointed to the freshly turned earth of the grave. “There.”
He didn’t know what to say. He looked so completely taken aback, stunned. At last he muttered:
“I had no idea. I’m sorry. I had no idea.” He shook his head bewilderedly. “I heard about—about Helen while I was away. I got back to England only a short while back.”
“You can’t have wasted any time getting on the phone.”
“I’m sorry. Really.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Since I heard about her I just—just haven’t been—thinking straight.”
“I have to ask you,” I said. “Do you really think—do you really believe that my brother—was responsible . . . ?”
He turned away from me. “What does it matter what I think any more?”
“It matters to me.”
“I wish I’d never come here,” he said. “But I ha
d to.” He gave a bitter smile. “I’d planned on going up to the cottage afterwards . . .”
“To see my brother.”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“It’s not important now.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Please,” he said. “To find out I’ve been hating a dead man, it’s . . . I don’t know . . .”
“The fact that he’s dead doesn’t really change anything, does it? It can’t alter what he did . . . or what he didn’t do.”
“No.” And then, the words stumbling one upon the other, he said, “I loved her. Then he came on the scene. God, I was so jealous. And I didn’t trust him. It was all so—so sudden. And in next to no time they’re getting married. Not that it would have made any difference to me in the long run. I mean—she’d never loved me.”
“Did you know her well?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do you think she—she loved Colin?”
“Yes,” reluctantly, and then: “The worse for her . . .”
“You really do believe he killed her.”
“I had a letter from her. Not long before she died. I know from that how unhappy she was. But not only that; I know from my own eyes. I’m sure that—from the moment your brother came here she was threatened. I know—I’m certain—that she’d be alive today if they’d never met.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“It was just a feeling I had. It’s hard to explain, but it was very real, that feeling, that—that sense. It was almost as if he was—trying to drive her out of her mind. Even before I went away from them I saw certain things happen. She kept losing things, mislaying things—and I know it wasn’t her fault. And then there were all those other little things that started to happen to her. The injuries, and so on. And when she wrote to me she——”
I cut in quickly, after his words had registered at last: “You said, ‘Before you went away from them’ . . . You stayed here with them?”
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