‘Did you kill him?’
‘Jonathan, darling, please! I thought we understood each other. He killed himself: too many beefburgers and beers. Would you pass me my water?’
Jack loosened his grip and gave Challoner his glass.
‘I was with one of my late-night patients when Stella Darnell called her father’s phone. I shouldn’t have answered, a stupid mistake, but after the first call, when I found the phone, I couldn’t resist it. I forgot about background sounds of water rinsing into the sink; still no matter, she wouldn’t have noticed; she is a cleaner, not a detective, after all.’ He tilted the cup; this time he just moistened his lips. ‘She had to be better than her father. She had to poke about in our business.’
‘Stella loves her dad.’
‘She doesn’t understand love. The Stella Darnells of this world do great damage with their lack of insight. They hurt the likes of you and me.’
As the scarf closed on his larynx, Challoner spluttered: ‘If you kill me, you kill her.’
The little boy had collapsed, hot and panting, against the plinth. Unable to reach, Jonathan promised the Leaning Woman he would bring a knife and cut off the plastic box tied to her arm. He promised to set her free.
‘I will save you,’ he told his mummy.
The scent of Eau Savage was overwhelming, the silk of the scarf cool in Jonathan’s hands.
68
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
The light switch did not work. Stella switched on her key-torch: they were in a cloakroom. Signalling to Sarah, she trod lightly on the tiles but tripped over a wellington boot. Beside this was an industrial-sized top-loading washing machine and on a shelf above were packets of soap powder. Sarah gasped and jolted Stella’s elbow, making the torch dip wildly. Sarah Glyde was a liability; Stella should have sent her back to her car.
‘Those were my mother’s.’ Sarah indicated the soap powders.
‘Ssssssh. How can you tell?’ Stella lifted down a box. It was empty.
‘These boots are mine, that coat was my father’s. Antony has kept everything.’
They crept into a passage which went in either direction. When Sarah stumbled against her for the second time Stella clenched her teeth: for an artist the woman had little spatial awareness.
‘Left or right?’ Stella hissed.
‘Your choice.’
‘No, I mean what is the best way?’
‘Left takes us to the garage and back stairs and that way leads to the kitchen and through to the main stairs and the sitting room.’
‘Right then.’
Stella kept the torchlight down as they felt their way to the kitchen. She played the light along the wall until she found a light switch. When she flicked it on, nothing happened. She sighed: she had done this stuff too recently in Terry’s house. She was used to empty houses, but this was straining her nerves.
She manoeuvred around a long deal table and opened the fridge. It was an old Lec model, over forty years old. The lamp inside remained unlit, even with the door ajar. In such an old model the motor would have been noisy: ‘He’s turned the power off,’ Stella breathed.
‘Why would he do that?’ Sarah spoke in a normal voice.
‘Why do you think?’
‘Can you just tell me rather than talk in riddles. Antony doesn’t suffer from power cuts, his father had a generator installed.’
‘He’s expecting visitors. Your brother is prepared for us.’
‘You don’t seriously think he will harm us?’
Stella gave her a look. Not having siblings she could not be certain she would believe it if someone she hardly knew told her that her brother was a murderer. She might demand evidence. She suspected Sarah Glyde of long closing her eyes to clues.
Sarah gripped her arm, her terror palpable. Stella straightened. Only the fact that she would not admit to feeling afraid kept her from tearing out of the house. That and knowing that Terry would not have done so.
They tiptoed past a breakfast table laid for two; Sarah knocked a packet of Cornflakes off and in her effort to catch it batted it across the floor. The noise echoed in the cold silence.
There was no sound from above. Stella retrieved the box: it was light even for a packet of cereal. She looked inside. It, too, was empty. She caught sight of the sell-by date and squinted at the tiny figures. December 1981.
That could not be right. She trained the light directly on to the flap of the packet. Even if the one was a seven, and she was sure it was not, the eight was definitely correct. The cardboard was worn and had been reinforced with clear tape. The cereal box was nearly thirty years old. She directed the beam on the table. The marmalade jar was empty; nor was there any ketchup in the old-style glass bottle. The breakfast table was a museum exhibit.
Stella pulled the kitchen door open quickly and thrust the quavering torch forward as if its beam might save them and turned left into a passage. At the end was the hall and the front door, its stained-glass lights casting watery triangles over the mosaics.
Out of the corner of her eye Stella caught a glint. Sarah Glyde had a carving knife, its sharpened blade tapering to a point. She was unblinking, her mouth grim. Stella was stunned: she would be prepared to kill her brother. This did not make Stella feel better.
The door led into a garage. Stella got a vague sense of comfort from the smell of petrol, paint, chemicals, garden implements, bags of compost. It reminded her of Terry’s shed. She got another feeling too: Terry had been here.
A dark shape draped with canvas filled the space; everything else – the lawn mower, flower pots, spades, a strimmer, canisters of calor gas – was ranged around the walls.
Challoner had another car.
Stella held the torch at shoulder height and scooted along to what, judging by the shape, must be the bonnet. She had little room to bend down and had to crane sideways. Sarah Glyde stayed by the door with the knife.
The strings holding the tarpaulin had been cut. Stella flung it back and a cloud of dust stung her eyes; she had to pinch her nose to stop a sneeze. The car’s windscreen was greyed with dust; cobwebs obscured the wing mirrors as if a massive spider had been at work wrapping the vehicle as it would a fly. The front tyres were flat, the rubber perished. Stella tried to see the registration number. She expected to find it obscured by grime.
It had been cleaned.
Terry had been here. She felt a rush of heat. In the quivering torchlight, she read a registration plate – black against white – she could have recited it with her eyes shut.
CPL 628B.
She did not need to look above the radiator grille. Despite the dirt and the dark Stella knew what her dad had found:
A blue Ford, possibly an Anglia, was seen leaving Black Lion Lane at approximately eleven on Monday 27 July. Mrs Hammond, an elderly widow aged 74, noticed it because her husband had owned the same model in the 1960s and it brought back memories. The last letter of the number plate might have been a ‘B’, but she couldn’t swear. (Note: reliable witness, timing wrong.)
Mrs Hammond had seen the car an hour before Kate’s supposed time of death around midday, so they had discounted her statement; the only definite sighting that day. After Terry found the photograph of Isabel Ramsay opening the Charbury Village Hall, the Ford Anglia gained new significance, but by then Mrs Hammond was dead.
Challoner had not driven the Ford Anglia since that day.
Stella straightened up and squeezed back along the gap. Sarah led the way back to the hall.
‘That’s the sitting room.’ She jabbed the blade at a door beyond the foot of the stairs. To their left, brass stair rods were illuminated in the beam. At the top of the staircase was a portrait of a woman. The head seemed to turn when Stella shone her torch up. It was Katherine Rokesmith.
Sarah bumped into Stella; the blade sliced the air.
‘You nearly had my ear off!’
‘Sorry.’
Neither of them was whispering.
T
hey heard a crack. It came from the sitting room. Keeping close, they flew to the doorway; Sarah swishing the blade like a sword. A fire was burning in the grate. It appeared to have just caught; flames flickered, whipping and licking around logs that hissed and crackled.
The room was empty.
A photograph of Kate Rokesmith lay upon the logs, just shy of the flames, warping and browning with the heat. Someone had stoked the fire: a poker lay on the hearth. Bright, white teeth between rosy parted lips, a pointed incisor to the left of the front teeth marring an otherwise even set, were crumpling amidst the smoke, the ink turning metallic blue.
‘Jack!’ Stella shouted. ‘Come on.’
She rushed up the stairs two at a time and flung wide doors in the passage to check inside each room. Sarah caught up with her in the bedroom where sheets were heaped on the floor and the mattress was sagging off the bed’s metal sprung frame. Make-up littered the floor and was scattered over the mattress. The mirrors on the dressing table were smashed, glass sparkling among lipsticks and foundation bottles in the torchlight.
The window frame blew to and fro, a rhythmic squeaking like stertorous breathing. The curtain twisted over the wood had half ripped from the hooks; it ballooned in and out with gusts of wind. Melted snow pooled on the sill and dripped to the floor with a steady put-put.
Stella raised the light; Sarah clutched her arm, staying her. Kate Rokesmith smiled at them from all corners.
For an instant, an absence pervaded the room – an absence stronger than the more temporal departure of the person who had ransacked it – and filled the cloying atmosphere with the irreversibility of death.
But after a moment Stella saw the bedroom was no more than bricks and mortar, mite-nibbled paper and moth-eaten bedclothes, damp walls pasted with photos and articles about a woman long dead.
She let herself breathe: there was no one there. Terry was dead. She would never talk to him again. Terry would never know she had followed in his footsteps. Her dad had gone.
‘What an adventure, we’ll have hot chocolate when we get home.’
‘I know where they are.’ Sarah ran out, finding her way easily along the corridor without the torch.
69
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
It was Stella who found the bolt at the top of the door, stopping Sarah’s clumsy struggle with the handle. She slid it across; the oiled mechanism gave at once.
Winding stone steps receded into darkness. Cool damp air laced with a clinical odour drifted up. Stella could smell Eau Savage Extreme; neither Ivan nor Jack wore it.
‘It’s hers.’ Sarah’s breath was hot in Stella’s ear. ‘The studio smelled of it after she had been for a sitting.’
They listened but heard nothing.
Logic came back to Stella: the door had been bolted on the outside so whoever was in the basement had been locked in.
‘We’re too late.’
She plunged down steep steps, catching herself with a rope slung through loops on the wall.
‘There he is!’ Sarah leapt the last three steps, jolting Stella, who lost her balance and dropped the torch, extinguishing the light.
‘Challoner’s dead.’
Stella thrashed about on all fours in the smothering darkness, flailing for the torch. The slate floor grazed her palms. She scrambled to her feet and at last found a switch. She knew it would not work, but habit made her flick it down.
The room was flooded with light.
Stella’s first thought was that there was no blood. Next she saw her van keys on a step beneath a gigantic contraption of red leather beneath a cone of light. A figure lay supine, feet right up, a surgical mask strapped to its face, wrap-around sunglasses shielding the eyes. Thin plastic straps clamped the calves, waist and wrists. Challoner lay motionless, skin waxy in the remorseless glare.
‘Antony!’ Sarah darted forward and grabbed a wrist. ‘I can feel a pulse.’
Stella ripped off the mask.
It was Jack.
‘Pass me a scalpel. Quick!’ Stella gesticulated at a jumble of surgical utensils on a worktop.
She eased the blade between Jack’s skin and the plastic thongs, willing her hand not to slip, and released Jack’s limbs. Only when she had finished did Stella think to remove the wrap-around sunglasses.
Jack stared through her with eyes like Terry’s in the hospital, glassy and unseeing, the pupils dilated. She leant on the lever making the chair descend abruptly to a sitting position. Jack’s head jerked to one side and a string of spittle swung from his mouth.
Sarah shut her eyes and, concentrating, tried his pulse again.
‘There’s a fluttering.’
‘Are you sure?’ Stella willed it to be true. She waved a hand over Jack’s face but he stared impassively at something far away. ‘Jack, wake up. What’s the bastard done to you?’ She gripped his shoulders, holding him to her, breathing in the familiar scent of detergent and damp wool.
‘I think this might explain it.’ Sarah held up an empty syringe. She pulled off the needle and sniffed the open end of the capsule. ‘Lidocaine combined with adrenaline, judging by the size of his pupils.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m a dentist’s sister, remember?’ Sarah raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s a ten-millilitre syringe. One of these would be fine, the maximum safe dose is five hundred milligrams, which is five of these syringes. It depends how many times he’s been injected.’ She lifted Jack’s arm and tugged up his sleeve. There were two red blotches on his arm.
‘Three is OK, isn’t it?’ Stella demanded. ‘That’s three hundred.’
‘Antony wouldn’t overuse a site.’ Sarah dragged Jack’s shirt out of his trousers. There were three more areas of red on his stomach above the line of dark hairs from his navel. She fumbled with his other sleeve. ‘Hmmm. Looks like he’s had six hundred, with three jabs away from his heart, which gives him a chance. I can’t say for sure – but too many, whatever. You can see he’s suffering from visual disturbance.’
Stella stared at Jack. His gaze was unfocused and his lips working silently.
‘He’s trying to tell me something. Jack, how much did Challoner give you?’ Jack blinked slowly and his tongue appeared between his teeth. ‘It’s no use. Call an ambulance!’
‘There’s no signal down here.’
‘Go upstairs, then.’
‘I don’t have a mobile and there isn’t a telephone. Antony got rid of it. Give me yours.’
‘It’s in the car!’ Stella grabbed her keys and ran up the stairs. At the top she slammed into wood and, grabbing hold of the rope, only just stopped herself toppling back. The door was shut and there was no handle on the inside.
Challoner had locked them in. She kicked at the wood but it did not give. She raced down and wheeled impotently around the room, rattling instruments and banging the counter.
Sarah had somehow got Jack on to the floor in the recovery position and folded her jacket under his head. Dimly Stella considered she would not have thought of that.
There were no windows. No other doors. No way out.
‘Help!’ Stella yelled, her voice cracking.
‘It’s soundproofed. No one will hear us. Not even Antony.’ Sarah swabbed Jack’s mouth with a moistened pad. ‘We won’t suffocate – I can tell the air is fresh, but I don’t know how long we can last without food. At least we have water.’
‘I don’t care about us. What about Jack? Is there something we can give him, to reverse it, neutralize the drug, anything?’
‘I think there’s an antidote but Antony won’t have it here. He doesn’t even keep oxygen down here. Jack needs supportive management – his airway protected and cardiac monitoring.’ Sarah Glyde’s haphazard manner had vanished: she had turned into a medic.
Neither of them said the obvious: if they could not get Jack to a hospital within the next few hours, he would die.
‘Did you tell your office where you were going?’
Stell
a shook her head. She had not told Jackie where she was going for days. ‘Wouldn’t Challoner’s receptionist think of finding you here?’
‘Mrs Willard wouldn’t care, but if she did ask, he will tell her I’m away.’
Stella went over to the dentist’s chair. Jack looked frightened. She stroked his fringe back from his face.
‘We will get you help, Jack. I promise,’ she whispered.
The counter took up one wall; apart from a sink and the instruments it was strewn with rubbish. And a mobile phone.
‘He’s left his phone!’ Stella grabbed it and pressed the ‘on’ button. The screen lit up, accompanied by Nokia’s tinkling signature tune, but then went blank. The battery was dead. Infuriated she slapped it against her palm and saw minute scratches on the casing. She tipped it towards the light.
‘TCD’. Terence Christopher Darnell. It was Terry’s phone. Final proof, had she needed it, that her dad had been here. Although she was convinced he had not seen Challoner’s secret surgery. Challoner had found his phone and answered it when she rang the night of her dad’s death.
The water fountain trickling into the ceramic bowl beside the leather dentist’s chair filled the silence. The murderer spends time dressed in white beneath the ground beside a bubbling fountain. Not all psychics were crackpots.
Her dad had cleaned dirt off the Ford Anglia’s registration plate. It would have been a strain in the tight space. He had not noticed his mobile fall out of his pocket.
Terry had told Martin Cashman he was going to ring his daughter and Stella had not believed it because he had not called. Terry could not ring because Ivan Challoner had his phone. Too tired to drive, he had slept in his car all night – in his clothes – and when he woke he’d parked near Broad Street and bought ham rolls in the Co-op. He was going to call her before he drove back to London and that was when he realized he did not have his phone. Upset by such a stupid mistake, his heart rate took off. Her dad had died in the street.
Sarah was talking: ‘When I was a child – I must have been terribly young – I would be sent to find Antony at mealtimes. I’d get a chair and bolt the basement from the outside and then search the house. Bonkers really, it showed how much I hated him, but this was always the last place I looked, although it was where he would be. Eventually I’d pluck up the courage and sneak down the first few steps. The surgery was always empty with the light on and the rinsing fountain going. My mother would tell me off for trespassing because only Antony was allowed here.’
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