A Dark Dividing (50 page)

The journey was quite a long one, but Roz would have driven far longer distances to mete out punishment to the creature who had murdered Sonia.

Still, she was not used to driving for so long a stretch, and there was also the worry that she might not have judged the chlorpromazine shot accurately. Supposing Simone managed to get free of the plastic tapes around her wrists and ankles?

But Rosie was urging her on, and the journey was achieved without any trouble whatsoever, with Simone remaining in the helpless half-daze in the back of the car. Roz saw she had been silly to panic about that: had she really not trusted herself to administer a properly calculated drug, after all these years of nursing? As for the rest—when it came to it, she had lost none of her old cunning.

A lot of planning had gone into tonight, and with it the careful working out of a timetable. By means of keeping a careful watch on Simone Roz had managed to establish the pattern of her days, and she had decided that Friday evening should be the night. Friday. Her heart bumped with nervous tension at the realization of how near she was to her goal. Friday.

Since Sister Raffan could not suddenly absent herself from her duties without prior warning, at the start of the week Roz had requested four days’ holiday, to begin at the end of Thursday evening’s shift. She was sorry it was short notice, but it was a family crisis, she said sadly. She would try not to be away longer than two or three days, so she might even be back on Monday morning. There had not been any problem because she hardly ever took her full entitlement of holiday; the nursing director was happy to grant the request and the other theatre sisters were willing to organize cover while she was away. She was so conscientious, good, reliable Sister Raffan. No real private life, of course, wonder what she does with her spare time, wonder what she does about sex…

And then—would you believe it!—just with everything nicely arranged that artful bitch, Simone, had suddenly vanished! Her car was no longer parked outside her flat, and the flat itself was silent and deserted each night—Roz had checked the place every evening. This had been worrying, but eventually Roz had telephoned Thorne’s and asked to speak to Simone.

Angelica Thorne, snooty cat, had taken the call. She had said Simone was away at present, she was out of London.

Away! Out of London! All the crime stories—fiction and truth—said there was almost always one small detail the criminal overlooked, and Roz had smiled at this because she had believed she had provided for every eventuality. Now it seemed she had not.

Angelica asked if there was any message she could take for Simone, and Roz had been ready for this. She said, ‘It’s about her dentist’s appointment. There’s been a muddle about the dates, and we’re trying to sort it out.’ This was a ruse she had seen used in a TV film, and she had thought it quite a good one. She added, conscientiously, that it would be easier to speak to Miss Marriot direct. Did Angelica know when she would be back?

She waited, her heart beating too fast with nervous tension, but Angelica was unsuspicious. In her cool expensive voice she said Simone would be back on Friday—probably not until early evening, after the gallery had closed. But she could leave a note on Simone’s desk if that would help.

‘I wonder if that would be best.’ Roz pretended to think. ‘No, look, I won’t trouble you to do that, I’ll put a little note in the post to her, that’s what I’ll do. Thank you so much.’

Friday. Simone would be back on Friday. She was expected to check in at Thorne’s, after which it sounded as if she would go on to her own flat. Excellent. The plan did not even need to be altered.

Roz calmly worked her normal turn of duty on Thursday evening—two routine scheduled gastroscopies, and an emergency appendectomy on a small boy brought in just after lunch. Nothing very demanding about any of them. She left the hospital shortly before seven, and drove home to pack a small suitcase and leave a note cancelling the milk for the weekend. She did not want to return to a doorstep full of sour milk.

When Roz had gone back to St Luke’s after Sonia’s death most of the nurses she had known had left or moved on, but the nursing director had been so pleased to have someone with a few years’ training, no matter how long ago it had been, that she had welcomed Roz with open arms, and allowed her to take a refresher course before assigning her to theatre work again. It was easy to slip back into the old life: her tenants had left her aunt’s house, and now that she had a regular salary again she had afforded that car she had always promised herself, and a course of driving lessons. No one had asked much about what she had been doing in the intervening years and it had been easy to give the vague impression of elderly, sick parents who had needed her support for a few years. It was a situation easily associated with someone like Roz.

Life was a circle, anyway. She supposed it had been inevitable that she should return to St Luke’s. She supposed it was inevitable that she should return to Weston Fferna and Mortmain House, as well: in the end all roads led you back there; they all led back to the shameful, soulless workhouse, whose dark despair and whose sad, bitter memories Roz had absorbed as a child.

Her aunt had told her that once you had lived inside Mortmain—once you had known Mortmain’s sadness and its memories—you never really escaped from it. Roz knew her aunt had never really escaped, and because of it, Roz herself had never really escaped either. She had told Sonia the stories when Sonia was old enough to understand, and Sonia had listened with absorption. She had liked hearing about Mortmain and about the children who had lived there, and the songs they had sung. She had understood that even though you might go to live hundreds of miles away, in your mind you would never really escape.

And now Simone, who had killed Sonia, and who had achieved the life that had been denied to Roz’s aunt, would never escape from Mortmain House, either. There was a symmetry and a rightness about Simone dying inside Mortmain.

Roz reached the lonely stretch of road and parked on the grass verge, swinging the car well off the road so that it would not be noticed by some officious motorist or inquisitive AA man. It was just after midnight. She opened the glove compartment for the two torches she had brought, tucking one into each pocket, and adding the spare batteries as well. Details, you see. You had to allow for every eventuality.

Then she got out and opened the car’s rear door to drag Simone out. Simone was still barely conscious from the chlorpromazine; Roz had judged the dosage very accurately indeed. Just enough to keep the bitch helpless for the length of the journey, and just enough for it to start wearing off once she was inside Mortmain.

The ghosts were clustering around her as she began the climb to the house. Rosie was one of them, of course. She could not have done any of this without Rosie, that strong wilful lady that Joseph Anderson had summoned into being all those years ago. (
‘You made me so aroused, Rosie…’
) As she went up the narrow track, half-pulling the stumbling helpless Simone with her, Roz was glad to have Rosie’s strength once again.

Sonia was here as well, of course, for where else should Sonia’s ghost be except in the place she had loved and in the place where she had died? Sonia was pleased with what Roz was doing tonight: Roz could sense it. Sonia was glad that Roz was meting out this punishment to the creature who had murdered her.

Lastly and most importantly, Roz’s aunt was here. The spirit of the indomitable woman who had lived through such nightmare years, and who had never really shaken the nightmares off, was with Roz as she approached Mortmain. It was very late now—almost midnight—and although there was only a thin sliver of a new moon, several times Roz saw the unmistakable outline of her aunt’s figure walking along beside her. She saw the two sticks her aunt had always had to use because she could not walk very well, and she saw the unmistakable skewing of her aunt’s shoulders. Sonia had had almost the exact same skewing. You did not come unscathed out of the kind of fearsome operation that Sonia had had, and the even more fearsome operation that Roz’s aunt had endured.

Roz could even hear her aunt’s hissing venomous voice inside the night wind: the voice that had talked and talked of her dreadful early childhood, and of the later months when she had fallen into the clutches of an evil, venal man who had touted his collection of sad misshapen performers around the countryside…

Aunt Viola walked steadily with Roz as they went up the track by the light of a sickle moon.

M
ORTMAIN HOUSE WAS wreathed in darkness, but this did not frighten Roz in the least. She knew all about Mortmain’s darkness, and she knew precisely where she was going. Once she was through the main door she had to cross the central hall and go along the corridors and rooms on the right-hand side. Through the Paupers’ Ward and across the well-room, and down the twisting stone steps to the underground rooms.

Viola had known about those rooms, of course; she and her sister had never been taken there, but all the children at Mortmain had known about them. Cages, they had said, whispering the word fearfully to one another. Cages for punishment.

‘Dreadful,’ Viola had said, seated in the wooden-backed chair, her face set and austere, her eyes bleak. ‘On some nights we had to pull the sheets over our heads to shut out the screams of the people carried down there, and locked into the cages. For we could hear them crying for help, on and on, until you thought your head would burst with the sound—’ And then the bleakness would vanish, and the hard bitterness would show. ‘But they were sinners,’ Viola would add. ‘Sinners in the Lord’s eyes, for why else would He have sent such a punishment to them? Just as He sent punishment to my sister and to me. I learned about punishment when I was very young—I learned a great many very hard lessons when I was very young, Rosamund, and you must learn them as well. Above all, you must never forget that God punishes. He has His instruments in this world, and He makes use of them.’

God has His instruments… Roz was God’s instrument now, guiding Sonia’s murderess along the dim echoing passages of the place where Viola and her sister had spent that dreadful childhood. Through the Paupers’ Ward where tramps sometimes spent the night, and into the courtyard room with the old well. As the torch beam cut a triangle of white brilliance through the dust and the dirt, showing up the rotting wooden cover over the well, for the first time Simone struggled. Roz tightened her hold at once and quickened her step in case the chlorpromazine was wearing off. Four to six hours, that was the rule of thumb, but you could never be precise about it.

The worn shallow steps were thickly covered in dust, and as they reached the foot Roz’s torch showed up the thick festoons of cobwebs like layered veils. When she reached up with the torch to brush them aside they shrivelled at her touch.

The cages were directly in front of the steps: iron bars, formed into oblongs, each one about as tall as a fully-grown adult, and half as deep. They were set against the wall and there were eight or ten of them. At the front of each one was a door, fashioned from the same iron staves, but made to swing outwards. There was a small catch on each one, and a padlock. Even from this distance Roz could see that the padlocks were all rusted beyond use but that did not matter, because she had brought one with her, carefully purchased from a large, busy hardware store one lunchtime.

It seemed as if she had timed the chlorpromazine absolutely right. Simone was struggling harder now—it was a frail kind of struggle that would not have harmed a kitten and would certainly not prevent Roz from completing the plan—but she was certainly coming out of the drug-induced haze. There was no time to waste. Roz dragged Simone to the nearest cage and pushed her inside, giving the bitch a shove that sent her tumbling forward. Then she slammed the iron-bar door and taking the padlock from her pocket, snapped it into place before Simone could escape.

She paused at the foot of the stairs, shining the torch on the cages. Simone had crawled to the front of the cage, and her fingers were curled around the iron bars. In the livid light from the torch her eyes were wide and terrified, the pupils still pinpoints from the chlorpromazine. Her hair was tumbled and her face was white with fear and panic. As Roz brought the torchbeam back to the steps she was glad that the chlorpromazine had worn off sufficiently for Simone to understand what had happened to her.