A Dark Dividing (52 page)

But the ghosts were impossible to ignore. Simone could hear them and she could feel them. Sonia had once said, in her sly way, that the children who had lived here had sometimes been taken by dealers in child prostitution—she had said they used to hide down here to try to fool the child-traders—and for a wild moment Simone could hear the heavy stomping tread of the child-traders searching the house for their prey. She listened carefully, in case there really was someone walking about overhead, but it was only the pounding of her own blood in her veins she was hearing.

I’m delirious, she thought, sitting up as far as possible, and forcing herself to breathe calmly and slowly. It’s something to do with—what do they call it?—sensory deprivation. It’s as black as pitch down here, and as silent as the grave—No, I won’t use that word. But I do wish it wasn’t so silent.

But the ghosts were not silent. Simone could not see them but she could feel their presence and she could hear them. She could hear the long-ago children scrabbling to escape the child-traders, and she could hear their small hands beating uselessly against the door.

Nails scratching against iron… Hands beating against bricks…

She came back to full awareness to discover that she was beating frantically against the iron bars of the cage, and that it had been the frantic beating of her own hands that she had heard and felt.

‘I
T’S PROBABLY ABSOLUTELY nothing to worry about,’ said Angelica’s voice on the phone. ‘But there’s this thing that’s happened, and the more I think about it, the more I find it just a small bit worrying. So I thought I’d see what you thought about it.’

Harry asked what was a small bit worrying.

‘Well, it’s Simone. She seems to have—this is going to sound frightfully melodramatic—but I suppose you’d say vanished. I haven’t seen her since Monday—that’s not the worrying thing because she left me a message to say she was going off on a field trip for our new exhibition, and wouldn’t be back until Friday night—’

‘It’s only Saturday afternoon,’ Harry pointed out. ‘She’s probably still on the field trip.’

‘No, I don’t think she is. We were due to meet someone for lunch today—an idea I had about including some paintings on silk for the next show and we were going to have a look at the artist’s portfolio—and Simone didn’t turn up. That’s so unlike her, she’s very nearly old-fashioned when it comes to keeping appointments and being on time and things like that.’

‘Perhaps she’s not well. Flu or migraine or something.’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve phoned and
phoned
,’ said Angelica. ‘And it’s just the answerphone at her flat—well, it’s not even that any longer because the wretched machine’s reached the end of its tape and it just bleeps at you now,
very
rude it sounds, I do wish they would make these things more
harmonious
—So then I drove out to her flat, and here’s the thing, Harry, her car is there so she must have got back from her trip all right, but there’re bottles of milk on the step and mail on the mat. You can see it through the door and it looks like several days of mail.’

‘There might be any number of explanations.’ But Harry could not, for the moment, think of one. He felt a small jab of unease.

‘So
then
,’ said Angelica, ‘I came back to Thorne’s, and I went into her darkroom. I
never
do that because it’s by way of being her sanctum and I never pry into her work. But I thought there might be a clue to where she was, so I broke the rule this time.’

‘And was there anything?’

‘I’m not sure.’ For the first time Angelica’s voice lost some of its colour and affectation. ‘I found something she’d been working on—from the look of it she did come back here yesterday, because she developed some film.’

‘Yes?’

‘This is the part I’m worried about,’ said Angelica. ‘Listen, Harry, is there any possibility that you could come over to see the prints she developed, because I don’t quite know what to do about them.’

‘Those two are Mortmain House, of course,’ said Harry, standing in the narrow darkroom with Angelica and staring down at the four prints lying on Simone’s workbench.

‘Well, I do
know
they’re Mortmain House for heaven’s sake, we’ve got that
grisly
view of the place upstairs, perfectly gothic although utterly brilliant of course, and we’ve sold several prints of it—’ She trailed off as Harry picked up the last image.

‘This is the one, isn’t it?’ he said after a long time.

‘Yes. I don’t even know what it is.’

‘It looks as if it’s a tunnel of some kind,’ said Harry, frowning. ‘Somewhere narrow and very old—’

‘The child’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘Oh yes.’ Harry went on studying the print. ‘She looks to be about ten or twelve,’ he said at last. ‘Is there any way of knowing when this could have been taken? Any date-stamp anywhere on the film, or anything like that?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t a clue about that kind of thing. And I haven’t dared disturb things in here. Those were lying on the workbench, face up. But I think this is the original film over here.’

‘It’s quite an old one,’ said Harry, taking it. ‘I don’t think you can buy that make any longer.’

‘And the shots aren’t trimmed,’ said Angelica. ‘Simone always trims her prints as she develops them—she’s amazingly neat and organized. I’m pretty sure she must have developed this last night when she got back.’

Something was tugging at Harry’s mind, and it was something he could not quite grasp. Something about the child lying in her own blood on the photograph—Something he ought to be able to identify—

‘This will sound utterly mad,’ Angelica was saying. ‘But when I first saw that shot of the dead child, I thought it was Simone. I’ve seen a couple of photos of her as a child, and that’s exactly how she looked.’

The thing in Harry’s mind that he had not been able to grasp came sharply into focus. He said, ‘Oh God, of
course
. Angelica, it isn’t Simone. It’s Sonia.’

‘
Sonia?
The sister? The twin who died—?’

‘Yes.’ He laid the print down very carefully. ‘Have you got any really good maps of England and Wales?’

‘Well, I daresay I could find one, or there’s the AA,
so
useful—Why? Are we going to call the police or something? Or Simone’s mother—oh wait, though, she’s still in Canada.’

‘We aren’t going to call the police yet,’ said Harry, although at a different level his mind was saying, Canada! Then
that’s
why I couldn’t track down Melissa! ‘I don’t think we need to worry Simone’s mother until we know there’s something to be worried about,’ he said. ‘What we are going to do though, is find Mortmain House.’

‘You think that’s where Simone is?’

‘I don’t know. I’m going purely on instinct. But these shots are of Mortmain, and that’s Simone’s twin, and I’d like to take a look inside the place before we call in the cavalry.’

He borrowed a car for the journey from one of the sub-editors at the
Bellman
; the car’s age was honourable but its suspension and staying-power were questionable, and the sub-editor had been dubious about its ability to ever reach its destination. If it did not blow all the gaskets by the time Harry got off the M25, he said glumly, then it would most probably develop carburetor trouble, in fact the likelihood of either Harry or his passenger or the car ever being seen again was pretty remote. Still, here were the keys, and please to remember that if you had to smack the foot-brake hard for any reason, you then had to lever the pedal back into place with your toe on account of there being an airlock somewhere in the hydraulics.

But the car did not fall victim to any of the ills predicted by its owner. It bounced spine-jarringly over the various roads and it drank petrol with vampiric greed, but it reached without mishap the part of Shropshire that the map designated as the Welsh Marches. The names on the signposts altered gradually along the way. Childs Ercall and Morton Say. Whixall and Whorthenbury and Threapwood. And then the start of the inevitable
Ll
names, and the Mawrs and Bryns.

‘Nice,’ said Angelica, leaning back luxuriously on the battered passenger seat and looking out of the windows. ‘Living in London one forgets about things like fields and farmlands and hedgerows.’

‘And smudgy blue and purple hills, and tractors and churches with lych-gates, and village pubs.’

‘Dear me, you aren’t a thwarted romantic by any chance, are you, Harry darling?’

‘Perish the notion,’ said Harry, but he thought: one day I’ll write a book with all this as the setting, and with the history and the legend of these places somehow woven into it. Tudor bastard princes and Owen Glendower rebelling against the House of Lancaster… The Book of Taliesin and the Mabinogion, and the Severed Head of Harlech that presided, undecayed, over revelries… And an old, old house named for an ancient law that had been created in the Middle Ages…

He was roused from this reverie by Angelica, who had been map-reading for the last thirty miles, pointing out a turning off the bypass that they had better take. ‘And Weston Fferna’s about five miles along from the look of things.’

‘OK. Yes, there’s a signpost to Weston Fferna. You’re sure, are you, that this is the right place?’

‘Yes, I told you. Simone lived in Weston Fferna for a while as a child. That’s when she took that shot of Mortmain House—the one in the gallery. Oh, and the hotel guide says there’s a place called the Bridge where we can stay.’

The Bridge was larger and more comfortable than Harry had been expecting, and, since it was Angelica’s choice, probably quite expensive. He was beyond worrying about this, however.

They were given two rooms at the front of the building. There were deep comfortable beds with huge puffy eider-downs, and chintz curtains and padded window-seats. If you opened the casement windows you looked directly on to part of an old coach road which had meandered through the countryside before the brash dual carriageway was gouged out.

‘
Very
nice,’ said Angelica, coming in five minutes later. She did not comment on the separate rooms. Harry was grateful for that.

He said, ‘What time is it? Half past eight. OK, I’m going downstairs to do a bit of prospecting.’

‘Would you like me to come with you? Or shall I stay up here and change for dinner—although I have to say that the
jumble
I threw into my case in London—’

‘Never mind the jumble,’ said Harry. ‘But you’d better stay up here. You’ll only confuse matters.’

Downstairs the small dining-room was serving a few tables with the evening meal. Harry wandered through to the bar, and by way of opening negotiations, requested a whisky and soda. The barman, who seemed to also be the landlord or even the proprietor for all Harry knew, accepted the offer of a drink for himself and was amiably disposed to chat. Yes, this was a fairly quiet time of year for visitors, although they were always very busy during the spring and summer months. Tourists, of course, and romantic weekends. And they did a good trade in bar lunches for people passing through.