Spider Light (16 page)

The playing card had been prepared a long time ago, of course. Five years ago, to be precise. Quite soon after Antonia’s trial, Donna had quietly and unassumingly set about joining several charity organizations attached to the hospital where Antonia had worked. She used a false name, and explained to people that she had not a great deal of money but that she would like to help.

She had been welcomed enthusiastically of course, and after a year or two she became quite well known for her work. Absolutely tireless, people said. A real godsend to the Friends of the Hospital, to the fund-raising committee for the new scanner, to the campaign for more ICU and HDU beds. Always willing to organize flag days, charity discos, sponsored walks or swims. Pure gold. We’ll have to invite her to a few official things, by way of a thank you.

The invitations to the few official things snowballed–Donna made sure they did–and she got to know people on the hospital’s staff quite well. After a time it was easy to form several convenient friendships with a few of the bitch’s former colleagues. Antonia’s name was quite often mentioned, especially in the first year or so, when people were still in shock. A dreadful thing, they all said. How on earth would she cope with eight years in gaol?

Donna listened politely to this, and to people saying what a loss to the hospital Antonia was and what a good and committed doctor of psychiatry she had been. Great company as well–those terrific supper parties she and Richard used to give, oh dear, life could be so cruel, couldn’t it?

Antonia Weston had not been a good psychiatrist, and Donna did not give a damn if she had been good company or the most boring person in the world. Weston was going to die for what she had done to Don, and she was going to die alone and terrified, as Don had.

Two years later, moving the plan along, Donna took a long lease on Charity Cottage, using the name of Mrs Romero–her grandmother’s maiden name. She posed as a widow, modestly affluent, who travelled a good deal, but who wanted a base in England. She would be at the cottage at infrequent intervals, but would keep the place clean and safe between times. The Quire House Trust had only just been formed and was still in its infancy, so the letting of Charity Cottage was dealt with by agents in Chester who did not care if the place was lived in every day or only an hour every year, providing the rent was paid.

Donna paid the rent promptly, sending a cheque every month from a specially created building-society account so her real name never appeared. It was quite a drain on her resources, but she did not mind because she could not risk the cottage being let when Weston was released. She needed to be sure Charity Cottage would be available.

She stayed there at intervals so people would not wonder why it was empty for such long periods, and she made sure she was seen in Amberwood, although she kept her distance from people. During the winter months she set up a time switch for the lights so anyone seeing the place from the road would assume it was occupied. She kept the inside aired and clean and the little fenced-off garden neat.

At the hospital she kept her ear to the ground for mentions of Antonia’s release.

It was as well she did this, because one summer came the news that the bitch was being released early. Good behaviour, remission and time served prior to the trial, said people at the hospital. It had all been added up and what it amounted to was that Antonia would be out this coming autumn–the end of October, in fact. Wasn’t that marvellous? She would need a few weeks to recuperate of course–somewhere to readjust to the world–but perhaps by Christmas…They went about beaming, and Donna hated them for liking Antonia so much. She hated the dumb-witted, insensitive prison authorities who were letting a murderess walk free after only five years.

She almost panicked at the short time this gave her to finalize her plan. Barely two months. Was it long enough? It would have to be.

As September drew to a close, she ended the lease on Charity Cottage. It was not very likely the agents would find anyone to take the place at this time of year. Before handing in the keys, she had two extra sets cut, using one of the big, while you wait key-cutting places in Chester, and paying cash, so she would be able to get back into the cottage whenever she wanted. And she would want.

After this, she began to slide the name of Charity Cottage and Amberwood into conversations within the hospital network, saying offhandedly that a friend had mentioned the area, referring to it as a wonderfully peaceful part of the world, a marvellous place to heal wounds–somewhere to go if you were recovering from an illness or a bereavement or a divorce.

Or a prison sentence.

She was as sure as she could be that these carefully casual references reached people who had known Antonia and who had stayed in touch with her. Some of the clerical staff and the therapists who worked at the psychiatric clinic occasionally wrote to Antonia, and one or two of them had visited her a few times. Dr Saxon, the consultant psychiastrist who had been Antonia’s immediate boss, had certainly visited her. Donna thought Jonathan
Saxon had rather fancied Antonia at one time, although if you listened to hospital gossip, you would have to believe that Jonathan Saxon had fancied most of the females in the hospital at various times. Donna did not care if he screwed every female in sight providing he knew about the marvellously peaceful cottage, and providing he mentioned it to Antonia.

Apart from the bitch’s earlier than expected release, the plan was proceeding almost exactly as Donna had hoped. The only thing she could not predict with any confidence was whether Weston would take the carefully prepared bait. Donna was not given to praying, but during those weeks there were several times when she almost did. If her plan failed at this stage she would have to start all over again. But it would not fail. It must not.

It did not fail. The timing worked, and Donna’s own psychology worked as well. Less than a week after Antonia Weston’s release, she heard from one of the therapists that the bitch was renting Charity Cottage for a few weeks.

Antonia had walked straight into the trap Donna had so painstakingly set. Now all she had to do was keep a careful watch, and move the various stages of her plan along.

She kept watch by the simple expedient of parking her car at a big new garden centre about three quarters of a mile away, and walking up to Quire House each day, going openly through the gates in the wake of ordinary visitors. It was easy to step off the main drive and take the footpath that wound through the trees. Quire had not yet entered the world of CCTV cameras, and if anyone had challenged her, Donna would have assumed the mien of a rather thick visitor, apologetic at having missed the ‘Private’ sign. But no one did.

She watched the cottage from the concealment of the trees, which was tedious, but had to be done. There was a brief alleviation of the tedium quite early on when she was able to let the large inquisitive cat into the cottage and unwrap food from the fridge for him. It only took a few moments and although it was
a small incident Donna thought it would unnerve Weston. On the fourth day her patience was rewarded more substantially. Shortly before four o’clock Antonia set off across the park, carrying a large envelope. Donna waited to make sure she was not coming straight back, and then slipped into the cottage, the rope looped around her waist under her anorak.

She was wearing gloves, of course, and she had tied her hair under a scarf and then drawn up the hood of her anorak. You had only to watch a TV crime programme to know how very precise forensic science was nowadays, a single hair could be enough to identify a suspect, and she did not intend to be caught.

It was easy to pull out a kitchen chair, stand on it and tie the rope to one of the old ceiling beams near the door. Fashioning the noose was the best part of all; it looked amazingly real and startlingly sinister. She got down from the chair and dusted the seat, even though she was wearing cheap mass-produced trainers which were unlikely to be traceable. Then she returned the chair to its place. Yes, the rope looked all right, and the time of day was a bonus: it was nicely dark–that oddly macabre dusk-light you got at this time of year. She had closed the curtains so Weston would come into an unlit room.

Donna moved the rope back and forth experimentally. It was tied quite tightly to the beam and the movement pulled on the old ceiling timbers, making them creak softly. It was quite a spooky sound, and it brought a forgotten memory with it: the memory of how the kitchen joists had always creaked in just that way when someone walked across the floor of the bedroom directly overhead, and of how Don, before that last summer, sometimes pretended the cottage was haunted and made up scary stories about ghosts. There was definitely something in the far corner of the kitchen, near the door, he used to say. You had only to go in there to feel it. Occasionally he sounded perfectly serious about this, but Donna knew the cottage was not haunted, of course. Even so, it was still quite eerie to stand down here and
hear the ceiling beams creak as the rope swayed gently back and forth…

You did not abandon a plan you had spent months putting together and years polishing, but nor did you close your mind against an improvement. Donna gave a final look round the room, checked she had locked the garden door, pocketed the key and went quickly out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

It was a bit of a gamble to hide in the cottage when Weston came in and saw the noose, but Donna did not think it was much of one. She thought Weston would be so frightened when the rope began to move–apparently of its own accord, but really, of course, from the pressure on the joists overhead–that she would not search the cottage by herself.

But if by any chance she did remain there, Donna could get out unseen through the window in the back bedroom. At some stage of its history the cottage had been extended to join the kitchen to the old wash-house and make it one big room; the extension had a flat roof which was directly below the bedroom window, and there was a tough-looking drainpipe which she could climb down.

But it probably would not be necessary to do that and, in the event, it was not. Antonia ran out of the cottage, and Donna gave her a couple of minutes to get clear and than went down the stairs. Her heart pounding, she pulled the chair out again, and reached up to unfasten the knots. The rope slid down into her hands like an obedient snake, and she folded it under her jacket and went out through the garden door, locking it behind her.

Driving towards the motorway link road and the anonymous service station motel where she would spend the night, she was looking forward to the next move. She already knew which of Quire House’s occupants would be part of Antonia’s destruction.

After Antonia Weston left, Godfrey Toy had asked Greg Foster to look in the cellars for any more papers marked either ‘Forrester’ or ‘Latchkill’. No, it did not matter precisely what, just anything
labelled with either of those names. He had not really expected Greg to find anything, and was delighted when he came shambling back an hour later with a bundle of what looked like letters and some kind of ancient account book. Godfrey tucked them tidily into a cardboard folder, and decided to walk across to the cottage tomorrow to give them to Miss Weston.

He was just about to lock up his office when Oliver arrived home a day earlier than expected. Godfrey was pleased because he never felt really comfortable alone in Quire. He was still prone to dreadful nightmares and could not drive past that terrible old mill without first talking himself into doing so.

He pottered up to Oliver’s rooms to be told how the buying trip to the ex-headmaster’s house had gone. It was disappointing to hear that the hoped for Bernard Shaw letters had not materialized, although Oliver had never expected much of that. A too enthusiastic nephew, he said in the disparaging way that had gradually become natural to him over the last five years, but that Godfrey always found upsetting. The letters had no more been written by Shaw than the morning’s note to the milkman, said Oliver, and the Marlowe folio had been a mid-Victorian reprint.

Godfrey had gone back to his own flat, feeling quite glum. He exchanged a word with Raffles who had wandered in, and started to put together his supper. The prospect of walking over to Charity Cottage tomorrow cheered him up, and while the potatoes were cooking he poured himself a glass of Madeira. He liked Madeira, and he sang the fruity old Flanders and Swann song to himself while he drank it–the one about, Have some Madeira, m’dear–and tried to imagine how it might feel to put on a mulberry velvet smoking-jacket and embark on a seduction, although actually he had no idea how you went about seducing someone and mulberry was not his colour anyway.

It was at this point that Oliver knocked on the door to tell him about the extremely peculiar events at Charity Cottage.

Godfrey was so upset to hear about Antonia’s distressing experience (she had already ceased to be Miss Weston in his thoughts),
he abandoned the Madeira and potatoes in favour of a gin and tonic, and listened to the whole tale. At the end of it, he said he hoped Oliver had been sympathetic, and vanishing rope trick or not, oughtn’t they to invite Miss Weston to stay at Quire for tonight?

Oliver said he had been as sympathetic with Miss Weston as the situation had warranted, and that they could not be taking in flaky female holiday-makers who turned up out of the blue and had bizarre hallucinations all over the place. He also added that in future it would be better if Godfrey refrained from making absurdly trusting arrangements with unknown ladies to catalogue the contents of Quire’s cellars. Good God, this Antonia Weston might be anyone, said Oliver, and went up to his own flat and banged the door on the world, leaving Godfrey to a disconsolate and solitary supper, which he ended up sharing with Raffles.

He hoped he would not have nightmares when he went to bed.

For two nights after Thomasina killed Simon, she suffered fearsome nightmares.

In them Simon was trapped and frenzied, clawing at the heavy steel doors of the kiln room, screaming for help…Dreadful. Thomasina tossed and turned in the big wide bed that had been so wonderful when Maud had been there with her, and tried to push the nightmares away. But they clawed deep into her mind, causing her to wake in the small hours, gasping and covered in perspiration.

The days were easier, and once she began to spread the story of Simon’s puzzling disappearance, starting with that gossipy old Reverend Skandry, she felt better. Probably an official search had better be set in motion quite soon, but if–when–Simon’s body was found, nobody would be especially surprised because Thomasina had prepared the ground by saying she and Simon had discussed opening up the mill. Everyone would believe he had gone to take a look at the old place. In the meantime, Thomasina asked Mrs Minching to keep Simon’s room cleaned and aired, because no doubt he would turn up sooner or later.

Other than this, Thomasina went about her normal tasks, carrying trays of food up to Maud, visiting neighbours, letting it
be known that Maud was on the road to recovery from influenza, although not yet quite up to visitors. She talked to Maud very carefully about her health, although that was difficult because Maud thought it embarrassing to refer to the monthly cycle. Mrs Plumtree, who had explained about these things when Maud was thirteen, had emphasized that it was not a matter to be talked about, except perhaps with a doctor or a nurse if the need arose.

Surely there could only be one reason for Maud being sick in the mornings: Maud had conceived. Quite soon Thomasina would explain her plan for a secret marriage and tragic widowhood. Maud would go along with it; she would understand what a scandal it would be if she did not. She might not actually want to allow Thomasina to adopt the child after its birth, but Thomasina could apply a little firm persuasion when the time came. It occurred to her that Maud was becoming so strange it might be necessary to remove the child from her care anyway.

But if Simon was still alive, the whole thing would start to go very wrong indeed. Supposing the nightmare turned out to be true and he was able to talk? ‘My cousin hit me over the head with an iron bar, and shut me in the kiln room and left me to die…’ Would anyone actually believe that?

But the nightmares and the worries were only nervous reaction. Even if Simon had not been quite dead, he could not survive for very long. Even if he had shouted for help until his throat burst, no one would have heard him, and no one could have got into Twygrist anyway, because Thomasina had the only set of keys.

On the morning of the third day after her attack on Simon, Thomasina, who prided herself on never being ill or feeling out of sorts, went down to breakfast feeling very unwell indeed.

The nightmares had persisted, and last night there had been the hoarse dark whispers she had heard inside Twygrist.

Did you really kill him, Thomasina?
said these grating voices.
Are you sure he was dead when you left him down there, are you, ARE YOU?

She had woken at 3 a.m. with the voices reverberating inside her head, and with fear clenching and unclenching so badly in her stomach she had to run to the bathroom. Back in bed she managed to get to sleep, but an hour later the process repeated itself. It was annoying to find that fear was something that grabbed you not romantically in the heart but sordidly in the gut. It was especially annoying because the use of Quire’s bathroom at such a silent hour of the early morning would be heard all over the house.

But it was important to behave as if nothing was out of kilter, and so Thomasina appeared in the morning room as usual. When Mrs Minching brought in kippers she forced herself to eat them and even asked for more toast.

After this she determinedly spent half an hour in Maud’s room, while Maud toyed pettishly with her own breakfast, consisting of coddled eggs and thin bread and butter–invalid food.

Questioned as to her day’s plans, Maud hunched her shoulders and said there was not very much you could plan for when you were locked away like this. Still, she might practise her music, she thought. Or she might read a little. And again there was that
distant
look, as if Maud’s mind was no longer quite with her body. It made Thomasina uneasy. Normally Simon had been with her when she came up here.

As if she had heard this last thought, Maud suddenly said, ‘Where’s Simon?’ and Thomasina felt a warning twist of discomfort in her stomach again.

But following her plan, even with Maud, she said, ‘I don’t know. He seems to have vanished–I’ve asked Reverend Skandry to make a few enquiries, but I should think we’ll find that he’s taken himself back to London without so much as a goodbye.

‘Oh, I see. I wondered where he was.’ The words were quite ordinary, but there was the furtive sliding away of the eyes again, as if Maud had grabbed Thomasina’s words and taken them into a secret corner to pore over them. Thomasina did not like this at all. She gathered Maud’s breakfast things onto the tray, and
carried it to the door. Then she paused, and glanced back. Maud was still seated in the chair near the window, and she was watching Thomasina from the corners of her eyes. They had a dreadful sly glint; her lips were curved in a smile that seemed to bear no relation to the rest of her face. It was as if she was thinking: I know what you’ve been up to, Thomasina Forrester…I know all about you…

But Maud could not possibly know what had happened at Twygrist–she had been locked away up here. Even so, Thomasina was aware of the clenching pain she had felt in the small hours returning, like a hand dragging itself down in your bowels. Oh God, not again…

She murmured something to Maud about returning later, pushed the tray hastily onto a table, and got herself out of the room as quickly as she could, before half running down the stairs to the bathroom.

As soon as the colour drained from Thomasina’s face, leaving it pinched and sickly grey, the chance to escape suddenly presented itself to Maud. In her haste to get out–presumably to be unwell in decent privacy–Thomasina had forgotten to lock the door.

At first Maud did not believe it. She had not believed what Thomasina said about Simon leaving Quire, either, and she had sat down to play some of her beloved Paganini’s music: the eerie
Caprice
suites; the piece called
Le Streghe
which translated as
The Witches
. As she played, she laughed to herself over Thomasina’s discomfort. The laughter did not quite seem to belong to her, it seemed to bubble up of its own accord and become mixed up with the music. Maud found this a bit disconcerting, so she played louder and faster to drown the laughter out. When she stopped playing and laughing, she thought about the door.

It might be a trick. Let’s allow Maud to escape, Thomasina and Simon might have said. Let’s pretend one of us has gone away–we’ll pretend you’ve gone away, Simon, shall we?–and
let’s leave her door unlocked, and hide on the stairs and watch her think she’s free. Then, just as she gets to the door, just as she thinks she’s going to walk free in the park, we’ll pounce. Yes, Maud could just imagine those two behaving so sneakily, but she was not going to be caught like that, not she! She was going to be too clever for Master Simon and Miss Thomasina!

Presently she heard the clanking plumbing in Quire’s bathroom one floor down. Pressing her ear against her door she heard the bathroom door open and close, and footsteps going down the stairs. A few moments later she heard the big main door opening. Was it Thomasina going out? Maud darted to the window. She had to be careful, she would not put it past Thomasina to watch the window from below. Sneaky. Sly.

No, it was all right. There Thomasina went, striding out as she normally did, wearing her woollen cloak with the hood. It was not especially odd for her to be out in the hour before lunch but it was unusual. She had quite an orderly pattern to her days and this time of the morning was generally devoted to correspondence. Dull stuff Maud had always thought it, but Thomasina had been strict about it, and said these things had to be done.

Against the grey morning she looked very formidable indeed. It was like a pen and ink sketch. If Maud had been going to stay in her prison she might have wanted to sketch it and use the Indian inks which Thomasina had bought for her.

But there was no time for that. The door of her prison was unlocked, she must take advantage of Thomasina’s being out of the house. Mrs Minching would be in the kitchen preparing lunch, and the two young maids would be with her.

Her heart thudding with excitement, Maud wrapped herself in her own woollen cloak–the very cloak she had worn that other night when Thomasina had found her hiding at Charity Cottage–and pulled on a pair of stout walking shoes.

She opened the door very carefully, and began to creep down the stairs.

After Thomasina had emerged rather shakily from the bathroom, she made the decision to put this nonsense to rest once and for all. She would go out to Twygrist this very morning, and go down to the kiln room and make sure Simon was dead.

The prospect of definite action steadied her, and her insides were immediately calmer. Once outside in the good bracing fresh air, she felt even better. She walked at a smart pace across the park–Charity Cottage’s little garden was looking very nice. Someone–most likely Cormac Sullivan’s daughter–had planted a lavender bush near the door.

She went on down the lanes. Twygrist, when she reached it, looked exactly as it always did. Of course it does, thought Thomasina. What did you expect? She glanced about her to make sure no one was around, and then unlocked the door and stepped inside.

It was an eerie repetition of her visit of three days ago. She lit a candle again, and went across the wooden floor to the lower waterwheel and through the narrow door behind it. The creakings and rustlings went with her–Thomasina shut them out because she was no longer worried by Twygrist’s macabre echoes; she was concentrating on what might be ahead.

She would not have been surprised to find the steel doors open–by now she would not have been surprised at anything–but the doors were as tightly closed as she had left them. She pressed her ear to the surface, trying to listen for any sound from within, but there was nothing. Or was there? Wasn’t that a faint tapping from the other side?

Thomasina stood back, trying to summon the resolve to open the doors. Logic dictated that Simon was dead–that he had been dead when she dragged him in here. Supposing he was not? But it had been three days now and he had been in there without food–more importantly, without water. Surely he could not have survived? She would open the doors and satisfy herself that there was nothing to worry about. Then she would go home and leave somebody else to discover Simon’s body.

She set her candle down on the ground and remembered about finding a wedge to hold the door open. It would be the worst of all ironies if she got herself shut in. She wondered if she should have some kind of weapon to hand, but she dismissed this notion as ridiculous and grasping the handle of the left-hand door, began to drag it open. It moved more easily than it had that first time, but the screeching of the old hinges filled the tunnels exactly as it had done before. As the door swung slowly back there was a faint gusting of dry stale air in her face, and then the room was open.

Thomasina pushed the wedge into place, reached for the candle and held the flickering light up. For a moment she thought the room was empty, and she wondered wildly if the events of three days ago had been a grotesque dream or even a delusion. Perhaps Simon had secretly fed her opium as well as Maud.

And then she saw the room was not empty after all. Near the brick chimney, where once Twygrist’s fires had burned to dry the grain overhead, was a huddled shape. In the dimness it looked like a bundle of rags. Now she was a little nearer, and now the candle was burning up a little more strongly in the dry air, she could see the tumble of hair and an arm protruding from the bundle, the hand turned palm upwards in a terrible gesture of entreaty, the nails broken and crusted with blood.

Thomasina’s knees suddenly felt as if they could not support her, and for a truly appalling moment there was the watery quiver in her bowels she had experienced earlier that morning. She took several deep breaths and after a moment was able to take several steps towards the prone shape. Simon’s distinctive hair had fallen forward over his brow–he had always worn his hair slightly longer than most men–and Thomasina had to repress a ridiculous urge to bend down and smooth it back, and whisper how sorry she was that it had come to this. Because after all, Simon had been the closest thing she had to a brother–all those holidays at Quire, all those shared memories.

But Simon’s son would live. He would grow up at Quire, and Thomasina would make sure he did not know that his father had been a weak blackmailing drunkard.

She was just turning to go when the flung-out beseeching hand moved and snaked its fingers around her ankle.

In a thread of a voice, Simon said, ‘Help me, you bitch…’

Thomasina recoiled, and tried to back away to the door. She was shaking so much the candle was in danger of going out, and she had no idea what to do.

‘Help me, you bitch…’

It came again, like the dry rustling of old bones scraping together, like the brittle tapping of fleshless fingers against a night windowpane.

‘Harder to kill–than you–think–Thomasina…’

‘I didn’t intend to kill you,’ said Thomasina, recovering her wits slightly. ‘Only to teach you a lesson.’

‘Liar…It’s been too long.’

‘No. You’re delirious. I miscalculated.’ But oh God, what do I do? Do I strike him over the head again? I can’t. I
can’t
. And he’s nearly dead as it is–how did he survive this long?