The Little Stranger (53 page)

Caroline began to bite nervously at the tips of her fingers. Again she rattled the handle of her mother’s door, and knocked and called. Again, nothing.

‘God!’ she said. ‘This is no good. My mother
must
have gone outside. She must have gone before this latest fall of snow covered up her footprints.’

‘Without her coat and her boots?’ asked Betty, in horror.

Again they looked at each other; then they turned, and hurried down the stairs, and drew back the bolts of the front door. The whiteness of the day almost blinded them, but they went, as quickly as they could, across the gravel, then right along the south terrace to the steps that led down to the lawn. Here, dazzled and frustrated by the unbroken blanket of snow with which the lawn was covered, Caroline came to a halt, and peered across the garden. She cupped her hands to her mouth, calling, ‘Mother! Mother, are you there?’

‘Mrs Ayres!’ called Betty. ‘Madam! Mrs Ayres!’

They listened, and heard nothing.

‘We might try the old gardens,’ said Caroline then, moving forward again. ‘My mother was there yesterday with Dr Faraday. I don’t know, perhaps she took it into her head to go back.’

But as she spoke, her eye was caught by a small imperfection in the snow ahead of her; and warily, she moved towards it. Something had fallen there, some small metal object: she thought at first that it must be a coin, then realised as she drew closer that what she’d mistaken for a tilted shilling was actually the glittering oval end of a long-stemmed key. It was the key—she knew it had to be—to her mother’s locked room, but how it had dropped or tumbled there, into that unmarked stretch of snow, she couldn’t imagine. She could only think, for one wild moment, that it had slipped from the beak of a bird, and she lifted her eyes and turned her head, in search of a magpie or a crow. What her gaze met instead were the windows of her mother’s bedroom. One was closed, its curtains shut. The other was open—wide open to the frosty air. And her heart, at the sight of it, seemed to die in her breast. For suddenly she knew that the key was here because her mother herself, after locking her door from the inside, had thrown it out. She knew that her mother was still in her room, and did not want to be easily found; and she guessed why.

She ran, then—just as, soon, I myself would be running—ran awkwardly back through the powdery snow, catching hold of a startled Betty and taking her with her, pulling her into the house and up the stairs. The key was as cold as an icicle in her fingers as she fitted it into the lock. Her hand was trembling so violently that, for a second, the metal wouldn’t catch, and her leaden heart gave a desperate kick: she thought that, after all, she had made a mistake, the key was the wrong one, not her mother’s at all … But then the lock shifted. She caught hold of the handle and pushed at the door. She felt it open an inch or two and then stop, as something behind it, something heavy and resisting, got in its path.

‘For God’s sake, help me!’ she cried, in a terribly broken voice, and Betty moved forward to push the door with her, until it had opened just far enough for them to be able to put in their heads and look behind it. What they saw made them both cry out. It was Mrs Ayres, slumped and ungainly, her head lolling, her pose queer, as if she had sunk to her knees in a sort of half-faint just inside the threshold. Her face was hidden by her loose greying hair, but as they pushed the door further, her head moved slackly to the side. Then they could see what she had done.

She had hanged herself, with the cord of her dressing-gown, from an old brass hook on the back of the door.

There followed several ghastly minutes as they tried to release her, to warm and revive her. The cord was drawn so tightly by her weight they couldn’t unknot it. Betty had to run for scissors, and when she returned, with kitchen shears, they found the blades of them so dull they could only saw away at the thickly braided silk until it frayed, and then they had literally to prise the cord away from the swollen flesh of her throat. There is a particular horror to the appearance of a hanged person, and Mrs Ayres looked dreadful, bloated and dark. She’d clearly been dead for some time—her body was already cool—and yet, according to Betty when I spoke to her later that day, Caroline bent over her, shaking and chiding her—not speaking gently or sorrowfully but telling her, almost playfully, that she must wake up, must pull herself together.

‘She didn’t know what she were saying, sir,’ Betty said, sitting at the kitchen table and wiping her eyes. ‘She went on shaking and shaking her, until I said perhaps we ought to get her up on to the bed. So between us we lifted madam up—’ She covered her face. ‘Oh, my God, it were awful! She kept slipping out of our arms, and every time she did Miss Caroline told her not to be silly, speaking just as she would’ve if madam had done some ordinary thing like—like losing her glasses. We got her lying down, and she looked worse than ever with the white pillow by her head, but still Miss Caroline was acting like she couldn’t see it. So I said, “Oughtn’t we to send for someone, miss? Oughtn’t we to send for Dr Faraday?” And she said, “Yes, go and telephone for Doctor! He’ll see my mother’s all right.” Then, as I was going out the door, she calls after me in a different voice: “Don’t you tell him, mind, what’s been done! Not over the telephone! Mother wouldn’t want everyone hearing that! Say there’s been an accident!”

‘And after that, you see, Doctor, she must have thought about what she’d said. When I went back in she were sitting down quietly at the side of the bed, and she just looked at me and she said, “She’s dead, Betty”—as if I might not’ve knowed it. I said, “Yes, miss, I know, and I’m ever so sorry.” And we just stopped there, the two of us, not knowing what else we should do … But then I got frit. I got frit terrible. I pulled on Miss Caroline’s arm, and she rose to her feet like she were dreaming. We went out together, and I shut the door and turned the key. And it seems an awful thing to have done, to have left Mrs Ayres lying in there all on her own. She were such a kind lady, she were always nice to me … And then it come to me how, just a bit before, we had been standing there in front of her door, wondering where she could be, not thinking anything of it, and peeping through the keyhole, when all the time—Oh!’ She began to cry again. ‘Why would she have done such a horrible thing to herself, Dr Faraday? Why would she?’

It was a good hour or so after I’d arrived at the house that she told me all this, and by then I had been up to Mrs Ayres’s room myself. I had to nerve myself to go in there, standing at the door with my hand on the key. I, too, kept thinking of Caroline having been there before me, pushing the door and finding it blocked … My first sight of Mrs Ayres’s swollen, darkened face made me shudder; but worse was to come, for when I opened up her nightgown in order to examine her body, I found a score of little cuts and bruises, apparently all over her torso and limbs. Some were new, some almost faded. Most were simple scratches and nips. But one or two, I saw with horror, had the appearance almost of
bites
. The freshest, still smeared with blood, had clearly been made very shortly before her death—in other words, in that relatively brief space of time between Caroline’s having left her at five o’clock and Betty’s appearance with the breakfast tray at eight. What terror and despair must have gripped her in those three dark hours, I couldn’t imagine. The Veronal should have kept her sleeping long past the point of Caroline’s departure; instead, somehow, she had woken, had risen, had calculatedly closed and locked her bedroom door and disposed of the key, and begun the systematic business of torturing herself to death.

Then I found myself recalling our conversation in the walled garden. I remembered those three springing drops of blood.
My little girl, she isn’t always kind
… Was it possible? Was it? Or was it even worse than that? Suppose, in willing her daughter to come, she had only given strength and purpose to some other, darker thing?

I couldn’t bear to think of it. I drew up the blanket, to put her from my sight. Like Betty, I found myself overcome by a strong, almost guilty desire to get away from the room and the horrors it suggested.

I locked the door and went back down to the little parlour. I found Caroline still sitting blankly on the sofa; Betty had brought in tea, but the tea was cold in its cups, and the girl herself was moving between that room and the kitchen as if sleepwalking through the motions of her ordinary chores. I put her to make coffee, and when I had drunk a strong cup of that, I went slowly out to the hall to use the telephone.

It was like a nightmarish echo of the previous evening. First I called the district hospital, to arrange for a mortuary van to be sent for Mrs Ayres’s body. Then, with more reluctance, I rang the local police sergeant, to report the death. I gave the man the barest details, and arranged for him to come and take statements. And then I made my third and final call.

It was to Seeley. I caught him just at the end of his morning surgery. The line was bad, but I was glad of the crackles. I’d heard his voice and for a moment my own had faltered.

I said, ‘It’s Faraday. I’m out at the house. Our patient, Seeley. I’m afraid she’s beaten us.’

‘Beaten us?’ He couldn’t hear, or didn’t understand. Then he caught his breath. ‘Hell! I don’t believe it. How was it done?’

‘A bad way. I can’t say.’

‘Of course you can’t … God, this is terrible. After everything else!’

‘Yes, I know. But, look here, the reason I’m calling: that Rugby woman I told you about; the nurse. Do me a favour, will you? Call her for me, and explain what’s happened? I can’t do it.’

‘Yes, of course.’

I gave him the number; we spoke for another minute or two. He said again, ‘A bloody awful business for the family—what’s left of it. And for you, Faraday! I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s my fault,’ I said. The line was still crackling and he thought he’d misheard me. I said it again. I said, ‘I should have taken her. I had my chance.’

‘What? You’re not seriously blaming yourself! Come on, now. We’ve all seen this. When a patient has made up their mind to it, there’s very little one can do to stop them. They become devious, you know that. Come on, man.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

But I was unconvinced by my own words. And when I had returned the ear-piece to the stand, I glanced up through the curve of the staircase to Mrs Ayres’s door, and I found I had almost to creep abjectly away with my eyes lowered and my head bowed.

I rejoined Caroline in the little parlour and sat beside her, holding her hand. Her fingers were as chill and anonymous in mine as those of a wax mannequin; I gently raised them to my lips, and she made no response. She only tilted her head as if listening for something. That made me listen, too. We sat with frozen gestures—she with her inclined head, me with her hand still raised to my mouth—but the Hall was soundless. There wasn’t so much as the ticking of a clock. Life seemed held, arrested inside it.

She caught my eye and said quietly, ‘You feel it? The house is still at last. Whatever it was that was here, it has taken everything it wanted. And do you know what the worst thing is? The thing I shan’t forgive it for? It made me help it.’

B
ut that was all she would say on the matter. The police and the mortuary men arrived, and while the body was removed from the house, our statements—hers, mine, and Betty’s—were taken down. When the men had left, she stood blankly again for a moment, but then, like a puppet being twitched into life, she seated herself at the writing-table and began to make a list of all the things that must be done in the days ahead; on a separate sheet she wrote the names of the friends and relations who ought to be notified of her mother’s death. I wanted her to leave it all until later; she shook her head, working doggedly on, and I realised at last that the chores were protecting her from the worst of her own shock, and were perhaps the best thing for her. I made her promise she would rest soon, take a sedative and go to bed, and I took a tartan blanket from the sofa and tucked it round her to keep her warm. I left the house to the thud of closing shutters and the rattle of curtain-rings: she had sent Betty to darken the rooms, in an old-fashioned gesture of grief and respect. As I crossed the gravel I heard the last of the shutters being closed, and when I looked back at the Hall from the mouth of the drive it appeared to be gazing, sightless with grief, across the hushed white landscape.

I didn’t want to leave the house at all, but I had some dreary duties of my own now, and I drove, not home, but into Leamington, to discuss Mrs Ayres’s death with the borough coroner. I’d realised already that there was no concealing the facts of the case, no way of passing the death off, as I’d now and then done for other grieving families, as a natural one; but since I had effectively been treating Mrs Ayres for mental instability, and had already seen evidence of self-violence, I had an ill-formed hope that I could save Caroline from the ordeal of an inquest. The coroner, however, though sympathetic, was a scrupulous man. The death had been sudden and violent; he would do his best to keep it a muted affair, but an inquest had to be held.

‘That means a post-mortem, too, of course,’ he said to me. ‘And since you’re the notifying doctor, ordinarily I’d instruct you to carry it out yourself. Think you’re up to it, though?’ He knew about my connection with the family. ‘There’d be no shame at all in your handing the task on.’

For a second or two I considered it. I have never relished post-mortems, and they are especially hard to perform when the patient in question has been a personal friend. At the same time, I thought of giving Mrs Ayres’s poor marked body over to Graham, or to Seeley, and my mind revolted from it. It seemed to me that I had let her down badly already; if there was no way of sparing her this final indignity, then the least I could do was to see the thing through myself, and see it done gently. So I shook my head and told him I would manage. And as it was now well past noon, with my morning surgery irrecoverable and the afternoon stretching blankly before me, when I left the coroner’s office I went straight to the mortuary, to get the examination over with as quickly as I could.