House of the Lost

CHAPTER TWELVE

The present

Theo hit the Save key and leaned back, turning his head from side to side to ease his aching neck and shoulder muscles.

He noticed he seemed to have a surname now: Zoia had referred to Matthew’s father as Andrei Valk. Valk did not sound very Romanian, but that was the name it seemed to be.

It was half past three and he needed a break from Zoia and Annaleise, and their machinations. He glanced at the uncurtained window wondering whether to take himself for a walk. Shadows were already creeping across the garden and it would be completely dark in another hour. He switched off the laptop and went out.

He enjoyed his walk and he enjoyed the sharp winter scents that prickled his nose and made his eyes sting with cold. He went past the convent gates, glancing along the drive. What would the nuns be doing at this time of day? For a wild moment he considered ringing the bell and asking if Sister Catherine was free. Probably she would be busy with patients and, in any case, he had no real reason to see her. He went briskly on, through the grey, sepia lanes. The troubling ghosts of Annaleise and Zoia receded a little as he walked, although Matthew’s ghost did not. Theo thought Matthew walked with him, and he smiled at this idea.

The cousins had walked along these lanes hundreds of times. In the autumn they went blackberrying, and in the summer there were raspberries and strawberries – there was a fruit farm on the other side of the village that grew the most delicious raspberries. Mostly it was Theo with Charmery and Lesley, but other members of the family came and went. Lesley’s brothers were often there; when they were younger they ran back and forth along the lanes like unruly puppies. Once, when Charmery’s and Lesley’s parents had gone off somewhere for the day, the five of them had tried to make raspberry wine but something had gone wrong with the process and a container had exploded, splattering the kitchen wall. Lesley had been horrified and had wanted to rush out to buy paint so they could cover the marks up before anyone saw it, but Charmery only laughed and said no one would care and she was not getting covered in paint for anyone.

A thin icy rain was starting to fall, and Theo retraced his steps, turning up the collar of his coat and hunching his shoulders against the rain. As he went past the convent gates again, he smiled at the prospect of Wednesday’s talk and of seeing Sister Catherine again.

Fenn House, when he got back to it, felt chilly, and he turned up the heating. The water was hot, though, and he thought he would have a bath to warm up. Last night’s chicken casserole could be re-heated at the same time.

It was one of life’s minor luxuries to lie in a hot bath, and the water out here was so soft it felt like silk. Theo let his mind drift. He wondered vaguely at what point he would phone his agent to explain that instead of a book with a flawed hero suffering from post-battle trauma, she would be getting children living in Ceausescu’s bleak Romania, and a predatory female whose appetites ran rapaciously to her own sex.

When he went back downstairs the casserole was ready, and he ate it watching the television news, smiling rather wryly at the staid ways he was falling into since coming to Fenn. Supper on a tray in front of the television – it was hardly the high life. But he knew the solitude and the extreme quietness of Melbray was responsible; it had a soporific effect and it was one of the reasons he had come to Fenn anyway.

The drone of the newsreader’s voice on the television was soporific as well; by the time the weather forecast started Theo was almost falling asleep. Once he sat up sharply, thinking he had heard a sound outside, but he seemed to be mistaken and lay back in the chair. The weather forecast finished and he got up to take the plate back to the kitchen, but a sick dizziness engulfed him and he had to grab the back of the chair to stop himself falling. Eventually, he managed to reach the kitchen, but he felt so giddy he simply put the plate and used casserole dish in the sink and staggered back to the sitting room, half falling into the chair.

This was ridiculous. Perhaps he was coming down with flu. In the space of half an hour? he thought, disbelievingly. He felt as if he was being pulled down into a spinning black tunnel and although he fought it, the room wavered and blurred. Once he thought he heard Charmery’s clock chime the hour, but then he remembered he had muffled its chime.

Little by little, threads of light started to trickle across the darkness, and Theo came slowly and fuzzily back to a semblance of consciousness. The room was still blurred as if it was under water and he felt as if his brain was wrapped in thick flannel, but his sense of hearing had returned – he could hear the television which he had left on. But there seemed to be other sounds, that were not from the television. He frowned, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. Then he did make sense of the sounds, and horror flooded over him.

Someone was in the house. Footsteps, soft and stealthy, crossed the hall, and through the mist he saw the sitting room door slowly open. Theo, still fighting to climb out of the spinning tunnel, tried to call out, but the thick flannel wrapping round his brain seemed to have wrapped his tongue as well. It’s the prowler, he thought in panic. He’s got in. Oh God, what do I do if he attacks me?

A dark-clad figure came through the door, paused for a moment as if looking round, then crossed the room and came to stand by the chair. Theo could not make out who it was, but he had a sense of the figure bending closer, as if inspecting him. He managed to move his head slightly and look up, because if only he could see clearly, and if only he could speak… With the small movement the figure seemed to flinch and step back. This time Theo managed to lift his hand, and the figure moved out of his vision altogether. There was the sound of a door opening and closing. He’s gone, thought Theo. Did he even exist? He stayed where he was, thankful to realize the blurriness was starting to dissolve – he could see the mantelpiece clock now. Incredibly, it was just after nine o’clock. Could he really have been out of it for a whole two hours? How? But he was starting to feel slightly better, and he managed to sit up and look about him. There was no one in the room, and everything was exactly as it should be. Did I dream that figure? he wondered.

He got shakily out of the chair and switched off the television. Silence descended, but it was not a very comfortable silence. Even though Theo was still not sure if the figure had been real, he knew he would have to search the house. He was furious to find his legs were still unsteady, but by dint of holding onto furniture, he managed to get to the downstairs cloakroom and sluice cold water on his face. This revived him sufficiently to make a wary search of the house. None of the rooms revealed anything sinister, but when he went into the dining room he was aware of something different and he frowned, trying to pin it down. Was a light on – or off – that had not been earlier? Was something in a different place?

Then he knew what it was. The laptop. He had switched it off before going out for his walk earlier and closed down the lid, but now it was open and running. Theo could see the slight glow of the screen saver – it was this light within the unlit room that had attracted his attention. The screen saver was called ‘Starfield’, a kind of travelling through space pattern: thousands of pinpoint stars whirling on a velvet-black background. He had always found it rather restful, but not now; he found it terrifying.

He made his way to the table and sat down, staring at the screen with its journey through the cosmos graphics. Could he be mistaken about having closed it down? He had been more or less unconscious for two hours, and the laptop, even if it had been on, should automatically have gone into its complete sleep mode; it was programmed to do that if it was not touched for an hour. But it was still in the half-power state, which meant someone had touched it in the last forty minutes or so. While he was unconscious? The memory of that hazily seen figure returned, and he felt a shiver of fear. Without touching the laptop, he got up to close the curtains against the darkness beyond the windows and switched on the lights to dissolve the watching shadows. Then he returned to the table. If he brought the computer out of its slumbering state what would he see on the screen? He hesitated, then reached for the keyboard.

The instant he touched a key the starfield fled and an ordinary Word document appeared. The menu bar showed it to be three pages long, and it was in the font and typesize Theo normally used. He read the first words and felt them stab into his eyes.

‘Four months ago, I killed Charmery Kendal.’

Cold horror engulfed Theo and he sat motionless, staring at the words. He had absolutely no knowledge of how – or when – they had got there, but he realized with panic that there was quite a lot of text on the screen. His mind shied away from reading it. He went out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, trying to convince himself that when he went back the words would have vanished. I dreamed them, he thought. I was still in a half daze. Maybe there was something wrong with the chicken. But he had eaten the chicken last night and been perfectly all right. Unless a rogue mushroom had got in? Amanita muscaria, fly agaric. He seized on this flimsy explanation eagerly. I’ve had a dose of LSD without realizing it. I’ll bet that’s quite possible.

But when he sat down at the table again, the document was still there.

‘Four months ago, I killed Charmery Kendal.’

Theo had no idea how it had got there. Could it have been on the computer’s hard drive all along, and some quirk of its workings – even some peculiar blip in Fenn’s power supply – had flipped it out of its rightful place and opened it onto the screen. It was a wild idea, but he checked the list of files anyway. There was no record of it anywhere. He checked the stored emails next, in case it had been emailed to him some time, and was not surprised when this even wilder idea drew a blank.

It’s just floating on the screen, he thought, appalled. It’s been typed straight onto a blank page and it hasn’t been saved – it’s just been left here for me to see. He remembered again the shadowy figure, and a sinister image of himself semi-conscious in the sitting room while the faceless intruder sat at the computer typing, rose up. He considered deleting the whole thing without reading it but he knew he could not, and with the feeling of plunging neck-deep into black icy water – water which might hide all kinds of macabre things below the surface – he began to read.

I came to Fenn House in the middle of a long drowsy day – the kind of day when the air is scented with lilac for miles around and the only sound is the hum of bees, and the whole world seems to be slumbering. The kind of day when no one quite knows where anyone is. Certainly no one knew where I was that day, and I’m as sure as I can be that no eyes saw me arrive at the house. Throughout all the investigations into Charmery’s death, no one has ever mentioned seeing me there; nor have I really been questioned, other than perfunctorily. A lot of people were questioned in that way, though: eliminating them from inquiries, the police called it. Creating a timetable. I was certainly never slotted into a timetable – I didn’t expect to be.

Charmery was in the garden when I arrived, sprawling half naked on the lawn just below the French windows. The tiny bikini she wore would no doubt have some extravagant designer label and would have cost a ridiculous sum of money, and the little soft shoes that revealed her painted toenails would be expensive leather.

The stone statues with their pitted faces and lichen-crusted limbs looked down at her, and I remember thinking only stone figures would be unmoved by seeing her like this. I had never been able to look at her without feeling a surge of such wild longing it sometimes made me dizzy. It happened that day, as I went down the mossy steps, and it annoyed me because I did not want any distractions. So, to counteract it, I reminded myself that there used to be ugly names for women who lay around practically naked, waiting for people to call on them. It helped a bit to think like that.

There was a flush of colour on her cheeks because she had been drinking wine – the bottle was at her side, in a plastic sleeve to keep it cool. She looked – and this is no exaggeration – impossibly beautiful. In any other female the flush would have been an unbecoming alcohol floridity, but in Charmery, with her rioting hair and smooth skin, it gave her a slumberous incandescence and the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite era would have fought each other for the privilege of painting her like this. I would have fought them for her as well, if I thought it would do any good.

I have no idea whether she was pleased to see me, because she pasted on the false, bright smile that fooled most people nowadays but that could never fool me. She offered me a drink, of course, suggesting chilled lemonade as an alternative to the wine. It was such a hot day to be flogging round, she said in her languid, slightly too-breathy, voice, pouring the lemonade, and apologizing for doing it so awkwardly. This stupid sprained wrist, she said, waving her left hand. So tedious and the bandage horridly uncomfortable in this weather. She talked about a tumble down the garden steps which had caused the sprain, making a story of it, saying how ridiculous she must have looked lying all anyhow on the ground, but clearly believing she had looked beautiful and helpless.

When I suggested walking down to the river she was agreeable. She was not drunk, but she was very relaxed and amenable – a state of mind and body in which she loved the world and everyone in it.

It took some time to embark on the walk, because the vain creature needed to don a sunhat and sunglasses to keep the glare from her eyes. She pulled a thin silk wrap over the bikini.

‘I daresay you think I’m impossibly frivolous,’ she said, with a sideways glance.

‘Not at all.’ Here was the boathouse. I waited for her to make some comment, but she only said, ‘Goodness, this place is looking a bit battered, isn’t it? I haven’t been down here for ages. I suppose it ought to have a coat of paint some time. And the timbers need something doing to them, don’t they? Creosoting or something – I don’t know.’

‘I’m afraid they might have gone a bit beyond creosoting,’ I said, studying the low outline of the boathouse critically.

‘Might they? Oh well, I don’t know about these things.’

A pause. I let it stretch out, not wanting to spoil this part of the plan by being too eager, but thinking I would give it a count of ten and then, if she didn’t say it, I would have to say it for her.

But she did say it. She said, ‘While we’re down here perhaps I ought to take a look inside, just to check. I’d hate it to collapse and float out into the Chet one night all by itself.’

‘It would be a shame, wouldn’t it?’ My voice was vague, disinterested. I was neither of those things, of course, but I gave an Oscar-winning performance that day.

Surprisingly, there was a moment when she hesitated and this disconcerted me. I could not tell if it was because some half memory from her past waited for her in there, or if she was merely worried about the unsafe timbers. But she went inside and I followed her. The boathouse was dim and secretive and filled with waterlight, and if ever there was a perfect place for a murder… The blood was pounding in my veins, and a little voice was hammering inside my mind, saying, ‘Don’t fumble it. Stick to the plan.’

I did not fumble it and I stuck rigidly to the plan. That’s the secret of a good murder: a carefully calculated plan, and the ability to keep to it all along. I pointed out a sagging section of rotten plank on the landing stage – goodness knows there were enough of them. I had thought there might be. She leaned over, pushing the ostentatious sunglasses up into her hair, in order to see better.

The plan worked as smoothly as if it had been rehearsed a dozen times. The boathook was in its place – I didn’t even have to look round for it. It was heavy but not unmanageable, and she barely registered the small unhurried movement when I picked it up. Then I raised it above my head and brought it hard down on her. The steel end hit her between the shoulder blades and the force of the blow sent her toppling off the landing stage into the water. She yelled and clawed at the edges of the planks, screaming for help, but she was already half submerged. Her hair was draggled with weeds and her flawless complexion was stained with river mud.

‘Help me! For Christ’s sake, get me out! Don’t just stand there – I’m fucking drowning in this shit-hole—’

It would have been a good refinement to let the foul-mouthed bitch climb halfway out and then shove her back in, but I didn’t risk it. I lifted the boathook again, this time pushing her completely under. The water isn’t very deep at that point because the bank slopes, but it’s deep enough to drown in if you’re held down.

Charmery Kendal was held down very firmly indeed. Once the boathook slipped and knocked a large piece of the staging away, tearing into her shoulder. Blood, thick and viscous flooded out, staining the silk wrap and when she yelled in pain, I felt – I may as well admit it – a surge of triumph, shockingly close to sexual arousal.

She flailed and thrashed wildly, grabbing at the boathook, and there was a bad moment when her hand actually closed round it making it necessary to exert more force. But her lungs were filling up with water – disgusting green river water that would clog her whole cheating body – and her hands fell away. She stopped fighting. I didn’t move, though, not yet: I wasn’t risking her rearing up from the water again. But she didn’t rear up. She lay under the surface, her hair streaming out round her head, her eyes open and staring. The water rippled across her face so it looked as if it smiled and moved. By then I knew she was dead, so I gave her a good hard shove so her body would float out into the main part of the river. I didn’t much mind where it ended up; my idea was to delay it being found. The longer that was, the less easy to pinpoint the precise time of death.

Remembering all this warmed me for a long time afterwards. It was something to savour, to re-live during all the nights when sleep would not come and the nightmares crawled from their corners. The image of that selfish, vain, butterfly creature, drowned and smeared with river mud, brought vast satisfaction.

It was somehow like her to become wedged in the struts of the landing stage and disrupt the final part of the plan. But the secret of a good plan is that it should be fluid, capable of being adapted. So I adapted and deceived, and I lied. I lied to myself quite a lot, as well. People do that. Especially murderers. I’m a murderer. It looks shocking written down like that, but it’s what I am.

The press with their customary habit of coining phrases, dubbed the boathouse the murder place and talked about the Fenn House Drowning, and I daresay that’s how it will go down in Melbray’s history. They’re probably already saying the boathouse is haunted, telling one another that murdered people always come back.

I always thought that belief was nonsense, but it’s not. Charmery has come back – she’s come back to me, and that’s what I can’t live with. That’s why I’m writing this – typing it, if we’re going to be accurate, and since I’ll shortly be dead myself I suppose I had better be accurate.

I can live with my conscience – with the knowledge of what I did that afternoon – perfectly well. I have no particular contrition about it. What I can’t live with is Charmery herself. She’s haunting me, and that’s a statement I never thought I’d make. But it’s quite true. At first she was no more than a darting shadow or a scarcely heard footfall, but these last four nights I have seen her. She’s no longer the beautiful creature stepped down from the Pre-Raphaelite painting. She’s the thing they dragged out of the river four months ago – a pale, bloated corpse, the eyes eaten by the fish. That’s what lies down with me in my bed every night and comes in to sit with me every evening. That’s what I can’t bear.

It’s been progressive, this haunting. At first she was just a shadow, then she gradually became clearer. The clock in her room began to tick again – it doesn’t sound much, but it was disturbingly eerie. Before much longer I think my nerves will crack completely and I shall be judged completely mad and carried off to some bleak asylum. For me that would be a living death.

Last night, for the first time, Charmery spoke to me. In a clear and recognizable voice. She said, ‘Theo, why did you murder me?’

‘Theo, why did you murder me?’ The words keep echoing in my head. ‘Theo, why did you murder me?’ That’s what she said, whispering with hateful spite through her nibbled-away lips. Then, this morning when she came to me; she wasn’t alone. There was a child with her. And that’s the thing I can’t bear – the sight of the child, with its huge, knowing eyes watching me.

So I am going to kill myself. There’s even a sort of symmetry to it – to die here in the place where it all began. I shall finish typing this, then I shall do it.

Hopefully it will be clean and quick. It will be very simple – no untraceable drugs or exotic potions. I shall blunt my senses by swallowing a triple dose of the diazepam prescribed for me in London. They were meant to help me sleep after Charmery’s death, and I’ve got enough left although I’ll make sure not to take too much so that I’m incapable of carrying out the next step. That next step will be to slash both my wrists with the sharpest of the kitchen knives. It will take some resolve but it won’t be all that difficult. It’s very easy to kill, I know that already.

I wonder if she will be here when I do it? I wonder if the child will be here, too?

But whoever is or is not here when I die, this document is my confession that I murdered my cousin, Charmery.

Theo remained, absolutely motionless, in front of the screen. If the opening words had burned into his eyes, the whole dreadful, damning text of the rest of the document had skewered deep into his brain. Where has this come from? This is a confession, and I didn’t write it, I know I didn’t. His eyes skimmed the screen again, and words and phrases danced jibingly before his eyes, like demons with pitchforks.

‘Some half memory from her past waited for her…’ The words dredged up the image of two people making explosive love in the middle of a long-ago afternoon, but more vivid was the statement about her hair being draggled with weeds and her flawless complexion stained with river mud, because this was the image Theo had had since she died. People thought drowning a beautiful way to die – the water would just take you, they said poetically – but there was nothing poetic or beautiful about drowning in the foetid waters of the Chet, or being half blinded by the rank slimy weeds… For a moment Theo thought the sick dizziness was returning and he sat very still, willing it to go away. After a few moments it passed and he was able to look back at the screen.

‘A triple dose of the diazepam prescribed for me in London…’ Who else knew about those sedatives, suggested by Theo’s doctor four months earlier? He could not remember ever mentioning them to anyone.

The dreadful possibility that he might have written this himself trickled across his mind. Was that remotely conceivable? Maybe he was going mad – maybe that was the explanation to all the strange happenings in Fenn House, or maybe he had been harbouring some deeply buried guilt about sleeping with his half-sister. He could have committed the murder exactly as it was described – he could have come to Fenn without anyone knowing, and killed her in the boathouse. But why would he have done that? He had tried to hate Charmery and at times he thought he had succeeded, but he had never really stopped loving her.

And what about that mention of a child? He scrolled back up to re-read it. ‘This morning… she wasn’t alone. There was a child with her.’ A child.

If Theo had been suffering from fifty kinds of madness, he could never have written that – there had never been any hint that Charmery had ever had a child. But could she have become pregnant and gone into a discreet clinic for an abortion? The implication that it had been Theo’s was unmistakable, though. For a moment an image was vividly before him of the child he and Charmery might have had: tip-tilted eyes filled with light like Charmery’s, and hair like beaten bronze in sunlight. Beautiful, thought Theo. Any child of Charmery’s would have been beautiful and filled with her particular charm. But another part of his mind snapped across this and he thought, but nature plays cruel tricks when it comes to inbreeding. More likely it would have been misshapen in some pitiful way, or missing a chromosome and prey to God knows what awful mental condition.

But who would have known enough about Charmery’s and Theo’s past to type that? No one except Helen, and Helen was dead.

His hand hovered over the Delete key but he knew he would not delete this. No matter how damning it might be, he would save it in an obscure corner of the hard-disc drive. He could not simply wipe it out. Not yet. Because of the child, he said to himself, because of the little lost thing, the might-have-been. He created a miscellaneous file, saved the document into it, then with an abrupt gesture shut down the computer. After this he hunted out the briefcase he had brought with him, which contained the documents relating to Charmery’s death. As sole beneficiary he had been regarded as her next of kin and had been sent various papers, some of which had to be signed, others which the solicitor appeared to think he should have for the record. He had not read them all in detail; he had simply glanced through the ones for signature, and returned them to the solicitor, hoping he had understood the complexities and his own obligations.

He shuffled the loose documents out of the folder and began to sort through them. There were letters from the solicitor and from Charmery’s bank; there was the official registration of her death; police and forensic reports. There was the post mortem report, in grisly detail. Theo had not been able to read this, but he forced himself to a scholarly detachment, and began to scan the printed pages.

The report stated that the deceased was a young woman in the mid-twenties, apparently in good health at the time of death. She had been sexually active. Fair enough, thought Theo. I haven’t exactly lived the life of a monk myself. The primary cause of death was given as ‘suffocation due to immersion of the mouth and nostrils in liquid’. It was concluded that the deceased was alive at the time of submersion – there were unpleasant details verifying this, describing froth and blood-tinged foam in the airways and also the presence of silt and weed and large quantities of water in the lungs and stomach. Theo managed to skim over most of this. However, said the report severely, the mechanism of death by drowning was neither simple nor uniform: there were a number of variables. Drowning as a method of murder was uncommon and required either physical disparity between the victim and the assailant, or a victim who was incapacitated by drink or drugs, or had been taken by surprise. The evidence pointed to this latter circumstance, stated the pathologist, and it could be concluded with reasonable confidence that the deceased had been forcibly held down in river water until asphyxiation occurred.

‘She flailed and thrashed wildly, grabbing at the boathook, and there was a bad moment when her hand actually closed round it making it necessary to exert more force…’

Theo pushed the words away and went on reading. There was reference to an old appendectomy scar. Reading that, Theo was jerked back to Charmery’s twelfth birthday, when she had complained of tummy-ache and everyone had thought she was simply suffering from too much trifle, until she doubled up with pain halfway through the party and was sick on Helen’s new carpet. She had enjoyed herself afterwards though, languishing on a hospital bed surrounded by flowers and fruit, then convalescing at Fenn.

But it was the last sentence that leapt from the page and etched itself into his mind like acid. ‘Within the last five to ten years deceased had given birth to a child.’

Given birth to a child. Given birth.

It can’t be true, thought Theo, his mind spinning in disbelief. It’s a mistake. I would have known about it – an abortion could have been done in secrecy, but an actual birth surely couldn’t? And what happened to the child?

He put the report to one side, and went determinedly through the rest of the papers, wondering what he would do if he found a birth certificate for a child born nine months after that enchanted, tragic summer. But there was nothing to be found.