Faces of Fear (7 page)

He knelt on the ground, shocked and exhausted. A dark shape approached him through the bushes. It seemed to stand in front of him for so long that he thought that time must have stopped.

Then a dazzling light shone in his eyes, and a voice said, “He's here! Gordon, he's here!”

More footsteps; more lights. Then, “Oh my God, he's lost his hand. Barker, call for an ambulance, would you, and tell them to bloody well step on it.”

He was sitting in the waiting room at Roehampton Hospital to have his new hand adjusted when he thought he saw somebody he knew. An elderly, white-haired man, with a large distinctive nose. He was sitting at the opposite end of the waiting room, reading a copy of
Country Life.
His right hand was covered by a leather glove.

Marcus frowned at him for a long time, but he couldn't place him. It was only when the nurse came out and called “Mr Greenleaf, please!” that he realized who he was.

He waited for him and met him outside the hospital. The traffic was so noisy that they had to shout.

“Mr Greenleaf? Mr
Miles
Greenleaf?” he asked him.

The old man looked surprised. “I'm sorry. Do I know you?”

“No, you don't. But I know your brother, Duncan.”

“Well, well. How is he these days?”

“Don't you ever see him?”

Miles Greenleaf pursed his lips. “He writes, but I
don't write back. He wouldn't understand my letters anyway.”

“He told me you were dead.”

“Hmph! Most of the time he thinks that I am. He has his good moments and his bad moments. Mostly bad moments, these days.”

“He told me about your hand. How you lost it, I mean.”

“Did he now? And which story was it this time? Not the Thessalonian witches, I trust?”

Marcus nodded, and lifted his own hand. “I went looking for it, to prove him right. Exactly the same thing happened to me.”

Miles Greenleaf looked bemused. “My dear fellow, I don't think you
know
what happened to me. My brother and I were both naturally talented artists. The truth was, even though I was younger, and even though I say it myself, I was very much better. That was why, when I won the school prize for art and Duncan didn't, he took me into the woods, knocked me semi-conscious with a hammer, tied me up, and deliberately cut off my right hand with a carpentry saw. It was in all the local papers.”

Marcus felt himself trembling. “No man-traps? No dog?”

Miles Greenleaf shook his head. “Just all-consuming jealousy, I'm afraid to say. And a mind that wasn't altogether balanced.”

“But there were man-traps. I was caught by one myself. The Vanes told the police that it was just a Victorian relic, left undetected in the woods. But it didn't
work
like a Victorian relic.”

Miles Greenleaf held out his left hand and shook Marcus's left hand. “As far as the Vanes are concerned,
I think it's wiser to remain ignorant. You never know. I might not be telling you the truth, and there might be a Thessalonian witch there, after all.”

That night the moon came out and turned the woods to white, the colour of bones and claws. One of Roger's dogs snuffled through the undergrowth, searching for voles or mice.

Roger, at his back gate, was whistling and calling, but the dog didn't pay him any attention, and Roger was too far away to hear the biting mechanical
snap
!

Neither did he hear the heavy rushing of something black and cloaked, with glittering eyes, hurrying through the brambles with all the terrible greed of a hungry moon.

Mont St-Michel, France

Mont St-Michel is a granite islet in the bay of St-Michel, near the mouth of the River Couesnon, in the department of Manche. It is connected to the mainland by a causeway 2 km long, which frequently floods at high tide. The island is 73 m high, and is crowned by a Benedictine Abbey, established in the tenth century, and built by extraordinary effort and loss of life.

Although it has been featured on thousands of postcards and tourist guides, Mont St-Michel still presents an eerie and uplifting spectacle as you approach it. There is a village on the south-east side protected by ramparts, and these withstood the English in the Hundred Years' War and the Huguenots in the religious wars. After the French Revolution, the abbey was used as a political prison.

Close to the peak of Mont St-Michel, you can see the island and the sea-washed sands around it through a
camera obscura.
It gives you an unparalleled view of a quiet and rural land where almost anything could happen.

Behind Mont St-Michel, the sky had grown thunderously dark, and lightning was already flickering at the spire of the Benedictine Abbey. Yet here on the water-meadows of the Couesnon, less than three miles away, the sun was still shining through the broken clouds, so that the fields and trees were turned into a jigsaw of light and shade.

All the same, Gerry was never sure why he didn't see her. He wasn't even driving particularly fast. One moment the narrow roadway seemed to be completely deserted in both directions. The next she was cycling across it, right in front of him.

There was a deep thump, followed by the clatter of her falling bicycle. He saw a primrose-yellow dress billow, one arm flapped up, with a wrist-watch on it. He didn't see her face. He braked so hard that the rented Citroën slewed sideways, with its two front wheels on the opposite verge. Its engine stopped.

“Oh Christ,” he said, out loud. “Oh Jesus Christ.”

His chest was rising and falling and he was trembling so much he could hardly open the door-handle. He climbed out of the car and looked back along the road. The bicycle was lying on its side, its old-fashioned handlebars raised like the horns of a skeletal cow. The girl was lying further away, on her side, an impressionistic splash of yellow in the French countryside.

Gerry walked toward her. He felt as if he were wading knee-deep in clear molasses. Behind him, he could hear the thunder rumbling, and all around him the grass began to quicken and stir.

He was less than half-way toward her when he stopped. There were no other vehicles in sight for as far as he could see. The only witnesses to what had happened were a herd of Friesians, who stared at him dispassionately, their lower lips rotating as they chewed.

He thought for a second: supposing she's still alive? Supposing she's still alive, and I leave her here to die?

But he could see the dark-red tributaries of blood that were flowing from the side of her head, and he knew for certain that he had killed her. It was then that he turned around, and walked back to the Citroën, and climbed into the driver's seat.

He was appalled by what he was doing. How could he knock a girl down, and simply drive away? But what was the logic of staying here? He hadn't intended to kill her. He hadn't been speeding, or driving carelessly. He had drunk a bottle of St Estephe with lunch, but he was sure that he wasn't drunk. It had been an accident, pure and simple. I mean, why had she cycled across the road like that? Why hadn't she looked? She must have seen him coming. It was just as much her fault as his.

He started the engine, and backed the Citroën onto the road again. He glanced up at his rearview mirror and the girl was still lying in the same position. The wind lifted her dress, so that he could see a thin, pale thigh. No doubt about it, she was dead. Even if he went to the French police and gave himself up, that couldn't bring her back to life.

He hesitated for one moment more, giving himself a last chance to decide what he was going to do. Then
he released the handbrake, and drove very slowly away from the girl, no more than fifteen kph, watching her all the time in his mirror. Two hundred feet away, he stopped. The girl's dress rose and fell like a windblown daffodil. The sky was darker now, and fat spots of rain began to speckle the Citroën's windshield.

“God forgive me,” he said, and drove away.

That evening, in his flock-wallpapered hotel bedroom in St Malo, he called his sister Freddie in Connecticut.

“Freddie? It's Gerry. Just called to say hi.”

“Gerry? Are you back in the States? You sound so clear!”

“No, no. I'm calling from France. I probably won't be back till September or October, the way things are going. We've already found three really excellent hotels, and we're negotiating with a fourth.”

“That's wonderful. How are you? I was just saying to Larry that we hadn't heard from you in a coon's age.”

“I'm great, really great. It's really beautiful here. I love it.”

He carried the phone over to the window and looked down into the Rue St Xerxes. It was shadowed and angular, like the street outside Joseph Cotten's hotel in
The Third Man
, where Orson Welles was waiting in the doorway. Beyond the rooftops, the harbour lights dipped and sparkled in the dark.

Freddie said, all of a sudden, “You sound strange.”

“Strange? In what way? I'm fine!”

“Gerry – is something wrong? I mean, really? You don't sound like yourself at all. And, well, I don't mean to be rude, but when do you ever call?”

“Everything's great. Couldn't be better. How are the kids? And that big stupid dog of yours?”

“Petey and Nancy are fine. We lost poor old George, though. He was run over by a mail truck. He didn't die right away but we had to have him put down.”

“Hey, I'm sorry. I liked George.”

Freddie went on chatting about the summerhouse they were building, but Gerry couldn't help thinking about the girl lying in the road, her yellow dress rising and falling in the wind, and her blood trickling across the asphalt, into the grass.

In the end, he said, “I have to go now. I'll call you again real soon. I'll send the kids some postcards, too.”

“Are you sure you're not in any kind of trouble?”

“What trouble? I'm great.”

“You're not in love, are you?”

He put down the phone, very quietly. In the street below two men were talking. He could see the glow of their cigarettes. He saw them turn their heads, toward the shadows, and almost at once a young girl appeared, in a spotted yellow dress, riding a bicycle. And just as an upstairs window in Joseph Cotten's hotel had opened and spotlighted the upturned face of Orson Welles, an upstairs window in Gerry's hotel was noisily flung wide. The girl looked up, photographed, and for a split-second she caught Gerry's eye. Pretty girl, he thought. Then she was gone.

He went over to his bureau and poured himself a miniature vodka. In the brown-measled mirror he saw a thin young man with an angular face and brush-cut hair. Red-and-white striped shirt, red braces. At twenty-five years old, the youngest vice-president in charge of overseas property acquisitions that TransWestern Hotels had ever had. This was his dream job. He loved the hotel business, and he loved France. More than anything, he loved the French people. Now he
had killed one of them, and driven away without stopping.

That night, as he lay in bed, not sleeping, he listened to the doleful clanking of ships' rigging from the harbour, and the wind that made his shutters quake, and he tried to think rationally about what he had done at Mont St-Michel, as if by thinking about it he could give himself some kind of absolution. He heard the thump of the girl's body hitting his car. He saw her skirt billowing, and her thin wrist raised, with a watch on it. A cheap gold-plated watch, with a thin red-leather strap. It had imprinted itself so much on his consciousness that he was sure that he could visualize the brand name, if he concentrated hard enough.

I left her there, lying in the road. She might have been alive. Maybe I could have saved her, if I had driven her to a hospital. Maybe somebody
did
find her, and resuscitated her. He would never know; and it would be far too risky to try to find out.

He whispered a clumsy, almost childish prayer. He hoped that the girl in the primrose-yellow dress had died instantly, without pain, not knowing what had happened to her. He hoped that she had been discovered by people who loved her, and that they had given her the kind of funeral she deserved. With flowers, and hymns, and tears of grief.

In the middle of the night, he was sure that he heard the
tick-tick-tick
of somebody riding a bicycle along the Rue St Xerxes outside.

He was sitting at an outside table at the Moulin du Vey when he noticed the girl looking at him. She had glanced at him once when he first sat down, but now she kept staring at him all the time, and making no attempt to
conceal her interest in him. He gave her a brief smile and Carl said, “What? What is it?”

“Nothing. I was just admiring the view, that's all.”

Carl made an issue of turning around in his white plastic chair. “Yes, see what you mean. Very scenic. Two trees, the side of a building, and a girl to make your hair stand on end.”

“She's just been smiling at me, is all.”

Carl laughed, and sat back, and took out a cigar. “You should go for it. You know what the girls call you, at the office? Gerry the Cherry. I mean, you're not really a virgin, are you?”

“Get out of here. I was engaged once, when I was in college. And don't you remember Francoise?”

“Oh yes, Francoise. Who could forget her? Legs like the Eiffel Tower.”

Gerry shook his head and devoted himself to his pork in mustard sauce. The Moulin du Vey was one of his favourite restaurants in Normandy: an old ivy-covered mill on the banks of the Orne, with a huge barnlike dining-room and a pretty gravelled verandah overlooking the river. It was a warm, lazy day, and he and Carl had driven out here to look for new country hotels to add to TransWestern's inventory. Butterflies blew around them, and geraniums nodded in the breeze.

It was the girl, however, who had completely caught his attention, and he found that he could hardly taste what he was eating or understand what Carl was talking about. She was sitting with a very smart middle-aged couple who could have been her mother and her father. Her hair was long and blonde and it shone in the sunlight like the gilded thistledown that blew across the surface of the river. She had one of those disturbing French faces that attracted Gerry because of one imperfect feature. Her eyes were
wide; her cheekbones were high; her nose was short and straight; but she had a slight overbite, which gave her a look of vulnerability. She wore a white sleeveless blouse with embroidered lapels, and Gerry could see from where he was sitting that she was very full-breasted.