Roots of Evil (12 page)

‘Oh, I see. That doesn’t give us any leads though, does it?’ said Francesca. ‘Unless Trixie crashed her car driving back.’

‘A crashed car would have been found and reported by now, I should think.’

‘But if it happened on a lonely stretch of road—’

‘Nowhere’s that lonely these days.’

But Francesca had a sudden vivid image of Trixie lying dead in a ditch somewhere, being rained on and investigated by weasels, and because this was not an image she wanted to get stuck with, she said firmly, ‘What I think I’d better do is get in touch with this Ashwood solicitor.’

‘All right. Fane gave me his number. His name’s Liam Devlin. D’you want to borrow my phone?’

Liam Devlin, reached by Michael’s phone, said he would be perfectly happy to meet Miss – Mrs? – Holland at Ashwood. Yes, he would bring the keys out later today if she wanted, although she had better come clad as if for tempest, fire and flood, on account of the entire Ashwood site sinking into a mire after days of rain.

Francesca promised to arrive suitably garbed, hung up, and accepted Michael’s offer of a quick wash-and-brush-up in the rather antiquated cloakroom off the hall. She was a bit tousled and pale from the long journey, and her mouth looked too wide for her face in the way it always did when she was tired or anxious. She brushed her hair, which she had had cut very short after leaving Marcus – it made her look like Joan of Arc after a night on the tiles, but it had represented a very satisfactory two-finger gesture to his simpering blonde and her gleaming shoulder-length hair – and went back to the kitchen to thank Michael for his help.

It was infuriating, having got all the polite thank-yous and interesting-to-have-met-yous, and all the conven
tional safe-journey farewells out of the way, to encounter a completely unresponsive engine when she turned on the ignition. Absolutely dead. Not a spark.

Fran swore and tried it again, and this time a faint, slightly sinister, smell of petrol came into the car’s interior. Petrol-flooded or waterlogged or something. Third time lucky? She turned the key again, and this time, in addition to the ominous silence, the warning light for over-heating the engine glowed balefully at her from the dashboard. Hell’s teeth. Now there was nothing for it but to go back into the house and find the number of a local garage. The trouble was that it was Friday afternoon and the odds were that no one would be able to come out until tomorrow at the earliest. Which meant she would have to phone Liam Devlin and put off their meeting at Ashwood, and that, in turn, would most likely mean Monday morning before she could get into the place. Bloody,
bloody
internal combustion engine!

A shaft of light showed from the open door of the house, and Michael’s voice said, ‘It looks as if you’d better come back inside, doesn’t it?’

‘Wretched thing,’ said Fran crossly. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know how to fix it?’

‘You suppose right. What time were you meeting Liam Devlin?’

‘Six o’clock.’

He looked at the car, and Francesca had the sudden impression that he was holding a brief, silent argument with himself. But he only said, ‘You do the damsel in distress role very thoroughly, don’t you?’

‘I didn’t mean to get stranded,’ said Francesca, and
heard with annoyance the note of apology in her voice that had always infuriated Marcus.

‘I’m going back to London this afternoon,’ said Michael. ‘So I could drive you to Ashwood – at least, I could if you know the way. And I could wait for you while you take a look round, and then drop you at your house afterwards.’

So this was what the inner argument had been about. His sense of chivalry had been nudging him to make the offer but he had not really wanted to do it, so he had been trying to think of a polite way out. Perfectly understandable. Francesca said, very firmly, ‘Certainly not. I couldn’t possibly put you to so much trouble. I can easily phone Liam Devlin and arrange another meeting.’

‘But if your friend’s been missing since Monday, perhaps you shouldn’t delay matters. Give me ten minutes to lock everything up, and I’ll be with you.’ The smile that made him look unexpectedly mischievous showed again. ‘Chalk it up half to chivalry and half to curiosity. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to have some company on the journey.’

The second thing you absolutely never did in life was to get into an unknown man’s car and embark on an unfamiliar journey with him.

But for the moment Francesca was more concerned with wondering how to tactfully reimburse Michael Sallis for the extra miles he would have to cover, than with speculating whether he was planning to carry her off to a serial-killer’s lair or a bordello in some steamy Eastern port. She supposed if she offered to pay for petrol he
would refuse. Perhaps she could suggest a meal or a snack on the road somewhere, and pay for that. Or would it look like a come-on? When you had been married for five years you got out of training for this kind of thing. Would it be better to send a note of thanks to him c/o CHARTH’s offices, enclosing a book token or a Thresher’s voucher, or something of that kind? Oh, for goodness’ sake! said her mind crossly. Surely he’s not going to interpret a cup of coffee and a sandwich at a Little Chef as an invitation to unbridled passion!

These doubts having been put firmly in their place, she opened a road map to find Ashwood, and scribbled down directions on the back of her cheque-book. It would not hurt to appear efficient and organized, even if you were neither of these things. Fran made careful notes, and then, hoping she had got all the roads and traffic islands properly identified, said, ‘Tell me a bit about CHARTH. It sounds quite an unusual charity. Shall you actually use that house for your homeless teenagers?’

He took his eyes off the road for just long enough to look at her, as if he might be trying to decide if this was a genuine request, or if she was just being polite. Francesca had the feeling that he probably found small-talk boring. He had nice eyes, though: very clear grey and fringed with black lashes.

‘A lot depends on the surveyor’s report and builders’ estimates,’ he said. ‘We’d need to add extra bathrooms and probably a second kitchen. The attics are quite large, though, so we might make use of them. I’d like to think we could actually use the house rather than sell it and
invest the money – I think that’s what Mrs Fane really wanted us to do.’

He paused, as if weighing up whether to say any more, but Francesca, who was interested, said, ‘Go on. How would you use the house?’

‘Most of the teenagers we deal with come from the real bottom of the heap – they’re often homeless through no fault of their own. Some of them were born into squats and doss-houses, or abandoned by a mother who went off with the newest man and left them to fend for themselves. Some ran away from abusive parents at incredibly young ages – seven, eight years old – and lived rough.’

‘How about reading and writing?’

‘Trust a teacher to go for the literacy side,’ said Michael. ‘But you’re quite right: a good many of them can’t read, or even count to ten, or tell the time. We try to get them on training programmes or into adult literacy classes so that they’re at least semi-equipped for life. We aren’t a particularly aggressive set-up – we don’t force anything on anyone, but a surprising number of youngsters do get referred to us by probation officers and child-care specialists and organizations like Centrepoint or the Samaritans.’

‘Do you actually deal with the training?’ He looked as if he would be more at home in an Oxford common-room than trying to teach under-privileged teenagers how to cope with today’s world.

‘My side of it’s a bit more basic. I arrange for them to learn the real nuts and bolts of life: the things that you and I don’t think about twice, but that they don’t understand because they’ve never had them.’

‘What kinds of things? I’m not just being polite – I’m liking hearing about this.’

‘Well, for instance, if you’ve always lived in a derelict house with no gas or electricity or running water you won’t know much about cooking a meal and eating it at a table with knives and forks. You’ve probably had take-away food all the time, or eaten straight out of tins of baked beans and soup. So you don’t know how to use a cooker or how to shop for food.’ When he talked about his work the reserve melted a bit, and his whole face looked different. ‘Or even simpler things than that,’ he said. ‘Like how to switch on an immersion heater to heat water for a bath, or change a light bulb. So we have halfway houses where we put a group of them for two or three months, and try to teach them. It’s better to use fairly remote places for that – some of them can be a bit undisciplined. But if that goes all right, we promote them to a bedsit if we can find one, and from there to acquiring employment skills. I do think Deborah Fane’s house would make a good halfway house.’

‘It’s an unusual line of work,’ said Fran thoughtfully. ‘Do you deal with any of the asylum seekers? Some of them are quite young, aren’t they?’

‘We’ll probably have to in time. At the moment we’re leaving them to the government organizations, though.’ He gave her another of the sideways glances. ‘When it’s successful, it’s rewarding work,’ he said, and Francesca had the feeling that he had considered first whether or not to say this, in case it gave away too much of his inner self.

‘It must be very rewarding indeed.’

‘There’s a high percentage of failures. Some of them inevitably revert to type. Sleeping rough, dealing in drugs.’

‘We get the drug problem at my school sometimes – I don’t suppose there are many schools that escape that, though. And we get the usual quota of difficult teenagers, of course. It’s not always easy to know how best to cope with them. They’re so defensive.’

‘Everybody’s defensive sometimes,’ said Michael, and Francesca felt, as if it was a tangible presence, the barrier of reserve click back into place.

Liam Devlin’s office in Ashwood was on the first floor of a beautiful old building that might once have been the town house of an Elizabethan merchant. His room was disgracefully untidy, but Francesca thought it was the kind of untidiness you would rather enjoy working amidst. She glanced at Michael and had the impression that he thought so, as well. There were masses of books and documents, and ancient Ordnance Survey maps, and several nice old prints on the walls. The jutting bow window apparently overlooked the main street, but it was difficult to see out of it because a large black cat composedly occupied most of it.

‘You do realize,’ said Liam, having let them in and introduced himself, ‘that this appointment is wholly out of character for a man of the legal profession. It’s six o’clock on a Friday evening, and everyone else has gone home. In fact the conventions require me to have left
the place about three and headed for a golf course, or the local Conservative Club, or a mistress’s bed.’

He did not look as if he ever did anything as conventional as play golf, and the only political organizations he might be likely to support would be ones with romantic or rebellious aims, on the lines of restoring an exiled monarch or fighting for downtrodden serfs. On the other hand, Francesca could easily believe in the mistress’s bed. She said, ‘It’s very good of you to meet us so late.’

‘It is, isn’t it? Sit down while I get the keys – the chairs are cleaner than they look.’

The chairs were perfectly clean, although it was necessary to remove various files from two of them before they could be sat on. The desk was just as littered, but it was still possible to see that it was at least a hundred years old and that it had a master craftsman’s graceful lines. Fran glanced at Michael, who was inspecting two framed caricatures of legal scenes which hung near the door.

‘Hogarth originals?’ he said when Liam returned with the keys.

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘Something in the quality.’

‘I like having the real thing,’ said Liam carelessly. ‘You never know when you might need to sell something to stave off the creditors. Shall we go? We’ll take my car, if you like. It’s not very far, but since I know the way—’

‘All right.’

‘So now,’ said Liam, as they set off, ‘we’re looking for the elusive Ms Smith, is that right?’

‘Well, we’re trying to find clues as to her whereabouts,’ said Francesca from the back seat, which was strewn with cassettes and files and two or three battered paperbacks. The cassettes were a mixture of Gregorian plainchant, Bach cantata, and what Fran, from daily exposure to classrooms of teenagers, recognized as very goth, very aggressive, hard rock. The paperbacks were
Mansfield Park
, Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day,
and the latest
Harry Potter
.

‘She was certainly a memorable lady,’ said Liam, driving too fast along Ashwood’s main street, and turning on to an open stretch of road. ‘So I shouldn’t think you’d have much trouble in picking up her trail. Is she given to disappearing for several days, do you know?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Ah well, life’s full of these surprises that jump out at you, flexing claws and teeth, and people are full of surprises as well.’ He swung the car into a narrow rutted lane with overgrown hedges on each side. ‘This is the lane leading to Ashwood’s site. Shockingly overgrown, isn’t it? But one day it’ll be bought by a rich consortium, I expect, and they’ll bulldoze it to the ground and build neat little boxes for people to live in, and there’ll be a proper road here instead of a tanglewood lane that might lead to a sleeping-beauty castle, complete with moss and bats. And once that’s happened,’ said Mr Devlin, who appeared to possess his fair share of Irish eloquence, ‘the von Wolff legend will dissolve like a cobweb over a candle-flame and be lost for ever. And that’d be a pity, wouldn’t you agree, Mrs Holland?’

‘I would. Uh – it’s Francesca, by the way. Or Fran, for speed.’

‘Well then, Francesca, I hope you’ve got weatherproof shoes on, because once we get to the gates and I’ve found a bit of terra firma to park on, we have to get out and walk.’

‘Will we be able to see anything?’ asked Michael.

‘Not very much, for it’s as dark as a—’ The car’s headlights cut through the darkness as Liam swung round to park, and the analogy, whatever it might have been, was never uttered. Fran said, sharply, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘Over there,’ said Liam, and his voice was so different to his previous offhand tones that Fran felt a stab of fear. Something’s wrong. And then she saw where Liam was indicating, and the fear came surging up more strongly.

Parked a few yards away, just inside the car’s headlights, was a rain-splattered estate car, and it did not need a second look to know it must have been parked in that same spot for a long time, because the wheels were half-sunk in the wet mud.

Trixie’s car. The weatherbeaten, seldom-cleaned vehicle she had driven ever since Fran had known her, because it was reliable and there was room for the dogs in the back. Absolutely unmistakable.

After what felt like a very long time, Michael said, ‘I suppose I’m reading this situation right, am I? That’s her car, is it?’

‘Yes,’ said Francesca. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘In that case, Devlin, it’s as well you brought the keys,
because I think we’ll have to take a look inside this studio. Francesca, will you stay in the car?’

But Fran was not going to stay out here alone in the unfriendly evening which already seemed to be filling up with shadows and whisperings. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said firmly, and got out of the car before either of them could argue the point.

But neither of them did. Michael passed her her scarf, which had fallen on to the floor of the car, and Liam switched off the car’s engine and said, ‘I think there’s a torch somewhere on the back seat.’

The light from Liam’s torch played thinly over the ground as they walked cautiously forward, several times disturbing little clouds of darting insects that rose up.

‘Like will o’ the wisps,’ said Liam.

‘
Ignis fatuus,
’ said Michael, softly. ‘The foolish fire. Odd how the old English folklore stays around, isn’t it?’

‘In Ireland they’ll tell you that will o’ the wisps meddle with none but the guilty,’ said Liam. He paused, and then said, ‘None but the murderers and the cheaters of widows and children,’ and this time there was something in his voice that made Francesca turn her head to look at him.

‘I think,’ said Michael, ‘that we’ve got quite enough to worry about, without encountering creatures from ancient myths.’

But Fran thought he glanced uneasily over his shoulder as he said this, as if he suspected someone might be following them, and this was such a disturbing idea that she said, ‘Is that the studio over there?’

‘It is. Studio Twelve.’ Liam’s voice had regained its lightness. ‘The one your friend asked to see, Francesca. I’ll spare you the ghost stories: I suppose you both know what happened here, but it was a long time ago, and as somebody once said, it was in another country—’

‘And besides, the wench is dead.’ Francesca completed the quote almost on a reflex, and then wished she had not.

‘Exactly,’ said Liam rather dryly. ‘Can one of you hold the torch, while I unlock the door. Thanks.’

It had not been possible to live in the same house as Trixie without picking up quite a lot about this place; Fran had rather liked hearing about it, although after a while she had found it vaguely troubling, and she had wanted to say, ‘Please leave this whole thing alone! Can’t you see that you’re prising open a fragment of the past, and don’t you know that there are some pasts that ought never to be disturbed?’ The same impulse seized her now, and she found herself wanting to stop Liam unlocking the door. But of course they must unlock the door. This was not about ghosts, it was about Trixie; it was about discovering what had happened to her.

As Liam pushed the door inwards Francesca had the sudden impression that Ashwood’s history and its memories – all the quarrels and rivalries and all the jealousies and adulteries – had been piled in a jumbled heap against the inside of the door, and that opening the door had brought them tumbling out to lie in an untidy tangle on the ground. But as Liam led the way across a big square hall and into the main part of the studio, she saw that far from the place being peopled by the ghosts of
old romances and faded renunciations, it was simply a sad dusty warehouse, covered in the dust and dirt of years. There was a sense of scuttling black beetles and cockroaches, but there was nothing very menacing about it. (Or is there? said a voice inside her mind. Are you sure about that?)

‘There’s an appalling smell of damp,’ said Michael, hesitating in the doorway. ‘Or cats. Or something. Are you sure the place is weathertight, Devlin?’

‘No.’

‘We’ll have to look round, won’t we?’ said Fran, and heard with irritation that her voice sounded a bit uncertain. ‘Properly, I mean?’

‘I’m afraid so. But there’s a light switch just inside the door and it’ll be a whole lot better if we can see what we’re doing. Wait now till I find it—’

There was a click, and a solitary light flared overhead. ‘That’s better,’ said Liam. ‘Francesca, shall you stay here by the door, while Sallis and I explore?’

‘I’ll explore with you.’ Just as Fran had not liked the silent twilight outside, she was not liking this vast place with the huge dust-sheeted shapes under which anything might be crouching, and she was not liking, either, the sense that eyes were watching from the pools of thick darkness beyond the single pallid light. Perfectly ridiculous, of course. And yet…

And yet, walking between and around the mounds of stored furniture and scenery was an eerie experience. Fran could not rid herself of the feeling that they were brushing against sealed-away sections of Ashwood’s history, or tiptoeing past invisible doors behind which
might lie all the make-believe worlds that had been spun here. Worlds where cities were made of canvas and plywood – where walls flew apart and where people flew into love and into tempers. Over there was an elaborate chaise-longue that might have graced Cleopatra’s barge, or a Turkish seraglio, or Elizabeth Barratt’s sickroom. And the remnant of stonework propped against it was clearly only plasterboard and paint, but once it might have formed a battlement on a Norman castle, or a wishing-well, or a raven-infested midnight tower…

Or, said a small voice Fran had not known she possessed, the lid of Alraune’s grave, wherever that might be…

And of all thoughts to have, this was surely the most outrageously ridiculous of them all, although if you could not spin a few ghostly fantasies in a place such as this – a place where people had sacked cities and seduced lovers and killed enemies all on the same afternoon! – then where could you spin them? Yes, but it was disturbing the way her mind had thrown up that reference to Alraune…

(‘
A ghost-child.
’ Trixie had said.
‘That’s what most people believe now
…’ she had said.
‘Alraune’s name was surrounded with myths and moonshine but I’m convinced that once there was a real child
…’)

Once there was a real child…Francesca pulled her mind back to the present. Liam was moving ahead, shining the torch into the corners, occasionally making a comment about, Jesus God, would you look at the state of this place, but Michael was silent and Fran had the impression that he was disliking this very strongly
indeed. She felt guilty at having more or less dragged him into the whole situation, because none of it was his concern.

Whoever had covered up the old furniture and the tag-ends of scenery had not done so very thoroughly or very neatly. Here and there bits of a table or a chair showed under the edges of the dust-sheets, or a spray of marlin-spikes or a fake tree lay untidily across the floor. Perhaps, when Ashwood was silent and dark, the abandoned film props crawled out to reassemble in the groupings they had known when Ashwood was alive and filled with people and lights and life. Like the ghost stories where toys came to life and moved around a nursery while the children were sleeping. Perhaps the entrance of Francesca and the two men had taken the props by surprise so that they had not had enough time to scuttle back under cover.

Fran shivered and wrapped her scarf more securely around her shoulders, tucking a fold across her mouth, because the stench in here was making her feel slightly sick. Damp, Michael had said. Or cats.

One of the chairs seemed to have got itself completely out of its dust-sheet, and it was standing by itself, half in and half out of a pool of deep shadow. Like the last reel of a werewolf film where the wolf is caught in mid-metamorphosis just as the silver bullet hits it. It had once been a rather elaborate chair: you could still see the carvings along the wooden arms and the remains of beading on the edges of the seat.

Someone had thrown a length of dark brown fabric over this half-and-half chair – perhaps an old curtain –
and had flung down some shoes as well. The uncertain light striated the fabric so that if you looked at it for long enough, it began to seem like a pair of corduroy trousers…

A cold horror closed over Francesca, and words started to dance dizzily through her mind: words that repeated themselves maddeningly in her brain, saying over and over that something dreadful had happened here – you do understand that, don’t you, Fran? It’s something that’s all part of the stench that’s been making you feel sick, except that you’re not going to be sick, you’re absolutely
not
…But you do understand that someone has done a terrible thing in this place? And then there was her own inner voice was saying weakly that, yes, she did know that, of course she did…A terrible thing…

But her mind was somehow stuck, like a car with the gears jammed, and she was unable to move beyond these conventional words and phrases. Something dreadful had happened. An outrage. In a moment she would be able to identify what it was, this outrage, this thing that was so very dreadful, and then she would know what should be done about it.