Roots of Evil (20 page)

‘Yes, of course,’ said Edmund surprised.

‘I’d like that. Will she grow up to be like her grandmother, d’you think?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Edmund.

Just before the inquest Edmund said to Lucy that it would be better not to tell anyone about the oil lamp.

Lucy had regarded him with solemn eyes, a little too large for her small face. ‘Not ever?’

‘No,’ said Edmund. ‘Not ever.’

She frowned, and Edmund realized that she was going
to say something about it having been Edmund himself who had overturned the lamp – he could feel the thoughts forming in Lucy’s bewildered mind. So, not giving her time to frame the words, he said, ‘Lucy, listen. People might not understand about – about you being up there that night.’ A pause. ‘They might even decide the fire was your fault.’

It was rather dreadful to see the child’s expression change, but it could not be helped. Lucy was a truthful, intelligent child, and anything she said might be believed. No matter how badly Edmund’s plan to get revenge from that condescending bitch Mariana Trent had gone wrong – no matter how appalled he might be at what had happened – he had to cover his tracks.

‘Might I be punished?’ said Lucy after a moment.

‘No. No. I don’t really think anyone would do that,’ said Edmund, making it sound as if he was not absolutely sure. ‘But just in case, it would be better never to tell anyone about being in the attics.’

‘Yes, I see. I won’t ever say anything,’ said Lucy. ‘I promise.’

‘Good girl.’

‘But I thought,’ said Lucy, speaking very carefully as if she was determined not to cry, ‘that the rain would put the fire out. Didn’t you think that, Edmund?’

‘Yes. Yes, I did.’

‘I used to like night rain,’ said Lucy wistfully. ‘Didn’t you? It makes you feel all safe and cosy. And then in the morning everything’s all clean and sparkly and fresh. But I don’t like it now.’

‘I don’t like night rain at all,’ said Edmund.

There was night rain when Edmund’s father died a few weeks later – a ceaseless downpour that spattered against the windowpanes like bony fingers tapping to get in.

Edmund had spent his early childhood in this house, and he would have said he knew all its moods. He thought he knew the pace at which Time moved through the rooms, although he was already aware that when you were nineteen Time moved at a difference pace than when you were nine. But it would not matter if he lived to be ninety, or a hundred and ninety, the night on which his father died would always be the longest night in the world.

Since the fire his father had slipped further and further away from the normal world. ‘Well, we knew the condition was likely to worsen,’ said the GP when Edmund tentatively pointed this out. ‘And now he’s picked up this bronchial infection, probably because of his low phys
ical state. We’re having a bit of trouble shifting that, in fact I suspect that he’s not taking the antibiotics I’ve prescribed. In view of his mental condition that’s very likely.’

‘Shouldn’t he be in hospital?’

But hospitals, it seemed, were full to brimming with people who were about to die, or who needed urgent operations. Edmund’s father was a comparatively young man – barely past his middle fifties – and he did not need to be carted off to hospital just for a chest infection. But because of the – well, the other problem, he needed to have someone with him, just for the next few days, said the GP. Just to make sure he took his pills, and stayed in bed. It would not be a problem for Edmund to do that?

‘No,’ said Edmund, wondering how many lectures he would miss, and whether he would eventually manage to catch up.

‘Isn’t there anyone you could ask to stay with you to share things a bit? Family, perhaps. Or there are these medical organizations who supply nurses.’

But Edmund did not want any of the family there. Aunt Deborah would certainly come rushing over to help, but Edmund did not want her hearing his father’s wild ramblings, seeing the run-down state of the house, seeing the run-down state of his father. He did not want some gossipy busybody of a nurse there, either. So he said there was no one and that he could manage quite well by himself.

‘All right. Try to get the antibiotics down him – one tablet every four hours – and keep him warm,’ said the
GP, preparing to leave. ‘And give him whatever fluids you can. Sweet tea, glucose drinks, fruit juice, anything. He’s quite dehydrated. Oh, and don’t leave him alone, will you?’

‘He’s not violent, is he?’

‘No, but I think his mental state is deteriorating, although that’s not my field. We might need to call one of the on-duty psychiatrists in if he doesn’t improve.’

‘Might he have to be taken to a – a mental hospital?’

‘Let’s not look that far ahead.’ But the GP frowned, as if reassessing Edmund’s comparative youth, and said, ‘Are you sure there’s no one you could contact?’

‘I don’t need anyone. I can cope perfectly well on my own.’

He made up a bed in his old room, and he tried to persuade his father to take the pills left by the GP, and to eat and drink. He was horrified at how much his father had changed in the last few weeks, and how the once tall, once well-built figure had become shrunken and wasted. He’s given up, thought Edmund. He’s given up the fight to remain in the sane world, and I don’t think there’s any way of bringing him back. He realized with sudden surprise that his father was tired of fighting, and that he was grateful to the darkness that was at last pulling him into its deep oblivion.

Edmund only left the bedroom on two or three brief occasions during the evening – once to heat some soup for his father and once to make a glucose drink, both of which his father refused, turning his head away on the pillow. Each time he returned to the room he did so
with a beat of apprehension, more than half-expecting to find his father dead. Could you die, purely by wishing it?

Towards midnight the house slid down into a cold and haunted state that no longer seemed to be in the real world but in some desperately lonely wilderness. Was this the place his father had inhabited during all those appalling attacks of melancholia? This silent desolation? Edmund went round the house, turning up all the heating and switching on all the lights, but it did not seem to make much difference. The rooms began to smell of despair and ghosts.

Ghosts…

Shortly before one a.m. his father began the fearful head-turning that Edmund found so eerie. He constantly turned his head this way and that, as if he could sense the presence of something invisible creeping across the room, and as if he was trying to find it, not with his sight, but with his instincts.

‘What’s wrong?’ Edmund had been half dozing in a chair near the window.

‘Did you hear something?’ His father had pushed himself up on the pillows, and there was a feverish colour across his thin cheekbones. Edmund heard with a chill that his father’s voice sounded different. It sounded
old.
The two antibiotic pills he had managed to get him to swallow had had no effect; his breathing was like the slow creaking of a lump of thick yellowed leather.

‘It’s raining like fury outside,’ said Edmund. ‘I expect that’s what you heard. Try to go back to sleep. Or if I make a cup of tea could you drink it?’

His father shook his head impatiently and dismissively. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Can’t you hear? It sounds like someone creeping up the stairs.’

‘I can’t hear anything—’ He’s hallucinating, thought Edmund. But despite himself he crossed to the partly open bedroom door and looked into the deep well of the stairs. Nothing. He came back and sat on the side of the bed, and his father’s hands reached for him with the sudden frightening strength he sometimes displayed. ‘You imagined it,’ said Edmund. ‘There’s no one here except us.’

‘I’m not imagining it. I’m going to die tonight, Edmund. And
they
know I am. That’s why they’re here now. That’s what I’m hearing.’

An icy finger traced its way down Edmund’s spine, but he said, ‘
They
?’

‘The murdered ones. They walk, Edmund – that old belief’s perfectly true. The murdered ones really do walk. That’s why I’ve never been able to forget.’

‘Ashwood,’ said Edmund, softly. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it? You were there that day, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ The voice was no longer old and sick; it was younger, more vigorous. He’s going back, thought Edmund. In his mind he’s going back to those years.

‘I never forgot what happened that day,’ said this eerily younger voice. ‘That’s the trouble, you see. You think that in time you’ll be able to put it behind you, but you can’t. All the time, for all the rest of your life, you have to watch everything you do and you have to measure everything you say, in case someone finds out…’ He broke off, and Edmund waited, not speaking. ‘I was arti
cled to a firm just outside Ashwood village – you never knew that, did you?’

‘No,’ said Edmund obediently.

‘I’ve never talked about it. Or have I?’ A look of puzzlement crossed the thin face. ‘Have I talked about it, Edmund?’

‘No,’ said Edmund again. No point in saying Deborah had talked about it to him and to Lucy; that she had liked remembering those meetings at Ashwood, which had led to her marriage to the older brother, William Fane.

‘The firm I was articled to did a lot of work for the studios. Contracts for the actors, details on the leasing of the land. It was quite interesting. I used to be taken to Ashwood quite often, to take notes, to gain experience.’

Edmund could feel the memories crowding in, and he could see his father as he must have been in those days: young, charming, eager, his hair the colour of honey with the sun in it, his eyes vividly blue…

‘Lucretia had come to live in England after the war,’ said the voice that was no longer his father’s. ‘I think she had bought a house near to Ashwood – Essex or Sussex, somewhere like that. The first time I saw her I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was perfect, Edmund – skin like porcelain or ivory, and that black hair like polished silk. And a shining quality, as if she was perpetually surrounded by light. You didn’t actually see it, but you felt it. She could light up a room just by walking into it. But she was mischievous as well. Come to bed, she said, and I went. It was like being under a
spell – I sometimes thought she was a witch, but I would have done anything for her.’

He paused again, his mind still deep in the past. ‘A long time afterwards I married your mother – an old childhood friend, someone I had known all my life. A marriage based on friendship it was, and I thought it might help me to forget. It didn’t, of course. After Lucretia, no other woman could ever—’ Sanity flared in his face, faded away, and then struggled pallidly back, like an electrical current flickering on and off in a thunderstorm. Edmund wanted to tell him not to speak, to try to forget, but his father’s memories were winding their tendrils around his own mind now, pulling him into that same past.

‘That day,’ said his father, ‘that day at Ashwood, I believe I stepped over some kind of invisible line. I crossed a Rubicon or I forded a river somewhere, but whether it was the Jordan river or Charon’s Styx or the measureless sacred Alph, I never knew. But once you’re over that line, Edmund, you can never get back.’ A spasm of coughing wracked him.

‘Try to sleep,’ said Edmund rather helplessly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ But of course it was not all right, because the final strings of sanity were unravelling fast, and his father’s mind was moving beyond anyone’s reach.

‘Sleep, yes, sleep. To sleep perchance to dream, that’s the worry though, that’s always been the worry…And supposing death is only the prince’s hag-ridden sleep, after all…? Aye, there would be the rub, wouldn’t it? What punishment do they keep in hell for murderers, I wonder? Do you know, Edmund?’

‘You aren’t a murderer,’ said Edmund after a moment. ‘Lucretia von Wolff killed those two men. Afterwards she stabbed herself rather than face the gallows. She was – she was bad. Cruel.’

‘Was she?’

‘Murder is cruel and bad.’

‘Oh Edmund,’ said the unfamiliar voice from the pillow. ‘I know all about murder.’ A pause. ‘I’m a murderer,’ he said. ‘I was the one who murdered Conrad Kline that day at Ashwood.’

The silence that closed down was so complete that for a moment Edmund almost believed his father had died and pulled him down into death with him.

After what might have been moments or hours, he said, ‘Dad, listen. Lucretia von Wolff killed Conrad Kline.’

‘Lucretia didn’t kill Kline.’ The strength came back into the weak voice. ‘Listen to me, Edmund. I was nineteen when it all happened, and she was – I don’t know how old she was. Thirty-eight. Forty, perhaps. It didn’t matter. It was my first time with a woman – they’d laugh at that today, wouldn’t they: nineteen and a virgin, but it’s quite true. And I was clumsy and fumbling and mad with excitement, but I thought I had found the heaven that the religious talk about.’

I’m hating this more than I can ever remember hating anything in my entire life, thought Edmund. I don’t want to hear any of this.

‘It went on for three weeks. I would have died for her, killed for her. And then, that last day, Kline caught
us together. He stood in the doorway of her dressing-room – I can see him now, standing there, insolent devil that he was. He said, “Oh, Lucretia, are you at that game again?” And he sounded so – so indulgent. So loving. As if he was reproving a wayward child. I said, “It’s not a game – we love one another,” and he laughed. He took me into some other room – a wardrobe store, it was – and he said, “You ridiculous boy, she’ll ruin your life. Let her go. Find some nice English girl instead. Someone of your own age.”’

He broke off, struggling for breath, and Edmund said, ‘You don’t need to tell me this—’

‘I told him she loved me,’ said the harsh voice. ‘But he said, “She doesn’t love you. It’s a diversion for her.” I snatched up a knife or a dagger – something they had used on the film set earlier – and I attacked him. I just kept on stabbing him – I had to wipe out the words, you see. “She doesn’t love you,” he had said, and I had to get rid of those words, so I brought the knife down on his face – on his mouth – over and over again. There was so much blood – you can’t imagine how much blood there is when you stab someone, Edmund. And it smells – it fills up a whole room within seconds, and it’s like the taste of tin in your mouth.

‘I ran away then. Kline’s blood was everywhere, it was all over me, and I didn’t know what to do next. But I knew I had got to save myself. They would have hanged me, Edmund, they really would—’ Once again the hands came out, clutching, seeking reassurance. ‘I ran out of Ashwood as if the Four Furies were chasing me, and I ran until I reached the road and somehow – I don’t
remember it all – but somehow I got back to the house where I was living in Ashwood village. I locked myself in, and later I pretended I knew nothing about the murders; I pretended I had left Ashwood an hour before it all happened.’

He pulled Edmund closer. ‘But all these years I’ve wondered if someone did know and if someone had seen. I could never be sure, that was the thing.’ He turned his head away. ‘I was mad that day, and I think I’ve been mad ever since, Edmund. But if I’m really mad, I shouldn’t still be hurting, should I, not after all this time, thirty years since she died…’ His voice became fainter, not physically, but somehow spiritually, as if he was moving further away from the world.

Edmund had no idea what he should say. He kept hold of the thin hands. The echoes swirled and eddied all around the room.

Then his father said, very softly, ‘I think I’m going to die very soon, Edmund.’

‘No—’

‘Yes, I think so. I shall go down into oblivion and peace. Or will it be down into a tempestuous darkness, where hell’s demons dwell? People don’t know until they get there. But I’ll know quite soon, because I’m going to die tonight, aren’t I?’

Edmund stared down at the bed, watching the sanity come and go in the thin face, conscious of a dreadful pity. He could just remember the bright-haired, bright-minded man of his early childhood, and he could remember his father’s lively intelligence and imaginative mind, and the feeling of security he had given Edmund.
When Edmund’s mother had died when he was tiny, his father had said, ‘I’ll always be with you, Edmund. You won’t need anyone else, because whatever you do and wherever you go, I’ll be there.’