Roots of Evil (26 page)

The film wound to the final reel, and the doomed scientist was lured to his fate against a background of claustrophobic skies and what Edmund considered some rather showy music. But he was only dimly aware of it, although he did look with attention at the climax, when Lucretia von Wolff, as Alraune, brought her creator to his grisly end.

(
The eyes, Edmund,
the ghost-child Alraune had said in Ashwood that day.
There is no other way
…
Remember the eyes, Edmund, remember
mord…)

It made several people jump when Inspector Fletcher
said, in her cool detached voice, ‘Can we have a replay of that scene again, please?’ but Edmund had no real interest in Fletcher now, and he no longer had any energy to spare for Alraune. His entire attention was focused on Michael Sallis. He knew, with an unshakeable conviction, who Sallis was.

What he did not yet know was what he was going to do about it.

‘Did you get what you wanted out of that?’ asked Lucy of Inspector Fletcher, as they all dispersed. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

‘You shouldn’t ask,’ said Liam Devlin, overhearing this.

Fletcher regarded Lucy for a moment, and then said, ‘I did get something, Miss Trent. Not quite what I was expecting, but something very interesting indeed. I can’t tell you any more than that.’

‘I didn’t expect you could,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m glad it wasn’t a waste of time though.’

‘It wasn’t a waste of time as far as I was concerned, Miss Trent,’ said Liam, and Lucy glanced at him in surprise because this was the first time she had heard him speak seriously. ‘Thank you very much for arranging it.’ He sent Lucy another of the quizzical smiles, and went out.

The inspector said, ‘It wasn’t a waste of time for me, either.’

It was dark by the time Edmund reached home, and he went all round his house, closing curtains and switching
on lights. Then he poured himself a drink and sat down at the little desk in the sitting-room, reaching for the phone.

But he hesitated for a moment before dialling. The spider-strands of the plan that had formed throughout the homeward journey were still strong and good; Edmund had tested each one as the train sped away from London and he knew they formed a sound plan. But dare he carry that plan out?

Of course you dare
, said Crispin’s voice in his mind.
Trust your instinct
…
And if you can’t do that, then trust mine
…
When did I ever let you down
…
?

There had been times lately when the two voices – the silky assured voice that was Crispin, and the sly childlike voice that was Alraune – had fused in Edmund’s mind so that it was not always easy to tell which of them was speaking. Like a radio when it was slightly off the station, so that you got two sets of voices warring with one another. Once or twice Edmund had been a little confused by these blurred-together voices, although he always sorted them out after a moment or two.

But now, as he dialled Michael Sallis’s number, there was no doubt about who had the upper hand. This was unmistakably Crispin, and when Michael answered, it was Crispin at his most charming who said, ‘Sallis? Oh good. I hoped I had the right number. It’s Edmund Fane.’

‘What can I do for you?’ Sallis sounded polite but not especially friendly.

‘It’s about my aunt’s house,’ said Edmund. ‘As you know, although your company gets the actual building and gardens, the contents come to me.’

‘Yes, I do know.’

‘The auction firm’s coming out next week to pack everything and take it to the sale-rooms,’ said Edmund. ‘I’m keeping one or two bits for my own house—’ No need to mention that the one or two bits included an eighteenth-century writing table and a set of Sheraton dining chairs. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that if you will be using the house for these homeless youngsters, you might like some of the more basic furniture. Wardrobes or tables. The fridge is only a couple of years old, as well. And there’s quite a good set of gardening tools in the potting shed.’

Sallis said slowly, ‘Yes, I believe we might like them very much. Are you offering to give them, or can we negotiate a figure?’

‘Oh,’ said Edmund offhandedly, ‘I don’t want anything for them. I’m happy to let you have them if they can be of some use.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘Is there a day you could come up here and see which of the things you’d like?’ said Edmund. ‘It would need to be some time in the next week, because the auction people are coming next Friday. I need to know what to let them take, and what to tell them to leave in place.’

‘I could probably make it on Tuesday,’ said Sallis. ‘Would that be all right?’

Edmund pretended to consult a diary, and then said that Tuesday would be convenient. He had no appointments that day. ‘Shall you be staying overnight? It’s a hellishly long drive to do in one day. I could book you into the White Hart – you stayed there last time, didn’t
you? Or you could camp out at the house itself – the electricity’s still on.’

He felt the other man’s hesitation. Then, ‘I’d rather not stay overnight,’ said Michael. ‘If I set off early enough I can get to you around mid-morning. That would give me a good three or four hours at the house.’

Not ideal, of course; Edmund wanted Sallis there all night. But the essence of a good plan was to adapt as you went along, so he said, ‘All right. I’ve still got a bit of clearing out to do, so I’ll be there from ten o’clock onwards.’

‘If there’s any heavy lifting or anything massive to shift, maybe I can give you a hand.’

‘That would be kind. I’m afraid it’s a dismal business sorting out the possessions of someone who’s just died,’ said Edmund.

It’s a dismal business sorting out the possessions of someone who has just died, and when that someone has been brutally murdered, the task is a hundred times worse. But when DI Fletcher’s men had finished their search of the house, Francesca discovered that there was no one else to take it on.

She rather diffidently suggested to the Deputy Head that perhaps the school should assume responsibility for packing away Trixie’s things, but the Deputy Head instantly said, ‘Oh, I don’t think we could interfere in anything like that.’

‘But she hasn’t got any real family, you know,’ said Fran.

‘I know. It’s very difficult. Of course, you having lived in the same house for the last few weeks—’

So much for paternalism. Fran supposed she had better get on with it. The police seemed to have been
looking particularly for a will, but there had not appeared to be one – or if there was it was as well hidden as if this was a Victorian melodrama with a final chapter involving secret marriages and unknown heirs, which were all unthinkable in connection with Trixie.

Bank statements and bills had all been in order, and the only money owing was a couple of hundred pounds on a credit card, from Trixie’s purchase of new dog kennels last month. It also turned out that Trixie had owned the house outright, which rather surprised Fran, who had assumed there would be a mortgage. But perhaps Trixie had inherited money or even the house itself from her parents: Fran did know they had died when Trixie was quite young. As well as the house there was a modest building society savings account and a couple of insurance policies, both timed to mature in just over fifteen years’ time.

‘I suppose she was planning on retiring early,’ said DI Fletcher, preparing to leave Fran to her dismal task. ‘She was almost forty, wasn’t she?’

Fran said she had not actually known Trixie’s age; it was not something that had ever come up. She asked if the police really thought anyone would commit that nightmare murder for a house in North London and a few thousand pounds?

‘At the moment, Mrs Holland, we’re prepared to believe anything of anyone. But I’d have to say I don’t see this as being linked to sordid coinage. We haven’t been able to trace any family, by the way. Except for the elderly aunt – great-aunt, I should say – and even the wildest stretch of imagination couldn’t cast her as first murderer.’

‘I do know Trixie used to visit that aunt in the holidays,’ said Francesca thoughtfully. ‘But I believe she’s at least ninety. I shouldn’t think she could even manage the journey to Ashwood, let alone anything else.’

‘I shouldn’t think so, either.’

And so, taking it all in all, it looked as if there was no one prepared to shoulder the responsibility for Trixie’s things. Fran thought she would make a start on Friday afternoon, go along to Quondam Films on Saturday as requested, and finish the sorting out on Sunday. It would be a bit of a nuisance to have to break off midway through the weekend, although she was intrigued by the prospect of seeing
Alraune.

She had consigned the dogs to the care of the RSPCA with stern instructions that they must be found a good home, and the home must be for all three of them together. Trixie would never forgive Fran if her beloved dogs were split up, and Fran thought there was enough to contend with as it was, without risking being haunted by a peevish and accusatory ghost, purely because the ghost’s dogs had not been found sufficiently luxurious homes.

The actual sorting out was not as time-consuming as she had feared, and by Sunday lunchtime she was more than halfway through. As she worked, she thought about yesterday’s viewing of
Alraune
. She had found it disturbing but rather moving.

Trixie had not been very tidy, but at least she had not been a magpie keeping bundles of old letters or postcards, or even photographs. There were a few
photographs though, mostly pushed haphazardly into a couple of large manilla envelopes on top of a wardrobe. Fran, who rather liked old photos, even when they were of other people’s families or friends, put these to one side thinking she would look through them later, although it was rather sad if Trixie had had so few stored-away memories of her life. On the whole it was probably better not to surround yourself with sentimental fragments, but it meant a lot of the romance of the past got lost. It was not so many years since you could practically piece together entire lives from faded letters, or construct long-ago love affairs from theatre programmes and dance programmes or scratched gramophone records.

But she could not see today’s teenagers squirrelling away posters from pop concerts or print-outs of text messages. This strengthened her resolve to destroy everything from that disastrous marriage: Marcus’s letters and some theatre tickets, and the hotel bill from where they had spent their first romantic weekend, when they had not got out of bed until it was time to go home. Some romance, thought Fran cynically, and with the idea of forcing Marcus and his perfidy out of her mind, she worked doggedly on, making an inventory of furniture and the contents of drawers and cupboards. If you had no family, did you simply become just a typed list of saucepans and crockery and cretonne-covered chairs?

By mid-afternoon she had finished, and she stood in Trixie’s bedroom, conscious of aching back and neck muscles, and feeling unpleasantly grubby, and also very hungry. People deserted by cheating husbands were supposed to lose their appetites and dwindle to mere
shadows of their former selves, but Fran was not a die-away Victorian heroine or a twenty-first-century stick-thin model, and she was not going to stop eating just because she was getting divorced. And she had been carting boxes and books and clothes back and forth ever since breakfast and she had missed lunch.

She tipped the contents of some tinned soup into a saucepan to heat, and switched on the grill to make toast to go with it. While the grill was heating up, she looked through the photographs she had brought downstairs, trying to allot relationships to the faces. The slightly countrified woman standing in front of a nice old stone cottage might be Trixie’s mother, and the little group with 1950s hairstyles could be aunts. Were the dates right? Yes, near enough. There were one or two shots of a sturdy, somewhat belligerent-looking child whom Fran recognized after a moment as being Trixie herself. These had mostly been taken in gardens or on what looked like holidays on the coast.

But other than this there was not very much of interest. Fran turned over the last photograph in the envelope, thinking she would just label the whole thing as ‘Photographs’ and include it in the inventory for the unknown elderly aunt.

The last photograph was a postcard-size black-and-white shot taken against the background of some unidentifiable city. It showed a three-quarters view of a child around eight or nine years old, wearing a corduroy jacket. The child had deepset eyes and dark hair that flopped forward and there was something about the eyes that Francesca found slightly chilling. I wouldn’t like to
meet you in a dark alley on a moonless night, thought Fran, and then took in the writing on the white strip along the bottom and instantly felt as if a giant, invisible hand had slammed into her stomach.

On the bottom of the photograph was written a single name and a date.

Alraune. 1949.

Francesca sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at the enigmatic face of the dark-eyed child, occasionally putting out a hand to touch the photograph’s surface, as if she could somehow absorb the past through her fingertips, or as if buried within the images might be a key that would unlock the past.

Eventually she took a square of glass from a framed print Trixie had had of a Tyrolean snow-scene, and laid it carefully over the photograph. At this point the smell of burning reminded her that the grill was still switched on and was blasting toast-flavoured heat into the kitchen, and she hastily switched it off. She was no longer in the least bit hungry, which was ridiculous, because Alraune – the child, the ghost, the legend – could have nothing whatsoever to do with her. You don’t affect me in the least, said Fran silently to Alraune’s enigmatic stare.

But the kitchen suddenly seemed cold and unfriendly, and Fran repressed a shiver and glanced uneasily towards the garden door. The top half was glass, so that she could see the outline of the thick laurel hedge between this house and the neighbour’s, and also the tubs of winter pansies that Trixie had planted because they made a nice splash of colour when everything else had died down
and the dogs did not try to bury bones under them.

It had started to rain, and the thick old laurel hedge that Trixie had never got round to trimming this autumn was tapping gently against the window. Fran got up to draw the curtains across the darkening afternoon and flipped the blind down over the upper part of the garden door. The kitchen immediately felt friendlier and safer. But you don’t feel at all friendly or safe, she said to Alraune’s photograph. And where on earth did Trixie get you, I wonder? Were you just part of her research into Ashwood? Or did you instigate the entire project? Meeting the child’s uncompromising stare, Francesca was inclined to think the latter might be more likely, because if ever a face would print itself on your mind…

It was already almost six o’clock, and although she had never felt less like food, if she ate something it might stop her from thinking about ghosts and imagining them peering in through the windows. She was about to turn the gas up to heat the soup when she heard something outside that was certainly not the rain or the wayward laurel hedge and that was too substantial for a ghost. Footsteps. Footsteps coming down the gravel drive, moving slowly, as if the owner either was not sure of his or her welcome, or did not want to be heard.

Fran stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring out into the half-lit hall and the old-fashioned Victorian stained-glass panels of the door. Silence. No one there after all. And then a dark shape – unmistakably that of a man – stepped into the porch and a hand came up to lift the door-knocker.

This time Fran’s heart leapt into her throat, even though logic was already pointing out that it was most likely someone from school wanting to know if there was any news about Trixie’s killer, poor old Trixie, or even the Deputy Head inquiring how the packing up of Trixie’s things was going. But before she went out to answer the knock, some instinct made Fran snatch up a teatowel and drop it over Alraune’s photograph.

‘I could have thought up an excuse about you having left something at Quondam yesterday and that I was returning it,’ said the man standing on the step. ‘But I won’t bother with that. The truth is that I wanted to see you again.’

His coat collar was turned up against the cold and his hair was lightly misted with the rain. But his eyes were the same: grey and clear and fringed with black lashes, and the smile was the same as well; outwardly reserved but with that faint promise of something that was not reserved at all.

‘Hello, Michael,’ said Francesca. ‘Come in.’

It was as easy to be with him as it had been at Deborah Fane’s house, or at Quondam’s offices yesterday. There was no awkwardness; it was like meeting up with an old and trusted friend; one with whom you were always on the same wavelength even when you had not met for years. Francesca thought this was probably something to do with that appalling experience inside Ashwood, and then she glanced at Michael again and thought it was nothing to do with that.

He sat at the kitchen table while Fran made coffee,
and talked a bit about yesterday’s film, and asked how she had coped with the police interviews.

‘Reasonably well. The police were more courteous than I expected. I had to make a statement and give them as much information as I could about Trixie. Which wasn’t so very much when it came down to it. You?’

‘Much the same. Questions about when and where and how, and can anyone verify that, sir. In the main, nobody could verify anything about my movements,’ said Michael. ‘I live on my own.’

So he was not married or, from the sound of it, linked up to anyone. Francesca found this slightly surprising. With his looks he must have had opportunities, to say the very least. Yes, but there was that reserve; that would make it quite difficult to get close to him. She suddenly wanted to find out if she could do so. This would be nothing more than curiosity, though.

The kitchen was rather old-fashioned – Trixie had thought it a waste of good money to spend out on streamlined appliances when the old ones were still perfectly serviceable, and could not see the point of papering walls or painting doors every five minutes when the dogs scratched things to shreds as soon as your back was turned – but in an odd way the outdated background suited Michael. Fran, studying him covertly over her coffee mug, thought he did not entirely belong in the hard-edged world of high technology or fast foods or computer-generated music in supermarkets. She remembered that her original impression had been of someone whose spiritual home was an Oxford common-room, but seeing him again she revised this and set him instead
against the background of an old house – not an especially quaint or inglenook-picturesque place, just a fairly old house with a good many books that had been well read, and perhaps a nice untidiness of music and old programmes of plays or exhibitions seen and enjoyed, and maybe notes for a book he would never get round to writing…

And then she remembered that his work took him into the world of homeless teenagers and concrete-block skyscraper flats, and into the twilit realms of drugs and crime and sullen or violent adolescents, and her opinion of him received another shake, like a child’s kaleidoscope rearranging the colours and the patterns, although she was not sure precisely how the colours and patterns would fall.

She was just wondering how he would take it if she offered to make an omelette for them to share – it was coming up to seven o’clock – when Michael said, ‘You’ve probably already got some kind of commitment for tonight – I know teachers are always having to attend parent meetings and things – but if not, I noticed an Italian restaurant just along the road. It looked quite good. If you can eat pasta and feel like some company for a couple of hours—’