The Magdalena Curse (26 page)
Read The Magdalena Curse Online
Authors: F.G. Cottam
By the time Elizabeth dropped Kilbride at the pub he was fine to drive. The aspirin had done its job. They did not stay for the drink she owed him for the work done to her front door by the police locksmith. Neither of them felt a celebration was in order as the case of her harassment progressed towards its now inevitable resolution in the criminal court. Neither of them was inclined to drink and drive. And as Kilbride confessed to her, the very thought of a drink of any sort other than water was enough to make him heave again, dryly this time. There was nothing left in his stomach.
Elizabeth felt sad driving back to the Hunter house. She would have to leave it, now. His father was back and Adam no longer required her full-time care. Mark had enlisted her potential help in some future confrontation with Mrs Mallory. But though she had her own suspicions, they had no real idea where Mrs Mallory was. She had no justification for staying at the house. Her cottage had just been made a safe refuge once more for her. She would miss putting Adam to bed. She would miss their kitchen banter and their popcorn ritual. It had only been a few days and nights and some of it had been extremely disturbing. But most of it had been wonderful. Her feelings of impending loss on the drive back made her realise just how lonely and starved of emotion she had allowed her life to become. It was shocking. Surely she deserved better? But you got out only what you put in, she knew. She shifted into a lower gear as the incline towards the house began and she felt the shudder of the snow under
her in the torque-heavy grip of the wheels. Bloody hell, she thought, I’m thinking exactly like Jeremy Clarkson would. She laughed out loud, but there were tears in her eyes. When all this was over, she was going to live differently, she decided.
her in the torque-heavy grip of the wheels. Bloody hell, she thought, I’m thinking exactly like Jeremy Clarkson would. She laughed out loud, but there were tears in her eyes. When all this was over, she was going to live differently, she decided.
Adam was watching sodding Clarkson when she let herself back into the house. She asked where his father was and he gestured vaguely in the direction of upstairs. Perhaps Mark was having that siesta he had coveted earlier. It was after six now and late for a siesta, but in the army you napped whenever you could and probably the habit had become ingrained in him. She would shower before she packed. Her encounter with Andrew Cawdor had left her feeling soiled. She walked into the bathroom and Hunter turned from the sink to face her. She realised that of course he never locked the door, because why would he? He occupied the bathroom with only his family there to surprise him; he was not used to the protocol of house guests.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. His bare torso had scars and weals across the plates and ridges of sculpted muscle. She could not help looking.
‘Not so much a body as a campaign map,’ he said. He smiled.
She nodded. It was a good line. She wondered whether he had used it before. But she decided not. He had been anything but a philanderer in his life. She thought his body, as bodies went, went very well indeed.
She had caught him shaving. It was something he could not have done with his injuries and this was the first chance she supposed he had really had since her mother had healed him. His jaw was partially covered in shaving foam. Then his expression changed and she knew he had realised why she was there.
‘Oh, God. Please don’t leave us, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Please stay?’
He dropped his razor into the water in the sink with a plop and wiped the foam from his jaw with a towel and walked across the bathroom to her and she took his face in her hands and kissed him hard on the mouth and then held him.
That night Adam dreamed of a visit to the pub. He had very much enjoyed his lunch with Elizabeth and his dad. It had made him feel sophisticated and adult and the real joy was that he was supposed to be at school. It was a school day. And there he was, in the dining room of the pub with his dad and cool Elizabeth who was lovely on top of being so utterly cool. It was all perfect really, except for his failure to persuade his dad that two Diet Cokes in one day did not exactly make him the Anti-Christ of proper nutrition. Still, he had been allowed to drink lemonade. And Nosy McCloud (as Elizabeth called him) had put both ice and a slice of lemon in his glass of lemonade. A straw was the ultimate insult. Ice was pretty much to be expected. But, generally speaking, you had to be at least a teenager to qualify for a slice of lemon in your drink.
The pub in his dream was not the Black Boar. It was the Red Bull. And it was not constructed from stone and ancient beams of oak. It was pressed from metal in shades of silver and blue that had an odd, somehow queasy geometry about their shape. And the sign was red of course. The sign was a bright, bloody crimson swinging in the windy night under a pale curve of anaemic moon. Adam knew that he should not be there. He knew that it was way past his proper bedtime in the dream. He did not have any money and his mobile phone, the one his dad insisted he carry, had long run out of credit. But he pushed open the door anyway. He felt reckless in the dream, like one of those characters in a cowboy film or a country and western song on the radio who keeps saying they have nothing left to lose.
Nosy McCloud was not polishing glasses behind the bar. But why would he be? This was the Red Bull. Mrs Mallory ran the Red Bull and she was there, with her glossy black hair playing over the shoulders of her white shirt and a smile on her mouth the same crimson as the sign in the moonlight outside.
‘What will be your pleasure, Master Hunter?’ she asked.
But Adam was distracted. There were TV monitors suspended all over the pub, he saw. They would not have had that in the Black Boar. The Black Boar was all quaintness and tradition. They did not want MTV in there, spoiling the authentic Highland atmosphere with videos by Kylie and Girls Aloud. Except that these videos were all in black and white. And they had a grainy look. And they were of marching uniformed men in harsh spotlights, with torches that flamed and flickered held on high. And there were roared tributes and songs and staunch salutes. These had become familiar scenes to him in other dreams. He knew their smell, the hot stink of cigar breath and sweat-stained armpits on cruel summer nights.
Adam swallowed. He was afraid. Despite the knowledge that this was a dream he was having, he had remembered everything about who Mrs Mallory was and the things he had heard her say and seen her do. He did not like her just standing there and staring at him, the way someone hungry might look at something appetising on their plate. It seemed best just now to fill the conversational silence somehow, to distract and maybe flatter her. ‘You’ve witnessed a lot of history,’ he said.
She laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. It was the scrape of talons dragging at reluctant cloth. ‘History is not a spectator sport, Adam,’ she said. ‘It is not there to be watched like a football game. It is there to be influenced and affected. Sometimes, it is there to be determined.’ She laughed again.
He did not know what she meant. He would in time, he knew. It was not the vocabulary. He seldom came across an English word he did not intuitively understand the meaning of. It was the adult way of using language as a code. It took him a little time, sometimes, to decipher it. But he always did in the end.
He did not know what she meant. He would in time, he knew. It was not the vocabulary. He seldom came across an English word he did not intuitively understand the meaning of. It was the adult way of using language as a code. It took him a little time, sometimes, to decipher it. But he always did in the end.
He did not feel like bothering with a drink. Even if she offered him the speciality of the house, he did not want to stay to drink it. He wanted to go home. It was the yearning impulse he felt always in his recent dreams. He wanted to wake up. He wanted his mother. He wanted the strength and comfort of his father’s embrace.
The following morning, Adam again slept late. Elizabeth and Hunter discussed over breakfast what they thought they ought to do next. Outside the kitchen window, the snow fell and muffled the features of the landscape in subtly varied shades of white under a matt grey sky. It was very still and silent out there through the falling petals of snow. In the warmth and light of the kitchen, it was easy to believe that the world was empty and they were the only people left, just the two of them, and the boy sleeping peacefully upstairs. It was a seductive temptation, but of course it was not true.
‘She could be anywhere,’ Hunter said. ‘She could be in Cape Town or Havana or Boston or Madrid.’
‘So your journey to that place in the Tyrol was a waste of time.’
‘As a means of locating her, yes it was. But I think I found out what Miss Hall intended me to. I told you the last words Rodriguez said. Do you remember them?’
Elizabeth frowned, trying to remember. ‘Something about being safe when the current was strong.’
‘I thought it was a metaphysical remark, or some Conradian metaphor to do with a river or something. Major
Rodriguez had this poetic side to his character. But I now think he was speaking literally. Miss Hall had ambushed Mrs Mallory. As a magician, she was nothing like a match for her. But she had stacked the odds. Electricity robs Mrs Mallory of her power. I’m sure of it. I think there was a charge running through the chair she sat in and Rodriguez only saw the distress or pain she was suffering and switched it off.’
Rodriguez had this poetic side to his character. But I now think he was speaking literally. Miss Hall had ambushed Mrs Mallory. As a magician, she was nothing like a match for her. But she had stacked the odds. Electricity robs Mrs Mallory of her power. I’m sure of it. I think there was a charge running through the chair she sat in and Rodriguez only saw the distress or pain she was suffering and switched it off.’
‘Then why did she do what she did to him?’
‘He had a gun trained on her. And she took exception to the rosary he had draped across its barrel.’
Elizabeth pondered on what she had just been told. ‘That’s why she has the electric chair. I think I can work out for myself why she has the guillotine.’
‘That was the information provided in Bullock’s letter from the fens to Jerusalem Smith. To kill them you need to cut off their heads.’
Elizabeth frowned. ‘My own mother is a bone magician and she will die in her bed. Or, God forbid, in a row of her runner beans. I strongly suspect that Lillian could have been one too. And forgive me for reminding you, but she died in a car crash.’
‘Your mother has only ever used her powers for good,’ Hunter said. ‘Lillian lived her life oblivious of hers. The thing we call Mrs Mallory has confounded nature and consorted with God knows what dismal creatures. She is greedy and cruel and self-serving and has used her gift to make herself into something other than merely human.’
‘Why would she keep the things that can make her weak and kill her so close to home?’
‘In tribute to them, perhaps,’ Hunter said. ‘Or maybe she had those instruments put there in defiance of them. The place I went to is a sort of repository of her life. She has stayed there. But I sensed only ever briefly. The bed was
barely slept in. She doesn’t live there. There will be nothing so hazardous to her in the Georgian house my son dreams about.’
barely slept in. She doesn’t live there. There will be nothing so hazardous to her in the Georgian house my son dreams about.’
‘There are no Georgian houses in Havana or Cape Town. And in Aberdeen and Edinburgh our Georgian houses are granite and we do not paint them cream,’ Elizabeth said.
Hunter shrugged. ‘She’s in Boston, then, like I said a moment ago. Or she’s in Philadelphia.’
‘She’s much closer to home, Mark. Miss Hall gave you the biggest clue of all when she told you Mrs Mallory likes to party. What is the party capital of the world?’
Hunter sipped coffee and grimaced. ‘London,’ he said.
‘London is where we will find her.’
He did not comment on this last remark. But he thought it more likely than not. And the plural was not lost on him.
When Adam got up and had eaten his breakfast, his father took him out to walk in the snow. The boy had dreamed again and wanted to unburden himself. Before they left, after lacing on his boots, Hunter took the sled from where it hung on a hook in its cupboard near the door. He never forgot that Adam was a boy and that boys like to play, Elizabeth thought. He was a good father and he loved his son. She realised then how much he must miss the daughter he had lost and never talked about. Not for the first time, she was aware that Adam was all that Mark Hunter had. If Adam died, she knew then with certainty that his father would not survive the loss. They would both perish.
It was Friday morning. She called the locum to make sure that everything was alright at the surgery and with her patients. The snow would be keeping most of them out of harm’s way but someone might have had a fall and the winter killer, flu, was always a possibility in so cold an autumn as this was proving to be. He responded to the call cheerfully. There were no tragedies or catastrophes she need concern
herself about. Curious after her initial shock, she then went to the shelf in his study where Hunter kept Lillian’s collection of children’s books. She wanted to take a closer look at Walter the Wolf. She had been dismayed and horrified by Judge Smith’s account of the beast with which her ancestor had consorted. And her mother had said she possessed occult powers of her own. And of course, there was her appearance. But she had never knowingly entertained a lupine thought in her life. She didn’t think she had even seen a real-life specimen at the zoo.
herself about. Curious after her initial shock, she then went to the shelf in his study where Hunter kept Lillian’s collection of children’s books. She wanted to take a closer look at Walter the Wolf. She had been dismayed and horrified by Judge Smith’s account of the beast with which her ancestor had consorted. And her mother had said she possessed occult powers of her own. And of course, there was her appearance. But she had never knowingly entertained a lupine thought in her life. She didn’t think she had even seen a real-life specimen at the zoo.
Lillian could not blame an illustrator for the appearance of her fictional creature. She had done the illustrations in this series herself. Walter was ugly and scary. His insecurity made him a liability in social situations. His anxiety to pass as human was a theme running through the stories. It was intended to be humorous. But Elizabeth did not think it was funny at all. Children invested the characters they read about with their own generous instincts. Elizabeth thought Barney the dinosaur a total wuss but children adored him. The Thomas the Tank Engine stories were enduringly popular despite the catty, spiteful and peevish natures of most of the trains involved in them. Children were forgiving of the fiction they read.
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