The Magdalena Curse (29 page)

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Authors: F.G. Cottam

BOOK: The Magdalena Curse
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She was very beautiful. Hunter had been trained to be objective and there was no other word adequate. She was sexy and she was glamorous and she was beautiful. She wore her hair longer now than she had at Magdalena. The added length should logically have aged her. But it had the effect
of making her appear more youthful and feminine. It fell unconfined from a casual centre parting and its waves rippled blackly down to the top of her cleavage. Her eyes were grey and sparkling and sardonically amused. Her facial bones were coldly sculpted. But their perfection was offset subtly by the hint of warmth in the half-smile playing on Mrs Mallory’s succulent lips.
‘Kiss me,’ she had commanded Mark Hunter a dozen years ago. Those lips had parted as she spoke the words. And if you judged her only on this picture, it would seem an invitation wholly irresistible. He smiled to himself. He was almost alone in his carriage. It was the West Coast service and he had paid the ticket collector the upgrade to Weekend First. It was odd to think that the woman in this photograph had once looked like Lillian had, like Elizabeth Bancroft did. They were beautiful too. But she was self-invented. She had been long toiled over. And it was fair to say that Mrs Mallory had created, in herself, something of a masterpiece.
Kate Hunter’s ballet tutor had been Miss Dupree. And Miss Dupree had been a piece of work. She had a light physique and pulled-back hair, and splayed feet when she stood on one hip in the repose of the stereotypical ballerina. But she had retired from performance at the end of the 1980s. The odd thing about her was that she seemed to be ageing in reverse. ‘She’s a work in progress,’ Lillian had said, laughing at what she considered her husband’s ludicrous naivety when he’d pointed this out. ‘There’s more Botox in her face than face, Mark. She’s had more lifts than most skyscrapers are equipped with.’
Hunter asked his wife what Botox was and was given his reply. She told him about collagen and the other cosmetic alchemies that kept affluent women forever young-looking.
And he looked at his wife, who had not visibly aged one
single day since the one on which they had met. ‘Do you use this stuff, Lillian?’ he had asked.
And she had laughed again. ‘There are easier ways,’ she said.
‘Easier?’
‘More natural, you might say.’
Rosaline Dupree had not looked natural. But Mrs Mallory did. There was this tautness about everything above the jaw on the ballet teacher’s face that made it impossible for her features to register emotion. All the facial muscles need to do so had been frozen by the cosmetic toxin, Botox. But when Mark studied the magazine portrait of Mrs Mallory in pale November sunshine through the train window, she did not even look airbrushed. He smiled despite himself. No wonder poor, fat, cantankerous Miss Hall had always been so crabby about her.
He turned the page. The second spread comprised a full-page ad for Shalimar perfume on the left and a full-page-bleed editorial photo on the right with more reversed-out copy. It was another interior shot and again it was black and white. Black predominated. But then, this was Mrs Mallory’s world.
Nevertheless, Hunter thought the photographer had composed the image. She stood resting her right hand on the top of a Steinway concert grand piano. In the grip of her left fist were a bunch of white roses with their blooms pointed at the floor. Her eyes were downcast and petals lay in a pale cluster on the floorboards beneath the bouquet. She was smiling at some secret amusement and her lower lip had snagged slightly on her teeth. This imperfection made her look human and gorgeous. Lucien Hope, he assumed, had styled her for this shot. She wore a man’s three-piece evening suit. The trousers showed off the length of her legs and the tightly buttoned waistcoat how slender she was at the waist.
It struck Hunter as a picture that could have been taken at any time over the last eighty years or so. A bronze bust rested on the piano and he recognised the florid handsomeness of its subject, Rupert Brooke. He remembered the opening lines from Brooke’s famous, prophetic poem.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
By way of the Russian Steppes and Berlin and Magdalena and who knew how many other places on her dark odyssey, Mrs Mallory had come to England. She was not English, though. And she had certainly not come to England to die. But Hunter was an Englishman and he had chosen to live in the white, winter wilderness of the Scottish Highlands. The lines of the poem filled him as he recalled them with a cold blossoming of dread. For reasons he could not have articulated, they made him think of Adam, his son.
He could see the profiling of Lavinia Mallory in a current magazine piece, however esoteric the magazine, as a fortuitous break that would aid him in his quest, Hunter thought. He could interpret it as nothing other than a happy coincidence. But it was a part of a pattern that had begun at Magdalena and accelerated alarmingly with the dreams inflicted on his son. She was featured in the magazine because she had a public face now. She enjoyed stature and acclaim. She was influential where it mattered most. The time was coming when she would attempt to put her tilt upon the world. It would be her time and it was surely imminent. And its arrival would be swift and terrible and, when it came, there would be no escape from it.
As soon as Hunter left, Elizabeth started to mobilise Adam for a little excursion. She wanted to take him into the village to buy him something. She knew it was considered low and shallow and ultimately self-defeating to try to bribe a child into a more positive frame of mind. She’d done the reading on child psychology as part of her job training. But in the days when she had had a life, she personally had loved to get unexpected gifts. It was human nature. And just this once she thought that it would benefit the boy without necessarily critically undermining the rest of his life. The fact was she had recently become a bit cynical about orthodox psychology. She had found herself in circumstances that had forced her to reappraise its value. It was nowhere near the catch-all she had once complacently believed it to be.
Firstly, though, she wanted to stop off at her mother’s house. They had met before, but Adam had slept through the encounter, thanks to the medication Elizabeth had given him. It was likely that Adam would be left at some point in her mother’s care and therefore important that they met prior to that and got on okay. Adam did not appear particularly thrilled about meeting an elderly woman. Why would he be? But he was excited at the prospect of sharing Elizabeth’s two-seater car on the journey. She thought of her MG as a runabout. He thought of it as a sports car because it had a soft top and was painted green. To him his dad’s Land Rover was staid and boring. Elizabeth’s car was cool. She was more alarmed than excited as it skidded
and slid along the snow-packed roads and grateful there was no other weekend traffic. She drove dreading the slow but inevitable drift into a drystone wall that would wreck the bodywork and rob her of her dignity. He visibly brightened, enjoying the ride.
Her mother was bright-eyed and seemed energised when she opened the door. She looked, Elizabeth thought, a full decade younger than she had a week ago. She wondered whether this was to do with unburdening herself of the truth about Ruth Campbell’s malevolent nature. More likely she had been energised by summoning her magic after all those dormant years. She had restored Mark Hunter. In doing so, she seemed to have replenished herself. She made tea. Then she said, ‘Do you like bonfires, Adam?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ Adam said.
‘Yes, well, I expect he is. And I have my answer.’ She walked him over to the window. She pointed to a rough circle of stones about eight feet across and about twenty yards from the house. ‘Kindling first,’ she said. ‘Then twigs and finally, fallen branches.’
‘I know how to construct a fire,’ he said. ‘Before we came to live here, I was in the Cubs.’
‘Good. There are three copses of trees around this house. They will provide you with everything you need. Don’t venture beyond them. Do not cross the road. Do not cheat and take any of the logs from the pile chopped and stacked outside my door. They are for my grate and I will know. I have counted them.’ She looked stern and then winked at him and he grinned. ‘Now put your coat back on and off you go.’
He opened the door and skipped out into the snow. ‘Plenty of wood, mind,’ she called after him. ‘We want a proper blaze.’ She closed the door.
‘So, Mum. How long have you been a pyromaniac?’ Elizabeth said.
Margaret Bancroft turned to face her daughter. ‘I’m going to destroy something I should have dispensed with a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I want the flames high and the seat of that fire white with heat and fury. When I watch that devilish object burn, I want none of the vile things depicted in it looking back out at me with anything but the pain of their destruction.’
‘How much do you know, Mum?’
‘I know that the child and his father face grave danger. And you do too because you’ve come to love the father and you’re devoted to the son. And you are loyal and have always been much braver than I am, God forgive me.’
Adam had been gone only for a moment. He would be out for at least half an hour, Elizabeth reckoned, probably longer. He could endure the cold. He had inherited his father’s physical toughness and, for all she knew, his mother’s too. He would want to build his bonfire well. ‘Teach me to do it, Mum. If I have it in me, you can tell me what it is I need to do to bring it out.’
Her mother looked at her levelly. ‘There’s no trick to it. There’s nothing you need to learn. It was stronger in you than it’s ever been in me before you could walk or talk.’
‘There must be some technique to it.’
Margaret Bancroft glowered. She looked angry, indignant. ‘Some knack, you mean?’ She walked over to the kitchen counter and took a boning knife from a magnetic strip of knives below the row of kitchen cupboards. She placed her left hand palm up on her chopping board.
‘Mum—’
She drew the blade across the open palm of her hand. She kept her knives sharp and her stroke was sure. The cut was deep. Elizabeth glimpsed white bone and the blue of cartilage before the parted flesh became aware of the insult to it and blood welled out over her hand and on to the chopping
board. ‘You can start with that,’ Margaret Bancroft said, nodding towards the wound. Her voice was calm, devoid of inflection. ‘Since you think you need one, that can be your apprenticeship.’
 
He did not go straight to Cleaver Square. He had phoned ahead and arranged to meet first with an old comrade in arms. James Preston was one of the finest soldiers Hunter had ever had the distinction to serve with. But he had been cashiered out of the army after failing a random drugs test a few years earlier. He had been one of the fittest men ever to pass selection into the Parachute Regiment. Now he put his knowledge of exercise to profitable use as a personal trainer. He operated out of the ground floor of an old light-industrial building converted into fashionable apartments in a mews in Bermondsey. His own living quarters occupied one panelled-off corner of the apartment he had bought. The rest was taken up with Cybex machines and clusters of free weights in iron piles and punching bags. He trained some very high-profile clients, many from the film industry. Because he knew what he was doing, he got noticeable results very quickly.
The door was not locked. Hunter had walked in on a training session. Jimmy just nodded to him from over a clipboard, a client in front of him on a running machine. The air in the gym was hot and slightly fetid. He hoped the client, someone he thought he vaguely recognised, was warming down rather than warming up. He liked Jimmy very much. But he did not have time to hang about today. He went and sat on a workout bench to wait. The place was impressively sized and equipped. It had been bought, he knew, with a family legacy. Jimmy’s background was privileged. There was income from endowments, stocks and shares. Hunter suspected most of the money he made himself still went up his nose.
The client was warming down. Ten minutes later he left
and Jimmy took the precaution of locking the door behind him. He sauntered back to Hunter and the two men shook hands. ‘That thing over there in the corner, Jimmy,’ Hunter said, gesturing.
‘No problem. It’s decommissioned.’
‘It’s a Milan, for Christ’s sake. It’s an anti-tank weapon.’
‘It’s a souvenir,’ Jimmy said.
‘Doesn’t it frighten the clients?’
‘Most of them think it’s a prop.’
Hunter had to smile. Some people came out of the regiment totally immune to the standards demanded by civilian life. Captain James Preston was one of them. But then he had not left the army by choice. ‘Did you order the item I asked you to?’
‘Why don’t we call a spade a spade?’
‘You did order it?’
‘You could have ordered it yourself on eBay.’
‘Jesus, Jimmy.’
‘It’s on its way, Mark. Calm down. It’s the most powerful you can get, fucking lethal. It’s on its way to Scotland as we speak.’
Hunter looked at his old friend. He was wearing combats and a green ribbed singlet and jungle-issue boots. He looked very fit. But the fitness was cosmetic, the taut musculature flattered to deceive. The nose candy took its invisible, inward toll. ‘You seeing anyone?’
‘I go on the odd date. Nothing serious, though. I wouldn’t want to risk the prospect of domestic bliss.’
‘Domestic bliss isn’t called that for nothing,’ Hunter said.
‘Whoever sang that song got it right, for me, mate. When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.’
‘Well, I’m grateful for the favour. Thanks. Thanks, Jimmy.’
‘No problem.’ Jimmy seemed to hesitate. ‘You got time for a coffee?’
‘Another day,’ Hunter said. ‘I’d best be on my way.’ He turned to go.
‘Would you like to borrow a gun?’
He stopped. ‘You’ve got a gun?’
‘Course I’ve got a gun. Jesus. What do you take me for, Mark, a fucking pacifist?’
‘Why would I want a gun, Jimmy?’
‘Because wherever you’re going, mate, that look on your face tells me you’ll very likely need one.’
But guns were of no use, were they? He thought about this on the Underground on his short journey to Kennington. He thought about the double-tap execution he had performed, or believed he had, on Mrs Mallory. He had stood outside in the rain in Magdalena and watched Miss Hall sway in the window and thought she was performing some ritual of grief for her dead adversary. But Mrs Mallory had not died. She had slithered to her feet off the tiles in her drawing room and cursed Miss Hall, inflicting the disease that would eat away at her from the inside until her death a dozen years on. What he had seen from the street in the rain had been Miss Hall grieving for herself.
It was raining when he exited the station at Kennington. It was six o’clock in the evening and dark and raining hard. Big drops were bouncing off the bodies and through the windscreen grilles of the two police riot vans parked at the station entrance. In the bath of yellow light from the station Hunter could plainly see the rows of seated officers within, grim-faced and staring straight ahead from behind their visors in full riot gear. There were officers with dogs on the pavement, the leashes straining and the pelts of the powerful animals drenched.
He took a short cut through an estate to get to his destination and was sorry he had done so almost straight away. Clusters of hooded youths lurked in communal doorways
and at the bottom of stairwells eyeing him with hostile looks, emboldened by the pit-bulls providing their back-up, snuffling around their masters and tethered to chain leads. Most of these kids, he suspected, would be armed with knives. They were innately hostile to alien species and that was exactly what his age and dress and bearing made him. He knew he was not a natural target for assault. He looked far too strong and knowledgeable for that. He recognised the unease in himself he had sometimes felt on the streets of Northern Ireland, first on foot patrol and later, when he joined the regiment, operating clandestinely. He had never felt this sort of urban trepidation before in England. He read the papers. But he’d had no idea that things had got anywhere near this bad. He was about a hundred yards or so from Kennington Lane and the last bit of the route that would take him to the square when he was confronted.
The youth in front of him was white and febrile, rain-drenched and with the spasmodic mannerisms inflicted by chronic crack addiction. He had a blade gripped in his right fist. ‘Put the knife away, sonny,’ Hunter said. His voice was even. ‘You’re dealing with a grown-up.’ He held out his hands, the palms flat, the fingers splayed and rock steady. ‘These are all I need. They can put you in a very dark place.’
‘It’s dark where you’re going,’ this apparition said, grinning before skulking damply back into the shadows.
 
Adam’s industry was very impressive. It was a full hour before he returned from building his bonfire. Margaret Bancroft made him hot chocolate to thaw him out after his freezing toil in the snow. She grilled crumpets to go with the beverage. There was nothing at all wrong now with her hand.
‘Crumpets, Mum?’ Elizabeth said. ‘Have you gone soft? Where’s your patriotic pride?’
‘I can’t inflict oatcakes on the poor wee lamb,’ her mother
said. ‘I just can’t do it. We’re approaching the season of goodwill to all men. That includes boys.’ The mood between the two women had improved.
The pyre was about eight feet high. Otherwise occupied, they had not watched through the window as he had constructed it. Elizabeth could not understand how he had erected something so substantial without the use of a stepladder. There was a stepladder, but it was under lock and key in the stable.
‘Same principle as pyramid construction,’ Adam said. ‘You start with a broad base to give your structure stability. Course, you don’t want too much density, because fires feed off oxygen. Fortunately, branches have one architectural advantage over bricks. They interlock. They meld. Get your base right and you’re away. It’s construction work until it exceeds the height you can securely reach. After that, you’re basically lobbing the branches on and hoping they won’t slide back down and land on you.’
‘Is branch avalanche a risk?’ Margaret Bancroft asked.
He turned to her. ‘That’s got to be your worst nightmare with a bonfire, Mrs Bancroft, construction-wise.’

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