The Magdalena Curse (31 page)

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Authors: F.G. Cottam

BOOK: The Magdalena Curse
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Because the house was dark it would have to stay that way. His eyes would have to adjust and a meagre pen light was all he could risk beyond his night vision. He doubted Mrs Mallory subscribed to the local Neighbourhood Watch scheme. She wasn’t really the type. But he would have bet the people living on the other side of the square in the houses facing hers did. He stood in her kitchen and waited for the darkness around him to clarify into something more detailed and paler. When it did, he looked at a room that never properly functioned. The glass-fronted cupboards were empty of provisions. There was a light sheen of dust on the hotplates. The sink too wore a patina of dry neglect. He did not open the fridge because he could not risk the brightness of its interior bulb. But his hunch was that it would contain ice cubes, champagne, white wine and possibly vodka. There would be no food. What Mrs Mallory’s guests consumed came from
an outside caterer. Just as she wasn’t much of a neighbour, he did not suppose she was much of a homemaker either.
Her drawing room wore the chill of a mausoleum. There was a waxy smell of polished furniture and the bulk of the concert grand with the bronze bust of Brooke on top of it. He thought there were poets whose themes were far better suited to her character and inclinations. Eliot and Yeats were much more her style. In the pale cast of streetlight through the window he could see the spot where she had stood for her Dietrich moment. Or perhaps it had been her Garbo moment. That would surely have been what Lucien Hope had in mind. Fashion stylists thought in visual clichés. They referenced everything. But the effect of the photograph had been to out-glitter either star, in truth. There was still a single rose petal curled and atrophied like a withered fingernail on the floor.
Her library was his real destination. That was the focus of the house in the dreams that tormented his son. And he was intent upon it. But curiosity took him firstly up the stairs. He knew from her keep in the Tyrol that she did sometimes sleep. He climbed the uncarpeted steps with practised stealth. He was beginning to appreciate the incredible power of seduction she possessed. The house was dismal with menace in her absence. Her willing presence was all that must make it tolerable for her guests. More than tolerable, they found it thrilling. She dazzled and toyed with them. He climbed. When he reached the landing he sniffed the chilly air. Perfume betrayed her. He followed the scent of Jicky cologne into the open-doored maw of a spacious room. Her spoor was here. Her cold intimacy lay about the place in strewn underwear and rumpled sheets. The curtains were closed in heavy velvet folds and he thought he could risk his pen light. Its thin beam fingered gossamer negligees and brassieres filigreed with lace. She wore only black or ivory
against her skin and favoured silk and satin. He went over to the bed and pulled off the wrinkled counterpane. There was no odour of sex. Yet she attired herself at night in a manner bound to stir arousal. Did she have lovers? Perhaps she lived in the night-time on the memory of sex. There was a bedside cabinet from the top of which rose the acrid odour of a heaped ashtray. He squatted down and opened the cabinet door. Ampoules of some clear liquid sat in a neat row in a wooden rack beside an old-style steel and glass syringe. There was no blood on the needle.
There was a high double-fronted wardrobe against the wall opposite the bedroom window. Its doors wore a lavish walnut burr. When he opened it, the space within was hung only with dresses. She must keep her coats elsewhere, he thought. And her accessories, her shoes and gloves and bags and scarves. All of her dresses were black and when he stretched with his pen light to look at their labels many of them rustled with sewn beads and brocade. There were no real surprises. She favoured Chanel and Dior and Schiaparelli. He sniffed at the fabrics, but they were not musty and old. And there were some of the newer couture names Lillian had liked to spoil herself buying when the money from the books had started coming in. Mrs Mallory sometimes wore Katharine Hamnett and Bill Blass. It was just the colour, or lack of it, that never varied.
He walked into her bathroom. Here the smell of perfume was stronger. What looked at first in the darkness like an open door leading off somewhere else was in fact a full-length mirror. The mirror was disconcerting. Hunter did not want to dwell on what its depths might reflect. He took in soft white towels folded over a chrome rail and a large bathtub veined in purple marble. From the sink, there was the rhythmic lisp of a dripping tap. On a shelf above the sink there were nail clippers, tweezers and an uncapped
Chanel lipstick with a waxy peak that looked black in the absence of light. It would be red of course. Mrs Mallory habitually wore red on her lips.
It was time to face his demon. It took him about ten minutes to pick the lock securing the library door. It was a complex mechanism and it did not help that he was rushing things. Where calm deliberation was called for, he was now edgy. She could always come home. He looked at his watch but his watch had stopped. He remembered his grope through the canvas labyrinth in Magdalena, where his watch had also stopped. Then, Mrs Mallory had distorted time, Miss Hall had told them. While he blundered in that dark limbo with Peterson, Rodriguez had been given the leisure to gnaw his hands to the wrists. Hunter’s own hands were not so steady now as they had been when he’d held them out to discourage the crack addict from the thought of attacking him in the street earlier in the evening. And the palms were sweating. He wiped them on his thighs, crouched before the lock and heard its final click of release and rose and opened the library door.
The seated creature of Adam’s dreams was enormous. Its stillness on its wooden throne added to the impression of its size. It looked somehow poised and alert. It was clothed in the same grey uniform it had worn when he glimpsed it in the staff car in the film of Mrs Mallory in that summer in Berlin. He closed the library door softly behind himself and studied it. He approached it. And then it shifted and moved and he was not in the least surprised. He would hear the strain of the leather that shod its huge feet as it rose and the stiff boots took its weight and it strode forward, covering the distance between them. Dread engulfed him and he tensed and reached for the weapon he did not possess. But the impression of movement had been caused by the beam of a car headlamp on the street outside, travelling through the
square and sweeping through the closed drapes over the library window. It was no more than a trick of the light. Hunter swallowed and came closer to the beast. Adam was right. Its boots were of grotesque size. So were its hands, sheathed in leather gauntlets and maintaining a firm grip in death on the carved arms of its throne.
And it was dead, wasn’t it? ‘Mr Mallory, I presume,’ Hunter said. But the bravado felt entirely hollow and he dreaded the reply his crass jibe might just have provoked. None came. The yellow eyes in the creature’s great head stared glassily at nothing. Its long jaw was set in a mocking leer. Instinct told him not to turn his back on it. But he would have to, if the library was to reveal its secrets to him.
Her desk was an antique item of the roll-top sort and it was locked. But unpicking this lock was the work of only a moment. He revealed a clutter of papers and books. The books had been written by hand rather than printed. Scribes had done the work. Two of them were bound in what he strongly suspected was human skin, dried and cured for the purpose. He sighed to himself and opened one of them. Its pages were filled with runic symbols, some antique language he did not understand but suspected he had heard spoken by the vessel she had made his son when her curse was inflicted and he dreamed on her behalf.
The papers were sketches of colossal public buildings. There were figures in them drawn to show their oppressive, monumental scale. Hunter recognised none of them. There were sketched symbols too, motifs that were subtly reminiscent of the swastika and SS lightning strikes, of the brutal iconography of a time she no doubt remembered with nostalgic fondness. And he knew why it was he did not recognise the buildings. None was from the past. He thought of what Lucien Hope had said about Mrs Mallory’s soirées. He was looking at the blueprints for the future she planned.
 
He thought about the riot police outside the station entrance not half a mile away and the vacuous look behind the blue mascara on the face of the woman with the laddered stockings in the pub. He looked at the monster slouched in the shadows of the room he was in and repeated Adam’s warning out loud to himself, ‘She wants to put a tilt on the world.’
He wanted her to know he had been here. That was his real purpose in coming. He had told Elizabeth it was just reconnaissance. But that had been a lie. He had been hoping she would be absent so that he could violate her home. He wanted to provoke her into making a mistake, goad her into hasty retaliation. He was sick and tired of her tormenting his son. He wanted her to come for him. Then he would defeat and kill her. Miss Hall had all but out-manoeuvred her at Magdalena. There was a precedent. It could be done.
He walked back over to the seated creature. It was not a comfortable companion, he didn’t think. For all its apparent lifelessness, it possessed the sly insistence of a threat. In death it was disconcerting. In life he sensed it would have been a force of pure malevolence, only ever a bringer of dread and pain. Had the leer worn on its hungry jaw grown wider since he had entered the library and encountered it? He could have sworn it had. He fought the urge to flee, and studied it. He saw that it was armed. It wore a pistol belt and a leather holster shaped to house a Luger. It wore an SS dagger in a scabbard on the belt. Both weapons must have been hand-fashioned, their scale slightly greater than normal, individually tooled to suit the dimensions of their owner. The beast had evidently been held in high esteem. Hunter took the dagger. He unbuckled the belt and took the scabbard off it, put the belt back on and then slipped the dagger in the scabbard down his boot.
The taking of trophies was a long-established military custom. It was only ever done of course in victory. There was
a fine line always fiercely argued between what were legitimate souvenirs and what could be condemned outright as looting on the field of conflict. Hunter did not trouble himself over the finer points of military ethics in this situation. Neither greed nor profit had prompted the theft. The dagger would go through the grid over a gutter drain as soon as he regained the street. He figured that she would notice its absence straight away. That was the significant thing. Adam said she spoke to this unresponsive confidant all the time. She would not respond well to the insult his petty act of thievery represented. She did not like to be disrespected. That was the point.
Up this close, the clothed creature stank. Its odour was an unhappy mingling of ancient sweat and feral decay. Hunter glanced at his watch out of habit, but the luminous dial did not tell the time because of course the movement had stopped and the hands were still. It did not matter greatly. Whatever time it was, he thought it was high time he left. The leer had diminished, his training for detail insisted, on the face of the beast. It now wore something closer to a snarl. Was it his heightened imagination? He could not have said. He had a night train to catch, back to the snowbound Highlands of Scotland, back to that foreign field to which he had taken, in the indulgence of his private grief, his precious son in their shared exile.
The streets surrounding Cleaver Square sounded like a war zone. There were angry cries and screams, the barking of dogs, sirens wailing, the sound of glass shattering and the unmistakeable, staccato crack of small arms fire. When he reached Kennington Tube station, it looked more like a stockade than a place where you accessed Underground trains. Police officers armed with machine pistols stood in a grim-faced cordon at the entrance.
‘Nothing in or out of here tonight, mate,’ one of them said to him. ‘I’d scarper if I were you.’
‘Is it always like this around here?’
‘We have it under control,’ the officer said. Then he grinned to signal his personal contempt for the official line, the lie he was obliged to recite contradicted by the violent chaos around them.
They seemed short of manpower, unless they were just short of willpower. Hunter walked along Kennington Park Road towards the Oval. He thought he might be able to hail a taxi back to Euston Station if he turned right on to Kennington Road. There were usually plenty going north along that route after dropping fares in Clapham and Wandsworth. When he passed the Cost-cutter branch at the T junction, its windows were smashed and a fire seemed just to be taking hold inside. Looters were fighting on the pavement over bottles of liquor and cases of beer. There were no taxis. There seemed little point in heading for Oval Station because, like Kennington, it was on the Northern Line and that line was closed.
He stuck to his original plan and walked down Kennington Road. The sound of violence faded after the junction with Black Prince Road. But he was past the Imperial War Museum and on Westminster Bridge Road and able to smell the chill and damp of the approaching river before he was able to hail a black cab.
‘Where to, pilgrim?’
Hunter almost did not get in. Twice in a couple of hours he had been called that now by strangers. Maybe it was a London fashion, an idiomatic craze of the sort that came and went in a month. In the back of the cab he thought about the appellation itself. It was a curious one. Where he was concerned it was ironic. He had not come to Cleaver Square on any kind of pilgrimage. Quite the opposite was true. He had carried out what Mrs Mallory would see as an act of desecration. Not that the wolf creatures were deities.

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