Thorn (2 page)

‘Oh, you don't want a policeman,' said Flora at once. ‘They make frightful lovers, policemen. No staying power.'

She's changed the subject, thought Imogen. But she said, ‘Is it true you once had six lovers in one night?' This was the kind of thing you could say to Great-Aunt Flora, although you never knew whether to believe the reply.

Flora grinned. ‘You've heard that one, have you? I expect it was the night of the Pineapple Ball in nineteen forty—No, never mind the exact year. And there were certainly six
good
ones.'

Imogen found Great-Aunt Flora a huge comfort.

Dan Tudor had only attended Edmund Caudle's funeral because of two things. One was that the
Messenger
wanted a piece on the funeral and the family, and he was broke; the other was the intriguing nature of the Ingrams themselves.

As the owners of a children's publishing house they were not so very remarkable, but as a family they were slightly macabre. Dan found himself wondering if there was material for a book here. There was the famous cause célèbre of Lucienne Ingram in 1905: the guileless lady who had taken an axe to her brother and, as the idiom of the day had it, attempted to turn him into a female. Dan, researching background beforehand in accordance with his custom, read the report of the case on the
Messenger
's microfiche, and derived wry amusement from this gem of Edwardian prurience. And there had been an Ingram lady somewhere around 1810 who was supposed to have murdered a straying husband or lover, although the details of this were vaguer. Either the
Messenger
had not had very efficient record-keepers then, or the Ingrams had managed to cover it up a bit more successfully.

‘The
Messenger
's features editor wants something a bit gossipy,' his agent said.

‘I'm not a gossip columnist,' said Dan, with extreme distaste.

‘No, but they printed that extremely good review on your Le Fanu biography. You owe them something for that.'

‘I don't owe them a free gossip column.'

‘When did I ask you to do anything free?' demanded his agent. ‘It won't be free. Now listen. Dig up the Ingram murders if you can – it almost looks as if there's a homicidal female born about every ninety years—'

‘Something nasty in the distaff shed.' Dan found the idea of disinterring skeletons from the cupboard of a family who had just suffered a bereavement a bit unsavoury.

‘Yes, the ninety-year interval is probably coincidence, but you might look further back than Sybilla. Describe the present-day family as well, of course, if you can do it without being too litigious.'

‘Piers, I'm never litigious.'

‘And particularly describe the females,' said Piers, ignoring this. ‘Eloise Ingram is supposed to be a bit of a stunner, in a die-away,
Lady of the Lake
fashion.'

‘Oh, all right. And the bereaved mamma – what's her name? Thalia Caudle?' Dan supposed he might as well get as much detail as possible beforehand.

‘She's Royston Ingram's cousin,' said Piers, and Dan heard the grin in his voice.

He said, ‘Do you know her? What's she like?'

‘Fortyish. Efficient. Well known in charity circles. She does a lot for student groups.'

‘And?'

‘And she's supposed,' said Piers, ‘to have a robust appetite for good-looking, very young men, although she's fairly discreet about it. But I've heard it said . . .'

‘What?'

‘That all the charity work she does is simply a way of finding new lovers.'

‘I'd better wear my chastity belt and take a rope ladder to escape with. Anything else?'

‘Try to drag in the family empire: Royston Ingram's books for tiny tots.'

‘Was Edmund Caudle the heir?'

‘If he wasn't, find out who was. Basic research, Daniel.'

‘Basic gutter-press fodder,' said Dan and took himself off.

The aunts thought that considering the dreadful nature of the occasion, everything was going off quite well.

They had managed to keep Flora and Thalia more or less apart which was always advisable at a family gathering because those two had never got on. Flora had always said that Thalia spoiled Edmund disgracefully but then Flora had always preferred Imogen. It was surely only natural for Thalia to be concerned about Edmund's future. When he was born, everyone had seen him as Royston's natural successor at Ingram's, but lately this had looked a bit doubtful, what with Edmund failing his exams and not wanting to go on to university – ‘Not being
accepted
to go on to university,' said Flora – and Thalia apparently prepared to support him financially for as long as he wanted. Of course, she could afford to do it; her husband had left her comfortably off. Nobody knew the precise amount concerned, although Dilys and Rosa had speculated about it at the time, but it was plainly a very substantial amount. And anyway, a great many young men were a bit wild in their youth and settled down later on.

Aunt Rosa thought the choice of hymns had been suitably restrained and Dilys thought the lack of any flowers in the church showed a nice sense of feeling on someone's part. Two unmarried great-aunts of Royston's who lived in Dulwich commented on the excellence of all the arrangements.

‘And everyone brought back to Hampstead, with a buffet lunch all waiting for us.
Very
efficient. And so nice to see all the family assembled as well. There are a good many people we don't recognise, but then no one ever makes introductions at a funeral.'

No one made introductions at a funeral. It was this that had been in Dan's mind as he got in his car and drove behind the cortege as it turned out of the church. If you had enough panache you could bluff your way in anywhere.

The house was more or less what he had expected; large and solid and rather complacent. No one who lived here would ever have known what it was like to grind out hack articles because the gas bill was due.

The rooms were overheated almost to suffocation point and there was a scent of slightly too strong rose potpourri everywhere. If this was the way the Ingrams normally lived, Royston Ingram must have to publish an average of one bestseller a month to pay his central heating bills alone. Dan accepted a glass of chilled Traminer from a tray that was circulating, and studied the company. There was a fluffiness of elderly aunts and cousins, as there was at most funerals, and there were one or two decorative females. Dan regretfully but resolutely kept away from them. The elderly aunts all sat together and caught up on family news with guilty relish and smiled on Dan with hopeful curiosity. Dan smiled back with uncommunicative courtesy, and retired to the sketchy concealment of a window seat. The slightly furtive nature of this afforded him a perverse pleasure. Like the Robert Burns line: ‘There's a chield amang ye, takin' notes, an' man, he'll print it . . .'

His agent's thumbnail sketch of Eloise Ingram had been wickedly accurate: she was pale-haired and slightly languid and Dan had seen her twin in a dozen illustrations of
Morte d'Arthur
or Lambs'
Tales From Shakespeare.
She was the mad dead Ophelia, bizarrely transported from weed-covered, weeping willow-fringed rivers into a fashionable London suburb. For a moment this image was so vivid that it came as a shock to see that she was drinking what looked like a large gin and tonic, and wearing a designer suit.

Thalia Caudle was dark and thin, with huge hungry eyes like burned-out lamps. The Wicked Fairy of the tribe, thought Dan. She had not quite reached the age where she could be described as ravaged, but she was not far off. She looked as if she might very well possess carnivorous leanings towards young and attractive men. Dan finished his wine and reminded himself that Thalia had just lost her only son in a motorway pile-up.

He was just heading back into the room for a refill – the Traminer was very good indeed – when he saw Imogen Ingram.

I
t was a most remarkable moment, and it would teach cynical writers to jibe at Hampstead and to call houses complacent and make up absurd allegories about wicked aunts and pale, languishing ladies.

In a minute – maybe after another glass of wine, maybe after the entire bottle – Dan thought he might be able to analyse Imogen's extraordinary looks. But in this first crowded moment, he was aware only of dark cloudy hair and a pale, translucent skin with arched eyebrows, and of slender ankles and wrists. All the gifts, thought Dan, watching her. Beauty and charm and, from the look of her, intelligence and humour as well. She moves like a nymph or a faun. Yes, and if she's the heir to Royston Ingram's publishing empire, which she probably is, she'll have his money one day.

Money had nothing to do with it; this was a face to sack cities for and to burn the topless towers of Ilium for. A face you would not necessarily want to take to bed with you but that you might very well want to take into dreams with you. And she's probably no more than sixteen!

There was an appalled moment when he wondered with horror if he had reached the grim stage of finding nymphs – all right, nymphets – desirable, but surely to goodness you didn't start that at twenty-seven? And this did not seem to have anything to do with physical desire. This was nearer to the pure, glowing passions of the Renaissance: Dante seeing the unattainable Beatrice when she was nine and loving her for ever; Petrarch burning with cerebral and celibate ardour for Laura. It was the emotion that dreams were made of and that luminous essays and bright-flame poems were written about, and it was the very last thing Dan had expected to succumb to at a wake in Hampstead. I'd better concentrate on what I'm supposed to be doing here, thought Dan. Spying. No, that sounds dreadful. A chield, takin' notes.

He looked around the room again, and it was only now that he became aware that most people were watching Imogen. There ought not to have been anything very remarkable in that, she was worth watching, but Dan began to feel uneasy. There was something wrong here; there were currents and cross-currents filling up the too-warm room, like a vortex struggling to be born. Plain, straightforward grief at the sudden death of an eighteen-year-old boy? No, it's something more than that. It's something centring on the girl. But surely Imogen was only doing what thousands of sixteen-year-olds did at family gatherings? In Dan's experience it was something most of them enjoyed in a slightly egocentric way; unless they belonged to the shaven-headed, safety-pin-in-the-nose brigade, most of them liked showing how grown-up they were in front of indulgent aunts and uncles. But there was nothing indulgent here; there was no my-how-you've-grown-my-dear mien in anyone in the room. This was more like a roomful of people being extremely wary of an unpredictable child.

He scanned the room. There were mourners and friends and family. Assorted aunts and the occasional uncle – the Ingrams appeared to breed more women than men, or maybe the women possessed a stronger survival instinct. Eloise Ingram was holding languid court to a couple of admirers, one of whom had been pointed out to Dan as Dr Shilling. He was fiftyish, with a well-scrubbed look and an air of low-voiced reassurance. Trust the Lily Maid of Astolat to provide herself with a doctor as part of the frame for her decorative invalidism.

Dan looked across at Thalia Caudle. Thalia was standing against the curtains of the deep bay window, momentarily alone. The red velvet cast a dark shadow over her, pulling a mask down over the upper half of her face and giving her eyes glinting pinpoints of crimson. It was a trick of the light, no more than that, but for an unpleasant second Dan received the strong impression of something malevolent peering out. He blinked, and the odd, disturbing image vanished. But wasn't Thalia entitled to feel aggrieved towards the girl who had come unscathed out of the crash that had mangled Edmund? Wasn't she due a bit of angry jealousy?

As Imogen moved away, one of the aunts murmured that there should always be just one hot dish at a funeral and she believed Imogen had gone to fetch it now. The plump aunt said with guilty relish, ‘It's a Westphalia ham baked with cloves and honey, I heard.'

‘Trust Dilys to hear that,' said a third with affectionate reproval, and this was so ordinary and so mundane an interchange that Dan felt normality trickle back for a moment.

Then Imogen returned and the tension came back into the room. As if she's dragging some kind of dark force field with her, thought Dan. As if we've all moved over the centre of the vortex and it's starting up, ready to suck us all up into its greedy centre . . . Don't be absurd, Daniel. Yes, but there's something very odd here.

Imogen was carrying a large oval dish with a domed silver cover over its contents. She set it down on the long table that had held the canapés and the ice-cooler, and then glanced across to her father with a cautious smile. She's looking at him for approval, thought Dan. She's half proud of having had a hand in whatever's in the dish – Aunt Dilys's baked ham? – but half guilty at being pleased about anything on an occasion like this. An absolutely normal emotion.

And then Imogen lifted the did of the dish.

Dan felt at first as if he had received a sharp blow across his eyes, and he could not make sense of what he was seeing. He felt as if every one of his senses had been dislocated, and there was a rushing sound in his ears – the vortex again? – and then everything clicked back into place and his mind ran properly on its tracks once more.

At first he thought that what he was seeing was simply an insufficiently cooked piece of meat, but in the next heartbeat he knew it was nothing of the kind. He forced his mind to pin down the skittering fragments of thoughts. You're a writer, a recorder of emotions and events. Kick your mind back on course and bloody record, then.

At the centre of the dish carried in with guilty pride by Imogen Ingram, its ragged neck jammed hard down on to the spikes, its dead, staring eyes glazed and hoar-rimmed, was the head of a young man with golden hair.