Thorn (25 page)

Thalia lifted her head and said, very softly, ‘And now, Dan, I'm going to blindfold you.'

It was not precisely what Dan had been imagining, but it was unexpected for all that. He blinked and stared at her. She reached across the bed and took a silk scarf from the bedside table. Their eyes met. ‘All right?' said Thalia, still in the same purring voice. Her tongue came out to lick her lips and Dan stared, caught in fascination.

Blindfold. He said, ‘I've heard of it, although I've never actually done it.'

‘It concentrates the senses, Dan.'

‘I don't think mine could be any more concentrated than they are at the moment. But let's find out.' He took the silk blindfold from her hands and twisted it round his head, tying it in a loose knot at the back.

The silk did not quite blot out the candlelight. Dan could still make out tiny specks of flames, but nothing more. When Thalia's tongue flicked him again, and then when he felt her mouth go round him once more, he half-closed his eyes and gave in to the swelling waves of arousal a second time. Every fibre of his body was focused on what she was doing to him; there was nothing in the world save this warm, candle-scented, female-scented bower, and there was nothing save the silken mouth of the woman bending over him.

He felt her move slightly, and he thought one hand went out to the bedside table. She had done this last time; not making a fuss, not even referring to it, simply sliding the condom over him without comment. It had been a smooth, practised movement, but it had also been unexpectedly exciting. In another minute she would do it again, and then Dan would push her on to her back and go in—

There was a faint scrape of something that had nothing to do with condoms waiting discreetly and conveniently in bedside tables. Dan half turned his head. Something on the bedside table. She had put something on the bedside table. She was enclosing him again, moving up and down, her hair swinging across his legs which was arousing by itself. In another minute he would be beyond the point of control . . . There was something different about the angle of her head. She was lying more to one side and for some reason this broke into the mood of heady passion. Dan reached up to pull the blindfold away.

Thalia was still crouching between his thighs, her mouth and her lips working with that deadly expertise. But she was facing the small bedside cabinet, and her eyes were on the silver-framed photograph that was angled towards her. It had not been there earlier on; Dan knew it had not.

The photograph showed a young man with Imogen Ingram's eyes but with a cruel mouth and fair hair. Edmund.
Edmund.

Thalia had been watching the photograph with unblinking worshipping eyes all the time she was licking Dan into orgasm.

Sickness welled up in his throat; at the same instant he felt his body spin out of control and spasm in climax.

They did not leave the bedroom to eat; Thalia brought food in, and Dan saw with a sinking heart that it was the kind of sensuous, tactile food that they could feed to one another, in an extension of the earlier passion. Cold duck with cherries and triangles of brown bread spread with rich pâté. There were
petits-beurre
spread with almonds and melted chocolate, and small ripe grapes which had been dipped in sweet dessert wine and then in sugar. She'll certainly expect me to feed her with the grapes, he thought, torn between revulsion and a sudden treacherous stab of fresh arousal. This is either immensely sexual or it's farcically old hat. Hell and the devil, I really
don't
want to screw her again! But it looks as if I'll have to.
Noblesse oblige
. I only hope I can
oblige
after what I saw earlier. Thank God she's brought in another bottle of wine at any rate. That ought to settle matters. One way or another.

Thalia was still asleep in the tumbled bed when Dan finally slipped out and dressed with silent swiftness in the bathroom.

He used the loo and scowled at his reflection in the mirror. He was not really in hangover territory, but there was the suspicion of a skewering headache above one eye and his mouth felt intolerably dry. Too much wine, drunk too quickly. Too much sex with somebody who was mentally having her sex with someone else? And that someone her dead son? But this was too convoluted and too potentially worrying a thought to consider yet. Dan concentrated on the immediate and the tangible, which was getting a cold drink before leaving.

He padded through to the kitchen. There was a carton of milk on one of the worktops, and he flipped the top open and poured it into a tumbler. It was fresh but it was at room temperature, and he opened the fridge for an ice cube, only to find that the tray was empty. That was the trouble with service flats, small details got missed by cleaners. He glanced round the kitchen, and his eye fell on the chest freezer in the far corner.

He did not stop to think that freezers are usually kept solely for food rather than for neat little trays of ice cubes; he did not think, either, about invading anyone's privacy – people do not normally keep their bank statements or unit trust account numbers in the deep freeze.

It held the usual jumble of stand-by food. Bread and bags of frozen vegetables and ice cream and packs of steaks and chops. Dan propped the lid up and moved a pack of chicken portions aside, exposing the lower section of the cabinet.

Exposing what was lying on the freezer bottom.

The kitchen tilted and spun sickeningly, and jagged tag ends of memory splintered his mind. Imogen bringing in the covered dish that was supposed to be a baked ham but that had not been a baked ham at all. The bloodied fragments of legend about Sybilla and Lucienne Ingram, prowling those grim pages of Ingram history. Even, incredibly, snippets of half-understood information about human transplants and human embryos, about kidneys and livers and eyes that were kept at sub-zero temperatures and severed limbs packed in ice until they could be grafted on or sewn in or joined. And the nineteenth-century anatomists plundering fresh graves for the raw material of their groping research. But the anatomists had had to use formaldehyde or formalin; they had not had the advantages of modern freezing processes.

They would not have been able to put a human head in a modern freezer and pack it with ice so that it was glazed and hoar-rimmed, so that its once-golden hair was matted and stringy, and so that it stared with clouded ice-poached eyes at whoever lifted the lid.

B
y the time he let himself into the blessed normality of his own flat, Dan had passed through a dozen different emotions, ranging through repulsion to perplexity and then finally to downright disbelief.

What he had seen must have a perfectly innocuous explanation, and the likeliest was that he had misinterpreted. Almost certainly it had been an animal, and something to do with cooking. But people didn't eat the heads of animals, did they? At least not any more. Vague notions of chitterlings and sweetbreads crossed his mind, along with memories of his grandmother telling how people made brawn during the war because you had to use what food you could get. Dan thought there might conceivably still be enthusiasts who hoarded pig's faces in freezers and then boiled them up to make brawn and it was probably very good indeed, but homemade brawn and Thalia Caudle were not two things that occurred to you in the same breath.

What he had found was not credible at all. Margot might with impunity stalk Lady-Macbeth fashion through the pages of his book, dealing out death and mutilation and boiling away troublesome corpses, but Thalia would not. This was the twentieth century, for goodness' sake; people in London and respectable suburbia did not do things like that.

People in London and respectable suburbia did do it. Women did it as much as men, more often than men sometimes. They lived in ordinary places like Gloucester and they had light, feminine names like Rosemary West, or they prowled the moors of northern England in the 1960s and were called Myra Hindley. Or they lived in America and stored chopped-up bodies under the floor and then boiled them up in a cauldron to eat . . . Oh God, yes. Nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon, Daniel.

Yes, but they were surely all mad, those people. Then was Thalia mad? Not raving mad, not schizophrenic or depressive or melancholic. But fee-fi-fo-fum mad. Mad as in, ‘Let me strip the flesh from your bones, my dear.' Mad as in, ‘Let me store the head of my mutilated son and croon over it by the dead vast midnight.' But this was so bizarre an image that he refused to consider it.

And then another fact struck him.

He had been trying to persuade himself that it had been the carcass of an animal he had seen, but if he could not tell the difference between a pig's head and a human's, even after the better part of two bottles of Chablis, he had a severe problem.

He
had
been able to tell the difference. The head
had
been human. It had frosted golden hair, and a crushed-in mouth and splintered cheekbones. Edmund Caudle, carefully preserved. You should recognise him if anyone should, Daniel, you were the one who saw the photograph tonight while Thalia thought you were still blindfold. Yes, and you were the one who clanged the lid down on the appalling thing while all the mourners stood around in mute, helpless horror that afternoon. And if the thing was real then, it was real tonight. Because if you were hallucinating on the day of Edmund's funeral, then so were about twenty other people.

He considered this. Everyone had believed that Imogen was responsible for that gruesome episode; everyone thought it was the Ingram taint erupting and boiling over in a huge insane froth, and they had put Imogen in a clinic somewhere as a result. Dan did not know where the place was, but it did not matter because if Imogen was in a clinic somewhere she could not have put her cousin's head in the freezer of the Great Portland Street flat.

Only one person could have done that, and it followed, therefore, that the same person had caused the thing to appear at the lunch. Someone who had wanted it to seem that Imogen was mad. Someone who wanted to get Imogen out of the way and get her hands on the Ingram empire and the Ingram money. Someone who had been named as Imogen's guardian, and who perforce had the control of Royston Ingram's publishing empire.

Thalia Caudle.

But Thalia was not Margot – it was vital to keep remembering that. Yes, but that did not mean she was not capable of doing something monstrous. People performed all manner of monstrous actions to get their hands on fortunes. Imogen had been very neatly put out of the way, and was presumably reasonably safe until she was ready to pass out of Thalia's guardianship. This was most likely at the age of eighteen, but Royston Ingram's will might overrule the law and as far as the company was concerned Imogen might be a minor until she was twenty-one.

This was one of the times when Dan would have been grateful for Oliver's sharp, analytical mind, but Oliver had returned to Oxford and his breathless, wide-eyed students, and Dan was on his own. How would Oliver have viewed this problem?

Dan thought about it a bit more, and eventually came to the conclusion that he needed two separate pieces of information. One was the exact provisions of Royston's will regarding Imogen's inheritance. If Thalia's guardianship ended when Imogen was eighteen (in six months? a year?), Imogen could well stand in imminent danger. If it ended when she was twenty-one, Thalia might be satisfied to keep the girl in a nursing home for the next three years.

The other thing to find out was Imogen's present whereabouts, so that he could make sure that she was safe from any further assaults on her sanity.

Getting a copy of the will should be easy enough; Dan thought it was possible to request a sight of anyone's will, and he thought there was somewhere in the Strand where you put in a formal application.

Finding Imogen might be more difficult.

Juliette Ingram was charmed to be phoned by the mysterious young man who had been at Hampstead on that
grisly
afternoon, and delighted to accept his invitation to dinner. With the idea of testing the financial waters, so to speak, she suggested Langan's – ‘So
convenient
for my office.'

I'm spending money like a drunken sailor, thought Dan, but said, ‘Eight o'clock?'

‘Perfect.' Juliette rang off in order to phone Great-Aunt Flora and tell her that she had the most
intriguing
dinner date with the unknown gentleman who had clanged the lid down on the you-know-what at Edmund's funeral while the rest of them had stood around wringing their hands and keening and being sick on the Sheraton.

‘If he's a writer he must be successful to afford Langan's,' said Flora, repressing an unworthy wish that she was Juliette's age again and being asked out to expensive restaurants by intriguing young men.

‘Do you suppose he's going to
pump
me about the family scandal?'

‘I shouldn't be surprised,' said Flora rather grimly.

‘I'd rather be asked out for my
beaux yeux,
' observed Juliette. ‘But I don't mind, really. I remember thinking he was rather Heathcliff – all dark and damn-your-eyes.'

‘Well don't be beguiled by damn-your-eyes seducers, Juliette, and don't give away anything about the family.'

‘Of course not,' said Juliette, shocked. ‘But Aunt Flo, darling, it won't matter, not really. Dan Tudor can read all about it for himself when Friday's papers come out – that's always supposing he can find it without a magnifying glass, because it was played down to an amazing degree, wasn't it? The premature burial and so on. I don't suppose it'll get more than a tiny paragraph on page five. And after all, it wasn't actually any of
us
who did it, which is such a comfort, don't you think?'

‘Rosa thinks it was John Shilling,' said Flora. ‘She thinks he gave Eloise an overdose by mistake.'