Thorn (8 page)

The simmering hatred of the pampered bitch-creature had boiled over in a huge scalding wave then, burning into Thalia's mind, etching the idea of retribution and punishment into her heart. Punishment for the whey-faced brat who would grow up in Edmund's stead, whole and unflawed, and who might one day have Ingram's, lock, stock and barrel.

Never! thought Thalia grimly. She would turn the tables on Imogen, and she would turn the tables on the cheating forces who had tricked her so viciously. Edmund
would
come back – he would come back and he would come back whole and beautiful and golden! It was then that she had become aware of something lying serpentlike in the darkest, most secret corners of her mind . . . Something that had been there for a very long time, and that was only now slithering and uncoiling into life. To bring Edmund back . . . That would be the sweetest, most comprehensive revenge of all . . .

She went stealthily into the large, first-floor bedroom. She had told the family that she would cope with what was in this room on her own and so she would. She would ask for help presently, she said; in the morning she would be very glad indeed of people to help with the burning of sheets and nightclothes. The family had shuddered as one person, and had reminded one another of Thalia's work on hospital committees; at one time she had even helped in the local Casualty Department – which you now had to call Accident and Emergency – one of several volunteers who helped frightened or bewildered patients to complete forms, or explained about claims for street injuries, or how to find their way to X-ray. She would have seen some extremely unpleasant sights there. Elspeth's husband, George, put forward the theory that some people were less affected than others by these things. Everyone agreed that it was amazingly brave of Thalia to cope on her own.

None of them knew that she was not really on her own. When she entered the shadowed room with its smothering stench of blood, Edmund entered it at her side, pointing out what had to be done.

Thalia threw open the windows, letting in the sweet night air. It was very late; she caught the distant chiming of a church clock. Two a.m. The smallest of the small hours. The time when graveyards yawned and gave forth their wormy dead. When midnight's arch loomed dark and forbidding over the world, and when you could not be sure that eyes did not peer at you from out of the shadows . . .

There was no time to waste on imaginings, and no emotion to spare for being squeamish. The room had to be set to rights before breakfast time and what was in it had to be put into the semblance of normality. And it was important to be very quiet and very quick; Imogen was sleeping her drugged sleep along the landing. It was vital not to alert her. She closed the curtains and switched on the main ceiling lights to chase back the shadows, and then went to work.

She had brought up one of Mrs Scullion's aprons – it went round her thin figure twice, and it could be burned afterwards if necessary – and two pairs of rubber gloves. It was not particularly difficult to strip the bedclothes and bundle them into a large plastic bin liner for the garden bonfire, and it was no more difficult to remove Royston's pyjamas and Eloise's nightgown. She added them to the plastic bag, and then stood looking down at the naked bodies. Royston had become flabby and slightly paunchy of late – that was something the well-cut suits had concealed. Eloise's neck – treacherous area! – was crêpey and dry and her breasts sagged emptily. A pity John Shilling could not see her like this!

Edmund was with her as she sponged the blood painstakingly away, fetching warm water from the bathroom, replacing it several times, and finally tipping it down the lavatory. The sponge and flannels and towels could be burned with the rest of the soiled things.

The blood had been very convincing indeed. Thalia had not been in the least surprised at how thoroughly the family and John Shilling had been fooled by it. They had been fooled because it had all been carefully planned and efficiently worked out, and because Thalia herself had carried every part of it through with panache. It had been absurdly easy – even obtaining the blood had been easy. And it had
worked
! The fools had seen the blood puddling on the bed and they had made the obvious deduction that it was Eloise's blood and Royston's. They had seen the stained knife at the side of Imogen's bed, and they had assumed that Imogen had stabbed her parents. And in the rush to protect Imogen, no one had questioned any farther. Not even that doting fool John Shilling had actually examined the bodies.

Thalia made a final check before locking the door. Everything cleaned that needed cleaning? Everything put out for burning that was blood-stained? Yes. Royston and Eloise were now dressed in fresh night things – blue pyjamas and lace-trimmed nightgown – and at first light John Shilling would come, and between them they would transfer the two bodies to the best spare bedroom and arrange them for the undertaker.

One final thing remained to be done, and that was to remove the cut-glass tumbler that had stayed so innocently on Eloise's bedside table. In view of the way the family had come to a decision – in view of the way that Thalia had nudged them into the decision she had wanted – it was not very likely that any awkward tests would be made. But a thin smear of fluid remained in the bottom of the glass, quite sufficient to reveal that the glass had contained not innocuous mineral water at all, but a hefty mix of chloral hydrate and brandy. Eloise had been so busy with her die-away, I'm-not-strong-enough-for-all-this act, that she had hardly noticed the brandy. She had downed the draught in one go while Thalia watched.

She scooped up the glass. It would be smashed and the fragments consigned to the dustbin. If anyone noticed the set was incomplete, it would be a case of, ‘One of the crystal tumblers broken? Oh, what a shame, they are so difficult to match.' But it might be months before it was spotted, and no one would think twice about it, just as Eloise had not thought twice about drinking from it. The poisoned cup.

Thalia turned the light off and at once the shadows pounced forward, blurred and menacing. Edmund was there as well, and there was a moment when she saw him, faint but recognisable, the blurred outline bending greedily over the two still forms on the bed.

It was then that Thalia saw the thing she had been watching for and hoping for ever since she entered the room. From beneath the sheet that covered Eloise came a faint breath and then a tiny flicker of movement. Thalia waited, absolutely motionless, and with heart-stopping slowness Eloise's hand slid from beneath the sheet and dropped to the floor, the fingertips brushing the carpet. For three heartbeats the blueish vein at the wrist fluttered perceptibly, as if somewhere beneath the surface something was still struggling for life.

Deep, strong triumph welled up in Thalia's mind, and for a moment the dressing-table mirror gave back a startling reflection: her own face, but sharper, crueller, thinner. As if a mask had been clapped over her everyday features. Or as if the everyday mask had been removed to show the glaring madness beneath.

Chloral hydrate had not been the ideal drug but she had had to take what she could out of John Shilling's case, and he tended to be a bit old-fashioned. She had measured the dose carefully: enough to plunge Eloise into a coma but not enough to cause death. If John had made a more detailed examination the plan would not have worked, but he had not. He had reacted exactly as Thalia had thought he would react. It was deeply satisfying to know you could gauge people's behaviour so accurately.

She crossed back to the bed and tucked the errant hand beneath the covers. It was flaccid and still now, but for a few seconds there had been a threadlike pulse. Thalia smiled. Exactly and precisely as she had hoped. It seemed she had judged the dose accurately.

The medical textbooks on chloral hydrate had been largely unclear to a lay mind, but what had been clear was that if it was administered with alcohol, a large enough dose could cause coma or death. Thalia had not wanted death for Eloise; she had wanted coma. And she had wanted the coma to last until Eloise was safely buried.

If things went according to plan, Eloise would come out of the coma for long enough to understand what had happened. She would die knowing she had been buried alive. A bad death. But a just and fitting retribution.

It was rather a pity that Royston had died naturally from that last coronary attack. Thalia would have enjoyed meting out a similar punishment to him.

It was a pity as well that there was no means of knowing how much awareness Eloise would have at the end.

Dan had always known, with a complete absence of vanity, that he had an aptitude for writing. He had been sufficiently successful as a journalist and more recently as a feature writer and biographer to know that he could produce reasonably written, reasonably readable prose. He had not made a fortune out of this aptitude, but he had made a living.

What he had not known was that he would be able to write like this, working deep into the night, oblivious of his surroundings, plunging fathoms down into the strange, slightly surreal world of his own creating, sliding with almost frightening facility inside his characters' minds and into their thoughts, scraping their inner emotions away from their skins, like scraping food from the sides of a pan.

His heroine had been taken, heavily sedated and uncomprehending, to her asylum, and a bleak place it was. Her guardians had been deceived by the manicured gardens and the comfortable public rooms – and by the comfortable public manner of the sister in charge.

Dan had enjoyed himself over the sister: Sairy Gamp in modern-day garb, minus the taste for gin but plus a nicely-judged taste in gentlemen. It amused Dan to provide her with an umbrella –about three-quarters of people reading that would miss the point, but it was worth putting in for the other quarter who would not.

The problem was not so much avoiding the influence of modern-day writers as of steering clear of all those descriptions of nineteenth-century institutions. He had asked Oliver to bring anything he could find about Victorian workhouses or bedlams or even fever hospitals. If Oriel College could not supply the information, the Bodleian should be able to.

‘I know you probably won't be allowed to photocopy anything,' Dan said on the phone, ‘but you could make notes for me, couldn't you?'

‘Oh yes. Yes, I could do that. It sounds rather interesting. You haven't forgotten I'm coming to stay with you for half-term? It is still all right?'

‘Yes, it is still all right, and no, I haven't forgotten. I'll meet the train, when you know which one you're catching.'

‘Well, as a matter of fact,' said Oliver, rather diffidently, ‘I've bought a car. I thought I'd drive up.'

‘Heaven preserve us all,' said Dan and went back to his asylum.

Places like Rosamund's mental hospital did not exist any more, of course – at least, it was to be hoped they did not, although Rampton had almost passed into the language as a word in its own right, and there were occasionally cases of abuse in mental homes or orphanages, uncovered by crusading journalists. He had a vague idea that there had been something recently – the Rackham Commission, wasn't it? Something to do with searching out malpractice inside NHS mental homes. He would have to look into that in case there was anything he could use.

Oliver would remember the notes, no matter what else he might forget. Dan could just recall their father being exactly the same: charming, gentle, unworldly almost to the point of exasperation at times, but razor-sharp when it came to his own subject. Oliver was also razor-sharp on his own subject, which was day-to-day life during the Reformation, and he was pretty well honed on other periods of English history as well.

Even without the notes, Dan found himself tumbling more or less involuntarily into the mid-nineteenth century: conjuring up a dark brooding madhouse that was a nightmarish mosaic of every bleak house ever created. Dotheboys Hall and Mr Bumble's workhouse. That stark and pitiless institution in William Horwood's remarkable book
Skallagrig
.

He finished the description of his heroine's prison with relish, and turned with interest to the matter of removing her guardians from the scene for good. It was time for the long, dark sojourn to begin, and it was necessary for the venal Sairy Gamp and the increasingly sinister characters with which he was surrounding his heroine to have complete control over her.

M
atron Freda Porter was always just a little bit fluttered by a visit from Dr Sterne, and she was fluttered by it this afternoon.

She ordered a pot of tea to be brought to her private office and issued instructions that she was not to be disturbed on any pretext short of fire in the house or raging mayhem among the patients. It was not, of course, that she particularly wanted to be alone with Dr Sterne, but it was as well to keep his visits quiet because, aside from his reputation, which was peculiar, he had a disturbing effect on patients – not just the patients in Briar House, but everywhere.

He fascinated them. Even his detractors admitted this. He fascinated them so much that there had apparently even been occasions when patients had virtually mobbed him, reaching out to him like lepers trying to grasp the hem of Jesus of Nazareth's robe, or fourteenth-century sufferers from scrofula being touched for the King's Evil. Not that you got scrofula these days, of course, any more than you got leprosy, but it was irritating and unprofessional to have Dr Sterne being treated as if he was a cross between the risen Christ and Henry VIII, and Matron Porter was not going to have it in Briar House, never mind what might go on elsewhere. Nor was she going to allow her nurses to cluster about him as they had done on his last visit, batting their eyes hopefully, all giggles and no knickers, most of them, and absolutely shameless. Dr Sterne, to give him his due, had not seemed to accord any of them any particular attention, and it had occurred to Matron Porter more than once that it would not be surprising if Dr Sterne had an eye for the more mature woman. Just in case, she powdered her rather large face before his visit, and sprayed her bosom with scent.