Tower of Silence (30 page)

The footprints were already starting to dry out, in the way that wet footprints inside a house did. They faded halfway across the hall, so that it was impossible to know where the intruder had gone. Krzystof hesitated, wondering if there mightn’t be some quite ordinary, innocent explanation. What? demanded his mind. Because it certainly isn’t Selina March who made those prints, and if it’s some amiably disposed neighbour sheltering from the storm, why didn’t he–or she–answer when I called?

And surely it was incredible that some sinisterly intentioned person had been hiding in Teind’s grounds–perhaps in the little outbuildings that had once been a wash-house and disused earth closet–and had taken advantage of those few minutes when Krzystof had left the door open while he parked his car? Still, for all he knew, an entire network of burglars might be swarming all over Inchcape at this very minute. Itinerant serial
killers might regard the place as a stopping-off point. Itinerant killers…How about an escapee from Moy? Now there was a chilling idea.

Oh hell, thought Krzystof, I’m on my own in the middle of nowhere and I’m visualising homicidal maniacs creeping around all over the place. Yes, but I might be about to confront a murderous thug after the silver, he thought. Had I better call the police, I wonder? But when he went across to where the sit-up-and-beg telephone was discreetly housed under the stairs, there was no dial tone and no amount of jiggling the receiver produced one. The thunder crashed overhead again, and Krzystof recalled Selina March saying placidly that the phone lines had a way of disconnecting themselves in thunderstorms. And perhaps it was better not to start up a scare on such flimsy evidence, because it was always possible that Krzystof’s imagination had got the bit between its teeth and bolted into the realms of outright fantasy. But Joanna had vanished from this house several days earlier, and anything sinister, anything out of the ordinary, ought surely to be investigated. His heart was still jumping, but the idea that this intruder might provide a clue to Joanna’s whereabouts made the adrenalin kick in with what felt like a million volts. Krzystof thought he was no braver than the next man–in fact he suspected he was probably a lot less brave than the next man–but he would give a great deal for ten minutes with anyone who might have hurt his wife.

He closed all the doors that led off the hall so that nothing could fool him by hiding or sneaking outside
while he was searching the rest of the house, and then, gripping the oil lamp firmly, he set off up the stairs.

It was a nightmare journey. At intervals the lightning tore through the old house, illuminating everything with livid clarity, but between times dense shadows huddled in the corners of the half-landing, hunched outlines that might have been crouching intruders waiting to spring. There were black pools of darkness everywhere, which might contain anyone or anything, and several times the sparse branches of the trees leaned down to tap against the windows like skeletal ghost-fingers.

Oh God, for electric light to see properly, and a phone to summon help! thought Krzystof, but he went doggedly forward. This was certainly turning out to be the classic walk through the storm-ridden house by flickering lamplight. Joanna would make a good tale of this when it was all over, and when he had finally found her. He clung to the thought of finding Joanna alive and well, and hearing her embroidering the whole thing for friends, burlesquing it in the telling. ‘And he wandered through the spooky old house like a Gothic hero, my dears, hunting for the ghosts who were all hiding under the beds like a game of Sardines.’

Krzystof was not a Gothic hero at all, of course, any more than this was a ghost-hunt. For one thing, ghosts did not leave footprints.

He paused at the centre of the first landing, looking about him. Several bedrooms, including Selina’s own, opened off the landing, as well as the antiquated bathroom. At the far end the stairs went up to the second
floor, where his own half-attic room was, and where the water tanks lived in a grisly little half-room under the roof. OK, bedrooms first. One at a time. He was grateful for the heaviness of the oil lamp; if it came to a fight it would make a reasonable weapon. He looked warily into each of the bedrooms, slamming the door back against the wall each time, checking walls, windows—By this time his heart was beating so loudly that it felt as if it might burst out of his chest at any minute.

In one of the unused bedrooms the curtains stirred gently, as if someone might be standing behind them. Krzystof tensed his muscles and whipped one curtain back, but there was nothing save the cold window panes, still spattered with rain from the storm, and a faint draught of air in one corner where the window did not fit very well. He drew the curtain across again, and went up to his own room, pushing the door back to the wall, and standing at the centre of the room, moving the oil lamp around to show up the dark corners.
Was
there someone here with him? Someone crouching in a corner, breathing very quietly? He moved the lamp round trying to see more clearly, and overhead the thunder growled threateningly again. Like a giant drawing in its breath, ready to bellow for a victim…

A movement from within the green depths of the looking-glass over the dressing-table made his heart skip several beats before he realised that it was only his own reflection. He crossed to the window, and it was then that he saw what he had missed before. Beyond the glass, silhouetted blackly against the storm clouds
massing over Inchcape, was the outline of the Round Tower.

And within its depths, a light was flickering.

There were only two courses of action, and only one of them was really sensible. That was for Krzystof to beat it down the stairs and out into the storm, locking the door on the way if he remembered, and then to drive like a bat escaping hell down to the Black Boar, to summon help.

The other option, which was not, of course, to be seriously considered, was to go through the darkling orchard, across the patch of wasteland and along the disused little road, to find out what the hell was going in inside the tower.

Krzystof stared at the elusive light for another thirty seconds or so, and then went quickly back down the stairs and out into the night.

Through the darkling orchard and across the patch of wasteland to the disused road that led to the tower.

Robbie Glennon had been on an early turn of duty when Moy’s bell started to sound–seven a.m. to three p.m. it was–and only minutes earlier he had been thinking with relief that it was nearly the end of the shift.

He had been planning on having his meal in Moy’s canteen, rather than at the cottage he was sharing with a couple of the other warders. The canteen usually served a fry-up around mid-afternoon: high tea for people coming off the seven o’clock shift, breakfast for people going on early evening duty. Coronary on a plate, people said, but when you had got up at six, and spent a day coping with Flasher Logan’s antics and one or two more, you were in a mood to say, Oh, sod the cholesterol levels, and pig out.

He piled eggs and bacon and mushrooms onto his plate, accepted a mug of tea from one of the servers,
and sat down to eat. The food was very good here; it was mostly local farm produce, delivered to Moy’s little cottage community every week. You could always tell really fresh stuff from mass-produced supermarket fodder.

He was just taking his tray up to the serving hatch, and asking for a second cup of tea, when something seemed to shiver on the air–almost like a minor earth tremor–and after a moment he realised that somebody was sounding the huge old alarm bell. Almost at once a tremor of something seemed to ripple through Moy–in part fear, in part consternation, but in part a guilty excitement.

Who is it? Who’s tried to get out? The murmur crackled like a forest fire through the different wings and blocks, and people started turning anxiously to one another and asking what the drill was for this. Did anyone know what they were supposed to do, for God’s sake?

‘Go to your own wings and wait in the main hall for instructions,’ said Don Frost harassedly. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t any of you ever read the training manuals these days!’

‘Bur Mr Frost–sir–who is it who’s escaped?’

‘Don’t you know that yet?’

‘No—’

‘It’s Mary Maskelyne,’ said Don Frost tersely. ‘She’s strangled one of the doctors and disappeared.’

If Mary had realised how easy it would be to outwit her gaolers and get out of prison she might have done it years ago. But years ago there had not been any particular
incentive to escape, and in those days her face would have been too well known for her to pass in the world unrecognised. It had only been when she had heard about the woman living in Inchcape–the woman who knew about the towers of silence in India–that she had known what she must do.

The first thing had been to establish that the woman in whose house Krzystof Kent was staying really was the bitch who had been in Alwar with Christabel and the other children. There was no point in upsetting the unblemished record of the last thirty-odd years if it was not the right person after all. A certain amount of cunning and stealth would be needed here, but Mary could be very cunning and very stealthy indeed when she had to. That was one of her strengths and it was one of her gaolers’ weaknesses: none of them had ever really known just how very cunning and clever she could be. Certainly none of them at Moy knew.

And so she had asked her carefully off-hand questions of the warders who had been at Moy the longest, and she had listened with apparently casual attention to the answers. She had appeared to be interested in local history and local personalities after that–she had even taken a book called
Folklore of Inchcape
out of Moy’s small library. The talk by Joanna Savile last week had fired her enthusiasm to try her hand at one or two essays, she said. She thought she might start with something local, since there would probably be first-hand sources available for her researches. It made her laugh inside to see the approval on all the stupid flabbery faces.

Folklore of Inchcape
was a locally printed book by some boring old fart called Matthew McAvoy and Mary had no intention whatsoever of wading through its tedious pages. But borrowing it had opened up a conversation with the librarian, and within a very few minutes she had a name. Selina March.

And Selina March, it seemed, was the great-niece of this Matthew McAvoy who had written about Inchcape, and had, from the look of the book, succeeded in suppressing any interest that might have existed in his subject.

‘He was one of our local scholars,’ said the librarian, who had been at Moy for several centuries as far as Mary could make out. ‘His niece still lives here as a matter of fact. A very respected lady in Inchcape, Selina March. Orphaned young, of course–I believe the parents died in India when she was very small–some kind of uprising in the late nineteen forties I think–and Mr McAvoy and his sisters arranged for her to come back to England, and they brought her up between them.’

‘How interesting.’

Selina March, said Mary’s mind.
Selina March
. It sang through her brain like an incantation, like a spell. And it all fitted, everything about it fitted, and she knew now that that first, gut-jabbing instinct had not betrayed her. The woman at Inchcape called Selina March was the child who had escaped from the tower all those years ago.

So. So, the hated one was here: living perhaps as near as a mile from Moy. The information was so huge and so colossally satisfying that Mary wanted to run about and shout. She did not, of course. She sat very quietly in her
room, and let the knowledge pour inwards, until it had filled up her entire mind and heart and body.

She had the extraordinary feeling that she had been given this knowledge for a reason. Revenge? Was that the reason? Yes, of course, it was; revenge was what this was all about. It was about redressing the balance, and it was about retribution against the bitch who had let Christabel die and ruined Mary’s life as a result.

If Christabel had still been whispering into Mary’s mind, Mary might have evolved a different kind of plan, but Christabel had turned out to be a traitor. Just when Mary needed that extra strength from Christabel, the selfish cow had vanished. But probably Mary did not need Christabel any longer; in fact when you looked at this sensibly, Mary was doing very nicely by herself these days, thank you.

She thought very deeply and very carefully about Selina March, not sleeping at all that night, just lying on her bed and staring out of the small oblong of window. Skies were good things to watch when you needed to think: you could often see faces in the clouds, and the faces gave you ideas. And when the bell sounded for washing and breakfast at seven fifteen that morning, she had the plan all worked out. She felt a bit light-headed from not having slept and she felt a bit detached from everything as if she was separated from the world by glass. But she was not so detached and she was not so light-headed that she could not carry out her plan.

Delight welled up–she had forgotten how fiercely good it was to feel like this–and this time it was all
her own delight and all her own excitement, because that unreliable bitch Christabel had not played any part in this.

When the warder came along to wake people, rapping on the doors and sliding back the spyholes, Mary got up as usual. She washed and dressed in the ugly white-tiled showers, and then she ate breakfast in the dining room just as if it was an ordinary day. Early morning would not be a good time to set the plan in motion; there were too many people coming and going: change-overs of shifts, breakfasts being prepared for staff and inmates. She would wait for the before-lunch period, when it was generally a bit quiet.

She was scheduled to attend a group therapy session at ten o’clock–something boring and utterly futile about expressing your emotions through photography, and if Flasher Logan was part of the group it would give the therapist a bit of a shock because everyone knew what emotions the Flasher liked expressing–but she asked if she could be excused from it.

‘I feel sick,’ she said to the on-duty warder.

‘How sick? D’you need an infirmary check?’

‘Oh, not that sick,’ said Mary. ‘I think it was the kedgeree at breakfast. I’ll just lie flat for a while in my room. I can do that, can’t I?’

‘I’ll get you some magnesia or something,’ said the warder, completely unsuspicious, and within half an hour Mary was left on her own in her room. The warder would check back in a hour, she said. Would Mary be all right for an hour?

‘Yes, I’ll just lie quietly. Thanks for the magnesia.’

OK, the foundations had been laid. Now to the practicalities. She had one hour.

Anyone who had been inside any kind of institution for more than a couple of months knew how easy it was to induce a bout of vomiting in order to be carted off to the infirmary wing for a couple of days. You sneaked a packet of salt or a tin of mustard from the kitchens–bribing or threatening one of the kitchen workers if necessary–and then you drank down two or three pints of heavily salted, or mustard-laden, water. Or you did what the bulimics did; you learned how to jab a finger at the back of your throat or use the end of a feather from your pillow to make yourself retch. Mary would use this last method, because she was not going to trust anyone with even a fragment of her plan.

The being-sick part would be relatively easy, but she had had to think quite hard to sort out the next part of the plan, which was to get blood–as much blood as possible–into the vomit, so that they would not just think she was suffering from a brief bilious attack. At the Young Offenders’ Hostel the girls had sometimes put menstrual blood in the vomit, which looked very convincing, but Mary had not had a menstrual period for over a year, and in any case, this had to be done
now
.

None of the inmates were allowed scissors or knives, of course, and nor were they allowed nail files or needles or tweezers. Nothing that could be broken to create a sharp edge was allowed in any of the rooms. Two photographs were permitted, but the frames and covers
had to be plastic or perspex. The rooms and lockers were all searched once a week, on random days. Mary had already realised, rather grudgingly, that Moy’s security was very good indeed. Even combs were plastic rather than metal, and the mirrors over the washbasins were fixed so firmly to the wall that it would have taken an electric drill to get them off.

And then she had it. The under-wiring from a bra. Unpicking the seam was awkward but she used her teeth and her nails, and in the end she managed to draw out the semicircle of thin springy wire. She had put it in the little plastic wastebin, so that even if there was a spot-search of her room while she was at breakfast it would look as if the thing had snapped and Mary had put it to be thrown out.

But it was all right; no one had been in, and the wire was still there. Keeping her ears alert, she finally managed to snap the wire halfway along. It was quite difficult because each end was padded, but she did it. Now for the unpleasant part.

She used the finger-down-throat method, and after several attempts she was sick in the washbasin in the corner. She managed to let some of it go onto the floor. So far so good. Still listening intently for footsteps coming along the corridor outside, she dug the jagged end hard into the fleshy part of her underarm, holding it over the washbasin as she did it.

This took three attempts–it was harder than you realised to inflict real hurt on yourself–but Mary set her teeth doggedly and jabbed the wire deep into the wound
twice more, until the blood really flowed. Drip-drip into the smeary washbasin. Horrid. But necessary. And there was quite a lot of blood now. She made sure that some dripped into the little scooped-out part for the soap where it would not dry out.

They would realise what she had done at some point, of course, but they would not suspect anything for quite a while, because she had no history of this kind of deception. She had been a model prisoner, really. Anyway, providing nobody found the bra-wire until she was out of their reach, it did not matter. She pressed a wadded handkerchief against the wound to stop the bleeding, and then bound her arm up with strips of a cotton pillowcase. It was still bleeding quite a lot so she pulled two thick sweaters on, in case it bled through the bandage.

Her timing was absolutely dead-on. She had just finished hiding the broken wire under her bed when she heard the warder coming along the corridor again. Mary scooped up the still-wet blood from the soap dish and smeared it inside her mouth and over her chin. In the oblong of mirror and in the dull morning light it looked pretty fearsome, but it looked extremely convincing. She slumped against the washbasin, and waited for the warder to reach her door.

When she heard the sound of the key being turned, she called out in a shaky and frightened voice, ‘Please, I need help…I need a doctor. I’ve been dreadfully sick. And there’s blood in it–quite a lot of blood.’

The infirmary was a brightly lit, antiseptic-smelling place.
Mary was not allowed to walk there; two of the warders brought a wheelchair and a blanket, and they even brought a stainless steel kidney-dish in case she was sick again on the way. If only.

The warders wheeled her into a little examination cubicle off the main ward. There was a glass panel set into the door leading onto the corridor, and there was another glass panel in the wall looking out over the ward, but Mary saw that despite this it would be fairly easy to stay out of sight. Several of the infirmary beds were occupied, but from the look of it nobody was paying much attention to what was happening in here.

The doctor who came in was a large four-square female with a no-nonsense haircut and a brisk manner. She said, ‘Onto the bed, please,’ and Mary had a moment of panic, because surely the warders would not have to stay in here while the doctor examined her? But the doctor was nodding dismissively to the two warders, and both of them went back into the corridor. Mary watched them through the glass panel, and saw that one returned to the wing but that the other remained outside the door. Damn. But to be expected, really.

‘Any pain?’ said the doctor as Mary clambered onto the examination couch, doing so awkwardly as if it hurt her to move.

‘Yes. Stomach. Quite bad. But I don’t want people fussing around me—’