The uncanny, p.32
The Uncanny, page 32
These three turned their backs as two crime scene men came forward to tend to Mormo’s descent. They stopped by the chancel rail. Pullod glanced at Harper quickly, embarrassed. He looked only at Slade as he spoke, but Harper understood he was sharing the information with her.
“We’ve had a sighting of the black Mercedes,” he said in a low tone. “One driver, it looks like. Your boy confirmed the license number.” This with a half-nod towards Bernard, though he looked only at Slade. “They lost track of him in Mordern, but it sounds like he’s heading south along A24. We’ve got roadblocks up. We’re sure to find him.” Now he did turn directly to Harper. “We’ll run you and your lad over to hospital. I’ll go down to Mordern myself, see what’s what. All right?”
Harper frowned, shook her head. “He won’t go.”
“He?”
“Bernard—to hospital. He won’t go. He’ll walk out, get in his car, and drive wherever he thinks he’ll find Iago.”
“He’s in no fit state to drive.”
“Yes,” said Harper. “That’s why I suggest you give us a lift.”
Pullod and Slade exchanged a glance. Slade rolled his eyes.
“You say he’s headed south,” said Harper thoughtfully.
Pullod nodded. “That’s right.”
The door to the crypt opened now. Lester Benbow—the scarred man—was led out between two large patrolmen. His wrists were pinned in cuffs behind his back. His face was smeared with blood. His eyes peered out of the mess, rolling, murderous.
When his gaze lit upon Bernard, the scarred man bared his teeth.
Bernard raised his head. Looked unsmiling at Benbow. Nodded.
Harper watched the scarred man being led away up the church aisle.
“I think, Inspector, we had better head north,” said Harper Albright.
“North?” said Pullod with a laugh.
“Yes. I think we had better get out to Belham Grange as quickly as we can.”
20
I rose from the bed and moved across the room to stand before one of the windows on the far wall. Looking out between the curtains, I saw that night had now drawn down around the place completely. A gibbous moon, sporadically visible in the gaps between the racing clouds, served only to cast a pall of faltering and sickly light over the sere expanse of grassland to the east. In that field, now visible, now vanishing as the moon went once again behind its shifting cover, there stood an ominous and melancholy apparition: the ruins of Belham Abbey …
Storm gazed sadly through Sophia’s window into that misty, drifting night. What it is, old chap, old stick, he thought, what it is is time for The Reveal. That was the moment at the end of the second act of a film when the villain we thought was dead steps out of the shadows, or when the woman we thought we loved pockets the murder weapon—or when the hero we thought we admired is shown to be a dying louse without the courage to tell the truth. It was way past the end of the second act, thought Storm. It was way past time for The Reveal.
“What is it, Richard?” said Sophia softly.
He turned to find her awake, her eyes glinting in the room’s darkness. She had pushed the duvet aside and risen on one elbow. He could make out the shape of her under the frilly canopy. And even now, he didn’t know how he could ever tell her.
“You’re up,” he said.
Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. “I’ve been awake for a while.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been watching you. I’ve been thinking.”
He didn’t answer. He saw her shift a little. He thought she might have looked up a moment at the portrait hanging on the wall beside him.
“What was it you were going to tell me before?” she asked him. “Outside, before my father called me.”
Storm still hesitated. He felt sick with sadness. “I don’t … Look, maybe this isn’t the time,” he said—hating himself for it, hoping anyway she would let him off the hook. “With you so upset and all.”
But she said, “I’m not upset. In fact, I feel very calm at the moment, strangely enough. I was just watching you. I was thinking about you, and I wondered.”
Storm sat back against the window sill. He pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes. “Oh, man,” he said.
“Are you ill or something, Richard?”
He didn’t move, didn’t answer, couldn’t. He kept his fingers on the bridge of his nose, kept his eyes closed. If he could just sit here, he thought. If he could just sit here in the dark and listen to her voice, to the sound of her voice. He loved that sound. Mary Poppins.
“I thought—when you said you had something to tell me—I thought it might be that,” she went on quietly. “I don’t know why. It just came into my head. You look so tired sometimes. And your arm, you favor your left arm. And you just always look … so sad. Is that what it is? Are you ill? Is that why you always look like that?”
He smiled, his eyes still closed. Nodded. “Yeah,” he just managed to say. “Yeah, that’s why.” And then, quickly: “It’s bad, kid. It’s what they politely call terminal.”
She was quiet for several moments after that. Storm opened his hand now and covered his eyes with it. He felt the dampness against his palm. Shit, he thought. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. This quiet from her. And when she spoke again, her voice was cool, even, politely curious.
“Does that …? Does it frighten you? Are you frightened?”
He gave a short laugh. “Uh … well …” Lowered both his hands to his legs as he sat against the sill. He saw her watching him. “No,” he said. “Since you ask. I’m not frightened. Not really. Sometimes at night when I’m alone, a little. But not much, even then.”
“I didn’t think so. I didn’t think you would be.”
“There aren’t many symptoms—maybe the reality of it just hasn’t hit me yet. I don’t know.” He sighed heavily. “I was … To be honest, I was afraid of the doctors more than anything. I think it makes them feel better if they can pretend they’re in some kind of battle with it, even when the battle is really all over. I was afraid they’d cut me up, radiate me, poison me to death for no reason. That’s why I blew town in the first place. But …no. Not this. This doesn’t frighten me at all. It just makes me—it makes everything—really, really sad.”
After a pause, she went on—went on in the same way, still cool, still curious. “It makes you sad because …? Of regrets and that sort of thing?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Regrets.” He wiped his eyes quickly, the corners of his mouth pulling down. “I got me a suitcase full of regrets, babe, believe me. The thing is, I just didn’t … I didn’t get it right, you know? I don’t even think I got the rules of the game right. Not until you dropped your glass at the party. Until I looked up at you. And then I thought: Oh, yeah, I get it. I get it now. I mean, what a shmuck, right? Ach …” He looked up into an invisible corner of the ceiling above her bed. “Christ, kid, I should’ve stayed away from you. I knew that, damn it. I knew it. Or I should’ve told you right off. But I should’ve stayed away, that’s the thing. What a jerk-o.”
Sophia—with what seemed to him calm, unaffected movements in the dark—took the pillow from behind her and set it against the headboard. She sat up, patted it, propped herself on it, sitting quietly, regarding him quietly from under the canopy’s fringe.
“I suppose you were pretending it wasn’t true,” she said after a while. “I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me.”
He smiled unhappily, his head going up and down. What a smart dame, he thought. What a champion dame. “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “Not really pretending, you know—not like I believed it, but just … acting the part, sort of. Acting like we could be together. Like …”
He couldn’t continue. He just went on nodding silently, biting his lip.
“Like we could go on to get married and have children and so on,” she said.
He laughed, his heart in a vice. “And so on. Yeah.”
“No,” she said after a second or two. “No, I don’t suppose we could do that now.”
“No,” said Richard Storm. “I don’t suppose we could.”
“Still,” said Sophia, considering. “Still, if you had told me, I might well have stayed away from you.”
“Well, that’s it,” said Storm. “That’s what I should’ve done.”
“No,” she told him. “No. Because then I wouldn’t have had the chance to realize that I love you.”
Storm made a choked noise, covered his face with both hands.
“Which I did. Realize,” Sophia said. “Just now. While you were standing there, while I was watching you at the window.”
“I’m sorry, Sophie. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” She ran her hand up through her hair. Slowly, once and then again. “Don’t be foolish. Don’t be sorry. I love you, Richard,” she told him. “And at the end of the day …” But then her voice caught. Which surprised him. She had sounded so cool until then. But then her voice caught and she was silent for several moments, looking down thoughtfully.
“Well,” she finished brusquely. “At the end of the day, I think you should come to bed.”
21
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
Sir Michael sat erect, motionless, in the high-backed leather chair behind his desk. The sound traveled to him through the walls.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
He gave no indication that he heard it, no visible sign. But he heard it. It completely occupied his attention. It sparked his imagination. He sat with his eyes open, gazing ahead. Imagining. The mahogany desk before him hunkered hugely in the unlighted room. The carved ram’s heads on its pilasters stared as the Great Man stared.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
It was coming from the floor above him. From the room just above him, his daughter’s room. He imagined that it was the frame of her bed, clicking as it strained at the pegs of its ancient joins.
He sat without moving, his lips slightly parted. Sat tall and precise. He had been sitting like that for over an hour now. In the study, with the door closed, the lights off, the room growing darker and darker. He had sat and sat like that as night had come.
He had removed the box from the bottom drawer, removed the pistol from the box. The box stood open on the desktop blotter, the tray with the cigars and the silver lighter lay next to it. Next to that lay the gun. And he supposed that was what he was gazing at—that he was gazing at the gun, but in truth he hardly saw it. He was just gazing, listening, imagining, his hands folded in his lap, motionless.
Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
And there was another sound now, another sound above the sound of the straining bed. There was the sound of voices. His daughter’s voice, her lover’s. Their whispers, groans. Scrabbling in the wall like squirrels. Coming down to him.
Sir Michael did not move. Sat with his hands clasped. Gazed. Now he did see the gun on the blotter. He focused on it. The blunt gun.
Suddenly, Sophia cried out above him. It was unmistakable noise. She cried out twice, once harshly as if in anguish and denial, once again as if in triumph and release.
Sir Michael sniffed. The ticking had stopped.
After that, it was quiet. It was quiet all over the house for a long time. Minute after minute passed, and Sir Michael didn’t move and there was no sound in the house anywhere. Sir Michael didn’t know how much time passed. Half an hour, an hour, he wasn’t sure. He sat without moving. He thought about his wife, Ann. It was twenty years since she had died, but the thought of her was still wrenching to him.
After that long time, sitting like that, without thinking at all, he picked up the pistol. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Clearing his throat softly, Sir Michael swiveled in his chair and stood up. He moved around the edge of the desk, his fingertips trailing over the smooth border. He paused on the other side to button his jacket, pull the panels down. He felt the weight of the gun in his pocket. He went to the door and opened it.
It was so dark out in the corridor that he had begun to step forward before he realized that a man was standing there. Even then, he was so startled, he couldn’t comprehend what it was he saw.
But it was a man. An enormous man who almost filled the doorway. With his vast shoulders and his heavy, cinderblock head, he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. He towered even over Sir Michael. And he came slowly into the room.
Stupid with confusion, Sir Michael could only back away at first. Back away and watch the creature advance. His thoughts had all been on Storm, on Storm up in his daughter’s room. He could not take this in.
Then he had a single moment of fear and half-understanding. He even had time to wonder if he had got it wrong, got it all wrong.
His hand flashed to his jacket pocket, to the gun. His mouth opened to shout, to warn Sophia.
Then the monster struck him unconscious to the floor.
22
A police car, with its siren blaring, is no good place for conversation. Pullod, driving, PC Slade beside him, Harper and Bernard in the backseat, all sat without speaking as the car laced through the evening traffic, as it plowed over the miles of the motorway.
Harper had her stick pressed against the floor, her hands folded on top of the dragon’s head, her chin propped on her hands. Bernard leaned weakly against the door, his long legs stretched as far as they would go under the seat in front of him. His eyes were closed. His body looked limp and slender and frail in the white T-shirt and sweatpants, in the blue windbreaker one of the cops had loaned him.
The monotonous wail of the siren made it difficult for Harper even to think. It went on and on as the car’s red lights flashed and faded over glimpses of night countryside. Car after car sank past the windows, sank back behind them. Harper leaned on her stick and stared at the seat in front of her, trying to string her ideas together. Now and then she glanced over at Bernard. He didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes.
After a while she leaned forward a little, towards the back of Pullod’s head. She shouted to him over the racket.
“I wonder,” she said, “if it might be possible to have someone phone Belham Grange …”
It was Slade who half-turned to her. “Trouble with the line,” he shouted. “They’ve had a storm up there.”
“Perhaps, then,” Harper shouted back, “you could radio and have a local officer drop by the place …”
“All taken care of, darling,” Slade answered her abruptly. Then he looked out the window and muttered to himself, “Though why we should bother, I don’t know.”
Harper couldn’t hear what he said, but she answered him anyway. “Because,” she told him astringently, “Iago has been looking for the Rhinehart panels for twenty years. The only thing that’s kept him from finding them is that, in all that time, they haven’t changed hands. When Mormo got hold of the Madonna, it was reasonable for Iago to conclude that he might be able to get hold of the Nativity panel as well. Mormo was, after all, one of a few key fences of black-market art after the war. If the final panel had changed hands then, he might well have been aware of it. But if Mormo had had that knowledge, believe me, he would have told it at once. Since he didn’t tell, it seems logical the panel must have been traded by one of the other key fences. And there’s only one other such trader who’s been involved in these events from the beginning—one other who bid at the Magi auction. And Iago knows who that is as well as we do.”
She could not see Slade’s face, but she understood he was rolling his eyes. She could not hear his voice, but she imagined that he muttered, “Iago!”
She did not answer him again. She sat brooding, leaning on her stick, trying to ignore the siren.
And there is also the fact, she went on silently, that all this, all of it, must have begun with Spectre.
What ill wind had blown Iago into that Edgware Road cinema twenty years ago, she would never know. It was his talent, perhaps—as it was hers—to ride the tide of the Uncanny. Perhaps she herself had been in the same cinema on the same day—she could not remember. She only knew that Iago had been there. Five years after she had ruined his cult scheme. He must have been feeling quite fragile, poor lamb. His sense of destiny must have been growing precarious as he scrabbled and seduced among the lost of the earth, desperate to produce the offspring whose blood he needed, all the while realizing that one day, one day the precious blue stone itself would dwindle to nothing.
How that thought must have plagued him. No matter how much blood he got his hands on, one day, one day, the stone itself would be gone. And then the discoloration on his wrists would begin. And then the living decay.
With these concerns, he had wandered into the cinema. He had sat and watched Spectre. And as the climax sent shivers of recognition through him … a spilled soda. Yes. Someone nearby him had dropped her drink in agitation and surprise. Oh yes, yes, it would have been the same. Exactly the same as at the Christmas party. The ghost story. The spilled drink. And Iago, looking up—as Storm had looked up—saw, for the first time, the beautiful Ann Endering, Sophia’s mother.
She loved the cinema, loved American movies, and she had been there. And, startled by the film, she had spilled her soda, and Iago had looked up. Then, moved by the beauty of the mother as Storm had been moved by the daughter’s beauty, he approached her.
Harper could imagine it. She knew Iago’s mesmerizing attractions. Ann Endering—a kind, charitable, liberal woman—would have been his perfect target. If Sir Michael was any indication, she had a penchant for bold, energetic and somewhat dodgy men. And perhaps her idealism—her belief that the world could be made a better place—had softened her, as it did so many, to the beguiling logic of a powerful personality who saw himself as chosen for some great enterprise. In any case, she became his lover. Soon, he would have found out exactly why the film had disturbed her. She loved her house, her family history. She would have seen at once the connections between Spectre and the legend of the Belham Abbey Ghost. Perhaps she even recognized the debt the film owed to “Black Annie.” Perhaps—knowing her history as well as she did—she knew more than that, much more.
