A Dark Dividing (34 page)

Mortmain…

Something at the back of Simone’s mind jumped to attention. Mortmain. There was something wrong with the shot of Mortmain. Was the glass broken? No. But something—Something red where there should only be black, something obscuring the scowling façade…

And then she did understand, and the fear came pouring in with huge scalding waves.

Across the glass front of the frame, in scarlet scrawled letters, were the words, ‘
The Murder House
’. And underneath it, exactly like a signature, ‘
Sonia
’.

The
a
of Sonia sloped downwards; in the bright hard whiteness of the overhead spotlights it looked like blood that had trickled down and then dried.

It was lipstick, of course, it was nothing more sinister than bright red lipstick, but it took Simone about three horror-filled minutes to realize this. It took another three to get a handful of wet tissues from the cloakroom and wipe the appalling words away. Even then smears remained on the glass so that Simone had to forage in Little Hell for dusters and spray polish, because it was unthinkable to leave the smallest trace of the words visible.

All the time she was cleaning and polishing away the sinister menacing message, the brightly lit gallery was eddying and swirling with the old nightmares, and the old, remembered echoes were hissing through her mind.

It’s no use trying to escape me, Simone… Even if I’m a ghost, it’s no use trying to get away from me… Because I know what you did that afternoon, Simone… I know what is, and what has been, remember that, Simone…?

T
HE POLICE, WHEN they arrived, were painstaking and polite, but it was impossible not to think that they were also a bit patronizing.

Could Miss Marriot give any description of this prowler? they asked. Oh, she could not. A pity. Well, had anything been taken? Nothing? And there was no damage to anything anywhere? Simone, determinedly not looking in the direction of the framed darkness of Mortmain, said, No, nothing at all. It was just that she had heard someone creep in—yes, she was very sure about that—and when she went down to investigate she had caught a glimpse of someone running out through the street door. There was some quite valuable stuff in the gallery, so she had thought she ought to report it. Even to her own ears this all sounded like the twittering of an over-nervous female, not used to being on her own and dramatizing some perfectly innocent incident.

But the police said, indulgently, that she had been quite right to call them. Very unpleasant for her, they did not doubt. Now then—had they understood this right?—the street door had been left unlocked, for a while? Oh well, there you were, then. Leave a street door unlocked in the middle of London, and you were asking for trouble. Especially with all these paintings and things on display. A rather disparaging glance at the framed exhibits had accompanied this comment.

The odds were that it had just been a chance intruder, they said. Still, they would file a report, they said, just in case there was a repeat performance. A snapping of notebooks being closed followed this remark, and then as an afterthought, they asked how she would be travelling home. Russell Square tube? Perhaps she might be better to take a taxi on this occasion. Door to door. Not that there was anything to worry about.

Simone locked the door after them and went back upstairs to her partly completed compositions of mills and looms and call centres, because she would not, she absolutely would not, let herself be spooked by Sonia—or most likely by somebody pretending to be Sonia, because clearly that was what this had been. Yes, but how many people know about Sonia? said her mind.

She sat at her desk and considered this. Whoever had played tonight’s grisly trick must have known about Sonia beforehand. Yes, that was undeniable. But who, today, knew that Simone Marriot had once had a twin sister called Sonia? There would have been people at the hospital at the time of the birth, and Mother had said there had been a lot of media interest as well. But even though Thorne’s had generated quite a bit of publicity—mostly because of Angelica, of course—and even though Simone had been photographed once or twice, no one seeing those photographs could possibly have made the connection between Simone Marriot and a baby called Simone Anderson born more than twenty years earlier. Certainly no one could have made the connection to Mortmain. Mother had known about that but she could certainly be discounted, and no one else had ever known what had happened there all those years ago. Simone suddenly wanted to talk to Mother very much indeed, but she was still in Canada and it would be a bit thoughtless to ring up and have hysterics over the phone to someone who was several thousand miles away and might be fast asleep anyway. She tried to remember the time difference and could not.

It kept coming back to Sonia. It kept coming back to her. Sonia, who had known what was and what had been… Sonia had known all about Mortmain.

But the thing Simone had seen that day—the thing that had died inside Mortmain’s darkness—could not really have been Sonia, because Sonia had died as a small baby.

It was almost ten o’clock when Simone finally set off for home, setting the burglar alarm and locking the street door firmly.

She flinched from the thought of the Underground tonight. It was still comparatively early for London streets and there were a lot of people about. But Russell Square was one of the deep stations, and there was a lift with clanging iron doors and supposing you found yourself shut inside with the person who had written that mad, sinister message…? She picked up a taxi near the British Museum and reached her flat with a sense of relief. I’m safe now, thought Simone, letting herself into the tiny hallway. Nothing can reach me here.

She remembered she had not eaten since lunchtime, and on the strength of this made herself an omelette. After she had eaten it she scanned the bookshelves for something soothing and undemanding to read in bed. An Agatha Christie, maybe; she had quite a collection of those. Yes, she would join dear Miss Marple in the gentle charm of her long-ago world with its vicars and retired colonels and bodies in libraries. Nothing sinister there, and right always triumphed in the last pages. She fell asleep halfway through the first chapter of
A Murder is Announced
.

She awoke two hours later with her heart hammering violently against her ribs and the realization that she was sitting bolt upright in the bed, clenching folds of the sheet in both hands in the classic panic attitude.

OK, only a nightmare, nothing worse. Take deep, calming breaths. After a moment she switched on the bedside lamp, and warm, comforting light flooded the room. Simone leaned back against the pillows, still feeling a bit shaky. The nightmare would take a while to recede because it always did, and the hateful sinister sounds would reverberate in her mind for a while. Childish hands scrabbling in vain against bricks, and fingers worn to bloodied tatters from trying to climb out of a deep dank well-shaft. Tap-tap-tap, get-me-out… And the person who was trapped down there was someone who had sly eyes and a back that was not quite straight…

Sonia.

Simone glanced at the clock. Just on three a.m. Not quite the smallest of the small hours but certainly a time when ghosts might be thought to walk, and when graveyards might be expected to yield up their wormy dead. Certainly the hour when the darknesses of the past crept out to torment you and slide inside your dreams.

She got out of bed and padded out to the kitchen to fill the kettle for a cup of tea. She had woken, shivering and sweat-drenched, from this particular nightmare too many times not to know the pattern. The sly whisperings would echo over and over inside her mind for several hours yet, and if she went back to sleep they would be waiting for her.

It’s no use trying to escape, Simone… We know what you did that day… We saw everything that happened that afternoon… We know what is and what has been, Simone…
Hateful, sinister voices.
Wherever you run to, we’ll catch you, always remember that, Simone… Because you’re a murderess, Simone… A murderess…

But you can’t murder a ghost, said Simone’s mind defensively. Remember that and hang on to it, because it’s true.

She drank the tea, and then showered and got dressed. After that, moving quietly so as not to attract any attention, she carried her photographic equipment out to where her car was parked on the street, and stowed it in the back. Then she went back inside, and left a message on Angelica’s voice-mail at Thorne’s, explaining that she was going away for a couple of days. She wanted to drive up into Yorkshire and Lancashire to look for mills and looms and remnants of the industrial revolution for the new exhibition, said Simone; if there was anything urgent, Angelica could get her on her mobile number. Angelica would only ring in the event of fire, flood or Armageddon, and she was not very likely to question Simone’s sudden decision, either. When Simone got back Angelica would ask if it had been a good trip, and whether the drive had been hassle-free, but she would leave it until Simone was ready to talk in detail about what she had done, or display the gleanings of the expedition. One of the good things about Angelica was that she never pried.

It was a little after four a.m. by the time Simone drove away from her flat; it felt strange not to have to battle with the perpetual gridlock of the streets. London looked and felt completely different at this hour. Milk carts and road-sweepers and night-shift workers. Here and there were prowling cats making for home after the night’s tom-cat run, and there were one or two young men or girls also making for home after their own tom-cat night-run, although they were mostly doing so in cars or taxis.

Harry had left the night-club shortly after half past one, but it was four a.m. before he left Angelica’s bed. He walked for a little way before he managed to pick up a cruising taxi, and then spent most of the journey back to his flat trying to calculate precisely how much the evening had cost him, reaching the dismal conclusion that it had cost him far more than he could afford.

His flat, when he reached it, was shockingly untidy; the carpet needed vacuuming and the bedroom was strewn with cast-off sweaters and yesterday’s shirt and three pairs of socks. After the hectic glossiness of Angelica’s flat Harry was deeply grateful to it for being such a garbage heap.

He stripped off the jacket that smelt of other people’s cigarette smoke and hung it on the outside of the wardrobe so that he would remember to take it to the dry-cleaners later on. While he waited for some coffee to percolate he showered, and then made toast which he spread thickly with raspberry jam. Energy, my boy, that’s what you need. Get the sugar levels up, because you sure ain’t gonna be able to get anything else up for a while after the night you’ve just had. By way of antidote to the lush plush lifestyle of Angelica and her friends, he reached for Floy’s book, and propped it up against the coffee pot.

Tansy had not known about swish Chelsea flats decorated by fashionable designers, or about smoke-filled nightclubs with throbbing music, of course. She had gone from one sleazy house to another.