A Dark Dividing (55 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
After what seemed to be a very long time, I raised my eyes and looked at them. They were watching me with Floy’s eyes, but I could see, as I had not done last night, that they had my cheekbones and my too-wide mouth.
I managed to pull my skirt down and tug my jacket into some semblance of order. I said, as calmly as I could, ‘Is he dead?’ My first words to my daughters.
‘Yes, he’s dead.’ Viola again.
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, and Sorrel nodded. She’s gentler, I thought, and I looked at her, wanting to hear her speak. She said, ‘Anthony saw you last night—he told us he saw you. He met you once before. He said you looked exactly like us. So we knew then.’
‘Anthony?’ We were talking about things that did not matter: I was aching to rush forward and wrap my arms around them both but I did not yet dare.
‘Anthony Raffan,’ said Viola. ‘He was at Mortmain—he met you there one day years and years ago. He told us.’
‘He told us that you swore on our names that you’d never tell what he did to one of Mr Dancy’s men.’
Memory flipped upwards and I was standing in Mortmain again, facing the ragged little girl called Robyn. ‘Promise on the thing you hold most sacred in the world,’ she had said, and I had at once said, ‘I promise on the memories of Viola and Sorrel that I’ll never tell.’
‘Anthony told us about it,’ said Viola, watching me. ‘That’s how we know who you are. He followed us when Dancy took us away. He said one day he would help us to escape.’
‘We knew you’d come one day,’ said Sorrel.
‘I thought you were dead. Your—my husband told me you were dead.’ I glanced across the room at Dancy’s body, and Viola said, at once, ‘It’s all right about Dancy. No one will guess we did it,’ and I saw that she did not in the least care that she had just killed a man, and when I thought about it—when I thought about what Matt Dancy had done, and about all the children he had taken and abused and forced into prostitution—I discovered that I did not care either.
‘Are you going to take us away?’ said Sorrel, and I saw that she was on the verge of tears.
‘Would you like that? Would you come with me now?’
‘Oh yes,’ they said together.
But would there be anything to link the twins to Matt Dancy’s death? Viola killed him, said a small voice somewhere inside my mind. It was Viola who did it.
I said, ‘Listen, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to walk out of here, quite calmly and quite normally, and we’re going to get into the trap that’s waiting for me just along the road, and we’re going to make a normal life for you.’
That was when I crossed the room and put my arms round them and when I felt, for the first time, their soft cheeks pressed against mine.
Roz knew she had only escaped Harry Fitzglen because she knew the layout of Mortmain House and he did not. So she had been able to run through the rooms and along the passageways until she came out into the central hall. Aunt Vi had been with her, to see that she found the way, and Sonia as well, and behind them had been all those long-ago children from Mortmain.
Once she was in the hall she had gone out into the night, and back down the hill like a thin shadow.
She drove back to London, hardly noticing the roads, hardly aware of her earlier fatigue. In front of her mind was the look in Harry Fitzglen’s eyes when he had stepped out of the shadows. Pity. Contempt.
She had no idea whether Harry and that little alley-cat, Angelica Thorne, were following her, but she thought they were not. She reached her own house around one a.m., and went inside, switching on lights and locking all the doors and windows. Aunt Vi had always kept doors and windows locked; it was better to shut out the world, she used to say.
But Roz would not be able to shut out the world. Harry Fitzglen knew how to find her: he knew where she worked, and even though he had looked at her with that pity, he would tell people what she had done and there would be a police investigation and a charge of attempted murder. And before very long Roz would be shut away as a punishment.
‘There’s always the punishment,’ Aunt Vi had said. ‘I sinned once—a great, great sin, Rosamund, the worst sin in the world—and because of that I have lived my life alone. Sorrel left me after the doctors had finished with us—she married Anthony and they went away. They were your grandmother and grandfather, Rosamund.’ She indicated one of the silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece. ‘They had a son together—Charles, his name was. He was your father, Rosamund, and he was my nephew, but I never knew him. They all lived in France, and then they died in a car crash when you were small. I never had anyone except you.’
Roz could hear Viola’s voice very clearly tonight as she sat in the room that had been Viola’s sitting-room, the photographs that had been Viola’s staring down from the walls and the mantelpiece. Family photographs, cherished and polished, several in silver frames. All of the faces familiar to Roz. All of them looking at her now with the same pity and the same disgust as Harry Fitzglen…
Her head was beginning to hurt, and the pain seemed to be slicing through her mind, splitting it agonizingly in two. One half of her—Rosie’s half—knew that there ought to be some means of escaping Harry, who would certainly hunt her down, but the other half knew there was no way of doing so. In her mind she was already seeing the humiliation of a trial, seeing herself convicted of trying to kill Simone. Perhaps they would even find out what she had done to Isobel Ingram, and how she had stolen the baby from St Luke’s and left it in Isobel’s flat to burn, and taken Sonia. But she had lost Sonia as well, and with the thought she saw Viola nodding and saying, Yes, that was what happened when you had committed a sin: you lost everything that was most dear to you.
They’ll shut you away for ever once they know what you’ve done, Roz… They’ll say you’re mad, that you can’t be allowed to live in the world ever again… You’ll be put behind heavy clanging doors, exactly as Viola and Sorrel were put behind heavy clanging doors… Exactly as all those children were—those children who sang the song…
And naked to the hangman’s noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string…
Strangling in a string…
It was not so very long since people had been hanged for murder. Viola had murdered someone but she had not been hanged because her mother had smuggled her and Sorrel away. Viola had told Roz about that one night, saying that at the time she had not thought that what she had done had been wrong, for the man she had killed had been evil. But then afterwards—yes, afterwards, she had seen her act for what it really was and she had come to see that although she had escaped the justice of men, she had not escaped that of God. God had punished her by taking Sorrel away from her, and by never allowing her to meet a man to marry and have children with.
They would send Roz to prison, or perhaps to some grim bleak institution where they would prod and pry into her mind, and try to understand the things she had done. I can’t face it, thought Roz. There must be a way out of this.
It was as if Viola and Sorrel—Sonia too—had come to be with Roz properly at last, and as if they were looking at her with pitying eyes.
There is a way out of this, Roz, there IS…
She had almost forgotten Rosie, but suddenly Rosie was with her, and she turned her head slightly, the better to hear what Rosie was saying.
You can cheat them, Roz, you can, you CAN…
Can I? How can I?
You already know…said Rosie inside Roz’s mind. You know how it has to end, Roz… You do know, don’t you…?
She got up from the chair, moving very slowly and very quietly. A way out…
People would be shocked; they would say, Roz Raffan? Good, unexciting Sister Raffan? Surely not. They would talk and speculate for a while, and then they would forget.
Do it now, Roz… Do it quickly, for there isn’t much time…
Yes, whispered Roz. Yes, I must do it quickly. And I must do it
right
. She went into the kitchen where she had prepared supper for Joe Anderson and later for Harry Fitzglen, and from the cupboard under the sink she took a length of clothes line. Then she climbed the stairs to the landing with its railed banisters around the deep stairwell. She wound one end around the banister, and tested it. There was a faint creak, but the wood held, and the clothes line was tough and strong.
She looped the other end around her neck, and then climbed on to the banisters. It was what the ghosts all wanted her to do: Viola and Sorrel and Sonia. And there was someone else there with them as well now: a thin-faced woman whose face Roz did not at first recognize. Who—? And then she realized who it was. Isobel Ingram. Isobel, whom she had murdered more than twenty years ago, and whom she had not thought of for years. Punishment, you see. Retribution. Yes, it was right that Isobel should be here tonight to see that Roz did what had to be done.
But as she climbed up on to the banisters, her last thought before she jumped down into the stairwell was of Sonia. Would Sonia be waiting for her?
T
HE HOUSE WAS at the end of a narrow lane, on the very edge of England’s east coast. The clean pure light of the North Sea was everywhere.
The house was not quite what Harry had been expecting—it faced out to the sea, but it was modern and almost streamlined. Its owner was not quite what he had been expecting, either.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she had said when he arrived. ‘Simone’s told me quite a lot about you. You saved her life, of course. I don’t know how to begin to thank you for that.’ There were no polite preliminaries: no, how do you do, did you have a good journey, stuff. Straight in with, Thank you for saving my daughter’s life. This, then, was the woman at the heart of the twenty-year-old legend Harry had spent the past weeks trying to unravel.
‘It was Angelica who found the photograph of Mortmain that afternoon,’ he said. ‘All I did was help her put two and two together. And if I’d done that sooner, we might have saved Simone the night inside Mortmain.’
‘If you had done it later,’ said Melissa Anderson, ‘Simone might not have lived to tell the tale.’ She smiled at him, and Harry, who had been thinking she was quite ordinary-looking, suddenly saw why her memory had brought that odd look of wistfulness to the face of a cynical hard-bitten Fleet Street hack. She had a quality, Markovitch had said, commissioning Harry to write the article about this family. There had been something about her that made her stick in your mind. Simone had the same quality.
‘I’m glad you could come,’ Mel was saying. ‘It’s so remote here, not everyone wants to. But it’s a nice kind of remoteness, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Tranquil. Something to do with the light.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ She looked at him eagerly, as if pleased to hear this. ‘I lived in Norfolk for a while when Simone and her sister were very tiny—in a village just a few miles along the coast road—and I fell in love with the whole area. I always wanted to come back.’
‘To dodge the journalists?’
‘Partly. Not you. I don’t want to dodge you. I’m glad you’re here. Simone’s glad as well.’
‘Is she?’ Harry was annoyed to find that this came out a bit anxiously. What happened to the narrow-eyed cynic and the sardonic heartbreaker?
‘I’ve given you the little room at the back—I think you’ll be comfortable,’ said Mel. ‘It’s quite snug, and—Oh—this is Martin. You haven’t met, have you?’
‘No,’ said Harry. ‘We spoke on the phone, though.’ He shook hands with Martin, and then said, ‘This is actually quite an odd experience. In a way I’ve lived with you both for the last few weeks, even though you didn’t know about it. So I feel as if I know you very well. But there are still bits of the jigsaw that I don’t know.’
‘There are bits we don’t know, either,’ said Martin. ‘That’s one of the reasons we wanted you to come; so that we can fit them together. Simone’s gone for a walk along the coast—she often does that when she’s here. She’ll be back quite soon. Come in and have a drink. Is that your case? Good. You can unpack, and when we’ve had supper we’ll make a start on the jigsaw.’