Bitter Remedy (32 page)

Still holding the handrail, with his other hand he swiped at the wall till he found the switch, banging his finger in the process. The light came on, and the next flight below him posed no mystery and held no threat. He affected a nonchalant gait on his way down, but the problem of darkness re-presented itself at the next flight. Once again, the handrail plunged down, into a narrow landing, the stairs reversed direction, and all was dark.

He kept going, talking now, and challenging the figure to make itself known, chiding himself for being so impressionable, laughing a bit even, as he realized he was talking to himself. Finally, he reached the ground floor, where there was more light. He walked down through the hallway, shuffling to keep his footfall quiet.

. . . and when he died

All he left us was alone.

He opened the door to the room with the map. The light switch was by the door, and he flicked it on. Everything was OK. He was just a few hours behind schedule. The plan of the villa, still held in place with the lead weights, lay where he had left it. He went over and tapped the area that interested him before realising his finger was bleeding again, thanks to his frantic scrabbling for light switches in the dark. A drop of blood fell onto the plan in front of him. He tried to clean off the old paper, but merely smudged the mess he had made.

He went into the next room with its mixture of portraits, photos, and junk. A portrait of, possibly, the princess’s mother in 1920s clothes, her eyes too lustrous and her lips too full for it to be innocent, stared at him. The small photographs of the princess in the silver frames were mere grey smudges. A deer head looked down at him disdainfully. He lifted up the bunch of keys he had noticed before. They were so tightly packed around the ring that they did not jingle. The weight was surprising, and the heft reassuring: he felt he was at long last carrying a weapon. He was happy to leave the house.

Blume walked slowly, allowing the warm night air to reach his bones and take away the chill of his room, and he felt his step become lighter and his head clearer. The body had evidently been recovered, and all the equipment taken down. Everyone was gone, as if they had never been there. The streets were white and clear under the moon, which shone with unusual intensity. One or two windows had lights on and someone was watching TV with the volume too loud, but Monterozzo was its usual deserted self.

When he reached the car, he opened the boot, pulled at a tab on the floor, and hunted around till he had found the scissor jacks and screw for changing a tyre. He was pleased to find a heavy-duty emergency torch, too. It was one of those with compact fluorescent tubes on the side and a powerful lamp in front. Well done, Niki, for being so prepared, he thought. He dropped them on the passenger seat beside him and drove out of the town. The keys he had taken from Silvana’s were also on the passenger seat. The keys from the princess’s house sat beside them. The car clock told him it was now 1 in the morning.

He drove carefully down the hill. Nobody and no vehicles were about. The car had halogen headlamps, which cut through the darkness with a fierce blue light. On the first hairpin, the sweep of light caught a rat or a hare, or something that hopped quickly out of sight. On the third hairpin turn, they picked up the white face of a young girl standing by the roadside.

It’s OK, it’s OK, he told himself. Another hallucination. To be expected. ‘It’s OK,’ he told the girl. ‘I know, now.’

Chapter 31

He switched off the headlamps 50 metres before the gate to the villa, leaving the car on the side of the road. He got out, not forgetting the keys and scissor jacks, and flashlight in hand, made the rest of his way on foot.

He slipped in the entrance. No cars, the lodge dark. He kept his footsteps as quiet as possible as he moved across the gravel. Ignoring paths that wanted to him to follow a winding route to the villa, he ploughed his own direct path, which meant he had to push through bushes and trample down flowers. He almost stepped into a pond, so still and covered in fleshy water lilies that, bathed in the strange light of the supermoon, it resembled a patch of lawn. He skirted its edges.

He heard a scream.

He stopped dead, and crouched down. The scream came again, louder and closer, but from a different direction. Whoever was screaming was moving.

Cautiously, he moved onto a white path at the end of which loomed the villa. A streak of red leapt from one side of the path to the other, and he only had time to register what he had seen when the fox or vixen, untroubled by his presence, stepped daintily back the way it had come, and stood its ground no more than 20 paces from where he was standing. A small animal was wedged sideways in her mouth, surely too small to have been the source of the scream? As if to answer him, the vixen emitted a piercing bark that sounded for all the world like a woman in fear. Then she lifted her tail and streaked off towards the villa.

He stepped under the faded piece of red-and-white barricade tape. He swept the beam of the torch along the base of the wall, looking for any basement windows, steps leading down. Nothing, but that did not matter, because he was circling round to the rear to where he had been on that first day, which now seemed so long ago, with Silvana. That would be the place. The night seemed to grow darker, and he looked upwards. A black cloud was rolling across the immense face of the moon.

Death came hurtling down towards his upturned face. An instinctive and efficient part of his brain imparted instructions to his feet, and he had sprung backwards, arching his back like a high jumper clearing the bar, before his mind was able to articulate what was happening. A mass of bricks, rubble, and wood landed at his feet with a thud that sounded all the more weighty and deadly for the way the grass absorbed the noise. He rose from the ground and shone the torch up at the building. An entire ledge and half a lintel had crumbled, taking the shutter with it. The gap looked like a ragged mouth grinning at him. He kept the beam trained on the section of collapsed window, trying to resolve the fleeting image he thought he had spotted as he fell backwards.

He allowed himself a few minutes to recover, then followed the contours of the building from a wider berth until he reached the rear. He passed through the archway into the back courtyard, now containing the overgrown vegetable garden. To his immediate left was an old shed, ruining the symmetry of the enclosing wall. Farther on were Silvana’s unused guest quarters.

He turned his attention to the shed, the door of which was secured with a chain linking two hasps, thick enough to look at, but embedded in soft wet wood. It took a single, almost noiseless blow of the scissor jacks to detach the hasp from the wood – almost a waste of effort carting the jack this far. He felt he could have prised the metal anchor out of the rotting wood with his fingers, like pulling a rusty nail from butter.

Using the torch, he looked around. Greco had kept an organized and well-stocked shed. He registered a blue crowbar leaning in the corner, but chose a pair of bolt cutters and a hammer instead.

He pushed the wooden door closed, and walked into the middle of the yard where, in the sunlight, so long ago it now seemed, the killer had pointed him to a herb that tasted of carrot and had almost had the effect of hemlock. The smell of damp was so strong and the soil beneath his feet so soft that he imagined he might be about to step into a swamp. But beneath the soil, he knew, were solid flagstones, and at the far end of the courtyard, as the plan had shown him, would be a narrow staircase leading down to the bowels of the building.

For the last time, he saw a flitting shadow with a reddish halo in front of him, once again, hovering near the steps; she seemed to like steps. His unease was tinged with a growing fondness now, and he almost waved to her. Or it might have been the fox. He walked down a set of seven steps, counting as he went, opening and closing the jaws of the bolt cutter. Part of him felt like whistling, another part felt sad.

When he arrived at the cellar door, he switched on the fluorescent tubes and set the torch on the ground. The door was secured by a heart-shaped padlock that passed through two thick iron hooks, one on the edge of the door, the other on the frame. It seemed as if time had driven them deeper and deeper into the wood, and rust had sealed them there forever. The shackle of the heavy padlock united them and seemed to redouble their strength.

Before trying the keys, he pulled the padlock upwards, cupped it delicately in the palm of his hand, and examined where the shackle curved its way through the hooks. It scraped as he moved it, and a few tiny particles of rust rose into the air. He could not be sure, but it seemed that there might be a little less rust than might be expected, as if it had been opened recently. He took out Silvana’s ring of keys, but he could see at a glance that none fitted the padlock. Even so, he tried one or two. He wondered if Silvana had thrown this key away after she removed it from the ring, or whether she kept it on her person.

Now he took out the rusty keys from the princess’s house, and started trying in order of likelihood. The fifth one fitted. The padlock fell rather than sprang open. The door pushed outwards so that he had to push it shut with his shoulder to align the hooks and extract the padlock. He knew he was making a mess of potential evidence, but he also knew the door had been opened sometime in the recent past.

He did not want to contaminate the evidence further by placing the padlock on the ground, so he let it hang from the eye of the bolt. He stepped into the darkness behind the door, accidentally kicking in a pebble that resounded inside the dark chamber like an echo waiting to escape.

The smell told him all he needed to know. Automatically, his tonsils seemed to retract and his breathing became narrower, more cautious, and shallower as he tried to keep as much of the funk of rot from filling his lungs. But the body was not there in the small room in front of him, essentially a concrete bunker that looked like it had burst out of the side of the house like a carbuncle.

A gust of wind banged the door shut behind him, but the stab of fear had hardly reached his heart when the wind, just as casually slammed the door open again, then closed, open, and then closed, as if trying to air the room of its stench. Finally, the door and the wind tired of their game.

Blume stood for moment listening to the reassuring whisper and clicking of insects, then picked up the torch from the floor and shone it into the small chamber behind the door. A second door and nothing else. He was in a sort of airlock with a door behind and a door in front. Cement on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Thick black strings of webs in the corner. The door before him had an old-fashioned mortise lock, and above that a brand-new shining padlock holding together two bright new stainless steel clasps, inexpertly hammered into the door and its frame. Now there was premeditation.

He pushed up the iron lip covering the ancient keyhole. It took him several tries, but eventually one of the princess’s keys slotted neatly in, and turned, stiffly, but easily. He left the key in the door. Then he bent down and pulled out the bolt cutters. The wind started playing with the door behind him, but he ignored it. He was certain no one was coming, just as he was certain about what was behind the door.

He had seen dead bodies in various states of decomposition, but had never got used to the violence of death’s insult to the human form. Even a natural death became as unspeakably gruesome as a multiple homicide. All it took was time and heat.

Here, however, he was disturbed by the rank moisture and overpowering taste not only of death, but of mushrooms. A rotting cadaver he could deal with and almost looked forward to since it usually proved his thesis, but the idea of breathing in millions of tainted spores was making his stomach heave and his nose prickle. His arms and chest started itching, but he knew no pill would make it stop.

He recalled the princess’s story of her mad uncle forcing plants in the dark: white chicory, turning radicchio red, plots of rhubarb with poisonous leaves, spikes of pale asparagus. The padlock snapped like gingerbread under the force of the bolt cutters and fell on the ground, and the door swung outwards, releasing a foul breath of vegetable sweat and sick sweet death.

He lifted up the torch and pointed it in. Its diffuse light illuminated a forest of mushrooms, some flat-headed, others puffy, some powdery, others slimy. They were white, black, and brown, gilled, web-throated, stalked and unstalked; and they were everywhere. From zinc pails, washbasins, two ceramic tubs, and what looked like it had once been a wooden lab desk, the mushrooms poked shyly upwards or soared upwards like spongy trees. Some popped as he put his foot on the earthen floor, others leached out juicy liquids, and he had to stop himself from slipping.

It was as if they were all shying away from him, the intruder. They were all pointing, like the tentacles of a sea anemone, towards the deep back of the room. Now his beam picked up a few trails through the foetid broken stems, slimy paths cut through the room, at the far end of which the previous pathmaker, now a black, motionless shape, lay. He gazed down at her. He pulled his shirt up till it covered his mouth and nose.

‘Hello, Alina,’ he whispered into his own chest.

Her face was bloated, black, and livid, the largest fungus in the room. The body shimmered with insects, though the blowflies seemed to have gone. Her face seemed to glow, and Blume turned off the torch and stood there. Just as he was concluding that the blackness was absolute, he noticed the faintest gleam, there and not there, coming from above the far wall. The remnants of a white moonbeam produced a hint of a dark grey in the blackness. Perhaps when the sun came up, the grey grew a little lighter. It came from some sort of aperture, and possible exit, but not big enough for poor Alina to get through. That’s why all the mushroom heads were looking in the same direction, why all the stems seemed to be twisting away from him. They, like Alina, had instinctively leaned towards the feeble light.