The Witch Of Exmoor Part 8

Rosemary stared at this communication with a baffled irritation. Was she her mother's keeper? More to the point, was she one of her mother's heirs? It would be very handy if Frieda were to pop off and leave a tidy three-way fortune. Who knows what she might be worth?

This was an ign.o.ble thought, but Frieda, in Rosemary's opinion, had done little to induce a warmer regard in her children. Frieda had hated her own mother, and now was hated in turn. Frieda had alienated her children from their father, had brought them up unsuitably. Rosemary had little idea of who her father had been, what he had looked like. Had he been a red-faced, choleric, pressurized man? She thought not. He had been a mathematician and a drinker, a weakling and a runaway. Or this was the picture of him that Rosemary, on slim evidence, had formed.

The three Palmer children had never talked about their father, had never discussed why he had disappeared while they were still in their infancy. Daniel, the eldest, had set the tone of reticence. He could not bear to hear his father mentioned. The girls had not dared to speak of him. The subject was taboo. And Frieda too had kept her silence.

It would be trying to inherit high blood pressure from so absent a parent. Frieda herself had never suffered from it, as far as Rosemary knew: but why should she know? Of what had Frieda's sister Hilda died? Frieda's own father had died of a stroke. Perhaps it was the Haxby blood that had broken the little vessels in her eyeb.a.l.l.s and treacherously weakened the muscles of her heart.

Rosemary, at her desk, was in mild shock, which intensified into something near panic. She did not want to be ill. She had never been a hypochondriac, had never suspected herself of any ailment. This made the shock the worse. She was untrained in anxiety. Should she ring Gogo and ask her what high blood pressure in a forty-year-old might mean? Or did she prefer not to know the worst? The specialist had told her she must go back to the clinic the next week to be fitted with an ambulatory monitor. If news got out that she was not in perfect health, she would be sacked at once.

Cedric Summerson had been the blood pressure type: you could tell it from his complexion. Frieda had fancied beef-coloured men. Several of the uncles who had featured in their childhood had been red of face, including the most dominant of them, who had lasted a good eight years or more. He, like Cedric, had been stout, solid, fleshly. He had been rich and important and he had brought gifts. Uncle Bernard from Austria. He had been jowled and guttural, heavy and clever. He had been a philosopher and a philanderer. He had many children of his own and several wives, but he had nevertheless seemed anxious to spend his evenings in the Mausoleum in Romley with Frieda. He had helped Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary with their homework from time to time. He liked children, and they had liked him.

Rosemary had not thought of Bernard for years, and recognized that there was not much purpose in thinking about him now: whoever was responsible for her condition, it could not have been Bernard. He was genetically innocent. Innocent, and dead. He had died three years before, and had been buried with pomp. Frieda and two or three widows had attended the Memorial Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Rosemary had seen Frieda's photo in the papers, on the steps, arm in arm with one of the widows, unsuitably sharing a joke.

Frieda had been a scandal, in the days when scandal was less common than now. And she continued to be a scandal. Rosemary looked at Cate Crowe's fax and wondered what to do next. In the olden days one could have sent Frieda a telegram. Rosemary was just old enough to remember the days when telegrams were little yellow serious messages instead of large Occasional Greetings Cards that take just as long to arrive as normal mail, and a good deal longer than a fax. Was there money involved in Cate's cry? It smelt like it. Could she send a courier down to the West Country to summon Frieda? Could she alert the local police? Or perhaps she needed a lawyer, a detective? Could Frieda be cajoled into a signature? And if she couldn't, could Daniel take on power of attorney?

During her lunch break, eating carrot and nut salad with a plastic fork from a disposable plastic box, she investigated. Her PA (a well-trained young woman) had obtained telephone directories of Somerset and Devon, for it had occurred to Rosemary that there was no need to send a motorbike all the way from the metropolis. Even rural England (and it had, as she had driven through it earlier in the year, struck her as ridiculously, almost pretentiously rural) must have dispatch riders. And yes, here they were, two yellow pages of motorcycle and van couriers, promising urgent speedy fully insured distance-no-object twenty-four-hour same-day nationwide conveyance of doc.u.ments, parcels, packages, even livestock. One could dispatch a hamster or a goldfish, or, as a hospital had recently done, to in her view excessive public opprobrium, a dead baby.

No problem there, but what should she send to Frieda? A copy of Cate Crowe's fax, perhaps? That would let her out of having to make up any verbiage. She looked at the fax and decided that it wasn't quite suitable. There was something insufficiently deferential in Cate's wordingnothing overtly offensive, just a general lack of the obsequiousness that Frieda seemed to think her due. Rosemary would have to rephrase it slightly, make it sound lucrative, tempting, important.

Was there any hurry? Should she wait for Cate to get back to England with more details? Should she consult Daniel and Gogo?

She could feel her blood chugging, blooming, swelling. She tried to breathe deeply, calmly. She recited a bit of a mantra she had once picked up in a yoga cla.s.s, and stared at the Henry Moore sheep on the opposite wall. The sheep stared back with their silly saintly faces.

The young man on the motorbike buzzed happily along the high coast road, through the bracken and the gorse, past the nibbling sheep and a small herd of Exmoor ponies, sheltering from the prevailing wind in the lea of a high wall of beech hedge. It was a wild clear day, with high clouds over the channel: a dramatic day. The road was a switchback and he took the b.u.mps and curves at a reckless speed. It was good to be out of Exeter, and moving fast. This was an important mission. He was bearing a valuable doc.u.ment, marked CONFIDENTIAL: DELIVER IN PERSON TO ADDRESSEE. The route had been marked for him in shocking pink Glow Pen by Mr Ffloyd on an OS map. Terry wasn't all that brilliant at map-reading but he could tell that he was off to a remote spot, off the beaten track. He had been told to track down Miss Frieda Haxby, to force her to acknowledge his package, to compel her to sign for it, and if possible to extract from her some kind of answer. This struck Terry as quite a lark. His engine revved and roared as he overtook a G-reg Renault and a tractor.

The descent to Ashcombe slowed him down. His machine skittered over stones, b.u.mped over ruts, churned up mud. He was almost at the bottom, almost at the sea's edge, when he saw the roofs and bell-tower of the big house, just below him. There was no sign of any habitation, no smoke curling, no post-box stuffed with circulars nailed to a tree. It was desolate. Ferns sprouted at him from high banks. Boughs thrashed. It was getting darker, though it was only midday. Rain was on the way from Cornwall. He was dry and warm inside his windproof leathers, he was buckled and badged like a knight errant. A secret skull and crossbones was stamped upon his black shirt, and beneath his black shirt his snake tattoos rippled.

This was a wrecker's coast. Two summers ago he'd had a few drinks in The Wreckers' Arms,just ten miles back on the headland. The pub had been hung with trophies. Planks with inscriptions, bra.s.s lamps, old manacles, a pair of painted wooden hands from a wooden ship's figurehead. Terry and his mates had had a few pints, then smoked a few joints amidst the hot bracken. Bliss. The unmanned lighthouse had winked and turned.

Terry Zealley parked his bike in the weed-choked courtyard and stared up at the bleak facade. Then he marched boldly towards the nearest door, and knocked. He pressed an old white b.u.t.ton of a bell but could hear no answering sound within. He knocked again, then advanced, tried the sidedoor, shouted. He could sense there was n.o.body here. The old bird had flown. He skirted the side of the house, as Will Paine had done before him, making his way to the front lawn that faced the sea. Again he shouted and his voice sounded thin in the wind.

One of the long, low, mullioned windows had blown open, and was swinging and creaking. This was odd. Terry Zealley crossed the lumpy gra.s.s, and peered in. He could see a large table, laid with various objects, including a bottle and gla.s.ses, and several smaller tables, some also littered. It looked, as he was later to tell his mates, like the Marie Celeste. It was creepy. Again he shouted, into the damp interior. He could have climbed in, easily, over the low window-sill, but instead he went back to the sidedoor, and tried it. It was unlocked. He went in.

The house smelled of dereliction, but there were signs of recent occupation. Muddy boots in the hallway, a raincoat and a stick hanging from a peg, tins of dog food in a cardboard carton, a new-looking Calor Gas bombe, empty milk bottles, a plastic bag of wine bottles and fizzy-water bottles that looked as though they were awaiting a trip to a bottle bank. Terry backed out again, to explore the courtyard, the back regions. There might be somebody hanging about in the outhouses. In one of them stood an old grey Saab, with a broken wing mirror. It was unlocked. He opened the door, sniffed. It was stale, a smoker's car. A tin of boiled sweets sat on the dashboard, with a spectacle case and a box of tissues. Nothing remarkable there.

As he slammed the car door shut, hoping and fearing that the noise might attract attention, he heard a low whining, and saw, approaching, an old thin black and white dog. Terry, born and bred in a Devon village, knew that kind of dog: a scrounger, an outcast. He whistled at it, and it approached, its ears flat, eager, but keeping its distance. It would not come near his offered hand, but crouched, looking at him with its head tilted. Terry started back towards the house, but the dog did not want him to go. It looked at him and whined again, a mournful supplication, then stood up and set off towards the garden, stopping to see if Terry were following. Was it trying to take him towards his mistress's body, his mistress's grave? Was she lying in the woods out there with a broken leg?

Terry followed the dog, which led him down the shrubbery and through a gap in a hedge to a lower level of neglected kitchen garden and crumbling walls. The ground was thick and wet with autumn leafmould, and puffb.a.l.l.s and parasols sprouted from the decay. Brambles thick with berry clambered and caught at him. Flies buzzed, for this was a sheltered spot, and somebody had been burning garden rubbishhe could see and smell the remains of a large bonfire. He approached, kicked at the charred sticks. It had been a large fire, for the blackened circle it had left was some five feet across. Grey-black logs, partly consumed, and soft mounds of finer ash. Terry kicked again, and ash rose into the air. Looking more closely, he could see the remains of what looked like thick wads of papers, whole boxes of papers, which had been heaped on to the pyre. Was it a recent fire? Was it his imagination, or could he feel a faint warmth? He kicked again, and fancied that a single spark flew upwards. A fire like that could smoulder for days.

The dog seemed satisfied with his inspection of the embers, and now suggested that Terry return to the house. Terry was not sure what he was meant to have noted; had the dog been indicating the scene of a crime? And were those mussel sh.e.l.ls and splinters of bone that he could see in the ash part of the crime, or were they the remains of an innocent barbecue? He bent down, picked up a sh.e.l.l, rubbed it on his trousers, inspected it. It was neatly hinged, cross-rayed with brown and purple. Empty, sucked dry. It told him nothing. He followed the dog back towards the building.

He went in again through the sidedoor, and made his way down a long corridor to the large room he had seen through the open window. And there he found more clues. An abandoned meal, laid on the large table, with knife, fork, plate, a half-empty bottle of wine, a half-empty wine gla.s.s full of drowned flies. The end of a loaf, dusted with blue mould. A hard and shining cheese rind, a brown and withered apple paring. A bowl of winkle sh.e.l.ls. An open book, propped against a kitchen-roll. Terry stared, sniffed, prowled. He discovered a clock patience, half played. A board laid out with coloured counters for a game which he did not know to be backgammon. A dried orange skewered with a knitting needle, and an adas, open at the Americas. Spooky, definitely spooky. A little bra.s.s pot full of burnt-down joss sticks. A three-cornered pub ashtray full of cigarette ends. And, if he wasn't mistaken, a half-open matchbox full of the weed. He picked it up, sniffed cautiously. Yes, of course. And a packet of Rizlas. Somebody here had been smoking substances. A rum old lady. And where the h.e.l.l had she got to?

Miss Frieda Haxby: Deliver in Person. Easier said than done. He smelled sorcery, he smelled witchcraft, as he was to tell his mates. He was tempted to open the package, to see if it contained a contract with the devil, but knew better than to risk his job by tampering. There weren't many nice jobs going in the South West, for an enterprising lad like Terry Zealley.

The skull gave him a turn. He hadn't spotted it at first, in the clutter of bric-a-brac, but eventually it managed to catch his eye. It stared at him from its deep eye-sockets, grinned at him with its four remaining teeth, warned him from its blaring absent nostrils. Yellow and pitted and slightly marked with grey and pink, it held its place for ever. What were those cracks in its cranium? Those st.i.tched seams joining the plates above where its ears had been? Those deep slanting eyeslits? Had it ever lived, and how had it died, and why was it here?

Terry went out into the courtyard and ate one of his tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches. He didn't want to eat in that house. He'd thought he was hungry, but somehow it didn't taste as good as he'd expected. The Crosskeys Garage usually sold a good sandwich, but this wasn't up to the mark at all.

What to do next? Should he ring Mr Ffloyd on his mobile? Should he ring the police? Should he poke around a bit more in the hope of finding a corpse or a haul of gra.s.s?

Terry nosed around. The sandwich had restored perspective. He'd always wanted to find a dead body. Well, who hasn't?

He made friends with the skull, picking it up to speak to it: he was alarmed when its jaw dropped off, but he managed, guiltily, to rea.s.semble it so it looked just the same as before. He inspected the little bird and animal skulls that surrounded it. One was a sheep's skull, he thought, one a badger's. There were some curled horns, and a few feathers. Had there been voodoo, had there been slaughtered chickens and dancing goats, had there been hanky-panky? He rather hoped so. He went upstairs, boldly, and followed the sound of humming (a refrigerator? a corpse in a freezer? a dehumidifier?) to discover Frieda's workroom. There was her word-processor, switched ori, and speaking quietly and patiently to itself. The screen was blank, but there was a line of pale green flickering writing at the top of the screen which said EYEBOX PC 2000 8.3.1990 LAST USED 00.00.00 CURRENT INTERRUPTED. TO RECOMMENCE PRESS ENTER. TO DISCONTINUE PRESS ESCAPE.

Terry found the keys marked ENTER and ESCAPE, but thought better of pressing either of them. He did not understand computers. This whole thing was getting out of hand. How long had that machine been patiently waiting for its mistress's return? Did it know where she had gone? Did it contain her farewell message, her suicide note?

He looked around him, found the globe and the binoculars, switched on the light in the globe so that all the nations of the earth and all its oceans glowed with blue and green and brown and desert gold. Importantly, from the look-out post, he raked the horizon through the powerful binoculars.

A small fishing boat chugged along westwards, over a grey and choppy sea. Was it a drug-carrying vessel, part of an international plot? Was the package for Miss Haxby a summons from her G.o.dfather? Two tons of cannabis had been seized off Ilfracombe the month before, from a thousand-ton merchant ship called Proteus, on its way from Morocco. It had been a big story in the local and national press. Had Miss Haxby been the mastermind behind the fleet of bogus fish vans lined up to distribute this sinister loading? Was it from this very window that Miss Haxby had flashed her secret signals? For here, by the globe and the binoculars, stood a large, heavy waterproof torch, and an old-fashioned paraffin storm-lantern. He was surely on to something here.

The house was far too big to search, but on the way down he easily found what must have been Frieda Haxby's bedroom. A double bed, with a duvet heaped upon it, and piles of books and papers on the bedside table. A sea view. Another torch, a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, heaps of clothes upon a chair, several pairs of shoes lined up not untidily. No corpse in the bed: he lifted the duvet to look.

Frieda Haxby would never sign the doc.u.ment that he carried in his plastic satchel. She had vanished, to avoid it. She had gone for good. She was dead. So who should he ring, the police or Mr Ffloyd?

Of the two, the police seemed the more attractive option, the one which would yield him the most entertainment. He'd never had occasion to dial 999 on his mobile. Could you dial 999 on a mobile? Maybe mobiles didn't recognize real emergencies, maybe they only recognized privatized emergencies, financial emergencies. Well, now was the time to find out. Terry Zealley settled himself in the courtyard, in a sheltered corner where he thought reception would be good. He'd got his map reference ready. He was looking forward to his stint in the witness box. He punched in the magic numbers, and waited for a reply.

'Disappeared,' echoed Gogo.

'Yes,' said Rosemary, distraught, on the verge of unseemly laughter. 'Disappeared. Vanished. A missing person. Or a Misspers, as they seem to be called in the West Country. They've got the coastguards out, searching the seaward side of the cliff. And the local constabulary are going through the house.'

'Jesus,' said Gogo. 'How f.u.c.king inconvenient. Have you told Daniel?'

'I've left a message for him at chambers. He's in court.'

'He won't be best pleased when he hears.'

'You're right there. Can you imagine?'

'Do the police know who it is they're looking for?'

'I don't think so. She didn't have much of a social life up there, I don't suppose.'

'Better keep this out of the press.'

'Don't worry, I'm not going to put them on to it.'

'What had I better do? Ring Daniel this evening? When does he usually get out?'

'G.o.d knows. He's probably aiming to get back to the Farm, but this may stop him.'

'One of us is going to have to get down there.'

'It's five hours. I'm telling you. I suppose it's lucky it's the weekend.' 'Lucky?' snorted Gogo, and laughed.

'Gogo?'

'Yes?'

'I've just discovered I've got roaring high blood pressure. What does that mean?'

Gogo paused, changed tone. 'Oh, nothing, probably. Work pressure. Wonder we haven't all got it. Don't worry. Look, I can't talk now, I've got a patient waiting. I'll ring you this evening. I promise.'

How gratified Frieda Haxby would have been had she been able to witness the consternation with which her family greeted the news of her vanishing, had she been able to hear the messages that ran backwards and forwards along the wires on that Friday night! Such touching distress, such urgency of response. Not all mothers would have created such a stir. How impressed she would have been by the speed with which her three grown and busy and important children managed to shed their weekend work and leisure engagements in order to hunt her down upon the moor!

It took them, it is fair to say, a whole evening of renegotiations, during which they spoke not only to one another but also to the West Somerset Police, the Devon Police, the Exeter Express Dispatch Service, the coastguard in Swansea (why Swansea?they were not sure, but Swansea it was), Cate Crowe, and the old-fashioned family solicitor, Mr Partridge, whom Frieda had sacked over the VAT affair. They even spoke to Terry Zealley. They cancelled guests and rearranged meetings and collated their diaries and took money out of their banks. They left instructions with PAs and secretaries and clerks of chambers. Daniel personally rang to apologize to Sir Noel for letting him down over the briefing. It was a d.a.m.n nuisance, said Daniel tersely to Patsy, as he packed his bag on the Sat.u.r.day morning, but he couldn't afford not to go. Could he?

They were able to disguise their concerns as anxiety, and anxiety indeed was what they feltwhy examine its springs or its quality too closely?

Daniel drove: Rosemary and Gogo sat together in the back. They had not travelled in a car together like this for many years. If ever. Would it have been easier had they brought one of the in-laws along, to dilute the thickness of their emotions? By unspoken consent they had agreed to travel alone, the three of them, leaving their spouses behind to guard the home front. Each had insisted that it would be unfair to involve those not of the blood in such a quest. Each had known quite well that shame and fear and greed, not selflessness, had inspired this prohibition. Patsy, David and Nathan were not fit to see the Palmers in extremis, they were not to be allowed to witness the ign.o.ble chase. They would track Frieda down by themselves, and the three of them would confront her, alive or dead, without the help of marriage partners. This was an internal business, a family affair.

It was Gogo's view, which she expounded over a snack at the Gordano Service Station, that Frida was alive, and well, and had done a runner. It would have been just like her, she said, biting into an egg and cress baguette, to have left a false trail. She had faked a disappearance, and would turn up laughing in Monte Carlo or Uppsala or Rio.

'This is disgusting,' said Rosemary, opening her ham sandwich to look for the ham. A thin ragged half-slice lay, flattened in a smear of mustard. 'Shall I take it back and ask for another?' she asked Daniel.

Daniel shrugged. He was eating, unaccountably, a slice of pizza, and drinking an apple juice.

Daniel was of the opinion that Frieda had broken her leg in the woods, and would, by the time they arrived, have been discovered in a state of maximum distress and inconvenienceeither dead, or dying. Rosemary agreed that something horrible must have happened, but favoured a death by drowning. 'I think she may have fallen into the sea. It's right on the edge, and a steep cliff. And she was always a walker.'

All three of them contemplated the tiresomeness of a missing body. How long did it take for a missing person to turn into a missing body? How long would it be before they could prove the will? And where was the will, and what would be in it?

All three were united in a suspicion that whatever she had done, she had done it to annoy them. They did not state this baldly, but many of their asides, as they dried their hands in the jetstream in the Ladies, as they discussed which motorway exit to take from the M5, as they gazed at the willows bending over the Somerset Levels, might have been taken in that sense. Had she not for two or more years now been pursuing a policy of irritation, of aggression? They supposed that policy to be directed largely or wholly against themselves: it did not often occur to them that they did not loom as large in her life as she in theirs. They were unwilling to admit other, non-dynastic, non-familial motivations. They were understandably unable and unwilling to think of the tracts of Frieda's life which lay before and beyond their knowing. They feared these tractsthe dull ploughed furrows of her childhood, the swelling adolescent foothills of her career, the hidden and mysterious folds and valleys of her marriage to their father, the thickets of her scandalous romances, the public peaks and craggy coastlines of her ambition. She had been writing her memoirs: on what sc.r.a.pheap, in what vault, on what agent's desk lay those incriminating doc.u.ments today? Had she mapped the past, and if so, to what end?

Daniel and Rosemary a.s.sumed a deathwish, for what else, they argued, could the dead-end Ashcombe represent? And if death had come her way it was no more than she had asked for. She had gone to meet him halfway. Only Gogo dissented, and she with half her heart. Gogo was the last to have seen Frieda alive, and she described now the apparition of Frieda in her blue dress, shining like starlight. She had seemedwell, said Gogo carefully, she had seemed quite well.

But it must be remembered that Gogo, professionally, saw the ill, lived amongst the ill. Frieda had not trembled, Frieda had not stumbled or jerked her head or spilt her tea or fumbled for words. Her hand had been steady, her speech clear. No palsy, no paralysis had possessed her. And to Benjamin, she reminded her brother and her sister, to Benjamin Frieda had been very kind.

The name of Benjamin was not welcome in the car. It fell coldly, and Rosemary shivered, while Daniel turned up the heater. Neither of them wanted to hear of Benjamin's reception at Ashcombe. They feared the worst. Jealousies, exclusions, favours, compet.i.tions. Betrayals, thefts and alienations.

Darkness fell early even in the west, and Daniel turned on the headlights. They had agreed to pick up the keys to the house from the police station in Minehead, an unnecessary formality as the police had conceded that the house seemed to have been standing open to intruders and the elements for days, if not for weeks. They approached the neat brick suburban thirties building with apprehension, wondering what news could await them there: a discovery, a trail of clues? But the officer, apologetic, told them that no trace of Mrs Haxby had been found. They had searched the wooded areas, but had found nothing. 'It's very dense, very steep,' said PC Wainwright. 'It could take days.' The coastguard had been out, but no bodies had been reported. There were no signs of forced entry at the house, no evidence of foul play. They'd taken away one or two items for examination, but there'd been nothing suspicious. (He did not like to mention the cannabis to these three disconcerting Londoners: it had looked to him and to his boss as though the old lady had been smoking it herself, but this seemed so unlikely that he didn't like even to raise the matter. He'd let someone else deal with that one. If she had been having a puff, who cared? If they found outhouses full of the stuff, that would be another matter.) The boss had thought of shutting the house off and refusing the keys, but had decided not to bother. No point in over-reacting. There might be all sorts of innocent explanations. Mrs Haxby might have had a sudden call to go to London. She might have had a visitor and gone off with her to town. She might have gone on holiday. He gathered she was a professional lady. She wouldn't be pleased to come back and find her absence had been treated as a crime. Nor, it had occurred to him, would she necessarily be very pleased to find her keys had been handed over to her avenging family. But that wasn't his problem, was it? Next of kin is next of kin, in the eyes of the law. And Mr Palmer said he was a lawyer.

Mrs Haxby was a professional and an eccentric. Exmoor was full of eccentrics. Would a normal person want to live alone at a place like Ashcombe? Ashcombe had a bad reputation. n.o.body normal had ever lived at Ashcombe. In its hotel days, it might have had one or two normal guests, but they hadn't stayed long. And the manager had been barking mad. So had the proprietor, and so had the retired admiral who had built the place. It stood to reason that anybody who lived alone at Ashcombe might well wander off alone. Nothing illegal in that.

So PC Wainwright and his boss Sergeant Wiggins had reasoned, as they washed their hands of responsibility, and handed over to Daniel Palmer, Grace D'Anger and Rosemary Herz.

The trio drove on, with Gogo now at the wheel, and Daniel by her side. Daniel had been further downcast by the news that Ashcombe lay right on the county boundary, and that if Frieda had wandered from Somerset into Devon, if her corpse was washed from Somerset to Devon, her case would be at the mercy of two police forces, the subject of two files of paperwork. How characteristically inconvenient of her to live on a boundary, he remarked, as he peered into the gathering gloom. She always liked margins, said Gogo sharply, as she swung off the main road and down the steep descent.

Daniel was deeply shocked by the house. Neither Rosemary's warnings nor Gogo's emendations of those warnings had prepared him for this Victorian Gothic asylum. It offended all his instincts for comfort, for order, for maintenance. The degree of decay and dilapidation appalled. The smell stopped his nostrils. How could this ever have been kept up, how could it ever be restored? What impulse of folly had built this folly here and abandoned it here, at the sea's edge? Its very position clamoured with offence.

Gogo and Rosemary were almost amused by his horror, but they too were overwhelmed. The abandoned house had grown yet more sinister, it loomed darkly above them into the lowering afternoon night. Was Frieda in there somewhere, trapped in a closet, imprisoned in an oak chest? The police said they had searched the house, but had they? Frieda's last supper still stood upon the table: the winkle sh.e.l.ls, the glistening oily yellow rind, her open book. (Unlike Terry Zealley, they register the tide of the book, and register it with surprise: Frieda seemed to have been reading a Mills & Boon romance called The Sweet South by Amantha Knight.) And there were objects familiar to them from Mausoleum daysthe skull, the skeleton clock, the alabaster egg, the vase of red Bristol gla.s.s. They were instinct with foreboding. So Frieda had moved from one folly to another, from one mausoleum to another. From the grave to the grave. What life had she had, and where were its joys now? Where was she now? WHY HAD SHE COME HERE? Had all come to this? Or was this some endgame prank?

Their flesh crawled, shrivelled and listened. Rosemary sat heavily on an old basket chair and dropped her head into her hands. Her heart was beating loudly, for she too was marked for death. She was worn out, defeated. Gogo crossed to the window and stared out across the darkened garden towards the sea, the indecipherable scrabble of the interminable sighing of the water. She stood transfixed, like a dead person, like a statue frozen. She could hear her own blood. And Daniel, thinly, leanly pacing, came to a halt before the backgammon board, so neatly laid, before the game of patience. So she had wasted time, so she had eked away the dull long hours.

The skeleton clock had died when they were small children, in the heavy stifled fatherless shame of Romley. It never struck the hour. Time had stood still. They had lived in a house without a man, and Frieda had worked like a man. Frieda had taught Daniel to play backgammon. Night after night, during his lonely, freakish boyhood, he had played backgammon with his mother for an hour before bed. He had forgotten this. In turn he had taught his sisters, and they too had played. Did they remember? Did they now, like him, recall?

Daniel had tried to make for himself a rich light life without these grim shadows, yet here he stood, trapped. All three of them were motionless, silent, exhausted. The air was heavy. They could not move. She had brought them to this cave and turned them to stone.

Rosemary, the youngest, was the first to break the spell. She groaned, tightened her fingers in her red-gold hair, clasped at her skull, rocked back and forth as though to wind herself up into motion, and made a gurgling sound in her throat, as though she were a sybil about to speak after long silence.

's.h.i.t,' said Rosemary. 'Jesus f.u.c.king Christ. I can't f.u.c.king take this. Do you think there's a drink in the house?'

Daniel, who found, to his surprise, to my surprise, to your surprise, that his eyes were p.r.i.c.kling with tears, was the next to move. He laid his hand upon the pack of cards, turned one up. It was the three of hearts. 'I gave her these,' he said, perplexed. 'I bought her a couple of packs when I was killing time in Luxembourg. I can't think why. Look, they're the kings and queens of France.'

'Well done, Danny boy,' said Gogo bravely, turning back from the window, attempting the normality of sister scorn. 'Clever lad.'

But her voice shook a little, as though she did not trust it to find its register. She picked up at random black Marie-Antoinette, La Dame de Pique, and stared at her blue and silver dress, her blue and silver hair, her white aigrette.

'A drink,' repeated Rosemary. 'She was never short of a drink.'

And they jerked into action, opening cupboards, sniffing the dregs in the half-empty bottle (a perfectly good 1995 Chablis, noted Daniel, gone to waste), tripping over piles of papers, turning on switches to lamps. Some of them worked, and some did not. They found gla.s.ses, and, in the bottom shelf of the mock-Jacobean sideboard, a fine array of bottlesgin, whisky, sherry, vermouth, Marsala, cherry brandy.

'She'd stocked up for Christmas,' said Rosemary, her spirits rising as she poured herself a large Scotch. 'Gogo, whisky for you?'

'Who's driving?' asked Gogo, as she accepted a tumbler.

'Who cares?' said Daniel. 'Cheers, Cheers, Rosie. Cheers, Gogo. Cheers, Frieda. Can you hear us, Frieda? Are you out there listening?'

And the three of them stared defiantly at the dark windows, at the glimmer of sea and distant sh.o.r.eline beyond, and they raised their gla.s.ses and they drank.

There had been a crime, but this had not been the scene of it.

Gogo knocks at Rosemary's bedroom door, hears a tap running, hears her sister call, 'Hang on a minute, I'm coming.' Rosemary appears, in a shining white satin night-dress and a sage-green silk kimono, smelling of aloes. She is ready for bed. Gogo sits on the bed. There is nowhere else to sit, for Rosemary's hotel room is small and cramped, and the only chair is covered with Rosemary's discarded clothing. Gogo's room is bigger, a double overlooking the sea. The sisters had thought of sharing, but had not been able to face it. 'I snore,' Gogo had said dourly, to discourage Rosemary, who had herself been trying to think of good reasons to sleep alone. Gogo, the elder, had claimed the best room.

The hotel is an old coaching inn, perched on the cliff above the coast path. It boasts Fine Sea Views, but it is too dark to see them. It has known better days. Gogo, David and Benjamin had lunched there in the summer, eating scampi and chips from a basket. And Frieda Haxby too, it appeared, had lunched there. The elderly barman remembered her. He brought the subject up himself, as the three Palmers sat in the dark brown bar at a small round oak table, looking at the menu and eating Bacon Twirls. News of Frieda's disappearance had spread along the coast, from headland to headland, from beacon to beacon, from pub to pub. For a recluse, she had aroused a fair amount of interest. Nor, it now seemed, had she been as reclusive as they had thought, for the barman, a grey-haired, moustached, melancholy, gentlemanly figure, who smoked perpetually, even while pulling pints, claimed that she had been in for lunch with another lady. They came in once or twice, for pensioner's lunches, on a Thursday. A good value lunchroast and two vegetables, or fish and chips, for 3.50. They'd seemed to enjoy it. Of course the weather had been a bit better, last month. They'd sat out, on one occasion as he recalled.

He took a morbid interest in Frieda's disappearance, probing for more details. He volunteered that he could tell they were family, there was a likeness. (Gogo's expression of stony refusal at this suggestion was a wonder to see, and Rosemary got out her pocket powder compact to effect an instant cosmetic alteration.) Yes, they all knew she lived alone at Ashcombe, and had heard she was writing a book. About the Vikings, he'd been told, but he wouldn't know about that.

Daniel ignored the Vikings and ordered a baked trout, then asked if the barman knew the name of the other lady. No, he didn't. He thought she came from inland, from Exford way, but he couldn't say for sure. About the same age as Mrs Haxby, she would be. This, he had added, was a popular part of the world for retired people.

Gogo, sitting on the edge of Rosemary's bed, takes up this theme. 'A popular part of the world for retired people,' she echoed. 'And Frieda, out for a cheap pensioner's lunch. Do you really think it can have been her? And who on earth can she have been with? She didn't know anybody round here, did she?'

'G.o.d knows,' says Rosemary, applying cream of almonds to her hands and elbows. 'G.o.d knows what she got up to when we weren't watching. But it doesn't sound very likely. Still, he did seem to know where the house was. So I suppose it might have been her.'

'Daniel says we've got to look for the will tomorrow,' says Gogo. 'I think that's a bit crude and premature, don't you?'

Rosemary looked sharply at her sister, through the dressing-table mirror.

'Well, he is a lawyer,' she concedes. 'Do you think Frieda made him an executor?'

'I'm sure she didn't. He'd have known if she had. He's been on to Howard Partridge, you know. Didn't he tell you?'

Rosemary shakes her head and starts to brush her hair.

'He didn't tell me either, but Patsy did,' says Gogo.

The room is hot and full of the smells of Rosemary's nightly rituals, which overlay the older smells of tobacco. This is a heavy smoker of a hotel. The two sisters are rarely in such proximity, for they now inhabit larger s.p.a.ces, so that even when they are together, they rarely find themselves as close. It makes them physically uneasy. They are troubled, as though something is expected of them. And it is. As Rosemary too settles upon the bed, high up on her pillow, her back to the crushed rose padded b.u.t.ton plush velvet bedhead, and tucks her knees under the top sheet, Gogo at the bed's foot speaks again.

'Did Frieda ever speak to you about her sister Hilda?'