Thorn (30 page)

There was a series of small attic rooms, one leading out of the other, mostly windowless. At some stage in the house's history someone had fitted a stout lock and a bolt to them. Thalia smiled again. Yes, the house was exactly and completely right.

She would do all she could to become part of the scenery here. Unremarkable and unremarked. A recently bereaved lady, staying in this part of England to recuperate from a tragedy, here to collate research for a project for Ingram's Books, and to be near a favourite niece who tragically had been consigned to Thornacre. She would give herself a month, two at the outside.

And then she would begin her real work.

D
an was immersed in work when he was jerked back to reality by the sound of the letter box clattering and something largeish dropping on the mat. It would be a circular or a trial size of shampoo or washing powder. It might be a seed catalogue for the ground floor flat, delivered to the wrong number. Likeliest of all was that it was a bill, in which case it could wait. He carried on working.

His original idea had been to end the book with Rosamund waking. He had thought this was how the story did end: the awakening of the princess to the prince's embrace, preferably within that marvellous frame of Tchaikovsky's inspired ballet music, and a general epithalamium with all the characters clasping hands and good triumphing over evil. Even the Wicked Godmother and the Good Fairy usually took their bows together.

But according to both Perrault and Basile, the real trials of Sleeping Beauty – Perrault's
La Belle au Bois Dormant
– did not start until
after
she was woken, when she was confronted with the villainess of the piece. Dan worked steadily on, mesmerised by the swelling horror of the legend.

The prince's mother had set herself to seek the princess out and, upon finding her, to kill her. Several of the sources made much of her bloodthirsty nature, and most referred to her scouring the countryside to find the princess. All described her bitter fury at losing her beloved son to the whey-faced little cat who had done nothing for the last hundred years but sleep.

Perrault described the villainess's luring of the princess to a house deep in the woods ‘that she might with greater ease put in execution her horrible desires', and referred to the house's lonely situation. According to Basile, when the ogreish-inclined lady found the princess, she channelled her anger on to the whey-faced cat's twins, born to her and the prince exactly nine months after the famous kiss.

Twins. Dan stared at this on the page. The princess had given birth to twins. Which means that I was right all along about her being woken by a prick.

It was all to the good. Adam Cadence could buckle swash with the best, and when it came to hacking his way through thorns and briars he was unrivalled. But Dan had never thought he was of the calibre to be satisfied with a chaste peck on the lips when finally he reached fair Rosamund's virginal couch.

Dan leaned back, stretching his arms to ease his protesting neck and shoulder muscles, and considered the next twist of the plot. It was becoming increasingly plain that Rosamund was going to have to emerge from her drugged unconsciousness and face any number of tribulations before she could go hand in hand into the sunset with her prince, and this was something that would have to be carefully thought out. The overly melodramatic would have to be diligently avoided, never mind the downright comic. Dan's mind instantly went to all those other heroines who had opened their eyes from entranced slumbers and been faced not with the swashbuckling hero but with the villain of the piece, or even – heaven forfend! – the jester. Rosamund might still have a few trials to face that Dan had not bargained for, but she was certainly not going to be confronted with an ass-headed Bottom, or a frog prince or some freakish hunchback dwarf. In fact if Rosamund's creator was going to remain faithful to the original version, it looked as if Margot would have to travel in extreme secrecy to Rosamund's bleak asylum and encamp at the gates, there to make plans for what Perrault called the execution of her horrible desires.

Dan glanced at the clock. Two p.m. No wonder he felt hungry. It would be easier to cope with Margot's horrible desires on a full stomach. He wandered into the kitchen, and absent-mindedly heated a tin of soup and cut a hefty cheese sandwich. The post might as well be investigated at the same time.

On the mat lay a large manila envelope, probably a circular, and a preview copy of
Women in Business
with his article about Thalia Caudle on page five. The features editor had scribbled a note on a compliment slip, saying how good they thought it looked, and how they hoped to use him for future work. The cheque had been sent to his agent in the same post. This was all very satisfactory.

Dan boiled the kettle for coffee and propped himself on the kitchen table to drink it while he read the article through. It did not sound at all bad. There had not been too much mangling by the sub-editor, and somebody had got hold of a decent photograph of Thalia, seated at her desk with a smudgy view of Regent's Park just discernible through the window behind her. She looked exactly how the readers of
Women in Business
liked people to look, and she sounded exactly how they liked career women to sound. Intelligent and understated and well dressed, but with a recognisable vein of ordinariness, so that readers could think: that might be me. I could do that.

At the end of the article was a brief paragraph inserted by the features editor, explaining that since the interview with Ms Caudle, she had left London for a time to gather material for Ingram's planned new imprint dealing with ballads and folk songs. She had undertaken a roving commission and she might be gone for as long as six months.

Dan laid the magazine down, his mind tumbling. It was important to keep a sense of proportion about this, and it was vital not to leap to any conclusions. Dan was not, he absolutely was
not
going to assume that Thalia had gone to Northumberland to put into execution her horrible desires with greater ease. Remember that Thalia isn't Margot, Daniel. Keep remembering it.

In any case, short of breaking into the Great Portland Street flat and ransacking it for clues, there was no way of finding out where Thalia really was. And whatever else Dan was going to do, he was not going to start house breaking.

He opened the second letter, and found that it was not a circular or a bill after all; it was the response to his request for a sight of Royston Ingram's will. It contained a neatly stapled photocopy of what appeared to be the whole document. Dan carried it back to his desk and spread it out.

It was a relatively brief document, considering the position Royston had held, and assuming that by today's standards – by Dan's standards anyway – he had been fairly well off. Dan read it as he ate the cheese sandwich, skimming the paragraphs dealing with disposal of real estate, sums left to various charities and the small legacies for various long-serving staff at Ingram's. Real estate appeared to refer to immovable property, and could be buildings or just land.

Several times the phrase ‘as laid down in the Articles of Association of Ingram's Books' occurred, usually in relation to the disposal of Royston's financial interests in the company. The term ‘settled estates' was used as well, and Dan took this to indicate a kind of entail; in other words, Royston had been free to dispose of his personal property more or less as he liked, but the Ingram shares were controlled by the Articles. There was something called net personalty, which appeared to be anything other than land and property that was not freehold, and which Dan supposed could amount to anything from a thousand pounds to a few hundred thousand. The term ‘valuation as at date of death' was also spattered liberally throughout the document. He read on, his heart beating fast. At any minute he was going to find out how near the danger was to Imogen.

And then it was there. Towards the end of the final page was the paragraph he had been searching for. It was wrapped up in legal jargon but the intention was perfectly plain.

In the event of Royston and Eloise Ingram dying before Imogen reached the age of eighteen, Thalia was appointed as Imogen's guardian, to administer her interests in Ingram's and act as the governing board's chairman.
Eighteen
. Dan stared at this, and only then realised how strongly he had assumed that the period of guardianship would be until Imogen was twenty-one, which would have meant she was safe for two or three years yet.

He read on and discovered that if Imogen died or was declared unfit to manage her own affairs, Thalia Caudle continued to rule Ingram's.

He broke into Thalia's flat the next day. He chose the middle of the afternoon, which was a time when people might be thought to be safely about their own lawful occasions and not thinking about catching housebreakers. He wore gloves and an anonymous dark jacket, and he took the underground to Oxford Circus and walked up Regent Street. A taxi, or even a bus, might be traceable, but if you could not go unnoticed on the Central Line you could not go unnoticed anywhere.

Getting past the door intercom had bothered him quite a lot; it was the kind where you pressed a particular button for an individual flat, and the individual flat-owner then opened the door electronically from within. This meant that pretending to sell double glazing or being a spurious man-to-check-the-meters was out. Double-glazing salesmen were a joke anyway nowadays. But he had thought up a couple of fairly credible reasons for requesting entry.

He pressed the first of the three buttons for the floor below the Ingram flat. No response. He pressed the second button and a voice answered. Dan announced himself as having a delivery of flowers for the first. ‘Only there's no one in.'

‘Flowers!' said a pleased-sounding female voice. ‘Oh, how nice for her.'

If there had not been a ‘her' in the picture, Dan had been ready to enter into arguments about wrong addresses, or to go on to other flats. But it was all right. ‘Who are they from?' asked the unknown voice.

‘No idea. Just to deliver to Number Four this afternoon. P'raps she's got a secret admirer. I could leave them in the lobby.'

‘Oh yes, do that, will you?' said the voice. ‘She'll be home about seven. I'll make sure she knows. I'll open the main doors for you now.'

‘Right you are.'

Dan felt so guilty about raising the hopes of the unknown Number Four that as he crossed the lobby, he almost wondered whether to send flowers to her on his own account. But half a dozen trip-wires stretched across his path at once, one of these being that flower orders could be traced, and another that Number Four might have a jealous lover or husband. And when it was eventually discovered that the Ingram flat had been broken into, searching inquiries would be made. Sorry, Number Four.

Getting inside had been so easy that Dan began to feel suspicious. Probably there was a hidden security camera or an electronic eye somewhere, and at any minute he would be caught and hauled off to justice. But he was unchallenged as he went up to the flat where Thalia Caudle had dined him, seduced him, and left the grisly contents of the freezer for him to discover.

The door to the Ingram flat had several small panes of glass let into the frame. Dan had remembered this and had reasoned that they could be broken with minimum disruption. He had brought a small but heavy-headed hammer. He studied the door and the lock carefully. The glass was the swirly, bottle-bottomed kind and fairly thick. Dan eyed it doubtfully, wondering now whether it really would break sufficiently to let him reach inside and release the lock. He had no idea what he would do if the lock was some kind of double-treble security arrangement or something needing a code, or if he came up against a thread of thin wire woven into the glass which needed wire-cutters to get through. He also had no idea whether there was an interior burglar alarm. He glanced up and down the corridor. There was a fire escape at the far end of the hall. If he unwittingly set off an alarm system, could he be down the fire escape and into the street before anyone came running? He thought he could.

In films people picked locks with credit cards, but Dan had never been able to understand how they did it. He could not see how this one could possibly be opened other than with its designated key. It would have to be the glass. He looked about him again. There was a silent, deserted air about the entire floor, and the chances were that most of these flats were not occupied during the day. But there had been the female voice on the floor below and she might hear him. There were three other flats on this floor, and for all Dan knew there were any number of people inside them who might hear him as well.

None of it could be helped. He had got this far, and he was blowed if he was going to duck out now. He took a deep breath and brought the hammer smashing down on the pane of glass surrounding the lock. The sound was appallingly loud in the enclosed space and Dan's heart came up into his mouth. But nobody came running to find out what was happening, and no ear-splitting alarm bells rang.

The glass had crazed, but it had not quite shattered. Dan took another deep breath and raised the hammer a second time. This time the glass broke more thoroughly and he managed to push out several jagged splinters so that he could reach inside and release the lock. It sprang back and the door swung open.

Dan hesitated, wondering if it could really be this easy. But it was possible that the electronic intercom arrangement was thought sufficient to keep out prowlers. He remembered that this was a company apartment, and generally used only for odd nights here and there. Probably the more permanent residents had stouter front doors and better security.

The minute he stepped inside he knew that the flat was empty, in the way that you always do know if places are empty. But it was still an eerie experience. The apartment was shadowy and still, and the sky outside was grey and already sliding down into the early November night. A single glance around the rather characterless sitting room showed that the desk under the window was the likeliest place for information. But Dan found himself crossing to the kitchen and, with a feeling of helpless compulsion, reaching for the freezer lid. There would be nothing inside, of course, but . . .