Thorn (4 page)

Since the idea would not go away, he took a proper look at it. How viable was it? Blow viability, how sellable was it? Even romantic novelists had to pay gas bills and eat. And his typewriter was practically an antique. The appalling spectre of buying a word processor loomed.

All of this ought to have been daunting but none of it was. Dan did not really care if he wrote it on a typewriter or a word processor, or with a biro and ruled pad, as long as he did write it. How uninterrupted could he hope to be while he wrote it? There would have to be various journalistic commissions – at least, Dan hoped there would be, on account of having to live and eat and pay bills. He thought these could be slotted in. Oliver was coming to stay during the Oxford half-term, but Oliver had never been an interruption to anyone in his life. If Dan explained what he was doing, Oliver would smile the gentle, unworldly smile that probably drove his female students wild, and half the female dons as well, and say how exciting, and wouldn't their father have been pleased, and it was time Dan took a swing at fiction anyway.

I believe I'm going to do it, Dan thought suddenly, and was conscious of rising excitement. It would not be a serious book of course, at least, not in Oliver's meaning, but it would not be lurid pulp fiction either. One would have to avoid certain influences; the shadow of Angela Carter hovered perilously. Dan tipped Ms Carter a nod by way of acknowledgement, and reached for a fresh sheet of paper. At least let's see how it looks. Let's see if we can translate the original legend into modernity.

A girl born not quite into high wealth, which would be a little too sequinned, but born into reasonable affluence . . . Yes. But born under a threat of some kind. A disease? Well, you can hardly make it a spinning wheel and a dark bewitchment at a christening party, but what about making it one of those appalling inherited things? Was it Huntington's disease that lurked in the system and didn't make its presence known until the victim was thirty? Don't be absurd, Daniel, you're not Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn; you can't have a heroine crumbling away from some ghastly terminal illness through two or three hundred pages. In any case, you know perfectly well you're going to make the menace inherited madness. Lucienne and Sybilla Ingram, said his mind, with a satisfied nod.

The minute he started to type, the sentences tumbled out of his mind and rattled across the page. They became paragraphs before he knew it, and the paragraphs became full pages. Hardly daring to breathe in case he broke the spell, Dan experienced the indescribable sensation of seeing a huge, immensely exciting landscape start to unfold before him. I'm about to take a journey, and I don't know where it will take me, and I don't know what travelling companions I shall make, or even what kind of bedfellows I might pick up . . . And, said his inner voice, caustically, if you can possibly manage to avoid all the appalling puns about being sent to sleep by a prick and woken up by one as well, you might make something halfway decent out of this.

It was important to get rid of most of the heroine's guardians fairly early on, in order to leave her entirely vulnerable. Dan considered the methods of murder available to him. How close should he go to the original fairy story? Hadn't there been something about the princess's family – or at least her parents – being cast into a bewitched sleep as well? Would it be possible to recreate something along the lines of the sleeping sickness epidemic of the 1920s? Or could he come up with something more sinister? Some kind of deathlike trance? Catatonia, wasn't it? He would have to get hold of a copy of the story, and from the look of it a shelf-full of medical tomes as well.

But if he was going to deal out murder and mayhem on this scale, the first priority was to create an archvillain – or perhaps villainess . . .

A villainess. Dan felt his lips curve into a smile. He would have a villainess, a greedy, feisty lady who would wear a false face to almost the entire world, a bland, civilised mask that would stay firmly and undetectably in place until the killings began and the reader felt the spine-chilling breath of evil, and began to catch glimpses of the red tooth-and-claw madness beneath the urbane exterior.

But until then, while the archvillainess planned the killings and spun her evil web and discussed the heroine's plight, the mask would remain firmly and undetectably in place and no one would have the least idea of the truth.

How would she set about the murders?

‘What's going to happen to her now the madness has finally surfaced?'

Inevitably it was Aunt Dilys who said it, and most of the people in Royston Ingram's study thought she said it against the combined mental opposition of them all.

The aunts huddled together, sipping the hot, sweet tea that Mrs Scullion had brought, which was kind of her. The sprinkling of husbands had opted for large brandies, and Dilys had joined them.

Nobody had any idea of going home. Some kind of decision had to be made, and it had to be made today. There was an unspoken feeling that probably Thalia would take charge; she was so strong-minded and clever, and of course she was accustomed to meetings and decisions because of all her charity work – she worked very hard for several organisations.

Dilys, whose brandy had been a generous double, was moved to observe that the family had been along this road before, at least twice to everyone's certain knowledge, which had the effect of reminding everyone who might conceivably have forgotten about Lucienne and Sybilla. Cousin Elspeth said Dr Shilling ought to be here instead of fawning on Eloise as usual, and where was Flora?

‘Flora's with Imogen, I think,' said Dilys. ‘I don't know where Thalia is – does anybody know?'

Nobody did. Several people were secretly rather relieved at Thalia's continuing absence, because nobody quite knew how to treat someone whose son's head had somehow been taken from its coffin and placed on a serving dish. She would recover, of course; she was a very strong lady indeed, but she had to be allowed a little time to get over the shock.

Everyone was still shocked, of course, but beneath that emotion was now running a thin line of curiosity about the unknown young man who had gone to Imogen's side so swiftly. Dilys asked wistfully if he might be a boyfriend of Imogen's they had not heard about, but Rosa said this was unlikely, because Royston would not have allowed any boyfriend within miles of the child. In any case, the young man had been nearly thirty from the look of him – far too old for a seventeen-year-old.

Aunt Dilys, whose own youth had included one or two romantic episodes, was heard to murmur mutinously that age had nothing to do with it.

Flora, entering the room in time to hear this last remark, agreed.

Imogen lay on her bed and tried to push away the thick, clouding mists of the sedative administered by Dr Shilling; she must try to make sense of what had happened today.

She thought she should have been warned when she first fetched the dish from the kitchen and found it cold to the touch, almost as if it had just come out of the fridge, or even the freezer. It should not have been cold at all; the ham had been baked with whole cloves and basted with brown sugar and orange juice and honey. She rather enjoyed cooking, and she had timed it all carefully so that it would be ready to serve at the lunch, along with bowls of salad and buttered rolls. The ham had been left in the half-oven while people were eating canapés and drinking sherry, so that it would stay warm but not actually cook any more. Edmund's head, not cooking but keeping warm . . . Oh God, no!

She had made a lemon soufflé as well, and Mrs Scullion, whose son worked in a fish restaurant in Chelsea, had prepared a whole salmon. Concentrating on preparing the food had stopped Imogen from thinking about Edmund and how he must look inside his coffin, and how the coffin was in the ground now. Burial, not cremation, Aunt Thalia had said. She had been unexpectedly insistent about it.

If Edmund had been cremated today's appalling incident could not have happened. Imogen frowned. Was there a clue there? Could they ask the undertakers who had been into the Chapel of Rest before the service? But could anyone – any of the family or friends – really have opened Edmund's coffin and stolen part of his body? Imogen tried to visualise it and failed completely. Only I can't think properly! she cried silently. When I've slept this wretched sedative off, then I'll think. Then I'll try to reason it out.

If she had checked the serving dish before taking it in, it would not have been so dreadfully dramatic. But there had not been time: Aunt Thalia had come in and said to hurry with serving the ham, everyone was waiting. And so Imogen had hurried, and five minutes later everyone had seen what was under the dish's lid.

They had all been very kind afterwards, but they had all avoided looking directly at her. Even Great-Aunt Flora's eyes had slid away as she had helped her into bed and drawn the curtains against the afternoon light, and switched on the electric blanket – ‘Just for a few minutes. Just to help the shock.'

She thinks I'm suffering from shock, thought Imogen. I expect I am. But that's no reason for them to avoid looking at me.

The only one who had not done so was the unknown young man. He had looked at her very directly; in fact he had looked at her as soon as he came into the room. Imogen had been strongly aware of it, and she had wondered who he was. He was rather good-looking, in a dark, damn-your-eyes kind of way. If it was possible to imagine meeting Heathcliff or Mr Rochester at a family funeral, he would fit the part very well indeed. Only you would not meet either of those two at a family funeral; in fact if you lived in this house, you would not meet
anybody.
But he had been rather nice, the dark young man, and he ought to be thanked for coming to help her while the others had been standing about, staring in shocked horror. She would try to find out who he was – Aunt Flora might know – and send him a little note. Was writing polite thank yous to strangers acceptable? Imogen thought it would be more acceptable than telephoning. People at school had giggled over the sending of Valentine cards to boys, or the making of phone calls asking boys to parties or discos, but Imogen had never done it because she never met any boys to do it to. She had been invited to parties over the years, but Mother had a way of suffering migraines or vague nerve attacks on the afternoon of the party, and Father or Dr Shilling generally ended up asking Imogen to stay in – ‘Just this once,' Father would say. ‘She likes to have you here.' Dr Shilling would say that after all, there would be other parties. It was not asking so very much.

It was not asking much at all, but the trouble was that it had not been ‘just this once', and in the end there had not been other parties because people had stopped asking her. You could not blame them. You could not really argue against somebody's illness either, not when the somebody was your own mother, not when she had a habit of clutching your hands and crying and asking you not to leave her while she felt so dreadfully ill, and saying awkward things about being grateful. Dr Shilling had hinted once that Mother's delicate health might deteriorate and Imogen had instantly had visions of nightmare things like multiple sclerosis or cancer. You could not insist on going out to parties when your mother might be dying of cancer, even when it started to be obvious that she never got any worse. It was not something you could very well question, but Imogen had begun guiltily to wonder if she would end up like some ghastly Victorian spinster whom everyone whispered about rather pityingly – ‘Poor Gladys, such a waste of a life . . . Never married because of her mother, you know . . .'

Dr Shilling's sedative must have been stronger than she had realised; she was starting to slide down into sleep, which had better be resisted because of what might be waiting on the other side. Edmund might be waiting; what was worse, it might not be Edmund as he had been when he was alive but Edmund as he had looked after he died – squashed and bloody, grotesquely twisted . . . headless . . . grinning from the silver platter between the potato salad and the cheese board, his dead eyes glazed like those of the salmon . . .

It was getting dark and wintry outside, but in here it was very warm. Mother could not bear to be too cold. ‘I'm afraid I'm rather a chilly mortal,' she said when everyone else was scarlet-cheeked from the blast of the heating. ‘I have to be watchful of my health.' It was disloyal to think that Mother made sure that everyone else was watchful of it as well. Imogen did think it, and then felt guilty all over again.

The ivy that grew outside was tapping against the window, as if it might be twining itself over the panes of glass. It was normally rather a friendly sound, but this afternoon, with darkness closing down, it was vaguely threatening. Like something trying to get in. Like something tapping out Morse. Let me in, my dear, let me in . . .

Imogen's eyelids were growing heavy, a great weight was pressing down on her, and her heart was beating in exact time with the let-me-in tapping. It was necessary to stay awake to avoid meeting Edmund in a nightmare, and it was necessary to stay aware in case the let-me-in creature got in . . . Or was it in already?

It was necessary to fight the sedative and stay alert in order to work out why everyone had treated her so oddly after that appalling event at lunch.

D
r John Shilling thought he had handled matters rather well on the whole. It had been a nasty business – how on earth had Imogen managed it? – and it had been a delicate business as well. But he thought he had dealt with everything pretty well.

Royston was resting in bed – this was his third or fourth attack of angina pectoris and John had given propranolol along with a mild sedative. There was no undue cause for alarm, and no indications of any myocardial infarction. But just to be sure he would arrange for an angiograph.

Eloise, whose constitution was so exceedingly fragile, had taken a double measure of the phenobarbital John had prescribed last month for her insomnia. He had himself shaken out two of the tablets from the prescription bottle, and Thalia had gone down to the kitchen for the mineral water Eloise preferred for swallowing pills. John had seen Thalia's slightly curled lip at the request. Of course, none of the family really understood how extremely delicate Eloise was. John had never discussed it with the Ingrams; he liked to think of it as a small but perfectly permissible bond between himself and Eloise. Any bond of a more substantial nature was naturally unthinkable, even though it did not stop him thinking about it from time to time. He hoped he would never actually do anything about it and he thought he would not because he did not really want to spoil his vision of Eloise as a pale, untouchable creature. Also, the GMC were inclined to be severe about that kind of thing.