Thorn (50 page)

Exaltation was filling Thalia like a fiery golden river, and the blood of all the high priestesses was coursing through her veins. She was Deborah of the Old Testament, stirring up Barak to march against Sisera; she was Flaminica of the ancient Roman Dialis. She was Sibyl of Cumae guiding Aeneas through the underworld, and she was the Delphic Pythia. She understood now what she had not fully understood before: there was a link, a chain of power, passed down and passed on. Her ancestresses had known it and they had harnessed it and then channelled it. Sybilla (mark the name!) and Lucienne had done it. The others, further back, whose names had faded or been lost or forgotten, had done it as well. People had thought them mad, people might think she herself was mad, but they were very far from mad. They were the keepers of the ancient flamelike power. The knowledge that in another few minutes she would use that power to bring Edmund back to her was like a heady draught of champagne to her brain.

As Sibyl had guided Aeneas through the underworld, so Thalia would now guide Edmund up from the death-sleep and into the world again. She looked down at him, at the golden hair, at the white alabaster skin that would shortly be filled with warm, flowing blood; at the closed eyes that would soon open and see her once more.

T
he discovery that the acromegalic patients in the east wing had somehow got out and that the police had been summarily called angered Leo, but he banked his feelings down as much as possible.

The police inspector was the one who was in charge of Quincy's disappearance, and Leo thought he was intelligent and efficient. He explained that when the acromegalics were found they would have to be treated with caution.

‘Most of them have been in one institution or another for the better part of their lives,' he said. ‘Two or three of them in Thornacre itself, in fact. I'm afraid they were quite badly treated by my predecessor. He kept them half comatose on huge doses of largactil for years – that's an appallingly old-fashioned treatment – and they were in a pitiful condition when I came here. I've been trying to reduce the medication and gradually bring them nearer to the real world. We've tried to give them their own quarters – the nearest thing to a self-contained flat that Thornacre can provide—'

‘They were kept in the east wing?'

Leo saw the inspector's mind silently frame the words ‘haunted wing', and he said quickly, ‘Yes, it worked quite well. It wasn't precisely a halfway house, but it meant they could be introduced to a semblance of normality. The therapists have been teaching them some social skills. Most of them had never so much as made a cup of tea, poor things, or even watched a television programme.'

‘And there was nothing out of the ordinary about them tonight?'

‘No. As far as I can make out, the nurses gave them supper as usual and locked the wing up at half past nine.'

‘Well, somebody must have done something out of the ordinary somewhere,' said the inspector. ‘Left a door unlocked, or a window. We'll check. But I'm bound to say there are a few suggestive facts about all this, Dr Sterne.'

‘What kind of suggestive facts?'

‘It looks as if there might have been a bit of inside help given to your acromegalics. We've searched the grounds pretty thoroughly now, but so far we haven't found hide nor hair nor whisker of them.' He paused, and then said, ‘You've got a fairly sophisticated electronic locking system on those main gates, Dr Sterne.'

‘We need it. There are several acute cases here. What about it?'

‘If your missing patients got as far as the gates, could they have understood how to open them?'

‘Of course not. I doubt they could manage to change a light bulb.'

‘Then, Dr Sterne, somebody helped them to get through, either by explaining how the gates worked or by opening them, or . . .' He hesitated.

Leo said, ‘Go on.'

‘Or there's a way out of Thornacre we haven't found yet. I suppose there aren't any hidden exit routes, are there?'

‘Secret tunnels?' said Leo, with a brief smile. ‘You've been listening to village gossip, Inspector.'

‘Yes, I have, and you'd be surprised how useful it can be at times, sir.'

‘I wouldn't,' said Leo. He frowned, thinking. ‘I don't know of any hidden tunnels or secret passages,' he said. ‘But that doesn't mean there aren't any. I haven't been here very long, and we're still working on the renovations. Some of the older nurses might know if there's anything. I daresay you'll want to question them.' He paused, and then added wryly, ‘Again.'

‘Yes. You've had a run of bad luck here, haven't you, sir?' said the inspector non-committally. ‘Tell me about these acromegalics. How disturbed are they?'

‘They have some intelligence,' said Leo. ‘And also some sensitivity. But they certainly won't be able to cope with the outside world, although they won't realise that. They'll be a bit like children; they'll think they can cope until they're brought up against something out of their experience. Faced with a battery of policemen and bright lights they might react.'

‘Violently?'

‘Abruptly.' There was no need to give details about oculogyric crises involving obsessive behaviour patterns, or about the nightmares and ‘daymares' that sometimes reached hallucinatory proportions.

‘We could use nets to catch them,' said the inspector. ‘Or tranquillising darts.'

‘Not nets,' Leo said at once. ‘I'll get you some chlorpromazine and diazepam from the dispensary. By the way, who phoned you?'

‘We didn't get the name but she said she was the sister in charge of the wing.'

Leo started to say, ‘But there isn't a—', realised that this was only wasting time and could be gone into later, and went through to the dispensary to write up the order for the sedatives.

On the way back he made two discoveries. One was that Snatcher Harris had apparently gone on one of his tomcat wanderings again. The other was that Imogen had vanished.

Leo passed this new development on to the inspector at once, answered what appeared to be a string of totally unrelated questions, and returned to his office. His mind was churning and his whole body felt as if it was a mass of raw, exposed emotion. Imogen, his beautiful enigmatic wood nymph, had vanished.

He had no means of knowing if she had gone out into the night of her own accord, or if Harris or the acromegalics had taken her, or if someone had taken the acromegalics. Or if it was a combination of any of these things, or none of them. But he could not believe that Imogen had gone voluntarily. His mind presented him with the picture of her creeping out of Thornacre under cover of darkness, and he repudiated it at once. She would not have done it; she would not have gone like that, leaving him prey to agonised concern. Oh, wouldn't she, though? jeered his mind. Why do you imagine she'd give you a second thought? You're forty to her seventeen; that's a gap of twenty-three years and it's verging on the indecent. Svengali was a dirty old man if you analyse it and Frankenstein was a megalomaniac. She's probably been thinking of you – if she's been thinking of you at all – as a father figure. The nice doctor who helped her out of an illness. Probably there was a boyfriend all along only you never found out, and probably she got a message from him and now she's gone to meet him and they're at it somewhere in the bushes, or on the back seat of his car.

The thought of Imogen helpless and afraid somewhere beyond Thornacre's boundaries was like a knife turning in his guts, but the thought of her with some eighteen- or nineteen-year-old boy dug his guts out and flung them on to a blazing pyre.

He could hear the police still searching the grounds outside and he supposed he should be out there with them, but it seemed more important to remain in one place so that news would find him without any delay. Twice there was a timid tap on the door and he looked up in sudden hope, but the first time was only a request to know if he was all right or wanted anything, and the second was to bring in a tray of sandwiches and coffee. He ate and drank with the uninterest of an engine refuelling.

The disappearances had to be linked; it was stretching coincidence beyond credibility to believe anything else. Quincy, Imogen, Harris and the acromegalics. There had to be a common denominator. The thought lodged in his mind, but it was a maddeningly elusive thought and it was infuriatingly formless. It was like trying to grasp quicksilver or a piece of a rainbow. Harris was the most suspect of the lot, but Leo doubted that the Snatcher had sufficient intelligence to spirit away so many people. Oliver Tudor had believed Thalia Caudle was involved, but how? And why? Had she made an accomplice of Harris? Would anyone make an accomplice of Harris? And what could possibly be the motive?

Leo tilted his chair back and stared up at the ceiling. Imogen, Harris, Quincy, the acromegalics. Thalia Caudle. Did anything link them?
Think,
Leo. He rearranged the names in his mind to see if a different pattern formed. Thalia, Harris, the acromegalics. Quincy, Imogen. Like playing put and take. Like a child's game where you built up brightly-painted blocks to make a house or a picture. Paint. Pictures.
Quincy
.

He moved without thinking, going swiftly through the old house to the ward where Quincy had slept. Pictures. The police had already searched her things, but they would not have been looking for what he would be looking for.

The ward was deserted, and Leo knelt in front of the flimsy locker. It had been unlocked for the inspector's men earlier with the master key, and it was still unlocked. Leo began to go through the locker again. She had pitifully few possessions, poor child. Brush and comb, a small pile of underclothes. A couple of sweaters and pair of cheap cotton jeans. There was an expensive box of talc on a shelf by itself, probably given to her, probably by Imogen. The paints he had himself bought for Quincy were tucked in one corner as if she had feared they might be stolen, and next to them was the plastic wallet of aquarelle crayons that Thalia Caudle had brought on Christmas Day. And there, at the very back, was what Leo had been looking for: the block of drawing paper. He lifted it out carefully and sat on the nearest bed, turning the pages, despite himself smiling with wry amusement at the depiction of Matron Porter. And then he turned to the last sketch and felt as if someone had struck him between the eyes.

All of Quincy's work had more than a touch of the macabre, but her last drawing was the most disturbing of them all. It was vividly reminiscent of the old Flemish diableries – Hieronymus Bosch or Brueghel, whose works Quincy had surely never seen – and she had drawn in a thick, decorated border crammed with tiny creeping goblin figures and sneering dwarfish ghouls and hag-featured spectres, like a travesty of the illuminated proscenium frames of Victorian theatre posters, or the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval monks.

The central figure was recognisably Thalia Caudle, but it was a Thalia hugely tall and icily commanding. Quincy had cloaked her in rippling crimson silk, and every sculpted fold suggested corruption and menace. For foreground detail she had drawn a scattering of half-rotting human skulls and bleached finger bones. Crouching nearby, leering out of the macabre frame, was a familiar lumpish figure, and Leo stared at it and thought, Harris! Dear God, she's drawn Thalia as a kind of ogress witch figure, with Harris as the dark satanic familiar! The face, the pose, was familiar from a dozen different dark fairy stories. The scuttling hunchback servant, the frog prince, all denizens of that almost real fantasy world where deformity equated with evil.
Snow White
and
Rumpelstiltskin
and their kin. Leo stared at the figure and felt, as he always felt when confronted with human deformity, the guilt of being normal. But are you sure you're so entirely normal yourself? demanded his mind. Remember that not all deformities are visible. What about that quirk of the spirit, that kink in the mind that enables you to spin up the coruscating power like the miller's daughter set to spin straw into gold?

Clustering against the lowering clouds in Quincy's drawing were several brutish-featured beings, with great meaty hands and mean, red-glinting eyes. Leo stared at it, and even though he knew perfectly well what Quincy must have seen to have drawn this, and even though his physician's mind knew the medical terms and the medical palliatives, a prickle of fear scudded through his mind.
Because there were giants on the earth once
. . . Because they strode across the world in seven-league boots, and they prowled through the dark pages of Grimm and Andersen and Perrault. And they had names. They were called Blunderbore and Brobdingnag, and Pantagruel the ever-thirsty or Cyclops the angryeyed, and they devoured children and ground the bones of men to make bread.

The shadows of Thornacre seemed suddenly to gather and rear up to confront him. Leo shut the sketch book with a snap and returned it to the locker, and the ghosts and the darkness receded.

But he had the denominator. Quincy had seen through Thalia's smooth, urbane mask – he had nearly seen through it himself. She had seen through to something she had believed to be fearsome and menacing. She might have been wrong, but Leo did not think she was. This was her last drawing, clearly done on the night before she went out with Thalia, and it was filled with fear.

He was straightening up from the locker, the drawing still in his hands, when Nurse Carr came into the room to tell him that there was a Dr Tudor on the phone and it was a matter of extreme importance.

Oliver had driven back to the Black Boar, his mind working at top speed. The most obvious thing to do now was phone the police and haul them out here, but there were several aspects to this that had first to be considered, the most worrying of which was the dialogue that might ensue. Oliver could imagine it only too well: