Tower of Silence (19 page)

‘Mary, that wouldn’t be possible—’

‘Why not? People have children and careers these days. I read about it. There are day nurseries and things. You could do it if you really wanted to.’

‘It simply wouldn’t be allowed.’

‘I thought you meant all those things you said to me,’ said Mary, thrusting out her lower lip petulantly and snatching her hand back. ‘About loving me. About wanting to be with me properly–a little house together somewhere, where we could grow old together.’ Load of sentimental bollocks, said her mind; I wouldn’t live with you if I was destitute and starving, you stupid ineffectual old dyke! Never had a man, and wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway!

‘Oh, Mary, sweetheart, of course I meant them! But—’

OK, time for a change of tactics. Mary said, very softly, ‘Listen, Ingrid, if you don’t do this for me–if you don’t find a way to adopt this baby–I’ll tell them all what we do together. I’ll describe what you did to me that first time–up against the bathroom wall with the door locked. I’ll say you forced me to do all those things.’

Ingrid’s fear was instant and unmissable. She turned white, and the pupils of her eyes contracted to pinpoints. She’s remembering Darren Clark, thought Mary. She’s remembering what I did to him. In a tight, breathy voice, Ingrid said, ‘Mary, don’t threaten me—I’ll do whatever you want. Of course I will.’

‘I knew you meant what you said really,’ said Mary. ‘And I didn’t mean to threaten you, it’s only that I so long
to be with you and to have the child—I’d do anything to have that, Ingrid.’

She saw with resignation the darkening of Ingrid’s eyes that signalled a flood of emotionalism. Oh God, and
now
I’ll have to go through one of those tedious sessions in a locked bathroom somewhere, or maybe the linen cupboard on the dormitory landing…

But there was a price to be paid for most things, and by this time she was good at faking things with Ingrid. And at least afterwards she felt surer of Ingrid, and she could whisper, ‘You did mean it, didn’t you? About taking the child?’

There was an almost imperceptible pause. But then Ingrid said, ‘Yes, Mary. Yes, I’ll take the child.’

The birth, when it finally came, was far worse than anything she had ever imagined. Agony. Hours and hours of unremitting pain. Grinding waves of torment so that she began to believe the child so easily conceived was biting and clawing its way out of her body.

They had put Mary in a little side ward off the main infirmary, because it would be more private. Really, she should have been taken to the nearby hospital, they said, but it happened that one of Broadacre’s nurses had trained in midwifery not so long ago, and no complications were anticipated.

Only Christabel’s presence enabled Mary to cling to her resolve. Freedom, whispered Christabel, as Mary writhed and moaned on the bed. The attention of the world once again. Maybe even escape from this tedious
place. We wove the dreams and we laid the plans, Mary, but there’s always a price, remember? There’s always a price, Mary, every time, and this is the price we have to pay this time.

All very well for Christabel to say that. It was not Christabel who was gasping with agony in a bed, or whose hair was becoming stringy and sweat-soaked with the pain, and it was not Christabel who was humiliatingly sick during the birth, not once but several times, so that they had to prop her up in the bed and hold the basin under her mouth.

Dreadful. Disgusting. Yes, but hold on to the plan, Mary, remember the plan.
It was announced today that Sixties killer Mary Maskelyne gave birth to a son–a daughter–the result, it is thought, of a secret liaison with another inmate of Broadacre
…

Would that one work? Would people believe the story of a ‘secret liaison’? Would they say, Oh, the poor creature, she found some love in her life at last, but even that was taken away from her?

Just as, after one final unbelievable cleaving of agony when she thought they were sawing her body in two, they took the child away from her…

‘A daughter,’ they said when at last the agony began to recede. ‘A fine little girl. Dark hair and blue eyes. Six and a half pounds.’

Mary knew quite well that all new-born babies had blue eyes and she did not care how much the thing weighed. When they asked would she not like to hold the child,
or suggest a name, she turned her face away, tears in her eyes, and the nurses murmured to one another that she was being so brave, poor thing. They gave her something to help her to sleep; it spun her down into a deep, velvety unconsciousness.

But just before she toppled over the end of oblivion, she heard quite clearly one of the nurses say, ‘Shall I take the baby now, doctor? The foster parents have filled in all the forms. They’re expecting us to phone them as soon as we can–I’ve got the home number and the husband’s office number in London as well.’

And the doctor replied that yes, the phone call had better be made, but that the wife, rather than the husband, should be telephoned. Apparently as an afterthought he asked if they were aware of the child’s parentage.

‘Not the names, of course,’ said the nurse. ‘But they do know it’s the child of a long-term prison inmate, and they don’t mind in the least.’ Her voice was muffled for a moment as she leaned over to wrap the baby more carefully. ‘Poor souls, they can’t have children themselves, and they’ve been so anxious to adopt.’

Parents. A husband with a London phone number. The words etched themselves into Mary’s brain as if they were being traced in acid, and as she fell helplessly into the drug-induced slumber her last thought was that Ingrid had betrayed her.

The next night Mary asked for the sleeping pills again, and the night after that as well. The infirmary people
thought she was grieving for the child, and gave them to her without question. Sleep was healing, they said.

You only had to be inside places like Broadacre and the youth place for a week to find out how to put pills under your tongue and pretend to take them. Mary had never done it before, but she managed it without any trouble, hiding the pills in a rolled-up tissue under her pillow.

The plan worked exactly as Mary had hoped. When Ingrid came to visit her in the little side ward two days later it was easy to offer the bitch a drink of orange juice from the plastic bottle on her bedside table.

‘We have to drink to the child,’ said Mary, pouring out two glasses. ‘We could pretend it’s champagne, couldn’t we?’ Please, said her eyes. Do this for me, Ingrid. I’ve had to give up my daughter.

Ingrid, the silly emotional cow, fell for it. ‘We’ll drink to her happiness,’ she said, taking the glass from Mary’s hands, not even looking at it, not seeing the faint cloudiness from the crushed sleeping pills.

Mary waited until Ingrid slumped back in the wooden visitor’s chair, and then pounced.

As Krzystof and Patrick walked through the bleak corridors, unlocking and relocking doors as they went, Krzystof asked how Mary Maskelyne came to be in Moy.

‘An English inmate in a Scottish unit?’ said Patrick. ‘That’s what you mean, is it? It’s partly to do with a research project I’m heading. I managed to screw a grant out of one of the Edinburgh faculties last year, and then St Thomas’s Hospital in London came up with some funding as well. That’s made it possible for us to get quite a number of likely case-studies transferred here. The various government departments rather latched onto that.’

‘Putting all the bad eggs into one basket?’

‘Yes. It might sound a bit calculating to work like that–as if we take a begging bowl round–but it’s the only way we can keep going with the research. That’s a vital part
of the job, for me. There’s still so much we don’t know about this kind of mania, or any kind of mania, and it’s a sad fact of life that we need sordid dosh to study it.’

Krzystof said he understood only too well about grants and bequests. The Rosendale was reasonably self-supporting but they were always thankful when a large donation was made.

‘I’d like to see your Rosendale Institute one day,’ said Patrick.

‘We’re quite proud of it. Sometimes we give lecture tours or take exhibitions round to schools and history societies. I’m only one of the interpreters, so I’m mostly sent out with the buyers and the scouts, but I sometimes help with the tours–they bring us some of the sordid dosh. We were in Poland last year–they have some amazing things there.’

‘Isn’t there a Polish church filled with things made by people from the concentration camps?’

‘Yes, several of them. We don’t negotiate for anything like that, of course, but sometimes we’re allowed to make videos. They can be quite an interesting part of an exhibition.’

D wing was at the top of a flight of stairs and along an upper corridor with doors opening off it. Each door had a spyhole at eye-level and a small name-board outside. Electric alarm bells were sunk into the wall at regular intervals, each one painted with scarlet enamel–an unpleasant reminder that this was a high-security unit.

Krzystof was finding Moy a dreadful place, even though he knew, logically, that the inmates had to be locked away,
for their own safety and for the safety of everyone else. This is all they have, he thought, appalled, and this is all their life will ever be. Locked rooms, clanging iron bars, strict regimentation…Yes, but most of these people have killed and mutilated other human creatures. They’re mentally sick, and they’re extremely dangerous.

At his side, Patrick said very gently, ‘It’s a cruel old world at times, Krzystof. We do what we can for the patients, and we’re as humane as we can possibly be.’

‘Do you make a practice of thought-reading?’

‘Occasionally. I’m sorry you’re finding this so distressing. Perhaps if you weren’t here to try to trace your wife you’d be better armoured.’

Krzystof could not decide whether to be comforted by Irvine’s swift comprehension or annoyed. But it was true that he was a skin short at the moment.

Patrick said, ‘Being locked away in her room every night was one of the things Mary Maskelyne found difficult when she first came here. She had been at Broadacre, and Broadacre was never especially well run. Mary used that to her advantage, of course. In fact I suspect that if there had been more supervision there the wretched attendant she killed might still be alive.’

‘Now that I do remember hearing about,’ said Krzystof.

Patrick glanced at him. ‘It was at least twenty-five years ago,’ he said. ‘Mary was barely twenty at the time. You couldn’t have been very old when it happened.’

‘I wasn’t, but I remember seeing the TV news reports.
I remember hearing what was done to that attendant and it stuck in my mind. I used to have nightmares about it for weeks afterwards.’

‘Yes, it was a nasty business,’ said Patrick. ‘Mary thought the woman had betrayed her in some way–she thought the woman had lied to her.’

‘She knocked the attendant unconscious or something, didn’t she? And then—’

‘Say it,’ said Patrick as Krzystof paused. ‘Exorcise the childhood nightmare. Don’t you know the old belief that in order to rout out and banish a demon you must first name it?’

Krzystof grinned. ‘And I was thinking you were a man of science.’

‘I am, but there’s often a grain of good common sense in the ancient beliefs.’

Krzystof said, ‘All right. The story was that Maskelyne drugged the woman or knocked her out, and then cut off her lips with a fruit knife.’

‘That’s pretty much what happened. The poor woman died from shock and loss of blood. Maskelyne said she had absolutely no memory of doing it, and it was only two or three days after she gave birth to a child. They said at the inquest that Maskelyne could have been suffering from some form of post-natal syndrome, depression, baby-blues, whatever label you like to give it. She could
just
have been suffering from something like that, of course, although I don’t think anyone really believed it. And she’s never referred to either the child or the dead woman since.’

‘Curious, that,’ said Krzystof. ‘You’d expect any woman to have some feeling for her own child.’

‘Mary isn’t just “any woman”,’ said Patrick dryly, and stopped before a door. ‘This is her room,’ he said. ‘You’ll remember what I said about her being at her most dangerous when she seems most sane, won’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Krzystof, but as Patrick unlocked the door his heart was beating fast with apprehension. He thought: I’m about to meet one of the dark ladies of the twentieth century. Mad or sane, this woman was a macabre legend by the time she was fifteen. Her name will certainly stick in the history books, along with all those other evil icons–Myra Hindley and Rosemary West and their sisterhood. Lizzie Borden with the axe. Ought I to be feeling more fear than I do? he thought. Ought I even to be feeling awed? I’d happily feel all the emotions available to mankind if it would give me a clue to where Joanna is.

The anger and the bitterness he had sensed earlier on was strongly present in Mary Maskelyne’s cell-like room, but at first impression Mary Maskelyne did not look like a legend, and she did not even look particularly evil. She was a small slight figure with short dark brown hair. She had on a plain dark sweater with a grey skirt and if you saw her in the street or in a restaurant or a supermarket you would not give her a second look. You would barely give her a first look, in fact. It took a moment to superimpose onto this insignificant woman the famous photograph of the fourteen-year-old girl with the Sixties eye make-up and smooth Sixties hair. Krzystof was just thinking that
after all there was nothing so very remarkable here when the small figure turned its head to look directly at him, and he felt as if something cold had trickled through his mind. This one was not unremarkable at all and she was not insignificant by any means. And if she had in any way latched onto Joanna…

But after that first look Mary Maskelyne seemed almost to retreat behind a veil of conventionality. She listened as Patrick Irvine introduced Krzystof and explained briefly what had happened, adding that as far as possible they were trying to piece together Joanna’s movements before she disappeared. Mary had spent some time with her after the talk: could she remember anything that might give any clue to Joanna’s state of mind? Any names mentioned, or places, perhaps?

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can help you,’ said Mary, and Krzystof heard with a further shock that her voice was rather gentle and soft. There might have been a slight accent–southern counties, was it?–but it was barely discernible. ‘I don’t think she said anything that you’d call significant.’

Krzystof said, ‘I didn’t think there would be anything. But I’m clutching at all possibilities. I’d be very grateful if you could tell me a bit about your discussion.’

‘We talked mostly about writing,’ said Mary, frowning slightly as if thinking back. ‘She gave me a few very good tips, in fact.’ A swift glance to Dr Irvine. ‘I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at a short story.’

‘Good idea,’ said Patrick, non-committally.

‘So I talked to your wife about it. She was very helpful.
Interested.’ The curious eyes turned to Krzystof again and this time he pinned down the elusive flicker of recognition. Snake’s eyes. Dark and calculating and watchful. ‘She’s very attractive, isn’t she, your wife?’ said Mary thoughtfully, and at once Krzystof felt a sharp stab of anger and panic slice through him. He remembered that it had been hinted that the murdered woman at Broadacre had been Mary’s lover. Had this soulless, snake-eyed creature looked on Joanna with some kind of desire? But he said, as casually as he could, ‘Yes, very.’

‘She did tell me that she was staying in Inchcape for a couple of weeks,’ said Mary, still apparently searching her memory. ‘She didn’t say exactly where, of course…’ This time the glance she sent to Patrick was unmistakably malicious. ‘That would be your instruction, wouldn’t it, Dr Irvine? “Never tell the inmates where you live”, isn’t that what you always say?’

‘It’s a reasonable precaution,’ said Patrick, unfazed.

‘It’s in case any of us manage to break out,’ said Mary to Krzystof, and incredibly there was a glint of amusement. Before he could think what to say, she said, ‘But she did say it was in Inchcape, because she said she thought it was a beautiful spot. Oh, and she mentioned the Round Tower–that’s one of the famous landmarks, isn’t it? She said it was intriguing. You’ve searched there, have you?’

‘The police searched it,’ said Krzystof. ‘They didn’t find anything.’

‘Oh, and I thought I might be giving you a clue.’ The unnerving eyes went on studying Krzystof. ‘Have you
seen the tower yourself?’ she said. ‘Do you know about its origins?’

‘I’ve seen similar ones in Ireland,’ said Krzystof, unsure whether this conversation was helping him but seeing no reason not to follow the direction it was taking. ‘And round towers crop up in a number of cultures, although the basis for their existence varies with the country. As a matter of fact I’m staying with someone who encountered one in India as a child—’

He stopped at once. The reaction was unmistakable. As if a strong light had been switched on behind the blank eyes. But she only said, ‘A tower? In India? How interesting,’ and Krzystof glanced at Irvine for guidance.

Patrick said, smoothly, ‘Mary’s family had connections with India before she was born. She has always found it an intriguing country.’

This seemed safe enough. Krzystof said, ‘Yes, I’ve always thought so. The ancient religions and the rituals. The–the friend I’m staying with was in a tiny northern province as a child. It was many years ago, but she remembers it quite well; she was telling me about it only this morning when I asked about Inchcape’s tower.’

Mary Maskelyne was staring at him. Her hands were clutching the chair-arms so tightly that the knuckles had turned white, and although her face was so expressionless as to almost seem like a mask, that strong light blazed from her eyes. She said, ‘Was the place where your friend stayed by any chance Alwar?’

‘Yes,’ said Krzystof, slowly. ‘Yes, I believe it was.’

Alwar.
Alwar
. The word reverberated through Mary’s mind, until her head throbbed and pounded with it.

After Dr Irvine and Joanna Savile’s husband had gone, she sat for a long time, staring out of her tiny window, watching the sun setting in its crimson and bronze glory, trying to assemble her thoughts into some semblance of logic.

So. So, there was someone living in Inchcape who had spent a few childhood years in Alwar. So, let’s not jump to conclusions, Mary. Yes, but Krzystof Kent said ‘many years ago’. She was in Alwar many years ago, he had said. So she was not a very young person, this friend. But she could not be all that elderly or she wouldn’t be having people to stay in her house.

But let’s stay calm. Let’s remember that even if she’s the right age, this friend, this woman on Moy’s doorstep, and that even if she was in India in the late nineteen forties, so were a lot of other people. Yes, but how many of them were in Alwar? Alwar was a small place in India’s north-west. It had a palace and a museum and some industry, but its population then was only that of a small market town. Mary knew all these facts very well indeed; she had grown up knowing them.

But this woman had known about the tower at Alwar; she had told Krzystof Kent about it, because Inchcape’s Round Tower reminded her of it. She
must
have meant the Tower of Silence at Alwar. She
must
.

Christabel would know if this not-so-young, not-so-old female had really been there, of course; she would know if this was the survivor from that blood-smeared
night when Christabel and those other children had died.

But Christabel was being infuriatingly silent. Mary knew she was close by, because she could feel her presence in the way that she almost always could nowadays. But there was no emotion coming from her, and no sense of her mind locking into Mary’s. Because Christabel had heard what had been said, and was still stunned by it?

I hate that child who escaped
…Leila Maskelyne had said, over and over until Mary had wanted to scream.
She has had the life our dear one should have had…Why couldn’t she have died instead of our dear girl
…

Mary had always hated the unknown girl as well. She had spoiled their lives, that child. If she had been the one to die instead of Christabel, Mary’s parents would have loved her. Mary would have known Christabel properly, as an older sister, instead of having this shadow-image who whispered into her mind.

It was stretching coincidence rather a long way to think that Krzystof Kent’s hostess might be that unknown child who had escaped, but if you added everything up it was just about credible. If she could find out a name–yes, that was the crux of this whole thing. A
name
. She wondered who she could talk to on Moy’s staff who might know the local people, and she began to frame apparently innocent questions. You could do that kind of thing without raising suspicions providing you were clever and cunning. And Mary could be very clever and very cunning indeed; none of the stupid sheep-creatures who guarded her really knew just how clever and cunning.