Forty-Seven

Robert Wilde was at home with Alice that evening.

The trip to France was the next day, and at six o’clock they were standing in her bedroom, considering her case, packed to overflowing, negotiating as to what she could possibly leave behind without falling forever from the ranks of the super-cool in Year Nine.

‘What’s this?’ Wilde asked.

‘It’s a body blusher.’

‘What do you want that for?’

‘Oh, Dad,’ she sighed. ‘You’re just so hopeless.’

The ferry was due to leave at six the following morning. The plan was that Robert would drive Alice to the port, but if they couldn’t negotiate a reduction in the luggage, Robert was afraid he’d need a trailer in addition to the car.

‘You’re only going for five days,’ he observed, as the bag strained at the seams. ‘You’ve got enough here for a month.’

‘I need these things. I need it all.’ Alice put both hands on her hips and regarded him critically. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’ve been in a bloody mood.’

‘You can’t even lift this, Alice.’

‘It’s my holiday.’

‘OK, fine,’ he told her. ‘Take what you want.’

‘What’s up?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing.’

‘You look wrecked.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he lied.

The phone rang. He went to his own room, and picked it up.

‘Wilde.’

‘Chief Inspector, this is Wallis.’ Robert glanced back at the door, where Alice was standing, watching him. ‘We have some developments here. We have a body at Pennystone Road.’

Robert stared for a second at the floor, then slowly sat down. ‘Whose?’

‘We think it’s Acland.’

‘Acland,’ Wilde repeated, slowly. ‘Where was it?’

‘In the cellar.’

Alice walked towards him. Wilde didn’t ask how or when the cellar had been found—ever since talking to Endersley he had known that a cellar existed, and he knew exactly where the entrance was. It was behind the smooth-walled, smooth-floored space under the stairs that kept creeping back into his conscious thoughts.

Wallis continued to talk. ‘We have a curious situation …’

‘How, curious?’

‘We have Peter York in intensive care and two women in custody. We have a broken water main flooding the bottom floors of the house … that’s where we got the body from, the water.’

‘What is this to do with York?’

‘He was with the body. There was some kind of explosion.’

‘Explosion?’

Alice put a hand on her father’s shoulder. He glanced up at her, and put his own fingers gently on hers.

‘It’s an unnatural death.’

Nothing surprised him any more. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘The body was lacerated.’

‘But he’s been missing a year. How can you tell how he died?’

Wallis took a long pause. ‘I don’t think he’s been dead that long,’ he said, finally. ‘I don’t think he’s been dead more than a day.’

Wilde took the phone from his ear for a second, took a long breath, then replaced it. ‘Where has he been, then?’ he asked. ‘Not in the cellar.’ In the ensuing silence, Wilde’s blood really did run cold. I never heard him, was his first thought. ‘I went to the house only a day or two ago,’ he said.

‘He couldn’t have been there,’ Wallis said. ‘The wall was broken down from the hallway into the cellar stairs. We think Acland was taken down there. Whether he died in the house or in the cellar, we don’t know.’

‘What has York said?’

‘Nothing. He’s unconscious.’

‘And the women?’

‘Off the planet. We’re about to interview them. Wish us luck.’

Wilde shook his head, baffled at the turn of events. ‘Did you speak to your sergeant there?’ he asked.

‘Who would that be?’

‘Harry Endersley,’ Wilde said. ‘Talk to him. Acland is the father of the girl we have down here.’

There was another pause at the end of the line, then Wallis’s voice came back, with a slightly renewed, sharpened interest. ‘You’ll be coming in on this,’ he said.

Wilde glanced up at Alice. ‘I can’t do that until tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I have something more important to do first. But I’ll be with you about twelve.’

He put the phone down.

‘What is it?’ Alice asked. ‘Who died?’

He stood up. ‘Never mind.’

His daughter’s face took on a belligerent expression. ‘Who died?’ she repeated.

‘The girl’s father. We think.’

‘The girl who used to know Anna?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Her father’s been murdered?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Did she do it?’ Alice asked.

He stopped in his tracks, in the act of trying to usher her back to her own room. ‘Did who do what?’ he asked.

‘Did this girl kill her father?’

‘No, no …’ They got out on to the landing before Wilde stopped again, putting his hand to his head.

‘What is it?’ Alice asked.

‘I never could do crosswords,’ he said.

‘Crosswords?’

‘Cryptic bloody crosswords,’ he muttered, thinking aloud.

She smiled—a small, cryptic smile of her own. ‘Give,’ she said.

‘Pack,’ he responded.

He turned, and went downstairs.

He was thinking of McGovern. He had been thinking of nothing else all evening.

He had been thinking about Christine—how Benedict McGovern could possibly know about Christine. He had postulated all kinds of entirely rational explanations for this, among them the fact that McGovern’s family came from within eighty miles of his own, and that feasibly—it was feasible, surely—McGovern had known the tiny Cumbrian village that Wilde came from. Either that—yes, and this was still just feasible—or McGovern knew that his wife had been called Christine because he had asked when he visited the station. Perhaps he had fallen into conversation with one of the officers, and been told …

But there, the line of his reasoning always slid to a halt. He imagined McGovern leaning on the enquiries counter and finding a way of asking the name of the wife of a man he had never met … how? How did one do that? Oh, it was feasible. Yes, it was possible. But not probable. Not at all. And the gate … how could McGovern ever know about that gate?

He tapped his fingers irritatedly against the kitchen worktop, against which he leaned. That was where he had found his line of practical problem-solving completely dissolve into all kinds of impossible theories. The theory, for instance, that McGovern could read his mind. The theory that McGovern and Acland had been involved in some kind of psychic cult. The theory that McGovern—and he felt this more acutely than he could admit in words to himself—the theory that McGovern was inhuman, impervious to human decency. And the conversation with Wallis had kept flashing back to him—

‘What are the last four plagues?’

‘Thunder and hail and earthquake …’

‘And the last?’

He made tea, cut bread for toast, not wanting to think about the last.

‘I am the beginning and the end, the first and the last …’

She believes in the end of the world, he had told Wallis.

That innocent-looking girl with the milkmaid’s plait of hair lying loosely over her shoulder.

She’s waiting for the end of the world.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, aloud.

She had caught some sort of religious fever, Wilde thought. Some emotional infection from a plainly dangerous, even deranged, father. She had been brainwashed by Benedict McGovern himself, the older stepbrother, pouring all kinds of poison in her ear. The world was not going to come to an end tonight or any other night, not for millennia, and nothing that an abused child believed, or what she had succeeded in making Alisha Graham believe, or possibly even what Peter York had been dragged into—none of that altered the fact that it was one vast decayed edifice of lies, playing upon people’s fears. And what did they believe, anyway? Something to do with gates and angels. It was not even original, this continual obsession with Revelation. Every cult he had ever heard of pounced on those eerie chapters at the end of the Bible. It was not even anything new …

He found himself twisting the empty cups around on the tray in front of him. Even he had fallen prey to the same atmosphere, he thought. There was an atmosphere in that house in Pennystone Road, and he had let himself be swayed by it. As for Benedict McGovern …

His thoughts staggered to a halt.

As for Christine …

He turned on the television, trying to push this awful impenetrable crossword, this insane jumble of insoluble clues, to the back of his mind. The weather report was on, and he stopped what he was doing and looked at it.

‘Storm force gales along the south coast …’ the girl was saying, against a backdrop of an immense low pressure drawn against the map of the country.

The phone rang again. He swore softly to himself.

‘I’ve got it,’ Alice called from upstairs.

He watched the forecast.

‘Severe weather warning issued by the Meteorological Office at eighteen hundred hours this evening indicates a deepening band of low pressure sweeping from west to east …’

They were showing pictures now, live, from the borders of Wales. Floods were pouring through riverside towns. The image flashed again, and changed location. In Exeter, the Exe was churning within six inches of the deep channels that contained it just below the city centre. People could be seen on the quayside, staring at the huge volume of water. The reporter leaned against the wind, the microphone sheltered in the lee of his shoulder. ‘There is sleet here,’ he was saying, his voice raised against the wind. ‘The last sleet recorded at this time of year was …’

‘Dad!’ Alice shouted.

He tore his eyes from the screen.

‘Dad!’ He heard Alice come thundering down the stairs. She emerged in the doorway, out of breath. ‘Dad, the phone,’ she said. ‘Quick, quick …’

‘What is it?’ he asked her.

She held out the cordless receiver to him.

‘Quick,’ she repeated. ‘It’s Anna …’