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A CAR SPED BY ON THE motorway. Edward laughed then frowned.
“You think she’s in Black Gables?”
“I’ve brought a car,” Prakong said. “Also machetes, wire-cutters, two big axes, crowbars, torches, loft-light ...”
“Well ... well, I suppose it’s worth a try. We’d better go back to my house first, get changed.”
“Fine. That’s where I’ve parked the car.”
“Have you been over there lately?”
“This morning.”
“It’s boarded up, there’s a wall of timber with a year’s growth of shrubs and weeds underneath then a solid ring of barbed wire. It’s unassailable. If she is in there, she - she must be dead, mustn’t she?”
“We can’t discount the possibility. Are there no tunnels out of the house?”
“Nothing that extends that far. What would be the point?”
“It’s an old house. Getting Roman Catholic priests in and out?”
“The Swinters have been Anglican since roughly sixteen hundred.”
Prakong sighed. “Why don’t I just tell you what I know?”
“Good idea, yes.”
“After I wrote to you I had a sudden insight. That often happens. For some reason, you occasionally have to go through the motions of giving up. It’s a well known psychological phenomenon. William James, among others, discusses the fact. Anyway, Appleton’s demand that you prove yourself ‘worthy’: I’d interpreted that in intellectual terms. But actually, that’s not what people usually mean when they talk about ‘being worthy’. They mean demonstrating moral strength of character.”
“So you dismissed Madama Butterfly?”
“It wasn’t entirely irrelevant. The plane tickets were there to throw us off the scent. Our ‘worthiness’ there was our ability to see through the hoax.”
“Then what?”
“Then I decided I’d talk to Valérie. Given any other working hypothesis I’d have thought of that sooner, but the idea that Appleton had gone to Nagasaki and taken Noonie with him made it seem superfluous. And there was the difficulty in finding her - Valérie.”
“What difficulty?”
“She’s moved to Paris so she can be close to her new beau. ‘Michel’, from the French Ministry of Culture. I didn’t meet him.”
“What happened to Phillip?”
“Apparently he skied off a ravine and broke his neck.”
“Good God.”
“She doesn’t seem to miss him. Anyway, it was only after we’d been talking for some time that I discerned a lead. Almost by chance. After that, everything fell into place.”
“So what did she say?”
“I mentioned the fact that Black Gables had been boarded up. She said it was a shame, but needs must and she hadn’t thought about it lately. I said it was a pity about the tree trunks leaning up against it, the barbed wire, etcetera. Sad to do something that would hasten its decay.”
“What was her reaction?”
“She looked at me as if I was mad.”
“She probably thought you were being impertinent.”
“On the contrary. You see, she knew nothing about the tree trunks, the barbed wire, etcetera. As far as she knew, she’d simply had it boarded up. She actually took some convincing that I was being serious.”
“So who...?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
“Wh - ? Ah.”
“Just to confirm, I went to see the people who carried the work out: JL Hardrow. The order to put all the ‘extras’ in place came from a ‘representative’ of Valerie’s who delivered ‘her’ instructions in person and paid a substantial fee in cash up front. Way over the estimate, in fact. Bald, elderly, red-faced, stout. He was emphatic that they were her instructions and since he was able to provide a plausible story to that effect, they believed him.”
“I’m sure the money must have helped.”
“I’m sure it did.”
They turned a corner. Edward picked up his pace. “So far so good. But the central question remains. As Lek put it, you don’t just wake up from a coma to order.”
“I don’t think she was ever in a coma to begin with.”
“What? Come on, she was on life-support in a hospital. You’ve actually seen the records.”
“It was a private hospital. Private hospitals are privately owned. And this one’s owned by Appleton. Was she on life-support? All the paraphernalia was in place. Whether she was hooked up to it is another matter.”
“I see, yes.”
“If my theory’s correct, he gave you a copy of Girlfriend in a Coma to bolster his deception. In fact, that’s what a lot of this has been about: devices to stop us thinking ‘outside the box’. Among other things, ‘worthy’ probably meant overcoming those devices.”
“But what about the medical staff? They can’t all have been his minions?”
“They weren’t in on it, if that’s what you mean. But he took care only to employ people who would be in awe of his medical expertise. If he said she was hooked up to the life-support machine, who were they to question it? It probably never occurred to them. And Appleton was her chief carer – he was there most of the time. It would probably have been easy for him to deceive even professionals, providing they were inexperienced and deferential enough and allowed sufficiently little access.”
“Assuming she’s not in a coma then, what is wrong with her?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“Sorry, what are you saying? She was just pretending?”
Prakong laughed. “It’s a little more complex than that.”
“Then what?”
“We know that the night she went into her ‘coma’ was the night she returned to England after discovering her mother and brothers were dead. That was also the night Charles died. And of course, she’d lost you. So I think she really did try to take an overdose – it seems psychologically plausible. But I also think Appleton got to her before she had the chance to do any real damage. I think he put her into some sort of hypnotic trance, made easier because she wanted to enter a state of oblivion. To some extent, I think she must now be keeping herself in that state, assuming she’s still alive. Because she’s collaborating with him mentally, and because he’s such an experienced practitioner, I think he’s able to draw her through the various states of unconsciousness at will. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s spent most of her time since succumbing in state of virtual life-suspension. But if he needs to move quickly, at short notice, he can probably bring her to something close to consciousness.”
“Close to consciousness?”
“Something akin to sleepwalking. Think about it. Most of us spend most of our lives doing the equivalent of sleepwalking. While we’re walking along now, for example, we’re perfectly able to avoid obstacles and notice what’s going on. But it’s a very restricted form of awareness. We do it almost automatically because mostly we’ve got something else in our mental foreground. But imagine this kind of awareness without anything in the mental foreground. To an observer, we’d probably appear little different. Yet subjectively, there’d be all the difference in the world.”
“The difference between having the light on and having it off.”
“Precisely.”
“And this is how Appleton was able to get Noonie through customs at Heathrow airport?”
“You’ve got to remember she’s a very willing patient. Normally, the brain would resist something like this but, if my theory’s right, she’s embracing it.”
“Why did they even go through Heathrow to begin with?”
“To throw us off the scent. That, plus the airline tickets – which we were certainly meant to find – could only mean they’d gone to Japan. No one was meant to think of looking for them this close to home. No one who wasn’t ‘worthy’, that is. My guess is that as soon as they reached France they boarded a ferry back to England.”
“But what about Appleton? If you’re right he’s now in Black Gables as well.”
Prakong nodded. “I think so.”
“Doing what? It can’t be very nice in there. It must be pitch black. The electricity, gas and water have presumably been cut off. Although, wait: there’s a generator. In the kitchen, or just behind it.”
“I thought there might be. They’d still need to power it. I can’t imagine they’d be able to stockpile a year’s fuel.”
“Fair enough. Given that the windows have been boarded up, they’d need to have the lights on more or less constantly. Not to mention the heating.”
“This generator: would you be able to start it if we, say, took some fuel?”
Edward gave a single nod. “Diesel. I’ll do my best, although if it’s not been used, parts of it might have rusted or seized up. From what I remember, though, it’s quite noisy. It might be a bit of a giveaway.”
“I wasn’t thinking about starting it up it till after we’d searched the premises. Obviously, if we use it to put all the lights on we’ll be given away anyway.”
“We’ll need a twenty-four hour garage then. There’s one in Maidenborough.”
“Not too far away. Good.”
Edward shook his head as if to clear it. “The upshot of all this, of course – assuming it’s right - is that I’m not ‘worthy’. You are. You’re the one who solved it.”
“Had it not been for me, I think you’d have solved it long ago.”
“Really? You think so?”
“One of the most fascinating things about this job is it throws up how easily human thinking gets into a rut. If you start to think in certain ways, small successes as a result of that come to serve as justifications for more of the same. If you hadn’t called me in, you wouldn’t have come across the airline tickets and you wouldn’t have thought she was in Nagasaki. Each of those things was interconnected so they seemed mutually supportive. And they foreclosed new avenues of inquiry. Without me, you’d have had to think about Black Gables. My slant artificially prevented you doing that.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“You’re welcome.”
They reached Edward’s house. The lights were still on. His cup of tea was still on the carpet. Prakong went out to the car and returned with two sets of black clothes and two balaclavas.
“I don’t suppose there will be anyone around when we get there,” he said, “but it’s best not to take chances. I haven’t had time to map out the exits and the place is boarded and fortified. If we’re discovered, we need to act in concert. In that case, you follow my instructions, okay?”
Edward opened the door to his freezer and peered inside. “Surely, the important thing is that we don’t trip over each other and we avoid capture. Since I know all the hideouts and they’re all inside the house, I think I’m best qualified to coordinate any retreat.”
“Yes, okay, accepted. But I think you should tell me about these hideouts so if something does go wrong, I’m not fumbling about in the dark. If we lose each other, that could be the end. Before we set off, I want you to sit down and draw me a plan of the premises, including items of furniture.”
“That could take a long time.”
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Edward opened the bottom freezer compartment. It was filled with little cubes, wrapped in tinfoil and nearly a year’s growth of frost.
“What are you looking for?” Prakong said.
“Something Thanongsak Chongdee gave me when I first went to work with him. He said if I ever found Noonie, I should give her one of these. If she was subject to some sort of mental blockage, it might help snap her out of it.”
“What are they?”
“I don’t know. He just told me to trust him ... and I do.”
Prakong took one out and scraped the ice and some of the tinfoil away. He frowned and put a tiny portion into his mouth.
“Well?” Edward said.
He smiled. “It’s a piece of durian.”
Edward drew two floor plans and explained them. Prakong asked about the elevation and mass of specific objects, how worn the carpets were, what sorts of things could be requisitioned at short notice to bridge the barbed wire. He planned exit routes from six equidistant positions.
They changed into the black clothes and put coats on. They got in Prakong’s tiny hire car and drove to Maidenborough for diesel then double-backed to Black Gables. They didn’t speak. Edward disembarked when they were five hundred yards away and checked the coast was clear. He gave a discreet wave. Prakong switched the headlights off and drove into the grounds.
As soon as the house came into view, the moonlight made the scale of the task dauntingly clear. Black Gables was almost invisible behind the boles that had been laid upright against it. On a previous visit, Edward had estimated there were over two hundred, each about the width of a man. Some had subsided into their neighbours. Most looked as if they had sunk into the ground and were stuck there. Shrubs, brambles and the remains of climbers constituted a second front against intrusion. The house, the boles and the deep undergrowth were enclosed in a continuous apron of thick barbed wire, just over chest height.
The building betrayed no chink of light or life. The wind, hardly more than a breeze, was amplified to a reverberating moan as it passed through the brushwood. On the eaves, the beginnings of a frost glistened.
Prakong stopped and switched off the engine. They sat in silence looking through the windscreen.
“What are we going to use to cross the barbed wire?” Edward said. “We’ll have to make a bridge of some kind.”
“It’s not a First World War barricade. We don’t have to storm it. We’re going to use wire clippers. If we cut it away in six inch sections, it shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes before we’ve made a sizeable gap. We’ll have to be careful with the pieces, though. If we have to make a swift exit this way, we don’t want to fall on it or have it go through our shoes. I’ve brought two plastic buckets.”
“Shall we walk round first? See if we can spot possible exits or entrances?”
“It might make our lives easier.”
They got out of the car. It was colder now they’d left the huddle of the village. Edward was glad Prakong’s black clothing had included a pair of gloves and a thick puffa jacket. The breath came out of their mouths in long white packets.
They scaled a padlocked wooden gate and walked round to the back of the house. Charles’s ornamental lawn was now a bumpy mulch, halfway to being frozen. The trees were mostly bare and stark. A few evergreens loomed black.
Black Gables was as strongly fortified from the rear as it had been from the front. After ten minutes, they were back at the front where they started.
“If anyone is in there,” Edward said, “they haven’t been outside in a very long time. If JL Hardrow put the finishing touches to all this last January, we’re looking at an eleven month confinement.”
Prakong flicked the boot open and handed Edward a pair of wire clippers and a plastic bucket. “Even if there’s no one inside, there could still be valuable clues. Let’s get going. Remember, there’s no rush, so don’t get cut.”
They removed their gloves. Starting from the centre, they clipped outwards, removing short sections of wire and dropping them into their buckets. The most difficult sections were at the base, where it had sunk into the mud. After about five minutes, their hands became numb with the cold.
Suddenly, Edward started. Behind the tree trunks, in the gaps between the boards on the windows, tiny chinks of light seeped out. “Look.”
“What?” Prakong said. His eyes followed Edward’s. “Good God.”
They stopped working.
“What do you think it means?” Edward said.
“It could be we’ve triggered something.”
“A switch?”
“Maybe. Perhaps, underfoot ... Linked to a light in the house.”
“But there must be more than one light. Look, it’s every room.”
They looked along the length of the house and then at the upstairs.
“If there is anyone in there,” Prakong said, “they can’t have heard us. They’re behind a set of boards and a window pane.”
“Listen.”
They both strained their ears. There was a mechanical hum.
“The generator?” Prakong said.
Edward nodded.
Prakong suddenly backed up and began to walk away to his left. “I’m going round to the back of the house. If there are lights on round there as well, we can probably assume they’re on in every single room in the house.”
“So?”
“So that would reduce the chances of it being some sort of response to us.”
“There must be someone in there. Unless there’s some sort of timer. But after a year - ”
“You’d think they’d have run out of fuel, yes. Odd, very odd. The truth might be stranger than we can imagine.”
They climbed back over the gate onto the rear lawn. The humming of the generator intensified as they approached the kitchen. The light was the same: dim enough to melt into the dark unless you were looking for it but indicative of a sundering brilliance within the house itself.
Five minutes later they stood beside the car again. As far as they could see, the lights were still on.
“What now?” Edward said.
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“For them to go off, of course.”
“What if they don’t?”
“We’ll come back tomorrow.”
“What if they do go off?”
“We resume cutting the wire. If they then go on again, we know we’ve triggered something. But I don’t think we have.”
“What if they’re still on tomorrow night? What if they never go off?”
They got back into the car, taking care to close the doors as quietly as possible. They couldn’t put the heater on, but the temperature began to rise just from their bodies’ confinement.
“As you said before we started,” Prakong said, “generators require fuel. Fuel can’t last for ever.”
“I don’t know. My feeling is it’s squatters. You said a moment ago the truth may be stranger than we can imagine. But it needn’t be. The least strange thing consistent with all the evidence is that someone’s broken in, they’re living in there and they’re able to come and go in a way that we haven’t yet been able to work out.”
“Okham’s Razor.”
“What’s that?”
“The philosophical tenet that if you have two theories of equal explanatory power, the simplest should always be preferred - for practical purposes.”
“Exactly.”
“And we have two hypotheses here. One: there are entrances and exits we don’t know about. Two: sealed inside are two people who’ve managed to survive for a year and who still have fuel for a houseful of lights. Hypothesis one is definitely the simpler.”
“That’s right.”
“So shall we go home, then?”
“Go home? You mean, abandon what we’re here to do?”
“That would be the sensible option.”
“Yes, yes: I see that now. No, I don’t want to go home. Obviously not. I want to get to the bottom of this.”
Prakong watched the house. Suddenly, the lights went out. “You see, Ockam’s Razor only tells you which theory to prefer. It doesn’t tell you which is true. I make that thirty minutes more or less exactly.”
“Back to wire cutting?”
“Let’s wait another five minutes.”
They sat silently in the relative warmth for five minutes, then got out and resumed cutting, continually and nervously watching the house.
It took them fifteen minutes to cut a breach wide enough for several people to pass through. They took their buckets to the edge of the garden and emptied them next to a compost heap.
They went back to the car. Prakong stowed the wire-clippers and the buckets away. “Get in. We’re going to drive up to that window directly in front of us.”
“Drive up to it?”
“There could be man-traps on the ground. As for the car, the excess is a hundred pounds. After that, we’re covered by the insurance.”
They put their seat belts on out of habit and drove slowly through the gap. They came to a halt in front of the tree trunks. Prakong turned the engine off.
“Beats walking,” Edward said.
“It’s better than losing a leg. Now, be very careful. I’ve got a metal pounder in the boot. If there are traps on the ground, we want them to fasten on something other than us. Give the ground outside your door a good wallop before you step out.”
“Hang on: how can I get to the boot without getting out?”
Prakong paused. “Yes. Apologies.”
He reversed the car, then drew forward again to their left, then reversed and did the same to their right, then reversed and pulled forward to their original position.
“Trap-free, I think,” he said. “Let’s get out.”
“We’ve reached the point where we try to pull some of the tree trunks off the house so we can get to the windows, yes?”
“I think so,”
“Come on, then.”
They got out.
“Don’t step too far from the car,” Prakong said.
Edward slapped the side of the nearest trunk. “This one? Ready?”
They both got behind it and pushed. It was stuck fast.
“You keep pushing,” Prakong said. “I’ll go the other side and pull.”
“Have you got a spade?”
“It’s the one thing I haven’t brought.”
“Back to plan A then.”
They pushed and pulled without causing the slightest movement. They panted heavily and stood back and examined it.
“I think it’s intertwined with the others right at the top,” Edward said. “Perhaps we should try a different one, or another window.”
“I’ve got a better idea.”
Prakong went to the boot and returned with a jack. He inserted it between the tree trunk and the wall. He attached the handle, applied both hands and began to turn. To Edward’s astonishment, the tree began to move. There was an ominous creak as it extricated itself from its neighbours. Prakong looked up and his face filled with horror.
“It’s going to collapse!”
He snatched Edward’s arm. They ran behind the car and threw themselves on the ground. The creaking intensified and was succeeded by five seconds’ worth of deafening thumps and crashes as a family of tree-trunks crashed to earth around them. Just when they thought it was safe, one landed on the car. All the windows exploded and they were showered with glass.
They weren’t dead or injured. The silence of the night resumed. They crawled out dazed. Six tree trunks lay jumbled about then, the nearest embedded in the car roof.
They waited for the switching-on of the lights inside, or at least sounds of activity. But there was nothing.
“What did you say the excess was?” Edward said.
Prakong scowled. “Good God, Laurel and Hardy couldn’t have made a bigger hash of this. Now we’ll have to go into the house. We’ve no alternative. Once daylight comes someone will find this car, it’ll be traced to me and I’ll be deported.”
“Well at least we’ve got a clear view of the window.”
“What?”
It was true. The boarded window they had been aiming to uncover was completely exposed. It simply remained to prise away the boards.
“Unfortunately,” Prakong said, “although we have to go into the house, I’ve just realised, we can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“The crowbar was in the boot.”
They looked at the car boot. Its lid was crushed into the flooring.
“I assume the torches are in there too,” Edward said.
“Yes.”
“And your trusty loft-light.”
“Yes, yes, yes. We’re finished, in other words.”
“Didn’t you put anything on the back seat?”
“I rather wanted to keep it all out of view.”
Edward put his hand through the rear window and pulled out what looked like a roll of cellophane. “What’s this?”
“It’s transparent plastic film, adhesive. We were going to use it to stick over the window then we would have been able to break it noiselessly. But that’s all in the past now. Deportation, here I come.”
“Take it easy, I’ve got an idea. We’ve just used the car-jack. Most jacks have a tool attached for removing the wheels. At one end, it’s a spanner, at the other, it’s a - ”
“It’s a crowbar. My God, yes, you’re a genius.”
They began to scour the ground. Edward wanted to remind Prakong that neither of them yet had any idea what was actually inside the house. Entry being back on the cards wasn’t necessarily a cause for celebration.
“I’ve found it,” Prakong said. “Bring the adhesive film.”
Edward did as he was told. Prakong stood on the bonnet, then on the straddling tree and prised the boards from the window. Edward edged the jack into the gap under the boot lid and folded the lid far enough in on itself to get his hand in. The loft-light was in pieces but the torches had survived.
“Good God,” Prakong said, when he handed them over. “And there I was, thinking you were totally useless.”
“Talk about role reversal then.”
“Go back to the boot and get the machetes.”
“The machetes? But we’ve cleared the undergrowth now.”
Prakong attached the plastic film to the window and tapped just hard enough to break the glass. Without pulling it away, he switched on his torch and shone it into the room. “I wasn’t thinking of the undergrowth. Empty, as far as I can tell.”
Edward’s heart sped up. Till now, it had been possible to treat the whole thing as hardly more than a midnight escapade. Now, there was a strong possibility one or both of them was going to be killed. The adrenalin made him tingle. He went back to the boot and located the machetes. He handed one to Prakong.
“Just put it on the ground for a minute,” Prakong said, “and take what I’m about to give you. Place it gently out of harm’s way.”
He tugged at the plastic and took most of the window away in fragments. He passed it to Edward then, piece by piece, he removed the glass round the edge until the frame was empty. He climbed in. Edward picked up the two machetes again, handed them to Prakong and followed.
They switched their torches on and scanned the room.
Nothing.
For an eerie few seconds, Edward had the impression of being in Charles’s presence again. This was one of his little-used rooms: he’d preferred those on the other side of the house. It had a bookcase at the far end and a hepplewhite sofa at the left. With the exception of a thick layer of dust, some cobwebs and an unpleasant smell, not wholly of damp or stagnation, everything was unchanged.
“Take your shoes off,” Prakong said.
The torches weren’t as powerful as Edward would have liked, nor did their beams scatter as effectively. They provided a tunnel of light and brought what was outside it no further than the border of visibility.
Prakong was already on his way across. He gave the door handle a quick twist – not the painstaking rotation Edward would have preferred – and within a second he was in the hallway. Clearly, he’d decided everything had to be done at speed now. Excessive caution was suddenly out. He panned the hallway with his torch and gestured for Edward to hurry up.
“Where’s the kitchen?” he said. “We need to check that generator out.”
“Over there.”
Edward couldn’t help noticing the smell was much worse. Death and decay.
Prakong set off and Edward tried to draw alongside him. As he passed the staircase however, he heard a flopping noise from above. Instinctively, he turned his torch. He was just in time to see something hurl itself over the top stair and disappear into the darkness where the angle gave no possibility of further illumination.
He stopped dead. What he’d seen was something like a dog. Only, it wasn’t covered in fur. It was covered in flaps of skin. And it dragged itself like an amphibian. For a moment, he was paralysed. Then a deep revulsion worked its way into his system. Was that – could he hear it hauling itself away?
“Come on!” Prakong whispered. “What are you waiting for?”
“Did you see it?”
“What?”
“I don’t know!”
“Tell me in a moment.”
They grabbed the kitchen door handle together and went in, gripping their machetes ready for fierce resistance. There was a scurrying of rodents then silence.
The room was piled with packets of pasta, rice, desiccated vegetables and fruits and muesli, randomly assorted, in six or seven mounds almost as high as the ceiling. A large number had burst or been gnawed open and their contents lay spilled. The left wall supported a three metre tower of metal canisters. At the foot of the opposite wall some identical canisters lay in disarray. Seventy or eighty bottles of tablets with coloured tops stood on the table. Prakong picked one of them up.
“Cod liver oil.”
Edward picked up one of the metal canisters and unscrewed it. “Diesel.”
“So someone’s definitely in this house, somewhere. Or they were. I’m fairly sure we’re not looking at a group of squatters any more. They’d have confronted us by now. They wouldn’t have let us get this far.”
“I saw something. At the top of the stairs. It was like an animal. Not like ... well, I know this is going to sound odd, but ... not like any animal I’ve ever seen before. Four-legged, definitely; slow-moving ...”
“A dog?”
“It didn’t look like a dog.”
“If it’s here, it’s been here for quite some time. It almost certainly won’t look like a dog any more. I don’t suppose it’ll have the strength to attack us.”
“Let’s have a look at the generator.”
They pushed past the mounds and canisters to the generator. Edward put his hand on its side.
“It’s still warm.”
“How do you switch it on?”
He shone his torch onto a key. “Here. It’s still got fuel. If you’ve discounted the idea that we’re going to be confronted ...”
“Leave it off. I haven’t entirely discounted it. Our eyes have become accustomed to the dark now. If we switch it on and anyone later decides to attack us all they need do is switch it off again. In the time it takes our eyes to readjust we’ll be helpless.”
Edward removed they key and put it in his pocket. “We’d better take this with us.”
“The upstairs now?”
“Let’s go.”
The pushed their way out of the room and went back to the stairway. They changed their torches to their left hands and put their machetes in front of them.
Each step made them more rigid. They willed their torches to clear the top and reveal whatever was on the landing, waiting for them. They could hear every little sound. The darkness itself seemed to be uprooting and shuffling towards them.
At the end, however, there was merely a thick silence. More ghastly – because more fully established - than the silence downstairs.
By now, they were pounding with tension. Something was waiting for them somewhere – Edward had actually seen it. A sudden assault by ten or twelve squatters might come as a relief. At least they’d know what they were dealing with. The smell that had been increasing in strength and unpleasantness was now almost unbearable.
Prakong put his hand over his nose. “Do you know which room Noonie lived in?”
“At the west end of the house. I helped her in through the window once. Probably the last door on the right.”
“I suppose we’d better be methodical. Let’s start with the room straight ahead. Then we’ll work our way through each in turn. We’ll do the downstairs afterwards.”
“That would be where Charles lived when he became senile.”
They crossed the landing and opened the door. They were engulfed by a stench so powerful they drew back a pace. They swept the room with their torches and came to bear on the same spot.
Edward had to look twice. He didn’t believe it. Charles’s bed was where it had been during the last few months of his life and lying in it was ... Charles? But he’d seen them lower the coffin into the ground.
He turned to Prakong for reassurance. But Prakong looked as aghast as he was. As they approached the bed together, they realised it wasn’t a man lying there. Not any more. It was a corpse, in an advanced state of decay.
Its body was covered to the neck by thick blankets. The flesh of the face had shrunk exposing the bone. There was a hole where the nose had been and the eyes had shrivelled back, leaving the sockets empty. The teeth were fixed in the illusion of a grin. Although torn and shrunken, it was still recognisably the face of Richard Appleton. Edward felt as if he had been pole-axed, incapable alike of retreating or commenting.
“Come on,” Prakong said.
As suddenly as it had taken hold the spell was broken. They left the room as irresistibly as if they were being expelled by invisible bodyguards.
Edward knew Noonie was dead now. It simply remained to find her.
He couldn’t wait any longer. He was tearful and full of hate and disgust. He threw open the door of the next room along and scoured it with his torch.
She lay on the bed. He had to consciously maintain his upright posture while his mind digested his sense data. He wanted to shout Prakong but he was drawing a breath.
“I’ve – I’ve found her!”
He could hardly believe his eyes. There was nothing of Appleton’s condition about her at all. She looked filthy, ragged and emaciated - but not dead. He put his hand on her neck.
“She’s warm!”
There were two torches on her now.
“Give me the key,” Prakong said. “It’s time to put the generator on.”
The key. Edward fumbled in his pocket. He was trembling so hard it took him a moment to find it.
“I’ll call for an ambulance,” Prakong said as he left the room.
Edward knelt down beside her. She wasn’t breathing. He put his ear to her chest. Nothing. He felt for a pulse. Nothing. He recognised the rags she was wearing: she was the ‘creature’ who’d flopped onto the landing ... So she couldn’t be dead!
His mind was galloped. Shaking her would probably achieve nothing. She was warm. She had to be alive. He put his fingers to his temples and took two long, deep breaths in an attempt to clear his thinking.
Appleton had taken her through the airport. So there had to be some kind of trigger, some physical signal to bring her back. He reached into his pocket and took out the durian. It had defrosted now and it smelt. He guessed it had gone off. But could it ...?
Suddenly, he realised. It wasn’t the durian. That was irrelevant. No, it all made sense now: the ancient house, the impenetrable thickets, the profound sleep of the guiltless. And ‘worthy’.
The lights came on. He stroked a few wisps of hair from her forehead and leaned over her and kissed her lips.
Her lashes flickered. She opened her eyes and looked into the middle distance. Her fingers began to fold and unfold. She turned to face him and focussed and smiled.
“Edward?”
