The house was set on a rise, and as he approached it along the drive it seemed to loom out over him and open its mock-Palladian wings as if to enfold him in its sombre embrace. He wasn’t so fanciful as to take inanimate objects for anything other than they were. No house was haunted, no ghosts walked. Yet not a full day had passed since a man had died here, stabbed in the neck and mutilated and left to lie in a mess of his own blood and breathe his last. Surely such a violent act should leave something behind, a trace, a tremor in the air, like the hum that lingers when a bell stops tolling?
He clung to the belief that death was more than mere extinction. His grandfather had been a bishop. The genes will out.
A bat flitted above him, its wings feathering the encroaching dark.
He tried to feel how it would have felt, to be stabbed and slashed, to fall and bleed and die. When he was young and still a trainee in Templemore, he had imagined that as a policeman he would be granted a special kind of knowledge. He would learn things that other people didn’t know, things of life and, far more significantly, things of death, and dying. A foolish expectation, of course – to live was to live, to die was to die. It was what everyone did. What was there for a detective to detect that other people weren’t privy to?
Yes, he had been deluded in believing that at Templemore he would be received into a secret brotherhood, would be introduced, like an alchemist of old, to a body of arcane and secret knowledge. He had thought he would be not as others were, groping their way purblind through the world, dulled against everything except the simplest affects, the ordinary urges. He would be among the elect, above the world and its trivial doings. A fantasy, of course. And yet.
He had no one, no wife, no children, no lover – no friends, even. Nor had he a family, to speak of – a few cousins he occasionally saw, and an uncle in South Africa who used to send a card every Christmas but then had stopped, having died, probably. There was his father, of course. He thought of him, however, not as a separate entity, but as in some way a part of himself, the tree of which he was an offshoot, and which he would soon overshadow and, in time, outgrow.
None of this troubled him, or not seriously. He didn’t really know himself, and didn’t care to. His life was a state of peculiar calm, of tranquil equilibrium. His strongest drive was curiosity, the simple wish to know, to be let in on what was hidden from others. Everything to him had the aspect of a cipher. Life was a mundane mystery, the clues to the solving of which were strewn all about, concealed or, far more fascinatingly, hidden in plain view, for all to see but for him alone to recognise.
The dullest object could, for him, flare into sudden significance, could throb in the sudden awareness of itself. There were clues, and he was their detector.
It was this train of thought that somehow brought up the image of Geoffrey Osborne’s pale, etiolated wife. He saw her again, saw her, here in the cold blue air of evening, as she had appeared that morning in the kitchen doorway. Standing there, she had seemed not so much present, but to tremble, rather, on the brink of being. As he walked now, stumbling clumsily in someone else’s leaky wellingtons, he found himself saying her name aloud, breathing it out on breaths that billowed like wafts of ectoplasm – Sylvia. It seemed an invocation. A summoning of sorts.
What was this sensation that was flooding through him, wholly novel and yet somehow familiar? Surely he wasn’t falling in love, with a woman he had seen for no more than a moment? Love? That would knock him clean off his plinth.
*
The actual Mrs Osborne, when he encountered her again, was nothing like the daemonic figure of his fevered imaginings in the darkness of the driveway.
He pulled the rope that worked the doorbell. Mrs Duffy, when she opened the door, gave him an odd look that seemed to him at once complicitous and cautionary. Mrs Osborne, she said, had been asking for him. This made him frown. He didn’t like coincidences – she had been asking for him while he was thinking of her – and he felt a stirring of unease.
He found the lady herself in a little parlour off the main hall. It seemed to be her private domain, and all her own work. There was a preponderance of chintz and faded silk, and a liberal strewing of cushions and an array of brass pots and crystal vases. Miniature china figurines stood about in attentive poses, got up in capes and crinolines and knee breeches and cocked hats. The overall effect was uncanny, and faintly comical.
Mrs Osborne was seated on a small, high sofa upholstered in yellow satin. Her dress of dark-blue chiffon had a deep collar, a tight waist, and a wide skirt that fanned out symmetrically on either side of her, arranged just so, its pleats suggestive of the half-shell on which Botticelli’s Venus skims. She wore a string of pearls about her pale neck, and an emerald brooch in the shape of a scarab was pinned to the front of her dress. A small table before her was laid for afternoon tea. There were jugs, silver cruets, bone china cups, little knives, little forks, little spoons. Slices of assorted cakes were arranged on delicate little plates.
Strafford took all this in at a glance, and his heart sank. A star of reflected light on the cheek of the teapot seemed to wink at him in spiteful mirth. He felt a flush of embarrassment at the memory of the gusty emotions he had entertained out on the drive. Love me, love my knick-knacks.
‘There you are!’ Mrs Osborne exclaimed, her smile showing off two rows of small, even teeth, the top front two of which were lightly flecked with lipstick. She was as frothy and frilled as the gewgaws crowding all round her, and her eyes sparkled and her cheek was flushed. Strafford’s heart plunged a fathom deeper still.
Mrs Osborne patted the place beside her on the sofa, inviting him to sit. He pretended not to notice. Instead, he fetched a chair, set it down in front of the tea table and sat stolidly upon it. His hostess frowned briefly, displeased by this rebuff, but then managed again a brilliant yet decidedly cockeyed smile. ‘Yes, of course,’ she murmured, ‘of course – this way we can see each other’s eyes. Much more friendly.’
She seemed to him more than a little mad.
Her hair, which had hung limp and lank that morning, was done up now in an elaborate eighteenth-century style. A thick braid was set tiara-like above her forehead, and at the sides there were bunches of curls that covered her ears. The heel of Strafford’s sock inside his shoe was still wet. The wetness was warm now, and this was worse than when it had been cold. He wished he could be outside again, in the night’s dank darkness. He would like to have been anywhere that was not this make-believe room, with its crowding trinkets and trifles. He felt like the White Rabbit.
‘Shall I be mummy?’ Mrs Osborne asked, and without waiting for him to reply set about pouring the tea. ‘One lump or two?’
‘No sugar, thank you.’
‘Milk?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Ah. You prefer it black. Good, so do I. Here you are.’
The cup, when she passed it to him, rattled very slightly in its saucer. He balanced it on his knee, the tea untasted. ‘Mrs Osborne,’ he said, ‘I have to talk to you about last night.’
‘Last night?’
‘Yes. Or this morning, that is – I mean, when you found Father Lawless. Your husband said you couldn’t sleep and—’
‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, with a tinkle of rueful merriment, ‘I never sleep!’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Strafford paused a moment, licking his lips, then pressed on again. ‘But last night, in particular, I understand you were very – very restless, and that’s why you came downstairs. Will you tell me what happened, exactly?’
‘What happened?’ She gazed at him in seeming bafflement. ‘What do you mean, what happened?’
‘I mean, when you found Father Lawless,’ he said patiently. ‘I wonder, did you switch on the light?’
‘The light?’
‘Yes, the electric light.’ He pointed to the light fixture above his head. It had a pink shade, with roses painted on it. ‘Did you switch it on, when you went into the library?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because I’m wondering how clear a view you had of the body – Father Lawless’s body.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she murmured, frowning, and casting this way and that, as if searching for enlightenment from the wallpaper, or one of her china figurines.
Strafford sighed.
‘Mrs Osborne, you came downstairs at some time in the early hours of this morning and found Father Lawless in the library. Isn’t that so? And he was dead. Do you remember that? – do you remember finding him? Had you turned the light on? Did you see how he had died? Did you see the blood?’
She sat motionless, in silence, still scanning the room in perplexity. ‘I suppose I must have,’ she said uncertainly, in a faint, faraway voice. ‘If there was blood, I mean, I must have seen it’ – she turned suddenly and stared at him – ‘mustn’t I?’
‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ he said. He felt as if he were trying to unwrap some delicately breakable thing from fold upon fold of unexpectedly resistant tissue paper. ‘Can you remember?’
She shook her head from side to side, like an uncomprehending child, still staring at him. Then she stirred herself and sat up very straight, setting her shoulders back and blinking, as though she had just woken from a trance. ‘Would you like some cake?’ she asked, setting her brilliant smile in place again, like a carnival mask. ‘Mrs Duffy baked it – I asked her specially.’ Her look darkened, and she sank abruptly into a sulk. ‘I’m sure it’s very nice,’ she said petulantly. ‘Mrs Duffy’s cakes are always very nice. She’s famous for her nice cakes, Mrs Duffy is – everyone talks about them – the whole county talks about them, Mrs Duffy’s cakes!’
Fat iridescent tears welled in her eyes and sat trembling on the lower lids, but did not fall. Strafford, steadying his cup and saucer with one hand, extended the other across the table, and the woman before him lifted up her own hand, with a child’s solemn tentativeness, and placed it in his. He felt the chill of her palm, felt the small thin bones beneath the skin. Her knuckles were blue. Neither of them spoke, but sat gazing at each other in a shared, bewildered helplessness.
The door opened, with what to Strafford seemed a bang, and Colonel Osborne came bustling in.
‘Ah, here you are!’ he said, beaming at his wife. ‘I was looking for you everywhere.’ He paused, staring at the two of them staring back at him, one holding the other’s hand. ‘Is everything – is everything all right?’ he asked, bewildered himself now.
Strafford let go of Mrs Osborne’s hand and rose from the chair. He was about to say something, he wasn’t sure what, but Mrs Osborne cut him off. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ she snapped, in a new, hard voice, ‘why can’t you all leave me alone!’ Then she jumped up from the sofa, brushing away the unshed tears with the heels of her hands, and pushed past her husband and was gone.
‘I’m sorry—’ Strafford began, at the same moment that Colonel Osborne groaned, ‘Oh Lord!’