Margot had thought that the prospect of seeing the Torhaus – of actually starting to track down whether it might be Lina’s house and therefore, possibly, hers and Marcus’s – would drive away the stupid suspicion that Marcus had realized the truth about the deaths of Lina and their mother. But it did not. As they drove across the country, she was still remembering that soft insinuation he had made on the night of Stefan Cain’s dinner party; of how brothers and sisters protected one another – except if it came to murder. She kept remembering, as well, how he had looked at her with shocked fear the night their mother died. He looked at her in the same way several times during the journey to Lindschoen – but if their eyes, met, Marcus at once looked away.
But once they had found this gatehouse place, and established it was theirs, all those feelings would go. Margot was sure it was the right house; she said so, several times.
‘I wish I’d been able to find out a bit more,’ said Marcus.
‘You found out an awful lot.’
‘I found out a bit about German land registration,’ he said. ‘It’s a similar system to our own, but it isn’t as easy to get information from it. You have to explain why you want to see a particular entry, and you have to apply to the correct district court. They check whether you’ve got a legitimate claim, and I’m not sure how good our claim would be. There’s only that letter sent to Lina, and it’s half a century ago, and the firm that sent it hasn’t existed for decades.’
‘Let’s find the house and go from there,’ said Margot. ‘That letter you found in Greymarsh House said it was empty – it sounded as if it had been empty for years – so there must be keys somewhere. Somebody must have responsibility for it – even if it’s only to make sure squatters don’t get in or the garden’s kept tidy.’
She did not much care for Lindschoen, although Marcus said it was charming and full of interesting little pockets. If Margot had not known better, she would almost have thought he was putting off finding the Torhaus and tracing its ownership. Perhaps he did not want to admit that he did not know where to start.
But on their second day, he suddenly said they would try the civic office. He was a bit abrupt about it, but they found the office, which was on the outskirts of Lindschoen and which was a bit like a council office at home
Marcus talked to several people while Margot waited. She heard the words Torhaus several times, and then she thought Marcus asked about a key – Schlüssel? he said, several times. The man at the desk laughed, and said something to a colleague, who laughed as well.
‘What did they say?’ asked Margot once they were outside.
‘That there haven’t been any keys to the place for years,’ said Marcus. ‘They were lost decades ago, apparently, and nobody’s ever bothered to have new ones cut, because nobody ever goes there. It’s been empty ever since anyone can remember.’
‘Did you ask who’s supposed to own it? Or if anyone looks after it? Are there neighbours for instance?’
‘Yes, I did, but they just shrugged. They said no one knew who had any responsibility, and that they don’t think there are any neighbours. It probably stands in the middle of a field or halfway up a mountain or in the centre of an aerodrome or something,’ said Marcus. ‘Still, they found a map – bit like our Ordnance Survey map – and they’ve marked the route out.’
‘Good. Shall we have some lunch and drive out there?’
And again there was the curious hesitancy, almost as if he might be trying to make up his mind. He darted that strange, almost-furtive look towards her again. Then he said, ‘Yes, all right.’
‘We might be able to get in,’ said Margot. ‘Even without keys, I mean. It sounds as if it’s pretty ramshackle. And it’s what we’ve come to see.’
They had their lunch, and Marcus followed the directions on the map. There was only one occasion when he swore at her, stopped the car, and snatched the map from her to see the route for himself. Then he apologized. He was tired from the driving, he said, and it was a bit of a strain, still, to keep on the right.
The journey took longer than they had thought, and by the time they came in sight of the gatehouse, it was starting to grow dark.
And as soon as she saw it, Margot knew it would have been better to have stayed away.
They had to drive up a winding, deeply rutted track to reach the house and Marcus swore because if the suspension went or a tyre punctured or the exhaust was wrenched off out here, he had no idea what they would do.
Thick, overgrown hedges thrust against the car, and once Margot had to get out to push some aside before they could drive on. Halfway up the track was a rickety gate which, when she got out to open it, fell off one of its hinges, so they had to carry it to the side of the path and prop it up. Marcus swore again because he had stepped in a patch of thick mud.
‘If it is mud,’ he said. ‘It smells as if it might be from a cow. God, this is frightful. I don’t want to stay here.’
The Torhaus was almost entirely enclosed by a stone wall, which Margot had not expected.
‘And gates as well,’ said Marcus. ‘Can you see them? They’re quite high. I bet they’re locked. Even if they aren’t, they’ll be rusted up and we’ll never get them open. They’re too high to climb over, as well.’
He almost sounded relieved, and Margot looked at him in surprise. ‘Let’s try, though,’ she said. ‘And there’s a bit of wall over there where the stones have fallen away. Can you see? We could climb through.’
‘I suppose we could. Yes, all right. Having come this far …’ The odd thing – the vaguely worrying thing – was that when he said this, Margot had the impression he was not talking about the house. But he reached in the glove compartment for the torch, and they went across the uneven ground to the fallen-away part of the wall. It was easy enough to dislodge a few more bits and squeeze through the crumbling stonework. And there, in front of them, was the Torhaus.
It was ugly and bleak and lonely, and it looked as if it had been quietly decaying for the last fifty years. Margot’s heart sank, and she said, ‘If this really is the place, it would cost a fortune to prove it. And it would cost another fortune to put it right. Because we’d never sell it as it is.’
‘No one would come within a mile of it.’ Marcus had not taken his eyes from the house, and there was an expression in his face that Margot could not interpret.
‘What a disappointment,’ she said. ‘What now? Shall we go back? It’ll start getting dark soon.’
‘No, let’s at least try to get in.’
He walked towards the house, shining the torch to see the way, Margot, hardly believing this was happening, stumbled along at his side. The house loomed over them, as if staring down at the two intruders, and she looked up at the upper windows. Had something moved behind one of them? No, it had just been the reflection of the scudding clouds across the sky. But just for a second or two it had seemed as if a figure walked to a window just under the eaves, and as if a pallid face pressed against the glass.
Marcus did not seem aware of it. He was peering into the ground-floor windows, shining the torch. ‘There’s still furniture in there,’ he said, turning to call back to where Margot was waiting. ‘It looks as if someone simply walked out of it one day and didn’t come back. You’d have thought it would have been long since plundered, wouldn’t you? Although, it’s so far off the road, maybe no one realizes it’s even here. It’s a lonely place, isn’t it? It’s a place where anything could happen and no one would know about it for a very long time.’
Again there was the strangeness in his voice and the almost-frightening look had come into his eyes again. Margot shivered, hating the house more with every minute. But if this really was Lina’s house, they should find out as much as they could about it. And perhaps it could be renovated after all – made into a small guesthouse, even.
Marcus was reaching for the iron ring-handle of the house’s main door. It would be locked, of course, even with the house in this battered state, because no one, not even a madman, would leave a house unlocked, unsecured, out here.
But the door was not locked, or, if it had been, the lock had rotted away. Marcus pushed it inwards, shone the torch.
‘Stay here while I look,’ he said, and there was a moment when he was silhouetted in the doorway, then he went inside and the darkness closed down again.
Margot stayed where she was for what felt like a long time. It was getting very dark now, and once she saw the flicker of his torch behind one of the ground-floor windows. She thought the movement from the upstairs room came again.
The old trees surrounding the Torhaus were whispering and dipping their branches. It was uncomfortably easy to imagine they were watching her, and murmuring to one another. The wind stirring the branches and the leaves could almost be voices. Margot thought she would step through the partly open door and call out to Marcus to hurry up. When she did so, he was there, as if he had been waiting for her, standing at the foot of a wide staircase.
‘Come inside and take a look,’ he said.
It was not pitch dark inside the Torhaus because there was some overspill from the fading daylight outside, and there was also the light from Marcus’s torch. But the house felt horrid; there was a smell of damp and age and old vegetation. Margot repressed a shudder.
Marcus’s face was lit from below by the torch; it created hollows and pits where his eyes were. It was unnerving; it was almost as if it was no longer Marcus who was standing there.
‘In here,’ he said, taking her hand.
It was a small room, thick with dust, and with a lingering sadness, and there was a piano, set against the wall. It was small and old, the elaborate wood figuring on the front dull and slightly rotting on one side.
Margot said, ‘How odd—’
‘Isn’t it? And a piano can be a murder weapon, can’t it, Margot?’
A murder weapon. Margot shivered, and her head began to feel as if something was wrenching it apart.
‘Look,’ said Marcus, shining the torch onto the stand. ‘You recognize it, do you?’ he said.
Margot would have recognized it after a hundred years. A handwritten score, with Giselle’s Music written across the top. It had been there when she had whispered through the shadows to Lina – when Lina had clutched at her heart in fear, then fallen.
She said, ‘Did you bring it with you, that music?’
‘Yes. And a few other things from Lina’s desk. Things I didn’t want to leave for anyone else to find.’ Again the smile that made him look like a different person. ‘You thought we found everything there was to find, didn’t you? But I found other things, Margot – things you didn’t know about. Things that told me a great deal about Lina. And about Christa.’
‘What kind of things? And why on earth would you bring them out here?’
He reached to the music stand, and from behind Giselle’s Music took a sheet of creased paper. ‘Read it. Read it.’
Margot took the papers unwillingly, and looked at the top one. At first the words did not seem to make sense, but gradually she sorted them out.
The paper was a birth certificate. It was in German, but the layout was simple to understand. But what she was seeing sent the room spinning into a whirling confusion. In the section for the name of the newborn child it said, Lina Mander.
Father: Count Karol von Braxen (deceased).
But alongside that, next to the section for the mother, was a name that seemed to rear up from the page.
Mother: Christa Klein.
Margot felt as if she had been pulled into a dark echoing tunnel. She waited for her mind to steady, then in a thread of a voice, she said, ‘Lina was … she was Christa’s daughter.’
‘Yes. But she gave her away. Had her adopted. She must have done. You see the place of birth?’
Margot had not looked beyond the name of Lina’s mother, but now she did look. In a voice she hardly recognized as her own, she said, ‘Sachsenhausen. Christa had a child – born inside a concentration camp?’
‘Yes. And the child was Lina.’
‘And Christa killed the child’s father.’ It squared with the story Lina had always told about Christa killing Lina’s father. Butchered by that harlot, Christa Klein, Lina used to say. What she had never said, was that Christa had been her mother, or that Lina herself had been born in a concentration camp. Only the hatred and the bitterness had come through. Margot, looking again at the names on the birth certificate thought, for the first time, that she could almost understand Lina’s feelings over those years. To know your mother had killed your father … That you had been given away … I’m sorry, Lina, she whispered in her mind. If you had told the whole story, perhaps it might have been different for us all.
Marcus remained silent, and when Margot handed the certificate back, he slotted it behind the music again.
‘Why did you bring those things with you?’ said Margot again. ‘The birth certificate and the music?’
‘I didn’t dare leave them behind. I didn’t want anyone to find them and make assumptions.’
‘Not to prove we’ve got a claim on Lina’s house?’
‘Lina’s house probably doesn’t exist,’ he said, impatiently. ‘That was a pipe dream, a castle in the air. Something hopeful to hold on to in those dreary years.’ He put out a hand to her. ‘And now, Margot, come upstairs with me.’
Come upstairs with me … His hand closed around hers. There was a time when his touch and those words would have sent shivers of fearful delight through Margot, but now they terrified her. She said, ‘Can’t we just go back – Marcus, I really don’t like this house. Even if it is Lina’s—’
‘Of course it isn’t Lina’s house,’ he said, at once. ‘If Lina’s house exists anywhere, it’ll long since have belonged to someone else quite legally. I realized that ages ago. You’d have realized it too, if you’d had any sense.’
‘But that letter you found in Mr Cain’s house … It talked about the Torhaus and how no one could find out who owned it, and you said it all fitted.’
‘That letter gave me the idea, that’s all,’ he said. ‘A lonely old house, empty for so many years – a place where no one ever goes, and that no one knows who it belongs to … It was the ideal lure to get you out here. To get you to a place where you could vanish.’
He studied her, then said, ‘I did tell you that I’d draw the line at protecting you if you’d committed a murder, didn’t I? I drew that line a long time ago, Margot. And there’s the question of self-preservation, as well. I don’t trust you, you see. I can’t risk you letting out what you did – or being found out. And if that were to happen … Well, I don’t want to be seen – to be known – as the brother of a murderess.’
Margot tried to pull her hand free, but he was holding it too tightly.
‘Don’t you know, Margot, that I’ve hardly dared let you out of my sight since that night – since I realized what you’d done? I’ve watched you and I’ve guarded you, but I can’t do it for ever. Also,’ he said, very deliberately, ‘I don’t trust you not to mark me down as your next victim if you suddenly thought it would be to your advantage. So that makes it a case of kill or be killed.’ He was pulling her along the hall. ‘I looked all over the house while you waited outside. I was still making the decision, even then. It hasn’t been an easy decision, I’d like you to know that.’
Those furtive glances, thought Margot. Those sideways looks. All the time he was making this decision. Oh God, what is he going to do to me?
They were at the wide stairway, and he was dragging her up. Margot struggled and fought to get free, but she could not.
‘Marcus, let me go – where are we going—?’
‘At the top of this house is a room with a lock and a key,’ he said. ‘The minute I saw that room, I knew it was the answer. I hadn’t dared hope that I’d find somewhere like it, but there it was. Exactly right.’ As they reached a small landing he twisted her arms behind her back, wrenching painfully at her shoulders as he did so, then forced her up a second, smaller flight. At the end of a small passage a door was open, and Marcus pushed Margot through it, then stood in the doorway, barring her way out.
‘This is where you’ll stay,’ he said. ‘You can’t get out – the window’s too small, and you’d break your neck if you tried to climb out anyway. There’s a lock on the door – if there hadn’t been, I’d have had to use physical violence or some kind of restraint. I didn’t want any real physical contact, if I could avoid it. You always did, though, didn’t you? All those times – did you think I didn’t know what you would have liked from me? And didn’t you realize I was repelled?’
‘You’re going to lock me in?’ Margot focused on what was happening, because she could not bear to hear that Marcus had been repelled by her.
‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll stay downstairs for a while, though,’ he said. ‘Partly to make sure I’m not going to change my mind. I know I won’t, though. I know I’m going to leave you here. No one will know where you are, Margot, and if anyone at home asks, I’ll just say you’ve travelled to stay with friends. But you don’t know many people, do you? No one in Thornchurch, and no one anywhere else. So no one’s very likely to ask.’
Before Margot could get to the door, he had slipped through it, slammed it, and turned the key.
It would be useless to try the door, but Margot tried it anyway. It was locked of course. How about the window? But, as Marcus had said, it would be impossible to get through it, and in any case there was a sheer drop to the ground below.
The room smelled of damp and dirt. There were patches of mould on the ceiling where rain must have got in, and around the window, discolouring the plaster. Once there had been wallpaper on the walls – in places it was still possible to see the pattern very faintly: small bunches of cornflowers tied with lavender ribbon.
Beneath the smell of damp and mould there was somehow another smell – something deeper and older – something that might almost have printed itself on this room a long, long time ago …
There was nothing in the room except a chair and a small dressing table. When Margot opened one of the drawers there was a comb that somebody must have forgotten about, and a silver bracelet, made up of thin, glossy links.
She sat down on the narrow window-seat, and tried not to give way to fear. Marcus would not do this to her. It would be some sick joke – or she might have fallen asleep and be having a nightmare … Or she might have been given a drug and be hallucinating.
He had said he would not go away immediately. Probably he would come back soon. But the minutes went along, and there was no sound of his step on the stairs.
He had left her here in the dark old house. He had left her here to die and there was no way to escape.