'Now! Tell me, Borden! Which one are you? Which one?'
I could scarcely breathe, such was my fear, such was the terror that at any second the blade would thrust through my ribcage and puncture my heart.
'Tell me and I spare you!' The pressure of the knife increased.
'I don't know, Angier! I no longer know myself!'
And somehow that ended it, almost as soon as it had begun. His face was inches away from mine, and I saw him snarl with rage. His rancid breath flowed over me. The knife was starting to pierce my skin! Fear galvanized me into valour. I swung at him once, twice, fists across his face, battering him back from me. The deadly pressure on my heart softened. I sensed an advantage, and swung both my arms at his body, clenching my fists together. He yelled, swaying back from me. The knife lifted away. He was still on me, so I hit him again, then thrust up the side of my body to unseat him. To my immense relief he toppled away, releasing the knife as he fell to the floor. The deadly blade clattered against the wall and landed on the floor, as the spectral figure rolled across the floorboards.
He was quickly on his feet, looking chastened and wary, watching me in case I attacked again. I sat up on the couch, braced against another assault. He was the phantasm of ultimate terror, the spectre in death of my worst enemy in life.
I could see the lamp glinting through his semi-transparent body.
'Leave me alone,' I croaked. 'You are dead! You have no business with me!'
'Nor I with you, Borden. Killing you is no revenge. It should never have happened. Never!'
The ghost of Rupert Angier turned away from me, walked to the locked door, then passed bodily through it. Nothing of him remained, except a persistent trace of his hideous carrion stench.
The haunting had paralysed me with fear, and I was still sitting immobile on the couch when I heard beginners called. A few minutes later my dresser came to the room and tried to get in, and it was his insistent knocking that at last roused me from the couch.
I found Angier's knife on the floor of the dressing room, and I have it with me now. It is real. It was carried by a ghost.
Nothing makes sense. It hurts to breathe, to move; I still feel that pressing point of the knife against my heart. I am in the Hornsey flat, and I do not know what to do or who I really am.
Every word I have written here is true, and each one describes the reality of my life. My hands are empty, and I fix you with an honest look. This is how I have lived, and yet it reveals nothing.
I will go alone to the end.
PART THREE
Kate Angier
I was only five at the time, but there's no doubt in my mind that it all really happened. I know that memory can play tricks, especially at night, on a shocked and terrified child, and I know that people patch together memories from what they think happened, or what they wish had happened, or what other people later tell them had happened. All of this went on, and it has taken many years for me to piece together the reality.
It was cruel, violent, unexplained and almost certainly illegal. It wrecked the lives of most of the people involved. It has blighted my own life.
Now I can tell the story as I saw it take place, but tell it as an adult.
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My father is Lord Colderdale, the sixteenth of that name. Our family name is Angier, and my father's given names were Victor Edmund; my father is the son of Rupert Angier's only son Edward. Rupert Angier, The Great Danton, was therefore my great-grandfather, and the 14th Earl of Colderdale.
My mother's name was Jennifer, though my father always called her Jenny at home. They met when my father was working for the Foreign Office, where he had been throughout the Second World War. He was not a career diplomat, but for health reasons he had not entered the military but volunteered instead for a civil post. He had read German Literature at university, spent some time in Leipzig during the 1930s, and so was seen as possessing a skill useful to the British Government in wartime. Translation of messages intercepted from the German High Command apparently came into it. He and my mother met in 1946 on a train journey from Berlin to London. She was a nurse who had been working with the Occupying Powers in the German capital, and was returning to England at the end of her tour of duty.
They married in 1947, and around the same time my father was released from his post at the Foreign Office. They came to live here in Caldlow, where my sister and I were eventually born. I don't know much about the years that passed before we came into the world, or why my parents left it so long before having a family. They travelled a great deal, but I believe the driving force behind it was an avoidance of boredom, rather than a positive wish to see different places. Their marriage was never entirely smooth. I know that my mother briefly walked out during the late 1950s, because one day many years later I overheard a conversation between her and her sister, my Auntie Caroline. My sister Rosalie was born in 1962, and I followed in 1965. My father was then nearly fifty, and my mother was in her late thirties.
Like most people, I can't recall much about my first years of life. I remember that the house always seemed cold, and that no matter how many blankets my mother piled on top of my bed, or how hot was my hot-water bottle, I always felt chilled through to the bone. Probably I am remembering just one winter, or one month or one week in one winter, but even now it seems like always. The house is impossible to heat properly in winter; the wind curls through the valley from October to the middle of April. We have snow coverage for about three months of the year. We always burnt a lot of wood from the trees on the estate, and still do, but wood isn't an efficient fuel, like coal or electricity. We lived in the smallest wing of the house, and so as I grew up I really had little idea of the extent of the place.
When I was eight I was sent away to a girls’ boarding school near Congleton, but while I was little I spent most of my life at home with my mother. When I was four she sent me to a nursery school in Caldlow village, and later to the primary school in Baldon, the next village along the road towards Chapel. I was taken to and from the school in my father's black Standard, driven carefully by Mr Stimpson, who with his wife represented our entire domestic staff. Before the Second World War there had been a full household of servants, but all that changed during the war. From 1939 to 1940 the house was used partly to accommodate evacuees from Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, and partly as a school for the children. It was taken over by the RAF in 1941, and the family has not lived in the main part of the house since. The part of it in which I live is the wing where I grew up.
If there had been any preparations for the visit, Rosalie and I were not told what they were, and the first we knew about it was when a car arrived at the main gate and Stimpson went down to let it in. This was in the days when Derbyshire County Council was using the house, and they always wanted the gates locked at weekends.
The car that drove up to the house was a Mini. The paint had lost its shine, the front bumper was bent from a collision, and there was rust around the windows. It was not at all the sort of car that we were used to seeing call at the house. Most of my parents’ other friends were apparently well-off or important, even during this period when our family had fallen on relatively hard times.
The man who had been driving reached into the back seat of the Mini, and pulled out a little boy, just now waking up. He cradled the boy against his shoulder. Stimpson conducted them politely to the house. Rosalie and I watched as Stimpson returned to the Mini to unload the luggage they had brought with them, but we were told to come down from the nursery and meet the visitors. Everyone was in our main sitting room. Both my parents were dressed up as if it was an important occasion, but the visitors looked more casual.
We were introduced formally, as we were used to; my family took social manners seriously, and Rosalie
