ceiling. A microwave, a dishwasher, a coffee-machine. An empty pizza packet on the worktop near the microwave. All of this lit by one long, thin peach-coloured strip light.
No conspicuous damage, no sounds of intrusion. So who had left the door open? Had the sole objective been the killing of the oak tree?
Who would have known its importance? Presumably, only Winnie Sparke. And Merrily, now, and Lol.
She stepped cautiously over the threshold.
‘Mr Loste?’
It seemed so unlikely that she hadn’t met this man she knew so much about. Or did she? Like all the impressions you received of Elgar, the individual portraits of Tim Loste didn’t quite match. He was inspired and inspirational; he was crazy and manipulative.
There was certainly nothing of him in this kitchen. Opposite her, the door to the hall was wide open. The hall was in darkness. She started thinking about the big framed photograph of Whiteleafed Oak over the mantel-piece in the living room and all the other pictures of the sites of the perpetual choirs. Obvious and easy targets if someone
She went into the hall. Always hated being inside someone else’s house when they weren’t there.
Especially in the dark. Merrily felt around for a light switch, and as soon as her hand found it – one of those little metal nipples – the light from a white crystal bowl in the ceiling sprang into the otherworldly eyes of Edward Elgar, urging Mr Phoebus out of the shadows towards her.
It also fanned unevenly into the living room, where the glass protecting the photo of the whiteleafed oak had indeed been smashed, the picture tipped so that it looked as if the whole room was awry … as if a sudden gust of wind had rushed into it, tossing Winnie Sparke’s slight body back into the bookshelves in a hot shower of blood.
53
Unseeingness
The line was open, but there was no voice. Then the signal cut out and the screen went dark and the music from Inn Ya Face was going
‘Frannie?’ Merrily said urgently. ‘
She looked up in blank despair from the lawn behind Caractacus. The moon was high but the house was in the shadow of the hill.
All right, she’d try
She went back to the path, opening up the phone again, illuminating the screen and scrolling down the list to bring up Bliss’s mobile number.
‘Frannie.
When she snapped the phone shut, her hand was shaking. She could see this in the peachy glow from the kitchen door. She squeezed the phone hard, gripped the shaking hand with the other hand. Tried to pray for self- control. Couldn’t.
She didn’t have a choice any more. She had to go back in there. Make sure. Merrily felt the tautness of impending panic in her chest, turned away and saw a glinting from the edge of the lawn, where it met the path.
Knife?
Merrily walked around it, the hill going
She shook the phone.
What if they didn’t? What if Bliss didn’t call back for an hour or more? She should go back to Whiteleafed Oak. After … after she’d been back in there. After she’d gone back and checked once more. Made, dear God, absolutely certain that there was going to be no need for an ambulance.
It definitely
It was as if, Lol thought … as if this was how it was
In which case, its meaning was:
The sky was clear and starry and smeared with a buttery northern light, and the whistling made slow, luminous coils and lonely whorls on the silence.
Twice it had stopped and then started up again from a different direction, the way tawny owls might answer one another across the vastness of the valley.
The oak tree was flat and featureless, like a massive spidery blot of Indian ink. Lol kept on walking towards it.
A joke. But who, in this situation, wouldn’t be unnerved? It would be eerie enough after dark outside your own front door on Ledwardine market square – one reason being that nobody
As he approached the oak tree, the whistling seemed to develop a slow and rolling rhythm, like the breath- pattern induced, Lol caught himself imagining, by even, heavy pedalling on a gradual incline.
He’d thought it was coming from under the tree, perhaps from the hollow that looked like a sacrificial pit. But when he reached the oak, the whistling was still some distance away, across to the right.
It stopped again. Lol crept up to the oak and lowered himself between two of its varicose roots, pushing himself back into the bole, spreading out his legs against the roots, gripping cakes of bark in his palms and staying very still, just another part of the tree, an offering of himself in return for shelter – shelter against madness – as it began again.
The moon was higher now, with an amber cast, and he saw, over to the right – the east? where the distant Eastnor obelisk was, anyway – he thought he saw a movement. He kept still, and the tune continued, fluidly, long beyond the point where his own version might have feebled out. Under the circumstances, with your own breath coming faster, all rational judgement in suspense, it was impossible not to imagine for one thought-dissolving moment…
This time, when it was over, Lol spent some seconds with his eyes closed, trying to breathe evenly, before lifting his hands and beginning – with as lazy and relaxed a rhythm as he could summon – to applaud.
Merrily took three or four long breaths before stepping into the kitchen.
Walking directly through to the hall, this time touching nothing. Activating the living-room light by brushing the metal switch with her sleeve.
Last time, she’d seen it only by the light washing in from the hall. Now, two big white wall brackets were flaring theatrically, scattering shadows, and it was so much worse: blood on the books, blood on the pictures, blood on the walls, blood on the writing table, gouts and drips and smears, and Winnie Sparke in silent freeze-frame.
Winnie wore one of her long filmy dresses which seemed now as if it was hanging together in threads of blood and tissue. Her arms spread out across the bookcase, with books pulled out, and the empty fireplace. Her buckled bare knees, touchingly girlish. A breast partly exposed, cut into like a flaccid fruit. Her face ripped in several places, top lip joined to her nose by strings of blood and mucus. Her throat slashed many times.
But the worst of it was never the gore. It was always the unseeingness of the eyes and the open mouth through which no breath passed.
The room was hot and clammy and stank and, worst of all, it was so waxily still. Merrily swallowed bile, and then something overtook her and she was just standing there raging.
