‘Who?’ said Tristan, as though he was dredging up some long-abandoned wreckage from the bottom of the sea.
‘Could we have a word?’
‘The word is “Non”,’ snapped Tristan, shoving dancers aside, until he reached Bernard. ‘For Christ’s sake, try Rozzy again. Ask her if she’s seen Lucy.’
‘Where’s Mikhail?’ grumbled Baby. ‘I want to sing the Friendship Duet with him.’
‘Perhaps he’s eloped with Rozzy,’ giggled Simone.
It was Mikhail’s last night in the capitalist sweet shop. As a going-home present for Lara, he had decided to remove the Murillo Madonna from the chapel. But finding Valhalla awash with police when he returned home after the final wrap, he decided to sleep until things quietened down.
Waking just after eleven, he took a considerable swig from his hip flask and set out. The house was sculptured grey in the moonlight, a sudden chill wind sent the cypresses hissing like snakes. Sliding through the shadows, Mikhail passed two nervously patrolling uniformed policemen and wished he had had slightly more to drink.
He froze at the sound of more footsteps. Slow, lonely, then quickening, coming relentlessly towards him, from the swirling mists emerged a black-cloaked figure gliding down the cloisters, then disappearing through the chapel door. Frantic for company, Mikhail fled in terror back to the production office, but found it totally deserted — everyone must have left for the party. Deciding this was very unPosa-like behaviour and ghosts couldn’t produce footsteps, he crept back again.
The chapel was unlocked, no-one appeared to be inside. Feeling his way along the smooth edges of the pews and then the choir stalls, guided by the light of the rising moon now spilling like milk, then like royal blue ink, now like red wine through the stained-glass windows, he reached the Madonna. How beautiful she was, more radiant than any moon. How she would enjoy an exciting jaunt to Moscow.
Mikhail got out his screwdriver and pliers. Somehow she must come off the wall. But as he started to tap and feel round her gilded frame, he nearly jumped through the vaulted roof.
The panel to which she was attached had swung open, revealing utter darkness, a horrible smell of Maestro and footsteps echoing far in the distance. Climbing inside, running a shaking hand round to the left, Mikhail found a key. Someone had been stupid or careless enough to leave it in a lock. Turning it, he felt a door open; groping inside, he found a light switch, and nearly fainted.
He was in a tiny cubby-hole. All round the walls were grotesquely graffiti’d photographs of Tabitha, Flora, Claudine Lauzerte, Granny, Beattie, Hermione and Rannaldini. Ears had been lopped off, squints and beards added, and everything smeared with blood and excrement. But interspersed with these horrors, beautiful and immaculate, were pictures of Tristan at all ages.
Also hanging from hooks were wigs, pewter grey, blond, dark and light brown, and Hermione’s apple-green cloak with the pink rose-lined hood, except bloodstains were now rose-patterning the green as well. The table was piled high with body-paints, knives, ammunition, huge, cruel scissors, a half-full bottle of Maestro, videos, tapes, tape-recorders, Rannaldini’s cigars, bottles marked ‘poison’ and cans of petrol. On top lay a ripped-open brown-paper parcel marked ‘Tristan de Montigny, Private and Confidential’. And against the table, a going-home present for Lara for the taking, was the Montigny Snake Charmer. Beside it, the floor was littered with fragments of cut-up photograph.
Mikhail was nearly gagging on the stench. Who could do these sick things? Grabbing the painting, he nearly dropped it, as a voice snapped, ‘What in hell are you doing here? I wouldn’t do anything silly, sir,’ as Mikhail lunged forward to grab a knife.
Mikhail had never dreamt he’d be pleased to see a policeman. Karen, who was following Gablecross, thought Mikhail looked like a bear raiding a larder. Then she saw the walls behind him and had to clap her hands over her mouth.
‘I find vicar’s hole full of interest,’ announced Mikhail.
‘How the fuck did you get in here?’ Shoving him out of the way, Gablecross took in the contents of the table. ‘Jesus!’
‘I enter chapel to pray my vife will return,’ said Mikhail piously, ‘I just examine vork of art when wall open.’
Lying bastard, thought Gablecross.
‘Look, Sarge, here’s a parcel addressed to Tristan — in Lucy’s handwriting,’ said Karen, in excitement. ‘And there’s a wig exactly like Rozzy’s hair and one like Hermione’s. Why should anyone want to pass themselves off as Rozzy?’
They had been unable to track her down in Make Up, and she wasn’t answering her mobile.
‘She must be on the way to the party, unless the murderer’s got her too… Oh, God.’
Crouching down on the floor, Karen gathered up fragments of photographs, horribly reminiscent of Rozzy’s cut-up dress.
‘Let’s go,’ said Gablecross. ‘Put that painting down, Mr Pezcherov.’
Outside, having alerted two of the uniformed officers to keep an eye on the cache, Gablecross took the wheel and they set out for the wrap party.
No wonder he complains about my slow driving, thought Karen, as they hurtled through overgrown tree tunnels, down narrow lanes where great banks of elder and wild rose obscured any views of things coming the other way. Black trees and telegraph poles flew past the window.
Karen was being thrown from one side of the back seat to the other, as with the light on and a road map on her knees as a table, she tried to piece together the shreds of photograph.
‘It still points to Lucy,’ she said sadly, as they shot past a sign saying four miles to Rutminster.
‘Why?’ snapped Gablecross.
‘These cut-up photographs are all of Rozzy. Perhaps Lucy couldn’t stand Tristan giving Rozzy all that money for a new wrap-party dress.’
82
Lucy regained consciousness into darker nightmare. She was trapped in a chair, her wrists clamped to its arms by what felt like iron manacles padded with velvet, her ankles and knees similarly secured to the chair legs so her thighs were forced humiliatingly apart. This must be the debtor’s chair in which Rannaldini had once imprisoned Tab. The room was cold and dreadfully airless. It smelled like a slaughter-house, of blood, sweat and fear.
As her eyes grew used to the dark, she realized she was in a large steel container. She and the debtor’s chair were on a lower level in a kind of pit. Up some steps, on a higher level, stood an imposing carved armchair — like a bishop’s throne — a bed and a dressing-table pushed against the wall. From the only wall that wasn’t mirror, dully gleamed a highly sophisticated collection of whips and knives.
Then she heard hoarse, unearthly screaming. It was several seconds before she realized it was coming from herself. Shuddering with horror, she pieced together earlier events, Tristan firing her, the police arresting her, Rozzy hiding her in the priest-hole, then Rannaldini’s utterly terrifying ghost, or had it been Rannaldini himself? Thank God, Rozzy would seek help and could be trusted to give Tristan his important papers.
Then she remembered James’s cries growing more and more piteous. Someone must have tortured him. She started to cry, but as her eyes and nose streamed she had nothing on which to wipe them. Her ankle ached where she’d twisted it, her legs throbbed with nettle stings and, in the mirror opposite, her dim reflection showed her face, arms and legs cut even more to pieces from stumbling down the stony secret passage. She looked like a victim of Third World brutality.
Glancing at the whips and knives, she knew the churning fear Carlos and Elisabetta must have felt, aware that torture awaited them. The light was too faint to read her watch. She tried to pray. Rozzy wouldn’t let her down. But as the hours crawled by, and she grew colder and more dehydrated, her legs racked by agonizing cramps, hope faded.