The man he went to see near St Pauls was smooth, enthusiastic and vague on details.
‘Good pay. Very good, even. Bloody good lifestyle in Auckland. Excellent move for a man at your stage of career development. Five year contract.’
‘Why me?’
‘Can’t really tell you that. Someone somewhere likes you. Your name was on a very short list by the time it got to me.’
‘It’s not even my line.’
The head hunter peered doubtfully at the file in front of him. ‘They seem to think so.’
‘I’ve been concentrating on psychoactive effects.’
‘Look, old boy, they’re offering you a flight out for a look-see. Think of it as a free holiday. I’d bite their hand off if I were you. It’s a hell of a lot of money.’
New Zealand. He’d felt a bit depressed going back to his office, back to the painstaking re-analysis which might tell him where his experiment had screwed up, back to find a Post-it note that his bank manager wanted a call back as soon as possible please. Two days to think about it.
And then that night, unlocking the front door and bending with a shudder to pick up the pile of bad news – that was when the real surprise had come. One of the envelopes was thick and white and had ‘Palmer and Hunt’ neatly imprinted across the top of the back flap.
They sounded like lawyers and his first chill thought was of a summons but it was nothing like that. His aunt, Bernice Hodges, had, said Mr Hunt of Palmer and Hunt, passed away on the twenty eighth of the previous month and had bequeathed to him her house near Petworth in Sussex and the residue of her estate which Mr Hunt estimated to be of the order of £83,000 net. Probate would take some time to grant, he said, but in the meantime he was sure Mr Quill would wish to visit his inheritance and a key would be available on demand from his office and so on.
It changed everything. He hadn’t seen Aunt Bernice since childhood although there were no other members to his family. She just hadn’t felt like a relation. He tried to feel sorry for her, summoned up only a twinge of guilt that he could put no face to her name and could only think instead that now he could, for a time, forget research grants. Now he could carry on by himself. He rang the head hunter and turned down the New Zealand job.
‘Look, no need to be in a rush,’ the man said, ‘take a few days.’
‘I thought you said I had to make up my mind quickly.’
‘Just think about it, that’s all I’m saying. It’s a chance in a million.’
‘I have thought, thanks. Goodbye.’
The head hunter put the phone down, frowned and picked it up again. Matthew Quill did the same, without the frown, and called Mr Hunt.
‘I’m coming down tomorrow. I’ll stay the night at the house. How do I get the key?’
‘My secretary lives in the next street. She can take it home with her. Do you want me to ask her to get anything ready for you?’
‘No thanks.’
He drove to Sussex on Saturday morning in his Fiesta, reclaimed from the car pound, to investigate. The Maples was large and gloomy, built in Victorian times of red brick interspersed with sections of knapped flint. He knew within seconds that he would never live there but that wasn’t important. Selling the house would buy him time to carry on. Aunt Bernice, he thought, had saved him.
Had he but known, she had really put him in direct and dreadful danger.
The house was set back behind a high brick wall, among lawns dotted with overgrown and gloomy trees. Aunt Bernice had lived an old-fashioned, simple life. Someone would have a lot of work to do. It was a house of sculleries and pantries, passages and box rooms on which nothing in the way of a design trend had had any effect since some time in the Fifties. He wanted to stay the night just so that waking up in the morning he might start to feel and understand his good fortune and spend a little time thanking this distant aunt for her final kind thought.
He put the radio on in the evening – there was no television. The house, unlived in for some time, the lawyer had said, while his aunt spent her last weeks in hospital, grew sharply colder when it got dark. There was no central heating but he’d seen a pile of coal in the sheds at the back. He went outside. The yard light didn’t work and there was no moon, so he groped his way across the uneven paving stones to the long row of outbuildings. In daylight he’d seen the evidence of what had probably been loose boxes to each side of the wide central doorway, but the spaces were now filled up with rubbish – rusted bicycles, piles of broken furniture, ladders and the like. In the dark, his hand closed on the light switch set high up on the wall inside.
He turned it on and for a moment nothing happened then a rusty neon light glowed dull orange and began to flicker cold white light. The darknesses in between its clicks and flutters were too long, it couldn’t catch. Then he glanced to his left and his blood froze. There was movement in the flashes. From the far end of the stables, a figure was strobing horribly towards him, terrifyingly closer with each flash, arms rising to threaten – a man’s figure, swathed in darkness from head to toe, darkness that defied the neon. A flickering, violent nightmare, disappearing in the black between the flashes and reappearing ever larger, ever nearer. A man with darkness for a face in a scene from a 3D horror film.
He started to scream but nothing came out, then tried to get his legs to turn and run. The man reached him – no ghost this – hurled him to the ground, spraying something in his face which made his throat burn and his stomach’s acid contents come heaving galvanically up his throat. He doubled up on the rough concrete outside, vomiting and shrieking through his vomit, trying to see though watering eyes where the threat had gone. The light’s brief bursts lent fresh terror to the darkness as the man reappeared, framed in the doorway.
He tried to organize his jellied legs, tried to get away from the shape that now had in its hand a blade, bouncing neon back at him in lethal, flashing reflection. He got as far as his knees but the man had him by the collar, pulling him off balance as he tried to protect himself with arms that offered their feeble defensive sacrifice of skin, bone and sinew.
He was pulled back against the doorpost and released. He lifted his head, saw the arm drawn back with the knife in it and closed his eyes, powerless to avoid sharp, shocking death.
There was a thud, just a thud, right next to his ear and the sound of running feet.
He opened his eyes again and away in the lane heard a car door slam, an engine start and tyres scatter gravel. Heart beating so fast that the other senses seemed to have no space in his head, he turned, trying to control his retching. The knife wasn’t a knife, it was a wood chisel. It was embedded in the doorpost an inch from his eyes skewering a piece of newspaper to the woodwork. With shaking hands, he pulled it out, trying to make sense of it as the chemical spray dripped down his face mixing with the vomit on his chin. The light chose that moment, far too late, to come on fully. top scientist found dead, the headline said.
Mrs Marsh was used to walkers, dependent on them even. A painted sign, impossible to ignore, said Dirty feet this way please! with a peremptory arrow to back up the exclamation mark. It led to a large lean-to out of sight around the side of the house where boots could be levered from tired feet and scraped clean in a big Belfast sink. There were racks to stack them in and ranged in an inner lobby which served as a second line of defence an array of old slippers lay waiting as the passport to final entry. Heather and Margo knew this from their last trip the year before and they knew why. Mrs Marsh kept not just a clean house but an immaculate, obsessively, surgically clean house – a perverse ambition for the owner of a guest-house whose main appeal was its location in the middle of the most spectacular, wild – and frequently wet – walking country in the north.