She was grey-haired, her hands showing signs of rheumatism, but her eyes were bright and intelligent, her movements still energetic. ‘How long have you known the Hollands?’ I asked.
‘Let me see now. We came here when my husband retired. He was very keen on sailing. That was just over four years ago, and they came soon after.’
‘You knew her father then?’
She nodded. ‘He used to walk down to the yacht club and chat with us while we were working on the boat. We had a small twenty-footer then. He had lived a lot of his life abroad. In Papua New Guinea.’
‘He came to England when his wife died, I believe.’
‘Yes. But he never talked about that. She was killed, you see. By the natives. It was a very primitive place, and they had some sort of cult. Something to do with ships and cargo.’ She hesitated as though trying to remember something, then went on: ‘The Hollands were a shipping family, that’s why he was interested in boats. He’d have a drink with us sometimes, and then he’d talk about the incredible blackness of the people, the incessant rain and the war, when his father had lived close under an active volcano and had fought the Japanese, things like that. It was all very interesting and colourful. But he never told us what happened. He was a strange man, very withdrawn, very nervy. And that poor boy. You’d never think they were father and son, would you?’
‘I never met either of them,’ I said, wondering what she meant.
‘Oh, well, if you’d seen them together. The father was quite a dull little man, very English in his manner. But that son of his with his red hair, those strangely flattened features, and the eyes … you’ve met Miss Holland, haven’t you?’ And when I nodded, she said, ‘Yes, I thought I saw you here about a fortnight ago, before she left. She has something of the same features. Very striking, don’t you think — unusual?’ She was suddenly silent, as though she had been trying to convey something to me and was at a loss for words. ‘Oh, well, I mustn’t keep you. You’ll bring back the keys.’ And she added, ‘I hope it’s sold soon. I never liked the house — inside, I mean. All those terrible carvings.’
The first thing I noticed when I went into the house was that the carvings had gone, and most of the pictures, too. I went through it quickly, noting down the rough measurements of the rooms and drafting out the sale notice. The reddening sun cast a lurid light, and the empty, abandoned feel of the place made even a professional visit seem like an unwarranted intrusion. It didn’t take me long to check the contents against the inventory I had made on the previous visit. All the furniture was still there, but she had cleared out every drawer. No papers, no photographs, nothing to show the sort of people who had occupied the place. She had made a clean sweep of everything. Even the loft was empty. The trunk she had mentioned was gone, presumably into store. The place was dusty, still hanging in cobwebs, and in a corner close under the rafters my torch picked out a small pile of books. They were most of them old Army manuals, a copy of Queen’s Regulations, some pictures of Sandhurst, one of a group of cadets, several dinner menus. And then, tucked into the pages of a book called Black Writing from New Guinea, I found the photograph of a man in khaki shirt and shorts, a black and white picture taken against a background of round thatched huts exuding smoke in the shadow of sombre mountains.
I took it down with me to the window of the room that had been her bedroom. The picture had been taken in the fading evening light when the cooking fires were burning in the thatched village, the whole scene very dark, no humans, only that single figure and a pig with its tail up scurrying away from him. But some trick of the light, a shaft of sunlight perhaps shining through a gap in the mountains, illumined the man’s face. He was a young man, clean-shaven, hair standing up like a brush on his bare head, and the face rather square, a jutting jaw and wide-set eyes above a flattened pugilistic nose. It was a face that was both pugnacious and gentle, the nose and jaw contrasting oddly with the appearance of almost childlike innocence, the overall impression one of clean-living boyishness.
I looked up from the picture and saw her as I had last seen her, sitting on the window ledge staring out to sea, the same brooding, dreamy look, the same nose and jaw, only the hair different. They must have been very alike, the way twins are; I knew why she had gone then, understood her purpose, and it scared me, so that without thinking I stuffed the picture into my pocket and hurried downstairs, out into the fresh air, closing the front door behind me.
The sun was setting now, the sky cloud-galleoned and flaring red. The stillness and the brilliance, the peace of an East Anglian summer evening — my mood changed. The sense of something appalling and beyond my comprehension that had clung to those empty walls was gone. Like a bad dream, I could not even recall what it was that had so disturbed me, just the memory of her face and how she had stared out towards the sea.
I still had to calculate roughly the acreage of the garden, and I went round the back of the house to pace it out. At the far end, where it backed on to the garden of the house in the next street, there was a toolshed. I checked the contents, adding them to my list, then continued my pacing. A garden fork was stuck into the ground by the remains of a bonfire. I pulled it out and was about to put it in the shed where it belonged when I realised that the heap of ashes in front of me was not an ordinary bonfire. There were charred scraps of paper scattered around it. This was where she had burned the contents of the drawers, all the papers and rubbish that had accumulated in the loft.
I began turning over the half-burned scraps with the fork. There were cheque counterfoils, remains of bank statements, old Christmas cards and scraps of newspapers. Not our newspapers. The words were English, but the names were foreign. A headline caught my eye: Meteor Falls near Goroka Village. The paper was yellowed with age. And there was the remains of a letter. I bent down to read the charred fragment of notepaper and found myself staring at something that lay beside it, a tattered travesty of the human figure, a sort of doll about ten inches high, burned black but with the head still recognisable, a birdlike mask of wood and bones and feathers.
I picked it up. The wood was driftwood, smooth and hardened by the sea, the feathers seagulls’ feathers, and there were shells as well as the thin little bones of seabirds. I had a sudden mental picture of her striding along the beach, the brassy helmet of her hair blowing in the wind, gathering up the sea’s high-tide offerings and taking them back to her brother, and that young man, propped up in his room, half paralysed and alone, struggling to fashion this feathered monstrosity from the bits and pieces of her beachcombing.
I dropped it back on the ashes, standing there staring down at it, feeling sickened that he should have believed in sorcery to the extent of trying to defeat death with that — thing. In a sudden feeling of revulsion I raked the remains of the fire over it and in doing so uncovered something else, a thin sliver of carved wood like a long barbed needle. It was white with ash and badly charred at one end, but when I had wiped it clean on the long lawn grass, I saw that the pointed end was coated with red paint.
The actual point was about six inches long, and below that were several barblike nicks. It looked like the head of a very thin-bladed wooden spear, or perhaps an arrow. But what caught my eye, because it was so strange, was that below the nicks were three long slits cut into the shaft. They had been fashioned with great care, and there was no doubt at all about their purpose. Driven into the body of a man and wrenched back, those slits would cause the hard narrow splines of wood to spring outwards, tearing into the flesh and holding fast.