‘Improve me?’ Alice was angry again. ‘Like some reform school? But you’re my madness, you know that. Not me. You — with your … Well, every single stupid thing: possessiveness, meanness, bad temper, your ugliness. Was I to have nothing then before I got this house? Just a toy of yours? Cooped up like a —’ she couldn’t find the word, ‘like some fancy cake decoration, running your gracious social life out in the Hamptons or the Drake Hotel in Chicago or your New York apartment: just decorating your life, while the others worked. You gave them a life. But you took mine. You gave them everything that mattered. While I had to fight beyond fighting — that was my madness — just to get this house, to get away from you.’
I couldn’t follow this conversation at all. Who were these ‘others’? I assumed Arthur must have been married before and these ‘others’ were earlier children of his. We had walked right round the house by now and were coming up the covered laurel path, the old tradesmen’s entrance, where the branches arched overhead, blocking out almost all the light which came from the few lighted windows above us.
‘I told you when we spoke last time here three months ago.’ Arthur’s voice was faint, absorbed by the thick foliage above him. But the righteous anger in it was still clear enough. ‘I told you that you’d never make it here on your own. Go from bad to worse; dressed up in all these circus outfits, playing Red Indians or a bit-part from Camelot, living in the past — some damfool golden age of yours, with all those old crocks and platters, those cockamamie Victorian things. And I was right, by God. Now you’ve got yourself hitched to a killer. But if you give me that gun, maybe we can still get you out of it.’
‘This man has already got me out of it. I am out of it. Free and sane. And you’re not going to put me back — anywhere. I’m going to put you away this time.’ Alice spoke with the relish of a child now, winning at last in some long-running nursery antagonism. I was holding Clare’s hand tightly, walking along behind, more than uneasy. ‘But what can you do?’ I asked Alice. ‘Mrs Pringle knows everything. She’s probably called the police already.’
‘She has,’ Arthur intoned ahead of us.
‘We’ll see,’ Alice said brightly, firmly.
We’d come through the big stone gateway into the yard where the light from the tall back windows more clearly illuminated the enclosed space around us. We heard the trumpets spilling out from the great hall in front, some merry dance.
Alice was just ahead of me, Clare right behind, pushing forward, anxious not to miss the least development in this midnight charade.
‘We’ll lock him in here for the moment,’ Alice said, gesturing towards the old laundry, where the door was already half-open, blackness beyond. A moment later she had pushed her husband into the darkness and promptly locked the door on him, turning the heavy Victorian key with all the satisfied finality of a hanging judge.
‘We’ll find Mrs Pringle now,’ Alice said, ‘and do the same for her — the fat sneak.’ Again, the tone of Alice’s voice was high and childish. And the words, too, I felt, came straight out of some long-ago world of hers, from a childhood battle with her brothers perhaps, or from some Edwardian adventure book which she had read at the time, embarking even then on her golden age: a world of chivalry and derring-do. Alice, with the arrival of Arthur, seemed to have dispensed completely with all her new sanity and returned to a life of myth.
‘You mean — put her in with your husband?’ I asked.
She turned and I could see the startling glints in her eyes, even in the half light. ‘My husband?’ she said incredulously. ‘My father. Yes — he’s my father! Don’t you see?’
I hadn’t begun to digest this startling information before we heard the first thin scream coming from the old laundry a few yards behind us, more squeak than scream, like a rat’s first complaint in a trap. But it was Arthur’s voice, I realised, first this startled little whine, but suddenly rising then like some untuned wind instrument going wild until it reached the high strident pitch of a steam whistle. Then the shriek stopped, cut off in its prime only to start up again a few seconds later. But now the pitch was much lower, intermittent, as if someone was playing violently on an already broken instrument, punishing it, destroying it. There were scuffles after that and the sounds of heavy things falling about and being dragged along the floor inside. It was just as if Alice had unwittingly pushed the man into a cage where some wild animal had torn him to pieces and was now quietly devouring him.
We ran back. I turned the key and opened the door.
‘There’s no electricity here!’ Alice called out as we both tried to push our way through the door at the same time. ‘Just an oil lamp on the shelf, to the side there.’ I cursed Alice’s meticulous Victorian re-creations then. But I found the lamp almost at once, on a shelf next the diamond glassed windows, and lit it.
The old laundry was a longish, fairly narrow room, with the big copper boiler to the right, set slightly out from the wall, wooden draining-boards behind that and the huge Victorian linen-press running down the other side, its big wheel, handle and chain — which pulled the great coffin-like weight along the wooden rollers beneath — just visible in the dim light. But I could see nothing amiss anywhere. The room appeared quite empty, like a cave with its arched ceiling and heavy chocolate-brown paint, a cave or a freshly opened tomb filled with mysterious utensils, patent Victorian devices, strange grave gifts from a long-vanished civilisation which loomed up now, taking even stranger shape in the flickering shadows cast by the lamp.
Then, moving towards the boiler, I saw a single smart brogue shoe sticking up in the lamplight, over the rim of the cauldron. Arthur was slumped inside, lying like a banana, curved out round the bottom, his head rising up the other slope. His business suit still clung to him neatly like something dumped in a laundry bin before its time. But Arthur’s head had gone all astray. It was badly twisted, turned ninety degrees to the side, so that while he gazed straight over one shoulder, the rest of his body faced resolutely forward. It was as if his head had been a bottle-top which someone had wrenched open far too violently. He was dead. Yet he could hardly have killed himself in such a manner, I thought.
I lifted the lamp, searching out the other shadowy distances and corners in the room, looking for someone else. And as I did so, the wavering oil flames illuminating the spaces beyond, I saw the African — just for an instant — crouching beneath the draining board. It was certainly him. I saw the camouflage jacket, the long thin face a golden mahogany now in the lamplight, the ridges of scar tissue to one side, the eyes deeply inset, intent, vicious — exactly those of a trapped animal about to spring.
And in the next instant he did so, releasing himself like a sprinter from his blocks, rushing towards me. Yet it wasn’t me that he wanted. Clare, curious as ever, had come right into the room behind me, and in the darkness I hadn’t noticed her. But the African had, and he grabbed her now before I could do anything to stop him.
Then, putting the lamp aside, the three of us were on the floor, struggling beside the boiler, with Alice standing helplessly above us, flourishing the gun. But she could do nothing with it.
‘Don’t!’ I managed to shout up to her, as I tried to pin the African down. And she didn’t. The man, holding Clare with one hand, could only fight me with the other — while fear and vast anger gave me a second small advantage. Yes, just as I had when I’d shot Ross’s dog in the valley and battered the lamb to death afterwards, I found a fierce strength then, a strange, vicious physical supremacy. I had the African by the neck, with two hands round his sinewy throat. I think I would have squeezed the life out of him, as we twisted and turned, if he had not decided to cut his losses and struggle free. He pushed me away, his fingers driving fiercely up into my nostrils so that the pain became unbearable. Then he was on his feet, dragging Clare with him into the dark recesses of the room.