‘Do you think he could possibly take me for a ride, when he comes round tomorrow?’ cried Tabitha, her eyes alight with anticipation. ‘I love aeroplanes, you know. What sort is it?’
‘A Buccaneer,’ said Hilary.
‘The Lake LA-4-200, I suppose? With the four-cylinder Avco Lycoming engine?’
‘Oh, shut up, you old fool.’
Hilary picked a grape from the fruit bowl and began tossing it nervously between her hands.
‘Now there’s no need to get bad tempered, you naughty girl,’ said Tabitha. ‘A kind word and a happy smile don’t cost much, do they? Always look on the bright side, I say. Things could easily be so much worse.’
‘Aunty,’ said Hilary slowly. ‘We’re trapped in an isolated house, with a homicidal maniac, in the middle of a thunderstorm. All the phone lines have been cut off, we have no means of escape, two of us have been killed and another has gone missing. How could things possibly be worse?’
At that moment, the lights went out and the house was plunged into darkness.
‘Oh God,’ said Roddy. ‘What’s happened?’
The blackness to which they had been consigned was absolute. The heavy dining-room curtains were closed, and it was impossible to see even an inch or two ahead in such thick, impenetrable gloom. To add to the eeriness of the situation, it seemed to all of the company that the sounds of the raging weather outside had increased tenfold as soon as their powers of vision were taken away.
‘It must be a fuse,’ said Pyles. ‘The fuse box is in the cellar. I’ll see to it at once.’
‘Good man,’ said Roddy.
Whether he would succeed on this mission seemed open to doubt, for his progress towards the door was marked by any number of thuds, crashes, smashes and tinkles as he collided heavily with various objects of furniture scattered around the room. But finally he made it: the door creaked open and shut, and they could hear his receding footsteps echoing faintly as he made his halting way across the stone-flagged hall.
Then the clicking of Tabitha’s needles resumed, and she started humming another tune. This time it was ‘The Dambusters’ March’.
‘For God’s sake, Aunty,’ said Roddy. ‘How on earth can you do any knitting in Ulis dark? And would you kindly desist from singing those infuriating songs?’
‘I must say, Mr Owen, your ingenuity compels admiration,’ said Hilary; and her brother could recognize in her voice a forced, brittle cheerfulness — a sure sign that her spirits were violently agitated. ‘I can’t help wondering what sort of fate you had in mind for the rest of us.’
‘I hadn’t really thought, to be honest,’ said Michael. ‘I was more or less improvising the whole thing, you see.’
‘Yes, but surely you must have had a few ideas. Henry’s back; Mark’s arms. What about Thomas? What part of his anatomy were you intending to go for?’
‘Where is Thomas, anyway?’ said Roddy. ‘He should have been here ages ago. The last I saw of him he—’
‘Ssh!’ It was Hilary who cut him short. The atmosphere in the room grew suddenly tense. ‘Who’s that moving about?’
They all strained to listen. Was that a footstep they had just heard? Was there someone (or something), in the room with them, a furtive, watchful presence, creeping through the inky shadows — and now very close at hand? Was that the sound of something on the table itself — where they were all sitting, rigid with expectation — being very quietly, very stealthily moved?
‘Who’s there?’ said Hilary. ‘Come on, speak up.’
Nobody breathed.
‘You were imagining it,’ said Roddy, after about a minute.
‘I don’t imagine things,’ Hilary answered, indignantly. But the tension had gone.
‘Well, fear can play strange tricks,’ said her brother.
‘Look: I am not afraid.’
He laughed scornfully. ‘Afraid? You’re scared witless, old girl.’
‘I don’t know what gives you that idea.’
‘After all these years, darling, I can read you like a book. Anyone can tell when you’re upset. You start messing around with the grapes.’
‘The grapes? What are you on about?’
‘You start playing around with them. Peeling them. Taking the skins off. You’ve done it since you were a kid.’
‘I may have done it since I was a kid but I’m not doing it tonight, I can assure you.’
‘Oh, come off it. I’ve got one of them in my hands right now.’
Roddy stroked the fruit between finger and thumb — it felt smooth and oily without its skin — and then popped it into his mouth. He closed his teeth upon it, but instead of the expected release of fresh, tangy syrup upon his tongue, he felt only a rubbery squelch, and his mouth was filled with an appalling taste, the nameless virulence of which he had never known before.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he shouted, and spat it out. He began to retch violently.
Just then, the lights came back on. Squinting in the sudden brightness, it took him a few seconds to identify the object he had just coughed up, which was now lying on the table in front of him. It was a half-chewed eyeball. Its fellow stared balefully at him from the fruit bowclass="underline" the bloodshot eye of Thomas Winshaw, fixed for ever in its last, unblinking, lifeless gaze.
CHAPTER SIX
The Crowning Touch
‘HE should sleep now,’ said Phoebe, as Roddy lay back on the pillow, his breathing gradually taking on a slower, more regular rhythm. She gently took the glass from his hand, set it down on the bedside table, and put the bottle of pills away in her bag.
Hilary regarded her brother dispassionately. ‘He always was a squeamish little thing,’ she said. ‘Still, I’ve never seen him perform in quite that way before. Will he be all right, do you think?’
‘I expect he’s just in shock. A few hours’ rest ought to take care of it.’
‘Well, we could all do with that.’ Hilary glanced around the room, and went to check that the window was securely fastened. ‘I suppose he’ll be safe in here, will he? There’s not much point leaving him sleeping like a baby if our resident maniac is just going to sneak in and bump him off the minute our backs are turned.’
They decided that the best thing would be to lock him in. Phoebe didn’t think that he would wake before morning, and even if he did, the temporary inconvenience of being held captive was surely of little importance when set beside his personal safety.
‘I think I’d better keep the key,’ said Phoebe, slipping it into the pocket of her jeans as they set off down the corridor together.
‘Why’s that?’
‘I would have thought it was obvious. Michael and I were tied up when Thomas was killed. That puts us in the clear, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Hilary curtly, after a moment’s thought. ‘In any case, my congratulations go to whoever’s behind this whole set-up. They haven’t missed a trick. Disconnecting all the phones, for instance. I think I could forgive just about everything apart from that.’
‘Preventing us from calling the police, you mean?’
‘Worse than that — I can’t even use my modem. First time in six years I’ve missed a copy deadline. I’d got an absolute corker for them, too. All about the Labour Party peaceniks and how the Iraqis would have run rings around them. Ah well.’ She sighed. ‘It’ll just have to wait.’
They made their way back to the sitting room, where Tabitha was once again installed by the fire, now preoccupied not with her knitting but with the perusal of a bulky paperback which on closer inspection turned out to be Volume Four of The Air Pilot’s Manual. She looked up when Hilary and Phoebe came in, and said: ‘Why, there you are! I was beginning to think you were never coming back.’