Flowers for a Dead Witch, page 14
Shortly after ten o’clock on the following night, Mabel Ayers drove her husband’s Mini to a spot they had selected: a natural amphitheatre in the waste of sandhills, ten miles south of Denwich cliffs; a circular barrow, carved out by the action of wind and spring tides; open to the beach for one-third of its perimeter, and shut in by high walls of grass-fringed sand on the rest.
There—cut off from all living sight, with only the scudding night clouds and the wind that beat the dry grass on the sand crests—they partly incinerated the body of Lady Fiona Fettes with a pair of four-gallon jerrycans of petrol brought along for the purpose.
While the dying flames still rosily bathed the secret hollow, they lay together in the sand.
‘No regrets, my love? Was I worth all this?’
‘Yes … yes!
‘Keep that thought in front of you, my Hugo. It isn’t all over yet.’
It was past one o’clock—and the village had been a place of the dead half an hour after the two pubs closed at eleven—when she parked the Mini in the shadowed lane leading up to the old graveyard. Their burden was lighter now, and Fettes was able to carry it himself, wrapped in a sack.
Mabel Ayers forced the rusty lock of the mausoleum and together they prised open the witch’s catafalque, and laid the thing upon the bed of dusty bone fragments.
She said: ‘One more thing to do. With that done—and the witch’s legend—it will be Mabel Ayers lying here.’
The Reverend Jonathon Ayers’s precariously balanced mind had, over a period of several months, been subjected to a deliberate assault. By two o’clock on that Sunday morning it had collapsed completely, and any competent medical practitioner would have declared him certifiable.
At two o’clock, he sat huddled in the fireless kitchen of the Rectory; collarless and unshaven; rocking himself backwards and forwards, and keening to himself in a reedy falsetto.
He never heard the car coming into the drive; never looked up till his wife came in through the door leading from the hall.
She stood regarding him, her arms folded across the breast of her trenchcoat.
‘You waited up for me. How nice. But what a complete waste of time,’ she said.
‘I waited …’ He was seized with an uncontrollable spasm of trembling. ‘I waited … to tell you that you … are not beyond forgiveness.’
‘A waste of time,’ she said, ‘because I’m going straight out again. I’ve an appointment.’
‘An … appointment?’
‘With my—friends!’
‘Friends!’
‘That’s right. We’ve a special meeting. And I shall be playing a rather important part. But you know about these things, don’t you? You’ve made a sort of extracurricular study of them.’
He got up from the chair, and she stood back a pace to smile when he pointed a shaking finger at her; and she laughed when his voice crazed away into breathless silence.
‘Witchcraft and abomination! I knew … when I found the pentacle that you’d constructed in the locked room upstairs … but there was more … the writings you kept … the diary of your filth and blasphemy … I warned you and your companions from the pulpit …’
He tried again, but her laughter quelled him. Only when she turned towards the door did he make a move: darted in front of her and barred her path with outstretched arms across the door.
‘You shan’t go … I can prevent it … what you and your abominable companions are doing … is also beyond the law of man!’
‘You’re being very difficult.’ And now her voice was throaty and amused; laden with secret meaning. ‘They’re waiting for me. The coven. My coven. Up at the graveyard. Look …’
Slowly, deliberately, she unbuttoned and unbelted her trenchcoat. A pouting, mischievous smile—and she opened it wide.
‘Devil, not woman! Whore of Babylon!’
He plunged towards her, eyes closed and arms wildly flailing. His right hand glanced from her shoulder and she spun round as if thrown off balance. And she screamed before she hit the floor.
When Hugo Fettes came in through the conservatory, the man made mad was kneeling by the prostrate figure and trying to pray. The trenchcoat had been rebuttoned and her hands were folded across her breast.
The ruined face turned.
‘I—I have killed her!’
The rest was a simple matter of persuasion, and a little physical dexterity.
Persuasion lay in suggesting that Ayers should come with him to the police straight away, to give himself up.
‘Yes, yes! I have taken the laws of both God and man into my own hands!’
Ayers never questioned from where the length of rope with the noose had come. When Fettes threw it at his feet, he stooped and picked it up, embracing it like a bride and sliding the noose round his neck.
‘The badge of the murderer and the penitent! Yes, you are right … I must walk there … wearing it.’
The loop of the rope over the beam; a long, slow pull that lifted the kicking feet the height of an ordinary kitchen chair above the floor. The Reverend Ayers died slowly—but his agonies had ceased by the time the overturned chair had been laid in place, and the tell-tale word had been scrawled on the wall.
She had been watching it all. She came forward then; slipped her round arms about Fettes’s shoulders from behind and nuzzled the side of his cheek.
‘It’s all over, darling. We’ve got all our lives together ahead of us now!’
But it was soon Sunday morning at ten o’clock, and they should have left by nine—and they had to be seen to leave together (‘Me in my blonde wig and my dark glasses, with my head ducked low—and don’t stop for anything on the way through the village, my sweet!’); but he found some minor trouble with the engine of the car, and it was too risky to chance a breakdown on the way. So she sat and played patience, in Lady Fiona’s Chanel suit that she’d had to take in at the waist, in Lady Fiona’s bedroom, with the crested luggage laid out ready; while he tinkered between the waiting car and the garage.
Then, the sound downstairs that had to be Hugo coming to tell her that the car was ready—only it was the Lestrange girl, with her alien accent and her cool, watchful eyes—like the eyes in the portrait of Julien Granchester. Hugo had been right about her figure too, damn him.
Afterwards, they watched her go.
‘Take the car and go after her. Stop her! Run her down if you have to!’
‘In the village street … are you mad?’
‘Hugo, she’s got to be put out of the way before she sets eyes on my mother and knows who I am. I don’t care how, or where, but you’ve got to kill her!’
So Fettes followed the girl on foot, through the gorse and undergrowth of the clifftop, skirting close to the road and keeping her in sight.
He was behind her when she pushed open the door of the mausoleum that they had left ajar to attract the first curious sightseer of that last Sunday of summer; and when she recoiled from the horror in the catafalque, it was into his outstretched hands.
She was dying under his fingers when he heard the voices and footsteps in the lane. He let her slump to the floor of the mausoleum, unconscious—and barely had time to hurl himself into the undergrowth beyond the cypresses before the intruders came in sight.
Later, back at the cottage, Mabel Ayers raved: ‘Still alive? What do you mean, still alive?’
‘I was interrupted. They’ve taken her to Mays’s surgery. I hung around in the crowd outside, and the news came out that she’d come to. Of course, they’ve found Fiona’s body and the police have arrived … Darling, let’s get out of here while there’s still time!’
‘Get out? And go where? Half-way to London, or to be picked up on the plane? Is that how it’s going to end, after all our plans?’
‘But—’
‘You’re going to kill again, Hugo! You have to!’
So then it was a stake-out in the small copse behind the Mayses’ house, with the Jaguar—perilously conspicuous—parked outside the other pub: the Fox. Not the Green Man, where the police were.
He saw Polly Lestrange leave with Griselda Mays, and he drove to within sight of Mondisfield gates when the doctor’s daughter came back past him. Almost immediately after, the Canadian girl’s red sports car came out of the gates and went off in the opposite direction.
He followed her. He was watching through the painted windows when she wandered into the pin-table parlour at the pierhead; followed her inside and kept close to her. When she walked up the pier, he followed at the other side of the windbreak.
He was witness to her grotesque encounter with the old fisherman. When she broke away to the end of the pier and stood with her shoulders bowed, looking out to sea, he knew that she was too distraught to be aware of her imminent danger.
The will of Mabel Ayers guided his hands. And when the girl’s desperate fingers remained locked round the base of the iron stanchion, it was her will that brought his foot down on the yielding young flesh.
Ten minutes later—from a shop doorway across the esplanade—he saw two youths drag her up on to the shingle and pump the water out of her. He drove away as the first police car screeched to a stop at the pier entrance.
And, when he got back: ‘Kill her! You’ve got to kill her!’
He then became a hunter with a pair of binoculars. Through the soaking hours of Sunday night, he lay in the copse beyond the paddock at Mondisfield. The light behind the curtains of the room in the guest wing beckoned him to action: to evade the guardian constables and swim the ancient bastion of the icy moat. But he searched himself and found he didn’t possess the courage to blunder his way—half paralysed with cold, perhaps—through the creaking labyrinth of an unfamiliar house, to kill his victim.
In the end, when morning came, and he saw her sports car cross the bridge and head towards the village, he went after her with no real belief that the killing could ever be successfully engineered; not now, not when he had failed twice already.
Sitting in the parked Jaguar in the deserted lane that led out on to the beach, he saw the inconceivable happen: he saw her standing—alone—on the highest point of the cliff above him.
His nerve didn’t fail. Only the thudding of his heartbeats, as he scaled the cliff and crept towards the screen of hawthorn; even the telltale snap of a twig underfoot only prompted the chill calculation that, hearing it, she could only run for the cliff edge, and that he would have her—there, or on the deserted beach below.
A few moments later, and he was looking down at the screaming young face protruding from its filling grave beneath him …
‘But you couldn’t let it happen! You scrambled down and saved me!’
Polly broke through the woman’s monologue: the sickening account of the two cold-blooded killings and their aftermath. Mabel Ayers’s voice had taken on an edge of unctuous relish when she had come to the climax of the girl’s entombment in the shifting sand …
She made her appeal directly to Fettes: searching the face that, to her sudden anguish, was telling her nothing.
‘It wasn’t in you to stand there and watch me die! It might have been different if she’d been there, at your elbow, holding you back. But you were alone—and, alone, you followed your own emotions …’
Oh God! If only he’d look at me, instead of staring at her. There must be some way of getting through to him. I can’t be mistaken—not after what he did—there must be some humanity in him. Compassion …
The last remains of her talisman-image crumbled before his impassivity. She backed away towards the bow window, her eyes questing for an avenue of escape.
Silence—and then a thin and disturbing sound. It was like the delicate scraping of an untuned violin string. It grew in volume and pitch, tremored on a high note; and cascaded down into a grating boom of noise, like the pealing of a great tenor bell in a shut-in tower. It was—inconceivably—human laughter. She looked round.
Hugo Fettes was laughing at her. And his laughter was as mad and mocking as his eyes.
Mabel Ayers remained seated where she was. Still feline, it seemed to Polly that she had turned from a tigress to a pampered house-cat, curled and purring in anticipation of torture and meat.
‘How deliciously romantic,’ she drawled. ‘My dear, you do have a real talent for self-dramatization. So you really think that darling Hugo saved you on account of your lissom girlish charms. It wasn’t like that at all, you know. He dug you out of that hole because he had no choice—someone else was watching him!
‘And he needed—needs—no encouragement from me to kill you. Only a little pointing in the right direction.
‘I think he’ll enjoy it more than the others—and I know I shall!’
CHAPTER XIII
No escape.
Mabel Ayers stirred in her seat and looked across at Fettes. He stood silently, staring at Polly, with the flaxen cowlick of his hair drooping over one raised eyebrow and hands hanging limply. He stood, lean as a crane—or like a carrion bird. She saw, and registered for the first time, the size and power of the hands below the heavily-boned wrists. The hands of a strangler.
‘We’re safe, darling,’ said Mabel Ayers. ‘She came straight here after seeing my mother, and without telling anyone. The little fool, the oversexed little bitch, really did think you saved her on the cliff because you’d fallen for her.’
The two of them laughed. Polly’s eyes flickered from left to right. Behind her was the middle of the bow window, with the door leading out on to the lawn—and that had to be locked.
‘Did she really think,’ murmured the woman, ‘that she could blackmail us, perhaps, through you, Hugo? Or perhaps she so liked the arrangement that she saw herself taking my place. To be Lady Fiona Fettes herself, in an ash-blonde wig.’
Fettes was four paces from her, but there was the edge of a sofa between them, round which he would have to pass. That made five paces, maybe six. The measurement of the life left to her …
‘I hadn’t thought—had you, Hugo darling—that there were so many of us around? People who’re willing to take a chance with life; to stake everything for the few good things this world has to offer? You’d never have thought there could have been two of us in a neck of the woods like Denwich. And now she comes along. It must be the Granchester blood she shares with me. Not that she’s in our class.’
The woman remained in her seat, and now she was a Roman empress curled up to watch the slaughter of the games. No danger from there; it would come from Fettes.
‘She’s beginning to bore me, darling. Kill her!’
He hitched off his striped tie and flicked back the cowlick of hair; advanced slowly towards her with ambling, easy grace. Not till he had rounded the sofa did he raise his large hands, hooked and powerful like hawk’s talons. Eyes crazed and amused. Lips tightly smiling.
‘Sorry about this, old thing. It may hurt slightly.’ In the mandarin accent of the best type of English gentleman.
She backed away carefully, one step at a time, and questing the parquet floor with her heels for fear of slipping.
He was three paces from her when her seat connected with the narrow lintel of the bow window. She shrank back against the Venetian blind, and the slats were deformed by the pressure of her shoulders—so that anyone outside in the garden could have caught a glimpse of her patterned dress.
She screamed when he raised the tie to the level of her throat. And she saw the agony of dismay in his suddenly flaring eyes—as the door of the bay window splintered and slammed back into the room under the impact of Detective-Sergeant Blakey’s rugger player’s shoulder.
The lawn was full of men, and they were crowding in. Horrible was with them, and he was wearing her dressing-gown.
They cornered Hugo Fettes at the edge of his garden, where the dying heads of hydrangeas were already golden and half mummified. He had burst out of the front door and swerved on the gravel to avoid the blue-clad figures advancing at him; raced past the garage and skirted the lawn. More of them were waiting for him, strung in a loose line along the cliff edge, where his garden ended.
‘Stop!’
‘Catch him, there!’
He went on, ducking an outstretched arm, and right over the edge. The cliff face there was firm and unbroken; no scree slope to check his fall. He fell forty feet on to the hard bank of shingle which the spring tides carried right up to the base of the cliff at that point.
In their fumbling compassion, they yielded to the woman’s hysterical pleadings; brought her to the cliff edge and let her look down for a few moments at the dark figure sprawled, face uppermost, and limbs splayed out like a star.
‘We were in love … we would have been so happy!’
The seagulls echoed her cries, as they hung motionless in the thermals above.
CHAPTER XIV
They had a grotesque tea-party in the white drawing-room. The late afternoon sun came in through the leaded windows and burnished the pink roses on the lap of the lady in the picture.
The room was cold and smelt of ancient damp. Emma Chesham had provided a small electric fire, and had placed it nearest to Horrible. He was wearing levis, jacket and pants—freshly dried in the linen cupboard by Emma Chesham—but crumpled and unironed. The old house-keeper revealed an unexpected vein of affection in her attitude to the boy. She pressed a plate of cucumber sandwiches on him, nodding approvingly when he took two. And she motioned him to get nearer the fire.
‘You’ll get straight home to bed as soon as you can, my lad,’ she said gruffly. ‘Swimming the moat! You should have your head examined.’ And she ruffled his hair.
‘It was quite reprehensible,’ said Middleton primly. ‘Though in the event the young man purged his contempt of the law.’
Emma Chesham ignored the remark, as she had ignored the red-haired detective’s presence since she had entered the room with the tea-trolley. ‘You’ve got all you need, miss?’ she asked Polly. ‘Call if there’s anything else.’
‘Thank you, Miss Chesham,’ replied Polly with matching formality.
