Ancient Images Part 13

Now that the gate was open, the vault was less dark. Beyond the fat gray pillars that supported the ceiling, which was so low she thought the present Redfield might have to duck if he ever went in there, she could see memorial plaques set in the greenish walls. She began to read the plaques to her left, starting with the first that didn't look too overgrown to decipher, inscribed to the memory of a fifteenth-century Redfield. She read four plaques before she admitted to herself she had been mistaken to suspect what she had half suspected. There was no pattern to the dates of death-- nothing like the regularity of which "The Lofty Place" had made so much.

She read one more plaque, to be absolutely certain. There was no need for her to venture into the darker reaches of the vault, which must extend beyond the chapel, toward the fields of wheat. The faint stale smell must be the smell of moss or something else that had grown in the dark, and the m.u.f.fled hollow rustling had to be the wind in the gra.s.s at the top of the steps.

She was on her way out when she noticed that a s.h.i.+ft in ------------------------------------199 the light had made another plaque visible, close to the gate. It was so old that it had cracked from corner to corner. She crossed the floor, the stones of which felt swollen, and squinted at the inscription. The plaque was so overgrown that most of the carved letters were stuffed with moss, which she thought must be one source of the smell of stale growth. She'd a.s.sumed that a shadow was making the diagonal crack appear wider than it was, but in fact it was wide enough to slip her fingers through. Strings of moss glistened between its lips. She moved aside a little so as not to block the light that was reflected from the nearest pillar, and squatted down to bring her face closer to the plaque. Eventually she managed to distinguish the date of death, which suggested no more of a pattern than the other carved dates had. "Sorry to bother you," she murmured, and grasped her knees to push herself to her feet, her dangling handbag nudging her like an old dog. Cramp in her thighs arrested her in a curtsy halfway to standing, and so she had time to see what she hadn't realized she had already glimpsed through the crack.

It was only a hole, a large hole that seemed to extend back further than would have been necessary to house a coffin. Presumably there had been a coffin which had rotted away at some time in the past. No doubt the far end of the niche had collapsed with age too, Sandy thought, trying to ma.s.sage the cramp from her thighs so that she could move away. The object she could just make out beyond the crack must be a tangle of roots, and of course it wasn't really stirring. Roots must have broken through the collapsed wall of the niche, another proof of how fertile the soil was, and over the years they'd formed a scrawny shape that looked crouched, about to leap. Though her thighs were still aching, she had unlocked her muscles sufficiently to be able to stagger to her feet--but she staggered so badly that she needed to support herself, and the only support within reach was the plaque.

She felt it give way. Perhaps the moss hid other cracks ------------------------------------200 in the stone. The plaque was about to fall to pieces, opening the niche. She wavered backward, b.u.mping into the pillar, before she realized that she hadn't felt stone giving way, only its pelt of moss. She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, roughly enough to steady herself, and then she marched toward the steps. A face loomed out of the darkness above her, inside the arch.

Her legs jerked together, bruising her knees, and she almost fell headlong. She retreated a few inches and saw that the face was a carving. "Panicky b.i.t.c.h," she snarled. It looked at least as old as anything in the vault, probably older. It was so eroded that she couldn't tell if it was meant to be a hungry face composed of wheat, or overgrown by it, or turning into woven stalks. It looked dismayingly threatening and primitive, and far more like the sketch Charlie Miles had made for her than the coat of arms carved above the Redfield mantelpiece had.

She hurried to the steps and closed the gate behind her, and saw its vague shadow flood across the stone floor like an upsurge of soil. She scrambled to ground level, wondering why the rustle of vegetation had seemed louder in the vault than in the open. Just now she was more concerned that Lord Redfield might think she had been out of sight for too long. Once she was past the chapel she could see n.o.body watching, but that didn't make her feel less watched.

She walked quietly back to the town, through the teatime streets and into the hotel. Roger must have arrived; the receptionist was opening her mouth to say so. "Cook was wanting to know--was "Has anyone been asking for me?"

"Cook has, to know if you'll be--was "You know what I mean. Has anyone been here looking for me or left a message?"

"I'd have said if they had," the receptionist said huffily. "But I need to let cook know--was "I expect I'll be having dinner," Sandy said, and ------------------------------------201 trudged up to her room. Could the girl have been instructed to withhold any messages to her or even to tell callers that Sandy wasn't staying at the hotel? Could Roger have already been and gone, having been told she'd left or had never been there? She mustn't grow paranoid, it was only her period thinking for her. Most likely Roger had been delayed and had failed to let her know, or perhaps the receptionist at Staff o' Life wasn't prepared to accept messages for her. Now Sandy thought about it, it had been somewhat cheeky of her to a.s.sume that anybody would.

She dialed Roger's number and listened to the ringing until her head began to throb. She considered driving back to London, leaving a message at the hotel in case he was on his way, but even if she set out now she would have to drive most of the way in the dark. She went downstairs to apologize to the hotel receptionist for having been brusque with her, and couldn't bring herself to say she had changed her mind about dinner.

Dinner ended with bread pudding that tasted strongly of the Redfield special, and after that she felt too heavy even to dream of driving home. She went out to walk off her meal. The night had closed down like a lid, and the streets were illuminated by lamps of a kind she hadn't seen since early childhood, bolts protruding from both sides of their necks. The Staff o' Life complex was lit and rumbling. In the pubs, and in some of the houses, she heard s.n.a.t.c.hes of folksong above the tuneless continuo of the wind. The light from a bedside lamp hovered on the ceiling of a child's bedroom, and a woman was humming a lullaby. In another house Sandy heard a shot, a scream, the Vaughan Williams melody of a Staff o' Life commercial. Out beyond the northern edge of town, where the tower soaked up the night, the fields were pale and restless.

Back at the Wheatsheaf she stood under the awning and gazed along the main road, hoping dreamily to see headlights that would prove to herald Roger's arrival. She felt too ------------------------------------202 sleepy to be discontented. She didn't know how long she had been standing there when the receptionist approached her. "I'll be locking up when you're ready, Miss Allan. n.o.body's come for you or called."

"Well, that's men for you," Sandy said as they went into the hotel.

The girl gave her a look so placid it was beyond interpretation. "What does your man do?"

"Writes."

"And you too?"

"No, I'm from television," Sandy said, disconcerted to realize how long she had had to be wary of saying so. She thought she could be open here, but she changed the subject anyway. "He'd have to come along that road from London, wouldn't he?"

The girl locked the front doors and withdrew the key with a loud rattle. "Aye, that's the only way, the Toonderfieldroad."

Sandy faltered, her mouth tasting suddenly stale. "Which road did you say?"

"The road through Toonderfield."

"Where's that?"

"Toonderfield? Why, you came through there yesterday. It's the edge of Redfield, past the Ear of Wheat as far as the wee wood." The girl stared at her, the iceberg of a countrywoman's contempt for urban ignorance just visible in her eyes, and snapped the key ring onto the belt of her uniform. "You'll see it when you leave," she said. ------------------------------------203 So Giles Spence had died on Redfield land. That needn't seem sinister or even very surprising, Sandy told herself as she brushed her teeth. Lampooning the Redfields hadn't helped his film, and so he'd come back. It seemed clear that Lord Redfield had waited to be sure that she wasn't aware of it before he would discuss Spence's first visit, but after all, Redfield had been protecting his family from suspicion. Or perhaps she was being too suspicious, and he genuinely didn't know where Spence had died, given that he himself had been barely out of his cradle at the time. As for Spence, if he'd driven off in a rage after having failed a second time to shake the Redfield poise, the copse beyond the humpbacked bridge was a likely spot for him to have lost control of his car.

She unbolted the bathroom door and padded to her room. The wall-lamp by her door had died; the gla.s.s bud among the wooden leaves was gray as a parched seed. The other lamps illuminated sheaves that were printed on the wallpaper, all the way along the uninhabited corridor to the empty stage of the landing. She wondered where the staff of the hotel slept; wherever it was, she couldn't hear them. They wouldn't be able to hear her, but why should that worry her? She let herself into her room and locked the door. Toonderfield might be a contraction of Two Hundred Acre Field, she thought as she brushed her hair. The insight made her feel sleepily contented, not least because it seemed self-contained, a bit of information that was already tidying ------------------------------------204 itself away at the back of her mind. She stood up from the stool in front of the dressing table and stretched and yawned, and was ambling to the bed when she heard a sound beyond the window.

She parted the thick curtains and opened the window wide, and leaned out to see what the regular sound might be that made her think of pacing claws. The streetlamps sprouted from their plots of light, but otherwise the street was deserted. Of course, the hotel sign was making the sound, ticking as it swayed in the wind.

She closed the window and the curtains, and climbed into bed, catching hold of the light cord to let herself down into the dark and sleep. She must have been exhausted last night not to have heard the restless sign, the wind bl.u.s.tering at the window. The weight of tonight's dessert sank her into sleep.

Silence wakened her. The wind had dropped. At some point, she realized, she'd heard the rumbling of lorries from Staff o' Life. Lying under the quilt in the midst of the silence, she felt peaceful and warm and safe. She listened to the m.u.f.fled noises of the hotel sign, which sounded even more like the pacing of an animal now that there was no wind to blur them--but if there was no wind, the sign shouldn't be making a noise.

The thought stiffened her body, held her still and breathless, straining to hear that there was a wind after all. She was wide awake now, her nerves buzzing. She lifted her head from the pillow, wis.h.i.+ng that she hadn't drawn the curtains so closely that no light could reach the room, and then her neck grew rigid as she realized what she was hearing. The sound of pacing wasn't beneath her window, it was in the corridor outside her room.

She kicked off the quilt, grabbed the light cord and hauled at it so fiercely she thought it would snap. The small cosy room sprang into view, and it felt like a cell. Some part of her mind had hoped that the light would drive away the ------------------------------------205 sound, but it was still there beyond her door, a rapid clicking like claws on the linoleum. "So now you know I'm in here," Sandy cried, "let's see what you look like," and flung herself off the bed, ran to the door, grappled with the lock and snapped the bolt back. Seizing the doork.n.o.b with both hands, she threw the door open and stalked into the corridor.

It was deserted. A moment before she had looked out she'd heard the pacing just outside, but the corridor was deserted. The doors of the empty rooms paraded away to the stairs, reminding her how alone she was up here. n.o.body could have got to the nearest room, let alone the fire exit that led to the car park, in the time it had taken Sandy to look; an animal, which was what the noises had suggested to her was prowling the corridor, couldn't even have opened a door. She tried to think that the staff quarters were on the floor above, that the noise had been coming from there, but the trouble was that the corridor wasn't quite empty, after all. A faint smell lingered in it--a smell she fancied she had met before.

She stared along the corridor and thought of heading for the stairs, but then where would she go? She backed into her room and secured the door. She could ring the switchboard and raise the staff from wherever they were sleeping, but what would she tell them? Deep down she was nervous of calling unless she absolutely had to, in case n.o.body responded. She leaned her cheek against the door and listened, and eventually crept to the bed and pulled the quilt over herself. She couldn't quite bring herself to turn off the light; why should it matter if the light showed where she was? As she closed her eyes she had the unpleasant notion that she would be just as easy to find in the dark, if not easier. It took her some time to doze off, even when she had managed to suppress that idea. Not only was she listening nervously, but she was trying not to recall while it was still dark where she had first encountered the faint decaying smell. ------------------------------------206 In the morning it was gone. A smell of toast drifted upstairs. Sandy found she had slept late again, and ran to the bathroom with hardly a glance along the corridor. She'd meant to call Roger as soon as she awoke, so early that if he hadn't left London he was bound to be in his flat, a.s.suming that he wasn't sleeping somewhere else. She went back to her room and dialed, and galloped her fingers on the bedside table while she listened to the ringing, ringing, ringing. At last she dropped the receiver daintily into its cradle. Whatever he was playing at, she wasn't prepared to wait any longer. Today would be her last day in Redfield, she promised herself.

She dressed in a T-s.h.i.+rt and denim overalls, and went downstairs. The receptionist greeted her warmly, if slowly. "The breakfast's ready when you are," she said, and Sandy hadn't the heart to leave without eating, since they would be cooking it only for her. It would have done for two people: the slabs of fried bread under the bacon and eggs were as thick as the slices of toast in the rack. Since this would be her last taste of the Redfield special, she indulged herself, and almost gave in when the waitress asked if she wanted more toast. "Do you all sleep in the hotel?" she said instead.

"Aye, downstairs."

Perhaps the noises had been coming from down there or even somewhere else entirely. Perhaps they'd been caused by a fault in the plumbing; that would explain the smell. They hardly mattered, since Sandy was leaving, though not ------------------------------------207 straight away. When she plodded upstairs to brush her teeth she felt too full to begin driving at once. She needed a walk, especially since she would be spending most of the day in the car.

She couldn't move fast enough to elude the receptionist, asking the question the waitress had already asked. "Will you be having the lunch?"

"I shouldn't think so," Sandy said, and received a look of polite skepticism as she left the hotel. All right, yesterday she'd said she wouldn't be here for dinner, but today was the end. "You'll see," she muttered, low enough not to be heard by the women who were gossiping outside the nearest shop. "Good morning," they said as if they were inviting her to join them. She couldn't imagine being content just to gossip and shop.

She walked to Staff o' Life and called the receptionist there to her window. "n.o.body's asked for you, Miss Allan," the young woman with the horsey smile said. Half of the waiting was her own fault, Sandy thought, for a.s.suming she meant more to Roger than in fact she did. Serve her right for making so much of a one-night stand-- for not realizing she needed to. At least she was learning a few truths about herself.

The walk had made her feel lighter, if not exactly energetic. She came out of the visitors' entrance and saw the graveyard, reaching alongside the factory toward the fields. It ought to be a good place for a last stroll and for her to be alone with her thoughts. She walked out of the factory grounds and around to the churchyard gate.

The church was early English: austere walls, windows full of tracery that led up to pointed arches. Given the extent of the graveyard, she concluded that the church must have been raised on the site of an older building. Feeling nostalgic, she strolled among the graves.

The youths she'd seen working here yesterday had gone, having finished what appeared to be a thorough job. ------------------------------------208 The gra.s.s was neat, the plots were weeded. There were no trees, only shrubs whose shadows the sunlight was tucking under them. Flowers in vases decorated mounds, wreaths that looked freshly plucked lay against headstones. As Sandy followed the gravel paths she read inscriptions: "Dust to dust," "Called home," "As ye sow so shall ye reap." Many of the epitaphs referred to harvesting, predictably enough. Most of the graves were family plots, but she saw very few inscriptions for children or young people: another tribute to the local diet, she supposed.

She was in the eighteenth century now, and nowhere near the limit of the churchyard. She stepped off the path to glance at stones that weren't readily visible. There were more images of harvesting; the tops of some of the headstones were carved into sheaves. "Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter," an epitaph said.

Toward the field the blackened stones grew greener. Weeds spilled over the rim of a cracked urn on a pillar; an angel so weathered it was almost faceless had lumps of moss for eyes. Beyond the angel the graves were marked by horizontal slabs. Sandy strolled among them, musing over the inscription carved on the angel's pedestal: "Nor shall the beasts of the land devour them." She was treading on the seventeenth century, where some of the inscriptions were decidedly savage. "He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare," for heaven's sake! Admittedly this would have been in the time of the bubonic plague; perhaps the inscription, or the treatment it referred to, had been intended as a deterrent to the townsfolk, though she couldn't quite see how. She stepped over several mossy decades. "A wild beast has devoured him," said a stone she almost trod on. The angel hadn't helped him, then, but of course the angel had been erected later--most of three hundred years later, she a.s.sumed. She stooped to the date, which was more overgrown than the epitaph. Fifteen-something: 1588, comfortingly distant. A couple of strides took her back another few ------------------------------------209 decades, to an inscription that made her s.h.i.+ver: "He led me off my way and tore me to pieces." She wasn't even nearly at the hedge that enclosed the far side of the graveyard. There must be markers as old as any she had ever seen, but she wasn't sure that she would bother exploring that far, especially when another epitaph caught her eye: "One who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces." She could just distinguish that it dated from the fifteenth century, 1483 to be precise. The date wasn't as rea.s.suring as she felt it should be; the past no longer seemed quite dead enough. She turned toward the church, the town, her car, and then stopped short. She peered fiercely at the slab, and bit her lip. The final digit had been partly obscured. The date wasn't 1483 but 1488--exactly one hundred years before the last date she had deciphered.

The inscriptions were disturbingly similar, but couldn't that be a coincidence? She hurried toward the path, and saw another epitaph. It was for a woman, yet the text read, "And his nails were like birds' claws." Its blurred date might be 1433, except that the last two digits weren't quite the same: the final one was incomplete. Beyond it another slab proclaimed "Their land shall be soaked with blood." The thought of going any further made Sandy's mouth taste stale and sour. She picked her way back over the slabs, looking for the ones she'd read, praying that she would be proved wrong.

She snapped a twig off a shrub and poked the moss out of the date beneath "He led me off my way," and sucked in a shaky breath. The year of the inscription was 1538. She stumbled to her feet and went from grave to grave, willing there to be a date that didn't fit, that would show her she was imagining a pattern where none existed. But she already knew that "A wild beast has devoured him" referred to 1588, and now she remembered the date of the inscription about kidneys: 1688. The gap between those wasn't even slightly comforting; after all, there were many stones she ------------------------------------210 hadn't read. The last date on the angel's pedestal was 1888, and "Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter" was dated 1838. Worse than any of this was the thought that Giles Spence had died violently at Redfield in 1938--fifty years ago.

She mustn't think about that now, mustn't make herself nervous when she was about to drive, to escape. There would be time for reflection when she was well on her way. She hurried past the church, forcing herself to breathe slowly and regularly, and then she faltered. Three women were waiting for her just outside the churchyard gate. ------------------------------------211 She should have been able to find them absurd. They reminded her of rose-growers converging on a judge who had given someone else the prizes they coveted, or diners cornering a waiter to complain about afternoon tea, or members of a townswomen's guild confronting a civic blight. All three wore hats like garish lacy coral, pinned with imitation pearls. One carried a basket of vegetables, one held a long loaf under her arm like a club; the third, whose hands were even larger and stronger than those of her companions, carried nothing. "Had enough?" she said.

Taken singly none of them would seem threatening, Sandy told herself, and the three of them seemed so only because they were between her and her car. "Enough of what?" she said as calmly as she could.

"Of us. Of our town."

How could they know she was leaving? She saw their broad unsmiling faces, their stout bodies blocking her way; she felt the graveyard at her back. "Why do you say that?"

"Why do we say that?" The woman turned to her companions. "Why do we say it, she says, when we saw her running through the churchyard like a hare with the hounds on her tail."

"Like a scared rabbit," the woman with the basket said.

"A scalded cat, "said the one with the loaf.

Their deliberateness felt like thunder, like a threat of violence underlying the docility of the town. The way they blocked the gate like three sacks of potatoes made Sandy ------------------------------------212 want to lash out at them. Her impatience quickened her mind instead, and gave a cold edge to her voice. "I dropped something, that's all. It blew away."

"A notebook, was it?" the empty-handed woman said.

"All the notes she's been writing about us," said the woman with the vegetables.

"A handkerchief."

The three women stared at Sandy as if she had spoken out of turn. "She'll be telling us next she was having a weep," the woman with the loaf said. "She'll be saying she's got someone buried there."

"Of course I haven't," Sandy said, and told herself she wouldn't s.h.i.+ver, even though the women had started to smirk as if she had betrayed herself. "What's the problem?" she demanded.

"She wants to know--was the woman with the vegetables began, but the empty-handed woman interrupted her. "We haven't much time for reporters," she said.

The third woman tucked the loaf more snugly under her arm, so hard that the crust crunched like a bone. "There was one came looking for trouble the other year."

"Aye, came looking for folk who wanted to be in a union," the vegetable woman said. "And when he couldn't find any he made up stories to put in his paper. Made out we were afraid to say we weren't content because he couldn't believe what he saw. And you know what? He did us a kindness. Kept outsiders from coming sniffing round for jobs."

"We've a paper of our own," the empty-handed woman said. "We don't need his kind."

The woman with the loaf stared hard at Sandy. "We don't need strangers poking round, trying to stir things up."

"I believe Lord Redfield invited him to look for discontent," Sandy said, and realized what she ought to have told ------------------------------------213 the women in the first place. "It was Lord Redfield who invited me here."

The three faces grew sullen, almost accusing. "We'd like to be sure he's glad he did," the empty-handed woman said.

Sandy might have told them she wasn't a reporter--the hotel receptionist must have let them know she was from television--except that saying so might raise more dangerous questions. "I don't lie," she said, holding her voice steady. "Excuse me now, please."

They didn't budge, but her interrogator rubbed her hands together with a soft dry hollow sound. "Where are you going?"

"If you want any further information, please ask Lord Redfield. He told me I could go wherever I liked."

That didn't move them; if anything, they seemed to grow more monolithic. "Should have asked for some guidance," said the woman with the truncheon of bread.

"Can't say you've seen a town until you've met the people."

"Can't get the flavor of it if you leave out the salt of the earth."

If they were hostile to her only because she hadn't interviewed any of the townsfolk, how did they know she hadn't? She felt as if the empty-handed woman could read her thoughts, for she smirked and stepped back a pace. "Let her come out or we'll have her thinking there's somewhere she can't go."

The others moved just enough to let Sandy sidle by. She took a deep breath that she would release slowly once she was past them, and the vegetable woman said, "Why, look at the time. She can come with us."

The empty-handed woman displayed a wrist thick and k.n.o.bby as a branch as she consulted her watch. "Aye, it's time." ------------------------------------214 There wasn't quite enough room for Sandy to squeeze past them after all. She was about to demand what they were talking about when the woman with the loaf told her. "We'll take you for lunch. Give you time to get to know us."

Lunch would include more of the Redfield special, Sandy realized--more of that heavy contentment which had delayed her. For the second time that day her mouth tasted stale, the rusty Redfield flavor rising into her throat. "I can't, I'm sorry," she said. "Thanks anyway, but you'll have to excuse me. I'm already late."

The women stared grim-faced at her, their broad shoulders almost touching. "You'll learn nothing sitting by yourself," the vegetable woman said.

How did they know she would be? Having to lie to them, being nervous of telling the truth without quite knowing why, made Sandy hot with suppressed anger, but she would say anything now to s.h.i.+ft them. "I have to get back to the hotel. I'm expecting a call," she said, uncertain whether that was a lie or a desperate hope.

"Fine," said the woman with the loaf. "We'll walk with you and when you've had your call we'll give you your meal."

"Then let's walk," Sandy said edgily, afraid they might guess what she was planning. "It's very kind of you," she added. "Thanks so much."

They moved apart at last, and stepped back. The sight of an escape route was so tempting that she had to restrain herself from das.h.i.+ng for her car. She imagined herself fleeing three stout women with hatpinned hats as the townsfolk watched, imagined discovering that breakfast had left her too weighed down to outdistance the women, and felt absurd and irrational, barely capable of pretending that nothing was wrong. She made herself smile confidently as she pa.s.sed the gate.

The women closed around her, the vegetable woman on her left and the woman with the loaf on her right, the ------------------------------------215 empty-handed woman so close behind her that Sandy expected the large dull black shoes to tread on her heels. A group of gossiping shoppers bade the women good morning but ignored Sandy, which made her feel even more like a prisoner. So did the question the woman tramping at her heels asked almost casually. "Let's hear about it, then. What have you been seeing?"

She didn't mean the graveyard, Sandy thought, wis.h.i.+ng she could watch the woman's face. "I had afternoon tea with Lord Redfield, and I've been up the tower, and all round the town. Oh, and I've been to the factory a couple of times."

The women greeted that with silence, in which the tramping of feet beside her and behind her seemed oppressively loud. Ought she to have mentioned the Redfield chapel? Could they know of her visit to it and be wondering what she had to hide? She was about to mention it when the empty-handed woman spoke, so loud that Sandy felt breath in her hair. "n.o.body we know saw you in the factory."

"And we've got cousins there," the vegetable woman said.

"I said I went to it, I didn't say I went in. Lord Redfield sent me there."

"Well then," the woman at her heels said triumphantly, "that's where we'll take you after lunch."

"That's where you'll meet the folk you should meet."

"That's where you'll see the lifeblood of Redfield."

They had reached the hotel. They were pa.s.sing the entrance to the car park. Sandy could see her car, its misted windows dim, its wheels stained with reddish mud. She made herself stride onward, up the steps into the lobby, the women on both sides of her shoving the doors back. The receptionist smiled slowly at the four of them, and Sandy told herself that the girl was just glad Sandy was meeting the townsfolk. Then the girl's mouth straightened. "Sorry, Miss Allan. No calls."

For once Sandy was grateful to hear it. She turned ------------------------------------216 toward the stairs, and the woman with no shopping moved into her path, holding up her palms, which looked hard and raw. "She'll tell you when your call comes. You can sit down here and talk."

Sandy felt as if a shovelful of hot ash had been flung at her. She changed her panic into rage, let it glare out of her eyes and chill her voice. "Please wait here for me. I'm having my period and I need to go upstairs."

The woman stared doggedly at her. Sandy wondered if she was about to ask one of her friends for a tampon and usher Sandy to the toilet near the reception desk. "Talk to the receptionist about lunch," she suggested, and pus.h.i.+ng past the woman with the reddened hands, marched upstairs without looking back.

As soon as she was out of sight beyond the landing she halted and held her breath, though it throbbed in her windpipe and threatened to make her teeth chatter. The women weren't following. She hurried to her room, s.n.a.t.c.hing the key out of her handbag, and slammed the door behind her. With the sound still thudding in her ears, she grabbed her suitcase and threw it on the bed, snapped the clasps back, swept everything she'd laid out on the dressing table into the case and pulled open the wardrobe door. The jangle of unclothed hangers made her catch her breath. She lifted her clothes out of the wardrobe as swiftly as she could without rattling any more hangers and slung them into the case, cursing the women for making her crumple them. "I ought to send you the bill," she said through her teeth, and gave the room a last glance as she locked the case. She ran to the door and easing it open, leaned her head into the corridor.

The women were downstairs. She could hear them murmuring dully, one after the other, in what might almost have been a chant. She seized her case and walked loudly across the corridor, opened the bathroom door and closed it with as much noise as she could, and then she tiptoed rapidly ------------------------------------217 to the end of the corridor, to the door that opened onto the fire escape.

She took hold of the bar across the door with both hands and pushed it gently, shoved it harder, bore down heavily on it. It didn't s.h.i.+ft. She leaned backward, listening breathlessly for anyone coming upstairs, then let herself fall onto the bar. The only response was sweat that sprang out of her palms, making the bar feel colder and spiky, undermining her grip. She shut her eyes so tight that her vision blazed red, and flung her whole weight at the bar. As she felt it jerk away from her she restrained it, and it emitted only a m.u.f.fled clank as the door inched open. She fumbled her keys out of her handbag and almost dropped both bag and keys. She clenched her slippery fist on the handle of her suitcase, and stepped onto the fire escape.

Should she close the door? Mightn't someone in the lobby notice the draft? She set down her case on the iron mesh of the fire escape in order to shut the door quietly, and all at once she felt grotesquely ridiculous. How could she sneak away like this without saying goodbye to Lord Redfield or thanking him for his hospitality? What was she afraid of--three women in silly hats? Embarra.s.sment and guilt were ma.s.sing in her stomach, an aching weight that needed to be a.s.suaged.

Suddenly it wasn't the women or even the dates in the graveyard that frightened her, but her own growing inertia that felt like a hunger to stay in Redfield. She grabbed the handrail so hard it shook the iron staircase beneath her, and clutched the handle of her suitcase. Though a staleness that might be a taste or a smell was threatening to make her dizzy, she tiptoed quickly down the fire escape.

Her car was cold: the misted windows showed that. The engine wouldn't start at once, and how much time would she have to start it before the women noticed her? Hers was the only vehicle in the car park. If she began antic.i.p.ating the worst she wouldn't be able to go down. She forced herself to ------------------------------------218 think of nothing but reaching the foot of the fire escape, crossing the mossy car park, slipping the key swiftly and easily into the lock of her car, as she did.

She opened the door wide and heaved her suitcase onto the back seat. There would be time to move the case into the boot once she was out of Redfield. She climbed into the driver's seat and closed the door gently but firmly, holding her breath. She pushed the key into the ignition and rubbed condensation off the inside of the windscreen with her forearm, and risked one sweep of the wipers. They left two arcs like monochrome rainbows of mud, but she could see ahead. She could see the hotel receptionist, less than twenty feet away from her beyond the window behind the girl's desk.

Sandy pulled the choke out as far as it would go, and gripped the key until the tips of her thumb and forefinger ached. "Start first time," she whispered, halfway between a command and a plea, it didn't matter which so long as it worked. She poised her foot ready to tread on the accelerator, and the receptionist stood up.

She wasn't coming to the window, she was going to the counter. Sandy let a s.h.i.+ver pa.s.s through her and opened her fists to release it, and grasped the key again, just as the three women appeared at the counter. If they glanced past the receptionist they would be looking straight at Sandy. "Try and stop me," Sandy mouthed at them, and twisted the key, held it as the engine roared. She let go of the key, shoved the lever into first gear, trod on the accelerator. The engine made a clogged sound, and died.