Despite her resolve, Elizabeth pulled to a halt outside the Hunter house feeling shaken as well as indignant. Her home had been violated. And by extension she had too. She pulled down her sunshade to look in the small mirror backing it and switched on the interior light to examine her reflection. She was still struggling with the implications of what she had revealed to herself at the stable at her mother’s house on Saturday. The cross on her own front door was not as troubling as that. But it was particular to her, intimate in its scorn and distaste. She composed herself in the mirror. She looked all right. Children could be extremely sensitive to stress and anxiety in adults. Adam needed her to be carefree and calm. She did not think she looked very much like a witch. There could be a hint of hauteur about her appearance when she pulled back her hair and made herself up. It was the shape and colour of her eyes, she supposed. But despite her bloodline she did not think she looked blackly magical or even malicious. Outside the car it was fully dark, the night moonless. She looked towards the warm illumination of the house. There would be the smells of cooking and a roaring fire within. She hoped to God there would be no nightmares, no ancient, rusty voices emanating from the sleeping boy in Mark’s absence. She hoped the crone whose call he’d answered was a woman of her word. She smiled in the mirror. And her reflection smiled back at her, unconvincingly. She snapped back the sunshade, switched off the light and got out on to the gravel. It was five minutes to six.
The phone rang in Hunter’s hotel room at 7 p.m. and it was reception to tell him that a visitor awaited him in the lobby. He knew it would be one of two people. It would be Miss Hall’s emissary or it would be the man from the airport whose face wore a masked tattoo. He stood up from the bed, from where he had taken the call using the phone on the bedside table. He had showered and was dressed in a lounge suit for his audience with the fat sorceress. He had been tying his tie knot when the phone rang. He had no weapon. He had no uniform inside which to feel confidently clad for combat. But he felt secure enough in himself. He was skilled at half a dozen sorts of unarmed combat and had used them all his professional life, distilling what he considered most practical and lethal from each. A man weighing three hundred pounds would try to grapple him to the floor and kill him with a choke hold. But a man weighing that much lacked mobility and Hunter would knock him cold and break his neck before he got the chance to take him down.
He took the stairs because emerging from the lift gave him no perspective on what its doors would open to reveal. He pushed through the fire door. It was not the airport sentinel. Only one man waited, seated in the lobby. He was attired formally, in evening wear. Over it he wore an astrakhan coat and hat in a matching grey. He was tall, but he was very thin and was scrabbling absently at a set of worry beads. Hunter approached him. The man saw him and stood up. He was quite pale and his face cadaverously gaunt. He blinked and looked around. He seemed afraid. But there was no one else present, no one lurking. Hunter was combat alert now. And he would have sensed the danger.
‘I am the Comte de Flurey,’ the man said. He made no offer to shake hands.
‘Sir,’ Hunter said. He did not know the protocol for a
French count. He considered France a republic and French aristocratic titles a silly affectation. But then Miss Hall’s emissary had already signalled an inclination towards pomp over the phone.
‘May I say how very sorry I am about your son’s ordeal, Colonel.’
‘Why are you here? I have the address.’
‘I am to drive you, if you will permit me.’ The Comte gave a short bow. Hunter pondered the offer. It deprived him of the security of a taxi driver as solid witness to the journey he was about to take and its destination should he fail to return. But the hotel staff had anyway seen the Comte. He was not an inconspicuous man.
‘The house is high above the lake, remote,’ he said. ‘The route is not straightforward.’
‘All right,’ Hunter said. He walked across to the reception desk to cancel his cab. He slipped the key to his room into his pocket. The hotel would have others. But it was still a precaution, of sorts. He turned back to the Comte. ‘Let’s go.’
The car was not her glossy Palmetto bug of a limousine. It was a mundane Mercedes people carrier in the metallic silver ubiquitous on Europe’s roads. Hunter hesitated for a moment over whether to get in beside Miss Hall’s emissary or behind him. But practicality was more important than etiquette, and so he got into the front passenger seat. He did not particularly want a conversation with this man. But he did want all the information he could amass before they reached their destination.
‘How is Miss Hall’s demeanour?’
‘Her demeanour? She is very sick, Colonel.’
‘What’s her mood?’
The Comte shrugged. ‘Resigned,’ he said. ‘She knows she has little time.’
Hunter remembered Mrs Mallory’s boast about comforting Rupert Brooke in Berlin, a full eighty or so years before the Magdalena confrontation. Mrs Mallory had looked decades younger than Miss Hall had done. She might well have little time. But the thought of how much time she might already have enjoyed made him shiver in the chill of the car’s interior.
‘Would you like the heater on?’
The Comte was very observant. It was interesting that the cold did not afflict him, despite his being so thin. There was not much flesh on him to insulate his bones. It was getting colder because they were ascending well above the level of the lake into thinner air.
‘Have you been with her for long?’
The Comte smiled. ‘Always.’
‘You were not there at Magdalena.’
‘That was a private encounter, Colonel. Nobody should have been there but the two protagonists. As I understand your comrades learned to their cost.’
‘It’s why I asked about her mood,’ Hunter said. ‘I have seen what these people are like when they are angry.’
The Comte drove for a while in silence. ‘I will offer you two pieces of advice,’ he said. ‘Never make the mistake of thinking of them merely as people. And do not compare Mrs Mallory, in her wrath, with my employer and benefactress. Miss Hall is far more good than bad.’
Hunter nodded. It was a claim he had heard before from the horse’s mouth. He asked no more questions because he sensed that what the Comte had said was a sort of summing-up of their conversation. The people carrier twisted along the steep incline of the road in first gear. The Comte smelled vaguely of some antique cologne. It was very faint, as though he put it on and then showered afterwards to avoid the vulgarity of being scented to excess. Hunter recognised it and knew he would remember the name. It was the women’s perfume Shalimar. There were rings on the third fingers of each of the Comte’s hands. His hands were pale and bony on the wheel and the stones set in the rings glittered blackly. After a few more minutes, they were there.
The house occupied by Miss Hall was tall and narrow and shuttered. It stood in isolation, flanked by ascending pines on the steep slope that rose behind it. The Comte had to get out of the car to open the locked gate between the walls that guarded the house. The walls were high and constructed from old stone but, despite their age, were smooth and sheer. Hunter was no authority on domestic architecture. But as they passed through the large ornamental iron
gate, he judged the house to be an eighteenth-century construction. There was that classical coldness about it, that essential formality. There was no garden at the front of the house. There was just a generous rectangle of gravel deep enough to crunch audibly under the wheels of the Mercedes. There was a sundial directly in the centre of the route from the gate to the front door. The Comte got back in when he had closed the gate behind them and steered carefully round this object and parked. He was nimble enough to get out and round the front of the vehicle to open the passenger door before Hunter had quite freed himself from his seatbelt. He was not just nimble, Hunter thought, as the Comte treated him to the death’s head leer of what he supposed was intended to be a smile of welcome. He was preternaturally fast.
The Comte approached the large front door and let them into the house. Beyond the door, a spacious entrance hall led to other rooms on the right. To the left, against the wall, rose a broad flight of wooden stairs behind a carved balustrade. The whole space was lit, somewhat dimly, by a single chandelier. The chandelier was huge. But it depended from a short chain and was remote from where they stood.
‘Wait here,’ the Comte said. Hunter nodded, aware that he had no choice. The Comte took the stairs. Once more his movement was so fleet that his ascent seemed like some cinematic trick, a jump-cut rush rather than a natural progression to whatever awaited on the upper floor. The thin aristocrat had the knack of devouring space. Outside a door, he knocked and waited before he opened it. He went through and then closed the door softly behind him.
Hunter looked around. He was aware of his heart beating in his chest. But the rhythm was steady and his pulse rate deliberate. He was reconciled to being here, resolved to do whatever was necessary to help his ailing son. He was less
afraid in truth than he had been before the call purporting to be from Mrs Mallory. Then he had been entirely without a direction to go in, beyond trying to follow a trail allowed to go cold for more than a decade. Now, however sinister the circumstances, he felt that a measure of hope had been extended to him. Looking around, he saw that there were carved reliefs in oak lining the walls. There were tapestries, reaching almost to the high ceiling, above them. The floor was a design of red and white diamonds. He thought the bold pattern on the floor engaged the eye in the dim light in a restless way when he examined it. It created the illusion in his peripheral vision that the figures in the oak reliefs on the walls twitched and shifted slyly. His gaze kept returning directly to the figures depicted there. But whenever he looked at them properly, they were cunning and bestial, clothed in human apparel and entirely still. He had seen them before. He had liked their effect no better then.
The Comte appeared at the top of the stairs and invited him up with a curled forefinger. The door behind him was open. But from the bottom of the staircase, Hunter could see no light beyond it. He climbed the stairs. They were carpeted in some rich, soft stuff that sank luxuriously under the weight of his tread. It was not a pleasant sensation. The pile of the carpeting was so deep it seemed to stick under the soles of his shoes and cling in the manner of something viscous and sticky. Approaching the landing, he heard faint music from the room beyond the Comte. And he knew it. He was almost entirely ignorant of classical music, but Lillian had possessed an ardent love for a number of romantic and choral works. He recognised the Ninth Symphony by Mahler. It was the Berliner Philharmoniker version recorded under the baton of Herbert von Karajan. Lillian had owned the CD. She had played it constantly, laid up in the late stages of her pregnancy in the weeks before Adam’s birth. It was
the second time he had been reminded of his dead wife in half an hour. For Lillian had worn Shalimar perfume, also.
‘Enter, Colonel Hunter,’ a voice said. He would not have recognised it. It was not the deep, querulous contralto he remembered, or thought he did. Her voice had not lost its relish for command. But the body had gone from it. And when he entered the room and sensed the discreet withdrawal of the Comte behind him to another part of the house, he was immediately able to see why.
He had expected Miss Hall’s domain of sorcery to be lit by candles, or at least oil lamps, something suitably Gothic and antique. But the large room was illuminated by electric globes that each offered a yellowy seepage of light too feeble to cast shadows. They hung from the ceiling on chains and were evenly spaced. She sat upright on a plumply upholstered leather sofa and looked like some gaunt, living ghost. A velvet skullcap covered her bald head. He could not keep the shock from his face on seeing her. She drew shrunken lips back from her too large teeth and he saw that they had developed a tortoiseshell pattern of decay. She was dying, all right. He would have known it blindfolded. He would have known it from the odour in the room. She clapped her hands together. The impact was harsh, the skin stretched over her palms brittle sounding. He would have bet she had no more than a few days left in her. She cocked her head to the side and laughed.
‘You are no sort of actor, Colonel. But you never were. You could not disguise your revulsion for me a dozen years ago. And that was when I was well, before you took the action that condemned me.’
‘I did not condemn you, Miss Hall. You saved my arm and probably my life and I was properly grateful to you. I killed Mrs Mallory. I regret I pointed my gun at you. But I meant you no harm.’
Her eyes were large in her shrunken face and they gleamed. ‘You were a fool then. You are a fool now. Why should I have supposed you would be any different from how you were? Perhaps I am as big a fool as you are.’ Her hands had dropped to her lap. Now she lifted one of them and brushed away something imaginary. She looked up at him again. The glint in her eyes was still present. She was angry, perhaps even furious. Her demeanour did not seem resigned to him. ‘What do you think happened, Colonel, all those years ago in Bolivia? Have you ever allowed your mind to consider that?’
‘We blundered into something we did not understand,’ he said. ‘We had no mechanism for dealing with it. It was beyond our remit and experience. We were motivated by damage limitation and the instinct for survival, when it all went wrong. And when we discovered the mutilation suffered by Major Rodriguez, I am ashamed to say I was driven entirely by the impulse for revenge.’
Miss Hall seemed to consider this. ‘What do you think we were about, at Magdalena?’
‘I don’t know. It was beyond my scope, beyond my comprehension.’
‘Do you believe in magic?’
‘Not really. But that’s not really the point. You do. That’s wholly the point.’
Miss Hall nodded. She coughed. Affliction soughed through her like a stiff breeze through autumn leaves about to fall. ‘Look around you.’
He did. There were more of the sly carvings on the walls that cavorted on the edge of vision. There was a sculpture on a tabletop; an expression of solid geometry featuring spheres that would not stay circular and squares undermined by their own odd angularity. Studying this piece provoked a queasiness that could easily have risen to nausea.
Miss Hall said, ‘Are you really so arrogant as to think that your species has this world to yourselves? Perhaps you are innocent enough to believe, Colonel, that the meek will inherit the earth? I do not believe you are. And I assure you, they will not.’
He thought it was odd that he had not been invited to sit. He did not truthfully want to be anywhere closer to her than he was. But he had assumed he had been summoned to provide some sort of service for her. As it was, he was the naughty schoolboy being carpeted for long-ago acts of stupidity and disobedience. Hunter felt he ought to move matters along. ‘Here’s what I think. You are a powerful hypnotist. Your rival and adversary Mrs Mallory was a powerful hypnotist. You might have thought yourselves witches or black magicians and you might think that still, Miss Hall. But the power of auto-suggestion is what you actually possess.’
‘And your son’s dreams?’
‘Triggered by something programmed in me, I think. I don’t believe I remember everything that happened to Captain Peterson or me in the canvas labyrinth.’
‘How did auto-suggestion heal your arm?’
He shrugged. ‘Positive thinking can be very beneficial.’
‘The dog was rabid and the limb already gangrenous. Either infection would have killed you.’
Hunter smiled. ‘Perhaps you are mistaken,’ he said.
‘No. But you, Sir, are very much mistaken,’ said Miss Hall. She rose frailly to her feet.
He saw how loose on her the clothing she wore had become. It had been cut to accommodate her obesity. It resembled sacking more than items of dress. She had not possessed the optimism or the energy, apparently, to replace it with something literally more fitting. She did something with her hands. She folded them in some
complex choreography. It looked like origami without the use of paper. That hard glitter had not left her eyes since his entry into the room.
He was unaware of his feet leaving the floor. The process was too rapid. He was aware of the smack of his skull against the bare stone of the wall and the way his brain juddered and the fact that his nose had begun to bleed with the physical shock. He thought too a tooth might have chipped. He knew that his heels trailed the floor by a couple of feet when he hit the wall. And there was a band of iron around his chest that prevented him filling his lungs.
‘Is this auto-suggestion,’ he heard the sick sorceress say in her brittle, autumnal voice. ‘Do you die at the mercy of illusion?’
His backside and shoulders scraped stone. He was shunted sideways. He felt the breath of the night from a window towards which his body was edging. He managed to turn his head to look at it. The effort was immense. The window was arched and as tall as he was. He shunted further with a scrape of good cloth towards the carved ornamental edging, an inch or so proud of the wall. It rippled under his shoulder blade.
‘I could put you outside. You might survive the drop. It’s about seventy feet. And you are not wearing your parachute now, Colonel.’
He could not breathe in the iron corset encasing his lungs. She knew. Perhaps she wanted to prolong his agony. He felt a fractional space of relief and gasped into it. And his heels juddered and rocked on stone. He was a strung puppet.