Roots of Evil(117)

He switched on the rather old-fashioned electric fire in the small room overlooking the lane and closed the curtains. He liked this room; it had a friendly atmosphere, and it looked as if it had been used as a study; there were bookshelves and a little writing desk and a rather weatherbeaten sofa near the window. Had Lucy and Edmund done their homework in here during school holidays? It was still odd to think that Lucy was his cousin – that Alraune had been half-brother to Lucy’s mother. Michael wondered how Lucy got on with that dry stick, Edmund Fane. Had they had a teenage romance, as distant cousins sometimes did? Had people in the family speculated about whether they might one day marry?

Michael’s own childhood, once he had left Pedlar’s Yard and once he had found Alice, had been extremely happy. He had loved living in the old stone house set amidst the ancient fenlands, and it was a measure of Alice’s own charm and energy that there had never been any boredom. But he thought he would have liked to have Lucy as a small cousin, part of his growing-up years. And Edmund, said his mind wryly. Don’t forget that Edmund would have been a cousin as well. Oh yes, so he would. Only a distant one, though.

He might as well spend the night in the friendly little study rather than go foraging around for sheets and pillows. The sofa was wide and deep, and there would probably be a travelling rug or an eiderdown somewhere upstairs.

To counteract the rather brooding silence he switched on the radio, tuning it to Classic FM. A request programme was on and the ordinary announcements for music and the breaks for advertisements and news went some way towards dispelling the unsettling atmosphere.

He went along the hall to the back of the house. The kitchen had been more or less completely cleared, but a kettle stood on the top of the cooker. Filling it was awkward – Michael had to disentangle his hand from the sling to do so, and he acknowledged with annoyance that the doctor had been right about not driving. But he managed to make a cup of instant coffee which he drank gratefully, swallowing one of the painkillers with it. The label recommended two every six hours, but Michael loathed the vague muzziness that even an aspirin caused. He would take one pill now, and if necessary he would take the second one later.

Now for the call to Francesca. He smiled again, thinking he would say that if she was free tomorrow evening they would still go to the Italian place, because he could spoon up pasta with one hand. It was good to imagine the two of them in the restaurant, Francesca seated opposite to him, her eyes wary and defiant most of the time, and then suddenly and disarmingly intimate when she smiled.

His jacket was in the hall, flung over the stair rail, and he felt in the pocket for his mobile phone. It was at this point that he remembered Edmund Fane using the phone to call the local pub to book a room for the night. Fane had had to get out of the car to make the call because the signal was weak, but it had only taken a few minutes, and then he had got back in.

But what had happened to the phone?



It took the best part of half an hour, and an awkward, one-handed search of the downstairs rooms, before Michael finally accepted that the phone was not in the house and that it must therefore still be in Edmund Fane’s car. Blast Edmund Fane and his spinsterish outlook and his unfamiliarity with mobile phones! Dear me, am I using this right? he had said. I don’t possess a mobile phone, you know – I’m afraid I’ve always found them rather intrusive.

And now Fane’s dithering uncertainty had resulted in Michael being stranded out here with no means of communicating with anyone. At the moment he did not much care if he never communicated with the entire western world again, but he did care about not communicating with Francesca. Would she think he had stood her up? Was there any way he could get to a phone? Was he, in fact, sure that the phone in this house really was disconnected? He tracked down the two extensions, one in the largest of the bedrooms and one in the hall. Both were dead. Hell’s teeth.

He went back into the study and sat down to review the situation. From what he had seen on his previous visits this house was at least a couple of miles from any other buildings. Could he walk that far in his present state? The painkiller was already starting to kick in, and he was feeling unpleasantly light-headed. And even if he did manage to reach a house, could he be sure he would be allowed in to use the phone? His mind flew ahead, seeing himself knocking on the door of a house where some lone female lived (it was a safe bet that the first place he tried would have a solitary woman there!) and making the classic horror-film request. ‘I’m stranded and I wondered if I could possibly use your phone.’ And the bandaged hand, and the blood on his shirt-cuff, and his dishevelled appearance all contributing to the sinister image.

How about a public phone-box? He tried to remember if he had seen one along the road, and could not. But how often were phone-boxes working nowadays? How far away was the White Hart? Not far, surely?

This was ridiculous. It was the twenty-first century, and it was possible to contact most of the world with the touch of a phone-pad, or the press of a computer key, or the activating of a fax machine. And here he was, stuck in this old house, as cut off from the world as if he had been transported back a hundred years!

He glanced at his watch. It was coming up to six o’clock. Would Francesca be home from school by now, perhaps taking a shower and deciding what to wear for the evening? Did women bother about that kind of thing these days? Michael had not exactly fought shy of women, and women had not exactly fought shy of him, but he had backed away from the deeper emotional involvements. He did not want to back away from Francesca, however.