Roots of Evil(3)

Alraune. It was years since Lucy had even heard the name. Her mother had always maintained that Alraune had genuinely been nothing more than a publicity stunt. A ghost-child created by the gossip-columnists, the conception and birth deliberately surrounded by mystery. It had just been something that would sell newspapers, and bring people flocking to see the films, she had said; Lucretia had always had an eye for a good story, and she had never had much regard for truth. But there had never been any such person as Alraune – why, the name alone went to prove that it was only fantasy. Mandragora officinarum. Mandrake root. For pity’s sake, said Lucy’s mother, who had lived a bright mayfly existence with her husband and small daughter, would even Lucretia name a child after a mandrake root!

‘But it was a film!’ Lucy had said to Aunt Deb years later. ‘Alraune was the title of the first film Lucretia ever made! Didn’t mother ever understand that?’

Aunt Deb had said yes, of course, the name had come from the film – and a very outstanding film it had been in its day, by all accounts. But other than that, she would never talk about Alraune, although she once said that if even a tenth of the stories had been true, it must have been a childhood so bizarre and so bitterly tragic that it was best not to re-tell any of it. Alraune, either living or dead – and most probably dead – was better left in peace.

Lucy frowned, and picked up the phone to ring Aunt Deb to explain about Trixie Smith. Aunt Deb would probably talk to Edmund about it all – she talked to Edmund about most things – and Edmund would be strongly disapproving of the whole thing, but Lucy could not help that.

After she had done that, she would cook herself some supper and have another glass of wine, in fact she might even finish the bottle. Why not? Hearing Alraune’s name again after all these years surely warranted it.



Edmund Fane did not have to cope with rush hours or crowded tubes. He lived within two miles of his office, and he drove himself there and back each day.

He liked his life. He was due to turn forty in a couple of months’ time, which a great many people would have found vaguely alarming, talking about landmarks and watersheds, planning slightly hysterical celebrations or starting rigid exercise regimes that they would not keep up. Edmund had no intention of adopting such extreme behaviour; he viewed his fortieth birthday with quiet confidence and thought it was not being vain to look at his life with satisfaction.

On the material side there were a number of pleasing credits. There was his house, which, although small, was two hundred years old, and not only carefully maintained but very tastefully furnished. No one realized what a kick Edmund got when guests complimented him on his possessions.

There was his small solicitor’s practice, which he had built up almost single-handed in the prosperous little market town, and there was another kick to be got there. ‘Mr Fane,’ people said. ‘One of the town’s leading solicitors.’

People liked him, Edmund knew that. When he was still in his teens, they had said, Oh, what a nice boy! So responsible, so clever. And such beautiful manners. When he got a first at Bristol University people told Aunt Deborah how proud she must be of him. A brilliant future ahead, they said, and expressed surprise when he chose to come home and set up his own law practice, because wouldn’t you have expected Edmund Fane – Edmund Fane with that first-class honours degree in law – to have aimed for something more high-flying? Rather odd that someone with such a brilliant mind should bury himself in a small country firm – why, it was barely five miles from the place where he had been born. Ah, but perhaps he wanted to remain near to Deb Fane who had been so very good to him, almost a mother to him, in fact. Yes, that would be the reason. Dear, thoughtful Edmund.

On the strictly emotional side, the score was not quite so healthy, in fact Edmund admitted that if you were going to pick nits, you might say that the one shortfall in his life was the lack of a wife. But he had fostered a small legend about having carried a torch for some unspecified lady all these years, and it had worked very well indeed. (Poor Mr Fane, so romantically good-looking, and is it true that he never recovered from losing the love of his life…?)

Aunt Deborah had once or twice wondered if Lucy and Edmund might one day get together – such good friends they had been in their childhood, and only cousins by marriage, and wouldn’t it be nice? – but Edmund knew it would not be nice at all; Lucy would drive him mad inside of a fortnight.



At around the time Lucy was drinking her wine and thinking about Alraune, and Edmund was reviewing his life with such satisfaction, a sharp and incisive mind was remembering a very particular childhood fear.

It was a fear that still sometimes clawed its way to the surface, even after so many years and even when a degree of prosperity had been doggedly achieved. Even today, the fear that had ruled the life of a lonely child and that night after night had filled up a house had not completely faded.

The house had been in Pedlar’s Yard, once the site of an East London street market, once a busy little world of its own. The original cobbles were still discernible in places, but the market had been abandoned a century and a half earlier, and the houses and the surrounding areas were sinking into decay. No. 16 was squeezed between two larger buildings whose frontages both jutted out in front of it, so that it was always dark inside and there was a squashed-up feeling.

On some nights in that house it was necessary to hide, without always understanding why. But as the years went by, understanding gradually unfurled, and then it was necessary to be sly about the hiding places, changing them, sometimes doubling back to earlier hiding places, because if you were found on the nights when fear filled up the rooms – the nights when he stormed through the house – terrible things could happen.