Roots of Evil(89)

Trixie had not been very tidy, but at least she had not been a magpie keeping bundles of old letters or postcards, or even photographs. There were a few photographs though, mostly pushed haphazardly into a couple of large manilla envelopes on top of a wardrobe. Fran, who rather liked old photos, even when they were of other people’s families or friends, put these to one side thinking she would look through them later, although it was rather sad if Trixie had had so few stored-away memories of her life. On the whole it was probably better not to surround yourself with sentimental fragments, but it meant a lot of the romance of the past got lost. It was not so many years since you could practically piece together entire lives from faded letters, or construct long-ago love affairs from theatre programmes and dance programmes or scratched gramophone records.

But she could not see today’s teenagers squirrelling away posters from pop concerts or print-outs of text messages. This strengthened her resolve to destroy everything from that disastrous marriage: Marcus’s letters and some theatre tickets, and the hotel bill from where they had spent their first romantic weekend, when they had not got out of bed until it was time to go home. Some romance, thought Fran cynically, and with the idea of forcing Marcus and his perfidy out of her mind, she worked doggedly on, making an inventory of furniture and the contents of drawers and cupboards. If you had no family, did you simply become just a typed list of saucepans and crockery and cretonne-covered chairs?

By mid-afternoon she had finished, and she stood in Trixie’s bedroom, conscious of aching back and neck muscles, and feeling unpleasantly grubby, and also very hungry. People deserted by cheating husbands were supposed to lose their appetites and dwindle to mere shadows of their former selves, but Fran was not a die-away Victorian heroine or a twenty-first-century stick-thin model, and she was not going to stop eating just because she was getting divorced. And she had been carting boxes and books and clothes back and forth ever since breakfast and she had missed lunch.

She tipped the contents of some tinned soup into a saucepan to heat, and switched on the grill to make toast to go with it. While the grill was heating up, she looked through the photographs she had brought downstairs, trying to allot relationships to the faces. The slightly countrified woman standing in front of a nice old stone cottage might be Trixie’s mother, and the little group with 1950s hairstyles could be aunts. Were the dates right? Yes, near enough. There were one or two shots of a sturdy, somewhat belligerent-looking child whom Fran recognized after a moment as being Trixie herself. These had mostly been taken in gardens or on what looked like holidays on the coast.

But other than this there was not very much of interest. Fran turned over the last photograph in the envelope, thinking she would just label the whole thing as ‘Photographs’ and include it in the inventory for the unknown elderly aunt.

The last photograph was a postcard-size black-and-white shot taken against the background of some unidentifiable city. It showed a three-quarters view of a child around eight or nine years old, wearing a corduroy jacket. The child had deepset eyes and dark hair that flopped forward and there was something about the eyes that Francesca found slightly chilling. I wouldn’t like to meet you in a dark alley on a moonless night, thought Fran, and then took in the writing on the white strip along the bottom and instantly felt as if a giant, invisible hand had slammed into her stomach.

On the bottom of the photograph was written a single name and a date.

Alraune. 1949.



Francesca sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at the enigmatic face of the dark-eyed child, occasionally putting out a hand to touch the photograph’s surface, as if she could somehow absorb the past through her fingertips, or as if buried within the images might be a key that would unlock the past.

Eventually she took a square of glass from a framed print Trixie had had of a Tyrolean snow-scene, and laid it carefully over the photograph. At this point the smell of burning reminded her that the grill was still switched on and was blasting toast-flavoured heat into the kitchen, and she hastily switched it off. She was no longer in the least bit hungry, which was ridiculous, because Alraune – the child, the ghost, the legend – could have nothing whatsoever to do with her. You don’t affect me in the least, said Fran silently to Alraune’s enigmatic stare.

But the kitchen suddenly seemed cold and unfriendly, and Fran repressed a shiver and glanced uneasily towards the garden door. The top half was glass, so that she could see the outline of the thick laurel hedge between this house and the neighbour’s, and also the tubs of winter pansies that Trixie had planted because they made a nice splash of colour when everything else had died down and the dogs did not try to bury bones under them.

It had started to rain, and the thick old laurel hedge that Trixie had never got round to trimming this autumn was tapping gently against the window. Fran got up to draw the curtains across the darkening afternoon and flipped the blind down over the upper part of the garden door. The kitchen immediately felt friendlier and safer. But you don’t feel at all friendly or safe, she said to Alraune’s photograph. And where on earth did Trixie get you, I wonder? Were you just part of her research into Ashwood? Or did you instigate the entire project? Meeting the child’s uncompromising stare, Francesca was inclined to think the latter might be more likely, because if ever a face would print itself on your mind…

It was already almost six o’clock, and although she had never felt less like food, if she ate something it might stop her from thinking about ghosts and imagining them peering in through the windows. She was about to turn the gas up to heat the soup when she heard something outside that was certainly not the rain or the wayward laurel hedge and that was too substantial for a ghost. Footsteps. Footsteps coming down the gravel drive, moving slowly, as if the owner either was not sure of his or her welcome, or did not want to be heard.