Roots of Evil(92)

‘Yes, I think so. She used to take me to concerts in Lincoln and Norwich or Cambridge – and gorgeous choral stuff in Ely Cathedral at Christmas and Easter. I had never heard music or singing like that before and it knocked me for six – in fact at one stage it nearly swept me into a religious vocation.’

He glanced at her as if expecting a reaction. Fran said, ‘But – it didn’t?’

‘I found out I had a fairly unspiritual side,’ he said gravely. Fran grinned, and saw that he had relaxed for the first time since he had seen Alraune’s photograph. But then he said, ‘Shall I grate the cheese?’ and she felt the barriers go back into place.

Even so, it was friendly to have him sharing the small task of making the omelettes. Marcus’s forays into the kitchen had been rare, and had usually involved cooking an impossibly elaborate dish, the preparation of which necessitated using every saucepan they possessed and apparently absolved him from washing up afterwards. Michael simply reached for the cheese and got on with it.

‘Lucretia had no patience with men who expected to be waited on,’ he said, apparently picking some of this up. ‘She was quite domesticated as a matter of fact. And she made sure I knew how to cook a reasonable meal. I’ll make you my five-star gourmet Hungarian goulash some evening if you’d like that.’

Francesca had a sudden image of Michael’s flat or his house, which would be warm and comfortable and safe-feeling, and of the two of them eating goulash and drinking wine at a small dining-table. She discovered she was smiling at the prospect, so in case he got the wrong idea, she said, ‘I’d have to say that the words domesticated and Lucretia von Wolff don’t seem to belong in the same sentence.’

He smiled properly this time. ‘Her real name was Alice Wilson, and she had been a servant in a big house in Vienna until the late nineteen-twenties.’

Francesca finished beating the eggs and poured them into the omelette pan. ‘Not kidnapped Russian royalty or the heiress to a Carpathian castle, after all?’

‘Nowhere near. A perfectly ordinary background in fact.’ He passed the little heap of grated cheese to her. ‘Would you like me to open that bottle of wine?’

‘Yes, please.’ She handed him the corkscrew and reached for two wine-glasses. They might as well use the expensive ones Trixie had brought back from one of her walking holidays; perhaps Bohemian crystal would lend an air of grandeur to the very ordinary meal and the even more ordinary bottle of supermarket plonk. This discussion of resurrected legends and ghost-children ought to be given at least a smidgeon of ceremony and be dignified by a touch of class. And Michael Sallis was somehow a person with whom you associated more than just a touch of class.

She tipped the grated cheese on to the just-setting eggs, and said, ‘It’s a remarkable thing, but ever since I heard about the Ashwood murders from Trixie, one thing seems to have overshadowed all the rest.’

He paused, and then said, very softly, ‘Alraune.’

‘Yes.’ Fran determinedly avoided looking towards the curtained windows which hid the dark whispering night. ‘Alraune seems to overshadow everything.’

‘That,’ said Michael, looking at her very intently, ‘is exactly what Alice said to me on the night before my seventeenth birthday. The night when she finally told me the truth about Alraune.’



One of the things Michael had loved about growing up in the Lincolnshire house had been listening to Alice’s stories about her past.

She had unfolded the stories bit by bit, as if she understood that he wanted to absorb the details gradually, and she told a story as his mother used to; making it vivid and exciting and real. Most of the time she had talked to him as if he were already grown-up, although he had always known there were parts of her life she had not told, and that she might never tell.

But on the night before his seventeenth birthday – the night she talked to him about Alraune – she did not make a story of it; she talked plainly and rather flatly, and several times Michael thought she was going to stop partway through and not go on. And if she does that, I’ll never know.

‘Alraune’s birth seemed to overshadow everything else that had ever happened to me,’ she had said in the firelit room that night, seated in her usual chair, Michael in his familiar inglenook seat.

Alraune…The name whispered around the warm safe room like a cold sighing voice. Like something sobbing inside a bitter night-wind, or like brittle goblin-fingers scratching out childish letters on a window-pane in the dark…

‘Alraune was bad,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t just mean dishonest or selfish or bad-tempered. I mean truly bad. Cruel. It’s as if – oh, as if Nature occasionally gets things a bit twisted and lets loose something wicked on the world.’

Something wicked…Michael shivered, and edged nearer to the fire.

At once Alice said, ‘You should remember, though, that it’s nearly always possible to spot the world’s bad people very easily. And once you have spotted them you’re perfectly safe, because you can give them a wide berth.’

‘It’s as simple as that, is it?’

‘Most of the time. Don’t be cynical, Michael, you’re still too young to be cynical.’

‘Sorry. Tell me about Alraune. You never have done, not properly. Tonight tell me properly.’