Spider Light(104)
St Michael’s clock was chiming ten when two nurses, both unknown to Maud, came along the path. They were talking animatedly, and one of them called cheerfully to the lodge keeper to let them out, Albie, and be sharp about it because it was freezing enough to turn you to ice out here.
It was too dark for the lodge keeper to make out the individual features of people who went in and out. Maud waited a moment, and then ran out onto the path, as if she had been trying to catch the nurses up. The gate keeper saw her, sketched a good-night salute, and let her through.
She was outside the gates. Free. She would do anything to avoid being taken back to Latchkill. She would kill someone, if necessary. With a jolt of surprise she remembered her plan, and that she would have to kill. It would have to be tonight, and she knew who the someone would be.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Donna had spent five years working out her plan; she had polished it until it was foolproof, and now, when it was almost time for the final blow to be administered, she could see all her careful work was going to pay off.
The catalyst for the final chain of events was to be the murder of someone within Quire House. The identity of the victim had never mattered–Donna had known she must go for whoever was around at the right moment, but she had always hoped there would be a young boy, and so there had been. She had seen Greg Foster on her careful forays to Quire House–she had visited the place a few times over the years at deliberately-spaced intervals, deliberately choosing term-times when there might be school parties working on projects, or when there would be enough visitors for her to pass unnoticed. She changed her appearance each time; no one must connect her with the seldom-seen lady who rented Charity Cottage, but she needed to keep a close check on the component parts of her plan and Quire House was one of those parts.
So on one occasion she was an earnest collector of architectural information, wearing an indeterminate-coloured jacket and skirt with a felt hat crammed over her hair, and on the next she was an untidy student in jeans and a t-shirt. Another time she wore a flowing Indian-print cotton skirt with wooden beads and earrings. She kept a low profile during these visits but she kept her eyes open for anything that might be incorporated into her plan. For a long time there was nothing and Donna became anxious, but the week after it was announced that Antonia was to be shortly freed, she saw something that would fit into her plan with beautiful precision.
She saw the sulky-faced boy who had worked at Quire for the past few months take two pieces of Victorian jewellery from a display table and slide them furtively into his pocket.
From then everything unrolled immaculately. The boy was a work experience student or something like that, and Donna had waited for him when he left Quire for the day.
He had been suspicious at first, disinclined to trust this unknown female, but when Donna confronted him with what she had seen, he turned truculent. Yes, he had taken stuff, he said. So what? They had enough, didn’t they? All those things, just for people to come in and stare at. They wouldn’t miss one or two.
‘Or three or four,’ said Donna very deliberately.
They looked at one another. Donna said, ‘We’re in the same game. And here’s the deal. You let me into Quire, we’ll take the stuff, and I’ll get rid of it. We split fifty-fifty.’
‘How do I know you won’t rip me off?’
‘You don’t.’
‘How do I know you aren’t a copper?’
‘You don’t know that either. But suit yourself,’ said Donna, and turned to walk away. She had taken four steps before he said, ‘How would you get rid of it?’
‘I’d take it to one of the jewellers in London who deals in secondhand stuff.’
‘Wouldn’t he guess it’s nicked?’
He was so small-time, so na?ve, Donna wanted to laugh. She said, ‘For God’s sake, look at me! I’m the ultimate in respectability.’ And so she was that day, wearing a plain suit, with her hair combed back behind her ears. ‘I simply say it was my grandmother’s jewellery or china–no, I’ll make that great-grandmother–and that I need the money. And believe it or not, that’s perfectly true. I’m flat broke. That’s why I went to Quire House today.’
‘To see what you could nick?’
‘Yes. It’s a good scam,’ said Donna, mentally reading from the script she had prepared for herself. ‘I go round museums and smaller stately homes–places like Quire. But I only take small things–things that I can pocket. No one ever suspects me, because I don’t look like a thief. Then I sell what I’ve picked up. I use a different jeweller each time, of course.’
The suspicious eyes assessed her for a moment. Donna’s heart thumped. Had she sounded convincing? Most of her expressions had come from crime books and might be wildly off the mark, but she did not think Greg Foster was likely to know the real jargon.
‘All right,’ he said at last.
‘You’ll do it?’
‘Yeah, why not? Nothing to lose, is there? If you grass on me, I can deny it. Or say you approached me and I told you to sod off. I’ll get the stuff and meet you here.’
‘No,’ said Donna. ‘I’ve already seen that you haven’t the least idea of what’s valuable and what isn’t. So I’ll be the one deciding what we take and what we leave.’ She frowned, as if thinking hard. ‘Quire House doesn’t have any electronic alarms or anything like that, does it?’