Spider Light(118)
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jonathan.
‘I’ll switch on in a minute and take a look.’
‘Isn’t that a bit of an invasion?’
‘Professor, if Miss Weston has been carted off by this killer, nothing’s an invasion. And if she’s the killer herself, it’s not an invasion, it’s necessary evidence.’
There was a brief silence, and then Oliver said, ‘You don’t really think she’s the killer, though?’
‘He might do,’ said Jonathan. ‘He’s probably thinking that she’s killed once, and–how old did you say that boy was last night?’
‘Nineteen or twenty.’
‘Don Robards was twenty-two,’ said Jonathan. ‘On that basis, I should think Antonia’s your prime suspect for this, isn’t she, inspector?’
‘I wouldn’t say that, sir. What I would say is that if those incidents she reported really happened, then there’s a very twisted, very sick mind in all this.’
‘And,’ said Jonathan, angrily, ‘if Antonia made the incidents up–or even set them up herself–then she’s the one with the twisted mind, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’
‘She struck me as perfectly sane,’ said Oliver and for the first time Jonathan sent him a quick glance of approval.
‘She is perfectly sane,’ he said. ‘She was a very good, very hardworking doctor of psychiatry, and it’s our loss that she was struck off. She admitted to killing Don Robards because he attacked her, but she shouldn’t have been given a prison sentence. If Robards hadn’t been her patient at the time, it probably wouldn’t have been prison at all.’
‘The law always was an ass,’ said Oliver. ‘D’you want any help with the search for the phone, inspector?’
Antonia was aware that she was starting to tread a very fine line between keeping hold of sanity and tipping over into something that would not be sanity at all.
At times she was afraid she had already stepped over the boundaries. She thought she heard the Caprice suite being played somewhere nearby and for a moment she believed Twygrist’s monstrous clock had wound itself backwards, and she was with Richard again and the nightmare of his death had never happened. She listened, to see if Twygrist picked up the music and spun it echoingly around her head, but it did not, and she thought after all she had imagined it. It faded after a time, but she heard her own voice, and realized with a shock that she was talking to Daniel Glass.
‘You helped me through the agoraphobia thing once or twice, Daniel, you seemed almost to be with me when I went out, so how about helping me again now? I don’t quite know how you could do it, but there must be something…’
It was at this point she discovered she was speaking aloud, and her words were swooping above her head in the darkness.
Drag me through the worst, Daniel…The worst, the wor-s-s-t…There must be something, s-s-something, there must, there MUST…
Antonia clapped her hands over her ears to shut out Twygrist’s evil echoing voice, but that made the silence and the darkness so absolute she could not bear it. Even the inexorable ticking of the clock above her was preferable.
She sat down with her back against the wall and tried to think logically. If she could not get out she would die from hunger or thirst. Dying from thirst was a particularly unpleasant death–didn’t you go mad at the end? How did I end up here, in this dreadful place, entirely on my own, facing madness and death? But I won’t believe I’m on my own: I’ll believe Daniel’s here. No, stop that, Antonia. Keep a grip. But what if that woman who knocked me out means to come back? That’s a nasty possibility. But I ought to be able to match her if it comes to a fight. Except that she’s clearly mad, and she’ll have the strength that sometimes goes with it…No, I’d better not think about that. I’d better focus on the practicalities of the situation. How long have I been down here, I wonder? It feels like quite a long time but for all I know I’ve lost all sense of time. The air’s reasonably fresh–does that mean it’s getting in from outside? How? From where? Think, Antonia. It’s not coming from those doors–I’ve felt every millimetre of them and they’re as tight-fitting as they could be. Then where else?
For a moment there was only the thick darkness and the thudding of the clock, but she forced herself to think back, to that day in Quire House when she had looked at the sketches and diagrams of Twygrist’s interior. All the levels had been neatly depicted, all the way down to the underground rooms: the garner floor, the chute for the grain, the kiln room where they used to light fires to dry grain spread out at the top of the chimney vent…
The chimney vent. Hope surged upwards, because if this really was the old furnace room–and Antonia thought it must be–then the air could be coming in through the chimney vent. Did that mean part of it had fallen in? And if so, might it be possible to get out by climbing up the chimney itself? Sanity teetered again, because it sounded like something out of a farce. Escaping up the flue. I don’t care how farcical it is if it gets me out, thought Antonia. And what a tale it would make–the kind of tale I could have told around a table with Richard and the friends we had all those years ago. For a moment an image of the big comfortable bungalow swam in front of her eyes, and the ache for Richard was as painful as it had ever been. She pushed it away angrily, got up, and began to feel her way along the wall again. After a few feet she stumbled over something lying on the ground, grazing her ankles, and making her head throb all over again with the impact. When she explored with her hands, she discovered she had fallen over a jumble of old bricks, and the thin curl of hope strengthened slightly. Had the bricks fallen out of the chimney wall? If so, it ought to be possible to knock more out; she could use one of her shoes as a hammer.