Spider Light(7)

He closed the curtains, hoping Charity Cottage’s new tenant had liked his little gift, and hoping she was able to sleep on her first night there.





CHAPTER THREE




Either the memory of that well of terror in the cottage’s kitchen, or the recurring image of the dark blue car, or possibly a combination of the two had prevented Antonia from sleeping.

At half past midnight she gave up the struggle, and went downstairs to make a cup of tea. The kitchen was shadowy and cool, but if the clutching fear still lurked, it lurked very quietly. Good.

She paused to look out of the window for a moment, remembering how, not so long ago, she had been deeply afraid to look out of her own window in the middle of the night. But nothing stirred, and the parkland was a smooth stretch of unbroken sward, the trees bland and unthreatening. A large, dark-furred cat appeared from their shadows, considered the night landscape with the unhurried arrogance of its kind, and then padded gracefully across the park, vanishing into the night on some ploy of its own. The kettle boiled, and Antonia made her cup of tea and took it back upstairs.

It was probably madness to unlock the small suitcase, and take the five-and six-year-old sheaf of curling newspaper cuttings from their envelope, but there were times when you needed to confront your own madness. Sometimes you could even pretend to relive the past and sidestep the mistakes.

She spread the cuttings out on the bed and looked at them for a long time. The wretched gutter-press had dug up a remarkable variety of photographs to illustrate their articles. It was anybody’s guess how they had got hold of them but the sub-editors, predictably, had chosen the worst and the best.

Seen in smudgy newsprint, the boy called Don Robards who had stared up at Antonia from a hospital bed–the boy who had discovered something so appalling within his world that he had not wanted to live in that world any longer–looked impossibly young. Antonia’s own image, next to it, appeared sharp and predatory by contrast. Did I really look like that in those days? Do I look like it now? Might anyone here recognize me?

She thought this unlikely. She had not deliberately tried to change her appearance, but the years had pared the flesh right down, and the once-long, once-sleek leaf-brown hair was now cut short and worn casually. People might remember Don though; he had been very good-looking.

Some of the sub-editors had slyly positioned Richard’s photograph on the other side of Antonia’s, so she was shown between the two of them. The message was unpleasantly clear: here’s a woman with two younger men in her toils, and look what happened to them both. One of the tabloids had called Antonia a Messalina, and it was probably the first time in recorded history that a tabloid had used an early Roman empress to score a point.

Richard, too, looked soft and defenceless in the photo–it was a shot that had been taken at the piano, head and shoulders only, but it was well-lit, emphasizing his fragile-looking bone structure and luminous eyes. It was a false image, of course; beneath the translucent skin and the Keats-like air of starving in a garret, Richard had been as tough as old boots, and had a gourmet’s delight in good food and wine. It had been one of his quirkier pieces of luck that the calories were burned up by his amazing energy and that he remained thin.

Antonia traced the outlines of the frozen black-and-grey images with a fingertip. I miss you so much, she said to Richard’s photo. I still can’t believe I’ll never see you again.

Beyond the crowding memories, she was aware that it was raining heavily. She could hear it lashing against the windows and wondered vaguely if the large black cat had found shelter. But she only accorded the rain a small part of her attention. Her thoughts went deeper and deeper into the past; a ribbon of road unwound in front of her, and she was pulled helplessly along it. It was a road that was five years long, and it echoed with the clang of a heavy door being locked at precisely the same time each night. It was a road deeply shadowed by bars of moonlight that fell on exactly the same place on a bare floor every night. Between midnight and two a. m. had been the worst hours. They still were. She glanced at the time. Quarter past one.

She stood up and pushed the envelope of cuttings back into her suitcase, locking it with the tiny padlock. Stupid to take such needless precautions, but she was not yet used to taking her privacy for granted.

It occurred to her that so far from her original concern that the residents of Amberwood might seek her out to tell her their dreams and cure their phobias, if they discovered she was a convicted murderess who had served five years of an eight-year sentence, they were more likely to lynch her or revive the medieval custom of ducking her for a witch in the village pond.



Godfrey Toy was charmed to meet the new tenant of Charity Cottage on the very morning after she had moved in, and delighted to invite her into his little office. It was a good thing he had had a new visitor’s chair delivered only that week. (A really good soft leather it was as well, in a rich dark brown. It had cost just a tad more than perhaps he should have spent, but there had been no need for Professor Remus to use words like squander or wastrel.)

Godfrey had been hoping Miss Weston would turn out to be a pleasantly gossipy lady with whom he might form a friendship. He did not often travel outside Amberwood, but he liked meeting people and hearing about their lives and work and families. Sometimes he imagined himself with a family: a distant cousin had just had a baby and Godfrey was going to be its godfather. He had already chosen a silver porringer as a christening present–late eighteenth century it was, and he had had it engraved since you should not stint on these things–and he was visualizing being called Uncle Godfrey, and planning trips to wherever children liked to go these days. Quire’s work-experience boy, Greg Foster, had said, when Godfrey asked, that kids mostly liked computer games and burger bars and boy-band concerts, which had rather disconcerted Godfrey who had been thinking more of the pantomime at Christmas and the zoo in the summer.