Spider Light(88)
Amy? Please don’t let it be Amy. But if it does have to be Amy–and I know it won’t be–please let her be just injured, nothing worse than that. A bit bruised–a broken arm or leg. Repairable. And let her just be knocked out, because you come round from being knocked out…
Godfrey began to shake so violently that he thought he might fall down. He took several deep breaths, and set the torch on the ground so it created a little pool of light against the water tank. It showed up the burst-open sides, and the small pool of black brackish water that had spilled out. It showed up the reaching hand, and made a square-set amber ring in an old-fashioned setting glint. Godfrey recognized the ring at once. Amy always wore it; she liked Victorian jewellery. He knelt down and reached for the hand.
Dreadful. Oh God, it was the most dreadful thing he had ever known. The nails were broken and bloodied, and the hand itself was appallingly bruised and torn. But the skin was cold and flaccid, and it was Amy, just as he had known it was, and she was quite certainly dead. Oliver’s bright lovely wife was dead.
The post-mortem showed that Amy Remus had suffered multiple injuries, and had been badly torn by the jutting cogs and pinions of the ancient waterwheel. Her injuries were too many and too severe to draw any safe conclusion, but her death had been caused by massive trauma to the skull, almost certainly from where she had fallen against the inside of the tank. She had died sometime between midday and two p.m. on the day Godfrey found her.
The inquest, held two days later, concluded that Amy had fallen into the tank, although there was no telling how it had happened. It was not the kind of place into which someone would fall by accident, just as Twygrist was not a place anyone would enter without a definite purpose.
Godfrey, there to give evidence of finding the body, in agony for Oliver all the way through it, had seen the shuttered look come down over the professor’s face at this part of the proceedings, because the implication was unpleasantly clear. The coroner and the police believed Amy had gone to Twygrist to meet a lover, although nobody actually came out and said so. But Godfrey could feel them thinking it, and he wished he had the courage to stand up and denounce this unsaid accusation. Amy would not have had a lover in a million years: she and Oliver had been deeply happy.
The final twist of the knife had come from the police pathologist. From the position of the body when it was found, he said unhappily, and from the condition of her hands, they were forced to the conclusion that Amy Remus had not died instantly from the fall. The splits in the ancient wood were not from the force of her falling. They were from where she had tried to batter her way out.
They had never talked about it. After the inquest and the funeral were over, Godfrey had tried several times to discuss it with Oliver, but the the professor had retreated behind barriers so impenetrable that it would have taken a braver person than Godfrey to force through them.
The local newspaper had made the most of reporting the tragedy, of course, and some bright journalist had dug out an article about how two people had died at Twygrist several years earlier, and used words like deathtrap and eyesore. The paper had mounted a campaign, saying Twygrist should either be properly renovated or demolished, and people had sent in letters saying it was a disgrace to let such an historic place fall into decay and that somebody should do something about it. There had been talk of setting up a Save the Mill Society, but in the end people had been too engrossed in their own lives, and in any case, the various communities around Twygrist were too small and too widely spread. Godfrey was aware of the irony of it all, because once he and Oliver would have suggested the Quire Trust spearhead such a society. But in the end, the responsibility for Twygrist had again been shunted from local authority to county authority, and all the way back again, and in the end nothing had been done at all.
Godfrey and Oliver had continued to work amicably together–although Oliver had become more distant, and less patient when Godfrey got into a muddle, which he sometimes did. The workings of the Quire House Trust was one of the things that muddled Godfrey most of all, because balance sheets sent him into a panic, but he did know that after a couple of years the Trust started to show a small but acceptable profit.
And presently, little by little, it began to seem as if life was not quite so anguished.
But since Amy’s death, Oliver had never, so far as Godfrey knew, spent any time alone with a lady, or even met one for so much as a cup of coffee.
Until Antonia Weston came to Charity Cottage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Antonia spent what was left of the afternoon piecing together the notes she had made on Latchkill. It was infuriating that there was no exact date on the notes about the woman who had shut her eyes against the world and crouched in a corner. Antonia would have liked to tie them into Daniel’s letters but it could not be done.
Eventually she set the notes aside, put some chicken in the oven to cook, and went upstairs to wash her hair. This last was nothing to do with Jonathan’s arrival tomorrow; it was simply that it was a long time since she had been taken out to dinner, and she might as well look halfway decent. She would wear the autumn-leaf outfit she had bought on that first day of freedom in London; the fabric was silky and expensive-looking, and it would look terrific.
Her hair was dry by this time and pleasantly scented with shampoo, and she sat down at the kitchen table to eat the chicken. She was still enjoying the novelty of being able to eat what she wanted when she wanted. It was raining quite heavily outside, but the cottage was warm and snug. Or–was it? What about that shadowy corner of the kitchen? It was still there, that patch of fear and despair, and it would not take very much for it to rear up into a solid wall of suffocating panic. Once upon a time, someone had crouched in that corner.