Spider Light(90)
Quire was not especially spooky but the ground floor seemed to be in near-darkness, and the person Antonia had been following might very well turn out to be the chief villain in this particular scene. And if there was not the throbbing organ notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue for atmospheric background, there was a piece of music composed by a man whose contemporaries had believed him to practise devil-worship.
What if this madman belonged to Quire itself? How possible was that? Nice little Godfrey Toy with his white-rabbit scurryings and his eager, elderly-cherub face? Oliver Remus, with that impenetrable reserve but sudden disarming smile? But Antonia thought that although she could believe a great many things, she could not believe that.
The music was still faintly discernible, and she stood very still, trying to sense exactly where it was coming from. The hall was in shadow, but there was a faint spill of light from the two narrow windows on each side of the main door. There must be a security light on somewhere, because it was not as dark as she had expected. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw the light, whatever it was, came from a room at the far end of the hall.
The music room. Of course it would be the music room. Then this is certainly where I go bounding up the stairs to hammer on Godfrey Toy’s door, to tell him there’s an intruder and please call the police at once.
She began to move cautiously across the hall, and she was almost at the foot of the stair when the Caprice suite faded and then cut off altogether. There was the faint scrape of something–a window opening?–and then nothing. Antonia hesitated, and looked towards the music room. The door was wide open and from here she could see that the narrow French windows were wide open as well.
It might be another trick, but Antonia did not think it was. She thought the man had got her out here, and then slipped out into the night. But was he hiding somewhere outside, waiting for her to retrace her steps? She sent a hesitant glance to the stair, wondering if she could still go up there and tell Godfrey or Oliver Remus what had happened. Would they believe her? It was unlikely they had heard the music–Quire was a solidly built house. Would it be better to simply beat a discreet retreat? But the prospect of walking back to the cottage through the dark was a bad one. Antonia did not think she could do it; the scalding anger that had driven her earlier had drained away, and she was too frightened of what the darkness might hold.
It was then that she saw that something was lying on the floor of the music room, half under the spinet. It was a coat, lying on the silky Indian rug, but Antonia stared at it, because there was something wrong about it–something that was starting to send unpleasant flurries of nervousness through her stomach. In another minute she would make sense of this, she would understand what it was she was seeing, although surely it was only a coat that had slipped off a chair back or been forgotten by its owner. But it was odd that the careful Godfrey Toy had not tidied it away before going up to his own flat for the night. It was even odder that he had apparently left the main door open.
The arms of the coat were flung out at right angles, and there was a smudgy blur of paleness just above the collar. That’s the part that’s wrong, thought Antonia, and a sick coldness began to steal over her. She already knew what was wrong, and somewhere near her a small scared voice was whispering over, and over, ‘Oh no, oh no…’
The coat had not been flung down or forgotten by its owner at all. Its owner was still wearing it; there on the floor of the lovely room. There was blood on the front of the coat, and some of it had seeped out onto the silky rug–Godfrey Toy was going to hate that, because he loved Quire and its beautiful things and he would hate having the Indian rug ruined by bloodstains.
Antonia fought incipient hysteria, and glanced towards the open windows, and then back to the shadowy hall. Was the music-maker still in here after all, watching from some dark corner, gloating? No, she had no sense of anyone’s presence. She forced herself to go nearer to the dreadful thing lying by the spinet. There was a bad moment when her mind rebelled, and when she thought–but I’m a psychiatrist, I can’t do anything about this! I need to call for help–paramedics, hospital…But what if a spark of life still struggled to keep going, and what if it was a question of a few minutes pressure on a wound making the difference between life and death? Instinct kicked in, and she bent down to feel for a pulse.
The pale smudge resolved itself into a set of features and she knew, even with the dreadful glazed eyes, even with the fallen-open jaw, who this was. Quire’s sullen, eighteen-year-old work-experience boy. Greg Foster. There was no pulse beating at his neck, but Antonia forced herself to open the blood-soaked coat to feel for a heartbeat.
He was dead and beyond all help, and whoever had killed him had stabbed him in the heart with a long-bladed kitchen knife. Exactly as Richard had been stabbed in the heart five years earlier.
The sheet music for Paganini’s Caprice was lying next to him, spattered in his blood.
Godfrey Toy had written and posted a careful description of the cookbook for the BBC, had quoted a sale price that might be thought reasonable but not greedy (although there was no knowing what the BBC’s yardstick might be), and had diligently locked up all the rooms.
After this, he had taken the cookbook to his flat because although it had been lying innocuously in the stock cupboard for quite some time, it would be just the way of things for it to be filched in the way the jewellery and snuff-boxes had been filched, or for a fire to break out, or even for Raffles to choose it as a dinner plate for a newly captured or messily half-eaten vole. The possibilities were disastrous and numerous.