The Little Stranger
Then I found myself recalling our conversation in the walled garden. I remembered those three springing drops of blood. My little girl, she isn’t always kind … Was it possible? Was it? Or was it even worse than that? Suppose, in willing her daughter to come, she had only given strength and purpose to some other, darker thing?
I couldn’t bear to think of it. I drew up the blanket, to put her from my sight. Like Betty, I found myself overcome by a strong, almost guilty desire to get away from the room and the horrors it suggested.
I locked the door and went back down to the little parlour. I found Caroline still sitting blankly on the sofa; Betty had brought in tea, but the tea was cold in its cups, and the girl herself was moving between that room and the kitchen as if sleepwalking through the motions of her ordinary chores. I put her to make coffee, and when I had drunk a strong cup of that, I went slowly out to the hall to use the telephone.
It was like a nightmarish echo of the previous evening. First I called the district hospital, to arrange for a mortuary van to be sent for Mrs Ayres’s body. Then, with more reluctance, I rang the local police sergeant, to report the death. I gave the man the barest details, and arranged for him to come and take statements. And then I made my third and final call.
It was to Seeley. I caught him just at the end of his morning surgery. The line was bad, but I was glad of the crackles. I’d heard his voice and for a moment my own had faltered.
I said, ‘It’s Faraday. I’m out at the house. Our patient, Seeley. I’m afraid she’s beaten us.’
‘Beaten us?’ He couldn’t hear, or didn’t understand. Then he caught his breath. ‘Hell! I don’t believe it. How was it done?’
‘A bad way. I can’t say.’
‘Of course you can’t … God, this is terrible. After everything else!’
‘Yes, I know. But, look here, the reason I’m calling: that Rugby woman I told you about; the nurse. Do me a favour, will you? Call her for me, and explain what’s happened? I can’t do it.’
‘Yes, of course.’
I gave him the number; we spoke for another minute or two. He said again, ‘A bloody awful business for the family—what’s left of it. And for you, Faraday! I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s my fault,’ I said. The line was still crackling and he thought he’d misheard me. I said it again. I said, ‘I should have taken her. I had my chance.’
‘What? You’re not seriously blaming yourself! Come on, now. We’ve all seen this. When a patient has made up their mind to it, there’s very little one can do to stop them. They become devious, you know that. Come on, man.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’
But I was unconvinced by my own words. And when I had returned the ear-piece to the stand, I glanced up through the curve of the staircase to Mrs Ayres’s door, and I found I had almost to creep abjectly away with my eyes lowered and my head bowed.
I rejoined Caroline in the little parlour and sat beside her, holding her hand. Her fingers were as chill and anonymous in mine as those of a wax mannequin; I gently raised them to my lips, and she made no response. She only tilted her head as if listening for something. That made me listen, too. We sat with frozen gestures—she with her inclined head, me with her hand still raised to my mouth—but the Hall was soundless. There wasn’t so much as the ticking of a clock. Life seemed held, arrested inside it.
She caught my eye and said quietly, ‘You feel it? The house is still at last. Whatever it was that was here, it has taken everything it wanted. And do you know what the worst thing is? The thing I shan’t forgive it for? It made me help it.’
THIRTEEN
But that was all she would say on the matter. The police and the mortuary men arrived, and while the body was removed from the house, our statements—hers, mine, and Betty’s—were taken down. When the men had left, she stood blankly again for a moment, but then, like a puppet being twitched into life, she seated herself at the writing-table and began to make a list of all the things that must be done in the days ahead; on a separate sheet she wrote the names of the friends and relations who ought to be notified of her mother’s death. I wanted her to leave it all until later; she shook her head, working doggedly on, and I realised at last that the chores were protecting her from the worst of her own shock, and were perhaps the best thing for her. I made her promise she would rest soon, take a sedative and go to bed, and I took a tartan blanket from the sofa and tucked it round her to keep her warm. I left the house to the thud of closing shutters and the rattle of curtain-rings: she had sent Betty to darken the rooms, in an old-fashioned gesture of grief and respect. As I crossed the gravel I heard the last of the shutters being closed, and when I looked back at the Hall from the mouth of the drive it appeared to be gazing, sightless with grief, across the hushed white landscape.
I didn’t want to leave the house at all, but I had some dreary duties of my own now, and I drove, not home, but into Leamington, to discuss Mrs Ayres’s death with the borough coroner. I’d realised already that there was no concealing the facts of the case, no way of passing the death off, as I’d now and then done for other grieving families, as a natural one; but since I had effectively been treating Mrs Ayres for mental instability, and had already seen evidence of self-violence, I had an ill-formed hope that I could save Caroline from the ordeal of an inquest. The coroner, however, though sympathetic, was a scrupulous man. The death had been sudden and violent; he would do his best to keep it a muted affair, but an inquest had to be held.
‘That means a post-mortem, too, of course,’ he said to me. ‘And since you’re the notifying doctor, ordinarily I’d instruct you to carry it out yourself. Think you’re up to it, though?’ He knew about my connection with the family. ‘There’d be no shame at all in your handing the task on.’
For a second or two I considered it. I have never relished post-mortems, and they are especially hard to perform when the patient in question has been a personal friend. At the same time, I thought of giving Mrs Ayres’s poor marked body over to Graham, or to Seeley, and my mind revolted from it. It seemed to me that I had let her down badly already; if there was no way of sparing her this final indignity, then the least I could do was to see the thing through myself, and see it done gently. So I shook my head and told him I would manage. And as it was now well past noon, with my morning surgery irrecoverable and the afternoon stretching blankly before me, when I left the coroner’s office I went straight to the mortuary, to get the examination over with as quickly as I could.
It was a horrible business all the same, and I stood in the freezing white-tiled room with the covered body before me, the instruments waiting in the tray, wondering if I could really go through with it. Only once I had put back the sheet did I start to regain my nerve. The injuries were less shocking now that I knew what to expect; those nips and cuts, which had so unnerved me out at Hundreds, began, on inspection, to lose some of their horror. I had supposed them to have covered almost Mrs Ayres’s entire body; now I saw that most were located on areas that had been well within her own reach—her back, for example, being unmarked. What harm she had suffered, she had plainly caused herself: that was a relief to me, though I didn’t quite know why. I pressed on, and began the incisions … I expected secrets, I think; but no secrets came. There were no signs of illness, only the mundane deteriorations of age. There was no evidence that any sort of force had been used against Mrs Ayres in her final days or hours; no damaged bones or internal bruising. Death was plainly the result of asphyxiation by hanging, completely compatible with the facts as Caroline and Betty had described them to me.
Once again, I found myself relieved; this time the feeling was unmistakable. And I realised I had had a darker reason for wanting to perform the post-mortem myself. I had been afraid of some detail emerging that would throw suspicion—I didn’t know what, I didn’t know how exactly—on Caroline. I had still had that niggling doubt about her. Now, finally, the doubt was dispelled. I was ashamed I’d ever entertai
ned it.
I restored the body as best I could, and passed my report on to the coroner. The inquest was held three days later, but with the evidence so pointed, it was a very summary affair. The verdict returned was ‘suicide whilst the balance of mind was disturbed’, and the whole process took less than thirty minutes. The worst thing was the public nature of it all, for though the crowd was kept quite small, several newspaper-men were present and they made rather a nuisance of themselves as I took Caroline and Betty away from the court. The story appeared that week in all the Midland papers, and was swiftly taken up by a couple of nationals. One reporter came up from London and drove out to the Hall, wanting to interview Caroline, and passing himself off as a policeman in order to do it. She and Betty managed to get rid of him without too much trouble, but the thought of that kind of thing happening again appalled me. Remembering the time when the park had been briefly barricaded against the Baker-Hydes, I resurrected those chains and padlocks and refastened the gates. I left one of the keys at the Hall, and kept the other on my own key-chain; I had a duplicate cut from the key to the garden door, too. After that, I felt happier, and could come and go from the house as I needed.
Not surprisingly, Mrs Ayres’s suicide shocked and stunned the whole district. She had rarely been seen outside of Hundreds in recent years, but she was still a very well-known and well-liked figure, and for many days I couldn’t walk through any of the villages without someone stopping me, keen to hear my side of the story, but also wanting to say how upset and sorry and disbelieving they were, that ‘such a lovely lady’, ‘such a real old-fashioned lady’, ‘so handsome and kind’, should have done a dreadful thing like that—‘leaving those two poor children, too’. Many people asked where Roderick was and when he would be coming home. I said he was holidaying with friends, and his sister was trying to get hold of him. Only to the Rossiters and the Desmonds did I give a truer account, for I didn’t want them bothering Caroline with difficult questions. I told them frankly that Rod was in a nursing home, being treated for a breakdown.
Helen Desmond said at once, ‘But this is terrible! I can’t believe it! Why didn’t Caroline come to us sooner? We guessed the family was in trouble, but they seemed bent on managing things by themselves. Bill offered them help many times, you know, and they always refused. We thought it simply a question of money. If we had known things were so bad—’
I said, ‘I don’t think any of us could have predicted this.’
‘But what’s to be done? Caroline can’t possibly stay out there now, in that great big unhappy house. She should be with friends. She should come here, to Bill and me. Oh, that poor, poor girl. Bill, we must go and get her.’
‘Of course we must,’ said Bill.
They were ready to leave for the Hall at once. The Rossiters were exactly the same. But I wasn’t sure Caroline would welcome the interference, however well meant. I asked them to let me speak to her about it first; and, as I’d suspected, when I told her what they wanted for her, she shuddered.
‘It’s very kind of them,’ she said. ‘But the idea of being in someone else’s house, with people watching, every minute, to see how I am—I just couldn’t. I should be afraid of seeming too unhappy; or else of not seeming unhappy enough. I’d rather stay here, at least for now.’
‘Are you sure, Caroline?’
Like everyone else, I felt terribly uneasy at the thought of her there, alone in that house, with only poor, sad Betty for company. But she seemed very resolved to stay, so I went back to the Desmonds and the Rossiters, and this time when I spoke to them I made it plainer that Caroline was not quite as lonely and unsupported as they feared; that she was being pretty well cared for, in fact, by me. After a moment of misunderstanding, they took the hint, looking surprised. The Desmonds were quickest to congratulate me; they said it was by far the best thing that could happen to Caroline now, and ‘a huge weight off their minds’. The Rossiters, though polite, were more wary. Mr Rossiter shook my hand amiably enough, but I could see his wife rapidly thinking the whole thing through, and I learned later that as soon as I left their house she called Caroline up, to have the story confirmed. Caught off guard, distracted, tired, Caroline had little to say. Yes, I was being a great help to her. Yes, a wedding was planned. No, we had no date for it. She couldn’t give it much thought yet. Everything was ‘too unsettled’.
But after that, at least, there were no more attempts to persuade her from the house, and the Desmonds and the Rossiters must have quietly passed on news of our engagement to one or two of their neighbours, who must just as discreetly have passed it on to their own friends. Over the next few days I sensed the slightest of shifts in the district’s attitude towards me; I began to be treated less as the Ayres family physician, who might be companionably pumped for information about that dreadful business out at Hundreds, and more almost as a member of the family itself, worthy of respect and commiseration. The only person I spoke to directly about it was David Graham, and he was absolutely delighted by the news. He had ‘known there was something afoot’, he said, for months. Anne had ‘scented it out’, but they hadn’t liked to press me. He only wished it hadn’t taken such a tragedy to bring it all into the open … He insisted that Caroline be my priority for a while, arranging for the easing of my case-load, taking some of the patients himself. So in that first week after the death I spent a good part of each day at the Hall, helping Caroline with her various chores; sometimes going for gentle walks with her in the gardens or the park, sometimes simply sitting with her in silence, holding her hand. She still gave the impression of being slightly insulated from her own grief, but I think my visits provided a structure for her patternless days. She never spoke about the house; but the house, oddly enough, continued to feel strikingly calm. Over the past few months I had watched life in it dwindle to what had felt like almost impossible proportions; now, astonishingly, it dwindled further, became a matter of murmurs and quiet footsteps in two or three dim rooms.
With the inquest out of the way, the next ordeal was the funeral. Caroline and I arranged it together, and it took place on the Friday of the following week. Given the nature of her mother’s death, we both agreed that the event should be a subdued one; our biggest dilemma at first was whether or not to involve Rod. It seemed out of the question that he should miss it, and we gave much serious thought as to how his presence could be managed—wondering, for example, if he mightn’t come down from Birmingham in the company of a male attendant, who could be passed off as a friend. But we might have saved ourselves the debate: I myself drove up to the clinic to break the news of his mother’s suicide, and his reaction horrified me. The loss itself he seemed hardly to register. It was the fact of her death that impressed him. For he saw it as evidence that she, too, had finally fallen victim to that diabolical ‘infection’ he had struggled so hard to contain.
‘It must have been waiting,’ he said to me, ‘all this time; breeding, in the quiet of the house. I thought I’d beaten it! But you see what it’s doing?’ He reached across the table to grip my arm. ‘No one’s safe there now! Caroline—My God! You mustn’t leave her there alone. She’s in danger! You must get her away! You must get her right away, from Hundreds!’
Just for a moment, I was unnerved; the warning almost rang true to me. Then I caught the wildness in his eye, and saw how far beyond the reach of reason he had strayed—and realised that I was at risk of following him. I spoke calmly and rationally to him. That made his manner grow even wilder. A couple of nurses came running to restrain him, and I left him struggling and shouting in their arms. To Caroline I said only that he was ‘no better’. She could see from my expression what that meant. We gave up as hopeless our idea of his returning to Hundreds even for a day, and, with the Desmonds’ and Rossiters’ help, we put out the story that he was abroad, and unwell, and unable to make the journey home. How much anyone was really deceived by that, I don’t know. I think rumours as to the real nature of his absence had been circulating
for some time.
Anyway, the funeral went ahead without him, and it went about as well, I suppose, as such a thing could. The coffin left from the Hall, Caroline and I followed the hearse in the undertaker’s car, and in the three or four cars that came after us there rode the closest family friends, and those relations who had been able to make the difficult journey up to Hundreds from Sussex and Kent. The weather had lifted properly now, but the last of the snow was still on the ground; the black cars looked grimly impressive in the leafless white lanes, and all our attempts to keep the affair a low-key one came to nothing, after all. The family was too well known, and the local feudal spirit too resilient; on top of that, there had always been more than a touch of tragic mystery to Hundreds Hall, and the newspaper coverage of Mrs Ayres’s death had only intensified it. At the gates of farms and cottages people had gathered in solemn curiosity to see the coffin go by, and once we turned into Lidcote High Street we found the pavements crowded with watchers, falling silent as we approached, the men removing their hats and caps, a few of the women crying, but all of them craning for a better view. I thought of the time, nearly thirty years before, when I had stood beside my parents in my College blazer to watch another Ayres funeral, its coffin half the size of this one; I thought it with an almost giddy feeling, as if my life were twisting round its head to snap at its own tail. As we approached the church the crowd grew thicker, and I felt Caroline tense. I took her black-gloved hand and said quietly, ‘They want to show their respect, that’s all.’