The Wounded Snake Read online

  ‘Mind if we join you?’ It was Harry Walters, husband of the blonde-haired Jo.

  ‘No, of course not.’ Veronica smiled.

  ‘Bit of excitement,’ said Jo, moving in to take the remaining seat. ‘We were coming up the drive when this ambulance came tearing down the road. Siren screaming, lights flashing. Harry had to pull out of the way. We were wondering if there’d been an accident in the kitchen. All those sharp knives.’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ Hilary told her. ‘Dinah Halsgrove was found collapsed in her room.’

  There was a startled silence.

  ‘No! Surely not!’ Jo’s cry brought other heads turning round to listen.

  Hilary rose to the occasion, and to her feet. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you might as well all hear it now. While we were on the cruise, Dinah Halsgrove was taken dangerously ill.’

  At the back of the room a young woman with a ponytail gave a nervous laugh.

  ‘Are you sure it was genuine? You don’t suppose Gavin has staged this for our benefit? A murder, on a mystery weekend?’

  The word fell jarringly into the silence. Hilary snorted.

  ‘Don’t be silly. No one’s mentioned murder. She’s not dead.’

  She found herself crossing her fingers.

  FIVE

  Hilary woke suddenly in darkness. She groped for the light switch. An unfamiliar bedside baffled her fingers.

  Before her brain could catch up with the reason, a more startling truth broke in upon her. She had identified the sound that had woken her.

  Someone was trying the door latch.

  Scattered bits of knowledge were coming back to her. She was in a bedroom at Morland Abbey. On the top floor of the East Cloister. Veronica was in a room across the corridor. David was not beside her in the big bed.

  On an unexplained instinct, she abandoned her attempt to find the light switch. Her senses were sharpened as she swung her feet quietly to the floor. In a few swift steps, she crossed to where she now remembered the door to be.

  As her eyes accustomed to the gloom she reached cautiously for the handle. Her nerves were stretched, waiting for the sound to come again. She had almost grasped the latch when she heard it lift.

  With the determination of decades spent as a teacher, she forestalled whoever was on the other side. She flung the door wide open.

  The hiss that greeted her sparked a memory she could not immediately place.

  The corridor was dimly illuminated. Backing away from her was a tall, thin figure spectrally gowned in white. Pale brown hair fell forward around her face.

  Fragments of memory were falling into place. She had stumbled across the same figure, clad then in floating green, in the corridor below this. Again, there had been that sibilant alarm.

  Melissa. That was the name. Gavin Standforth’s assistant. The woman who had fetched Dinah Halsgrove from the station.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she said, taking the advantage of surprise. ‘Can I help you?’

  Generations of schoolgirls would have recognized the menace in that simple question.

  Melissa floundered, as Hilary had meant she should. ‘No … I … got lost.’

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  Hilary was getting into her stride now, beginning to enjoy herself.

  Both women were startled out of the encounter by a commotion further down the corridor.

  ‘Melissa!’ The masculine cry was both suppressed yet urgent. It might not have woken Hilary if she had still been asleep.

  She made out the pale figure advancing towards them. Gavin Standforth, in silvery silk pyjamas. Hilary was suddenly aware of her own skimpy summer nightdress. A little of her schoolmistress’s authority ebbed from her. She stiffened her back. She was not the one who should feel embarrassed.

  Gavin was as smooth as ever, his smile rather ghostly in the lamplight.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Masters. Hilary, isn’t it? Melissa, I’m afraid, is prone to sleepwalking. I hope she didn’t alarm you. Come along, Melissa. Let’s get you back to bed.’

  He took the tall woman’s elbow. At first, she made to shake him off, but then her head drooped. She let him begin to lead her away.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Hilary said. ‘Your rooms are on the floor below us, aren’t they? Her sleepwalking’s taken her remarkably far off course.’

  Even as she said this, she didn’t know if it was true. How far did somnambulists venture from their beds?

  A second later, she knew what was bugging her. That encounter before Dinah Halgsrove’s talk, when she had gone back to fetch her badge. Even at the time, there had been a startling malevolence in the reaction which had greeted Hilary when she bumped into Melissa. As though she was not only surprised that Hilary should meet her in that corridor, but angry. Why?

  Her imagination took her back to that first moment when she had woken in her bed and known that someone was trying to get into the room. Hilary was not of a nervous disposition, but there was something about that surreptitious movement, coupled with that earlier flash of rage, that made her scalp crawl. She knew with a certainty she could not explain that Melissa had not been sleepwalking.

  It took a couple of seconds, as the couple retreated towards the staircase, to realize that Gavin knew that too. He might have manufactured a more plausible excuse than Melissa’s, but it was no more true. Whatever had brought Melissa to Hilary’s bedroom, Gavin must have known what it was and feared it. He had come hurrying after her with that urgent cry.

  She watched their figures dwindle under the last lamp before the stairs.

  She turned back to her door and started.

  Another figure was standing in the corridor behind her.

  ‘Veronica!’

  ‘Am I as alarming a sight as all that?’

  Veronica had slipped a pink cotton housecoat over her rose-patterned nightdress. She managed to look, Hilary reflected ruefully, as delightful as always, even suddenly roused from sleep.

  ‘No! I mean … well, it’s been a rather surprising night.’

  ‘You seem to have had company.’

  ‘Melissa. Lost or sleepwalking. Take your pick. She was trying to get into my room.’

  ‘And you don’t believe either of those. Come into my room while I make us some hot chocolate. You look a bit shaken.’

  Hilary followed her into the smaller room with the single bed. She collapsed into the armchair while Veronica put the kettle on.

  ‘I might have believed her, or Gavin, if it wasn’t the second time I’ve had a run-in with her in the last few hours. I don’t think I’ve told you this.’

  She went over again that strange encounter in the East Cloister corridor.

  ‘I can’t explain just how … menacing it sounded. Like a snake you’ve just startled.’

  Veronica carried her hot chocolate across the bed and sat there.

  ‘And you’ve got it into your head that this might have something to do with Dinah Halsgrove’s falling ill. But we don’t know there’s anything suspicious about that, given her age.’

  Hilary heard again the question echoing across the bar last night.

  ‘Unless Gavin staged it for our benefit.’

  ‘And this could be one more clue for us?’ Veronica shook her head. ‘I don’t buy it. Still … Gavin found her in our corridor. It’s above theirs. Yet it seems he knew where to come.’

  Hilary pondered this. ‘We’ll have to wait till the morning to clarify that. Find out just what was wrong with our distinguished speaker. I can’t believe they’d actually harm her, just to jazz up a murder mystery weekend. And I don’t see where I could fit in.’

  Veronica put down her cup. ‘Will you be all right now, on your own?’

  It was not normal for people to be so solicitous about Hilary. She did not usually give the impression of being vulnerable. But Veronica had always been perceptive.

  Hilary shook her head, not in denial, but to clear her thoughts. ‘If Melissa wasn’t sleepwalking, why el
se would she come to my room?’

  An uncharacteristic shudder ran through her.

  ‘I’m not a fanciful woman, but I can’t help wondering what she might have done if she’d found me asleep in bed.’

  The question lay between them unanswered.

  It was an uncomfortable thought.

  SIX

  The next time she woke, a faint grey light showed through a gap in the curtains. But the window was in the wrong place. Hilary struggled once again to make sense of the unfamiliar bedroom. This was not her bed. It was far too wide and there was no David beside her.

  An unexplained feeling of dread overshadowed her.

  Slowly, the reality slipped into place. She was in Morland Abbey, for a weekend course on crime writing. It was Saturday morning. But the realization did not bring her the pleasure it should. Something had happened that should not have.

  Her body was growing aware of what had woken her. She needed to go the bathroom. It was one of the downsides of growing older.

  She was halfway to the bedroom door when her sleepy brain clicked into gear. A few hours ago she had made for this same door in total darkness. Someone had lifted the latch.

  The reason for that sense of fear flooded back to her.

  Melissa. Spectral in her white nightgown. And then Gavin calling to her urgently from further down the corridor.

  And now a darker truth came on the heels of that memory.

  That was the dread that was hanging over her. She had gone to bed with the news that Dinah Halsgrove had been rushed into hospital after a sudden collapse. Theresa had been sceptical about food poisoning, but still …

  Melissa? Hilary had surprised her yesterday in the corridor leading to Dinah Halsgrove’s bedroom. Is this what had brought her to Hilary’s room in the middle of the night? Because Hilary alone had witnessed that?

  It was an unsettling thought. Hilary was not normally given to irrational fears. But was this irrational?

  Dinah Halsgrove had nearly died – might even now be dead. Was it too ridiculous to imagine that Hilary too might have been found dead this morning? Smothered by her pillow, perhaps.

  She shook herself back to common sense. She was very much alive this morning. It was the danger to the author, not to Hilary, that mattered now. Clearly, considering Halsgrove’s age, nobody was taking any chances last night. But a cloud had hung over the course participants in the bar. Would the author survive the night? There had been those two young men who had helped Hilary right the bookstall, the improbable redhead and the darker one. They had joked that it might not be natural causes. Was the queen of fictional poisoners going to meet her end in the same way as her dozens of imagined victims?

  If that had been meant as a joke, it was a ghoulish one.

  But as Hilary had turned out the light yesterday evening and lain in the darkness, another disturbing thought had laid hold of her. If it was indeed accidental food poisoning, whatever Theresa’s doubts, would anyone else fall victim to it? Would Hilary herself wake in the night with some violent warning of death?

  She breathed deeply with relief, as her cold toes curled against the carpet. She had survived the night. She needed to empty her bladder, but it was no more than that. No stomach cramps, no vomiting. Just a normal, early-morning waking.

  Sixty-three was certainly not old by modern standards, but it was still a blessing to be given another day.

  As she returned from the bathroom, she crossed to the window and drew the curtain aside. An autumn mist shrouded the quadrangle. She could barely see the West Cloister on the opposite side. No sign yet of the sunrise ready to strike through the gloom. Yet day could not be far off. She turned on the bedside lamp to check her watch. Five a.m.

  Still, she sat on the seat in front of the window, without returning to the warm nest of her bed.

  A cold doubt was creeping over her. It had seemed a fun idea to come to this evocative setting and try her hand at a kind of writing which had never occurred to her before. But why not? She had enough knowledge for a convincing Elizabethan background, and historical crime novels seemed to be endlessly popular. She had a sharp analytical brain. She could surely set up a viable plot, with a set of colourful characters. She had infected Veronica with the same enthusiasm.

  She had not expected to get involved with a real-life drama of life and death on a weekend about violent endings.

  Coincidence. Probably not food poisoning. Heart? Stroke? The novelist herself had said she was diabetic and heavily medicated. Given her advanced age and questionable health, anything was possible. There was certainly no need to believe the young woman in the corner who had laughingly suggested it was a put-up job.

  Hilary was getting cold. She got to her feet and was hesitating about whether to close the curtains again, when a tremor of sound came up to her from two floors below. Someone was opening the door which gave on to the cloister garth. She leaned forward, with her forehead against the chill condensation of the windowpane. Infuriatingly, she could not see directly beneath her without opening it and alerting the person below to the fact that she was there. But as she craned her neck sideways, she had the impression of a figure running along the path until it merged with the early-morning mist. The quadrangle fell quiet again.

  A jogger. David would sometimes get up and go for an early-morning run. She had never seen the attraction herself.

  Hilary sat on for a few minutes. Then, with a sigh, she went back to bed and dozed again.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Veronica cast a concerned look over Hilary as they met before breakfast.

  ‘Never better,’ Hilary asserted, with a confidence she no longer felt.

  ‘Last night you were thinking Melissa had evil designs against you.’

  ‘You can imagine anything in the middle of the night.’

  Breakfast in the restaurant was more subdued than it should have been, given that they were about to embark on their writing course.

  ‘Have you heard anything?’ Veronica asked her neighbour. It was the young woman with the ponytail who had advanced the theory last night that Dinah Halsgrove’s illness was not real at all, but a carefully planned drama to fuel the murder mystery weekend. ‘Do we know if Dinah made it through the night? I’ve been praying they got her to hospital in time.’

  ‘If it really was genuine.’ A long-legged man of the girl’s generation threw his limbs across the bench and set his glass of grapefruit juice beside hers. Dark hair fell forward over an earnest, bespectacled face.

  ‘I’m with Tania. It’s got to be suspicious. It’s just too far-fetched a coincidence that it should happen this particular weekend. Where are the witnesses? We’ve only got Theresa’s word for what happened. And she’s part of Gavin’s team. The rest of us were miles away on that boat. I bet they’re setting up a crime for us to write about.’

  Hilary’s thought flew back to Melissa lifting her door latch. Could that be part of it? The thought came as a relief.

  She surveyed the pair of fellow writers. The young man was wearing navy shorts and a sweatshirt saying Wirral Whippet. It was, Hilary thought, rather late in the year for shorts. The woman he had called Tania was more warmly dressed in a black tracksuit, with white flashes on the sleeves and legs. There was a rather ostentatious athleticism about the pair.

  ‘You forget,’ she said crisply. ‘There was an ambulance with a crew of trained paramedics. There were the Morland Abbey staff. Or are you suggesting the ambulance service was in on the hoax too?’

  The young man flushed a little and shrugged. ‘Do we know it was a real ambulance? There must be mock-up ones you can hire, you know, for films and such. Someone with Gavin’s background would know how to set that up.’

  Harry Walters’ voice rose from the next table, addressing the middle-aged waiter. ‘Is the English breakfast safe to eat? I don’t want to be the next one ending up in hospital.’

  The waiter’s voice was icy. ‘I can assure you, sir, the cooking area has been thoroughly cle
aned. The plates and cutlery are sterilized, as they always are. Chef’s going mad at the suggestion that it might have been his food. From what I’ve heard, the lady wasn’t even sick.’

  Hilary turned back to the conspiracy theorists.

  ‘So where’s Miss Halsgrove now, if you think she’s not in hospital?’

  ‘Probably safe at home in Sussex,’ Tania suggested. ‘If she was too tired to go back last night, they could have smuggled her away early this morning, before any of us was up and about. Rob’s right.’

  Hilary remembered that sense of someone opening the East Cloister door below her. Of a figure on the path before the mist had swallowed it up. Should she say anything?

  But that figure had been alone and running. Hardly that of an elderly woman with luggage being escorted to the car park.

  There had to be some other explanation. Just an early-morning jogger.

  The mist had lifted, promising a fine autumn morning.

  They gathered in Lady Jane’s Chamber, at the end of the East Cloister. It was a high-ceilinged square room at the far end of the first-floor corridor. Its size was better suited to the thirty or so course members in this morning’s group than that splendid auditorium of yesterday’s talk.

  Hilary looked around at the assembled participants. There should have been an air of anticipation, a nervous appraisal of their wished-for talents, the hope that Gavin would set them on an enjoyable – and even profitable – path. But a feeling of anxiety was palpable in the room, that had nothing to do with their literary abilities.

  ‘He’s here!’ Veronica whispered.

  All heads turned as Gavin Standforth appeared in the doorway. He paused, as if for dramatic effect. Hilary took in the yellow cravat at the neck of his crisply laundered shirt, today’s cream jacket and trousers. She had not read any of his books, but he looked a picture of the successful author. Then she remembered the others saying he’d had just one bestseller, among a mediocre output.