Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [96]
‘And?’ Baker prompted quietly.
‘There was a girl.’
Baker smiled. ‘There always is,’ he said.
‘I wanted… We wanted to marry. My aunt forbade it. She was the executrix of my parents’ will. It wasn’t a lot of money, but…’
‘I understand, sir.’
‘My aunt had already paired me up in her mind with another girl. She introduced us, pushed us together at every opportunity, and eventually we fell in love. Deeply in love. And we married. I joined the police and we lived very happily together in a house of our own in London. Then I began to realise that my wife and I had very different ideas about what love and marriage actually meant. She is the sort of person who can love many people at once, not just her spouse. Oh, she was faithful to me – at first – but I couldn’t understand her, couldn’t cope with the fact that she loved so many people and just happened to be married to one of them. We argued… Oh, we argued…’
I could feel it welling up within me, a wave of sick coldness from the dark, scarred places that were the legacy of my brief marriage. An old, familiar feeling.
‘We divorced… We had to. She had met someone else, someone younger than me. I couldn’t hold her back. She went off with him for a while, then they split up and there was someone else; then I stopped asking.’
Baker’s fatherly hand tightened on my arm.
‘I blamed myself for a long while. Then I blamed my aunt. I can’t stop visiting my aunt – she’s all I’ve got left – but I can’t forgive her.’
‘And your wife?’
‘Oh, I forgave her long ago.’
There was a long silence while Baker tried to think of something to say and I thought back to the happy days of the past. It was so long ago. So much had changed, and I had changed so much. I had some sort of flair in those days. I was a good policeman. Deferential, glad to be of use. Politic, cautious, meticulous. And now? Full of high sentence and a bit obtuse. At times, indeed, almost ridiculous.
‘I thought I heard something earlier, sir,’ broke in Baker. ‘While you were asleep. It seemed to come from upstairs.’
‘What was it?’
‘I’m not sure, sir. I thought at the time that it might have been a scream, but thinking about it I’m not so sure.’
‘Susan!’
‘No sir, not Miss Seymour. It was too deep, whatever it was. I think it might have been Simpson.’
Simpson. The eternal footman. Was he dead? Had his quiet snickering at the pretensions of his masters finally ceased? There was no way to tell, stuck there, trapped there, in the drawing room. I felt as if Baker and I were standing at the still point of a vast conspiracy which wheeled and revolved about us. The dance went on, but we were not dancing.
My train of thought was derailed by a scrabbling within the walls. Something was moving within them, sensing us surrounding us. With the remnants of my nightmare still clinging to my mind, I attempted to get to my feet, knowing beyond any possibility of doubt that a stream of rats was about to descend from the chimney and devour us. Baker attempted to restrain me with one hand while fumbling for some impromptu weapon with the other.
A fine haze of soot fell into the fireplace.
‘Sir, I think we ought to get you to the door.’
The haze became a trickle…
‘But isn’t Catherine Harries still outside?’
A cascade…
‘Even so, sir –’
A deluge…
‘Baker, we’re staying where we are!’
And suddenly, too fast to properly comprehend, two black, powdery bodies fell into the grate. Bodies that coughed and thrashed around, spraying soot across the room. Bodies that eventually opened startlingly white eyes and stared at us with relief.
‘That heaven for that,’ Fitz Kreiner said. ‘I was worried we were going to end up in Harries’s lap.’
‘It’s just like The Water Babies,’ Susan Seymour said, exhilarated. Even covered in soot, she was striking.
Baker crossed the room and helped Miss Seymour to her feet, while Fitz used George Wallace’s precious upholstered chairs to haul himself upright. Amid the joy of knowing they were still alive, I still felt a stab of pain when I thought