Still gripping the torch, he went forward. The floor sagged as he walked across it, and the worn joists creaked like giant’s bones. The nearer he got to the rotting tank the more it looked as if human hair really was spilling out through the rotting wood, and as if a human hand really was reaching out…And the beating of the horrible clock no longer sounded like the minutes ticking away, it really did sound like a human heart.
‘The hellish tattoo of a terrified human heart in the minutes before death?’
Oh for pity’s sake! He was standing in the middle of a medieval watermill with a smeary twilight all round him and Twygrist’s hideous clock pounding the seconds away, and all he could do was quote Edgar Allen Poe! He reached the waterwheel in its decaying tank and, taking a deep breath, shone the light.
Oh God, it really was a human hand reaching out through the rotted wood, and it really was human hair spilling out. Godfrey felt as if his temperature had soared to at least a hundred, but an icy hand seemed to be clutching at the base of his stomach. There was somebody inside that grim tank. Somebody had fallen inside it–all the way down–and was lying under the monstrous teeth of the waterwheel. The force of the fall had caused the decaying wood to rupture so that whoever it was had half fallen through.
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.