After mamma’s funeral she had been sent to stay with some cousins of mamma’s, then she had gone to school, and she had forgotten the morning when mamma had fallen between the grinding millstones inside Twygrist.
But she could see now that she had not really forgotten. She could remember how, after a few minutes, the waterwheels had slowed down and then stopped, so she knew papa had closed the gates to stop the water pouring in. It was quite a long time before he came out–far longer than the very little time he had said–but when he did come out, Maud saw there was a frown between his eyes that had not been there before. It had frightened her, but then papa had smiled and they had gone home, and talked about Maud visiting mamma’s cousins for a while.
Throughout all these years, the memory of what had happened that morning had remained so deeply buried Maud had not known it was there. All that had remained were nightmares of the black iron doors that opened onto Reaper Wing.
St Michael’s clock was chiming ten when two nurses, both unknown to Maud, came along the path. They were talking animatedly, and one of them called cheerfully to the lodge keeper to let them out, Albie, and be sharp about it because it was freezing enough to turn you to ice out here.
It was too dark for the lodge keeper to make out the individual features of people who went in and out. Maud waited a moment, and then ran out onto the path, as if she had been trying to catch the nurses up. The gate keeper saw her, sketched a good-night salute, and let her through.
She was outside the gates. Free. She would do anything to avoid being taken back to Latchkill. She would kill someone, if necessary. With a jolt of surprise she remembered her plan, and that she would have to kill. It would have to be tonight, and she knew who the someone would be.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Donna had spent five years working out her plan; she had polished it until it was foolproof, and now, when it was almost time for the final blow to be administered, she could see all her careful work was going to pay off.
The catalyst for the final chain of events was to be the murder of someone within Quire House. The identity of the victim had never mattered–Donna had known she must go for whoever was around at the right moment, but she had always hoped there would be a young boy, and so there had been. She had seen Greg Foster on her careful forays to Quire House–she had visited the place a few times over the years at deliberately-spaced intervals, deliberately choosing term-times when there might be school parties working on projects, or when there would be enough visitors for her to pass unnoticed. She changed her appearance each time; no one must connect her with the seldom-seen lady who rented Charity Cottage, but she needed to keep a close check on the component parts of her plan and Quire House was one of those parts.
So on one occasion she was an earnest collector of architectural information, wearing an indeterminate-coloured jacket and skirt with a felt hat crammed over her hair, and on the next she was an untidy student in jeans and a t-shirt. Another time she wore a flowing Indian-print cotton skirt with wooden beads and earrings. She kept a low profile during these visits but she kept her eyes open for anything that might be incorporated into her plan. For a long time there was nothing and Donna became anxious, but the week after it was announced that Antonia was to be shortly freed, she saw something that would fit into her plan with beautiful precision.
She saw the sulky-faced boy who had worked at Quire for the past few months take two pieces of Victorian jewellery from a display table and slide them furtively into his pocket.
From then everything unrolled immaculately. The boy was a work experience student or something like that, and Donna had waited for him when he left Quire for the day.