The cellars seemed to Donna to be filling up with panic, and the smooth-as-eggs doors began to take on a dreadfully sinister appearance. Airtight. Airtight… The clock was still beating out its rhythm, but the words of the rhythm had changed. Airtight…airtight…
The inspector’s voice cut through this horrid tattoo. ‘One of you had better go back upstairs and radio Area to ask about the availability of oxyacetylene cutters in case—Oh, wait though, it looks as if you’ve got some purchase on it at last. Don’t let it slip back!’
The door did not slip back. Its old hinges screeched like a thousand souls in torment, and the metal scraped protestingly against the rough and ready levers the men had inserted, but Donna saw it begin to swing outwards. Dry stale air gusted out, and something that had been huddled against the other side of the door fell forward.
‘Oh, God,’ said Donna, no longer bothering to remain hidden. She clapped both hands over her mouth as if to force back a scream or a sob. ‘Oh, God…’
They were both there. They must have been there all along–all the time. Four days. And the room had been airtight…
Maria Robards had fallen onto her back, and the glare of the torches showed up her terrible face. The skin she had taken such care of–beauty treatments at expensive salons, her insistence on buying the best make-up obtainable–was suffused with purple where the veins had swollen in her frenzied efforts to escape and the panic-filled struggle for air. Her eyes were wide open–bulging from their sockets–and the whites were stained crimson where the tiny capillaries had haemorrhaged.
She had taken care of her hands as well. Scented hand lotions, manicures, always wearing costly rings. The rings were still there, but the once-perfect nails were broken and the fingertips were crusted with blood where she had clawed at the heavy steel doors.
Donna’s father was not by the door; he was lying near the brick chimney. His face was turned away from the torchlight, but it was possible to see that his hands were also bruised and bloodied. Perhaps he had been trying to find a chink in Twygrist’s structure: a tiny tear in the fabric which could be widened to let in air. Perhaps he had not known where he was, though, and had been beating uselessly against the bricks, in the mad, dying belief that they were doors that could be forced open.
In a high strained voice, Donna said, ‘They’re both dead, aren’t they?’ and in the small enclosed space, her voice seemed to bounce back at her, mingling with the steady beating of the old clock.
There was the sound of the inspector’s voice, kindly and concerned. ‘Yes, my dear. I’m afraid they’re both dead.’
Both-dead…Both-dead… The clock snatched at that. Tick-tick, both-dead, tick-tick, twice-dead…
Twygrist’s darkness reared up and wrapped itself round Donna in a dizzy, sick-making vortex. She pitched forward into this swirling dizziness and the inspector caught her as she fell.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It hurt Thomasina very much to put Maud in the room on Quire’s second floor, but if she was to get a child–a boy who would be a worthier heir for Quire than Simon–there was no alternative. And after all, the room was not some grim stone-floored, iron-barred cell like something in Newgate; in the precentor’s time it had been a nursery–inside it an inner door opened onto a night-nursery. Admittedly there were bars at all the windows–they had been put there to stop the precentor’s sons from toppling out while fighting one another–but they were quite thin bars and there were only a couple of them across each window. As well as that, the two rooms were conveniently far away from the main part of the house, and there was a lock on the outer door.