Macandrew was almost relieved that the place seemed so ordinary but Emma had not said that her home was in Moscow, only that it was near it. But in which direction? An added problem might be that large houses were often hidden from the road. People with money could afford privacy.
The main road out of Moscow led north but there was a minor road crossing from east to west. At the mental toss of a coin, he headed slowly east with frequent checks in his rear view mirror for any traffic coming up behind. The road was little better than a farm-track and wound steeply uphill through a forest of Scots pine trees.
He had travelled less than half a mile when he saw what looked like evidence of a broad path leading off to the left. It didn’t seem like a farm track because it was almost overgrown but it did look as if it might have been the entrance to a property at some time in the past. He parked the car on the verge to take a closer look and found clear evidence of what had once been a stone-built perimeter wall and two gate posts, although the gates themselves were no longer there. The position of the rusting hinge-bolts embedded in the stone posts suggested that the gates must have been well over eight feet high.
Macandrew cleared a path through the tangled undergrowth that had largely reclaimed the junction with the road and started to make his way up what would have been the drive. The sound of the wind in the tall trees and the darkening of the sky made him shiver and pull up his collar as he made his way to the far end of the drive where he had to stop and fight his way again through tangled shrubbery and a dense cluster of wild rhododendron bushes. This he did holding his hands up in front of his face for protection, but when he finally succeeded and stepped out into a clearing, he saw what he had almost been afraid of finding. There was a big house standing there.
The building was clearly very old and in a poor state of repair. The windows had been boarded up and not recently for the wood had started to rot, leaving ugly jagged gaps and weeds had gained a foothold on nearly all of the crumbling stone ledges. What caught his attention more than anything else however, was the fact that the house had a round tower. Emma’s room was round because it was in a tower.
He moved slowly towards the house, fighting the fear of finding out more. There was a struggle going on in his head between his firm belief in scientific values and what was unfolding before him. He came to the steps leading up to the front door and paused to run his fingers through letters etched into a decaying stone pillar. They spelt out — as he was dreadfully afraid they must — Fulton Grange.
Macandrew rubbed his forehead gently and sought a rational explanation. How could Jane Francini have known about this place? She had never been to Scotland in her life. She had told him this in their early conversations when they had talked about their common heritage. Even if she had, it seemed unlikely that she would ever have found her way here by accident. So what was the connection between Jane Francini, Emma Forsyth and Fulton Grange?
He looked up at the brooding walls and clutched at straws. He supposed that the house might have appeared as an illustration in some story that Jane had read as a child. Emma might even have been one of the characters in it — a particular favourite of Jane’s and one that had stuck in her mind. He knew nothing at all about the history of this place but he did remember “Emma” telling Karen Bliss about the secret compartment in her bedroom where she kept her doll. Now, if he were to find that... It didn’t bear thinking about.
He walked around the outside of the house until he found the window that seemed most susceptible to forced entry and started pulling away the boards. They were in such poor condition that it did not require much effort but the glass behind them was still intact. He found it harder to free the sash window in its frame than remove the wood shuttering but, in less than ten minutes, he was standing inside Fulton Grange with the smell of wood rot and fungus in his nostrils.
There was no furniture in the room and the wind moaned in the chimney of a huge stone fireplace — a sad, lonely sound. He closed the window and the air became still again. The moaning stopped and a deathly silence took its place, only to be broken by his footsteps as he walked slowly through empty apartments and finally across the main hall with its stone coat of arms above the door.
He paused as he came to the passage leading to the steps that gave access to the tower. He would have to be careful; if any of the floorboards should give way and he should injure himself, the chances of ever being found were remote.
The steps in the tower were dangerously steep — as Emma had suggested — but had the advantage of being solid stone. He climbed up, using the broad edges of the spiral steps because there was no hand rail, although he could see that there had once been a rope threaded through iron rings on the wall to serve that purpose — there was still threadbare evidence of it. He came to a heavy wooden door and paused. The house had been uninhabited for a very long time but he still felt like an intruder when he turned the ring handle and put his shoulder to it. The door swung back to reveal the panoramic windows that Emma had described. A pulse was beating palpably in his neck as he tested the floorboards in advance with his toe and then moved gingerly across to look down at the wilderness that had once been the garden. Emma’s voice was in his ears, ‘Please bring me my doll...’
Macandrew saw the rose carving in the stone below the large window and applied fingertip pressure to each of the petals in turn. Nothing happened. He tried again but still without success. One final attempt and, as he touched the centre of the rose with one hand and the petal below with the other, the stone turned against a hidden counter-weight to reveal a dark space. He reached in... and brought out Emma’s doll.
The clothing on the little doll turned to dust in his hands and he was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of sadness and bewilderment. He didn’t understand what was going on but the one thing he felt sure of was that Jane Francini was not mad. She was trapped in the mind of some long-dead character, the little girl who had owned and cherished this doll. He looked out of the window at the wild garden below and absently brought the doll up to his cheek to hold it there for a moment.
This changed everything. He had been trying to put the Francini affair behind him but this was no longer possible. He felt an obligation to Jane to talk to John Burnet at the University of Edinburgh and ask him why he had stopped such promising research.
Macandrew hurried back to the car for it had started to rain. He had done his best to replace the boards over the window and leave things as he’d found them but he had brought the doll with him, cradling it gently inside his jacket to protect it until he was inside the car.
It was three in the afternoon when he got back to Edinburgh and it was — he reminded himself — Friday afternoon. He would have to get a move on if he was to talk to Burnett before the weekend intervened. He found a safe place in his room for Emma’s doll — an otherwise empty drawer — and left immediately for the medical school.
He couldn’t find a place to park near the school so he took a chance and drove straight into the quadrangle, ignoring the warning signs about the need for permits. He was aware of a man in uniform starting out towards him as he got out of the car but pretended not to see him and hurried into the building.
Macandrew knew — from the address given in his published work — that Burnett was attached to the Pathology Department at the university. He followed the signs and called in at the departmental office.