Black spindly legs were probing through the gap. A row of spiders was hunched there, low on their bellies, starting to crawl under.
Hannah dropped Hermione’s picture face down on the carpet, expecting the crash of breaking glass. But it just thudded. It’s Perspex, she realised gratefully. She slid the painting towards the door. It won’t fit! she thought wildly. It’s too big! It’ll jam on the frame and they’ll just crawl right over it and get me and bite me and drag me out the back door and through the rain and down. .
. . to the woods.
The thought of the Carmichael Road woods suddenly drenched her with more terror than the sight of the searching, testing, hairy legs. They were nearly in. She aimed the picture frame square at the door and shoved.
It squashed the spiders back and slid neatly between the jambs with just a couple of millimetres to spare each side. A nearly perfect fit.
Hannah knelt on the floor, eyes wide, breathing hard, suddenly wanting badly to go to the toilet. Rain rumbled on the roof.
Then the picture frame moved.
It slid back into the room a centimetre. Then another. The spiders were pushing it back.
Hannah scampered forward and sat all her weight on the frame.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a scratching at the door, and the handle began to slowly twist. First one way. Then the other. Then it jiggled — click, click, click. She could imagine monstrous, thorny feet on the other side pressed hard against the door.
She realised her lip was trembling. She was going to cry.
Stop it. Stop it.
The scratching stopped. The door knob ceased moving.
Quiet, except the hushed hiss of rain.
They’ve gone, she thought. Relief as sweet as cordial flooded through her. They’ve gone.
Then she heard another slow, sly noise down the hall.
The door to Miriam’s bedroom was creaking open.
23
Nicholas woke with a splitting headache. He blinked blearily and checked his watch. It was quarter to nine. How had he slept so late? Then he remembered how frustratingly last night had gone. What a fractured quorum he’d convened: an Indian Christian minister, a recent widow arcane as a sphinx, a white witch forced a thousand kilometres away. . and himself.
Well, it was like the old saying: if you want something fucked up properly, form a committee. That’s what he’d done. Who knew how much later into the night Pritam Anand and Laine Boye had kept arguing about whether Quill was alive or dead, whether the murders were connected or coincidence. Nicholas felt a fool for telling them so much.
Fuck them both.
He believed more than ever what he’d said last night: Quill was smart. She knew no one in their right mind could believe a woman could live so long, could hide in the middle of a crowded suburb, could get away with so many murders.
He showered swiftly, dressed, slipped on the elder-wood necklace. There was a pay phone outside the shops on Myrtle Street. He needed to see how Suzette was doing.
The world outside felt waterlogged. The torrential rain last night had swelled the gutters to fast-running freshets. The footpaths were wet, and the grass strips flanking them leaked water onto contiguous driveways. Grey clouds massed overhead, pressing down like monstrous fists and threatening to finish work left undone.
Nicholas jingled his pocket — a few coins, enough to phone Sydney and see if Nelson was improving. What if he wasn’t? What if he got worse? What if he died? He felt a slow wheel of fear tighten straps in his gut. Then it will be your fault.
A car slowed behind him. Then another vehicle slowed and stopped a few steps ahead of him. Police cars. Four doors opened and four officers stepped around him.
‘Mr Close?’
Nicholas recognised two of the officers: they’d visited his mother’s house the evening the Thomas boy went missing. He smiled without an ounce of fondness.
‘Silverback and Fossey. Don’t you guys miss Rwanda?’
The officers were unamused.
‘Sir, we need to ask you some questions.’
Pritam had been up since six.
He’d awoken sore and cold on the pew, and the sight that greeted his eyes was of Christ suddenly sideways, as if God had decided crucifixion was, in fact, a poor fate for his only begotten son and so had uprooted the cross.
Pritam stood, shambled to the presbytery, boiled the kettle. He felt as if he’d had no sleep at all. Sipping tea, he unplugged the telephone, plugged in the modem and switched on the church laptop.
Laine Boye had been right. If one dismissed Nicholas Close’s theories, boiled away all the speculation and happenstance, all that was left was one simple coincidence: Eleanor Bretherton looked uncannily like Mrs L. Quill. Pritam wished he could dismiss that as a fluke, but he’d seen John staring at Bretherton’s photo and turning pale. That was enough to warrant a bit of effort. He opened Google and started typing.
‘Eleanor Bretherton 1880s’.
The search revealed only one unhelpful curiosity: Macmillan had published a book by Mary Ward entitled Miss Bretherton in 1885.
He dug deeper. He logged onto and searched the Anglican database. Then he rifled electronically through records at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He emailed the Department of Immigration for information on how to secure lists of free settlers from the city’s founding in 1859. He searched the State Archives for shipping manifests, cargo allocations, passenger lists.
By a quarter to nine, he had found absolutely nothing.
More tea. A quick piss. Back to it.
‘L. Quill, Tallong’. Search. Several Quills in several different states. Back to Births, Deaths and Marriages. He guessed a birth year, around 1910, her death around 1995. Several L. Quills, but none the right age, the right gender, the right place. This, he told himself, was not unreasonable: Quill could have been born interstate and died far from home. To search every state’s and territory’s records could take days. Weeks. It was hopeless.
Nicholas would say that she meant it to be hopeless, he thought.
He made toast, chewed slowly, debated stealing a quick nap. Rain pattered again on the roof and tapped through the trees. English weather, he thought. He stopped chewing. An idea crystallised in his mind. English. If Quill was as old as Nicholas thought, surely she came from Britain, one way or another. Either freely or. .
He typed: ‘Convict Ships to Moreton Bay’. Search.
Three ships. One arrived twice; one three times; one just once. The Elphinstone, the Bangalore, the County Durham. All left Spithead, all docked Moreton Bay.
Pritam clicked County Durham. Master: William Huxley. She arrived 2 October 1850, having sailed 144 days. Convicts embarked: male — 154, female — 34; disembarked: male — 147, female — 30.
He clicked the hyperlink and the female convicts’ names appeared.
Eighth on the list was ‘Quill, Rowena’. ‘Trial place: Trim, Meath County. Crime/s: Fraud. Prostitution. Term: Life. Comments: Pardoned 1859.’
Pritam sat back in his chair. He was stunned. A quotation by Flavius Josephus crawled in his skulclass="underline" ‘Now when Noah had lived three hundred and fifty years after the Flood, and that all that time happily, he died, having lived the number of nine hundred and fifty years. .’