Tower Of Silence [Mass Market Paperback]

Selina March has lived in the remote Scottish hamlet of Inchcape, with its mysterious Round Tower, for nearly fifty years. Brought up by elderly relatives, long since dead, she now lives alone, shunning the outside world.

But when she reluctantly accepts a paying guest, Selina's secluded life will change for ever. Crime writer Joanna Savile has come to Inchcape to research her latest novel by interviewing inmates at Moy, the asylum for the criminally insane situated nearby. Her secret aim is to question former child murderer, Mary Maskelyne, Moy's most infamous patient.

Joanna's prying will yield unexpected results. For, although they have never met, Selina March and Mary Maskelyne are connected by a shared family tragedy: a terrible act of unspeakable cruelty that took place in India fifty years before.

And there are secrets in Selina's more recent past, too. Secrets that are about to be uncovered with the most devastating and horrifying consequences...

'If you're as broke as all that,' said Gillian Campbell to her godmother, 'why on earth don't you sell Teind House?'

'Oh, I couldn't do that,' said Selina at once.

'Why not? You'd probably make enough on the sale to live anywhere you liked. You could leave Inchcape altogether if you wanted. Buy a little bungalow.'

'Oh, no,' said Selina, and instantly felt the words take on a menacing reality. Leave-Inchcape, leave-Inchcape ...She shivered and said, 'No, that's out of the question.'

'Why not?' said Gillian again.

But it was impossible to explain to Gillian, who lived a crowded modern life in London, that there were things at Teind that strangers must never find: things that must be kept concealed from the prying outside world at all costs ...No, she could never leave Inchcape.

And so she said, 'You see, Gillian, I've always lived here. Since I was seven years old -- dear goodness, forty-eight years ago! The aunts and Great-uncle Matthew left me Teind House. They wouldn't like to think of it going out of the family. I wouldn't like to think of it, either. I -- I feel safe here.'

Gillian looked at Selina, for whom life seemed to have stopped somewhere in the 1940s, and about whom people smiled sadly and indulgently and said, Oh, she's just like a Victorian pressed flower in somebody's old album, and tried very hard not to feel exasperated. Selina was not Victorian, of course, she was nowhere near old enough, but she did seem to have been stuck in a past age -- a dim, cobwebby past -- ever since Gillian could remember. All the fault of those finicky old women who had brought her up, and the even more finicky old man who had been their brother. 'OK, if you won't sell up, why don't you make the place work for you?'

'How?'

'Well, there's only you rattling around here and you don't use much more than a quarter of it. You could let the top floor -- turn the attics into a flat. There're always wildlife students at the bird sanctuary in Stornforth who want summer accommodation.'

'Oh, not students. I couldn't have students -- so noisy, so irresponsible. Parties and drugs--'

Gillian pounced. 'Then how about offering bed and breakfast?'

'You mean -- charge people for giving them hospitality?'

Dear, twittery Selina was plainly shocked to her toes. Gillian grinned and said, 'Why not? It needn't be anything high-powered; you'd get retired couples motoring through Scotland, or little groups of two or three ladies. Stop-over accommodation, that's what they call it. The Black Boar does lunches and nice evening bar meals, so all you'd need provide would be tea or coffee and orange juice, with scrambled eggs and ham or kedgeree and toast.'

'And a room.'

'Selina, darling, even without the attics you've got four bedrooms you never use, and three sitting rooms!'

'But there'd be laundry,' said Selina, rather desperately. 'Bathrooms -- gentlemen using the lavatory--'

For pity's sake! thought Gillian, but she said, 'There's a perfectly good second loo on the half-landing. And a wash basin in two of the bedrooms to my knowledge. There's even a laundry in Stornforth who still collects and delivers. You could do it easily. Look on it as an adventure.'

'But would people want to come?'

'I don't see why not. There're always tourists driving through and stopping for lunch at the Black Boar. The bird sanctuary gets masses of visitors. And there's a lot of history scattered about this part of Scotland. I bet you'd get loads of people wanting to stay. You could charge thirty or forty quid a night, and you wouldn't need to take more than two couples at a time if you didn't want to -- in fact you'd probably only need to do it between April and October anyway. If you averaged two couples for two nights a week, that would bring in between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and sixty pounds each week.' She grinned. 'Truly, Selina darling, it'd be money for old rope.'

Gillian's words reminded Selina sharply of her father, even after so many years. It was odd how an expression could trigger a memory.

Money for old rope, father used to say when Selina was small and somebody commissioned him to write an article about a politician or a statesman. He had said it when the family sailed for India all that time ago. After years of reporting about the warlords of Europe, he had said it would be money for jam to write about the birth-struggles of Indian independence, and to focus on Mr Nehru's determination to modernise his country. Father always gave his articles what the newspapers called human interest, which was why he was commissioned to write so many things. And he liked travelling around and meeting people. ('Nothing but a gypsy,' Great-aunt Rosa had once said, lips pursed.)

Father had not been a gypsy, of course; it was just that he was good at making friends in new places, and at finding out what was going on and shaping it into the kind of story people liked to read. He would have discovered everything that went on in Inchcape, except that nothing much ever did, and father would probably have been bored very quickly.

Selina was not bored by Inchcape, and the tourists who drove through the place did not seem to be bored by it either. They were usually bound for the bird sanctuary at Stornforth, of course, but they often stopped to have lunch at the Black Boar, and they almost always walked up to see the eleventh-century church, and the remains of the monastery which had been abandoned somewhere around the ninth century when the monks of Columba decamped to Ireland.

Teind House itself had a history, as well: it took its name from the old Gael word teind meaning tithe, because the house had once been a tithe barn where the laird of Inchcape -- when Inchcape had a laird -- had gathered tithes from his tenants every quarter day. The whole village would come along and there would be a party in the evening after all the tithes had been paid.

Great-uncle Matthew had told Selina all this when she came to live with him and his two sisters, who were Great-aunt Flora and Great-aunt Rosa. It was nice to know about the place where you lived, wasn't it? said Great-uncle Matthew, who studied local history, and always smelt of bay rum and ink. The aunts smelt of Yardley's lavender water, and the little sachets Aunt Flora made to put in clothes cupboards.

Selina, considering Gillian's wild suggestion from all angles, thought that the aunts and Great-uncle Matthew would have been horrified at the thought of their great-niece taking in paying guests; they would have seen it as a lowering of standards. Standards, they had always said, were very important. To be sure it was very sad that Selina's mother and father had died -- the implication was that John March ought not to have taken his wife and small daughter to such an outlandish country as India in the first place -- but it was important not to make any scenes. Certainly not to sob and weep and make an exhibition of yourself. The good Lord had seen fit to take John and Poor Elspeth to His bosom -- although it was a great pity He had done so in such a very unpleasant and unChristian fashion -- but it was His will and Selina must accept it. There would be a memorial of some kind, naturally: a tablet in the church, perhaps -- they would ask the vicar. Memorials were important. You had to honour the dead, said Great-aunt Rosa. Great-aunt Flora thought Selina might plant rosemary or a little lavender bush in a corner of the garden as a private little memorial, how would that be?

In Scotland, death and your parents' memories apparently smelt of lavender and rosemary, but in India, where John and Elspeth March had died, they had smelt of sandalwood and frankincense, which the people burned to prevent the spread of disease from decaying flesh, and to help speed the departing soul on its way to heaven.

But on the day that Selina's parents had died, there had been no sandalwood or burning oil. There had only been the dreadful stench of blood and fear, spilled entrails and burst eyes.

'I've thought of a problem,' said Selina.

'Darling, there aren't any problems. We've worked it all out--'

'Moy,' said Selina. 'It's one thing for tourists to drive through Inchcape and stop for lunch and walk round the church and so on. But they won't want to stay in a place where there's an asylum for the criminally insane on the doorstep.'

Gillian said, 'Moy isn't really on the doorstep. It's four miles away. And I think you're wrong, anyway. People go to Dartmoor in positive droves.'

'Butterflies and Sherlock Holmes,' said Selina.

'Well, Inchcape's got birds and monks -- OK, the ghosts of monks and the remains of a monastery. But listen, Moy's so high-security it squeaks. When was the last time the alarm bell was rung? 1920? 1910? The place is famous for only having had about one break-out in the last hundred years!'

And then Selina said, 'There was a bulletin on the television news last evening. Moy's head of psychiatry -- Dr Irvine -- made a statement. It's been decided to transfer Mary Maskelyne to Moy.'

'Oh,' said Gillian rather blankly. 'Oh, yes, I see what you mean.'

Opinions among the staff at Moy were divided as to whether Patrick Irvine had angled to get Mary Maskelyne here in order to help with his research into the criminal mind, or whether he had done everything he could to avoid it.

Donald Frost, who was D wing's head, and would therefore be Maskelyne's wing governor, God help him, said non-committally that Maskelyne was a very interesting case; Dr Irvine would find it very valuable to study the lady. In private, he reminded his team that observation of Maskelyne would need to be covert but extremely high. Dr Irvine might put her on suicide watch after he had carried out an initial assessment; they would have to wait to see about that.

The original case, in the mid Sixties, had been very high-profile indeed, of course, and most people remembered it, even those who had not been there at the time, in the way tha...