The Devil Walks Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 2

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Fine

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Evil is not ugly. You cannot tell, simply from looking at a man, what colour is his soul.

  For most of his life, Daniel has known only the company of his mother – a silent, reclusive woman who has hidden him away from the outside world.

  Then a forceful knock at the door changes everything and Daniel realizes just how many secrets his mother has kept from him.

  Secrets of a dark family history – a history of fiendish spite and devilish wickedness that Daniel must now confront …

  A sinister thriller from Carnegie, Whitbread and Guardian-award-winning author Anne Fine.

  As certain as the sun behind the Downs

  And quite as plain to see, the Devil walks.

  John Betjeman

  For AJMW

  Right from the very beginning, my life was strange. It didn’t seem that way to me, of course. I’m sure, deep down, everyone in the world believes their life rolls on the way lives are supposed to go and it’s the others who are off the track. But mine was the most peculiar start because of the way I’d been raised.

  It was – oh, put it bluntly, Daniel! – halfway to mad.

  My mother was no raving lunatic. Perhaps if she’d screeched and torn her clothes and wailed at the moon, then people would have noticed earlier and everything would have been different. But, no. My mother was the quietest soul. Or so I thought. As far back as I could remember, she moved with calm tranquillity around my room.

  My sick room, I should say.

  For, from the moment I was old enough to understand the words she said, she had been telling me that I was very ill indeed. And I believed her. Why shouldn’t I? I had no reason not to trust her word. So I spent most of my growing years slumped against pillows. I was allowed to rise and totter unsteadily along the landing to the chill room that housed the water closet; but she would clutch my arm to steady me. (You too would have felt dizzy after so many hours in bed.) Sometimes in summer, when the lawn was bright with daisies, I’d be allowed to cling to the banisters and come downstairs – ‘Oh, slowly, slowly, Daniel! Take care not to fall!’ – till suddenly I could feel the brush of air against my thin, pale shins, and smell the heady lilac.

  As soon as I’d been settled in the wicker chair under the pear tree, rugs would be wrapped around my legs again. But at least I’d be out, seeing full skies, not just that poky square of light forcing its way through the grime coating on my small back window.

  Mostly, though, I was kept in bed through all those endless days and years. Hour after hour my mother sat at my side, quietly crocheting the intricately layered collars of lace she wrapped in whispering sheets of tissue and sent to Manchester, where they were sold through ladies’ catalogues to pay our rent. Sometimes I’d drift into sleep, and wake to find her gone. Or, when I was alone, I’d fall into a dream, then open my eyes to find she was beside me, her little ivory tools twisting and tugging at the dangling lace. I felt as if I dreamed her very comings and goings – but then again, I spent so much time bobbing on the fringe of sleep that I lost touch with what was really happening and what was not. Often the dreams seemed real, but solid objects in my room appeared mere fancies of my own: the carved oak wardrobe and the paintings on the wall, my mother’s beautiful old doll’s house and the books on the shelf.

  Those books. Without them I would have gone mad. I couldn’t swim or walk, so others swam for me up crocodile-infested rivers, and strode over ice caps. I can’t remember how I learned to read. I have a memory of my mother’s pointing finger, and two fat creatures dressed in tartan shirts and scarlet trews – could they have been Bear and Badger? – who walked beside me through the alphabet and into nursery stories.

  But by the time that I was of an age to come to a sense of myself – I’m Daniel Thomas Cunningham, and Liliana Cunningham’s only son – Badger and Bear had vanished. Now many of the volumes by my bed were carried up from book shelves in the rooms below, and only then if I made mardy faces, and begged for hours against my mother’s strictures that all the mould grown thick on their dank covers would ruin what was left of my ragged lungs.

  Then, one day, chaos fell upon our house. I heard the knock on the back door, and that was strange because delivery boys usually came in the morning, and there were rarely any other packages unless my mother had sent off for satin to replace a fading gown. Under my window I heard a flurry of voices, as though more than one person down there on our back step was whipping up a bother.

  ‘No, truly, Mrs Cunningham. You must come! Just for a moment. No further than your own front gate!’

  ‘Mrs Cunningham, I beg you! We must insist.’

  ‘You will be glad when you’ve seen what we have come to show you.’

  Confused, my mother must have stepped out and followed them a very few steps around the path that led to the front of our house.

  It was enough. The next thing I heard was the back door shutting behind her and the rasp as the night bolt slid across.

  Someone I didn’t know was in the house.

  I struggled upright in my bed. Outside, I could still hear my mother’s protests, each one more faint. ‘What are you so determined to show me? Why should I come with you? What’s anything on the street to do with me?’ But I could hear footfalls – heavy, hurrying footfalls – coming up the stairs, and then doors opening along the hall.

  Suddenly, there in the doorway stood a man. Though he looked young enough, his hair and beard were streaked with silver, and he was carrying a leather bag in such a businesslike fashion that I sensed at once he came for some honest purpose, and felt less frightened than before.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘it seems the whispering of all the ladies of the town is right. We have an invalid.’

  I learned my manners out of books. But they must have been none the worse for that, for when I whipped up the courage to greet him with the words, ‘Good morning, sir. Are you a doctor come to visit me?’ he beamed with pleasure.

  ‘You have a voice, then.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  I felt that, by answering so promptly, I’d earned the right to ask a question of my own. ‘Where have the
y taken my mother? Was all that commotion on the step simply a ruse to get her out of the house, and you inside it?’

  He smiled again. ‘And you have wits as well!’

  Clearly he didn’t think he had much time. Striding towards the bed, he took my arm and raised it from the covers. Pulling his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, he closed his fingers around my wrist and asked me civilly, ‘And what’s the name of your sickness? Can you tell me?’

  I shook my head. ‘I only know I’ve been this way as long as I can remember.’

  Frowning, he indicated I should open my mouth, so he could peer inside. He listened to my heart and made me breathe more and more deeply. He asked me to cough, then leaned me forward in the bed and asked me to cough again. Pulling back the covers, he tapped my knees and pinched my toes. ‘You feel that, then?’

  ‘I do!’

  I heard a rush of footsteps up the garden path, and others following. There was a noise I knew to be the door knob being wrenched, first to one side, then the other. I heard my mother’s cries: ‘What have you done? Am I locked out of my own home? Unbolt this door! Unbolt this door!’ And other voices, still determined to soothe her: ‘Come, Mrs Cunningham. Be clear on this: no one intends you any harm.’

  As if our home were still as peaceful as a country field, the doctor said to me, ‘Can you get out of bed?’

  I look back now, and part of me still wonders if it was some small bud of suspicion of my own that made me seize this chance to do exactly what the doctor asked, rather than make an effort to protest at the way he and his helpmeets had tricked my mother out of her own house. For, choosing to ignore the fluster outside, I carefully swung myself round and let my stick-thin legs search for the chill of the floor. The doctor held out an arm so I could steady myself, and I slid off the bed, gradually unfolding to my full height, not far short of the doctor’s own.

  ‘And can you walk?’

  ‘Yes, I can walk.’

  I made my way across the room towards the window. If I had had more strength, I would have raised the sash so I could lean out to console my sobbing mother. Instead, I turned to face the doctor, who was staring at me in astonishment.

  ‘Why, boy, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you!’

  ‘My mother says—’

  He pressed a finger to his lips to silence me. ‘I think perhaps we shouldn’t talk of Mrs Cunningham – not till this mystery’s solved.’

  As if the mere mention of my mother had reminded him she was another problem, he strode across and slid the window up higher than I had ever seen it go. Cool air billowed round the room as he leaned out to send some wordless message to those gathered below. Then he drew in his head and glanced about. ‘Now, have you clothes?’

  What did he think? That I was some neglected creature raised in a cave? ‘Yes. I have clothes.’

  But when we looked inside the wardrobe it was clear that there was nothing fit for any useful purpose. The only shoes I had were for a child far younger than myself. There was a jacket but, when it was spread, I found I could no longer squeeze so much as a fist into its narrow sleeves. In any case, I was distracted by the voices outside.

  ‘Hold her more gently!’

  ‘Come away, dear! No sense in struggling. You’ll see your dear son soon enough. Just come away now. Quietly. Quietly.’

  After a short search through my few belongings, my visitor gave up and sighed. ‘The dressing gown will be enough. Tie the belt firmly around you, and we’ll be gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  It was the simplest of ideas, and yet it made me tremble. What had I thought? That all of life lay in the pages of books? I scoured the room for reasons to be excused from something so terrifying: the world that lay beyond our garden hedge.

  ‘But what about my mother?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘Yes. What indeed?’ Then, as though brushing an unhappy question aside, he asked me suddenly, ‘So, young man, do you have a name?’

  ‘Daniel.’

  He put his hand out gravely. ‘And I am Doctor Marlow.’

  I knew enough to shake it and answer forthrightly, ‘I’m pleased to meet you, sir.’

  I saw him brush aside the faintest look of puzzlement before he said, ‘Well, Daniel, you’ll admit this is the rudest interruption of the tranquil life you and your mother have shared. So it may be a good few days before she can pick up the threads again. Meanwhile, you can’t be left alone.’ He looked around. ‘So, tell me, is there any small comfort in this room that we can take along with us?’

  I glanced about. This little room was my world. I knew the pictures on the walls as well – no, better – than I knew the view from the window. In any case, I think it can’t yet have occurred to me that paintings can, in one quick move, be unhooked from one wall and then as easily hung on another. Since Old Father Time had yet to offer me a reason to take much interest in him, I had no hankering to keep the clock. Indeed, in the whole room, apart from the story books, only one thing had ever filled my hours with pleasure. And that was no ‘small comfort’, but would take the strength of two grown men to carry out.

  I shrugged.

  The doctor pressed me. ‘Nothing in this room is precious to you?’

  ‘Only the doll’s house.’

  ‘The doll’s house?’ He looked confused, as if his earlier diagnosis might have been mistaken and there was truly something wrong with me. But then I pointed to the shrouded shape he must have taken for a piece of furniture my mother was protecting from the dust.

  He raised a corner of the sheet that covered it. ‘This?’

  I nodded.

  Curious, he whipped off the pale green cloth. And there the doll’s house stood in all its glory.

  The look of faint surprise that first came over his face – a strange choice for a boy! – shaded to admiration as he bent down to peer at it more closely. For the doll’s house was perfect, from the tiny hard-boiled beads of scarlet paint mimicking roses spilling over the portico, up the carved pear-wood coils of miniature ivy clinging to its walls, past the tall windows and the topmost parapet, up to the steep grey slopes of all its curiously shaped roofs and high chimneys.

  ‘Truly a labour of love,’ he murmured. ‘Even to make the shell of this beauty must have taken an age!’

  He put out a hand. I thought he was about to search for the hook that, once unlatched, allowed the front to swing wide to reveal the rooms and staircases inside; the secret spaces and the fading wallpapers. Perhaps, I thought, he’d even reach in to pull out some tiny embroidered chair from one of the cluttered attics he’d expose, so he could more easily admire the almost-invisible stitching and see how even its needle-thin wooden legs were polished to a gleam.

  But then it clearly struck him that, till the shock of his arrival, this doll’s house must have been my whole wide world. Sharply he drew back his hand, as if he realized that to prise it open and finger anything inside would be like trampling in a private place.

  Rising to his full height and stepping back, he said with soft courtesy, ‘Precious, indeed! And far too valuable to be moved on a whim. But I’ll make sure that no harm comes to it while you’re away.’

  Then, gently as my mother would have done, he took my arm and led me carefully through the door.

  Nothing seemed odd to me about our destination: the doctor’s own house. He was the only person I had met, the one who’d uprooted me, so it seemed natural that he should usher me to his own front door and introduce my shaking and enfeebled self to his astonished wife and wide-eyed daughters. Who else could I have pestered over the following days with endless questions: ‘Where is my mother?’ ‘When can I see her?’ ‘Has she no message for me?’ Questions to which he’d manage to give no answer before Mrs Marlow rushed in to bustle me away to the kitchen or dining room and beg me to eat. ‘You’ve managed to grow tall; but now you must grow strong.’

  No, stranger to me by far than my apparent adoption was the house itself. To someone who’
d been hidden away, it was like moving out of some crepuscular world into a flood of colour: the morning light that shone through the red diamond-shaped panes set in the hall window to hurl long, glowing ruby lozenges across the tiled floor; the sparkling chandeliers; the Chinese rugs on which the patterns were so rich and strange they seemed to swirl; the gleams of light along the burnished banisters.

  And the sheer strangeness of living in a house beset with voices. Where once I’d heard only the soft, soft shuffle of my mother’s approach, now my ears rang all day with the new sounds of family life: doors endlessly opening and closing, the gong that rang for every meal, the motherly commands: ‘Cecilia! Is this your cloak? Do you think Kathleen and Molly have nothing better to do than pick up after you?’ ‘Sophie! No need to stamp your way from room to room.’ ‘Mary, your kitten is loose again! Look in the lane.’

  But Mrs Marlow was kindness itself to me, and put herself and her two elder daughters into a frenzy of sewing until I had a set of clothes to wear. Now, for the first time, I was encouraged to set foot outside the house – at first with someone’s arm around me for support; then, as days passed, more steadily on my own. Beside me pranced the Marlows’ youngest daughter. ‘Daniel, catch up! Why must you keep on stopping?’ But there was so much to be seen: carriages bowling past beyond the hedge, raising a storm of dust; droplets of rain that glistened on wet grass; Sophie’s pet rabbit.