Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

To those who encounter him, Edward Hyde gives the impression of repulsive deformity, but without having any actual malformation. He speaks in a husky whisper, but with a murderous tone of timidity and boldness (Stevenson certainly knew how to put opposites together to good purpose!), and lives a callous and cruel life, but does so in the shadows.

The ill-starred Dr Jekyll unleashed his dark alter ego by means of a powerful drug, which he compounded in his own workshop – a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. But, drinking its smoky potency, he caused his dreadful inner self to come alive. The change happened in me in much the same way, although of its own accord. A deep apprehension would stir in the dimmest recesses of my mind, and moments later it was as if greedy ogre-hands reached down and took hold of my mind, wrenching it mercilessly, deforming it, until it lay bleeding and panting in a wholly different shape; altering the essence of what I really was. And if I looked in the mirror—

I can’t bring myself to write a description of what my mirror showed me during those darknesses and, after the first time, I never looked voluntarily in the glass. It was not me who looked back out of the silvered depths. And while the darkness was on me, I was not safe and no one was safe from me…

I make no apologies for the melodramatic nature of those last two paragraphs. A man facing death is allowed a few extravagances in his journal.

London, June 1912

Crispian Cadence did not indulge in many extravagances, but on the night he left university for good he reached London and his parents’ house slightly drunk.

He had intended to arrive at a civilized hour, but the goodbyes in Oxford had taken longer than he had expected, and then the train had been delayed, so it was midnight before he let himself in. By most people’s standards this was not particularly late, but by the standards of Crispian’s mother, Serena, it was outright dissipation.

He stood in the big shadowy hall with its black and white tiled floor and considered the stairway. It was in near-darkness, his bedroom was on the second floor, and he was by no means sure he could get up to it in seemly silence. He was perfectly entitled to make as much noise in his own home as he liked, but he baulked at being seen in this condition by his mother, or – God forbid – his father.

‘Your father’s jealous of you, of course,’ Crispian’s cousin, Jamie, had once said.

‘Why would he be jealous?’

‘Do you really not know? Crispian, your father’s an ageing roué no longer able to indulge in the pleasures of his youth,’ Jamie said. ‘He sees you indulging in them, and it makes him jealous.’

‘Come up to Oxford sometime and join me in a few,’ said Crispian, who had been in his second year at the time. But Jamie, who was serious-minded and rather quiet, had merely said politely that he would think about it.

He was crossing the hall, when Flagg, the butler and general factotum, came out, pulling a dressing gown round him, a look of anxiety on his face, which cleared when he saw Crispian.

‘Beg pardon, Mr Crispian, I didn’t realize it was you. I heard a noise—’

‘And I was trying to be so quiet, Flagg.’ Crispian grinned at him, and lifted his hand in the gesture implying drink.

‘Ah, yes, I see. Black coffee, sir?’

‘Better not. I don’t want to wake anyone. Is my father at home?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘Thanks. You get off to bed, Flagg. I’ll make my own way upstairs.’

He waited until Flagg had gone back to his own quarters, then grasped the balustrade and started up the stairs, hoping he could manage to be quiet. The stairs swung sharply back on themselves in a hairpin bend, then went on up again to the second and attic floors. Crispian and Jamie used to play games on these stairs when they were small, making faces at one another through the banisters, one on the higher flight, the other on the lower. Jamie had made up splendid games for them and, remembering this, Crispian smiled. Jamie had not been so serious in those days.

There was a wide half-landing at the top of the main stairs, with a long deep window. The curtains were only partly drawn across it, and shadows slanted in and lay across the stairs. Crispian had almost reached this landing when a faint movement from above made him look up. Standing in the half-curtained window was the figure of a man. A burglar! thought Crispian, and fear scudded across him. The man pressed back into the shadows, putting up a hand as if to keep his face in shadow, but Crispian had already started up the remaining stairs, shouting loudly to rouse the household. At once the man darted out of his hiding place and hared up the smaller stairway to the top floor, vanishing into the shadows. Crispian followed him, missing his footing on the last few stairs, cursing, then regaining his balance. But the man had vanished, and Crispian stood on the upper landing, looking about him. Had the man gone into one of the bedrooms? Up the tiny stairs at the far end into the attics?

Crispian heard Flagg calling from below, wanting to know what was happening.

‘There’s an intruder!’ called Crispian, coming back down the stairs. ‘I’ve just seen him – he ran up to this floor. God knows where he is now – hiding in one of the rooms most likely. Tell everyone to stay in their room and barricade the door. You stay here to make sure he doesn’t get out. I’ll fetch the constable – there’s always one on duty in the square.’

‘Mr Crispian—’ began Flagg, but Crispian was already crossing the hall and opening the front door. He gasped as the cold night air met him and cursed the wine he had drunk earlier, then managed to half-run to the far end of the square.

By the time he and the portly constable got back to the house, Flagg was hovering agitatedly in the hall.

‘I’m that sorry, Mr Crispian, but it seems the ruffian’s escaped us after all.’

‘He can’t have done,’ said Crispian incredulously. ‘He was on the stairs and he went up to the top of the house – I saw him. He couldn’t have got out.’

‘I’m sorry, but he did,’ said Flagg. ‘And I know you said not to, but I’ve looked in all the rooms. I took the fire tongs from the drawing room, and Dora and Hetty came along as well, for they wouldn’t stay in their room alone, not for you, me, nor King George. Dora had the rolling pin and Hetty had the meat mallet. Mrs Flagg barricaded herself in our room with the frying pan.’

Despite the severity of the situation, Crispian was aware of a stab of amusement at the image of the stately Flagg prancing round the house in his dressing gown and slippers, brandishing the fire tongs, while the two maids tiptoed along in his footsteps, glancing nervously over their shoulders every few seconds.

He said, ‘Did you go up to the attics?’

‘We did,’ said Flagg. ‘But not hide nor hair nor whisker did we find.’

‘It looks as if our man’s got clean away,’ said Crispian, turning to the policeman. ‘But you’ll make a report to Bow Street, will you? In case of any other break-ins hereabouts?’

‘Yes, sir, you can be sure I’ll do that.’ The constable sketched a half-salute and went out into the square again.

‘Flagg, one of the girls had better tell my mother what’s happened – reassure her there’s no cause for alarm.’

‘I’ll see to it, sir. And now, if you’d care for that black coffee after all…?’

‘That’s a very good idea, Flagg. Make about a gallon of it, would you?’

Serena Cadence had gone to bed at her usual time.

Crispian had said he would be home this evening but that he might be quite late, so please not to wait up for him. He would see everyone in the morning.