Cages by David Mark (reading fiction TXT) 📗

He looks at the grand frontage of Caldwell Hall – the image taken some time in the early 1970s, judging from the style and haircuts of the people in the foreground. It’s an imposing red-brick structure, built in the early 1800s for a rich family from Leicestershire and set in some fifteen acres of grounds. Neilsen skims the details, printed off from a website run by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings and Monuments. It details 150 years of the house’s history, but Neilsen will admit to not giving a damn about any of that. He starts to read from the section headlined June, 1963.

… at which point the Hall passed to Arbuthnot Cox’s only surviving daughter, Procne Henshaw-Cox. She had been living in Italy at the time of her father’s death, but returned home to begin the lavish restoration of the house, which had fallen into some disrepair. True to her vision, Caldwell Hall was developed in keeping with her fascination for Italian Romanticism and Renaissance, when Classic art and literature was elevated to the status of the sublime. Chief among her achievements was the complete transformation of the overgrown gardens and lake. Over the course of the next ten years, the overgrown gardens at the rear of the property were radically reshaped in the image of Verona’s Giardino Giusti. As with the original, visitors can still see many items that were in vogue in sixteenth-century gardens: pots with citrus plants, statues of mythological figures, fountains, lemon houses, grottoes, grotesque masks. The lower garden is divided according to the giardino all’italiana style, into nine square sections, each symmetrical green room formed of box hedges and dominated by statues of Diana, Venus, Atalanta, Apollo and Adonis. The garden’s main axis is formed of the cypress alley leading to the grotto and the mask, with the labyrinth on the right, while on the left is a French-style parterre, the citrus garden and the so-called vaseria where plants in their pots are overwintered. This part of the garden, with its rigidly geometric design and straight lines speaks to us of man’s intervention, of order and symmetry. In contrast, the wooded part of the garden is deliberately conceived in order to astonish the visitor as he climbs its steep and shady paths. The rocky precipice, the grotto, the play of light and shade and perspectives are all created artificially to elicit feelings of admiration, awe and wonder in the viewer. A secret staircase concealed in the little turret dug into the rock face leads up to the highest point of the garden …

Neilsen stops reading. He knows he’s out of his depth. He wonders who he might know who would be able to translate it all into something relevant. His sergeant, the cleverest man he knows, is up in his native Scotland with his family, and he can’t think of anybody else who reads for pleasure.

He glances again at the book on the seat. Thinks again of Rufus Orton. Glowers through the windscreen before letting his eyes fall back upon the folder. He turns to the next page, and looks upon Procne Henshaw-Cox. She’s dark-haired and dark-eyed, and there is an energy about her that comes off the page in waves. She has the most mesmerizing eyes he has ever looked into, even when pixilated and printed on plain paper. She’s wrapped in a length of shimmering golden silk: a crown of berries, flowers and thorns twisted into her hair. At her breast, a fat pink child, glorious white angel wings upon his back, held in place by lengths of twine. He has one pudgy fist gripping the strings of a small wooden harp. Behind her, sitting on the bonnet of a yellow sports car, a tall man with red hair and an Easy Rider moustache. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s in the photograph: stares off into the distance – coloured lenses flipped up atop the frame of his spectacles.

Neilsen shakes his head. He will make no allowances for Cox based upon the peculiarities of his upbringing, but he cannot help but feel a surge of compassion for the boy. Everything he has read or viewed about Cox’s childhood suggests his mother saw him as a prop in whatever fantasy she was acting out.

Remembering something of note, Neilsen flicks back to a transcript of one of the first interviews with Cox, conducted shortly after he was locked up for the abduction of the teenager in York, and around the time he started coming to the attention of various other investigative teams looking into historic disappearances. Neilsen finds the section he’s looking for. Most of the time, Cox answered the detectives with a polite obstinacy. He’d love to help, but couldn’t. Didn’t know why they thought he was guilty of such terrible acts; wished he could help but had no recollection of ever meeting the individual whose tragic disappearance pains him.

When they asked him about his childhood, he became more animated. Spoke, fulsomely, about the joy of his earliest recollections.

‘… we make them well, the English. Eccentrics, I mean. And yes, that would be a fine description of Mother, although I was encouraged not to call her by such an outdated title. She was Procne. Are you familiar with the story? Forgive me if I suppose you aren’t scholars. Daughter of King Pandion of Athens, as I’m sure you will know. A woman of rigid principle. Served her husband his own son for dinner when she learned of his misdeeds against her sister. Quite a name with which to saddle a child, but her own father was a trifle touched by the old family curse. Always a little trace of madness in the family line, I’m sure you’ll have identified that. Procne was treated in several sanatoriums in her childhood but only found the peace she craved when she came home and inherited the Hall. I like to think that motherhood also assisted in her finding some form of