Free Tower of Silence by Sarah Rayne

Mary had a turn. Yes, killing them was the right thing to do. But how should it be done?
    Lying on her bed, the faded photograph of her sister watching her from the dressing table–‘So sweet that Mary wants Christabel’s likeness in her room,’ Leila Maskelyne had said–Mary considered the matter carefully. It ought to be an appropriate murder. Something that would show her mother and father what she thought of them. Something to do with the years they had spent in Alwar? The murder-embryo unfolded a little more; it flexed its claws, and the plan slid into Mary’s mind, neat and whole, the edges buffed smooth.
    When you have been forced all your life to listen to tales of India; when you have had stories of violence and rioting, and sagas of religious quarrels, drummed into you since you were old enough to understand; and whenyou have absorbed the customs of Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs, you do not have to look far for a murder method.
    If William and Leila were so bound up with the dark sub-continent that was India, they should die in a way that would be understood–and approved–by its people.
     
    In India, Mary’s father had worked for a government department, dealing with something called auditing of public services. It sounded utterly boring to Mary, but it meant that William knew about things like how much the government was spending on the development of the country, and on hospitals and schools. It meant he had been quite important and that he was paid quite a lot of money.
    ‘Your father was a very important man in India,’ Mary’s mother sometimes said. ‘But after the Tragedy I had to come home–the doctors said so; they said I couldn’t possibly stay in that place–and of course your father came back with me, there was never any question of his staying on alone. They gave him a pension. An insult to offer us money–and the money was hardly more than a pittance–but we took it out of politeness.’
    What the pittance had meant, in practical terms, was that when Mary was born her parents had been able to buy a house in the country–not a huge house, but a nice old redbrick with ivy on its walls, and shady gardens, in a village in Berkshire. William did some work from home, which was called consultancy, or sometimes worked for a few weeks in offices whose books had to be audited,and Leila helped with one or two local charities. It was something to do. There were WI committees and modest dinner or lunch parties. Mary went to a small private school for girls in the next village. Life went on, said Mary’s mother, bravely.
    (But there were still all those nights when Mary could hear, through the bedroom wall, her parents trying to make another baby. ‘One day, William, we’ll have her back, our lovely girl. Come into the bed with me, William…’)
    The house was quite old, and there were some rather tumbledown outbuildings–what had been a small stable block and an old buttery. Leila said, oh dear, wouldn’t they have made splendid hide-and-seek places for children, but William said they were an eyesore and he would see about getting them pulled down one of these days.
    One of the outhouses had been a wash-house, in the days when people did not have automatic washing machines and dryers, and washing was done separately. It was a stone-floored room with a deep, square, old-fashioned sink and a huge copper boiler, nastily crusted with green verdigris around the waste pipes. The sink smelt of clogged-up drains and sour dish cloths, and there were black beetles and spiders inside the boiler. It was not a place where people wanted to go, but it was far enough from the house and far enough from neighbours for sounds not to carry. Mary inspected it carefully, walking all round it, examining the door and the window and the floor. She took a transistor radio in there one day and tested the range to seehow much sound carried. With the door shut, hardly at all.
    Yes, this should be the Murder