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Eyebrows lifted. In the greasy light of the oil lamp on my cousin’s kitchen table, her hair looked more frayed about the edges than it had been before. The yellow glow was casting her cheekbones into strong relief and it made the shadows under her eyes stronger. She looked tired. But no weariness could affect her presence. She was, as I have said, rather tall and immaculately clad in a navy skirt and jacket, and she had a jaw that implied considerable strength of will and carried its own kind of beauty. There was, I’d noticed, something about the confidence of women of that age – all over thirty – who knew these days exactly what they were capable of and wore it as easily as a dash of lipstick.
Mrs Abbey’s mouth only formed a little smirk as she conceded, ‘If I’d gone with them on their little jolly to see the doctor, they’d have insisted on driving me straight home and I’d have been safely tucked up under the sheets by now instead of bothering you on your doorstep. No, the truth is I’m here because it’s getting horribly late and it’s still a long way home and I’ve done something rather foolish.’
The smirk eased to show a brief gleam of teeth.
I repeated blankly, ‘Foolish?’
She leaned in to confide dramatically, ‘I went to where it had happened and to see if this vagrant had left any signs behind.’
Ah. She wanted to discuss her squatters again. I disarmed her as best I could. ‘It’s not foolish at all. Freddy and I did exactly the same thing. Would you like a cup of tea?’
It was only after I made the offer that I remembered that my cousin’s kitchen was like Mrs Winstone’s house. Here too we were dependent on an ancient cast-iron range for any cooking. My parents’ home in Putney had running water, gas and electricity laid on. This kitchen had a big stone sink without taps, a tiny window that looked out onto the privy and the single luxury of a full jug of water on the sideboard waiting to be used. Unfortunately, I hadn’t lit the beast of a range yet and it was going to require a minor war to get it going. Then Mrs Abbey chose that moment to break the latest shocking news of the evening. She actually laughed at my offer and said, ‘No tea for me, thank you. I know where you get your water.’ Then, seeing my face, added, ‘You did know it came from the stream, didn’t you?’
I’d been drinking from that jug all afternoon. While I was hastily resolving to boil the water very thoroughly from now on, Mrs Abbey drew out a seat at my cousin’s tiny table.
The kitchen was whitewashed on both walls and ceiling and the clean austerity of the room was a direct contradiction of the clutter that swamped the rest of the house. I moved to the sideboard and propped myself there. Now that I’d let this woman into my home and gone through the brief flutter of companionship I had time to wonder why she was here at all. I prepared to let the silence stretch. I was beaten by Mrs Abbey’s sly sideways look and murmur of, ‘How did you get along with Freddy?’
Her manner puzzled me. It was the sort of tone a woman might use while probing an illicit liaison, only this boy was barely fifteen. I said helplessly, ‘He seems very nice.’
‘Didn’t you find him a little simple, poor boy?’
This was what she was probing. ‘No.’
‘I suppose you didn’t know him before, did you? That’s one thing that can be said for Matthew Croft, he’s certainly improved the boy.’
‘Mr Croft isn’t his father, is he? I mean, he’s not Freddy Croft?’
This question amused her. She laughed. ‘He certainly isn’t. Matthew married Mrs Croft in the spring. Or Eleanor Phillips, as was, I should say. And she isn’t his mother either.’
I conveyed my enquiry with a look. The name was not one that had made its way into my cousin’s letters. Which, to be frank, meant my cousin liked her.
Mrs Abbey added cheerfully, ‘Her farm is the one just up the lane from the village. You’ll see her out and about exercising her horses. Or, at least, usually you do but I haven’t seen her ride for a while. Freddy’s helped her with them since he was evacuated here. He’s from London, like you. Although perhaps not quite like you. His former home is presently a flat piece of ground in one of those cleared spots around the East End.’
‘And is yours?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You, me and Freddy; we’re all from London. It’s starting to feel more like home by the minute.’
Mrs Abbey looked askance at my comment. It made me realise what it was about this visit that felt slightly out of kilter with my expectations. She wasn’t here for tea. She wasn’t really here as my cousin’s friend and she certainly wasn’t quite succeeding at becoming mine. That was the point, I realised. The problem here wasn’t so much that I didn’t think that I would like her but that I felt she wasn’t quite letting me know her. I might have decided that I thought she was wrong for sifting through so many subjects just as soon as she entered the house but they were all shifting so rapidly from genuine humour into sharp edges that I still couldn’t say that even these rather harder gossipy kind of comments were truly giving me a clear measure of who she was.
Actually, there were two things I could tell. The first was that she didn’t have a very nice way of repaying the way everyone tended to be kind to her. And they did it without seeming to like her very much either.
I also could tell that she was only prepared to allow a discussion on her old life amongst the barrow boys of the London East End in that it gave her a chance to return to a discussion of those squatters.
‘Sweet of you, Emily, dear,’ she remarked with the crisp elocution that comes from superior schooling at an early age, ‘to imply that I rank amongst the Freddys of this world as an evacuee but actually my old home was levelled years ago for a new gas works. But if it’s Londoners you want, you’ll find this place feels even more like home soon. There’s a whole bunch of émigrés in a camp a mile or two away at the old air-raid look-out station on the Gloucester road.’
Her little conversational turn was so neatly done it made me smile. I understood at last why she’d been so keen to talk about Freddy. His origin would have brought us to this point if my comment about hers hadn’t.
I was standing with my back to the cast-iron stove leaning against the rail that dried the dishcloth. Mrs Abbey’s attention didn’t enjoy the subject of the squatters for long. Her mouth was already running on to fresh sympathies for the old Colonel and his prolonged absence which had allowed the squatters to arrive unchecked. At least, I thought she meant to seem sympathetic. What she actually said was, ‘Silly old coward. The whole family knows how to make a mess of things, so I suppose we shouldn’t expect them to step into the breach about this. I suppose your cousin told you about young Master John Langton’s antics and passed them off as if they were just a little misstep?’
I stilled against my prop of old metal while she added a shade sourly, ‘Everyone does it. It’s a great conspiracy of silence out of respect for the old man, but I can tell you that nothing the son did should ever be classed as forgettable. They have no right to do it to him. Master John was unreasonable, beautiful, vibrant and terrible and he gambled everything, including his life here, as if they were just counters to be won and lost. At the end, those fearsomely blue eyes—’
‘Mrs Abbey, don’t.’ The plea was sudden but forceful. The way that her voice dwelt on the man’s nature was almost like a caress.
My urgent interjection came as she drew breath to start telling me about how John Langton had died. Only I already knew how he’d died. He died like anyone does losing a game they had intended to win. Unwillingly.
She persisted, ‘Didn’t you say tonight that the man you saw was tall and dark?’
Now Freddy’s white face was in my mind, and the way the Captain had sounded when I had unwittingly dredged up the memory for him. When I didn’t manage to formulate a reply, she added it for me. Musingly, seriously, she added, ‘Yes. Yes, you did. When you were telling Mrs Winstone that you’d seen him on the path you said that he was wearing summer clothes that were too good to belong to a farmhand, that he had black hair and was tall. Lean, was it?’ This was as I corrected her. ‘Well that’s just another way of saying tall, isn’t it? And if he should have happened to have a limp …?’
‘I—’
She was sitting there with her hands spread on the table. It was the sort of manner a person contrives when they think they’re being very daring and I didn’t like it. I suppose I was easily spooked tonight. Her mistake in Mr Winstone’s house had sent all sorts of shadows racing about the room and Aunt Edna’s slightly mad collection had accompanied me all evening. I certainly didn’t need Mrs Abbey to begin conjuring the dead man’s shade from the corners again now.
I told her more clearly, ‘I don’t want to know about it. Don’t you think it might be time for bed?’
She didn’t take the hint. She told me with relish, ‘Master John had a physical weakness in one leg. He took a riding accident in his youth and his body never quite allowed him to forget it. Its waxing and waning was a barometer of his darkest moods.’
I think she could tell I was about to protest rather more precisely. She turned her eyes to an ugly vase on the high shelf before she said with a different kind of eagerness, ‘Of course, if you’re about to tell me that the man on Mr Winstone’s path today didn’t have a limp and piercing blue eyes—’
‘You think I remember the colour of his eyes?’
‘— There is someone else who matches that description, who didn’t die last March. Someone who is also tall and capable and to whom, for all they say he was innocent, everyone was happy to attribute all manner of violent tendencies until young Master John’s death put it clear out of their minds …’
Her gaze returned to me. It actually made me laugh. ‘Mrs Abbey, if you mean to hint at Matthew Croft, I have to tell you I think you’d do better to stick to the version that blames the squatters. There must be someone amongst them who matches your description of tall and dark with blue eyes.’
For a moment I thought my tone had shocked her. Then I realised that she was just amused by my tart adoption of her idea of Mr Winstone’s attacker. It didn’t really matter what I said I thought he looked like. She knew what I’d told them at the village.
With rather more frankness and rather less play at scandal, she asked me with a coolness that was the most authentic curiosity I’d had from her, ‘When you were with Freddy just now, did you see anything? Find anything he’ll feel obliged to tell the others?’
Oddly enough I appreciated the honesty of this open question. She wanted to know what we had found because if Freddy lived with Matthew Croft and Freddy told him that we’d searched the spot, she knew perfectly well that the information would not be returned to her. The exclusion almost explained her visit here, except that this might have just as easily waited until the morning.
I told her the truth. ‘We tried to look about but it was dark and more than a little unnerving. We didn’t find any great clues, if that’s what you’re asking.’
Mrs Abbey wasn’t smiling in the lamplight. This was the real woman and she was deeply alert for something. I could feel its energy emanating from her; building in hard waves ready to break. The thought came unbidden – ready to break like anger.
‘Mrs Abbey,’ I began tentatively, ‘Why don’t you like Mr Croft?’
Her gaze flickered and cooled to a wry smile. ‘I wasn’t very tactful earlier, was I? That man … well, that man is everything John Langton can’t be. He’s alive and he’s frustratingly reserved. He won’t talk about what happened, regardless of how I ask – and don’t look like you think I’m only probing for the sake of gossip because, believe me, I knew young Master John and of all the ways we could manage what went wrong, this conspiracy of silence so that we never dare to even speak his name is the worst kind of healing. There isn’t even a grave where we can lay his ghost to rest—’ Something passed across her face like a settling of control. Afterwards, her words were steadier and less inclined towards revelation. I still wasn’t allowed to know her. ‘And to crown it all, that man refuses to buy my old car that’s mouldering in my barn.’
Her mouth plucked into amusement. I mustered a vague smile in return as I was meant to. Then she asked in her own version of my earlier hesitancy, ‘Emily, dear, tell me the truth. Did you really see as little as you declared earlier? Or are you just displaying the practical city-dweller’s approach to a drama and walking swiftly by on the other side of the street?’
‘Do you mean to ask if I’m minding my business in case someone minds it for me? What do you think?’
Mrs Abbey hadn’t meant to offend. At least, I presumed not. She said benignly, ‘I think it’s very unfortunate that poor Mr Winstone can’t remember the man’s face …’
‘… Since that just leaves my description and I barely saw him at all.’ I finished the point for her. Foolish honesty made me add, ‘Although, I should say that I think I’d recognise him if I saw him again.’
I didn’t expect Mrs Abbey’s demeanour to transform to decisiveness quite so abruptly, but it did, all the same. The change might almost have been with relief. This feeling was certainly running high. She was suddenly dragging out a wristwatch on a broken strap from a pocket. I suppose it mattered to know that I knew enough that this man might be identified and caught; in a strange way I suppose it promised safety even if this night had to be got through first. And that in itself was a clue to her real purpose here, because then she was telling me about the footpath to her little farmhouse and doing one of those funny twists people do when they mean to point out its location only to find themselves waving a hand at the impenetrable screen of a wall. This was the reason why she was here. At last I understood that she wanted to feel in control and at last I was allowed to know the reason for all this odd circular conversation that she patently didn’t really enjoy. She’d given herself a fright at the turbine house and couldn’t quite bring herself to face the long walk up a darkened path to her farmhouse alone.
‘You could stay,’ I offered doubtfully. ‘Unless your hus—someone will be out looking for you?’ I’d almost said husband then and saw from the way she jumped that I’d cut rather too close to that deeply private pain. For a moment she stared at me with that vacancy of expression that a person gets when they’ve been tested unexpectedly on an unhealed wound.
Then the moment passed and she was saying with elegant amusement that was also very genuine, ‘What, will you make room for me amongst all the Welsh love-spoons? No, I’ve got to get back. It’s practically neglect as it is and if I hadn’t been foolish enough to meet with Mrs Winstone by the shop I’d have been home hours ago. The path from the ford is very overgrown—’
‘Let me just fetch a jacket,’ I interrupted, ‘and a torch.’
I stood up from my lean against the stove. Mrs Abbey’s eyes followed the movement. In the lamplight, her face was wan. ‘As easy as that? You’re coming with me?’ Her voice was odd. Shaken would be the best term I had for it, as though guilt strode in on the heels of getting what she wanted.
I pressed my lips into a hapless line. After all those musings on responsibility, this particular question didn’t even require debate. There were some things that you would agree to do without forcing a person to ask first.
I moved past her into the hallway. She rose to follow me and seeing her afresh in a different light I was startled to perceive the faint sheen of moisture on her skin. There was an energy to her movement that had nothing to do with her endlessly shifting humour. She had that look of exhaustion where she was growing so tired of her lot that she was coming out the other side. She was very glad I’d offered to come with her. It hadn’t been temper before. I’d mistaken it. This energy came from the unpleasantness of being horribly spooked by her night-time prowling and the release of finally admitting it.
I found the torch as I struggled into my shoes. It was jammed inside a large and genuine Grecian urn that stood beside the elephant’s foot umbrella stand in the hall. The umbrella stand was inevitably a mark of the old lady’s taste, but the urn might just have been my cousin’s. Phyllis’s war had been a rather different experience from mine.
Having lingered silently beside me for the past five minutes while I searched, Mrs Abbey abruptly spied a different object of interest. My suitcase was standing at the foot of the stairs where I had left it many hours before. She asked in a curiously strong voice, ‘Have we driven you away?’
I didn’t quite trust myself to reply. It was too complicated. So instead I blew out the last of the lamps and stepped out into the surprisingly well-defined landscape beneath a starlit night in August. My companion took the torch from my hand and waited while I fumbled with the key. It was an enormous thing and I had a vague suspicion my aunt had taken it, lock and door and all, from a church somewhere. I only hoped the church had been a more willing participant in the transaction than the elephant who had supplied the umbrella stand.
The night air seemed to revive Mrs Abbey. I heard the increase in the rate of her breathing while I struggled to turn the key. With the sort of embarrassed haste that, in my experience, is commonly used when one has just found a lost object in one’s own pocket after initiating an extensive communal search, I heard Mrs Abbey say, ‘You know, I don’t really need you to come with me at all. I’m bothering you unnecessarily. I’ll just borrow the torch, if I may, and return it tomorrow if I catch you before you go. Otherwise, I’ll leave it for Miss Jones. Goodnight. I’ll be quite safe, and thank you for the company tonight.’
She left me standing there so swiftly that I didn’t even have time to formulate a protest. Or perhaps I was relieved to believe her and let her go. The garden gate clanged shut and then I briefly saw her shadow as a darker shape against the white streak of the stone track. There was a brief flash from the torch as she found the path beside the ford and then the light was extinguished long before her shape was swallowed by the scrubby woodland at the base of the hill. Wood smoke that wasn’t from my stove hung in a silver mist on the silent valley air. The idea of darkness in this desolate place really took on a very different quality compared to the sooty gloom I had known in Putney.
Closer by, something rustled in the dry stalks of the bean plant behind me. It made me shiver and step back in through that heavy door very rapidly indeed. What, I wondered, had she been so afraid was waiting for her out there that she’d come to find me, only to abruptly change her mind? Because she had been afraid for a while there, I knew she had. It had been the only feeling she had shared, but it had been genuine. And then the feeling had passed for her with a suddenness that had carried its own kind of violence.
I bolted the door and checked all the windows. This house was wonderfully secure. No intruders would be working their way in here except in the same manner as the one who had lately stepped in after knocking on the front door. I shut out her visit like I shut out the night. It was, however, impossible to shut out the overwhelming sense that I had just escaped something, only I didn’t know whether the relief had really been hers.
Chapter 6 (#u6c0a0f35-f7e5-5851-8e6f-61eead70f44e)
This new morning began with company and friendliness, where yesterday had ended with loneliness and worries. The nearby shop – and by nearby I mean at the end of a heating two-mile walk to the bus stop and beyond – stood a few doors down from Mrs Winstone’s hairdresser in a sunken lane with sheep pasture beyond. The most sinister thing I encountered in that busy place while I made the sacrifice of funds and rations for the sake of the Colonel’s lunch was the welcome offered by the shopkeeper and her mildly mildewed husband and the collection of respectable mature ladies who used the shop as a waiting room for the doctor’s house next door. They seemed to take their slice of gossip as a kind of tithe on users of the public telephone.
Which meant in a way that it was perhaps fortunate that I failed to reach my cousin on the ward telephone at the hospital. If I had, I’d have unwittingly filled the assembled ears with enough gossip to keep their mouths working for the next few days at least. Instead, I only got to speak to a nurse, who wouldn’t even confirm that there was a Miss P Jones on the women’s ward at present. The most she would say was that the telephone trolley would be on the ward for the patients’ use at six o’clock this evening and I could try again then, which wasn’t terribly useful since sometime in the course of last night I had discovered the idea of achieving a different and more enjoyable kind of flight in the form of going down to join Phyllis today. It would be typical if it turned out that as I travelled down on the bus to Gloucester, she should be travelling up towards her home.
I’d left my suitcase at the Manor. It would save at least part of this long walk if I decided to make the trip anyway. It was a good job too because I knew I’d never have found the courage to climb back up out of the valley otherwise. The walk back to the village on its own seemed designed for exhaustion. It was hot already and a heat haze was casting mirages amongst the tall masts of the wireless station by that bus stop. Only one car passed me on the long lane and it was fortunate that I had about a mile’s warning before it came into view because, unbelievably, it nearly ran me over. It barrelled down into a dip between farm buildings like a rude black beast of a bull and sent a chip of stone flying up onto my ankle while I politely waited on the verge. Then it vanished around a bend and took the roar of its motor with it.
I thought I’d found it parked in the massive stone barn that flanked the Manor farmyard. No one was in the village again and the farmyard had renewed its camouflage of dereliction. I’d walked that way round to the Colonel’s kitchen door after doing my duty by knocking on Mr Winstone’s door first. He wasn’t there. No one spent their days at home here.
The long black nose of the enormous car was occupying the cusp between light and shade beneath the great gaping threshing doors of the barn. A touch to its bonnet proved that the engine was warm. Movement emerged from the depths within and it was Danny Hannis’s dog. He sauntered out from the left-hand wing of the barn. It was now that I saw that this great building was no longer dedicated to grain processing. Half of the space within was consumed by the unmistakeable profile of a shrouded steam engine. The other bay housed rusting hay rakes and implements and a very expensive modern grey tractor which looked similarly like it had already worked very hard for its keep.
There was no sign of the man but the dog was a curious soul. He supervised me as I abandoned this dark cathedral for farming technology. He was with me when I caught the distant murmur of a voice beyond the turn of the other barn; the older one that sagged beneath the weight of its years and ranged further up the hill to meet the Manor kitchen.
It wasn’t a happy voice. It was a low stutter of ‘m’s, like a moan. My first thought naturally enough was of Mr Winstone. My second was for that missing housekeeper.
There it was again, to my left behind a low door into this second barn. It was a low mumble like an injured soul might make, or a hostage, bound and gagged. It made me grasp another concept of horror. The one where a forgotten woman lay unheeded for days on end.
The cobbled space between house and barn was empty. So were the long terraces of the garden. There was no other sound of life here. Other than the dog, I mean. He was at my heels and the only sound he made was the faint click-click of claws on the cobbled ground.
It was the stuff nightmares are built on. I had to ease open the door into an ancient space. I had to wake to the guilt of knowing I’d meant to look last night for conclusive signs that the housekeeper really had left, only I’d been distracted by the way Freddy had appeared. The door was set on surprisingly well-oiled hinges between ancient walls several feet thick. Within was a long narrow stone-flagged passage that ran like a cave along the painted face of wood-panelled stalls and loose-boxes and pillars that supported a low hayloft. This barn had been a tithe barn in its former life – a vast storeroom for a medieval wealth of grain – but its recent job had been to house the Manor stables and, like the rest of this place, its grandeur stood as a monument to neglect after the loss of the son. A set of heavily bolted carriage doors stood at the far end as a bar to freedom and daylight. All the Manor buildings seemed to have issues with good light. The only light here came from about five unglazed slits spread along the barn’s length and the small open door by my side. Dust hung in the narrow beams of sun-shot air, waiting for a breeze.
Mrs Cooke the housekeeper wasn’t here. No one was, at least no person. The murmur came from a lonely goat living in quiet luxury in the stable that was tucked at the end of the row beneath the steps to the hayloft. I’d never met a goat before. This one had his own lancet window and he was a friendly beast, albeit slightly alarming when his head suddenly appeared at eye height, with his front feet hooked over the stable door. He was also rather too interested in the forgotten parcel of groceries in my hands. I left him with a promise to return later with the scraps.
The dog left me at the kitchen door. Alone again in the dry stillness inside I laid out my collection of salad stuff and wondered just how exactly I expected this meagre fare to do for the squire’s lunch. Then I remembered that the note my cousin’s friend’s had added to her letter had included the name of the woman who would sell me eggs. It seemed that someone lived by day in this place after all. She was tiny and crabbed and the luxurious cluster of eggs she unearthed in a vacant cowshed behind the steward’s house was a far cry from the paltry one egg allowance Putney residents had enjoyed each week provided that they were in stock. Our transaction was also mildly illegal but I was hardly going to complain, particularly when she was kind enough to give me butter and half a loaf of bread for the Colonel’s lunch too.
Phyllis’s letters were always a source of information. Apart from the recent missive that was presently lodged in my suitcase and bore the crucial invitation to visit and directions to her door, I also had the memory of a hundred or so more that spanned the years and had come from various corners of the world. She was, as implied by my father’s use of the unattractive term spinster, an unmarried woman of independent habits. But I didn’t think she entirely warranted the term when she was in fact only thirty-one and, besides, I thought it a terrible way to summarise the contribution made by a woman who belonged to that generation of intellectuals who were recruited immediately in 1939 to lend their expertise to the various specialist branches of the War Office. Phyllis had been called up to do something very interesting with maps; her background was in geography.
My letters to her were the childish musings of a girl penned during the quiet times at the chemists. Phyllis’s bold and witty replies were invariably written from obscure locations made even more obscure by the heavy hand of the censors, until they said only that she was well and that the weather was fair – meaning Scotland, I thought – or bracing – perhaps Shetland – or enjoyably temperate, which I took to mean somewhere hot and therefore foreign. The impressive Grecian vases nestling amongst her mother’s clutter in the hall told their own story about where that might have been.
Unfortunately, I had neither my cousin nor one of her letters to guide me now. I was setting the hardboiled eggs to cool in a fresh pan of cold water – indoor taps in this kitchen, of course, presumably drawing spring water from a delightfully hygienic cistern – when I heard a clunk from the depths of the house. It manifested itself into a clatter from the floor above, followed by the bang of a door slamming at the front of the house. It reverberated along the passage and into the dining room and from there to me in the kitchen. It even made me cast an anxious glance out through the window in case a sudden squall had blown in, which it hadn’t, and then it made me recollect my suitcase left any old how by the kitchen table, as if I were expecting the Colonel to invite me to stay.
I moved to retrieve it and found it wasn’t there. But someone was indeed at the front of the house. Scurrying through the gloom of the dining room and then the passage, I learned that the bang had been a door being flung open. I’d assumed it had been the sound of it blowing shut. The distinction mattered because now I found the weighty front door thrown wide, letting in sunlight and flies, and a man heading up the stairs.
He was a short man in a dark suit and he had a suitcase in his hand. My suitcase.
He was oblivious to me. He seemed intent on marching upwards two steps at a time. There was a car outside, black and ordinary, like a cab the Colonel might have taken from his solicitor’s office. I reached the curving scroll at the foot of the banister as the driver’s foot disappeared out of sight.
I called some form of surprise up at him and set foot upon the stairs, I believe because I thought he was a respectable cab driver taking the passenger’s bags to his room and he had somehow managed to confuse my bags for the Colonel’s and it was my duty to correct the mistake. Only then the nature of the man’s gait changed. Before it had been confident, decisive. Now, at the sound of my voice, he snapped round and charged with a clatter of footfalls back into view again. I heard his breathing. Rapid and light and not very friendly at all. There was a rush and a thump and a lasting impression of the beautiful plasterwork on the ceiling as I reeled for the banister. I thought for a moment he must have launched off the top step and landed on me. Then I thought he must have bolted blind straight past and caught me with the case. Finally I realised he hadn’t done either and had the sudden cringing discovery that the man was beside me.
This space was light. White walls, white plasterwork and blinding sunlit glass. The tan case swung above me at about the height that might batter my head. There was a moment when a hand caught in my hair. Then it let me go with a suddenness that shocked almost as much as the impact had, leaving me to discover pain beneath my arm that would later reveal itself as a vivid bruise and also to taste the unpleasantness of a cut lip where I had bitten it while clutching painfully at the solid support of the wooden rail.
There was a crash below as he charged out through the door and missed his step, to turn an ankle where the stone flags met gravel. Then there was a roar as an engine kicked into life. I twisted there, hanging from my wooden anchor, catching my breath, and watched as a battered black Ford veered unevenly away up the curve of the drive towards the lane. I thought he turned right at the end, downhill.
I did nothing. The only thing I could state and did state later with any confidence was that this imposter’s bald head was most definitely a long way removed from Mr Winstone’s lean attacker.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_84f3d6ae-b42e-5d3b-9a13-a8118ca0dd23)
It was easy to trace where he had been. He’d allowed himself some time, I think, to search the house before our encounter in the stairwell. The evidence implied he must have been on the point of leaving until some sudden recollection drew him to race back inside with the bang that had brought me scurrying. It occurred to me that perhaps he had left some telltale mark behind, made some error that would allow us to identify him, and that was why he had dashed back in – in a determined effort to retrieve it.
If so, it wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms. He’d left doors swinging into the little room that opened from the wall beside the little table with the lamp on it – a library – and also the study where the telephone stood. At the swift glance I cast in through the door of each, the shelves of the library were untouched, but perhaps the bottles on the drinks trolley in the study were fewer than they had been. He had, of course, also made a thorough tour of the kitchen and helped himself to my suitcase.
The door of the kitchen was probably how he had got in. I’d bolted the front door firmly as I’d left with Freddy last night and it showed no signs of a forced entry now. I bolted it firmly once more and crept upstairs. I know why I went stealthily, as if I were myself a burglar. It was because the house suddenly felt cold and alien again and I wished I wasn’t here.
Upstairs I found a series of three or more closed doors and a long passage that served as a gallery with a further collection of doors just distinguishable at the far end. It was darker again up here and the whole place smelled of mildew and old polish.
I was being watched. Not by the balding man or any possession of his. There was nothing to indicate he’d even been up here before the moment I caught him on the stairs. Instead, my audience was the row upon row of photographs on the wood-panelled walls. Hard Victorian gazes judged me severely as I passed. The women had sharp noses and the menfolk wore unattractive beards that sat beneath the jaw. Then I was greeted by the woman from the photograph in the study downstairs, this time glamorous in her Great War wedding suit. In the next she was smiling tiredly with black hair and extraordinary deep-set eyes and a very young boy in her lap and a badly concealed bulge around her middle. The same eyes were met in the portrait that followed this tranquil family scene, but this time in a young man. Even in hand-tinted colours in this gloom, the intelligent blue gaze of her teenage son shone out of the shifting features of one who might have been designed for the life of a musician or perhaps an orator. I knew which son this was. The clue was in those eyes and the height which matched Mrs Abbey’s idea of a ghost. He was older in the next and this portrait gave an even stronger sense of the handsome face with a flair for drama, yet here I thought I could perceive a tinge of something colder, sadder. Harder. Perhaps it had been taken after the accident that had lamed him. Even so, even with the slightly defiant challenge of the supple lines of that mouth it would, I thought, have been easy to have liked him.
By contrast, the next photograph showed a different kind of man. He was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty. It came with a peculiar twist of pity that I observed how unexciting this person seemed compared to the brother who had looked so much like their mother. It proved how misleading an impression could be when it was formed purely by hearing a voice on a telephone. The present man must be older. His voice had led me to imagine a man with easy confidence and my mind had countered it by presuming he would turn out to be the sort of officer whose chin retreated into his neck just as his forehead advanced on his hairline. This young man in the photograph was neither. His brother burned; this man was subdued, a level gaze in a blandly unemotional face. He was followed by a sequence that captured the career of his father – a senior military man distinguished by an ever-increasing collection of medals – and I thought I could perceive something of a similarity between the Colonel and his older son, particularly in the set about their mouths. Neither looked like they smiled easily. Above it all I was remembering my complaint about Mrs Abbey and how hard I found it to be certain I knew who and what she really was. I suspected the same rule would apply to this man.
The floorboards at the end of the row creaked. I had drifted down the length of the gallery, to be standing just shy of the black corner where a second, narrower flight of stairs turned out of sight up to the attic floor. That sense of trespass returned violently. It carried the message that at any rate I ought to know precisely who and what the younger brother was. He was dead and the sort that left a terrible memory for his neighbours.
The thought dawned that it was not my job to find the traces left by that imposter. The air up here was not still and settled after his invasion. He was here, brooding and silent, and waiting for me to climb onwards from this unexpected encounter with the images of masters past and present. I whirled and raced for the lifeline of the telephone downstairs and the police station that could be reached through it.
I was woefully unprepared for the sudden tilt of my heart as I reached the stairs and a man emerged from the blaze beaming in through the freshly unbarred front door. His figure took form below, ascending as I prepared to race downwards.
I snatched at the banister rail. Only he wasn’t charging into the attack like a burglar. He was running his hand along the rail himself as if he had every right to be there as he climbed steadily towards me. There was a stick in his other hand. The sight forced my mind to swing violently away from the dread of a renewed confrontation with a returning imposter to a jolt that was altogether less tangible; less easily digested in the light of day. At the heart of his silhouette, I could feel he was watching me. For a second my legs actually carried me down a few more steps, as if I might attempt my own version of the wild leap down the stairs and bolt past him for the door.
Then in the next second my mind sharply observed that my appearance had surprised him just as much as he had surprised me. More than that, I saw that he had noticed my impulse to escape and was instinctively bracing himself to put out that arm to intercept it. It made him real. It made his shape become more solid. My hand tightened on the banister, snatching me to a halt where my feet weren’t quite yet ready to do the job themselves. He stopped too; or rather the instinct that threatened immediate action passed into something less intimidating as he read the manner of my appearance more clearly. And then my eyes adjusted to take in his features.
‘Emily, I presume,’ Captain Richard Langton said from his position about seven or so steps beneath me, and placed himself firmly in the land of the living. ‘Why are you up here?’
