by Heidi Swain
‘Are you absolutely sure that it’s been sold?’ he had asked for what must have been the hundredth time. ‘It isn’t tucked away in the house somewhere, under a dustsheet or something?’
I had even resorted to helping Luke look for it myself, getting into all sorts of uncomfortably tight spots and dusty cupboards with my newest neighbour, but the only things we had found were gargantuan spiders. At the end of the search we were both adamant the portrait wasn’t at the property, but Luke couldn’t lay his hands on a bill of sale or trace any paperwork suggesting where it might have disappeared to either.
Luke was finding it all very frustrating, but I still hadn’t told him I was on the case. Beyond a couple of dates and the artist’s name we had very little to go on, so what would have been the point? In fact, we had so little to work with that even Charlie, who could find the tiniest gem in a dragon haul, was poised to admit defeat, so it would have been heartless to get Luke’s hopes up only to disappoint him.
‘It’s definitely not there, Charlie,’ I confirmed yet again.
‘Then I think you need to tell this chap I’m helping out and ask if he’ll let you have a proper sort through the property paperwork,’ he wisely suggested. ‘I daresay he must have missed something. Penny to a pound if you have a look the mystery will be solved in a heartbeat. You have a nose for these things, Kate, you know you do.’
I had been thinking along the same lines myself, but my reluctance to get involved wasn’t only due to my concerns about getting Luke’s hopes up. The crux of it was that I didn’t want him to know that I had asked Charlie to get involved in case he got the wrong idea about my intentions.
Luke had said himself that he could appreciate how difficult it would be for me to get back in touch with any of David’s and my former friends and I didn’t want him thinking that I had gone and done it anyway because I had feelings for him. Romantic or otherwise. Because I didn’t.
Yes, he was one of the kindest and most generous men I had ever met and yes, my stomach did flip when he brushed the cobwebs out of my hair, and yes, my heart did pound when he turned up day in, day out to help in the garden, but it didn’t mean anything. My desire to track down the portrait and see it returned to its rightful place was purely professional. End of.
‘Let’s just give it a few more days, Charlie,’ I said determinedly, ‘and if there’s still no joy, I’ll tell him then.’
‘All right, dear girl,’ he said resignedly. ‘I’ll keep trying.’
I finally settled on redecorating my bedroom, which was at the front of the house, first. I knew that ideally the really laborious jobs which were going to involve the most dust and upheaval should have taken priority, and they were at the very top of my lengthy to-do list. However, I had failed to take into consideration how long I would have to wait for tradesmen, not to mention the fact that I still hadn’t settled on a kitchen design because my head was filled with the blasted glass wall that Luke had suggested.
‘Right,’ I said to myself, rolling up my sleeves as I began to re-pack boxes and move the furniture so I could rip up the carpet. ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’
I hadn’t been at it long when I heard someone let themselves in through the front door.
‘Need a hand?’ called a voice up the stairs. ‘Lisa sent me over.’
‘Come on up, John,’ I called back. I had already worked up quite a sweat and the added manpower was most welcome. ‘I could do with a bit of extra muscle.’
I knew I would have to empty the room completely when I had the new carpet laid, but for now we were able to manhandle the bed and the wardrobe between us, pushing them from pillar to post as necessary. The old carpet came up with good grace and we shared a pot of tea and a teacake apiece while sitting on the bedroom floor poring over the yellowed newspapers that we had discovered covering the floorboards.
‘How’s Lisa’s job hunting going?’ I asked as we recovered our strength. ‘Any joy yet?’
‘That’s actually why I’m here,’ he explained. ‘She wanted me out from under her feet.’
‘Form filling and CV writing can be a tricky business,’ I agreed. ‘No doubt she wants the peace and quiet.’
‘She’s not form filling,’ John explained as he handed over his empty mug and crumb-covered plate. ‘And I don’t think she’s ever had a CV.’
‘What is she doing then?’
‘Following her heart,’ he said mysteriously, ‘like she should have done years ago. Like I’ve been telling her since goodness knows when.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I frowned. ‘What’s her heart been telling her she should be doing?’
He looked at me and chewed his lip for a second.
‘You’ll need to hammer down those few nails,’ he said, pointing to the edges of the floor where we’d caught our hands on the sharp heads which stood proud. ‘It’ll be quicker and easier than trying to pull them out.’
Once he had shown me how to set up the wallpaper stripper he had lent me he then went home to collect the children and take them to the community garden.
‘We’re on egg duty today,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to have a measure up for this pizza oven Luke keeps on about. It’ll give my good lady a few extra minutes’ peace.’
He still refused to elaborate as to what it was she was doing and why she needed peace in which to do whatever it was.
‘I don’t suppose Luke told you what he had gone on holiday to think about, did he?’ I asked, hoping he might feel some way inclined to enlighten me about something.
My curiosity was piqued, and I didn’t like looking across the Square to the empty house. I hadn’t expected to miss its new owner, but I did. Not that I would have told John that.
‘Well, if you can’t work that out for yourself,’ he said with disdain, ‘then you haven’t the brains I’d credited you with.’
He’d disappeared downstairs before I had the opportunity to think of a response.
The wallpaper stripper made light work of the multiple layers, but I made a point of keeping a few of the patterned pieces which were salvageable. They were a part of the house’s history after all and an interesting reminder of how tastes had changed since the last time anyone had stripped the walls back to bare plaster.
By late afternoon there was just the one wall left. My arms were aching and the steamy air had turned my hair from smooth and tidy into a mass of kinks and curls. I pinned it up into a messy bun, made myself the biggest mug of coffee I could find and traipsed back up the stairs for one last push. All I really wanted to do was sink into a lavender- or rose-scented bubble-filled bath, but I was too close to the finishing line to put off crossing it now.
Thankfully the last wall had the least paper to strip. It was the wall furthest from the door and the addition of the original little ornate cast-iron fireplace meant it wasn’t too big, which was why I had left working on it until last. I knew when I started that I was going to need something simple to finish on at the end of the day when my impetus was flagging. But as it turned out, the wall wasn’t simple to deal with at all.
The recess to the left of the chimney breast, the bottom half of it at least, seemed to have far more layers than the rest of the room put together and I wondered how I hadn’t noticed the bulge at the bottom of the wall before. However, the mahogany chest of drawers which had been left behind by Doris had been positioned there until this morning and I knew that the sprigged floral wallpaper was capable of playing tricks on the eyes if you stared at it for too long. ‘Migraine inducing’, my mother would have called it, just like the swirly carpet in the dining room, but I thought it had a certain old-world charm. The paper, not the carpet.
I was pulled up short as I realised the wallpaper stripper in my hand was hitting something hard, certainly not wallpaper, and I turned off the steamer and ran my hands over the area which was now damp. I could definitely feel the solid outline of something.
‘Have you still got my husband up t
here?’
I almost jumped out of my skin as Lisa’s head appeared around the door.
‘No,’ I told her, all plans to winkle out of her what she had been up to quickly forgotten, ‘and I haven’t got your kids either. They’re all over at Prosperous Place.’
‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked when she spotted me tapping away with my ear pressed to the wall.
‘There’s something under this paper,’ I told her. ‘Listen, it’s hollow.’
Carefully we scraped around the edges and I noticed that the skirting board had been cut in line to match the shape on the wall above.
‘I bet it’s a cupboard,’ said Lisa, her eyes wide. ‘A cupboard full of forgotten treasure, that’s been papered over.’
I rolled my eyes and shook my head, but she was probably right, about the cupboard part anyway.
‘Told you,’ she said smugly a few minutes later as we sat back on our haunches and stared at the edges of what definitely looked like a door.
‘I wonder what’s really behind it.’ I swallowed.
I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of having a secret cupboard in the room where I slept. I still hadn’t mustered the courage to brave venturing far into the dark cupboard under the stairs yet. There looked to be far too many cobwebs for my liking and I could all too easily imagine this recess would be similarly adorned.
‘Only one way to find out,’ said Lisa, reaching for the metal scraper. ‘Use this to work around the sides,’ she ordered, while reaching across to grab a screwdriver. ‘We need to chip off the paint to free the edges so we can lever it open.’
‘I think I’ll leave it for today,’ I said, jumping up and brushing down my jeans. ‘I’ve been at it for hours and shouldn’t you be home cooking dinner, or ironing, or something?’
‘No,’ she said, sounding disappointed. ‘All that can wait. Come on,’ she encouraged. ‘I want to see. You aren’t scared, are you?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Just knackered and anyway,’ I added artfully, ‘I’m more interested in hearing about what you’ve been up to today. John mentioned something about following your heart.’
‘Did he now?’ she said, holding out her hand so I could pull her to her feet.
‘He did,’ I nodded, ‘and I’m more interested in the workings of your heart than what’s inside some spider-infested cupboard.’
‘Well, you’ll just have to stay interested, won’t you?’ she said, swaggering across the room. ‘Because it’s supposed to be a secret.’
Oops, it sounded like I’d really dropped John in it, but at least she was almost out of the room and away from the cupboard.
‘And you know you’ll never get a wink of sleep in here tonight, don’t you?’ she added with a smile and a look back towards the little cupboard door.
I didn’t want her to be right, but she was of course. I had my dinner, my longed-for bubble bath and my evening watching rubbish on the TV and by the end of it I was still dead on my feet, but no sooner had my head hit the pillow than my eyes, which had been so determined to close when I was curled up in my armchair, sprang open and I began imagining all manner of things that could be hidden in the cupboard next to me.
It had to be something pretty important, didn’t it? Something someone had decided they didn’t want anyone knowing about because why else would they go to all the trouble of making it look like the cupboard didn’t exist? Or was I making too much of it? Was it just the lateness of the hour and Lisa’s taunting making my mind play tricks?
As the lady herself said, there was only one way to find out.
It seemed to take forever to chip away enough paint to get the leverage I needed to force the door open. I did it as carefully as I could, taking every precaution not to damage the door. I might have been wary about what may have been stashed behind it, but extra storage was always a bonus and some simple furniture rejigging could mean this space became a shoe cupboard, or somewhere to stow the Christmas decorations, assuming of course there wasn’t a body bundled in there and the whole house was going to end up being ripped apart by the police.
I shuddered, as with an ear-splitting creak the door finally began to move and I wondered which planet I had been on when I had decided that tackling this on my own in the dead of night had been a good idea. Before I pulled any harder I checked the torch on my phone was fully functioning.
‘Shit,’ I swore as it sprang into life, the annoying jingle alerting me that there was unusually both a text message and a voicemail awaiting my attention.
Both would have to wait because I currently had far more pressing matters to attend to. I took a deep breath, and with the phone in one hand, I used the other to open the cupboard door wide enough to see inside. I snatched up the screwdriver to defend myself from whatever beastie lurked within and braced myself to explore.
‘Nothing?’ said John. ‘Not a thing?’
It was early the next morning, after what had eventually turned into a reasonable night’s sleep, and John had popped over to see how I was faring with the wallpaper stripper. Lisa hadn’t taken much notice of the walls apparently, but was all agog as far as the cupboard was concerned.
‘No,’ I shrugged, looking over at the space which I had spent a good long while de-cobwebbing.
It wasn’t as if I had wanted to find anything sinister of course, but the fact that it was completely and utterly empty was a bit of a let-down. I had, in one mad moment, just before I pulled it open, imagined that I was going to find Luke’s elusive portrait inside. I had imagined myself presenting it to him at the Easter party and him being so grateful that he . . .
‘Kate?’
‘Sorry,’ I faltered. ‘What?’
‘I said,’ John repeated, ‘do you mind if I take a quick look?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all. Do you want to borrow my phone? The torch is pretty decent.’
He whipped a torch from his back pocket and proceeded to dazzle me with it.
‘Lisa’s always telling me that you’re prepared for every eventuality,’ I smiled.
‘Is she now?’ he laughed.
‘I’ll go and put the kettle on,’ I told him. ‘Have you got time for tea?’
I was barely halfway down the stairs before he started hollering. I shot back up to the bedroom.
‘I haven’t got public liability insurance you know,’ I warned him. ‘You’d better not have done yourself a mischief.’ I was pulled up short by the fact that rather than crawl into the cupboard – not that he could have got all that far because he was a big bloke – he had gone in on his back and was reaching up in the direction of the chimney breast.
‘How did you miss this little lot?’ he choked, as his fiddling dislodged as much dust and as many spiders as I had already hoovered up. ‘How did you not see all this?’
Two minutes later and I found myself gazing in shock at the astonishing loot with Lisa’s words about ‘forgotten treasure’ ringing in my ears. It wasn’t the lost portrait from Prosperous Place, but it might well offer up some clue as to where it had disappeared to.
I made John promise that he wouldn’t mention what he had discovered to anyone, not even his good lady wife. The most I could get out of him was that he would do his best, but if she used her feminine wiles then he couldn’t guarantee his discretion. It was about as good a commitment to keeping the secret as I could have hoped for and in turn I promised him that when I had had a chance to show everything to Luke, then I would free him of his obligation and tell Lisa all about it myself.
Chapter 22
‘We were beginning to think you weren’t going to come back,’ Carole scolded Luke the day before Easter Sunday as we all gathered together in the bothy to finish the preparations for the party. ‘We were beginning to think you’d gone for good!’
Lisa rolled her eyes at Heather who returned the gesture. Our friend was looking a little peaky, but had rallied enough to help with the arrangements and stop everyone trying to se
cond-guess why she hadn’t been putting in an appearance in the garden recently.
I looked at Luke and his topped-up tan and shook my head. No one had really thought that at all.
‘Oh, Carole,’ said Lisa, determined not to let her get away with her over-the-top comment. ‘You do love a drama, don’t you? Even if it is of your own making. I hardly think Luke would have gone to all the trouble of buying Prosperous Place just to abandon it again, do you?’
Carole didn’t say anything, but her lips became a very thin line and she went back to ticking things off on her clipboard when the man himself refused to elaborate.
‘So, how’s everything going then?’ Luke asked.
He rubbed his hands together as he cast an appreciative eye over the garden and the area John had measured up and cordoned off for the pizza oven and potential fire pit which had also been added to the list now. Clearly, he didn’t want to become embroiled in the women’s spat any more than he wanted to enlighten us as to where he had been.
‘It all looks good to me,’ he smiled, ‘but then I’m no expert.’
‘It’s doing wonderfully well,’ said Graham proudly. ‘It’s all thriving.’
‘And there’s even enough of the cut-and-come-again salad to feed us all tomorrow,’ joined in Glen. His increase in hours recently, working with Evie looking on in her buggy, had more than made up for his wife’s absence from the garden. ‘It will be our first little harvest. These cloches have been a godsend. Thanks for putting them together, John.’
Lisa reached up and kissed her husband’s cheek.
‘He can turn his hand to anything,’ she sighed. ‘What would we do without him?’
‘Oh, for god’s sake, get a room,’ Tamsin muttered, disgusted. ‘I’m going to take Archie and Molly to check on Violet and Dash.’
‘And I’ll go and collect the meat from the butchers,’ said Rob.
I had suggested to Rob that he might bring Sarah along to the party tomorrow, but he declined. He was as keen as I was to stop Carole dropping hints and pushing the pair of us together, but not willing to subject the woman in his life to our neighbour’s scrutiny and interrogation.