The Time and the Place

by Jane Renshaw

  But she wasn’t looking forward to it. She particularly wasn’t looking forward to getting him talking about that car crash.

  She stopped at the door into the courtyard and took a deep, fortifying lungful of cold air. The courtyard had been salted or gritted, or whatever, between the door in the wall and the back door of the house, creating a wet dark path through the white. More such paths radiated to the outbuildings.

  So here she was, about to step onto the stage. Usually at this point she’d be feeling physically sick and wondering where the nearest toilet was, but she felt okay.

  She could do this.

  At the back door of the house, she stopped for a moment, wondering whether she should put her thumb on the little pottery bell-push set into the stone surround. No. Claire Colley worked here now. She should just go in. She turned the faceted brass doorknob and pushed the door open.

  The kitchen, when she found it, was empty. And supernaturally tidy. And blessedly warm. The massive Aga was pumping out heat. She stood with her bare hands on one of the lid things and grimaced as they tingled. Then she pushed them under her armpits and surveyed her domain.

  There was a small piece of paper on the table with neat handwriting on it.

  Hello Claire!

  Please make yourself at home. Help yourself to any of the food and drink you fancy. Karen, your full-time cleaner/dogsbody, should be around somewhere (but don’t count on it). I’ll see you at lunch – a game pie might be nice.

  PTO

  Karen? Was that Karen DeCicco, the girl who’d found John’s body? She worked here too? But there was a more pressing question: how the hell would she even start to make a game pie?

  She turned the paper over.

  I’m joking! I’m just about capable of making myself a sandwich. Mrs MacIver would like to see you at some point - flat at the top of the house, in the Victorian part directly above the Terrace Room.

  Have fun!

  Hector

  PS Wifi code Yu78ij098JK.

  There was an old armchair by the Aga with a crocheted blanket thrown over its back. She sank onto it, the note in her hand. She hadn’t been able to stop herself from smiling when she’d realised he was winding her up about the game pie.

  Oh God.

  She unzipped her boots, kicked them off and pressed her freezing feet to one of the smooth, bulbous oven doors. She assumed that was an oven. She was going to have to Google all about Agas. The priority was just to get through her first day without being sacked.

  Not that that was likely to happen, no matter what. She suspected that she’d pretty much have to burn the house down. He’d resumed flirting with her where he’d left off, and he wasn’t even here.

  And she was responding.

  God.

  She’d had a recurring dream about him, in the two months since the interview, in which she was pursuing him through this house, and then he was pursuing her. But the disturbing thing about it was that it wasn’t in the least frightening – it was one of those dreams you woke from with a huge smile on your face.

  Never let your guard down.

  When she’d thawed out, she put her boots back on and climbed the stairs to the corridor that led to the baize door. The temperature was several degrees lower than in the kitchen. On the right was the lift and another narrow staircase, but they weren’t living in the 1920s, for God’s sake. She wasn’t going to scuttle up and down the servants’ stairs so as not to offend the nobs with her presence.

  She pushed through the baize door into the hall.

  It was even colder in here, draughts seeming to come at her from all directions as she crossed to the sweep of the main staircase. On the half-landing she looked out onto the courtyard below, but there was still no sign of life. All she could hear was the tick... tock tick... tock of the grandfather clock in the hall below.

  From the half-landing she had a choice of symmetrical staircases, each ascending to the first floor, like a horseshoe. She took the one on the right, examining as she went the oil paintings hanging above her: some were portraits, some landscapes, and one was a snow scene with a white hare lying dead or wounded, the only colour in the picture the blood on its fur and on the snow, pooling around the hare itself and staining the snow alongside its tracks where it had struggled on after being wounded... desperately, futilely trying to outdistance the unseen hunter.

  It was beautifully painted. But if that picture was stolen, she imagined the original owner would probably rather have the insurance payout. Imagine having to look at that every morning on your way downstairs.

  If you were Hector Forbes, you probably relished it.

  On the first-floor landing she stopped at the three big Georgian windows to look at the view to the front of the house, the frosty fields and trees, the pale light of morning now lemon-yellow, slanting, casting long shadows, black on white.

  Not a thing moved.

  There was a large round table with an arrangement of holly and seed pods of some kind, and some small items of bijouterie, as Grannie would have called them: a mother-of-pearl card case, a silver bird – a grouse? – a little Chinese dish, some snuff boxes.

  Nothing here, she thought, of great value. He was unlikely to leave the stuff he’d stolen lying out on a table on the landing, but it might just be the kind of thing he’d get a kick out of. He was a risk-taker. Maybe he’d get a buzz from leaving a priceless piece of jade, say, amongst the run-of-the-mill knick-knacks.

  DCI Stewart had provided her with a list, including photographs, of the highest value art and antiques stolen in the north of Scotland in the last decade. She had tried to memorise it.

  ‘Such high-end burglaries have increased exponentially in frequency in the past ten years,’ the DCI had told her. ‘Unfortunately, the victims haven’t always been as forthcoming as the Boyles. These are billionaires we’re talking about, often from outside the UK, Americans and Russians and Brazilians and Qataris, billionaires who’ve snapped up Scottish country estates and often have something of a murky history – you don’t amass a fortune like these folk have got, in my experience, without being a bit of a ruthless bugger at best and dodgy as hell in a high percentage of cases. So yes, they report a burglary, they report cash or the odd piece of relatively low-value jewellery as having been stolen... but you’re in there in this bloody great castle or Victorian pile or state-of-the-art brutalist monstrosity, gawping about you, thinking there isn’t room to swing a cat without hitting something priceless, and it’s not adding up, it’s not adding up that a burglar would break in and nick a ring and a necklace worth a total of two thousand quid. They’re not giving you the whole story. And if the victim won’t say what’s actually been stolen, how can you begin to investigate?’

  She had grimaced. ‘Makes it a lot easier for the thief to dispose of the stolen items, too, if no one will acknowledge that they’ve been taken.’

  ‘If no one will acknowledge that they had them in the first place,’ the DCI had added grimly.

  To her right was a wide corridor ending in a big Victorian window. That was where the guest bedrooms were, she remembered from the lightning tour he’d given her in October. To her left, there was a narrower, panelled corridor up a couple of steps. That was the old part of the house, and you could tell from the proportions, the lower doors and the thicker walls. She turned that way, passing the door to the library on her right and the door to the servants’ stairwell on her left. Beyond was a small sitting room, overlooking the courtyard, and the two rooms she was interested in: Hector’s bedroom on the right, and his brother’s straight ahead. ‘You won’t need to bother with those,’ he’d told her. ‘We clean them and so on ourselves.’ He hadn’t shown her inside them.

  She could claim to be lost if she was discovered.

  First, Hector’s room – which was freezing cold. Oh my God, the windows were both open! The lower sashes were raised to let in the icy air. She touched the old-fashioned radiators under each. Off. Was he a masochist or wh
at?

  It was otherwise a pleasant room, painted a soft green. It had two front-facing windows and a large brass bed and was in military order: the mahogany surfaces of the twin chests of drawers on either side of the door gleaming; the windows smear-free; the throw over the back of the armchair carefully aligned; the duvet neatly folded back to air the bed. He had, of course, been in the army before he was kicked out.

  No discarded clothes, no clutter on the bedside tables or the mantelpiece.

  The one discordant note was the groups of watercolour landscapes on the wall above each of the chests of drawers; delicate, pretty things.

  There were two doors, one on each side of the room. One opened into a dressing room, with a massive mahogany wardrobe along one wall, which she opened out of curiosity and was unsurprised to find half empty. Tweed jackets, trousers, suits, shirts, a few ties...

  The other door opened onto an en suite bathroom that looked original Art Deco, tiled in green and white and black, with dark green fittings – a big, comfortable-looking bath against the wall, a loo with a big wooden seat, a massive angular sink under the window. At a later date a shower had been added in one corner. Everything was sparkling clean. The shampoo in the shower was Tesco ‘Value’ stuff. The cabinet on the wall next to the window held a razor in a mug, shaving cream, deodorant and condoms.

  About as far from metrosexual as you could get.

  Back in the bedroom, she went quickly through the drawers in the Victorian bedside cabinets. Two books (SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard and The Racketeer by John Grisham), a pen and a notepad with half its pages missing. The remaining pages were blank apart from the top one:

  To Get

  1. Engagement present for Perdita and Twat - urns for garden?

  2. Christmas presents:

  Damian - chocs, bird food, book

  Mrs Mac - chocs, hedgehog

  Helen - kitten? Sound out Jim

  Beryl - ask Norrie

  McAllisters - ?

  3. Winter tyres for Claire’s car

  4. Goodies for Christmas binge

  5. Sofa – Coach Hse Flat + washable cover

  He was hardly pushing the boat out with the Christmas presents – bird food for his brother, for God’s sake? – but then in her experience, the higher the social class, the less was spent on Christmas. Stereotypical non-metrosexual man, though – just ten days till Christmas and he was still wondering what to get people and making ridiculous decisions like a kitten.

  The chests of drawers just contained clothes, neatly folded. On top of the left-hand chest were the only personal things in the room – three framed photographs, one of a smart, coiffured elderly lady smiling at the camera; one of a good-looking couple sitting on a hillside, the wind lifting their hair, laughing into each others’ eyes; and one of a fair-haired boy of maybe ten or eleven, leaning over a wall to talk to an inscrutable-looking cat.

  She hadn’t really expected to find anything – the Viking chalice, for example, used as a tooth mug – but it was a disappointment. As she stood looking round the room, she admitted to herself that the reason she’d come in here was to give herself a little hit of the fear she needed to feel, the frisson of danger that would keep her vigilant. That would keep her safe.

  And – nothing.

  What if he walked in here right now, Claire? What would you say? What would you do? What would he do?

  And there it was. Her pulse quickening, her mouth going dry.

  She slipped out of the room.

  With her hand on the doorknob of the door at the end of the corridor, she stopped. When she was seventeen, she’d have been horrified at the thought of a stranger entering her bedroom, let alone searching it. But there was a much higher chance of finding something in here than in the target’s room. Hector Forbes hadn’t evaded the consequences of his criminality for ten years by being careless. His teenage brother, on the other hand... The teenage brain was hardwired for carelessness. And according to the DCI, little brother was quite a piece of work. He could well be involved in some capacity in the ‘family business’, or at least be profiting from it in the form of stolen goods.

  She opened the door and stepped inside.

  Another supernaturally neat bedroom, a lovely large corner one with two windows in the wall opposite the door and another two in the wall on the right. In the far corner was a tall bookcase and a desk. Facing the view over the garden, a sofa and two chairs were arranged around a coffee table. To the right of the door there was another massive, four-door wardrobe, this one possibly Edwardian? The bed – a large mahogany affair with snowy-white covers – was against the wall on her left, and between the windows facing her was a fireplace with a painting of a wildcat above it. Between the other two windows was a tall glass-fronted display cabinet containing an interesting-looking collection of objects.

  She crossed the room to investigate.

  Animal skulls! She counted six of them. Fossils, polished stones, shells, a strange stone ball with carvings on it, a massive cone... But what caught her eye was the cute little plush mouse sitting looking back at her. Was it a mouse? He had mouse ears but a pug-like face. Button eyes and an innocent smile. Pipe cleaner-thin arms and legs and big flat feet. Red shorts. His fur was worn – in some places, completely worn away. There was a key sticking out of his back.

  Tempting, to take him out and wind him up and see what he did.

  It was the only toy visible. He’d probably had a purge, as her brother had, when he’d considered himself too old for kids’ stuff, but this little mouse had survived it. It looked antique. Probably a family heirloom, but she took a photograph of it, and the stone ball, just in case. Neither looked valuable, but you never could tell.

  In the bedside tables there was a book (Mind of the Raven), an iPod, and in one of the deeper bottom drawers something made of black padded material with Velcro fastenings and a plug. A heat pad of some sort? And neatly stashed under the bed, a pair of crutches.

  The en suite through the door next to the bed was huge, with two windows. There was a big walk-in shower featuring a seat and lots of grab rails, and a bath in the other corner with a wide tiled ledge around it. The shampoo in the shower was expensive-looking, and there was conditioner in the same type of black bottle. A small cupboard contained cleaning stuff: two wooden trugs with scrubbing brushes and scourers in them, a neat array of eco-friendly products, a bucket and one of those microcloth mops, and stacks of different coloured cloths and dusters. The mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink had a razor in a mug and shaving cream and deodorant identical to those in the other en suite. Packets of painkillers.

  Not exactly metrosexual either, but when she glanced into the big wardrobe in the bedroom she found it full of nice clothes – lots of expensive-looking shirts, mainly white or blue or stone-coloured, lots of trousers, mainly beige or khaki, jeans, some suits, tweed jackets, sweatshirts and T-shirts and fleeces. Again, everything was supernaturally neat, arranged first by type of clothing and then by colour. One section of the wardrobe had drawers in it, the kind with a dipped front – lots of soft cashmere jumpers she felt compelled to touch, again arranged by colour. There were shoe racks containing trainers and polished leather shoes.

  On the opposite side of the bed from the en suite, there was another door: a walk-in cupboard, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on one wall, most of which held books and a range of neat cardboard storage boxes. Here was all the detritus of childhood – jigsaws and games and an X-box, a little plush rhino, one of those miniature wooden xylophones. And propped in a corner, a wooden walking stick and a prosthetic leg. A spare one, presumably. It was covered in flesh-coloured plastic and seemed to be designed to sit under the knee. She knew from the file that the boy had had a transtibial amputation of his right leg, roughly halfway between foot and knee, and there was extensive damage to the remaining limb, particularly the knee, so he’d been left with approximately fifty per cent of normal function.

  It hadn�
�t occurred to her until now to wonder how Campbell Stewart had obtained that information. Surely it was confidential medical stuff?

  Poor kid.

  She was having to fight the urge to turn on her heel and go. Poking about in here felt horribly intrusive and wrong. No matter what his brother had done, this was an innocent child’s privacy she was invading.

  But she was here to do a job.

  She started opening the storage boxes. More games; stationery; cables and USB sticks and other IT stuff. At the bottom of the fifth box she tried, which was full of sheet music, she found a photograph album. As she was removing it, she heard a noise.

  Footsteps.

  In the corridor outside!

  Oh God! She couldn’t be caught in here, rummaging amongst the brother’s personal belongings! What to do? Try to hide?

  Calm.

  Calm calm calm.

  Think!

  Hiding was too risky. She shoved the album back in the box, and the box back on the shelf, and scuttled out of the cupboard, shutting the door behind her. To be discovered standing in the middle of the room gaping around her would be fine. She’d just say she was doing what she always did on her first day in a new house – taking stock of what was where, and what needed to be done.

  But the sound of footsteps had stopped.

  She stood, letting her breathing slow, remembering that evening with Phil, the celebratory pint after her first UC collar which had turned into another and another. In the end she’d been sobbing, confessing that she had cheated during the UC selection process. She had worked out the qualities they were looking for and adopted them – primarily a calm unflappability and an ability to control one’s emotions in all circumstances. ‘I – I have this thing I do,’ she had whispered. ‘I can pretend to be what people want me to be. I call it putting on my chameleon skin.’