by Jane Renshaw
‘Best not drop them in a puddle, then.’ Hector caught the box as it slipped from her hand. ‘Winsor and Newton. Nothing but the best for Cat, I see.’ He carefully placed the box back in the girl’s little hand. ‘Hold onto it tight.’
‘They were expensive,’ Lizzie agreed, now wriggling to be put down. She ran back to her mother and held up the paints. ‘Can you put them in your bag, in case they get in a puddle?’
The mother’s handbag was one of those big leather ones, obviously quality but a little scuffed. She took an inordinate amount of time to unzip it and push the box of paints into it, head bowed.
Lizzie ran back to Hector, grabbed his hand with both hers, and used it to swing herself up and around. ‘Are you coming to our Christmas party? Is Damian?’
‘Not this year.’
Lizzie pushed out her lips. ‘Why not?’
The woman was looking past Claire to Hector, her face stricken. All the prettiness, somehow, had been stripped away, leaving her gaunt and distressed-looking.
Interesting.
‘There’s going to be games. Charades. That’s Damian’s favourite. And Mummy’s making her trifle. You like it. You had three bowls. More than Daddy.’
‘I’m officially a greedy pig – and I have a badge to prove it.’
Suspiciously: ‘Do you?’
‘Yes. It’s the law.’
‘No it isn’t!’ she frowned, and then laughed. ‘You don’t really have a greedy pig badge, Hector! Do you?’
‘No, but I probably should.’
Suddenly shy, the little girl looked down at her wellies. ‘I could make you one.’
‘Could you?’ As if this was the most amazing proposal ever.
She looked up at him with a sweet smile and nodded, confidence returning. ‘With a big fat disgusting slobbity pig!’
‘Fantastic. Thank you, Lizzie.’
The woman, finally, approached them, her mouth set in the approximation of a smile.
‘Claire, this is Fiona McAllister,’ said Hector. ‘One of our local GPs. Fiona, Claire Colley, who’s just embarked on a rather daunting task: she’s our new cook and housekeeper.’
‘Oh heavens,’ said Fiona, offering Claire her hand. ‘That is an impressive level of bravery.’
She had no idea.
Claire took the woman’s hand with a weak smile.
‘Are you coming to our party?’ Lizzie was demanding of Norrie, obviously a distant second choice. And then, doubtfully and even less enthusiastically: ‘Are you?’ of Claire.
‘I am,’ said Norrie. ‘Sounds like I need to get a greedy pig badge so I can eat three bowls of trifle.’
Lizzie completely ignored him.
‘I’m not,’ smiled Claire. ‘I don’t even know you, do I?’
Lizzie shrugged.
Her mother said, ‘Come on now, Lizzie,’ and held out her hand to the child. ‘People have their own Christmas plans that don’t necessarily involve you, you know.’
Something had happened, between last Christmas and this one, and Claire was suddenly certain she knew what it was. She imagined ‘Daddy’ – maybe he was fair, like his wife – at last year’s party, watching Hector stuffing his face with his wife’s trifle and dark-haired, dark-eyed little Lizzie resting her head against his arm, smiling up at him adoringly...
A long-suppressed suspicion, crawling into his consciousness.
Had he confronted his wife with it, finally?
Had she admitted it?
That the child was Hector’s?
The warm fuzzy feeling of earlier had been replaced by a cold hard lump in her stomach. As she watched the woman walking away from them, Lizzie’s hand once more grasped in hers, she told herself it was because she felt bad for them, for that woman with the brittle smile, for that happy little girl turning to wave back at them who must surely, some day, if Claire was right, be in for a horrible shock.
She risked a glance at Hector.
And found his amused gaze on her, eyebrows slightly raised.
16
‘Isn’t that the, um, Twatmobile?’
Claire had trained herself to memorise vehicles, and she knew this was the same TDV8 they’d seen in the street in Ballater, now parked in the courtyard at the House. It was the same registration.
‘Oh Christ, yes.’ Hector drew up by the back door, where Damian was standing watching them.
As they got out, what Claire at first thought was a leaf fluttered down from the gutter of the clock tower building, but then she saw it was a little bird, swooping onto Damian’s hand. It was pale grey-brown with cream and greenish bits around its head and on its wings. It stood on his hand for a second, looking down, then plucked up a small worm – oh God, the worm was moving, it was alive – and flew away again.
‘What was that?’
Damian smiled. ‘Mabel. Female chaffinch. Don’t worry, she won’t attack you unless you have mealworms.’
‘Which I won’t,’ said Claire, grimacing at the plastic box she saw was sitting on the waist-level shelf inside the back door. The contents were moving. ‘Ever.’
Hector gestured at the Twatmobile. ‘What the hell?’
‘Perdita and the Twat are here.’
‘Yes, I’d gathered that much. The question is why? They’re invited to dinner, not lunch.’
‘Perdita claims to have got it wrong.’
‘What have you done with them?’
‘I left them in the library on the pretext of getting lunch.’
The brothers were looking at each other as if psyching themselves up for an appalling ordeal.
‘This is bad,’ said Hector, unnecessarily.
‘Yep,’ said Damian.
‘If they stay until, say, eleven –’
‘– that’s ten hours you’re going to have to get through without decking him. I almost wish I could stick around, but sadly I’m going to have to go soon. Now, in fact.’
‘I thought this shindig didn’t start until three.’
‘I need to buy a present for the Mairs en route.’
‘And that’s going to take two hours?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well, you’re not driving.’ Hector glanced up at the sky. ‘Chris will take you, and I’ll pick you up – that can be my get out of jail free card.’ He turned to Claire. ‘I suppose we’d better get lunch sorted. Perhaps you could make your Icelandic soup?’
‘Claire has enough to do with those pheasants to prepare,’ said Damian breezily. ‘I’ve made some soup. Leek and potato. It’s simmering. Thought you could have it with garlic bread, then fruit and ice cream. Would that do?’
‘God, yes. Perdita will probably only have a thimbleful of soup anyway. And maybe a grape.’ Hector was frowning over at the Twatmobile. ‘Claire, you may as well have a few hours off – dinner won’t be until seven. I’ll run you over to the cottage with all your shopping –’
‘Oh, no, that’s fine, I can take the shortcut.’
She would have a snooze for a couple of hours, then come back and start plucking.
‘Stop procrastinating and get in there,’ said Damian to Hector. ‘Twatface has some fascinating expert opinion to impart about Black John.’ He looked at Claire. ‘Black John, in the library – putatively a portrait of one of our ancestors. One of the more interesting ones. But according to the Twat, the portrait’s a Victorian fake – or, at a push, Georgian.’
‘Is he an art expert?’
‘He’s an art dealer.’
Interesting. Very interesting. A lot of dodgy dealers were fences for stolen artwork. Was this rather overdone antipathy of Hector’s towards ‘the Twat’ a bluff? Had she just stumbled on a link in the chain of people handling the stuff he stole? Was Weber maybe even here to make a collection, hence his and Perdita’s ‘early’ arrival?
‘Not sure that’s quite the same thing,’ Damian added.
‘It isn’t,’ said Hector heavily. ‘What the hell does the Twat know about Sixteenth Century Scottish ar
t?’
‘Nothing. But that’s not going to stop him delivering a ten-hour lecture on it.’
◆◆◆
The tiny piece of twig she’d left trapped in the front door was lying on the step.
Claire set down the shopping bags and stood, perfectly still, all her senses alert. She could hear a bird flapping in the trees; a snapping and cracking from off through the wood... Then silence.
Heart pounding, she looked quickly in through the front-facing sitting room and kitchen windows. Both rooms seemed empty. She ran around between the side of the house and the garage to the paved area at the back. A scraping noise brought her up short, but it was just the branches of the trees skittering on the roof of the wood shed where they brushed it.
The rear-facing kitchen and sitting room windows offered alternative views of the rooms – definitely empty. She crept to the back door and peered in through the four small panes set into it. The back hall was clear, and there was no movement on the stairs. She stooped to unlace her boots, kicked them off, and carefully turned the key in the lock. Then she eased the door open and slipped through it, her stocking feet making no noise on the flagstone floor.
She left the door wide open behind her: her escape route, should she need it.
She stood in the claustrophobic little back hall and listened.
Silence.
Her imagination conjured a man, standing equally silently in the bathroom, waiting –
She quickly stepped through the open door, taking in the little room in a swift, wide-eyed sweep, ready any moment to turn and run for the back door.
But there was no one there.
The darkening sky outside had plunged the cottage into gloom, and as she crept through the kitchen and across the hall and into the sitting room, she found herself straining to see into the shadowed corners, behind the sofa, into the space at the end of the sideboard, the perfect size for a crouching man...
She knew someone was here – or had been here. She could feel them, in the air, with that sixth sense she’d developed that probably had something to do with sounds and smells too faint for the conscious mind to pick up on but which alerted you, at some deeper level, to an unseen presence.
She yanked opened the cupboard door in the hall and an arm reached for her –
But it was only the sleeve of a coat, moving in the draught of air she’d created by opening the door so quickly.
Breathe.
Back through the kitchen, moving noiselessly, balanced on her toes, her whole body ready for fight or flight, heart going like the clappers.
No one in the little back bedroom.
Okay.
Upstairs.
But for a long moment she just stood staring upwards, straining her ears. Climbing those steep, narrow stairs, she’d be at her most vulnerable. And once up there, if someone was to come up behind her, she’d be trapped.
Just do it.
The second step creaked. Loudly.
Hell! She ran up the stairs, into first her own bedroom and then the other one.
Clear.
She was breathing as if she’d just run a marathon. She went to the little dormer window in her room and stood with her hands on the windowsill, looking out at the trees that surrounded the cottage.
Someone had been in here.
And they must either have had access to a key, or picked the lock. There was no sign of a break-in, and nothing had been obviously disturbed.
It had started to snow, she realised; fat flakes were dropping past the window, surprisingly quickly. She’d better get the bags of clothes inside. She’d left them on the doorstep. But as she crossed the landing, she saw that there were little pieces of debris on the bare floorboards. Dead insects and bits of grot.
She looked up.
The hatch to the attic was directly overhead. It must have been opened, and in the process gunk had been disturbed and fallen to the floor beneath.
Okay.
She ran back down the stairs to the kitchen and found the heavy torch she’d brought with her in one of the drawers. Then she ran back up the stairs. Adrenaline pumped again as she reached up to the catch and yanked the hatch open, jumping back, scanning the dark square above her head in the light of the torch. There was a pull-down ladder. She yanked it down, extended it until it clicked, and shouted: ‘Okay, you may as well come out.’
Silence.
She waited a minute. Two.
Then in a rush, she was up the ladder and sweeping the beam of the torch around the tiny attic. Nobody up here. It was little more than a crawl space – the bedrooms were in the eaves, so the available space above them was very limited. It was floored, and there was what looked like a water tank, but other than that it was empty.
They’d been up here, though. Whoever had been in the house had been in this attic.
Why?
She returned to the front door and retrieved the bags from the doorstep, her eye caught by the tiny piece of twig lying there. She should check her other ‘traps’ too. The first was a small pile of A4 pages on the kitchen table, just innocuous recipes she’d printed off the internet, but hopefully appealing to anyone wanting to snoop through her things. She’d aligned the top sheet so it was slightly offset, exposing a long triangle of the sheet below, the edges of which she’d marked with two small dots.
It was exactly as she’d left it.
The other ‘trap’ was a notebook left on top of a sheet of paper on the bedside table in her bedroom. Again, she’d used a biro to mark its corners on the paper with tiny dots. And again, it hadn’t been moved.
She sat on the bed, looking out at the falling snow, shivering despite the new jacket she was still wearing. Had he organised this? Hector? Had he taken her off shopping, bestowed on her all this bounty, just so the coast would be clear for one of his henchmen to search Pond Cottage? Theoretically they could have searched it while she was at work at the big house, but they couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t pop back for some reason and catch them. Taking her off to Ballater had got her properly out of the way.
She took out her phone and called Phil.
After she’d outlined what had happened, and they’d discussed the need for a couple of camera traps to cover the front and back of the house:
‘I don’t like this,’ he said.
‘But it wasn’t anything to do with me. None of my things were touched. This is someone searching the place where John lived – I’m sure of it. Searching for evidence he may have secreted somewhere, or...’ How to put this?
‘Or what?’
She had to just come out and say it. ‘Or loot. You know you were saying you thought John was getting... a bit too comfortable, maybe, in his Chimp persona? A bit too close to Hector and the others? Is it possible he might have been sucked in to criminality?’
Phil sighed. ‘Have you uncovered anything to suggest that he was?’
‘No. Not really.’ Other than the fact that they were just so appealing, those two brothers. It would be all too easy to fall under the spell of their particular brand of charm.
‘All this is pure speculation,’ said Phil.
‘I know.’
She was playing with one of the zips on a pocket of her new jacket. Could this whole edifice DCI Stewart had constructed, the whole Hector-is-a-criminal theory, be built on sand? There was no evidence against him. No evidence. Had DCI Stewart ever even considered the possibility that this might be because no evidence existed; that Hector Forbes was entirely innocent?
‘The one indisputable fact,’ she said slowly, ‘is that John didn’t report that he’d found any evidence against Hector Forbes. Could we be making a mountain out of a molehill here?’
Phil sighed again. ‘I agree it’s a possibility. Campbell has a bee in his bonnet about this guy, certainly, on the basis of flimsy evidence. But I’ve seldom known him to be wrong about this kind of thing. That being said, obviously this investigation needs to be approached like any other – we shouldn’t clo
se down all other avenues other than the one leading to Hector Forbes being responsible for any act of criminality that occurs in a twenty-mile radius.’
She let out a long breath. ‘Yeah... This “intruder” – it could just have been a tradesman or an estate worker letting themselves in for some reason. Maybe it was just someone checking the water tank in the attic, or... insulating the pipes or something. It’s started to snow. The forecast is for lots of snow, apparently.’ She stood and went to the window to watch the rapidly falling flakes, creating shifting veil upon veil between her and the trees. ‘Another point against the theory that Hector is looking for evidence squirrelled away by John – he’s had months to search Pond Cottage while it was lying empty. While it was being refurbished.’
‘True. It would make sense for him to make sure the search was completed before you were installed. But human beings aren’t always sensible.’
‘I can’t see Hector Forbes being that disorganised.’
‘The chances are that Campbell is right about this guy, though, Claire. You have to remember that.’
When she’d finished the call, she deleted the record of it from the call history – a necessary precaution every time he or the DCI called her, as was never leaving her phone unattended. As she put her new clothes away in the wardrobe, she acknowledged that Phil was right. The probability was that Hector was exactly what DCI Stewart suspected him of being. She remembered, once again, that crack about Chimp’s unquiet spirit slopping about in the toilet bowl...
Underneath the easy charm, Hector Forbes was not a nice guy.
It was possible that John had ‘gone native’ and told Hector that he was a cop... and Hector had decided he couldn’t take the risk of a crisis of conscience, and removed him from the equation. Another possibility was that John had been straight, Hector had found out he was a cop, and killed him before he could report on what he’d found. Either way, Hector would need to make sure there was no evidence against him hidden in Pond Cottage. Perhaps they’d already searched the place during the refurbishment and found nothing, but new possibilities for hiding places had just occurred to him?