by James Oswald
‘What are we looking for?’ Harrison echoed his thoughts. She’d taken a few paces in the other direction from him, as if to skirt around the ruins to the back door along the path worn by countless recent visitors. Now she stood uncertain, since he’d not followed her.
‘Anything that was missed before. Some better clue as to who she was, and why someone would want to kill her. Too much to hope forensics missed a hidden security camera.’ He’d meant it as a joke, but Harrison’s face suggested she’d taken it seriously. He shooed her off in the direction she’d been going. ‘You go that way, I’ll meet you at the door.’
The side of the house was taken up by an overgrown vegetable and fruit garden. Once-tidy gravel paths linked a series of raised beds, but the weeds were reclaiming it all. McLean didn’t know much about gardening, but he managed to identify some caterpillar ravaged cabbages and what he suspected might have been brussels sprouts in among the grass and thistles, although they were purple rather than the green things he’d hated so much at boarding school. A couple of the tall sprout shoots had been broken in half, and the more he looked around, the more he saw evidence of careless feet trampling the ground. Had forensics been over this part of the scene? Stupid question, really. Of course they would have, but a week after the event when the rains would have washed any useful evidence away.
An old wooden lean-to shed had been built on to the gable wall of the house on this side. Protected from the fire by thick stone walls, it had remained unscathed. In it, McLean knew from the forensic report, were gardening tools, a potting bench beneath a window that looked out on to the garden, an elderly wind-up radio tuned to Radio 4. The details had all been meticulously logged. He didn’t remember any reference to the little cat-flap cut into the base of the shed door itself. Maybe because the door had been open then and now it was closed.
He opened it, stepped inside. There was something about the quietness of the place that calmed him. It reminded him of the ramshackle shed in his own garden. Not as it was now, but as it had been when he’d been a boy. Back when it had been the domain of Bill Bradford the gardener. Many was the time McLean had ended up in there, watching as the old man patiently dibbed seeds into pots of fresh compost, or rolled his horrible-smelling cigarettes. Like that shed, this one was a place of old tin boxes, neatly stacked terracotta pots, hand tools and bundles of bamboo stakes. The workbench under the window had been cleared, but time and lack of use had covered it in dust, spiderwebs and the husks of half-eaten insects. This wasn’t a place often visited.
A series of shelves on the opposite wall held ancient boxes of fertiliser, fish, blood and bone, more tools of the gardener’s trade. No slug pellets, poisons or weedkillers as far as he could see, but there on the bottom shelf was an empty food bowl, and beside it a bag of cat food. A pile of old hessian sacks bore a dent in the shape and size of a cat. When he ran his fingers over the surface, they came away with a few short black hairs stuck to them.
‘Thought you were going inside, sir.’
The voice startled him, and McLean almost banged his head on the upper shelves as he stood up in a hurry. Harrison stared at him from the doorway, her expression one of concern.
‘Anyone know what happened to the cat?’ he asked. Harrison’s face was answer enough.
‘What cat?’
McLean pointed at the bowl, the food, the makeshift bed, but Harrison was already pulling out her phone. She stepped away from the shed, either for a better signal or because the conversation with the incident room was likely to be embarrassing. He took another look around the shed, but saw nothing of interest, nothing that suggested it might be a clue as to why someone would come here in the night, beat an old woman to within an inch of her death, then finish the job with petrol and a match.
‘No mention of a cat in any of the reports, sir,’ Harrison said as he stepped out into the garden a moment later. McLean carefully closed and latched the shed door. He looked out across the abandoned vegetable patch, then up past the trees to the slate-grey sky overhead. Fat raindrops started to fall as if they’d been waiting for his upturned face. He turned away, pulling up the collar on his jacket against a sudden chill.
‘Come on. Let’s go have a look inside.’
A smell of damp pervaded the interior of the house as McLean stepped in through the front door. Instinctively, he reached out and took hold of the nearest steel prop, checking it was still firmly holding up the first floor before ducking under the lintel and into the narrow hall. The room where Cecily Slater had died was at the front of the house, he knew, but that was also where the worst of the collapse had happened. No point going in there, so he turned left and stepped into the kitchen.
In many ways it reminded him of his own kitchen, even if it was considerably smaller and the range cooker appeared to run on wood rather than expensive heating oil like his Aga. Marginally more environmentally friendly, maybe. The cupboards were of a similar vintage, handmade by some long-forgotten carpenter and far removed from the sleek designs he had seen in some of the glossy magazines Emma occasionally left casually open around the place. Twin green lines stained the deep Belfast sink, the marks of years of drips from a pair of ancient brass taps. McLean would have bet good money the pipes feeding them were made of lead.
He resisted the urge to bend down and look, instead going through the cupboards one by one. It was exactly as he might have expected to find in the kitchen of a lone old woman who had lived here for many years. A few pots and pans; chipped plates and cracked cups from a set that once had been both elegant and expensive; some sad-looking vegetables that had probably been past their best even before the fire; packets of dried pasta, beans, rice and enough oats to sink a battleship. Drawers yielded cutlery, cooking utensils, the sort of bric-a-brac that got put somewhere in case it might be useful someday. But then didn’t everyone have a useful drawer? He certainly did; it was the first place he ever looked for anything, even if it was rarely the last.
‘Find anything?’ Harrison asked as she appeared in the doorway. McLean went to shut the final drawer, but something caught his eye. A length of shiny red ribbon glowed as if someone had shone a torchlight on it. He reached out and picked it up, finding that it was tied around an old iron key.
‘Not exactly.’ He held up the ribbon and watched the key twist under its own weight. ‘I don’t suppose we know what this is for?’
Harrison’s shrug was answer enough, but McLean kept a hold of the ribbon and key as he pushed the drawer closed and went back out into the hall. The rainclouds had cast a gloom over the clearing, and what little light there was struggled to illuminate the hall. Even so, he could see there would be no going upstairs. A jumble of half-burned rafters and crumbled plaster blocked the way on to what might once have been a landing.
‘From what I’m told, she didn’t use the upstairs, sir.’ Harrison correctly read his gaze and pointed to a couple of doors on the opposite side of the hall to the kitchen. ‘There’s a bedroom to the front there, and the bathroom’s next door.’
McLean looked in both of them, but it was obvious the forensics team had been there before him. He caught sight of fingerprint dusting powder here and there, and all the toiletries and brushes had been moved to one end of the dressing table in the bedroom. He stood for a while, trying to imagine a ninety-year-old lady living here on her own, searching for an idea of who Cecily Slater had been, but there was nothing of her in the place. Or at least nothing he could sense.
It was only as he stepped out of the bedroom back into the hall that he noticed the cupboard under the stairs. It was locked, but the keyhole was much the same size as the key he’d found in the kitchen drawer, and when he slotted it in and turned it, the lock clicked and the door swung open. Too dark to see much, but he pulled out a pen torch and clicked it on, scanning the light over the interior.
A mop and bucket, an elderly vacuum cleaner, its flex that brittle fabric
material he remembered from his childhood, two dustpans and brushes hanging from hooks on the back of the door; the little cupboard contained exactly what McLean would have expected it to. There was even a shelf with little pots of shoe polish, Brasso and a neat pile of folded polishing cloths. Wedged in under the stair, he saw an old hazel broom, handmade, its handle shiny with decades of use. He reached in and picked it up, feeling a substantial weight to the thing. A good balance, too.
‘Wow, that’s a proper witches’ broom, right enough. Reckon you could play Quidditch with that.’ Harrison stared at the broom, her mouth slightly open as if it were something far less mundane than a tool for sweeping floors.
‘Quidditch?’ McLean asked, even though he knew what she was talking about.
‘You know, sir. Harry Potter?’
‘Here you go then, Hermione. Take it outside for a spin.’ He thrust the broom at her. Startled, Harrison took it in one hand. He thought she would underestimate its weight, let it fall to the floor. He had, after all. But the moment she touched it, her hand jerked upwards a little, then steadied. She swung the handle around until she held it in both hands, but drew the line at straddling it, which was just as well. He might have tolerated that from a constable, but never a sergeant.
Turning back to the cupboard, McLean saw what looked like an old shoebox lying on the ground under the lowest stair tread. It had been hidden behind the broom, no doubt forgotten many years before. He crouched, leaned in and fetched it out, seeing as he did so that it was tied up with the same red ribbon as the key. The top of the box was thick with dust, but he could make out handwriting underneath it. He carried the box to the porch, blowing away the dust as best he could. Outside, the rain had strengthened, coming down in stair rods. What was it the Welsh said? Old ladies and sticks? He looked back at Harrison holding her broomstick, then past her to the room where the old lady had died.
‘What is it?’ the detective sergeant asked, although whether she meant the box or his sudden change in expression he had no idea. He wiped away the last of the dust from the box and peered at the writing on the top again. A single word, written in neat ink that had faded over time.
‘Burntwoods?’ Harrison asked as she leaned over his shoulder for a look. ‘What’s Burntwoods?’
‘I have no idea,’ McLean said. Outside the falling rain had begun to roar as it hit the ground and the surrounding trees. ‘But it looks like we’re stuck here for a while, so we might as well have a look.’
13
They took the box back to the kitchen, the only place in the house that had a couple of chairs. Judging by the state of the table, the forensic team had been making use of the facilities while they were here, although McLean wasn’t sure how they’d managed to boil a kettle. The range had a cold, dead feel to it, and the electricity had been cut off when the collapsing back wall had snapped the overhead cable bringing power to the house.
‘Could really do with a little more light,’ McLean said as he carefully untied the red ribbon and took the lid off the box. Rain clattered against the window, and the sky had turned almost black. Harrison dug into her pocket and pulled out her phone, tapping at the screen until the flash on the back lit up. The pale yellow light wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
‘There you go, sir. Hope it doesn’t kill the battery.’
McLean grunted his thanks, then turned his attention once more to the box. Inside lay a collection of papers, photographs, letters written in neat copperplate handwriting, a few ancient invoices and some yellowing newspaper cuttings. He picked up a postcard showing a sepia print image of the seafront at Carnoustie, at least that was what it said it was. Flipping it over, he saw that it had been addressed to C. Slater, the address not Bairnfather Estate, but Burntwoods in Angus. No post code, and the stamp would have excited many a collector – this card had been sent sometime before the Second World War, when Cecily Slater would have been a young girl.
‘Can you read that? My eyes can’t cope.’ McLean held the card up for Harrison to see, relieved that she, too, had to squint to make out the message written in faded ink. He could kid himself he didn’t need spectacles for a little while yet.
‘Not sure, sir. Looks like “Came to . . .” something “you but could not . . .” something.’ She held her phone up to the card, snapped a picture of it, then pinched and zoomed to enlarge the text. ‘Ah, that’s better. “Came to visit you but could not enter the place. Seems my kind are not allowed. Trust you are being treated well by the witches and that you will soon be able to come home. Father and I both miss you terribly. Your ever loving brother, Archie.” Well, that’s as clear as mud. Witches?’
McLean took the card back and stared at the handwriting again. Without the benefit of modern technology, he still couldn’t make out much of what it said, but there was something about that one word that stood out. He ran his finger lightly over the text, feeling for any irregularities, perhaps a sign that something had been erased or altered. A full forensic examination would be more revealing, but he didn’t think it would be a good use of their scarce resources. There was nothing particularly odd about the postcard other than its message, and that might simply have been the way two siblings spoke to each other back when the card had been written. Eighty years ago, give or take. If it was a clue to anything, it was a very cold one.
‘Archie would presumably be Sir Archibald Slater, Tenth Lord Bairnfather.’ Harrison was peering at her phone again, which meant the torch light wasn’t shining in a particularly helpful direction. McLean was beginning to wonder whether there was any point to searching through this box at all, apart from killing some time until the rain eased off.
‘According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1925 and died in 1984. Speculation is it was AIDS, although the family denied it and the rumours he was gay. The current Lord Bairnfather’s his son, so perhaps he swung both ways.’
‘You know half of the stuff on the internet’s made up, right?’ McLean leafed idly through some of the photographs. There were family pictures, black and white and awkwardly posed. A few showed Bairnfather Hall in an earlier era, a massive coach and horses pulled up in front of the grand entrance. A couple were portraits of young women, perhaps Cecily herself. And tucked almost at random in among the others were a series of pictures of a stately home that made Bairnfather Hall look small by comparison. Granted, McLean wasn’t exactly an expert on the nation’s country mansions, but he didn’t recognise this one at all. The photographs were all black and white, or shades of sepia yellow, and nothing in them suggested any kind of modernity. Perhaps, like many of those places, this one had been demolished when it became too big and too expensive to run.
‘Aye, I know that, sir. Wikipedia’s a good enough place to start, mind. And there’s a lot of stuff here about the Bairnfathers I didn’t know.’
‘Did you know much? I only knew the name, and mostly because of the hotel rather than the family. There was some function I was meant to go to a couple of years back. Meet the politicians and their paymasters kind of thing. Don’t think anybody noticed I wasn’t there.’ Idly, McLean flipped over the last photograph of the mansion. None of the others had been written on, but this one had a brief description in soft pencil. Burntwoods – July 1949. He held it up for Harrison to see. ‘You know anything about this place?’
‘Burntwoods?’ The detective sergeant leaned in close to look at the image. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells. Big old place, isn’t it? How on earth could anyone afford to build places like that? Why on earth would they?’
McLean glanced at the window, aware that the rattle of rain had ceased. The light appeared brighter, as if the heavy clouds had passed over. Time to make a run for the car; he didn’t think they’d find anything more in this cottage.
‘The why of it would be showing off, same as men have always done. See how successful I am. My house is bigger than yours.’ He stood up, put everything back in
the box and closed the lid, then tucked it under his jacket to keep it as dry as possible. ‘As to how they could afford to, well a lot of these places were built by rich merchants looking to do something with all their new-found wealth. And most of that wealth came from trade between Glasgow, Africa and the New World.’
Harrison had put her phone away and was zipping up her jacket, better equipped for this outing than McLean. Her expression was one he had come to recognise as her not knowing what he was talking about but unsure whether she should be asking for clarification.
‘Slaves and sugar, Sergeant. These mansions might have been built by Scottish stonemasons, but they worked on the backs of African slaves and Europe’s sweet tooth.’
It didn’t really matter that the rain had stopped and the clouds begun to part. They still got soaked walking from the old gamekeeper’s cottage back through the trees and down to where McLean’s Alfa Romeo was parked. Fat drops of water fell from the branches, and the tips of the pine needles glistened with it. Impossible to avoid brushing up against wetness with every step. McLean had the shoebox tucked under his jacket to try and protect it as much as possible; everything else was thoroughly rinsed.
‘Knew I should have worn a hat,’ Harrison complained as she peeled off her coat and shook it. McLean popped open the boot of the car and placed the box alongside the stout walking boots he’d forgotten to put on before heading up to the cottage. His raincoat and woolly hat might have been useful too, although it was a bit late now.
‘Let’s just get back to the station. I’ll ask a constable to have a more thorough look at that box, but my best guess is it’s a red herring. Reckon we’ll get further following the money, which means we really need to speak with the current Lord Bairnfather. Given my past history with the rich and famous, that should be fun.’