A Stranger's House

by Clare Chase

  She looked angry, but Nate knew he was right.

  ‘In the meantime, do me a favour? Bolt the doors, front and back, when you’re alone in the house. I’m not patronising you. I’m planning to do the same.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  In a way, the run-in with Nate had been a good thing. I’d been furious at the way he’d spoken to me, but at least it had put some distance between us. The fierce look in his blue eyes came back to me again. He’d got past the way I’d behaved the day before; business had taken over. Eventually, Samson reappeared, ready to be chauffeured home, and Nate and I managed to stay out of each other’s way for the next few hours.

  By the time I went out to buy a paper that afternoon someone had laid flowers, wrapped in cellophane, by the front iron railings. Word must be getting around. The wind was still high and the bouquet shifted in a sudden gust, so I propped it up in the lee of the front steps. A couple on the Common looked at me curiously as I walked away up the path.

  At the newsagents on Fitzroy Street I saw Damien had made the front page of the local daily, with promises of further coverage on pages six to eight. I paid up, tucked the paper into my shoulder bag and walked back, past the elegant townhouses on Maid’s Causeway and along Midsummer Lane.

  Paul Mathewson was standing outside Oswald House, facing away from me, his shoulders hunched against the wind as he did up his jacket.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, and he turned in my direction. ‘How’s Emily doing?’

  His look said it all. ‘Completely distraught. I’ve just left her. She’s bent double on the sofa now and I can’t get anything out of her. When I arrived she was still upstairs, making the most pitiful noise. It went right through me.’ He shivered. ‘She sounded like a wounded animal.’

  Paul looked dreadful too, his face white and pinched, eyes rather blank. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I don’t actually know what to do.’

  I didn’t imagine the short course Fi said he’d taken covered offering solace following the murder of the client’s heart’s desire. ‘Presumably the university’s counselling service will step in to give you some backup now,’ I said, ‘if Emily’s willing to see them.’

  He nodded. ‘I think I’ve talked her round. And they’ll be much more adept at providing what’s needed, but all the same …’ He paused, his eyes wide. ‘I don’t know that they’ll get through to her. I mean we both know, don’t we, that Damien Newbold would only ever have caused her more pain.’ He looked to me for support and I nodded. ‘But she can’t see that at the moment, and she feels as though her life’s over.’

  I put a hand on his arm; he looked so lost. ‘It’s such early days. It’s going to take time.’

  He shook his head. ‘I can see that makes sense. But I’m starting to realise that his death’s actually taken away her chance to move forward. She’ll probably always think they could have been happy together, if only they’d had the chance.’

  ‘Whether she thinks that or not, she’ll still come to terms with it, eventually. She’s young. It will always be a dreadful incident in her life, but she’ll still grow up and blossom.’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve done all the right things,’ I said.

  He looked at me as though he’d realised who I was for the first time, like someone coming out of a trance. ‘Thanks. I’m sorry, it’s just that it’s hard not to get involved, you know?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Once you’re on someone’s case you feel you should be able to wave a magic wand and come up with all the right answers. And students often think you’ll be able to do just that, against all the odds. When I find I can’t – well, it just makes me feel bad.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s only natural,’ I said, smiling at him, ‘but not justified. What’s just happened isn’t exactly run-of-the-mill stuff, is it? I think most support staff would be somewhat challenged, under the circumstances.’

  The ghost of a smile crossed his lips and he took a deep breath. ‘True.’ He put a hand on my arm for a moment. ‘Thanks for listening.’ Then he got on his bike, and cycled slowly away.

  Back inside the house, I made a cup of tea and spread the newspaper out on the kitchen table. The front page covered all the most important details of the murder. Damien Newbold’s body had been found at eight-thirty on Tuesday 9th June by Elizabeth Edmunds, owner of the cottage where he’d been staying. She’d apparently arranged to meet him there for a drink – yeah, and the rest – and had let herself in with her own key. The body had been towards the back of the house, in the kitchen, slumped on the floor. Damien Newbold had been beaten over the head – the police were guessing that a hammer (or similar) might have been the murder weapon, though nothing had been found.

  The victim had been at work until six that evening, so the time of death was somewhere between six-thirty or so, when he would have arrived back at the cottage in Little Boxham, and eight-thirty when he was found.

  I took a sip of my tea and scanned the article to see if there’d been any sign of a break-in. Hmm. Apparently not. The police thought that he must have known his assailant, and have invited them in quite willingly. When he was attacked he’d been in the process of getting glasses out of a cupboard below the work surface, enabling the murderer to take him by surprise, and from above.

  There was a quote from DI Johnson which read: ‘This was a vicious and frenzied attack. The person who committed the crime is therefore even more likely to have made mistakes than someone operating in a cold and detached manner. I would urge the public to search their memories for anything relevant they might have seen at any stage on Tuesday. It’s important that they should come forward to the police with their input, however insignificant they think their information might be.’

  Vicious and frenzied. The awful thing was, I couldn’t imagine Damien Newbold having been killed in any other way. He’d taken such pains to make sure each of his human instruments were strung up nice and tight and then twisted the tuning keys further and further, almost as though he wanted to see which one would snap first.

  There was a picture of the cottage he’d been renting, and the caption described it as ‘an idyllic hideaway turned house of horror’. It looked as though it might be relatively isolated. The photograph showed a field to one side. Would Elizabeth Edmunds ever be able to let it out again?

  The article noted that the police were keeping an open mind as to the motive for the killing, but did confirm that Mr Newbold’s laptop was missing. It went on to note that unconfirmed rumours had been circulating recently about a new discovery he had made, which might be worth a lot of money, and that some industry commentators were speculating – off the record – that this could have provided a motive for the crime.

  Would someone become vicious and frenzied when killing in a case of industrial espionage, though? That didn’t sound right.

  The inside coverage really went to town. There was a box containing information about Damien Newbold’s working life, with the headline: ‘Damien Newbold – Impassioned Genius.’ They’d used the same awards photo that was framed in the drawing room. The article estimated how much money he’d earned TomorrowTech as its head of research, and talked about his impact on what it termed ‘Silicon Fen’ and the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon.’ There was a quote from the Chief Executive of TomorrowTech which talked about Newbold’s extraordinary creativity and vice-like mind, which could latch onto any problem and produce a result. I noticed that he hadn’t felt moved to mention any attractive personal qualities. The article said he was unable to comment on the rumour about Damien Newbold’s latest discovery.

  I left off reading for a moment to think. What would Damien Newbold have been like to work with, when it came down to it? What if he’d schemed against colleagues who got in his way, and then bragged to one of them about some new discovery? Perhaps then the frenzied attack might be more believable.

  Underneath the article on TomorrowTech came one about Newbold’s social connections
with the headline ‘Affairs of the Heart.’ Yuck. And there was a photograph of Damien and Maggie Cook outside some kind of premiere in London; the opening of Why I Loved Larry, apparently. It didn’t sound familiar, but there was lots in the article about Maggie’s acting career and her ongoing starring role in the TV show Mike’s Friday.

  It described their affair as ‘volatile’ and told of a very public row they had had at the Savoy Grill, where Maggie had tipped a glass of red wine over his head and he’d slapped her across the face. They’d managed to produce a photo to prove it: Damien, still seated, his hair plastered flat on his head and wine dripping down a pristine white shirt. The thought made me shiver. Knowing what I did of his personality, I could barely begin to imagine his reaction to such public humiliation.

  The article also described Damien as ‘popular’ with women – presumably something they’d deduced by the number he seemed to have had affairs with, a fact that might also have made him unpopular with each individual woman, as the affairs came to light. Next to this bit of commentary there was a photograph captioned ‘Elizabeth Edmunds’. Now I understood why the police had recognised the fourth woman in Damien Newbold’s nude collection; it was the lady who owned the cottage in Little Boxham. Oddly, she was standing in exactly the same position in the newspaper photo as she was in her portrait – looking down and to one side – but in this instance her hand came right up to cover her eyes. There was no comment on her relationship with Damien, but the positioning of the image, next to the ‘Affairs of the Heart’ section, gave a huge hint.

  They’d also produced a section on Little Boxham itself, saying that Damien’s was the first recorded murder in the village since 1794, and talking about the cruel intrusion of violent death into a society more used to cricket on the village green and tea at the vicarage.

  Finally, they moved onto Damien Newbold’s family, noting that he was the son of 1960s society beauty Bella Carrington and renowned Cambridge academic Harry Newbold. Under a ‘Troubled Youth’ sub-heading they went on to say that Damien had been an orphan by the time he was seventeen, when his mother had been killed in an horrific car accident. Apparently there had been some speculation at the time that it might have been suicide.

  That was something new. Where had that rumour come from?

  Then the section went on to talk about the boarding school Samson had mentioned. Apparently it had been a place of extreme austerity that hadn’t drawn the line at beating sixth formers, on top of which, Newbold had found it hard to fit in because he’d arrived so late in his school career. The newspaper had done its homework, managing to track down some old school friend to say what an awful time Damien had had there. The classmate, one Max Williamson, was quoted as saying: ‘I think his treatment made him all the more determined to succeed in life. Every time someone got the better of him you could see the look of determination on his face. He was vowing to get his own back.’

  Nate nipped back to Two Wells Farm after he’d dropped Samson off in Newmarket. As soon as he’d got rid of him, he’d opened the windows of the Volvo as far as they’d go, but the smell of stale booze, cigarettes and aftershave lingered.

  He spent some time dealing with a pile of letters that had turned up at home – it was amazing how many of his clients still preferred to communicate that way – and then did some intensive placating of Speck before he headed back to Cambridge. Nate wanted to make sure he was in residence again by evening, but he knew Ruby would be glad of his absence until then.

  When he let himself back in to River House, it felt strangely still, and he wondered if she was out, except the alarm hadn’t been set. He stood in the hall for a moment and, at last, heard the faint creak of a floorboard up above.

  In the kitchen, he found a copy of the local paper she must have bought, got himself a beer and sat down to scan the murder coverage. There was a photograph of the fourth nude from Damien Newbold’s wall. So that had been Elizabeth Edmunds, the woman he’d been renting the house from. Given their likely relationship, perhaps it had been a case of borrowing rather than paying for his accommodation. And if she was a current lover, that added up to quite a collection.

  Nate thought again about Newbold’s words when he’d seen Ruby’s photograph. She looked perfect. And yet he’d gone ahead and served her up for him anyway. Newbold had played games with her, clearly wanting to control her, just as he had all the rest. Not by seducing her, but with Newbold it seemed as though it was all driven by the same impetus: the desire to get women where he wanted them. What had made him like that? And was it one of them who had finally taken back control?

  A sound from the hall made Nate look up, and at that moment Ruby came in. She raised an eyebrow. ‘I see you’re just as bitten by this mystery as I am, underneath it all.’

  ‘I never said I wasn’t. I expect half of Cambridge is poring over all this …’ He tapped the paper. ‘… wondering who did it, and yes, sure, I’m probably all the more curious because of my background. But trawling through the details, and speculating about it, is different from investigating. Do you want a beer?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Ruby, I think I’ve made us both being here impossible. I meant what I said: this is a two person job now, but that second person doesn’t have to be me. I could call a female member of my team to take over.’

  ‘But it’s not really a two person job, is it?’ she said, her tone fierce. ‘You just need one professional. You’ve kept me on out of charity, and I’m well aware of it.’

  ‘That’s certainly not true at the moment. I’ve got a business to run, and commitments during the day. The house would be unattended for far too long if you weren’t here.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘If you don’t believe me, think about it. Do you imagine I was just sitting at home, kicking my heels each day before I moved in?’

  She made a face. ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t ask any of my regulars to watch the house of a murdered man on their own.’ She was still silent. ‘So, do you want me to swap someone in?’

  At last she shook her head. ‘There’s no reason to. We were both overwrought last night. And I was drunk too, for that matter. None of it meant a thing. Given that, I’m sure we can get along okay. I was just still smarting because you told me off earlier.’

  And she turned on her heel, and walked out of the room.

  Great. Nate downed the rest of his beer, and sat there feeling ridiculous.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In spite of the awkwardness between us, it felt safer when Nate and I were both at River House together. Unfortunately, as he’d pointed out, he kept having to go out on business which meant the moments of calm were few and far between. I was convinced he was partly just avoiding me. Either way, he was always back by six in the evening, ready to do his guard dog bit again.

  During the day, if I was alone, I fidgeted, not knowing whether it was better to be in or out. It was stupid, but when I went into the garden I kept worrying that the back gate might open – there was no lock on it – revealing Samson on the other side.

  Being properly out was okay. Then I knew if he turned up at least I wouldn’t be there to face him. I was lying in bed on Saturday morning, wide awake, and worrying, so I decided to get up and go for a run along the river. I’d already heard Nate go out. The day was bright, with mist just shifting off from the grass on the Common, and all the signs were that it would be hot later.

  I ran up towards Jesus Lock. To my left a tramp searched an overflowing litter bin, his grizzled head hung low over an open bag, ready to store anything useful. A woman on a moored narrow boat to my right was out on deck, soothing a fretful baby. The roof of her vessel was covered in terracotta pots spilling over with aubretia, a mass of purples, pinks and white. It looked idyllic, but I could imagine what hard work it must be. What would it be like in winter, when the baby wanted to get up at five?

  Past the lock, a city council worker was clearin
g rubbish on Jesus Green, addressing an area where the imprint of a group had been left: a circle of burger wrappers, empty drinks cans and cigarette ends.

  Up on the boardwalk the punting stations were still quiet, but I tried to focus on the beauty of Magdalene College and take an interest in the other comings and goings. A couple of drunks were following a cleaner into the loos on Quayside, intent on a good-natured chat she probably didn’t want to have.

  But the tapestry of Cambridge life was losing its effect. I didn’t want to jog through the busy city streets and, in any case, I was running out of steam. It was time to turn round and head back to River House. The thought made me feel instantly sick; clammy tendrils of fear, born of paranoia, clutched at my insides. Samson could be there now, waiting for me. And each time I let myself back in that would be the case. Stupid. He had no reason to visit, and I had found nothing damning about him.

  All the same, Nate’s words of warning had hit home, once I’d got over my irritation and embarrassment. From what I’d seen of Samson, it was entirely possible that he might have killed his brother, even if there was no positive evidence. He obviously had a lot to gain financially, and there was clearly no love lost between them. My mind strayed back to the photograph albums. No secret, of course, that Damien had been older than Samson, but when you looked at those images you could see what a practical difference that age gap had made. When Samson was seven, Damien had been a teenager, his mother’s confidante, learning to drive, the apple of her eye. That was the kind of dynamic that could foster serious resentment.

  But then Damien’s bond with his mother had broken down. Had it been the photographer, Nico, who had caused that dreadful rift? And if the relationship was in ruins, perhaps that might have ironed out any resentment on Samson’s part. But then I thought of what I knew of him, of his sly smile and the calculating look in his eye as he’d taken stock of the goods in Damien’s house. What was it he’d said about the things his mother had left in her will? Something about Damien having got ‘all the good stuff’. If Samson had been resentful of Damien, I was willing to bet it was over who had been left what, rather than a mother’s love.