A Stranger's House

by Clare Chase

  I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I overshot River House. I had to run back across Midsummer Common, using one of the paths that struck off diagonally from Cutter Ferry Bridge up to the row of villas. The single bunch of flowers left in Damien’s memory had grown to a mound, and the sight of them struck me afresh as I ran up to the front door. I wondered which of the contributors had actually known him. Not many, judging by the messages, but Emily had left one: a bunch of white lilies, with a note that said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I was sure she was referring to the final row she’d told me about, but it could obviously be misconstrued. It was clear she was far too shaken to think of that, even for a moment.

  The flowers were forgotten as I stood on the doorstep, holding my breath as I turned my key in the lock, Samson’s image filling my head. But the moment the door swung open I heard the familiar alarm warning tone and keyed in the number, sighing with relief. A sense of my own ridiculousness welled up inside me.

  As I showered I sifted through the information I had so far about Damien, Samson and Bella and my thoughts left me wanting one thing: more information. It was a plus that trying to get it was a harmless way of passing the time whilst I shut myself up, doors bolted, hidden away from the world.

  I set myself up in the kitchen and opened my laptop. Time to Google Damien’s dad, Harry Newbold. Presumably he ought to feature somewhere if he was such a renowned academic as the local paper had claimed. Good. Wikipedia had him. That was a start. I clicked on the link. There was quite a bit. I scrolled down the page to get the measure of what was there: early life, career, personal life – excellent – and a list of publications.

  I decided to save the academic stuff for a spare moment later and went straight to the section that revolved around family.

  ‘Newbold’s ten-year marriage to society beauty Bella Carrington resulted in the birth of two children, Damien in 1964 and Samson in 1970. However, pressure of work increasingly kept the couple apart, and the marriage began to falter as early as 1969. When Newbold was offered a professorship at Harvard in 1971, the marriage was effectively at an end, and a new relationship, with actress Matilda Wentworth, quickly followed. In 1973 Newbold and Bella Carrington were divorced, freeing Newbold to marry Wentworth soon after. The couple were childless.

  ‘Newbold made frequent return visits to England for academic conferences, but never regained full contact with his children, making only one visit back to the family home in 1974.’

  I wondered who had put that detail in. Anyone could add to Wikipedia, I knew. I imagined either Damien or Samson keying in the accusatory words.

  ‘Tragedy struck in 1976, when, aged just 46, Newbold was killed in a plane crash on his way to a conference in Australia. The incident cut short an astoundingly impressive career and left his wife heartbroken.’

  So there it was. Bella had been left to bring up their children alone, and had been doing a good job of it, if the photographs in the album were anything to go by. But then, presumably, Bella had met Nico. That photograph he’d signed with a kiss. The nude in Damien’s bedroom. Oh yes, she’d looked happy, joyous even, but perhaps it was that joyous look – directed at a new man, Nico – that selfish Damien couldn’t take. He’d been his mother’s right-hand man for years, the one she relied on, and then suddenly he’d felt supplanted. Was I being fanciful? But that was the way it looked from the photographs. Not just the adoring way in which Bella had looked at her older son pre-Nico, but also the expression in his eyes. As though she’d somehow put him in charge after his father had left. That might have changed when a new lover arrived on the scene, and I was quite sure he wouldn’t have taken demotion lightly.

  Poor Bella. Deserted by horrible Harry, she had remained a devoted mother, holding things together for her family, but all the time she’d been unwittingly building Damien’s conviction that he was top dog. And then she’d seen her chance of happiness: the loving Nico, ready to adore her, to help with the burdens she’d shouldered for so long, and instead of being happy for her, Damien hadn’t wanted to share his mother with another man. By the look of things she hadn’t let him get his own way, and he’d never forgiven her for it.

  What about Bella? What had happened to her? I went to fetch the 1980–1985 photograph album and brought it back to the table. Throughout the 1980 section there were more of the reversed photographs and then, late in 1981, they stopped. When Damien was seventeen; when Bella had died.

  Suddenly I heard a knocking from outside. A woman was standing at the door of Oswald House. She was glamorous – I could tell that, even from behind. The sort of person who always dresses with the opposite sex in mind. Slit skirt, but classy, not tarty; expensive looking. She had a neat waterfall of platinum-blonde hair, behaving exactly as it should in a well-controlled bob. It was Fi who let her in.

  I turned back to the photo album. How far should I go? I’d already eased out one picture. I got up to get the sharp knife from the drawer again, hesitating for a moment. What with this and peeking at next door’s visitors, I really was letting my nosiness run away with me. I hoped Steph would agree that I wasn’t normally this bad. But under the circumstances it seemed only reasonable to try to find out the background to this business. After all, I was the one who might have to deal with Samson at any moment. The more knowledge I had of his background, the better prepared I’d feel.

  With the image of Nate in my head, his blue eyes boring into mine, appalled at my behaviour, I set to work, but in the end I wished I hadn’t.

  I’d Googled Nico again, to check the date he’d died, and then homed in on November 1981 in the album. It was horrible. The first photo I investigated was of Bella with the children, caught on camera as she struggled to carry on with normal life, but the sadness in her eyes was like nothing I’d ever seen. I only looked at a couple more after that: one where she was standing alone in the snow in what was clearly the back garden here in Cambridge, and one that someone had taken of her and the children. Damien was looking up at her in much the same way as he had in the pre-Nico pictures, but although she held Samson’s hand, I had the impression that she was hardly aware that either of them was there.

  And then what about the car crash the newspaper had mentioned, and the possibility that it had been suicide? The woman pictured certainly looked utterly without hope, but I was sure she would still have hung on for the sake of her children.

  Of course, I hadn’t Googled Bella. I tried it then, and found she was actually mentioned on Nico’s Wikipedia page as well as on Harry’s. I’d been so caught up in the chase previously that I’d only read the first paragraph. Under a section on his personal life, there was information on ‘a passionate and deeply happy love affair with divorcee, Bella Newbold, cut tragically short when Nico succumbed to cancer’. And there, as far as the Internet was concerned, both his and her story ended.

  And I had no way I could think of for getting at the truth.

  I jumped about a foot when the door knocker went; a loud peremptory sound of someone who didn’t want to be kept waiting. My heart thumped as I walked across the hall. Through the spyhole I could now see the front half of the same woman who’d knocked on the door of Oswald House earlier. Viewing her at this angle confirmed what I’d gleaned from her rear view. Good looking but hard with it, showing a carefully polished exterior. I guessed she must be in her mid- to late-forties – her hair had been touched up perhaps – but her skin had very few lines and I imagined her figure was still as it had been when she was eighteen.

  What on earth did she want? Better open up and find out.

  She smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and introduced herself. ‘Saskia Amos. I gather from my daughter that you’re one of the people she’s been confiding in since this business with Damien Newbold began.’ She already had one foot on the hall mat.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not supposed to entertain visitors here,’ I said, not quite believing she was about to barge her way in. ‘It’s nothing personal, just strict house-si
tting rules.’

  She shook her head, ostensibly to get the very tame hair out of her eyes, but really, I thought, as a way of disguising a moment of anger. ‘Surely under the circumstances you can invite the respectable mother of a grieving neighbour into Damien Newbold’s precious house,’ she said, and, of course, I did see her point. Horrible though she reportedly was, she was presumably angry with Damien for leading Emily a dance, and the last thing she wanted was someone being obstructive in his name.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘Damien Newbold’s brother’s in charge of this place now, as one of the executors of the will, and he’s very particular. He’s keeping an eye on me to see if I’m up to the job.’

  Saskia Amos gave me a look that told me what she thought of both me and Samson.

  ‘Why don’t we talk in the garden?’ I said. ‘It’s a halfway house, and, after all, it’s a lovely day.’

  She followed me through the hall saying, ‘How you can describe today as lovely under the circumstances I’m not quite sure.’

  Outside, I led her over to a bench by the lavender. We had to sit uncomfortably close together, but it was better than getting Damien’s reclining deckchairs out of the store and us both having to lounge around practically prone, as though we were on holiday.

  She refused a drink and so I waded in, wanting to get the talk over with. ‘You wanted to speak to me about Emily? Because she’s been talking to me about Damien Newbold?’

  She nodded, crossing one slim leg over the other, her lined skirt shifting neatly to adjust to the new position. ‘It sounds as though you’ve been very sympathetic,’ she said, ‘but in fact, what I want you to do is stop.’

  Okay. Interesting. ‘Stop?’

  ‘Oh, not just you; the whole lot of you, I mean. I understand Paul Mathewson’s involved on behalf of Emily’s college and, of course, Fi Parkinson’s been dancing attendance too. Not that her sympathy will be boundless; I can tell she’s losing patience already, very understandably. Emily really needs to pull herself together, and having a whole load of people hovering about, clucking over her isn’t going to speed the process up.’

  At that moment, I caught a flicker of movement at the kitchen window, which was open. Nate had come back.

  It took me a second to formulate a reply. ‘But Emily only heard of Damien’s death three days ago. Her grief’s still very fresh. Surely it’s a bit soon to be trying to jolly her out of it.’

  Saskia waved a hand, clear nail varnish gleaming at the end of slim, elegant fingers. ‘The death’s a fresh thing, of course, but her reaction to it is a continuation of the same problem.’

  I must have frowned and she was irritated by my slowness.

  ‘I mean it’s an extension of her gauche and rather embarrassing obsession with Damien Newbold. I’m certain the whole thing only existed in her mind. She’s not at all sophisticated; a man of Damien Newbold’s maturity would never have given her a second glance.’ She shifted her legs again, clearly cramped, and then sighed and got up from the bench to walk around the garden. Beyond her, in the kitchen, I could see that Nate was still standing where I’d spotted him before, presumably taking it all in. It looked as though he was indulging in a cool drink, too. Hmm. Nice for him.

  ‘Emily’s my daughter,’ Saskia went on, ‘and I know her better than anyone. She’s always been rather self-obsessed. If Damien Newbold had smiled at her across Midsummer Passage she’d have thought he was giving her a come on. The result is these histrionics over an invented love affair.’ She caught my eye. ‘I’d rather speak the truth than pussyfoot around. The fact is, you’re not doing her any favours, any of you, especially Paul Mathewson, from what I’ve been told. What an old woman. Awful mawkishness. The sooner she stops being the centre of attention, the sooner she’ll calm down, you mark my words.’

  She sat back down on the bench again and smoothed her hair. A strand of it caught in the setting for the ruby she wore on her ring finger.

  ‘Of course, you don’t have children,’ she said. ‘You don’t yet know what it’s like. Once they reach adolescence they may seem quite adult, but believe me they’re well short of the mark. Bags of unreliable hormones.’ She raised her eyes to heaven. ‘I once worked at the Philip Radley School and I remember it well. When I started, my children were still young and I was green around the gills. But I soon realised that those almost-adult students were very far from being grown-up.’ She made a disparaging little noise.

  ‘So did you leave teaching?’ I asked. I couldn’t imagine her in the classroom for one second.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t a teacher,’ she said. ‘I was the headmaster’s right-hand woman. A manager, effectively. But I didn’t really need to work, of course. I decided to devote more time to my growing family and my husband’s household instead. Managing a place as big as ours is a full-time job in itself. There’s only so much organising one person can do.’ She got up. ‘I must say, I’ve never met a house-sitter before. What an interesting career that must be.’

  I could feel her putting inverted commas around the word career, and decided to see her out of the back gate as quickly as possible. It was all I could do not to give her an encouraging shove.

  I would like to say that I rose above her ridiculous words, but it would be a lie. Instead I was busy stewing over what she’d said, like a six-year-old, when Nate came out into the garden.

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Finally decided to join me have you?’

  ‘You were doing such a good job with her, I thought it was best not to interrupt. Even though I’d love to have been introduced.’ The corners of his mouth twitched.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I did consider coming to hold you back when she made the crack about house-sitting. The look in your eye was scary. Why didn’t you tell her this isn’t your regular work?’

  ‘I decided she wasn’t worth the effort.’

  Nate announced his intention to go and shop, so I offered to cook once he was back and gave him a list of ingredients. After he’d left the house, I continued to brood over what Saskia Amos had said. The worst of it was, it should have been the awful way she’d talked about her own daughter that had got to me. But in fact it was still her taunts about my ‘career’ that left me full of impotent rage. Not very becoming. I hadn’t been quite honest with Nate. In reality I had two reasons for not telling her about my regular work. For a start, it would have made me sound defensive, as though I cared one way or the other what she thought. And also, didn’t ‘Oh, I write pseudo-scientific books about things like midlife crises’ sound pretty worthless? Making money from letting other people offload their woes, when later on, after their first flush of emotion was over, they might wish they hadn’t. My work … Well, I was out of love with it at that moment. But, hey, at least it wasn’t going quite so badly as my relationships. I was shocked to find that my mind flitted immediately to Nate when I thought this, rather than to Luke. His tousled look and penetrating blue eyes came vividly to mind … but then that image morphed, and I saw again his acute embarrassment after we’d kissed, and his anger at my nosiness. The feeling of shame was back in my stomach. I considered what Saskia Amos had said again. I supposed she was right, and house-sitting would be an unusual career choice, but, of course, no one started off their working life looking after empty properties. Presumably some had taken early retirement from the police, and perhaps some were on career breaks for whatever reason – maybe when the stress of a job working in frontline security got too much. I wondered again about Nate. What had made him crack and take on his current role? He didn’t look like the sort to buckle under pressure, physically or mentally.

  I got myself a glass of water, packed with ice from the posh fridge freezer, and as I cooled down, I made up my mind. Everyone’s got a web presence. Internet research had worked well in the case of Harry Newbold and Nico Sidorov, and now it was time to try to find out more about my employer.

  Of course the first hits on Google were all for the house-sitting ser
vice. I hadn’t actually looked at the website much, beyond a quick glance when Steph had first mentioned the job to me. Now I saw that it was clearly quite common for people to request a house-sitter after a death, as probate went through. There was a special section devoted to it on the ‘How we can help’ page. Nate’s face stared back at me; he looked unusually well-shaven and tidy. I was determined not to keep flicking back to peer at him again, like a teenager.

  The hits further down the list of results were interesting. There were a couple of links to ads in the Bury Free Press and the East Anglian Daily Times relating to his old business. The services offered were comprehensive; everything from surveillance to computer forensics.

  I clicked the back arrow on the browser window and carried on scanning the results page, noting that he’d obviously somehow avoided Facebook, LinkedIn and all the rest of it. Maybe you developed an instinctive caution about detailing your life online if you knew how easily hackers could plunder your history.

  And then I found something that brought me up short, the hairs on my scalp lifting. There was a link to an article in the East Anglian Daily Times, dated eighteen months earlier. The headline read, ‘Fire at Two Wells Farm was Arson, Police Confirm.’ Under the headline, the by-line read, ‘Victim’s death to be treated as murder.’

  Two Wells Farm? Wasn’t that Nate’s home? Hell, I was sure it was. I went back to his house-sitting website and clicked on ‘contact us’.

  Two Wells Farm.

  I clicked back to the results page and hit the link, not ready for whatever information it was going to give me.

  The article was long, but I scanned the page at high speed, wanting to get the worst over with. ‘The victim is believed to be Susie Bastable, sister of the house owner, private investigator, Nate Bastable.’ God, this was horrific. When Steph had said Nate had been through a bit of a rough patch recently, I was imagining girlfriend trouble, or a blunder at work, or, well … certainly not this.