by L. J. Ross
* * *
As the grandfather clock in the drawing room struck quarter-to-midnight, Ryan addressed the staff and volunteers of Cragside house, many of whom appeared worse for wear and ready to turn in for the night. He was sorry to disappoint them.
“I regret to inform you there has been a serious incident. Victor Swann has died, apparently after taking a fall down the rear servants’ staircase. The police have been called, as have the ambulance service.”
A mixture of tears and stunned disbelief greeted Ryan’s statement. He looked among the faces of the crowd to see who might have been the female voice during the little tête-à-tête he had overheard but nobody stood out and Martin Henderson was now mingling with the crowd as if he had never left them.
“What do you mean, dead?”
The man stepped forward to place himself firmly in charge, imperious red robes flapping around his knees.
“I mean precisely what I say,” Ryan said mildly.
“I’m going to see for myself.” Henderson turned as if to head for the door but Ryan took a subtle step forward.
“The party is over.” His tone brooked no argument. “Acting in my capacity as detective chief inspector, I would kindly ask you all to remain seated until we have taken care of Victor through the appropriate channels. Statements will be taken from each of you in turn but, until then—”
“If you think I’m going to sit around here all night, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Ryan was silent for a full ten seconds, allowing the tension to build, then he gave Henderson a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Do you have something more important to do than assist the police? I wonder if I should draw any inferences from that.”
A slow flush spread across Henderson’s neck and Ryan thought that, for a glorified pen-pusher, the man certainly had a temper. Tight-lipped, Henderson shrank back into the crowd and began to speak in disgruntled tones to anybody who would listen.
Ignoring him, Ryan turned back to the others.
“I realise you’re all tired and ready to go home. We won’t keep you any longer than necessary.”
“Chief inspector?”
Cassandra Gilbert walked back into the drawing room and looked among the crowd of upset faces.
“Has something happened?”
“Yes, I’m afraid it has. Your husband’s valet has been found dead in the exterior courtyard downstairs. The police have been called.”
“Victor?”
She lost all colour beneath her tan.
“I—I can’t believe it. Did he have a heart attack or something?”
“I’m afraid it’s too early to say. Is your husband well enough to join us?”
Cassandra shook her head slowly.
“I’m sorry, he’s fast asleep upstairs. I’ve just been to check on him,” she explained.
Ryan gave her a steady look.
“I’m sorry to inconvenience either of you but I’ll need to speak with Mr Gilbert to confirm his statement about tonight’s events.”
“Why? He hasn’t even been downstairs.”
Ryan thought privately that, in a house of this size, it would be easy enough for somebody to sneak downstairs without being seen.
“I would appreciate your cooperation.”
If she was bothered by the tone of command, Cassandra didn’t show it and began to usher her guests back to their seats.
Just then, Ryan’s sharp ears detected the unmistakable tread of heavy footsteps along the gallery, followed by a loud, jaw-cracking yawn which preceded the entrance of his sergeant into the drawing room.
Detective Sergeant Frank Phillips was a short barrel of a man in his mid-fifties with a boxer’s physique hidden beneath what he liked to call his ‘winter hibernation layer’, regardless of the fact it was high summer. His salt-and-pepper hair was thinning on top and framed a pair of button-brown eyes that missed very little. He came to an abrupt halt as he spotted Ryan, who remained dressed like an extra from a Victorian melodrama, and let out a rumbling belly laugh he couldn’t have hoped to contain.
“Frank,” Ryan injected a note of warning into his voice but it was waved away with one stubby, workmanlike hand.
“Nobody told us the circus was in town!”
Ryan drew in a long, steadying breath.
“Well, now you’ve had your money’s worth, would it be too much to ask you to take down some statements?”
Still chuckling to himself, Phillips gave Ryan a playful slap on the back.
“Aye, keep your hair on,” he said but was already thinking of who he would tell first back at CID and practically rubbed his hands together. “Faulkner’s van’s parked outside and there’s a patrol car on the way. No sign of a doctor, yet, but one’s been called.”
Ryan nodded.
“Did you see the body?”
Phillips pulled an expressive face.
“Aye, poor old bugger. Took a tumble in the dark, did he?”
Ryan lowered his voice a fraction.
“That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?”
Phillips rubbed a hand across the stubble on his jaw and gave Ryan a keen look.
“If you believed that, you wouldn’t have bothered calling me all the way out here. It doesn’t take two murder detectives to decide whether one old man’s death is a matter for CID.”
Ryan gave him a knowing smile.
“Let’s just say I want a second opinion.”
* * *
While two bleary-eyed constables set to work taking statements, Ryan and Phillips headed outside. Their feet crunched across the gravel as they rounded the side of the house to the courtyard where they spotted Tom Faulkner, who was already suited up in his polypropylene overalls and struggling to contain his mousy brown hair beneath a white plastic cap. A large spotlight had been erected outside, powered by the mobile generator in Faulkner’s nondescript black van. It shone a blazing white light on the area surrounding Victor’s body, highlighting the greying pallor of his skin and fixed, bloodshot expression of his eyes as they stared out into the night. “Evening, Tom.” Ryan shook the other man’s hand before accepting a pair of nitrile gloves. “Thanks for coming out here at short notice.”
Faulkner adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses and, not for the first time, Ryan wondered why the man didn’t wear contacts and save himself the hassle.
“No problem. I wasn’t entertaining a hot date,” he laughed self-deprecatingly. “Might as well take a drive out and see the stars.”
All three men looked up at the sky, which was awash with stars glistening diamond-bright.
“You ought to find yourself a nice lass and go stargazing,” Phillips remarked, in his usual fatherly manner. “Got the observatory up at Kielder, some canny walks and that.”
Faulkner fidgeted inside his suit.
“My ex-wife never wanted to,” he muttered. “She wasn’t much of an outdoorsy type. I don’t seem to have much luck finding someone who enjoys the simple things in life.”
Ryan and Phillips exchanged a surprised glance. Faulkner had divulged more personal information in the past few moments than he had in the last five years of working together.
Momentarily at a loss, Ryan cleared his throat.
“Well—”
“Let’s get started,” Faulkner cut him off, feeling awkward. “You told me this man—Victor Swann?—headed out to find the fuse box located through that doorway?”
He pointed a gloved finger toward the door leading to the basement.
“Yes.” Ryan was happy to get straight down to business. “That door takes you through the basement and up to the kitchen. The fuse box is in the corridor running beside it.”
Faulkner raised his professional camera and took a series of photographs. Lowering it again, he nodded toward the stone staircase cut into the exterior wall.
“You think he took these stairs all the way down from the drawing room on the mezzanine floor, intending to use the back door
to the basement and re-enter the house to access the fuse box—isn’t that a bit of a circuitous route?”
Ryan had already considered that and shook his head.
“No, I’d say it’s just as quick to take either route. Quicker this way, perhaps, because the servants’ stairs were designed to connect with this part of the house.”
Faulkner scratched the side of his head, joggling the cap he wore.
“What if the doors were locked?”
“Victor was Lionel Gilbert’s personal valet, so it’s highly likely he had a set of keys. Besides, the door was unlocked when I found his body. I used it myself,” Ryan added.
“I can’t believe people still have valets, these days,” Phillips muttered and both men swung around to look at him. “I’m just saying, it’s a bit of an outdated profession.”
“Everybody has to earn a crust somehow,” Faulkner retorted, hunkering down to tap Victor’s pockets with gentle fingers until he heard the jingle of keys. His nose wrinkled at the sight of the dead man’s face, which was a bloodied mess of flesh and bone, and he wondered if he would have been better off as a gentleman’s valet rather than a crime scene investigator.
“What are your impressions?” Ryan folded his arms across his chest to stave off the cold wind whipping through the archway leading from the courtyard.
“As soon as the ambulance gets here and the doc makes his formal pronouncement of life extinct, we’ll transport the body across to the mortuary and see what the pathologist says. But I can’t see any obvious signs of interference,” Faulkner replied. “No injuries that look to have been caused by a man-made implement. There’s no evidence of blood spatter around the body itself indicative of blunt force, only a bit on the stairwell.”
“You think he fell all the way down those stairs?”
Phillips cast a sympathetic eye over Victor’s shrivelled body and then up at the narrow stone steps.
“It’s likely,” Faulkner agreed. “The initial impact probably gave him that gash on his head and a secondary impact broke his spinal cord at the base of his neck. He probably had a couple of drinks at the party and lost his footing. Terrible bad luck, I would say.”
Ryan waited a beat, then asked the burning question.
“Is it possible he was pushed?”
Faulkner shrugged and the plastic suit rustled across his shoulders.
“Anything’s possible.”
* * *
While two young police constables grappled with a group of over-tired and inebriated party guests, one person stole away from the crowd and moved quickly through the hallways of Cragside house toward the staff room on the ground floor. Ryan or his flat-footed sergeant could re-enter the house at any moment and demand to know what they were doing, which made it a very risky excursion. Unfortunately, needs must.
Pausing every now and then to check they were alone, the figure scurried through to an anteroom just off the main entrance, converted into a common space for the staff to use.
The room was lit well enough thanks to a powerful beam shining through the windows from the courtyard outside. A quick glance confirmed that Ryan and Phillips were deep in conversation with a CSI, who had rigged up a kind of freestanding film light.
There was time.
Heart racing, the figure scurried across the room to the long bank of lockers belonging to Cragside staff members. It took very little force to break into the one at the end of the row and even less time to stuff its contents into a plastic bag. It would take another few minutes to hide it but that was factored into the risk.
The figure slipped away, just as silently as it had come.
CHAPTER 3
While Ryan and Phillips debated whether Victor’s death should be classified as ‘suspicious’, Detective Inspector Denise MacKenzie fought her way through a violent nightmare. Her lungs laboured as she struggled to regain control of her breathing and her eyes darted around the bedroom, her pupils wide and unfocused. She managed to push herself upright and was stupidly grateful to find that Frank had left the bedside light on.
She raised shaking fingers to her forehead and pushed back a tangle of damp red hair, fighting the urge to crumble. Her eyes stung with unshed tears but she bore down, digging instead for the rage that festered in her gut.
No more tears.
She looked down at her hands and was unsurprised to find a line of small purple semi-circles dug into the palms where her nails had formed tight fists.
MacKenzie swung her legs off the bed and felt the familiar tenderness in her ankle. It had been four months and she knew the breakage had fully healed, as had the torn ligaments, but there was a persistent ache she didn’t need any psychiatrist to tell her was wholly psychosomatic. Her leg bore an angry pink scar where The Hacker’s knife had sliced through the muscle, missing a major artery by millimetres. Two fractured ribs had also healed and she could breathe freely again. All in all, she considered herself fortunate to be alive.
But there were deeper wounds only she could see; wounds that might never heal.
She stumbled toward the en suite bathroom in Phillips’ house, smiling lopsidedly at the fluffy pink bath mats and matching towels he’d bought to make her feel at home.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d never liked pink.
Her mind skittered back to another bathroom in an abandoned farmhouse, to icy cold showers and ritual humiliation.
Anxiety made her chest tight and she gripped the edge of the sink, willing it to pass. She told herself to concentrate on simply letting the air in and out of her lungs but she was already starting to panic. Nausea followed next and she reached blindly for the bottle of beta-blockers she kept on the bathroom shelf, fumbling with the safety cap until she could stuff a couple of tablets into her mouth.
A few minutes later, the panic receded and she found she could breathe again. The black spots clouding her vision disappeared and she no longer felt like she was going to vomit.
But she didn’t feel better.
MacKenzie stared at herself in the mirror, at a once-attractive woman in her mid-forties with lank red hair and shadowed eyes. Her skin was almost translucent and she knew a lack of appetite had made her anaemic. Clothes that used to fit like a second skin now hung limply from her bones. Her lips trembled and all the anger and fear she bottled so carefully during the day erupted from her throat in one long, keening wail.
* * *
“Don’t lurk in the doorway! Come in, if you’re going to!” At the sound of that booming directive, Ryan and Phillips exchanged a meaningful look and stepped inside Cragside’s master bedroom to greet its elusive owner, Lionel Horatio Gilbert.
They approached an intricately carved four-poster bed and were met with a robust-looking man in his early eighties, almost completely bald except for a few strands of wispy hair smoothed across the top of his head in one long comb-over. Gilbert was heavily overweight, his rounded face sagging at the jowls with at least two extra chins that they could see. His small, myopic eyes were red-rimmed and the purple damask bed linen was strewn with crumpled tissues. There was a crystal tumbler of lemon water beside the bed, alongside a packet of cold and flu tablets and some throat lozenges.
“Well?” he demanded, peering between them with obvious disapproval.
“We’re sorry to disturb you at this hour,” Ryan began, and meant it. There were places he would rather be at one o’clock in the morning than questioning a cantankerous old man in his sickbed.
“Cassandra tells me Victor has finally popped his clogs,” Gilbert went on, without any note of sympathy. “Don’t know why you’re all making such a damned fuss. Comes to all of us in the end, you know.”
He reached across for a fresh tissue and blew his nose loudly.
“Blasted woman has been in here blubbering about it,” he went on, mercilessly. “She should be more worried about me, given the state I’m in.”
“We can ask Mrs Gilbert to join us, if you’d like?”
; Gilbert sighed gustily.
“No, no. Leave her to play Nurse Nightingale,” he said.
“We understand Victor Swann had been employed as your valet for the last fifteen years. Is that correct?”
Gilbert shook his head and the excess skin around his chin wobbled.
“Longer than that. I picked him up back in the eighties, when I was living down in Kent. I bought this place a few years ago as a wedding present to Cassandra and he moved up here with us. So long as he wasn’t drooling into his soup, I didn’t mind him staying on past retirement. Good laugh, old Victor was,” he added, with the air of one recalling a distant memory, although the man had been dead less than two hours.
“And when did you purchase Cragside?”
“Oh, back in ’98,” Gilbert said gruffly. “Cassandra had a fancy for the place.”
Ryan nodded, thinking briefly of his own nuptials and the plans he’d made for Anna’s wedding present. Sadly, they weren’t quite on the same scale.
“Were you fond of Victor?”
Gilbert blew his nose again and chucked the spent tissue onto the bedspread. Phillips eyed it with distaste, wondering whether his millions couldn’t stretch to a waste paper basket.
“Vic was a good, loyal employee, if that’s what you mean. Did his duties and wasn’t bad company. Had a bit of an eye for the ladies but who doesn’t, eh?”
He let out a bellowing laugh which promptly turned into a coughing fit. Phillips took pity and handed him a glass of water, which was snatched up. Gilbert handed the glass back to him without a word of thanks and Ryan asked the next question.
“Turning to this evening, when was the last time you saw Victor?”
“It was at about seven-fifteen. He came in to ask if there was anything I needed before he went down to have a bloody good drink at my expense,” Gilbert grumbled.
“Did he seem concerned or out of sorts?”
“Not that I noticed. He looked pleased with himself, all suited up and wearing some ridiculous hat or other.”
Ryan couldn’t argue with that.
“Can you tell me your own movements this evening?”