by Cleeves, Ann
‘That’s what we thought at first,’ Jill said. ‘But he’s only just started toddling and the doors were all shut. We’d put pillows on all sides so he couldn’t fall out. Where could he have gone?’
‘You’ve searched the house?’
‘Of course! Everywhere.’
‘The front door was unlocked,’ Robert said. ‘We don’t lock up until we go to bed. Someone could have got in.’
‘Could you show us?’ Joe was already on his feet.
Robert Falstone led them through a painted door to the rest of the house. It was clear the kitchen was where the couple spent all their time and this was like entering a different world. An abandoned film set. They walked down a corridor and in the hall light, through an open door, Holly saw a living room, furnished with a faded sofa and armchairs, an upright piano against one wall. On the other side there was a formal dining room with a large, ugly table and four chairs.
‘They were my parents’ things,’ Robert said. ‘We don’t use them much.’
The air was chill away from the Aga. A heavy curtain covered the front door. Robert pulled aside the curtain and opened it. The small spiky snowflakes had grown larger and the ground was already speckled white. They looked out on a garden, a lawn and borders. Again, the only light came from the house.
‘Jill’s the gardener,’ Robert said. ‘In the summer it’s glorious. We were thinking we’d get a swing for the bairn.’ This time he was the one almost to lose control.
‘Would you still park in the yard if you were coming to this side of the house?’ Holly tried to picture the place with the sun shining. There was a patio with a wooden table, the chairs tipped into it, so the snow slid off.
‘Aye, then walk round the house. Once you could drive right round to the front, but we put up a barn, so there’s no access now.’
‘Did you hear a vehicle this evening?’
Robert shook his head. ‘But then, I don’t think we would. The wind was so loud and we had the telly on all night. We didn’t hear your boss until she knocked.’
‘And you wouldn’t have heard this door being opened?’
‘I don’t think we would. Not from the other end of the house.’
Holly was thinking it would have taken some nerve to come in and snatch the boy. The couple might have been deep in conversation in the kitchen, but the abductor wouldn’t have known they’d stay there, that they wouldn’t come regularly to check on the child or use the bathroom. ‘You never thought to lock this door? After two murders close by?’
Robert shook his head. ‘We have our way of doing things. A routine. It would never occur to us to change.’
Holly could see that was true. The everyday rituals held them together, even with the arrival of the child.
‘Usually I went to see Thomas every hour or so,’ Jill said.
The start of another ritual? Holly imagined the woman marking the time, by a specific programme on the television, getting up from her seat, climbing the stairs to enjoy the sight of her grandson. ‘But not tonight?’
‘No! Tonight, we were so wrapped up in our own affairs.’ There was a pause, then she wailed, ‘I should have checked.’
‘Can we see where he was sleeping?’
The stairs went up at an angle, close to the front door. The four climbed them in silence. There were three bedrooms and an ancient bathroom. All the doors were open, all the lights on, evidence of the frantic search which had taken place. Holly saw into a small room which they must be preparing for the baby. Wallpaper was being stripped and there was a dust cover on the floor. She wondered if once Lorna had slept there. They walked on.
‘This is our room,’ Jill said. ‘Thomas has been sleeping here with me. As I told you, I’d put him in the middle of the bed with pillows at each side to stop him rolling out.’
It was a big square space. The furniture was the same vintage as the stuff in the formal rooms downstairs, heavy, solid, built of a dark wood. A wardrobe with a brass key and a dressing table. The bed had sheets and blankets, not a duvet, and two bolsters still sat with a space between them, where the boy had been sleeping. A sash window looked out over Jill Falstone’s garden. It had been covered by a red velvet curtain. The floor was bare, apart from a rug close to the bed, the boards stained almost black. Standing at the entrance Holly saw a set of footwear prints, faint but muddy on the wooden floor.
‘You don’t wear outdoor shoes in the house?’
Jill shook her head. ‘We leave our mucky boots in the porch.’
Holly had thought as much; they were both wearing slippers, shabby sheepskin affairs.
‘It seems that somebody has been in.’ Until then Holly had thought they’d find the boy hiding somewhere in the house. Now she saw that Vera had been right to react as she had.
‘What can we do to get him back?’ Robert turned so he was facing the detectives, determined. ‘We’ll do whatever it takes.’
‘Of course.’ Joe paused. ‘You haven’t had any message on your phone? Any threats or demands?’
‘I don’t know!’ Panic seemed to be robbing Jill of all reason. Holly was pleased Joe was there. He would keep them both calm. She wasn’t sure she’d have the patience or the sympathy to see the couple through it. ‘Not on the landline. I’ll check my mobile. Not that there’s much signal in the house.’
‘I’ll go,’ Robert said. Holly thought he was pleased to have an excuse to leave the room. He was finding this unbearable.
‘Can you check if any of Thomas’s clothes are missing?’ Joe asked.
‘His outdoor things were on this chair.’ Jill was crying now, large tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I should have noticed before. Then we wouldn’t have wasted time looking before calling your boss.’ She paused. ‘Where is she? Where is Vera?’
‘She’s looking for Thomas, of course,’ Joe said. That seemed to satisfy the woman and to stem her panic a little. ‘Why don’t you come downstairs into the warm with me? I’ll need a description of what the lad was wearing and we’ll check your phone for messages. We’ll leave Holly here to see if she can find anything else that might help.’
Jill followed him down the stairs, pleased to have someone to take decisions, to tell her what to do. Holly was left alone. The house seemed to echo around her, but the stairs were carpeted and she didn’t hear them leave.
She took a photo of the footwear prints and tried to put herself in the shoes of the abductor. This wasn’t a time to think about motive, but perhaps she could track his movements. She imagined him opening the front door, seldom used in the winter. He’d walk straight into the heavy curtain. Would that have freaked him out? The dusty cloth in his face, almost suffocating him? It occurred to her suddenly that she was thinking of the abductor as male now, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. The footwear print could belong to a tall woman. She should follow her own advice and keep an open mind.
The kidnapper would have parked somewhere out of sight, down on the road, and walked up the track, through the yard and to the front of the house. Had they known that the door would be open? They would have turned the handle and pushed it, and there might be prints. So, were they there by chance, hoping that they might get in? That implied a kind of desperation. They hadn’t stopped to take off mucky shoes, but had climbed the stairs quickly. Speed had been more important than not leaving evidence of their movements.
Had they gone straight to the main bedroom, which was at the end of the corridor? Holly went back into the hall and looked in the other rooms. The small one, half-decorated in preparation for the child, seemed untouched. Certainly, there were no footprints on the dust cover on the floor. Robert had been sleeping in the third bedroom and Holly saw that clearly this had once been Lorna’s. The couple had decided not to give Thomas his mother’s room. Not yet, at least. There were rosettes on a board, photos of horses, whitewood furniture, a single bed under the window. Holly couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Falstone to sleep in his daughter’s bed. P
erhaps he’d welcomed the opportunity. It could have made him feel closer to Lorna. Or perhaps he’d seen it as a kind of penance. Here too, there was no sign of any intruder.
Holly stood for a moment, putting off the time when she’d have to join the couple below. She paused, silent, going through the possible suspects in her head, trying to imagine who would have been so desperate or foolhardy to take the child, to scoop him up and run with him down the stairs and into the night.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
VERA WAS DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW, talking out loud to herself, because what did it matter if she sounded like a batty old woman when there was nobody to hear?
‘We got the whole thing the wrong way around. I should have realized from the start. At least when I saw that picture of the cottage. Lorna was nowhere near as needy as we all thought. It was the illness that put me off-track, and all that bollocks with Harriet and Juliet.’
The road towards Brockburn was familiar now, and she chuntered away without having to think too much about directions. Closer to the big house, she started to plan her move. There’d been a number of calls from Holly, messages and texts coming and going according to reception, but she’d ignored them all. The last thing she wanted was to go into this mob-handed. That would only put the lad in more danger and things had already got out of hand. Besides, she could have the whole thing wrong and she’d never liked making a fool of herself.
Vera stopped on the road, just after the track that led to the back of the house past Dorothy and Karan’s cottage. She pulled into the verge, hoping there wasn’t a ditch, and climbed out, hit by the cold. It was still snowing but in flurries, nothing like the blizzard on the first night she’d come back to Brockburn. She needed to go the rest of the way on foot. Usually, she avoided any form of exercise unless it was essential, but you could hear the Land Rover a mile off, and this was a time for discretion.
Before she left the vehicle, she sent a text to Holly and Joe, explaining where she was and what she had planned. Not with any sense of urgency. They were more use where they were. Just checking. I’ll call if I need you. She pulled on wellingtons, made sure her flask was in her pocket, and that her torch was working properly.
By now, it was past one in the morning, but there was a light on in the living room of the housekeeper’s cottage. She could see a sliver of silver where the curtains didn’t quite meet. She wondered who was up, and thought as she walked past the building that this other family, Karan, Dorothy and Duncan, was still a mystery to her.
She paused by the turn in the track that led to Jinny’s Mill, and looked down to the big house. The house itself was dark, but a security light outside shone past the outhouses and bins, so she could see the way onto the path towards the mill without using her torch. The grass was clear of snow, sheltered by the trees, boggy in places. Here the darkness was deep and dense and occasionally she stumbled. The trees were closer together than she’d remembered and in places she had to push her way through.
She’d forgotten how far it was to the mill and had a moment of anxiety, thinking that she’d wandered away from the footpath, that she was lost in the forest. It was a kind of claustrophobia – she’d never been good in enclosed spaces – and the same panic as when she’d been waiting alone with Constance Brown’s body. She was just thinking that she’d retrace her steps when there was a dip in the path and she came to the clearing, with the mill beyond.
There was snow on the ground here, blown around roots and plants into tiny drifts, like ripples on a pond. No footprints, but that might be because the snow had started to fall after they’d arrived here. Because there was somebody in the mill. A light flickered in the window and Vera could smell woodsmoke. She switched off her torch and waited for a moment, partly because she was knackered after the walk, partly because she wanted to decide the best way to deal with the situation. She hadn’t planned much beyond getting to the place. Brown clouds parted and suddenly there was moonlight. If anyone looked out of the mill, she’d be visible. She moved back into the shadow of the trees and waited for the clouds to blow over the moon again. In the brief moment that it was caught in the moonlight, the cottage had looked idyllic, an illustration from a children’s fairy tale. Except in the story Vera was remembering, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, a child had been held captive and put into a pot over the fire to be eaten.
She stood, motionless, for ten more minutes to be sure that nobody had seen her, then made her way carefully towards the mill. She kept away from the windows at the front and slid to the back of the building. It was so close to the burn that she was in danger of ending up in the water. She could hear the stream moving under the ice. It was dark here. No windows. She listened, hoping to hear a child crying, some sign that Thomas was in there and safe. There was complete silence apart from the wind in the forest beyond. She moved around the building, feeling her way, close to the wall. She was wearing gloves but the stone was still chill against her fingertips. She needed to know if there was a back door, some other way in, but there was no change in the texture of the surface.
She’d reached a corner and was making her way to the side of the building when she was hit on the cheek, just below her eye, a sharp stab that almost sent her into the water again. The pain was so intense that she couldn’t help crying out. She put her hand to her face and felt blood. She froze, stunned and confused, a moment of panic when she almost stopped breathing. She’d heard nobody approaching and still there was silence. She stood for a moment, then ran her fingers over the wall again, felt rusty metal, and risked switching on the torch.
She’d walked into an ancient hook, fixed to the house, some remnant from the mill’s working days, part of a winch perhaps. If there’d been anyone in the building, they’d surely have heard her cry out, but nobody had appeared to check. She moved to the front of the cottage again, and looked through the window into the room where she’d been the day before. A candle stuck in a bottle lit the space. The range had been lit. There was coal in a bucket and logs piled to one side. On the battered table stood a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. This stirred in Vera ideas that were faintly religious. Hector would have said religion was another form of fairy tale – he’d been a raging atheist – but she liked to keep her options open. Nobody was there.
She moved past the door to the other window that looked into the room she hadn’t seen on her visit. No candle here, but light filtered through from the kitchen beyond. She saw the bed with the brass headboard Billy Cartwright had described. Beside it was the wooden cradle on rockers that she’d seen in the photograph. It was handmade, beautifully painted. Very recently painted, she thought. It hadn’t looked like this in the picture. It was larger than she’d thought; not a small crib for a tiny baby, but big enough for Thomas, who was lying inside it, still in his bright red snow suit.
He was motionless, pale. She stared, holding her breath until he stirred in his sleep. There was no sign of anyone else. He was alone in the place. Vera felt the anxiety drain away. It would be hard to carry the boy all the way back to the Land Rover, but not impossible. She was picturing the relief on the Falstones’ faces as she walked with him into their kitchen, when there was a shout from the edge of the clearing and somebody was running across the meadow towards her.
She turned towards the person, who was too far from the house for her to make out in any detail. Then the clouds cleared again and she saw a figure covered in outdoor clothes. A shotgun.
‘It’s me,’ she shouted. ‘Vera Stanhope. Police.’
A crack as the gun was fired and the pellets bounced off the wall behind her. She started to run, because she was a perfect target, caught in the candlelight coming from the mill, and close enough for the gunman to hit her with accuracy. But also, because she needed to pull the shooter’s attention away from the cottage where Thomas lay. The killer was unpredictable now, desperate, and Vera had no idea what might follow. She ran away from the figure, who was blocking the only path she knew, the one that led b
ack to Brockburn, and headed into the cover of the forest. Here the dark was as deep as water and she felt she was drowning in it. It was impossible to move quickly, so once she’d stumbled away from the clearing she stood quite still, listening, half-hoping and half-fearing that the killer had followed her. Here, they’d be as blind as each other and if she made no sound, surely she’d be safe.
There were sounds. Scuffling sounds in the undergrowth. Animal sounds, somehow comforting. Followed by a more regular beat of heavy boots crushing twigs, roots and frozen leaves. The snow hadn’t penetrated the canopy to deaden the noise. Then a sudden white light from a powerful torch, its beam sweeping through the lines of trees. She was dazzled, held like the birds Hector caught in his flashlight, when he’d gone raiding nests for eggs in the middle of the night. Exposed.
In the moment the torch beam got to her, there was another shot, and again there was a near miss. Perhaps there was no real attempt to kill her. Perhaps the killer was losing nerve, or losing heart. They should have hit her that time. All the same, she wasn’t prepared to risk it and she started running again, dodging between the trees. The forest was dark once more. Had the shooter given up? Thought she’d been scared away? But still she heard the pounding beat of boots behind her. Perhaps the torch battery had run out, or she was being played, taunted; though, unless she’d got things seriously wrong, she didn’t think that was really the killer’s style.
She chanced upon a straight path between two lines of conifers. It was still hard going, impossible to maintain any speed, because the ground was uneven and boggy. At one point she fell into a ditch, got a boot full of freezing water. She stopped for a moment to pull herself out and listened. All she could hear was the wind in the trees. No footsteps. Perhaps she should go back to make sure the child was safe, but she feared her presence would only put him in more danger, and besides, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her way. That was when she remembered she wasn’t sure anyone knew where Thomas was. She’d told them where she was looking, but not that she’d found the boy.
