by Jane Renshaw
The phone in her blazer pocket vibrated against her hip. She pulled it out.
Message from Damian:
Your mother is five minutes away from calling the police. I realise that attention-seeking is the point of the exercise. Nevertheless...
And he’d added that ‘stupid’ emoticon with a goofy smile and cross eyes and its tongue sticking out. She thumbed in a reply:
Tell Mum I’m fine. I’m at the boathouse. But don’t tell her that. Don’t tell anyone. Thx for your concern. You are such a
And she added the emoticon for ‘shit’: a little steaming pile of jobbie with eyes. A pretty useful one when communicating with Damian.
She pushed the phone back into her pocket and rolled over onto her back.
The sun was warm on her face.
She closed her eyes.
◆◆◆
‘Oh God, an interview, is it?’ he said, raising his eyebrows at Claire, this handsome man with the broad smile and the warm eyes getting up from behind a desk, and she was smiling with him and taking his hand and thinking No.
No, he didn’t do it.
This wasn’t some criminal, this wasn’t a murderer. This wasn’t a psychopath, for God’s sake. Or Mr Darcy, or Tim Nice-But-Dim. This was someone who could have been a friend. Someone she could have known at university.
‘I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed if you’re expecting any degree of competence,’ he went on. ‘I hope you haven’t spent too long preparing answers to potential questions, because there aren’t any.’
It was a strong hand, a gentle hand, holding hers briefly before releasing it. He was a couple of inches taller than she was. She knew he was thirty-seven.
She smiled. ‘What, you’re not going to ask me where I see myself in five years’ time?’
‘How the hell would you answer that without sounding like either a megalomaniac or a simpleton? How did you intend answering it, just out of interest?’
‘I think that counts as a question.’
‘A question by proxy! I’ll take it.’
A hiatus while, ridiculously, they just smiled at each other.
What on earth? ‘I was going to say I don’t plan that far ahead because you never know what’s round the next corner.’
‘Thus neatly avoiding answering it at all.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I should have said: I’m Hector. Christ, sorry, I can’t even get that right.’
She guffawed. She actually guffawed. ‘Claire.’
She realised that Gavin seemed to have gone. That they were in a study, an old-fashioned study painted a dark blood-red. Despite the wall colour it was a light room thanks, she supposed, to being south-facing. Sunlight fell warm on the surface of the desk, the inevitable Persian rugs on the floor, the fat curling locks of the marble bust that sat on a table between the windows – a Greek philosopher?
‘What I thought we could do,’ he was saying, ‘is take a wander round the place and just have a bit of a chat. Would that be all right?’
‘Of course.’
Of course. She knew she would get the job. She knew he knew she knew...
What on earth?
She’d never felt it so powerfully before, this instant clicking with someone, this instant meeting of minds that left her with a feeling almost of déjà vu, as if she knew him, as if surely she must have known him all her life.
What was this?
All her fear had dropped away as if it had never been.
It was going to be fine. And that no doubt explained this weird feeling of amity – the release of all that pent-up terror as she realised that the target – he was the target – wasn’t some sort of monster awaiting her in his lair. That he wasn’t terrifying at all. That they were actually going to like each other.
It was just the relief of it, washing through her.
She felt like singing. She felt like dancing along at his side as they went for a ‘wander’ round the house. First, along the corridor to ‘the Terrace Room’, a huge square space with a huge stone fireplace and a grand piano and various musical instruments (‘My brother’s stuff’ – the poor kid who’d been in the accident, presumably – so he was indulged in an interest in music? He had an okay life? Well of course he did, with this man as his legal guardian – who’s very probably a criminal and could be a fucking murderer, Claire) and long windows on three sides, and doors out to – ‘The terrace, by any chance?’ she muttered as he opened the door and stood back for her to proceed him out onto it.
‘So beautiful,’ she said, half to herself.
There was a stone balustrade and steps down to a huge lawn bounded to the right by a shrubbery and straight ahead by what looked like an arboretum, a path winding invitingly through a stand of massive trees: great towering conifers that didn’t seem quite real, standing foursquare against the backdrop of the hills. In the middle of the lawn was another lovely big tree with a swing hanging from it, the old silvery wooden seat swaying in the breeze as if someone had just jumped off it.
‘What kind of tree is that?’
‘A cedar. A cedar of Lebanon.’
Her sister Gabby would have been convinced the place was haunted within about two seconds of crossing the threshold into that sludgy-green-painted corridor downstairs. She’d have insisted, now, ‘But there’s no wind,’ and stared at that swaying swing in horrified delight, even as the wind tugged at her own hair.
But it must be haunted, in a way. What must it be like to live in the same house as all those generations of your family, to feel their presence wherever you looked? Probably there was a sepia photograph gathering dust somewhere of great-great-aunt Gerty in the 1910s, daringly showing her stockings as she swung in and out of the shadow of that cedar, and great-great uncle George standing with hands on hips, and you could almost hear him remonstrating: ‘I say, Gerty, old thing!’ And in the Terrace Room behind them, someone starting up a gramophone.
What sort of emotional pressure must they exert, all those ghosts? You’d feel you were abandoning them if you sold up and got out, leaving them to the mercy of a developer or a hotel chain or a Russian oligarch.
And where else would ever feel like home?
This part of the terrace had a roof, supported by white-painted ironwork columns and scrolling ironwork vines. Under the covered area were wooden loungers and a big table.
‘It must be nice to sit out here when it’s raining.’
He was smiling at her, as if she’d said something funny.
‘What?’ she challenged him, as she would have challenged a friend. ‘Don’t you ever do that? Wouldn’t it be nice, to sit here watching the rain?’
‘Yes, it would. It is. It’s often warmer outside the house than in.’ And as they walked back down the corridor: ‘Terrible barn of a place, I’m afraid. Can get pretty chilly in winter...’
In fact the house, inside, had a homeliness about it that was at odds with the austerity of the exterior. Everywhere there were beautiful things – gilt-framed paintings; an ancient Japanned cabinet with lots of little inlaid drawers; ormolu wall sconces with faded pale pink shades in that old, subtle silk with hardly any sheen that you couldn’t buy any more. But the Persian rugs were worn in places, there was a chip out of one of the knobs on the chest of drawers they passed in the corridor, and next to the big glass vase on top of it was a cross-eyed felt fox and a pottery dish with odds and ends in it: paperclips, a stub of pencil, a wrapped sweet, an old tennis ball. The place had a lived-in, comfortable feel that suggested it wouldn’t matter if you tracked in mud or spilt something on a chair.
‘Soft Londoner couldn’t hack it, you reckon?’ she smiled. ‘A Highland winter?’
In the hall, he stopped with his hand on a doorknob. ‘I reckon you could probably hack it... But, regardless of where the official boundary is drawn – and that does vary – we don’t consider ourselves to be in the Highlands here. In the Highlands, people speak Gaelic and do strange things on a Sunday.’<
br />
‘You don’t speak Gaelic?’
He shrugged, faux-modestly. ‘A bit, but only because my mother came from Berensay.’ As if she’d know where that was. ‘And my grandparents made me learn.’
He opened the door and stood back and she walked ahead of him into a large, bright, elegant sitting room. The carpet was dense and soft under her boots, a muted antique carpet with a cream ground across which faded roses trailed over faded trellises, and improbable, exotic birds took flight, ghostlike, their plumage dulled to near invisibility in places. It must have cost a fortune when it was new – of such high quality that, although it had faded, it didn’t seem to have worn at all.
That was the kind of thing Claire Colley would be noticing.
And she would be reflecting that the furniture was pure Downton Abbey: chintzy sofas and mismatched ottomans and wing chairs and antiques in different woods. Here was the prototypical country house style, the genuine article that wasn’t designed but had evolved through the centuries, through generations of the lives of one family.
‘What do people speak here, then?’
‘A dialect of Scots called the Doric. That’s probably going to be your main challenge: deciphering what some of the old buddies are saying. Are you a native of London?’
‘Yes.’ She nudged one of the birds with the toe of her boot. ‘Islington. My parents have a flat in a converted textile warehouse. Very open-plan and modern.’
‘You’ll hate all this, then.’
‘Oh, not at all! I think it’s lovely!’ Here was a chance to impress him with her credentials, to tell him about a previous employer’s Georgian mansion in the Cotswolds, a fictitious house based on a stately home where her aunt was a volunteer guide. But all she said was, ‘My grandparents live in a Victorian terrace in Ealing and Grannie loves antiques, so... But their place is nothing like as grand as this, obviously. How old is the house?’
‘The oldest bits probably date back to the Fifteenth Century or earlier, but it was extensively remodelled by the Georgians. And then the Victorians came along and tacked an excrescence on the end.’
‘Lots of interesting history, then?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘We once had an architectural heritage bod out from Aberdeen University. My father was expecting him to take photographs and make measurements and what have you, but this chap just walked around shaking his head and frowning a lot, and when my father asked what he made of it – expecting him to wax lyrical – all he said was, “Of no particular architectural merit”.’
She laughed. ‘Oh. Isn’t it a listed building? Surely?’
‘Only Grade B. Are you interested in that stuff?’
‘Yes. Thanks to Grannie. She drags me round stately homes and museums and we sometimes go to antiques auctions where she buys what she calls “dust collectors” and I –’ She stopped, only just in time. She’d been about to tell him that her boxy little modern flat in Haringey was chocka with Victorian china and Edwardian mantle clocks and a collection of scruffy little cloth dogs that had tape measures in them that you pulled out of their mouths or their bums –
But Claire Colley didn’t have a flat in Haringey. She lived in the accommodation supplied by her employers.
She froze.
Where was her Claire Colley chameleon skin?
Not even half an hour in, and she’d already come within a whisker of blowing it.
‘Your grannie sounds like fun.’
‘Yes,’ was all she could find to say.
‘Would you like a drink?’
There was an array of decanters on a table against the wall.
That was the last thing she needed. ‘No. No, thanks – I’m driving.’
He smiled. ‘I meant tea or coffee. Water, juice...’
‘Oh. Right. Um –’
‘You won’t be marked down for it.’
Her mouth was really dry. She would love something to drink. ‘In that case, yes please. Tea would be nice.’
As soon as he’d left the room, she sank down onto an armchair upholstered in green linen. There was a lovely little bronze of a fawn on the table at her elbow. It had one foot raised, nose sniffing the air. She picked it up to look for the sculptor’s signature – there was something scratched on the base, but she couldn’t make it out. Once she’d started the job, of course, she’d be taking photos of every single antique in the place, every picture, every piece of silver so they could be checked on the Art Loss Register and the National Mobile Property Register and all the other databases. But the chances were that all this stuff had been inherited. That he moved the stolen art and antiques on straight away.
He came back with a tray with a teapot and cups and saucers and a milk jug, and a plate of biscuits. Incongruously, there was a blue and red knitted tea cosy over the teapot, fuzzy with use and washing. The smell of tea and warm wool took her straight back to all those afternoons after school when she’d take the bus past Regent’s Park and through Acton to Grannie and Grandpa’s, and sit with Grannie in the front room, pouring her heart out, while Grannie gave her all the time her busy parents didn’t have, listening and smiling and frowning in sympathy or censure, and suggesting solutions, and feeding her biscuits from the special tin. This much-loved old tin was an unappealing object, square and quite sharp-edged where the metal of the lid had been folded down at the corners, and so old that the picture on the front had faded so you could only just see the kittens’ faces and the red ball of wool they were playing with.
In her mid-teens, Claire had gone through an awkward, self-loathing phase when she’d shot up in height – five-eight, five-nine, five-ten; she’d thought she’d never stop – but at the same time she’d put on a bit of weight, so some of the girls at school had started calling her The Hulk. The prospect of Grannie, there at the end of the school day, had sometimes been all that had got her through. And then in sixth form – in sixth form, those cosy chats with Grannie had literally saved her.
But this wasn’t a cosy chat with Grannie.
There was nothing cosy about any of this.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He smiled, setting the tray down on a big ottoman by the fireplace. ‘I always think tea tastes better out of a proper cup.’ They were lovely pearly-white antique cups and saucers, sprigged with tiny forget-me-nots. ‘And the saucer, of course, accommodates a dunker. You probably don’t indulge in anything as unhealthy as a Hobnob?’
‘Oh, what the hell. I’ll live dangerously.’
He sat opposite her and there was silence for a bit as they glugged tea – refreshing and fragrant, not Earl Grey but something similar. And she was able to study him covertly, properly, for the first time.
He was undeniably handsome; very outdoorsy, tanned and fit and healthy-looking. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and a well-cut, lightweight tweed jacket. Stone-coloured trousers. Polished nut-brown shoes that looked handmade. A vintage watch that had probably been his father’s. She was looking at the archetype, she realised with amusement, of Gavin Jenkins’s sartorial style.
They had no actual evidence that he’d murdered anyone.
John Innes could have had some kind of blackout; fallen into the water and drowned.
And now, thank God, Phil’s voice was in her head:
Never let your guard down.
She had to remember that this was, according to Campbell Stewart, just another weapon in Hector Forbes’s armament, an easy charm he probably used on everyone. There was no ‘meeting of minds’ here; all that was happening was that he was putting on a performance and she was bloody falling for it.
She set her cup and saucer down on the table at her elbow. ‘I should have said that I have to drive back down south today, so, much as I’d like another Hobnob...’
‘Oh, God, sorry.’ He jumped up. ‘Yes, let’s get on with it. Lightning tour, then you can whip up whatever culinary delight you have in mind. You can meet my brother Damian and Mrs MacIver, who’s seventy-six and should be long ret
ired but will still be involved in a sort of ad hoc advisory role, as, um, a kind of housekeeper emerita. Then I’ll show you the accommodation that comes with the job, if you have time.’
Across the hall was a dining room containing a huge Victorian mahogany table. He rushed across the room as if fleeing a fire and threw open a concealed door beyond the sideboard. She glimpsed a room, lined with cupboards, overlooking the courtyard at the back of the house (‘Butler’s pantry, silver and so on’) and then they were back through the dining room to a door in the far wall, this one set off to one side near the windows (‘No corridors in this part of the house, rooms all lead one off the other, a bugger in terms of privacy’). Ludicrously, his sprint through the tour was being hampered by his unspoken insistence that she precede him across every threshold, so she found herself taking part in an absurd sort of relay, darting through the doorway ahead of him before he overtook her again to hurry across the room (‘Billiard room, obviously’) to another door to another smaller room overlooking the courtyard, this one with leather chairs and a card table (‘Old smoking room – disgusting’), then back in their relay through the billiard room to a pretty sitting room with windows on three sides.
The doors had been left open behind them, and as she turned she saw they were aligned so you could see right back through the billiard room into the dining room. An enfilade, was it called?
He was waiting for her to precede him through the doorway.
What would happen, she wondered, hysteria rising, if she just stood here?
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’m not on such a tight schedule that we have to break the house tour speed record.’
‘So I can forget the roller-skates?’
She laughed. ‘Actually, it would be a good house for roller-skating.’
‘Don’t think I haven’t tried it. Although I was eight years old at the time and, needless to say, it did end in tears.’
‘I bet you ran with scissors too.’
She sensed, rather than felt, his hand hover at the small of her back, encouraging her through the doorway. ‘I made a point of it.’
