The carriage drove away that morning carrying his wife and his unborn child, and Albert could not know that neither would ever return.
By two in the afternoon, blizzard conditions had set in and any thoughts of leaving faded. Mac had set up shop in Melissa’s office and begun taking statements, though as he said to Rina it was a bit of a pointless exercise in some ways: he could hardly isolate everyone from one another, and he couldn’t tell them not to discuss something that was bound to be the main topic of conversation.
Miriam had finished with the kitchen and had continued upstairs. To everyone’s surprise, Joy had asked if she needed an extra pair of hands, and Miriam had agreed.
‘Mac has to do other things,’ Joy said. ‘I’m not worried about dead bodies, and I know how hard it is to collate and collect at the same time.’ So Joy, decked out in fresh whites and with her long hair bundled into a net, had accompanied Miriam up the stairs to Edwin’s room.
Rina took Tim aside, and together they went back to the seance room. The fire in the big hall had been lit, but everyone had elected to settle in the small room next to the dining room where they’d had drinks on that first night. It was comfortable and warm, and Jay had drawn the curtains and shut out the blizzard. Despite the fire in the massive fireplace, the big hall was chilly.
‘I hope Gail and Prof Franklin are holed up somewhere warm and not still out in this,’ Tim said.
‘I’m surprised they didn’t come back. If both roads out of here are blocked, where have they got to?’
‘Mac got through, and they left about the same time as he did. I suppose it depends which way they went. I don’t really understand why they left so urgently,’ Tim said.
‘No, neither do I, but there’s not much we can do about it.’
The snow was creeping in under the French windows in the orangery. Rina made a point of finding the door she now knew led from there into the kitchen area and the other wing, opening it to find a small lobby and short passage through which she could see the kitchen. The library was also chilly; the fire was not lit in there, and the cold that filled the glorified conservatory penetrated the book-lined room, despite its heavy door. It seemed like a silly place for a library, Rina thought. The damp would do the books no good at all. The unheated seance room was freezing; the shutters Rina had opened earlier that day were still locked back, allowing the chill of falling snow to bleed in through the badly fitting glass and leach what little warmth there might have been.
Tim shivered. ‘Who opened the shutters?’
‘I did,’ Rina told him. ‘I came in here first thing.’
‘Find anything I missed?’
‘Not so far. Tim, I felt a draft on the back of my neck several times during the seance last night.’ Only last night; it felt so much longer ago. ‘Did the door open at all?’
‘No, we’d have seen it. It would have been caught on film.’
Together they examined the room again, tapping on the panelling, scrutinizing the floor. There was no electric light in the old study, and already, though it was not even mid afternoon, it was getting hard to see, the swirling snow blocking out the daylight and turning everything to shades of twilight.
‘I felt the table move,’ Rina asserted. ‘We all did.’
‘And you can see it move on the video. We both know that can be made to happen in all kinds of ways.’
‘But you found no evidence of any of them?’
‘No, but that doesn’t mean anything. We examined the room on Friday, but it was then left unattended for more than a day. It was locked, but frankly, that doesn’t mean a damn thing, the lock is easy enough.’
He knelt beside the table. Then stood again. ‘Help me with this, will you?’
The pedestal table was of a type that Rina understood was a tea table. The beautifully figured top was designed to swing upright, and the table could then be set back against a wall when not in use. It was solid and heavy, and she admired the flame veneer, stroking the smooth surface.
‘Did Melissa polish this?’ she asked.
‘No idea. Why? What are you looking for? If the shutters were closed, there’d have been no fading, surely.’
‘No, but there’s no heating either. I’d have expected at least a bit of warping, some lifting of the veneer. I don’t know. It’s in lovely condition for something neglected for well over a hundred years.’
‘True. OK, now tip the top back, right. Ah, now that’s new.’
‘What?’
‘This, look.’ What had looked like a perfectly flat rest at the top of the pedestal had been slightly modified. A small piece of wadding was slipped between the tabletop and the pedestal base; when they removed it and dropped the tabletop back down, they could tilt the table, just a little. ‘Well, I’ll be. So bloody simple.’
‘I thought you examined the table?’ Rina said. ‘You were under it when we came into the room for the first time.’
‘I was checking for microphones, hidden whatsits. Oh, I don’t know. I understood the table had already been examined, and anyway—’
‘You thought if there was going to be trickery, it would be clever trickery.’
‘So bloody simple.’
‘Hmm.’ Rina recalled her conversation with Rav. Experimentally, she tested the ability to rap the tabletop. It wasn’t easy, but a few practice tries convinced her that it could be done. ‘And who would be in the best position to manipulate this?’ she asked.
Tim stood back, visualizing the people sitting around the table. ‘It would have been Edwin,’ he said. ‘In the dark, in that kind of atmosphere, well, no one’s faculties are completely switched on. It must have been Edwin. None of us saw it.’
‘But he had both hands on the table,’ Rina argued, playing devil’s advocate.
‘True, but—’ Tim grabbed the chair Edwin had used and sat down. ‘Ah.’ He tipped back slightly. ‘The legs have been shaved off at the back, look, tilts.’ He slid himself beneath the table and laid his hands on the top, as Edwin had the previous night. He tipped the chair and lifted his knee. The tabletop tilted and cracked down with a solid thump. ‘Not easy,’ Tim said. ‘But eminently possible, and he was here right over Christmas so he’d have had plenty of time to practice.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Rina wondered. ‘And anyway, Tim, we don’t know for sure it was Edwin. Three of those chairs look identical. The room has been unlocked since last night, so it would have been easy for anyone to have swapped the chairs round.’
‘True. But . . .’
Rina nodded. ‘So who else realized?’
Mac had been on the phone to the local police again. ‘More power lines down, accidents all over the place. I’ve told them we can hold the fort here, and they’re going to try and get someone to us in a couple of hours.’
Miriam and Joy came down with a plastic box filled with freezer bags and camera equipment. ‘I need to download the images on to a computer,’ Miriam said. ‘Then we can send them if the Internet connection is still OK.’
‘Seems to be,’ Melissa said. She seemed very subdued. ‘I hate the thought of him just lying there. It doesn’t seem right.’
‘We’ve turned off the heating in his room,’ Miriam said. ‘That should slow decomp. I used the meat thermometer to take body temp readings so you might not want it back.’
‘Oh God.’ Melissa’s colour drained, and she fled to the downstairs cloakroom.
‘Sorry,’ Miriam said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Time of death?’ Mac asked.
‘Best I can offer is between four and six this morning.’
‘Between four and six,’ Rina mused. What time had she heard the noises in the attic? ‘There was someone else here around then,’ she said quietly. ‘I saw them the night before. I heard them last night and saw their footprints. Maybe Edwin saw them too?’
She shuddered at the thought that she might have gone to confront Edwin’s murderer armed only with a heavy glass candlestick.
‘Rina!’ Miriam was appalled.
Joy giggled and then sobered. ‘Sorry, I just have this image in my head of Rina in a pink dressing gown and slippers bonking an intruder on the head with a candlestick. It sounds like a Cluedo game, but really, Rina darling, why didn’t you come and wake us up?’
‘Because I’m not as sensible as I should be,’ she told them. ‘It opens up other possibilities though, doesn’t it?’ She sighed and glanced out at the heavy snow. ‘Actually, I hope it was someone from outside, otherwise it all gets a bit grim, doesn’t it? Amazing how helpless a bit of weather can make us, isn’t it?’ She pulled one of the big doors open and looked out. A blast of freezing, snow-laden air skittered in, and she let the door swing closed again. ‘I hate to sound melodramatic, but I think we should all be careful, stick with the people we trust. We have one dead body; we don’t want any more.’
SEVENTEEN
It was just before three in the afternoon. Joy, Tim and Miriam, along with Jay Stratham, were in the small room off the dining room, watching the videos shot the night before to see if Edwin had indeed been cheating.
Viv, Robin and Rav were sitting at the table, talking sporadically, trying to make sense of Edwin’s death and also Edwin’s insistence on setting up this event. Rav had been with him over the Christmas and New Year and was at a loss; Edwin had been excited but methodical, and it was he who had invented the character of Grace, the manufactured ghost.
‘He never said where he got the idea from,’ Rav said. ‘Just told us she should be called Grace and also the various ideas he had about her life. We brainstormed the rest.’
Viv was thoughtful, something nagging at the back of her mind. ‘There was a Grace in the news clippings, I’m sure of it. I just can’t remember where I saw it.’
‘Then he might have been influenced by that,’ Rav agreed. ‘I know he was very set on the name and the character. Maybe he found out something about the so-called ghost that Elizabeth and her group created?’ He looked hopefully at Viv, who shook her head.
‘I can’t remember,’ she said. Then: ‘Does it really matter?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘We could go over the records again,’ Robin said. The others nodded agreement, but no one seemed to have the energy to move.
In the large hall, Mac was trying to construct a timeline based on the statements he had taken. Jay paced while Terry watched. He held a script in his hand which he kept trying to read, but Rina could see he could not concentrate.
Toby had wandered off to his room.
Rina, bored with inaction, crossed the hall towards the kitchen wing to see if Melissa wanted any help. She was startled when the front doors swung open and Gail staggered through, supporting David Franklin.
‘Oh, Lord, are you all right? Mac! Come here!’ she called. ‘Come on, sit down, you’re both frozen through.’
‘We crashed the car.’ Gail was crying and obviously distressed.
Blankets were found, and warm drinks, and Miriam inspected the deep cut on David’s head. Both Gail and David were chilled through.
‘My God, you were lucky,’ Rav said. ‘You could both be dead just from the cold.’
‘I know.’ David was shivering uncontrollably now, hands clasped tightly round a large mug. ‘We knew we couldn’t stay where we were, but I really wasn’t sure I could make it back across the fields. We could see Aikensthorpe, but it just seemed like forever away. I thought we’d freeze to death before we made it back.’
‘Why didn’t you call someone? We would have come out to find you.’
David Franklin shook his head. ‘My phone is still back there somewhere in the car, we think – we didn’t realize it was missing until we’d already set off. Gail tried hers and couldn’t get a signal, then the battery died. The case was cracked in the accident, so we think it must have damaged the connector or something. I know she put it on charge last night just before bed.’
How does he know that? Rina thought.
‘Simeon was there,’ Gail said vaguely, leaning back into the armchair and closing her eyes.
‘Try not to go to sleep yet,’ Miriam told her. ‘You’re still really chilled and probably concussed.’
‘Simeon?’ Rina asked. ‘Oh, you mean Professor Meehan. He left here before we arrived,’ Rina explained to Mac. ‘I replaced him.’
Gail lifted her head and looked around the room. ‘Where’s Edwin?’
Silence as the others exchanged glances. ‘I’m sorry,’ Rav said finally. ‘Edwin died in the night.’
‘What! Died? But how? His heart?’
Rav hesitated and then shook his head.
‘Someone killed him, didn’t they?’ Gail demanded.
‘Gail, don’t be absurd, who would want to—’ David Franklin broke off, the expected reassurances that it was natural causes obviously unforthcoming. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘None of us do,’ Rav told him. ‘Mac and Miriam here are trying to make some sense of it, as the local police are on the other side of that landslide. It’s all very unfortunate.’
Ah, the great British art of understatement, Rina thought. They should make competency in that part of the new Citizenship exam, along with drinking tea and talking about the weather.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gail said. ‘Mac and Miriam? Who are you, anyway?’
While Miriam explained their presence and who and what they both were, Mac went back to Melissa’s office and made another call to the local police. The news was no better. He told them about Professor Franklin’s car and that both occupants had made it back to Aikensthorpe House. He was told that the route through should be cleared the next morning when the heavy equipment required would be on scene.
‘Weren’t you involved in the Cara Evans enquiry?’ Inspector Chandler, his local contact, asked him.
‘Yes,’ Mac told him cautiously. ‘I was.’
‘So you’re currently on suspension, then.’
‘That’s so, yes.’
‘Right.’
Mac could hear the questions hanging in the air. Instead of encouraging them, he said, ‘We’ve done all we can to secure the evidence and the scene, but I’ll be very glad to be able to hand this over to you.’
Again, a slight hesitation. ‘You’re sure the old bloke didn’t just pop his clogs?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Right.’ That word again, so full of unexploded meaning. Mac had become used to a certain notoriety being attached to his name this past year or so – inevitable, given his involvement in such a high-profile case as a child murder. Especially as he had been present when she died and was now a suspect in the death of her killer.
Mac closed his eyes and brought the conversation back to present matters. ‘So, we can expect someone to arrive tomorrow morning then?’
‘All things being equal, yes. Unless we get more bloody snow or another chunk of hillside decides to give in to gravity.’
Mac thanked him and rang off.
Returning to the main hall, he told everyone that help would be a little longer getting through.
‘Don’t they realize there’s a killer on the loose?’ Jay asked.
‘I’m not sure they are quite convinced of that. Edwin was an old man, and they only have our word that it wasn’t natural causes.’
‘But you’re a police officer and Miriam is a CSI.’
‘And murder investigations cost a lot of money.’ David was cynical. ‘Better for everyone if this is just a heart attack. I suppose you are sure?’
Mac experienced a moment of uncertainty, then pushed it aside. Of course he was sure. He wasn’t exactly a stranger to violent death, and neither was Miriam.
‘I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Look, we don’t know fully what went on here; I think we should all just be careful. The local police will arrive tomorrow and a proper inq
uiry can begin. In the meantime, I suggest everyone keep a lookout for anything strange and that tonight we lock our bedroom doors.’
‘There are spare keys,’ Viv pointed out. ‘Maybe we should take the spare keys.’
‘They need to be fingerprinted,’ Miriam said. ‘They need to stay in the key cupboard for now.’
‘But—’
‘If you lock your door and leave the key in the lock then no one else can unfasten the door from the outside,’ Mac pointed out. ‘We just all need to be sensible.’
No one actually argued with him, but the tension and fear were palpable. No one said it, but Rina could see the wary glances cast between the huddled little group and hear the unspoken question. One of them might have killed Edwin; would the killer strike again?
EIGHTEEN
The afternoon dragged on. Rina, Tim and Joy retreated to Rina’s room and pored over the folder Viv had given them all on that first night and the printouts from the Internet that Mac had brought with him.
‘So, as I understand it, the consortium that bought this place want to turn it into a conference centre and wedding venue,’ Tim said at last. ‘There are all these plans down on paper, and the local press report that it will bring jobs and opportunities into the area, that they will need tradesmen to do the restoration and kitchen staff and admin people to organize the conferences . . . and what do we actually see, eighteen months on?’
‘Melissa and a bit of rewiring,’ Rina said. ‘Yes, the rooms are comfortable and the kitchen is well equipped and clean—’
‘But the laundry room is one washing machine and a dryer,’ Joy said. ‘And the kitchen is fine for a smallish event, but I’d hate to have to cater an entire wedding.’
‘Maybe they just plan to use outside agencies?’ Rina suggested
‘And this event, this weekend, it’s been a real oddity.’
‘You mean even without the murder?’ Joy said. ‘No, but you’re right. I looked in the visitors’ book,’ she added. ‘You know, I like to see the comments and that. Well, there’s hardly any.’
The Dead of Winter Page 14
