The Winter House

by P. R. Black

  Also by P.R. Black

  The Family

  The Beach House

  The Long Dark Road

  The Runner

  THE WINTER HOUSE

  P.R. Black

  An Aries book

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Aries, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © P.R. Black, 2021

  The moral right of P.R. Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PB) 9781801102803

  ISBN (E) 9781800249370

  Cover design © Lisa Brewster

  Aries

  c/o Head of Zeus

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  For Elaine

  PROLOGUE

  They had him – by the arms, the scruff of the neck, and the throat. Dan Grainger had nothing left – no fight, not even a token attempt, and he wheezed as his feet dragged along the front path towards the garden. Before them, the trees waved in the breeze, the branches striped through with the deep blue of a late summer night.

  Cramond, the man who held him by the throat, said in a melodious Aberdonian accent: ‘I’m a fair person, so I’d appreciate it if you just told me where it is, Dan.’

  ‘Can’t breathe,’ Grainger croaked.

  Cramond let go of his throat, but only a little; the other two on either side of Grainger tensed, taking his weight.

  ‘Thanks,’ Grainger said. ‘Just wanted to say… you’re a bastard. And your dad’s a bastard.’

  The man with the Scottish accent folded his arms. ‘You’re right. He was. And I am. That still hurts my feelings, though. I’d really like to hit you for it, Dan. Tell you what I can do, though. Let you look at the place, one last time.’

  The two lumps on either side of Grainger turned his head to look at the house. Stolid, red-bricked, with the lights burning in the hallway through the open storm doors. With thick woodland on either side, this sight could have graced the cover of a gentle lifestyle magazine, and gave no hint at the rolling carnival of violence that had ensued earlier, in most of the rooms.

  ‘Had a good look?’ asked Cramond. He had a thin face with a cruel mouth, and long straw-coloured hair. From a distance, he might have looked young. ‘Hope so. Because that’s it. That’s the last you’ll see. Unless you do the decent thing.’

  ‘You know I won’t tell you where it is. Get it over with, Junior.’

  Cramond chewed his lower lip, pensively. Then kicked Grainger right in the balls.

  ‘I might have been telling fibs about not hitting you, Dan,’ Cramond conceded, as he watched the old man sag. ‘No hard feelings, eh? Look… To tell the truth… I know you’re not going to tell me. So this is the end. You’ve been straight with me; I’ll be straight with you.’

  Grainger tried to swear. He only managed a trail of drool. He didn’t have the energy to spit into the earth.

  ‘I’ll take you on a farewell tour of the place,’ Cramond said. ‘Some place, right enough. I can see why you picked this spot to go to ground. Imagine having your own woods! Wouldn’t mind retiring here myself. In fact, I might even do it!’

  He nodded towards the two other men. They dragged Grainger down the path towards the paddock. A long, low building abutted onto an enclosure and an empty field.

  Torchlight stabbed through the windows; there was a suggestion of a face at the glass. Horses began to whinny inside.

  ‘They sound nervous,’ Cramond said. ‘I reckon they’re nervous. What do you boys say?’

  ‘I’d say they’re nervous,’ one of the other two men said.

  ‘Like they might bolt,’ Cramond agreed.

  Grainger was dragged towards the stables. He saw one horse through the open gate – a chestnut mare he’d insisted they call Molly – and its cries and the panicked dilation of its eyes almost broke him.

  Then, when he smelled the petrol, he did break. ‘Don’t do that, Cramond. You don’t have to do that.’

  ‘I do. I’m going to take away what’s most precious, before I top you. I just need you to see it and understand before you go.’

  ‘How can you hurt a horse, son? How can you do it?’

  ‘They eat them on the continent. It’s like a good barbecue. Decent cut of pork. I wouldn’t get sentimental.’ Cramond nodded towards someone standing near the stables. The smell of petrol became too strong to bear. Grainger’s head swam, and tears obscured his vision.

  ‘It won’t get you what you want,’ the older man said.

  ‘That depends on you, not me. Something you want to tell me?’

  ‘I already told you. About you. And your father.’

  ‘On that note,’ Cramond said, putting a finger to his lips in mock contemplation, ‘isn’t it strange that when I said “the thing you value the most”, you immediately thought about your horses?’

  Someone else was dragged into the light. Grainger almost didn’t recognise his son; they’d ruined him, criss-crossing his face with what looked like sabre cuts, and taken their time, with it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ the boy whispered. ‘I didn’t tell them.’

  ‘That’s all right, son. You did well. You did the best you…’

  A gunshot brought an end to it. Grainger’s son sprawled on his back, his blood gouting and poo
ling, rich and dark, in the dust and gloom.

  The old man mewled like a cat. They held him up – they had to. A hand gripped the white hair above the nape of his neck and held up his head. When he tried to close his eyes, another hand slapped him.

  Cramond blew smoke from the barrel of his pistol. He actually touched the metal with his fingertip, recoiling as the heat stung him. ‘I can even tell you what’s going on the coroner’s report,’ he said. ‘It’s going to work out that you and number-one son had a bit of a row. He burned the stables, went a bit mad, blah blah. You’d fallen out recently. A well-known feud – now, that part is true. Some people might have trouble swallowing it. But I’ll fix it, the exact same way you fixed it over the years. You’re going to kill him… Sorry, you have killed him… with this gun. And then you’re going to kill yourself. Your other boy… He’s in the woods, decorating a tree. He came upon the scene; didn’t stop it. So he despaired. And he did something desperate.’

  There was no response from Grainger. Not even a reflection of torchlight in his eyes.

  ‘So, let’s crack on,’ Cramond said. ‘I’ll give you something nice to focus on while we do it.’

  He nodded towards the figure at the stable doors. The figure struck a match, then leapt back as the air ignited in between him and the stables. There was a rush, and searing white light. The horses screamed.

  ‘Now, we’ll just make an adjustment or two, here…’

  Grainger fought, for all that. But his hands were prised open – he remembered doing the same with his boy, forty years ago, when he wouldn’t let go of something when he was told – and the gun was placed in one hand, and then, as his strength failed, his elbow was bent, his jaw gripped and forced open, and then the warm muzzle burning his tongue and the roof of his mouth, the oily metal taste. He willed himself with every atom to jerk his arm clear and put the gun in the face of Cramond and obliterate it, and losing, and failing, failing, until…

  ‘Lights out, Dan,’ Cramond said, and Grainger’s own finger tightened on the trigger, and then the white light flared one last time.

  1

  Vonny Kouassi woke up slowly. The morning sunshine had stolen a yard or two on her through the skylight, revealing a bright but cold blue pool directly overhead. Vonny smiled at the vision, then instinctively turned to her left and cuddled into Seth.

  It had grown cold during the night, but this never seemed to bother Seth, and he’d taken his pyjama top off. She clung to his huge ribcage, imagining the bones of a whale sunk into a beach, expanding and contracting in the sand. He barely stirred when she touched him. However, when the crows landed on the roof, claws scuttling across the bodywork in a shadow play of razor cuts, his eyes flew open.

  ‘Hell is that?’ he grunted. ‘Pterodactyl, this time?’

  ‘I would say a crow,’ Vonny whispered, lips close to his skin.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Quite heavy buggers. That isn’t a sparrow. Plus, I saw one land on the skylight. Junior birdwatching badge, St Martha’s Junior School. Never leaves you.’

  ‘I just know pigeons,’ he said. ‘How do you know it’s not a falcon or something?’

  ‘Wrong time of year for them. Birds of prey can be quite dainty. Unless it’s, you know, a condor or a golden eagle or something.’

  ‘Kind of thing that would carry a lamb?’

  ‘Or a small child. Yeah.’ She giggled at her own joke. Then the claws scuttled over the roof, again, as the bird took flight.

  ‘Sounds like rats,’ Seth said, finally. ‘I know rats, too.’

  ‘We all know those, darling.’

  He sat up and stretched, struggling to fit his elbows in their cramped bed space. He was pale in the strained light of a winter sunrise, with a tuft of reddish hair on his chest, and in his sideburns and stubble, though the long hair on top of his head was black. He had bulked out as he began the long, slow descent into middle age, but had kept his hairline. ‘I can’t get used to this. My ma’s old place in Peckham had a bigger bedroom than this.’

  ‘Just as well it won’t be a problem soon.’ She watched him get up and kick off his pyjama bottoms.

  ‘At least the water’s warm. I like this mini-boiler.’ He turned to his right; there was the white door that led to the shower. He pulled the compartment open, and a light blinked on, illuminating a stark white space capsule with a shower head attached. He turned the dial, letting the first few drips tickle his hands, an uncertain expression on his face. ‘What there is of it. I guess I won’t be too long.’

  Vonny lay back on the bed, staring at the blue square of sky above. Not too long, now… That’s what they’d said about this place last month, and last week, and even yesterday. Things moved slowly, though. Rubble could pile up, dust could fly, paint pots could be stacked like a child’s blocks, but real-time work wasn’t like a computer game.

  A shadow passed over the top of the skylight, a bird moving too fast to make out in any detail – certainly not a crow, that one – and then, over the top of the shower, came the sound of voices.

  ‘Seth?’ she called out. ‘What time were they due to arrive?’

  ‘Not for another hour,’ he said, through the spray.

  ‘I think they may be keen, then. They’re here now.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He shut off the shower. ‘Give me two minutes. I’ll get dried and go talk to them.’

  ‘I think I can handle it, darling.’

  ‘Better watch. Didn’t you say it was a new crew today, to take care of the snagging?’

  ‘Yeah? So?’

  ‘I spoke to the foreman yesterday. When you were out.’ He sucked his teeth. ‘Builders, pet. You know? Be careful.’

  ‘I think your phone is going.’

  Seth frowned, reaching for a towel. ‘My phone, did you say? You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s the 1970s – they want their attitudes back.’

  He grinned. ‘Just saying, darlin’. It’s the real world, you know? Rough cases, on the building sites. Got to watch your step.’

  ‘I’ve been managing the site, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘You know – over here, in the real world. While you were off twiddling knobs and flattering singers almost half your age.’

  His only response – the only credible one open to him – was a snorted laugh.

  Vonny pulled on her pyjamas, then tied her dressing gown with a savage tug. Her green wellies were beside his on the mat at the front door, a his ’n’ hers set of thick rubber boots that struck her as particularly ludicrous. She slid her feet into them, shivering at the feeling of the material slithering up her shins. ‘Well. Guess I’d better go and sort the rough cases out.’

  She unsnibbed the door and pulled it open.

  Seth watched her back as she trotted down the small set of steps outside the ship’s cabin-sized door. She was slender and athletic, her daintiness rendering the giant green wellies doubly comical. For all that, she was sure-footed. He chuckled.

  *

  Vonny stepped outside the caravan, squinting at the irruption of light. As she came down a short incline into the yard, the frost underneath her feet crackled, but the weather was fine and clear. All around her were the trees, hemming in the entire site. Where the cars and vans had passed was still a little muddy, slashed through with puddles gleaming in the morning light. In the foreground was the house, or what would become the house all too soon. It was on two levels, but enormous. The plastic wrapping had been slashed off the windows just the week before, and she had marvelled at the immense glass features. The roof was flat but sloped, a design that Vonny had stolen from a church she had admired as a child, on the countless journeys to her grandmother’s house. What would become the lawn was now something akin to the farmer’s field, even down to the smell of soil and interrupted vegetation in the cut earth. The walls on the lower level were white, and, with its hidden garden area pointing south, the structure appeared cut into a diamond shape, a dagger held out towards Vonny as she stomped onto th
e path.

  Still rough, still with lots to do, but now it looked like a house, not a work in progress. The scaffolding had gone; the structure was complete. It had gone from a basic timber frame, to flooring, to grey brickwork, loose wiring and bleached wooden floorboards to something that could almost be called a house, if not yet a home. Sometimes Vonny wrestled with the design, wondering if she should have gone for something simple and square, with brickwork the colour of a fresh-baked loaf. But there was something in the crucible of trees surrounding the house that lent itself well to the glass and whitewashed structure; the hard edges and jutting corners had a certain symmetry and congruity with the bare branches and spiky fingers of the forest.

  This was it: a great big house, on the edge of a roughly circular woodland, with a stream running through it and a lake in the middle. On three sides of the property was farmland. The house was maybe two hundred yards away from a twisty A-road, the type you either absolutely loved to drive along, or utterly hated. The path took you through a sturdy set of gates towards the house, looping round to the front. Vonny had planned it all this way. The builders were applying the finishing touches.

  There were three men on the site in hard hats, plus another on his phone in the portable cabin set up at the far corner of the site. They all caught sight of Vonny at roughly the same time. They all stopped what they were doing.

  And they were all young – horrifically so. They looked like four kids dressed as builders for a Halloween party. Apart from one heavy-set lad with hamster’s cheeks stuffed into his hard hat, they were lean and rangy, toolbelts threatening to drag their trousers down.

  ‘Oh,’ said the lad in the portable cabin door. He was thin, fresh-faced and utterly startled. In that instant, he reminded Vonny of her young brother being caught raiding the biscuit jar. ‘Uh, Mrs, uh…’

  ‘Kouassi. And it’s not Mrs. And you can just call me Vonny.’

  ‘Ah right, Vonny, you’re Mr Miller’s partner, is that right? Apologies if not.’ The young man’s face was the colour of venison. This happened, of course – had happened, would happen. She’d left Seth in charge of one or two details, to give her a bit of a break. This had been at his insistence, of course. And in calling the snagging crew to finalise their arrival time and other details, he’d somehow forgotten to properly explain the situation. One job, Seth, she thought. One job.