“We were with you, Inspector,” Lord Hocking put in, looking at his daughter.
I gave him a stern nod. “Where are Henry and his wife?”
“They took the children out for the day,” Lady Hocking informed me. “Thank goodness, I’d hate to think one of the little ones might have seen that.”
“It’s probably just paint, mother,” Rupert sighed, collapsing into a chair, pushing his hair back from his face. “And they’re one, they wouldn't know.” His sister glared at him but didn’t make any move to correct him.
“Where has everyone been for the last hour or so, since I arrived?” I demanded, growing impatient.
“I was in my study,” Lord Hocking started us off, carefully and patiently, “my morning tea and paper, as usual. Got some work done for the estate as I waited for your good self to arrive.”
I nodded. “Lady Hocking?”
She looked over at me, flustered. “Oh, here and there, Inspector. I had breakfast with Henry and the children then sorted out tonight’s dinner with the cook. I was heading outside to cut some fresh flowers for Rosie’s room,” she squeezed her daughter’s hand, “and it was just there!”
“Dennis?” I spun around to where he stood at the foot of the staircase, his hands entwined before him, looking almost nauseous as his eyes flickered from me to the door.
He cleared his throat. “I began my day as usual. Brought Lord Hocking his tea and paper and took tea to rest of the family. Awaited your arrival, led your sergeant out to meet the groundskeeper, and I had just got back and was starting on the brass polishing,” he indicated the little apron he wore, “when I heard her Ladyship cry out. I came at once.”
“Rupert?” I wasted no time in picking over too many details.
The young lad looked up at me from where his head was bent into his hands and grimaced. “I woke up, oh, five minutes ago. Heard mother scream and came a running,” he said jauntily.
“Rose?”
“Rose was with us, Inspector,” Lord Hocking quickly argued.
I ignored him, fixing my gaze on her. “Rose only just joined us, Lord Hocking,” I reminded him. “She was somewhere before she joined us.”
She bristled slightly at my implication, sitting up straight to meet my gaze stonily. “I got up and had breakfast down in the kitchen,” she told me haughtily, “then I got dressed and went out for my walk.”
“Where did you walk?” I asked her, just as Mills came jogging through the front door. I met his eye questioningly and gave me a brief nod, they were on their way. He slowed down, strolling towards me and stood at my side. I gave Rose a nod to continue.
“I went out through the breakfast room,” she said, “through the garden and down to the woods.”
“She likes the bluebells,” Lady Hocking added, “when they bloom.”
“And you saw nothing?” I asked. “No stranger on the property? No one coming to and from the house?”
“No,” she replied surely.
“Well, someone came.” I was aware that I was practically snarling at the family, but this was beginning to feel ridiculous. “Someone managed to get all the way up to the house, outside your front door long enough to leave that and paint a word on your wall before leaving again. And you’re telling me that nobody saw?”
“What about the staff?” Mills asked. “The maids?”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“The kitchens,” Dennis told me quickly. “I sent them all there on my way to you.”
“Go and fetch them please, Dennis.”
He gave me a smart nod and walked away with a speed that was likely required for getting around this house on a daily basis. I took Mills’s elbow and turned him away from the family.
“None of them saw anything,” I hissed to him.
“Where are the others? Henry and Eloise?”
“Out for the day with the children,” I told him.
Mills rose an eyebrow. “Good timing?”
“Maybe. Did you get a look at it?” I asked, giving a minute nod in the direction of the door.
“I did.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I’m guessing that’s our painting.”
“Guessing so.”
“And vindicta? Hardly a common choice of word.”
“Tell me you speak Latin.”
“Some,” he admitted sheepishly, “from my dad. It means revenge. Loosely.”
“Revenge?”
I thought about Selene and Richard, the mystery child, and it seemed Mills shared my thought because he added, “I can call Sharp again, see if we can’t speed up the process of finding a name for the child?”
“Later. For now, I want to know how someone snuck up the front door of a busy house without being seen. It’s a person, not a ghost,” I added disgruntledly.
“You think it’s blood?” Mills asked me in a much-lowered voice.
“Looks it,” I said. But it remained to be seen whose blood it was, I was counting on Crowe for that. Not technically her job but she had a weird interest in it all that made her faster than any other lab. Mills’s phone dinged, and he pulled it from his pocket.
“Crowe,” he told me, “ETA ten minutes.”
I nodded, and we turned back to the family as Dennis reappeared, three women in tow. They all were simple black dresses, like caricatures of Victorian maids, but that was where any similarity ended.
“Inspector Thatcher,” Dennis ushered them forward, “Maud, Daria and Lara.”
Maud was clearly the eldest. Her hair, a bright silver was swept into an impeccably tidy bun, her dress pristine, her shoes polished. Not a hair or button out of place. She gave me a tight nod, her mouth pressed into her line and her eyes turned motherly towards Rupert and Rose.
The next one, Daria, gave Mills and I a polite if reserved smile and then faced her shoes. Her dark hair was in a style like Maud’s, her dress as equally clean and her shoes as equally shiny. She toyed with a bracelet on her wrist, her fingers flashing with the gold of a wedding ring.
And then Lara, the youngest of them easily, around the age of Rupert and Rose I would guess. I recalled what Mills had scribbled in his notebook, suspecting some attachment between the young ginger maid and the middle Hocking child. She didn’t spare him a glance though; she was looking at Mills and myself curiously. Her hair, a much lighter red than Jeannie’s fell in a long plait down her back, her pale skin smudged with charcoal and flour, her dress wrinkled and a bit dusty and her shoes scuffed. A pair of colourful, frilly socks peeked out over the tops and a tattoo was just about visible beneath her sleeve as she tugged it surreptitiously down towards her wrist, under the watchful eye of Dennis.
‘Please tell me one of you saw something,’ I asked them in a voice considerably kinder and gentler than the one I had been addressing the family with. They exchanged a look between them and Maud, apparently their chosen spokeswoman, took a step forward.
“I’m sorry, Inspector,” she offered kindly, “we haven’t.”
“Where have you all been this morning?” I asked wearily.
“I have been upstairs mostly,” she said proudly, “helping Eloise get the children ready for the day, tidying up their nursery and such like.”
“Daria?” I turned my attention to her.
“Kitchen,” she answered, “helping Ellen clean up after breakfast.”
“One of them always helps cook,” Dennis informed me. “They take turns.” I studied Daria’s flushed skin and attributed it to the heat of a kitchen and focused on Lara.
“Lara? Where have you been this morning?”
She glanced almost imperceptibly towards Rupert before looking back at me. “Sweeping the fireplaces mostly,” she indicated her ash bedraggled self, “laying them again for later this evening. And cleaning up the dining room.”
“Has anyone been by the house?” I inquired. “Have there been any deliveries?”
“Only the usual ones,” Maud informed me, “milk and eggs from the farm up the lane.”
“A package for Master Hocking,” Daria added, her eyes flicking to Rupert who nodded happily.
“My new ski coat,” he announced.
“Surely you don’t need a new one?” Rose scolded him. “You go through them like sweets, Rupert.”
“Just because you’ve never been invited.”
“Why would I want to be invited? You and your friends are awful company.”
“Oh yes,” he drawled, “far better to spend my life in this fire hazard of a house doing jigsaws with father.”
“Which is better than getting drunk in the Alps and almost being escorted from a ski slope by the French police!”
“Children,” Lady Hocking snapped. They both shut their mouths and slumped back down where they sat, glaring at each other across the room. Lady Hocking looked furious at them, but behind her, where she couldn’t see, Lord Hocking was suppressing a smirk, his eyes flushed with amusement as he looked from one of his children to the other.
“Please carry on,” I said to the maids after a drawn-out pause ran through the room.
“There was a girl,” Lara said, “one of the wait staff from the party. A few things got left behind and she came to collect them. She drove into the yard, I put the things in the boot, and she left again.”
“Must have been her!” Lady Hocking cried out. “She was there the night the painting got stolen in the first place!”
But Lara kept looking at me, and I gave her another encouraging nod.
“She never got out of her car, Inspector.”
“Do you know who it was? Did she give a name?”
Lara shook her head. Since she was new, I doubted she knew any of the hired staff by name, anyway.
“Inspector,” Dennis called my attention and nodded to the window. Cars pulled up onto the drive and the familiar, hectic figure of Dr Crowe stumbled from one of them, half dressed in her white suit, curls of hair pinging from her head like corkscrews.
“Please excuse us,” I said to the family, stepping out of the door. I left it open as Smith came up the stairs, her eyes homing in on the bloody picture.
“Bugger,” she murmured, “waste of paper.”
Mills laughed quietly, and I held the door open for her.
“Take some official statements, please, Smith,” I asked. Normally I might not bother, but Sharp was breathing down our necks enough as it was about doing things properly. Smith straightened her uniform and ducked underneath my arm, her shoes clicking on the floor. A few more uniformed officers followed her, and I closed the door, leaning against it as Dr Crowe zipped herself up and bounded up the stairs.
“Vindicta,” she read aloud, “revenge.”
“Of course, you speak Latin,” I observed.
“I am very wise,” she replied, squatting down and held out her hand. One of her team passed her a bag and Mills and I left her to it, strolling over towards one of the cars and looked back at the house.
“Turn for the books,” he said.
“Risky, doing it whilst we were here. Revenge,” I repeated, scratching my jaw, “we’ve got a fairly decent idea as to who might want revenge against Lord Hocking.”
“Is it worth mentioning to him? That we’re looking for the child.”
I considered this, staring at the house, but shook my head. There were too many unknown variables, and whilst the child in question might be a thief, they might also be unaware, innocent. And I wasn’t dragging them into all of this if I didn’t need to.
“What did the groundskeeper tell you?” I asked him instead.
“Says there are a few ways in and out of the estate, but if you were coming from the house and with a painting, he said some would be easier than others. To navigate the woods,” Mills told me. “You’d have to be familiar with them. According to the groundskeeper only himself and Rose Hocking are familiar enough with the woods to do that. Otherwise, it’s the driveway, or down and out along the fields.”
“Lots of cars coming and going that night,” I mentioned, “easy enough to blend in with the rest.”
“You’d probably need a nice car,” Mills pointed out.
“We’re in the countryside. A Land Rover would suffice.”
“You made a face,” Mills commented, “when I mentioned Rose.”
“She was out in the woods before that,” I pointed over my shoulder, “was found.”
“Why would she do it?”
“I have not a single bloody clue.”
“Well, let’s hope Crowe finds us one.”
Fifteen
Thatcher
With the family unable to offer much more in the way of help, Mills and I left them with two uniformed officers keeping watch on the house and followed Dr Crowe back to the station.
We hovered around, chatting to Sharp and Smith, trying to keep the media at bay with this particular advancement. Dennis sent over the footage from the security cameras, and as we waited for Crowe to analyse her nice new blood splatter, Mills and I slumped at a computer, watching the hours trickle by. We watched as we pulled up to the house ourselves, Dennis stepping out from the front door a few minutes beforehand and waited. There was nothing, I hated to say it, shifty in his manner. He simply stood and waited patiently, occasionally checking his watch. We arrived and went inside. The screen stayed the same, the minute ticking past and then a car pulled up and around, heading back towards the yard.
“Pause it,” I told Mills.
Leaning forward, squinting at the blurred image, I took a note of the number plate. I could just about make out a person in the car, and only one. They drove round the back, and as they slipped around the corner, a figure came from behind the camera. Mills and I sat forward as the hooded figure loped up the stairs, quickly dropped something down, dug into their pocket and pulled out a small bottle or vial, dipped their gloved finger in and scrawled on the wall, poured the rest over the photograph and scurried down the stairs. They were dressed head to toe in dark, plain clothing, hooded and shadowed. Nothing to give away who it was, not even a shape to determine if we were dealing with a man or a woman. A few minutes after they left, the car reappeared and drove straight away. Pausing it again, I could make out Nadia’s face in the driver’s seat, nobody else in the car.
I sat back, toying with a pen. “Send it to Wasco,” I told Mills, “see if he can’t get a clearer image.”
Shortly after, Dr Crowe called up and as expected, there were no fingerprints and it seemed that blood had once belonged to a pig.
“But,” she had added happily, “a hair. Got a bit stuck in the glue used to stick the photo to the card.”
“Any matches?”
“No.”
I dropped by head in my hands, letting a slew of curse words drop out. This was a slow-going affair.
That night, I headed to the coaching house, playing music and plastering wildly until my thoughts finally scurried away where they couldn’t bother me anymore.
I trudged into the station the following morning, tired and aching. There was plaster in my hair that I hadn’t managed to get out and wondered if paint stripper would be too extreme. As I headed up the stairs, I found Sharp waiting for me.
“You look awful,” she remarked.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Clean yourself up, you’ve got somewhere to be.” She sounded surprisingly cheerful, and I looked up, meeting her gaze properly. She was indeed, smirking at me.
“Where?”
She pulled out a scrap of paper from her pocket, an address and a name scribbled on the front. “The orphaned son of Selene Whitlock,” she announced, handing me the slip.
“You found him?”
“He goes back to the foster home from time to time,” she told me, “but if you want a birth certificate, you must wait a bit longer.”
“No, no.” I leapt forward, clapping her arm gratefully and looked down at the slip of paper. He lived here, in the city, on the other side of the river. Sebastian Whitlock. “I’ll go now,” I
decided, scratching my head.
“Clean yourself up,” she repeated. “Think about what you’re about to do here, Thatcher. You’re going to a boy to ask about the father he never met.”
I wanted to go now; I was itching to go now. But what she said made sense, and the voice she said it in left no room for argument. So, I headed to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water, scrubbing at my head with soap until the plaster flaked out and then dried my head under the hand dryer. At one point someone wandered in, looked at me, and quickly wandered out again.
Feeling a bit fresher, I fixed my shirt, and without any tie threw on a jumper and my coat, raking my slightly damp hair back from my face before charging back out towards the steps. Sharp still loitered there, looking me over and giving me an approving nod.
“I’ll tell Mills where you’ve gone. He and Wasco are going to look over the footage some more and track down that car of yours.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She gave me a wry smile. “Get out, off you go.”
I touched her shoulder as I darted down the stairs, out into the street and into my car. It was a short drive, no more than ten minutes and I ended up outside a modest little house, two up two down, with a nice enough front lawn and rickety little car. I felt sorry for the lad, if he had no idea who his father could be, but there was every possibility that he knew very well indeed.
I inhaled deeply and stepped forward, ringing the bell and waited a beat. When the door opened, I was faced with a man who looked like a rougher, darker version of Henry Hocking. He had the same bone structure in the face, same round cheeks and upturned nose. His hair was dark, his eyes brown, but he was a Hocking, that much was clear to me.
“Hello?”
“Sebastian Whitlock?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied hesitantly. I pulled out my warrant card and held it aloft.
“Detective Inspector Thatcher, North Yorkshire Police. Might I borrow a minute or two of your time?”
“Can I ask what this is about?”
DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crime Thrillers: Books 1-3 Page 38
