door, where Jerry waited awkwardly. The girl had wet shoulders and a pale, anxious face. She looked much younger than her seventeen years. “Could you possibly stop appearing like this?” he cried. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. Well, come in then,” he said, exasperated. “Have you got anyone else out there you’d like to bring in?”
“I brought you some evidence,” said Jerry, embarrassed to be speaking in front of the workmen, who had stopped tackling the paintwork and were watching the proceedings with fascination.
“What sort of evidence?” asked May.
Jerry withdrew the Bible from her jacket and set it on the desk.
May carefully opened the book and studied the flyleaf. “Where did you get this?”
“I found it in Mr Jacob’s room. The police missed it.”
“What were you doing in there?” Bryant asked. “Just having a look around.”
“And why do you think it’s of any interest to us?”
“There are some passages underlined,” she said. “They might mean something.”
“You mean you’ve been withholding evidence?”
“No,” she said indignantly, “I was looking around the room and – ”
“Suppose his murderer had been looking for this?” said Bryant. “You could have put your own life in danger. Did you stop to think of that?”
“No,” said Jerry, bowing her face. Suddenly Bryant saw how much of a toll her recent experiences had taken. She had knotted her pale hands over each other to keep them still. Death had unforeseen effects on the living. He wondered about the nature of the discovery it had brought to her.
¦
“She keeps turning up like some kind of awful wraith,” said Bryant as the squad car turned into another waterlogged avenue lined with sycamores. “She obviously has some kind of morbid fascination with this case. She’s starting to give me the creeps. I wish she’d smile occasionally.”
“You can’t blame her for wanting to be part of the investigation,” replied May. “The hand of Death has given her a good old shaking.”
“It can’t hurt, can it? You taking her around with you?”
“She’s bright enough, and I could do with the help. So long as we don’t let anyone else know.” May braked to a halt and killed the engine. The sound of rain continued to drum above their heads.
“If you need anything, you can call me on this number.” He handed his partner a slip of paper. “Or use your walkie-talkie.” Bryant reluctantly accepted the note and made a show of pocketing it as May watched him with suspicion.
“You haven’t got it, have you?” he said finally.
Bryant gave him a wide-eyed innocent look, and saw that it wasn’t going to work. “Er, no,” he admitted.
“What is the point of me providing you with a walkie-talkie if you don’t remember to bring it with you?”
“I put it in my jacket this morning,” Bryant explained earnestly, “but it, er, ruined the cut of the pocket.”
“What are you talking about?” May studied his partner, who had owned four secondhand suits in the last twenty years, all of them brown and shapeless. “You’ve lost it again, haven’t you?”
“Not lost, John, mislaid. Anyway, they don’t work properly.”
“Not the way you use them, filling them up with soup and fluff and bits of dinner.” May unclipped his own and passed it to his partner. “Take mine, I’ll get another. If you lose this one, you’re a dead man.”
Bryant climbed out of the car and watched as May drove away. Then he walked in the shadow of the dripping sycamores to the front door of Bella Whitstable’s house.
The property was situated in a pleasant part of suburban West London where only the company cars gave any hint of the area’s invasion by young professionals. Bella had rarely visited here in the past few years, preferring the peace of the country. Until recently she had allowed a lodger to stay rent-free in return for looking after the property.
Bryant pushed open a wrought-iron gate and crossed the overgrown garden. The sun, invisible during the course of the day, was making a faint embarrassed flourish through the fluctuating rain before dropping dismally behind the encroaching cloud of night.
When he had managed to fit a key to the front door lock, he entered the hall and tried the lights, but nothing happened. The electricity had already been turned off. He dug out a pocket torch and switched it on.
Bella’s house proved to be the opposite of her brothers’, decorated in a gloomy, spartan manner which suggested that the owner was little interested in comfort or the vagaries of fashion. These rooms were uncluttered by all but the simplest furniture, the walls adorned by a handful of sporting prints. Only the graceful decor of the bedroom upstairs gave any hint of warmth.
Wardrobes and cupboards proved mostly empty. A single unlabeled key lay beneath the lining paper in the empty chest of drawers. The belongings Bella Whitstable required for daily use were presumably stored at her house in the country.
Bryant shone his torch to the landing and up at the ceiling. There was no sign of a loft. He carefully descended to the ground floor again, pausing at the landing window to listen. Incredibly, it had begun to rain again. The sound suggested a long, dank winter filled with harsh saffron sunsets and flooded footpaths, the season of murder and suicide.
Bryant pulled his scarf tighter to his throat and shone the torch across a set of ugly Victorian hunting prints. For a brief second, his reflected face flared back at him. Perhaps there was a basement. Upon reaching the kitchen, he cast the torch beam across the walls, searching for a door.
He soon found it – a narrow wooden panel painted gloss white – but it was locked, and no key on his ring fitted the lock. Digging into his coat pocket he withdrew the unlabeled key from the bedroom and inserted it, turning the handle. The damp wood had swollen in its frame. Jerking it hard, he unstuck the door and peered inside.
Below him, a flight of stone steps led off into blackness. Beneath ground level, the temperature of the cellar was several degrees lower than in the rest of the house. There was an unhealthy, mushroomy smell.
As he descended, Bryant could see his breath condensing in the beam of the torch. Gardening equipment stood at one side of the steps. Behind the rakes and shovels were fence posts and bales of wire, presumably for use on Bella’s country property. Somewhere in front of him, water dripped steadily onto sodden wood. There was no such thing as a completely dry Victorian house in London.
The torch beam revealed the side of a large packing crate. Here were stacks of forgotten games that touched off childhood memories of his own: Lotto, Escalado, Flounders, Tell Me, Magic Robot. Setting down the torch, he reached in among ruptured teddy bears, grotesque china dolls with missing limbs and eyes, pandas and golliwogs with their stuffing protruding, and withdrew a sepia photograph in a mildewed frame of grey cardboard.
Three children stood arm in arm on a manicured lawn, tentatively smiling, as if they had been instructed to do so by an impatient parent. The girl, pale and heavyset, wore a lumpy linen frock decorated with large, unflattering bows. The two boys were older, and were dressed formally in suits and gaiters, adults in miniature. There was an air of melancholia about all three, as though the photograph had been taken during a brief moment of sunlight. Behind them, the ground floor of an imposing country residence could be glimpsed.
On the flyleaf of the frame was handwritten in violet ink:
The portrait exhibited a lack of warmth that Bryant had so often found in photographs of the upper-middle classes. He pushed the picture into his pocket, aware that it might be of some future use.
Behind the crate was an identical box, filled to overflowing but harder to reach. The beam of his torch was dimming.
It was then that he heard the sound of shallow breathing in the dark beside him.
Someone, or something, had just woken up.
He must have disturbed a sleeping tramp. That was it, a tramp had gained entry to the house and had fallen asleep in the cellar. He swung the torch around and tried to trap the nearby figure in its barely visible beam, only to hear a rapid shift of movement to the far side of the room.
As the torch beam fluctuated once more, darkness pressed in. Bryant inched his way across the cellar floor. There was an odd, perfumed smell in this part of the room, a scent he associated with the hippies of the sixties. As he reached the stairs, he sensed the change in air pressure rather than hearing any movement; it was all that saved him from being knocked unconscious.
Armed with a wooden club of some kind, his assailant only succeeded in grazing his shoulder and thudding
