He reversed the car back down the road and headed south-west for Alnwick. He found what he wanted in the market square. A chemists and opticians that sold microscopes and binoculars. They hadn’t got what he wanted but they could get it in two hours from their main shop in Newcastle.
Boyd had a leisurely coffee and then went to the main estate agents and asked about a cottage or a house on a short let. There were two. A large house at Wooler, and a cottage just a couple of miles south of Seahouses. They were honest enough to point out that it was isolated and the only access was a cinder track from the road. It had been the cowman’s cottage when it was part of the farm. It was £10 a week for a minimum let of a month. He paid cash and they gave him the keys and instructions for finding the cottage. By the time he had finished at the estate agents the binoculars were waiting for him, and he paid by Barclaycard in the name of G. H. Merrick, one of SIS’s favourite pseudonyms.
There were clumps of weeds, wild-parsley, thistles and couchgrass growing in the cinder track as the car crunched its way noisily towards the cottage. He sat in the car looking at the cottage before he got out. There was nothing picturesque or pretty about it. It was built of local stone with small windows and a grey slate roof. The windows were grey with dust and there was ivy growing over the blue-painted wooden front door.
He got out and walked round the cottage. There was a small orchard of very old apple trees, and a vegetable plot with Brussels sprouts that had gone to seed the season before and now stood three feet high in a dense jungle of rotting leaves. There were two milk bottles outside the back door and a pile of rotting windfalls by a wooden water butt standing on four cinder blocks. But the big old-fashioned key turned smoothly in the door and it opened easily into the quarry-tiled kitchen and parlour. There was a Rayburn stove and a small electric double ring alongside the sink. The walls were at least eighteen inches thick.
21
Boyd switched off the lights, parked the car close to the hawthorn hedge and walked up the farm track, ducking under the wire strands into the field that led to the grounds of Percy House. He walked slowly, stumbling from time to time in the dark on the tussocky grass, until he came to the low stone wall that marked the edge of the farmland.
He could see the house now. There were lights in the downstairs rooms and he made his way across the well-kept lawns to a magnolia, and then on again to a group of three tall cupressus that marked the edge of the lawn. The gravel driveway was about ten feet wide and there was no cover until he got to the shadows of the house itself. He stood watching the house and he could hear faintly the sound of a piano.
It seemed an interminable walk across the gravel and despite his efforts the noise of his feet on the loose stones sounded outrageous in the stillness of the night. There were rose bushes in the border along the walls that snagged at his clothes, and it took ten minutes before he could look cautiously into the room. It was a big room lit by two large crystal chandeliers, sparsely but elegantly furnished. The polished oak floor gave it the appearance of an artist’s studio.
He was looking across the top of a grand piano, its lid propped open. And a man was playing, easily and confidently, moving from one tune to another. From “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to “Try a Little Tenderness.” He was alone in the room, intent on his playing and as he changed key into “Manhattan” Boyd saw that he was singing the words to himself. Smiling as he sang. For a brief moment the man looked towards the window, directly at where Boyd was standing.
Boyd guessed that the man was in his middle forties; his black hair smoothed back, the first signs of baldness at the temples. His face was so smooth and shiny that he could have been wearing make-up, and his dark eye-lashes were like a girl’s, long and sweeping as he looked down at the keyboard. He played a few bars of “Moon River” and then he stopped, stood up, closed the piano lid and walked across the room, switching out the lights as he left.
When Boyd moved on along the back wall he came to another lit window. A small window with drawn gingham curtains. Through the gap in the curtains he saw that it was a big old-fashioned kitchen. The pianist and another man were sitting at a table and an elderly woman was serving them food, smiling at something one of them had said. The other man was tall, wearing a sweater and jeans. The fair hair, blue eyes and square shoulders gave him a Scandinavian air. He was looking up, talking to the woman.
Boyd moved back to the narrow grass border that edged the drive and followed it round the house. At the far corner an open archway led into a cobbled yard and in the darkness he could see the silhouette of the outbuildings where the two servants lived. He was about to move on when he heard the back door
