Abruptly the taxi slewed round one final corner and pulled to a halt before a tall, narrow house with black iron gates and unkempt hedges. “This is it,” the driver growled and quoted an exorbitant price.
Then Mark was left with his bag on the icy road. Thoughtlessly he rubbed his chin. As he felt the stubble growing through foundation, he realised he must have smeared away parts of his disguise. The tattoos would be showing through. He’d look as if he had a skin disease. He opened the gate and hurried up the slippery path to the door before he got a chance to change his mind about this.
Now that he was here, it all seemed horribly normal. Here he was paying a social call. Was this how kidnappings usually worked? He felt out of his depth.
Grand and lifeless, the house was like a modest slice of cake. In that dark suburban terrace it somehow stood alone, its icing sugar flaking off. An old man answered his knock, fumbling with catches on the double doors. It was like getting into a high-security prison, but the air that met Mark was warm and lit duskily by candles. The décor and furnishings he could see as he shuffled into the hallway behind the old man were rich; opulent, even. A chandelier hung at the mouth of the staircase, its crystal droplets tipped with nicotine stains.
The old man was silent; he nodded to Mark to wait there in the hallway, standing awkwardly by a large glass vase of irises. The man was almost bent double with age. His hands were the colour of corned beef with the jelly left on. He was obviously ready to go home: he wore a long coat and a beret and his hi-tech trainers were laced securely for a walk through the snow. Mark wondered who he was. The sight of those painfully watering eyes when the door first creaked open had caught him off guard. “Tony?” he had asked, so wound up that he would have asked the same thing no matter who had opened the door.
“He said you have to wait,” the old man had gasped. He took Mark’s bag and his fingers were freezing when they brushed Mark’s. Mark was about to say he could manage it himself, but with an inexplicable burst of speed, the hi-tech trainers had carried the old man to the top of the stairs. His voice quavered down behind him. “You’re to go and sit in the living room. There’s a fire.”
Only one door was open downstairs, so Mark took it. The carpet was thick under the soles of his shoes and the ceilings were high. He didn’t shout anything up the stairs in reply. He wasn’t sure of his voice at all.
The living room was sparsely furnished but warm. A single armchair sat before the fireplace. He sat right on its edge, as if demonstrating that he didn’t intend to stay.
Tony had done well for himself. Mark was amazed. A wide ornately framed mirror hung above the mantelpiece, complemented with soft lighting. Raising himself to see his face, Mark thought he looked dreadful. On the mantelpiece there was a single avocado resting in a yellow eggcup, a silver teapot and a pile of old hardbacked books.
He couldn’t quite work out what was odd about the house, aside from the fact it wasn’t how he had imagined Tony living. The silence? The fire crackled and sparked companionably. He noticed a connecting door in one of the room’s shadowed corners, and crept over to have a look. Beyond there was a deep-blue dining room. Its windows were tall, Georgian, an extravagant candelabra alight on the whitewashed sill. But on the floor the scarlet carpet was half rolled up, and dominating the unswept floorboards there was a jumbled hoard of objects. The candlelight glittered on teapots, saucers, cups, bits of statues. They looked like antiques: small, tasteful, and just showy enough to be valuable. They looked as if they had just arrived, or were about to be scooped up in a sheet to be flogged somewhere.
That was the look of the house, half assembled or half disassembled. The house was a luxurious stopover point for the accoutrements of whatever life Tony had invented for himself. The whole house exuded both largesse and abandonment, as if it were a bargain basement that declared to its hushed, private guests that this was their last chance to gather what they desired, and run.
Then the old man was at his shoulder. “I’ve done out your room and put your things there,” he said.
Mark had had enough. “Where’s Tony? I want to see him now. Has he got Sally here?”
Then the old man really unnerved him by looking him straight in the eye again. Except he didn’t; there was something gleaming yellow behind those eyes that made them look directed elsewhere the whole time he spoke. They gleamed with a manic distraction which, had Mark seen it on the telly, would have made him laugh, but here, in a strange house in a strange town, shocked him. He had no idea that eyes really did look like that in the faces of creepy old butlers of old houses. “I’m to make you a cup of tea in the scullery,” he said.
“Are you a butler?” Mark asked.
The old man, still in his beret and trainers and obviously wanting to goad him, simply tutted with disgust. He hobbled to the connecting door, saw that Mark had already peeked, tutted again, and led him through that dining room. They went
