Jill followed him down the stairs, pleased to have someone to take decisions, to tell her what to do. Holly was left alone. The house seemed to echo around her, but the stairs were carpeted and she didn’t hear them leave.
She took a photo of the footwear prints and tried to put herself in the shoes of the abductor. This wasn’t a time to think about motive, but perhaps she could track his movements. She imagined him opening the front door, seldom used in the winter. He’d walk straight into the heavy curtain. Would that have freaked him out? The dusty cloth in his face, almost suffocating him? It occurred to her suddenly that she was thinking of the abductor as male now, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. The footwear print could belong to a tall woman. She should follow her own advice and keep an open mind.
The kidnapper would have parked somewhere out of sight, down on the road, and walked up the track, through the yard and to the front of the house. Had they known that the door would be open? They would have turned the handle and pushed it, and there might be prints. So, were they there by chance, hoping that they might get in? That implied a kind of desperation. They hadn’t stopped to take off mucky shoes, but had climbed the stairs quickly. Speed had been more important than not leaving evidence of their movements.
Had they gone straight to the main bedroom, which was at the end of the corridor? Holly went back into the hall and looked in the other rooms. The small one, half-decorated in preparation for the child, seemed untouched. Certainly, there were no footprints on the dust cover on the floor. Robert had been sleeping in the third bedroom and Holly saw that clearly this had once been Lorna’s. The couple had decided not to give Thomas his mother’s room. Not yet, at least. There were rosettes on a board, photos of horses, whitewood furniture, a single bed under the window. Holly couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Falstone to sleep in his daughter’s bed. Perhaps he’d welcomed the opportunity. It could have made him feel closer to Lorna. Or perhaps he’d seen it as a kind of penance. Here too, there was no sign of any intruder.
Holly stood for a moment, putting off the time when she’d have to join the couple below. She paused, silent, going through the possible suspects in her head, trying to imagine who would have been so desperate or foolhardy to take the child, to scoop him up and run with him down the stairs and into the night.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
VERA WAS DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW, talking out loud to herself, because what did it matter if she sounded like a batty old woman when there was nobody to hear?
‘We got the whole thing the wrong way around. I should have realized from the start. At least when I saw that picture of the cottage. Lorna was nowhere near as needy as we all thought. It was the illness that put me off-track, and all that bollocks with Harriet and Juliet.’
The road towards Brockburn was familiar now, and she chuntered away without having to think too much about directions. Closer to the big house, she started to plan her move. There’d been a number of calls from Holly, messages and texts coming and going according to reception, but she’d ignored them all. The last thing she wanted was to go into this mob-handed. That would only put the lad in more danger and things had already got out of hand. Besides, she could have the whole thing wrong and she’d never liked making a fool of herself.
Vera stopped on the road, just after the track that led to the back of the house past Dorothy and Karan’s cottage. She pulled into the verge, hoping there wasn’t a ditch, and climbed out, hit by the cold. It was still snowing but in flurries, nothing like the blizzard on the first night she’d come back to Brockburn. She needed to go the rest of the way on foot. Usually, she avoided any form of exercise unless it was essential, but you could hear the Land Rover a mile off, and this was a time for discretion.
Before she left the vehicle, she sent a text to Holly and Joe, explaining where she was and what she had planned. Not with any sense of urgency. They were more use where they were. Just checking. I’ll call if I need you. She pulled on wellingtons, made sure her flask was in her pocket, and that her torch was working properly.
By now, it was past one in the morning, but there was a light on in the living room of the housekeeper’s cottage. She could see a sliver of silver where the curtains didn’t quite meet. She wondered who was up, and thought as she walked past the building that this other family, Karan, Dorothy and Duncan, was still a mystery to her.
She paused by the turn in the track that led to Jinny’s Mill, and looked down to the big house. The house itself was dark, but a security light outside shone past the outhouses and bins, so she could see the way onto the path towards the mill without using her torch. The grass was clear of snow, sheltered by the trees, boggy in places. Here the darkness was deep and dense and occasionally she stumbled. The trees were closer together than she’d remembered and in places she had to push her way through.
She’d forgotten how far it was to the mill and had a moment of anxiety, thinking that she’d wandered away from the footpath, that she was lost in the forest. It was a kind of claustrophobia – she’d never been good in enclosed spaces – and the same panic
