chances here.
‘OK, OK,’ Mayhew agreed, with a heavy sigh. ‘As soon as we’ve finished lunch we’ll search the place from top to bottom. Will that do?’
Ninety minutes later, hot and dusty from poking around at the top and bottom of the old house and everywhere in between, the team re-assembled somewhat grumpily in the kitchen. They’d found absolutely nothing to suggest that anybody else had been in the house recently, apart from an unfastened ground-floor window at the back of the house, which they’d now closed and locked, and which Angela had then jammed with a screw to ensure it couldn’t be opened from the outside.
‘Happy now?’ Richard Mayhew snapped.
Angela sighed. She still felt very uneasy. ‘I’d rather be back in London, thank you. But at least now I’m sure that there
‘OK, now that we’ve
Angela picked up another piece of china from the table to assess and catalogue. She had just opened up her laptop when she heard a startled gasp from David Hughes.
‘What is it?’ She spun round to look behind her.
‘I thought I saw something outside, some movement.’
He strode across the kitchen to the window and stared through the somewhat grubby panes of glass at the unkempt grassland outside.
Angela put down the china plate she’d been examining and stood up, joining him at the window moments later. The land in front of them sloped gently downwards, away from the house, dotted with clumps of shrubs and bushes, many of them easily big enough to conceal a person. And there was something else Angela noticed as well.
‘You might be right,’ she said slowly. ‘Every time I’ve looked out of this window since we got here, I’ve seen at least two or three rabbits hopping about out there. Right now, I don’t see any. Rabbits are extremely nervous animals. Because they’ve vanished, it could mean there
13
Jonathan Carfax stared through a pair of compact binoculars as the last of the cars drove away from the front of Carfax Hall. He knew he was invisible to the museum people, because he was standing in the shelter of a group of trees just outside the boundary of the property, but with a clear view of the house.
Earlier that afternoon, he’d crept closer to the house, approaching it from the rear and making use of the cover provided by various small groups of bushes, but he’d obviously been seen by somebody. As he’d moved towards the building, two faces had appeared at the kitchen window and looked out, but by that time he’d already run down the slope away from the house, and ducked down into a hollow behind a large rhododendron bush, where he’d lain and fumed. Jonathan was one of Oliver’s cousins, and like the rest of his family had only recently discovered that he’d been disinherited. Well, he’d told himself, as he became gradually colder and damper, he was going to do something about that.
Fifteen minutes later, he’d finally eased up into a crouch and then sprinted the last few yards to the boundary fence. Then he’d walked through the woods back to his car, and waited for the last of the British Museum people to leave.
Darkness was falling as Carfax walked back towards the house. The cars had left, and no one seemed to be around. A solitary bat swooped through the gloaming. So far, so good, he thought.
Quickly, he made his way to the window he’d left open at the back of the house. He took one more look round and pushed the sash upwards. Or tried to. It took less than a second for Carfax to realize that somebody – obviously one of the team from the British Museum – must have spotted the open catch and locked it.
‘Bugger,’ he muttered, backing away and retracing his steps. He had come prepared, though. In the boot of his car he’d assembled a selection of tools that he hoped would be enough for him to slip the window catch if he found it locked.
Ten minutes later he was back at the window, a long thin chisel in his hand, which he slid up between the two sections of the sash window. He positioned it against the locked catch and applied sideways pressure. Nothing happened – the catch remained obstinately closed. He tried again, and then again, each time increasing the level of force on the tool, and each time with precisely the same result – the catch didn’t move.
Carfax swore again, more loudly this time. He’d chosen that window because, of all those on the ground floor, that one had the loosest catch. Finding a chunk of stone that had fallen from some part of the house he dragged it across to the window and stood up on it. Almost immediately he spotted the screw jammed into the catch, and knew he wouldn’t be able to force it from the outside.
Somebody must have guessed he’d been inside the property. He thought he’d covered his tracks, and had only taken a handful of the choicest pieces. Quickly he tried forcing the other windows in the back wall of the house, but he knew that all the other catches were stiff with rust and disuse. Within ten minutes he was certain he was wasting his time – none of the other catches had budged even a millimetre.
Grumbling to himself, Carfax gathered together his tools and equipment. His best option seemed to be a ladder that he could use to reach one of the first-floor windows. Hopefully he’d be able to force one of them. His only other choice was to break a pane of glass and open a window on the ground floor but then the police would get involved and he really didn’t want that.
There were a couple of pieces of really good Georgian silver somewhere in the house that he hadn’t found yet, and a tray made by Paul Storr that he guessed would have a five-figure price tag, so being able to get inside undetected was vital.
No, he’d just have to come back tomorrow with a ladder. He had a right to Oliver’s possessions, and he was going to make damn sure they came to him, not to any museum.
14
‘Nice place,’ Chris Bronson remarked as Angela parked her Mini outside Carfax Hall the next morning.
Despite being divorced, he and Angela had remained the closest of friends, talking every day on the phone, and had come to trust and rely on each other perhaps even more than some married couples. Bronson was hoping they might get back together as man and wife, but Angela was still cautious about committing to that, the painful recollection of their separation and divorce still fresh in her memory. He was doing all he could to make her change her mind.
He had taken a couple of days’ leave and had driven up the previous evening, after Angela had told him about the possible intruder at Carfax Hall. Angela said she’d feel a
