behind her.
‘I’m afraid the house is virtually falling apart. All those lumps of stone’ – she pointed – ‘have fallen off the roof and the upper walls. That’s why we can’t park any closer. The building’s losing bricks and masonry like a snake shedding its skin. We reckon it’ll be bulldozed inside a year.’
‘That’s a shame. I suppose it’s just deteriorated too much to save.’
‘That, plus the fact that the ungrateful relative who’s actually inherited the place – he’s a second cousin twice removed or something like that, according to Richard Mayhew – has already applied for planning permission to build houses in the parkland.’
The front door was locked, so Angela rang the bell. ‘This is just a precaution,’ she said, ‘until we – or, to be exact, you – tell us we’re all imagining things.’
The heavy door swung open and Richard Mayhew peered out at them, looking the image of a museum curator, Bronson thought.
‘Oh, it’s you, Angela,’ he said, testily. ‘Hello, Chris. This is completely unnecessary, you know. Angela’s reading far too much into things.’
‘If you don’t mind, Richard, I’ll be the judge of that. In my experience, Angela rarely overreacts.’
Mayhew grunted, pulled the door wide open and stepped aside to let them enter the hall.
‘Thanks,’ Angela said, leading Bronson around the base of the main staircase and down a corridor towards the back of the house. ‘Thanks for backing me up like that. Richard’s one of those annoying people who always think they’re right.’
Bronson smiled at her. ‘If you say there’s a problem, there’s a problem, and I’m here to fix it for you. Or at least I’ll try to.’
Angela pushed open the door at the end of the short corridor and stepped through into the kitchen. ‘This is where I’ve been working,’ she said, indicating the old table partially covered in assorted china and ceramics.
‘You make coffee and tea for the chaps in here, do you?’ Bronson asked.
‘In their dreams.’ Angela put her bag at the end of the table. ‘If they want drinks, they make their own. But I am prepared to make you a coffee, if you’d like one.’
Bronson nodded. ‘While you’re doing that, let me take a quick look at that window.’
Angela plugged in the kettle and pointed towards a door on one side of the kitchen. ‘Down there,’ she said. ‘That corridor runs along the back of the house. The window we found unlocked was at the far end.’
Bronson strode out of the room. He wasn’t gone for long. Angela had only just finished making two mugs of coffee when he walked back into the kitchen.
‘Did one of you jam the catch with a screw?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I did. It seemed very loose, so I thought it was a good idea.’
‘I’ve found what look like fresh scratch marks on that catch. I think they’re recent because there are a couple of flakes of paint still attached to one of the scratches. It looks to me like somebody has tried slipping the catch with something like a Slim Jim – you know, a thin length of steel?’
Angela looked alarmed.
‘Well, someone’s been using something similar to try to get that window open,’ Bronson continued. ‘He’s been sliding a steel tool between the two parts of the sash window and trying to undo the catch. The marks are quite unmistakable. The good news is that the screw you jammed into the mechanism stopped him from doing it. The bad news is that I found similar marks on the catches of all the windows along that corridor, so it was obviously a very determined attempt to break in.’
‘Are you sure? I mean, couldn’t those marks have been there for some time?’
Bronson picked up his mug of coffee. ‘Not really, no. I reckon your intruder tried really hard to open the window with the loose catch, because there are more scratches on that than any of the others. He didn’t get anywhere, because you’d jammed it, so he tried all the other windows at the back of the house, then he gave up.’
Angela shivered and rubbed her arms.
‘Come and take a look at this,’ Bronson said, moving to the kitchen window.
Like all the other ones in the property, it was a two-part sash window, single-glazed with a wooden frame. The only lock was a simple turnbuckle mounted on the top of the lower frame that locked both halves of the window together when it was rotated through ninety degrees.
Bronson pointed at three or four vertical scratches on the side of the catch.
‘That’s where he tried to slip it,’ he said, ‘and if you look down here, at the gap between the two panes, there are scratches there as well, where he forced the tool up to the catch.’
‘But he didn’t get inside the house?’
‘It’s just possible he did manage to open one of the windows, but if he did he must have secured it from the inside afterwards, and then left by one of the doors. Could he have done that?’
Angela shook her head decisively. ‘Not a chance. The rear door is bolted on the inside – in fact, we haven’t had it open since we’ve been here – and the front door’s fitted with a deadlock. I think even Richard Mayhew would have been suspicious if he’d found that open.’
‘OK,’ Bronson said, putting his arm round her shoulders. He could tell she was still nervous. ‘So apart from that first day, when it’s possible he got in through the unlatched window, or maybe even strolled in through the front door if he had the balls to do that, he can’t have got back inside.’
‘So what can we do to make sure he doesn’t get inside again? Go to the local police?’
Bronson laughed. ‘Unless the Suffolk Constabulary is very different to the one I work for in Kent, it’d be a complete waste of time. They’ll have their hands full trying to solve crimes that have already been committed. They certainly won’t have time to try to prevent a possible future crime.’
‘So what can we do?’
Bronson glanced round the room, then looked at her. His face softened. ‘As I see it, you’ve got three choices. First, do nothing. Keep all the doors and windows properly secured and hope that’ll be enough to keep this tea-leaf out. Second, stop what you’re doing here and transport the entire contents of the house straight to the British Museum and do your classifying and sorting out there. That’s probably the best option.’
Angela shook her head. ‘Most of this stuff is of no interest to the museum – we really don’t want to clutter the place up with the kind of things you can find in any provincial antique shop. We’ll cherry-pick the very best bits and most probably sell the rest through a local auction house. What’s the third option?’
Bronson grinned at her. ‘It’s obvious, really. You employ a night-watchman. Somebody to patrol the house and make sure nobody breaks in.’
Angela stared at him for a few seconds. ‘We can’t afford to do that – not on our budget. Have you any idea how much it would cost?’
‘That depends who you get. Some people are a lot cheaper than others.’
‘You’ve got someone in mind, haven’t you?’
Bronson’s smile widened. ‘Of course I have,’ he said. ‘Me.’
15
Michael Daniel Killian stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and grimaced. The pad over his left ear, which he’d only changed an hour earlier, was showing spots of red again. Carefully, he unwound the bandage from his head, then teased away the cotton pad he’d placed over his injured ear. Some of the fibres had stuck to the open wound, and he gave a grunt of pain as the pad came free and his ear started bleeding again.
He turned his head sideways and looked closely at the wound. The old bastard in England had done a pretty good job. His teeth had been strong and sharp, and his jaw muscles surprisingly powerful. His bite, and Killian’s
