Microsurgery in East Finchley, less than an hour's walk across the Heath from Ferrier's Close. I had promised not to visit, or ring the hospital: Alice thought it would bring bad luck. She wanted to come to me, with no warning-'it'll be too awkward and formal otherwise'. Like a bride and groom keeping apart on their wedding day, not seeing each other until the ceremony. 'I want to save everything from now until we meet,' she'd said in her last message. She was spending long hours in physiotherapy, gaining strength every day. 'My feet haven't forgotten how to walk. I'm aching all over, and it feels wonderful. Nothing can go wrong now. Enjoy your house'-Alice was convinced that Miss Hamish meant to leave the whole estate to me-'and its mysteries, and soon-maybe sooner than you think-you'll hear a tap on the door.'
Secretly I agreed with her about the estate, but I didn't want to tempt fate by saying so: Miss Hamish might have another stroke and die before she'd met me. In which case the estate would presumably go to charity, or some distant Hamish relative; she sounded quite alone in the world. Tempting fate or not, I couldn't help imagining us arriving at Miss Hamish's place in the country-which had grown, in my fantasy, into a tall, rambling house with sweeping lawns and ancestral oaks-into Staplefield, in fact.
THOUGH MISS HAMISH HADN'T REPLIED TO ANY OF MY questions about Staplefield, that might well have been out of delicacy-for the same reason she hadn't yet given me her address. The destruction of Staplefield would have been a huge and traumatic event; Anne would have talked about it. Whereas if the house had survived, it was quite possible that Miss Hamish, once she'd been appointed executor, had decided to rent Staplefield from the estate. Or simply to live there: as the sole beneficiary of Anne's will, her only legal duty had been to herself. She just didn't want to tell me, until the time came for us to meet, that my mother had lied about the fire.
Back in Mawson, reading and re-reading Miss Hamish's letter in the chilly hallway, a ghastly suspicion had leapt off the page. It had obviously never occurred to Miss Hamish-she could never have written so openly if it had-that Phyllis Hatherley might have murdered her sister. Everything fitted perfectly: Phyllis and her aunt quarrel violently; Phyllis is disinherited and leaves home in a rage; her aunt dies suddenly (and very conveniently) within weeks, leaving everything to sweet-natured Anne, who immediately makes a will leaving everything to her best friend Abigail. Why would a girl of twenty-one make such a will, unless she was afraid of her sister? But Anne doesn't know where Phyllis is, so she can't tell her about the will. Until, perhaps, it's too late. Phyllis discovers she's killed her sister for nothing, and that's the last we see of her until she turns up in Mawson a decade later.
It had seemed horribly plausible, until I realised that the same thing must have occurred to the police and the lawyer. It would have been their first line of inquiry. And they would have questioned Abigail Hamish about Phyllis: they would have wanted to see Anne's letters. So the police, and the lawyer-and therefore Miss Hamish-
Or so I had persuaded myself. There were at least a dozen keys on the ring: three pitted gunmetal Banhams; two for spring locks, and several household keys, very worn and tarnished, for barrel-locks of various sizes. The door itself was curved at the top and recessed into the brickwork. It had weathered to a pale greenish grey, mottled with lichen; lines of moss sprouted between the vertical planks. A discoloured nameplate, a brass mailslot, locked or corroded shut, a latch and a keyhole. No bellpush or speaker grille; no way of making your presence known except to pound with your bare knuckles on the swollen timbers of the door.
The second of the Banham keys fitted the lower keyhole: the snap as it turned over was startlingly loud. I lifted the latch and pushed, against resistance. To my surprise the door opened silently.
I WAS STANDING AT THE ENTRANCE TO A TUNNEL ABOUT eight feet high, formed by hooped metal frames over which branches of some kind had been trained. Dim twilight filtered through an arched roof of dense greenery; a few spots of sunlight glowed on the flagged stone floor. At the far end, some thirty feet away, I could just make out two steps leading up to another door. Vines and creepers and climbing roses had grown up amongst the gnarled branches; the metal hoops were heavily corroded. But the inside of the tunnel had been recently pruned. The clipped ends of vines and shoots were still sharply defined, the dark, lichen-stained flagstones bare except for a scattering of leaves.
I withdrew the key and let go of the street door. It closed behind me with a faint hiss. The spring lock clicked shut; suddenly fearful, I snatched at the knob to make sure I wouldn't be trapped.
It had been quiet in the lane outside, but you could still hear the faint hum of traffic from East Heath Road, the occasional howl of an accelerating motorbike, the distant whine of a jumbo from the endless queue descending towards Heathrow. With the closing of the gate, all of those sounds had ceased. The tick-ticking of my pulse was suddenly louder. I set off along the path, accompanied by faint rustlings and stirrings. Birds, I hoped, though I couldn't see any. The surrounding vegetation was impenetrably dense.
At the far end, the sides thinned out enough to allow glimpses of red brick and stonework, and the light was a little better. Though the tunnel-what was the word?-espanniered?-no, pleached-extended all the way to the porch, you could see where the original structure had ended and another section had been added, also many years ago, by the look of the gnarled vines overhead. I went up the two steps into a porch, only a few feet deep, with solid brick walls on both sides. It looked as if there had once been vertical windows on either side of the door, but the apertures had been bricked up. No glass in the door, either. Its dark green paint was cracked and peeling.
Three locks this time. After the snap of the second Banham, I had to wait until my heartbeat had slowed enough to distinguish it from approaching footsteps. I glanced back along the green, twilit alley and turned the key in the spring lock.
The door opened quietly, on to a dimly lit entrance hall. Dark panelled walls, an elaborate hall-stand immediately to my left, then a recessed wooden bench. Carpeted stairs at the far end ran up to a half-landing. Light filtered through a doorway to the left of the staircase. I stepped across the threshold, keeping hold of the front door, which like the street door appeared to be self-closing. I took another step forward, letting the door close behind me with the same faint, unnerving hiss.
The hall-stand was draped with hats and coats and scarves; there were several umbrellas and at least three pairs of Wellingtons. The sense of trespass was suddenly overwhelming.
'Is anyone here?' A muffled echo-I couldn't tell from where-sounded disturbingly like a reply. Then I noticed that the hats and coats-all of them women's-looked very old-fashioned indeed. Tentatively, I drew out one of the umbrellas. A small cloud of dust followed, and I saw that there were holes in the fabric.
I TRIED TO MOVE NOISELESSLY, BUT THE FLOORBOARDS creaked at every step. At the far end of the hall, I found a closed wooden door to the right of the staircase. An opening to my left led into a passage running towards the rear of the house. Multi-coloured light shimmered through a doorway opposite.
At first I thought I had stumbled into a chapel. Two tall, narrow stained-glass windows shone in the upper half of the wall to my left, an elaborate design of leaves and vines and flowers climbing over a plain, lead-lighted background. The moving shadows of actual leaves and branches outside made it look as if the pattern had come alive, greens and golds and brilliant crimsons rippling upwards into darkness.
Tall wooden shutters, latched on the inside, concealed the windows in the lower section. Humped shapes of furniture stood around a massive fireplace opposite the door. To my right, the lower half of the rear wall opened on to what looked like a dining-room. A gallery was built out above the opening, running the full width of the room.
Crossing to the shutters, I got the first one open and came face to face with a chaotic mass of nettles, buddleia and leaf litter, shot through with ivy and rising above head height. Sunlight filtered through the foliage overhead. The windows were protected by vertical metal bars almost eaten through with rust.
Apart from some archaic electric light fittings mounted on wall brackets, I could have stepped back into the 1850s. The brocaded chairs and sofas, mostly faded lemons and pale greens, the chests and screens and occasional tables, were all marked and worn by use. The polish on the woodwork had faded long ago; you could see the outlines of ancient stains on the huge, threadbare Persian carpet. And yet someone must be coming in from time to time to dust and air the place, and turn on some sort of heating in the winters, or everything would be rotten with damp and mould.
I moved on towards the dining-room, whose dark panelled ceiling, though still ten or twelve feet high, was only half the height of the drawing-room's. The opening between the two, I saw, could be closed off by a set of sliding panels which stood folded, concertina-fashion, against the right-hand wall. The gallery loomed overhead: it had a
