Shadows on the Nile (9 page)

She drove into the village of Lower Lampton, a tired cluster of red-brick cottages with a last few roses losing their petals to the cold October wind. She enquired at the pub and was directed down a winding lane, past a sleepy church and up an incline. ‘About a mile out of town,’ the landlord told her.

Town?
He called this dead-in-a-hole place a
town
?

‘Can’t miss it,’ he added with a chuckle. ‘It’s got gates.’

It did indeed have gates. Twenty feet high. Wrought iron. Massive stone pillars on either side, with an arch spanning the gap between them and a magnificent stone stag rampant on top of it, but the whole gateway was in ruins. Rust and weeds had claimed it as their own, so that the stag was choked by ivy and the open gates hung by a thread on one hinge. Behind them a long
potholed drive cut a line as straight as a poker through rough pastureland and disappeared behind a grove of beech trees that whispered and complained in the wind. She imagined Tim arriving here, listening to the whispers, to the voices of the dead. His heart thumping.

She pressed her foot on the accelerator and shot up the driveway.

The house stood on a low hill on the far side of the beech trees, hidden from the road, a vast and gracious Georgian mansion with elegant columns, an intricate pediment and perfect proportions. It was the kind of building that even on a grey day like today acted like sunshine on Jessie – the beauty of its lines made her skin glow and her heartbeat slow with contentment.

But like the gates it was swathed in a pall of neglect and dilapidation, weeds colonising along its roofline and sprouting from its gutters, paint peeling, upstairs windows boarded, a green skin of moss and ivy clinging to north-facing walls. Worse, far worse, was the east wing of the house. It had been gutted by fire and what was left of its blackened bricks pushed up from the ground like rotten teeth. Nettles and elder had taken a stranglehold, so the fire could not have been recent. Jessie had a sense of time suspended, of breath held, of the trees and the fields waiting to creep up to reclaim the hill.

Yet as she neared the house, freshly mown lawns spread out with billiard-table precision on either side of the drive and a gardener in a leather apron was tending an immaculate rose-bed. He lifted his head as she drove past. She parked her car in front of the columned portico and walked up the wide front steps, glancing over her shoulder at the view behind her. The Chamford estate stretched away in the distance in a shimmer of russet and amber shadows. She reached up, rang the big brass doorbell and waited. She inspected the heavy panelled door and felt the wind nip at her neck. She heard no noise inside. Presumably the bell sounded somewhere deep in the belly of the house, but just in
case, she banged a fist on the door.

‘Can I help you?’

The man’s voice behind her startled Jessie. She swung round and saw it was the gardener, spade in hand.

‘I’m looking for Sir Montague Chamford,’ she said.

‘That’s me.’

‘You?’

‘Yes. But don’t call me Sir Montague or I shall have to go and don a wing collar and a gold pocket-watch.’ He laughed, amused by the notion, and she had a sense of someone who was accustomed to hiding behind laughter.

He, like his house, was not what she expected. No portly paunch or cigar-speckled waistcoat. No whiskers. He was thirty-five years old at most, with nondescript brown hair and sharp-boned features that bore the stamp of generations of carefully selected breeding. He was tall, with strikingly long arms as if he’d borrowed them from someone else, but even in his shaggy sweater and leather apron he looked undernourished.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked with courtesy.

‘I came here to ask about a séance that I believe was conducted here last week. On Friday the fifteenth.’

He had been standing two steps below her, leaning on his spade in a relaxed manner and looking up at her as though hoping she might perform a cartwheel or produce a rabbit from her pocket for his amusement. But the word
séance
shattered his cut-glass politeness. Abruptly, a hard energy stiffened his limbs. He leapt up the steps and pushed open the door without a word, just a curt nod of the head to indicate that she should enter.

She walked warily through the doorway and found herself in a high-ceilinged reception hall that reeked of mice and drains. Heavy oak furniture of much earlier ancestry than the house made the room gloomy, but Jessie barely noticed. She was too busy following Don’t-call-me-Sir-Montague down a maze of cold corridors, tight on his heels, and through empty echoing rooms with exquisite ceilings and bold statuary, past good and bad oil paintings, faces hanging like ghosts on the walls, and into a large comfortable
kitchen. It was clearly the only warm room in the house.

An ancient refectory table extended down the centre towards a fireplace where logs were burning inside an iron fire-basket, scenting the air with applewood. As they entered, a border-collie dog scrambled out of its basket beside the fire and leaned its shoulder against its master’s leg, regarding Jessie with intelligent brown eyes that were a darn sight friendlier than Sir Montague Chamford’s. He had folded his arms firmly across his chest and was studying her with suspicion.

‘So,’ he said curtly, ‘I assume you are another of the journalists, sniffing around here again trying to dig up a story. Well, I’m telling you now that there’s nothing to find. Yes, notable people have occasion to call in here sometimes, but these are private matters which have nothing—’

‘I’m looking for my brother.’

‘What?’

‘Timothy Kenton.’

He frowned. The dog uttered a low rumble in its throat.

‘My brother is Timothy Kenton. He came here on Friday of last week.’

It was subtle, the relaxation. But Jessie spotted it, the way his limbs grew less rigid, the threat of a smile arriving on one side of his mouth.

‘Well, Miss Kenton, it seems I may have wronged you.’

‘Yes, Sir Montague, it seems you may.’

For the slightest of moments there was a stand-off between them, both assessing the other’s position, before he stuck out his hand.

‘Please do excuse me,’ he said with an engaging smile.

She inclined her head, shook his hand and accepted the hardback chair that he offered her at the table. He took the seat opposite her.

‘Tell me about your brother.’

‘He came here on Friday the
fifteenth. To a séance.’

She half-expected him to deny it.
A séance? Here? What nonsense!
But he didn’t. He nodded.

‘That’s possible,’ he said.

‘So you know him?’

‘No, I’ve never met your brother in my life. It’s true that a séance is occasionally held here, but I don’t meet the participants.’ He said it casually, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have a séance take place in your house, and ruffled his dog’s ear, earning himself a flash of tongue across his wrist. ‘You have to understand that seekers after spirits like to come here. The house is apparently bursting at the seams with ectoplasm,’ he waved a hand through the air, ‘and spirits drift in and out like Charing Cross Station. More ghosts than rats in a sewer, it seems.’

He laughed and suggested a sherry. Jessie declined.

‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she told him. ‘I believe in people you can touch, ones you can hold on to.’

‘Like your brother, you mean?’

‘Timothy is flesh and blood. He can’t vanish. Yet ever since he came to your séance, he has been missing.’

He leaned forward, intrigued. ‘Vanished into thin air along with one of my spectres?’

‘No.’ Jessie slapped the flat of her hand down on the table, making the dog jump. ‘Nothing like your spectres. So will you please tell me what happened here that Friday night?’

He showed no sign of taking offence. He was an aristocrat to his fingertips; high prominent cheekbones and an air of benign tolerance, as if well accustomed to the boorish antics of peasants. He looked at her hard, his lazy brown eyes assessing her in a way that was not remotely lazy. His long limbs remained relaxed in an offhand manner, and his mouth remained set in its amused curve. But Jessie wasn’t taken in. There was no amusement in those eyes.

‘In a bit of a flap, aren’t you?’ he said nonchalantly.

‘I told you, I’m here to find my brother.’

‘So I see.’

For a moment a silence funnelled into the room. They looked at each other while a soundless tussle took place and it was the owner of the house who backed off first by lifting his sherry in its antique
cut-glass to his lips.

‘Let’s see what we can do, shall we?’ he suggested.

‘Do you know what happened at the séance?’

‘I have no idea. Sorry to disappoint you, but I told you, I wasn’t there. No, don’t look so glum, it doesn’t mean I can’t find out.’

‘Who else was here that night? The other people attending the séance, I mean.’

‘There’s only one person who can tell us that.’

‘Who?’

‘Madame Anastasia.’

‘She is …?

‘The medium who conducted the proceedings.’

He said it formally, as if talking about a law court instead of a needy group of ghost-hunters. Jessie stood up. ‘She’s the person I need to speak to. Do you have her address? Her telephone number?’

To her irritation, Sir Montague tipped his chair back on two legs with an indolent air and regarded her over his glass.

‘Slow down, Miss Kenton, slow down. Madame Anastasia is not an easy person to track down. She is an extremely private creature.’

‘Sir Montague, listen to me. My brother, Timothy, has disappeared. That may mean nothing to you, but it does to me. I need to speak to this Madame Anastasia, and I need to speak to her now. Please tell me where I can find her.’

She could feel his reluctance, and it annoyed her. She wanted to pluck the languid expression from his face and make him sense the darkness that stalked the charred corners of his house.

‘Her address?’ she asked.

Slowly he rose to his feet. ‘Madame Anastasia is always busy conducting séances on a Saturday,’ he told her. ‘So you won’t find her at home today. She could be in Manchester or Maidenhead or she may have travelled all the way
down to Cornwall, for all I know.’

‘And Sundays? Will she be at home tomorrow?’

‘Indeed she will.’

It struck Jessie that he knew a lot about the medium’s habits. How close, she wondered, was his association with this woman?

‘Then I shall drive over to question her tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I just need you to give me her—’

‘No.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I said no. I will take you to her myself.’

‘That’s not necessary.’

‘I think you’ll find it is.’

Again that odd silence funnelled into the room and built a wall, brick by brick, between them. Jessie didn’t waste her breath on arguing this time.

‘Ten o’clock tomorrow morning, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll be here.’

His hand rumpled his dog’s glossy black ears, as comfortably as if they were his own. ‘Make it two o’clock. Madame Anastasia doesn’t put a foot out of bed before noon. Don’t forget that she’ll have spent a frantic Saturday wrestling with her spirits and her importunate clients. Let the poor woman have her rest before you plague her with questions.’

Jessie didn’t like it. The way he’d turned her, Jessie, into the wicked witch in this situation.

‘Two o’clock,’ she nodded and headed for the kitchen door, but he reached it before her and swung it open with a courteous bow. ‘May I see the room where the séance was held, please?’ she asked.

‘There’s nothing to see,’ he said, but shrugged and led her back to the main reception hall with its coat of arms and sweeping staircase.

He pushed open a heavy oak door to reveal a beautiful room with a gilded ceiling that resonated with light and brilliance. The tall windows that overlooked the front drive were hung with weighty purple drapes and two circular tables stood in the centre of the floor, one large, one smaller, each one surrounded by elegant Queen Anne chairs.

‘This is where the deed is done. Like I said, nothing to see.’

She could picture Timothy here in one
of the chairs – which one? – his heart yearning for something he couldn’t have. What was it? Who was he seeking with such single-mindedness?

‘Sir Montague, why do you do this?’

‘Do what?’

‘The séances.’

He smiled at her with genuine amusement this time. ‘Why do you think? For money, of course. People pay highly to share a spirit or two with the ancestors of an ancient stately pile like this one.’

‘Are things so bad?’

‘Pretty dire, to be honest.’

She continued to stare at one of the chairs, searching for her brother’s imprint in the faded green silk of its seat.

‘Is that why the rooms are so empty?’ she asked. No furniture. No ornaments. No fine china or Georgian silver.

He shrugged eloquently and she felt a tug of sorrow for him, for the leanness of his limbs and the emptiness of his casual gesture. ‘Sold to fix the roof,’ he told her. ‘I’m starting on the paintings now. Just shifted a Watteau at Sotheby’s. Got a rotten price for it.’

She turned to study him. ‘You are a lucky man to have them.’ She thought of the men in Archie’s flat, the ones with the flat caps and the flatter bellies. ‘Most people have never even seen a Watteau, never mind owned one.’

He treated her to a polite nod. ‘Lucky. That’s me all right. In my lucky house. As lucky as a four-leafed clover wrapped around a rabbit’s foot.’

Jessie didn’t linger in the room, not with his words just asking to be ripped out of the air.

They emerged onto the
front driveway, gravel crunching under their feet. All around them the estate spread out in soft rolling pastures and shadowy patches of woodland, through which Jessie could make out the silvery metallic surface of a lake. What, she wondered, did it do to you to be raised in a place like this? Where you were lord and master of all you survey. Did it make you believe you were the centre of the universe? She rather thought it might. At the very least the centre of your own universe.