The Drowning Ground (10 page)

‘Idiot's going to run the batteries out if he isn't careful,' Graves muttered behind me.

At that exact moment, as if Cleaver had somehow heard him through the glass, the lights of the squad car went out. The snow glittered faintly in the light spilling out from the kitchen window.

‘Sir,' Graves said suddenly.

I turned around. Graves was standing on the Persian rug and looking fiercely at something on the other side of the armchair.

Resting against the far side of the chair, its barrels pointing up towards the ceiling, was a shotgun. I quickly walked towards it, then gingerly picked it up. It was a sportsman's double-barrelled model, and not the kind of practical and more powerful gaming rifle I would have expected to see in a manor house like this one. I examined the shotgun, feeling its coolness. It was surprisingly light and, in its own way, beautiful.

The receiver at the top was engraved. ‘Beretta EELL Classic. Made in Italy,' I read out loud. I turned the gun in my hands and checked the safety before cracking open the chamber. The gun was not all that powerful, but it would do the trick if some unexpected intruder came bursting in. The shot would spread out, making it impossible to miss. And there was something very purposeful about the way it had been put at the side of the armchair, within easy reach.

‘Safety wasn't even on,' I said.

‘Maybe he went out shooting for his supper,' Graves said without much conviction. ‘Meant to lock it up when he got back.'

In the chamber were two red cartridges. I pulled them out. For a while I stood there, undecided as to what I should do with them. Then I put them in my coat pocket. I left the chamber open and, carrying it crooked under my arm, placed it on top of the kitchen table.

‘So what do you make of it all?' I said, looking around the kitchen.

‘It's a bloody shambles, I'd say, and it's against the law to have a loaded gun that's not locked up.'

With a weary patience I said, ‘I know it's a bloody shambles, Graves, but what do you think Hurst was doing?'

Finding himself on the spot, Graves seemed to grow tight with worry as he gazed around the kitchen. His eyes finally rested near to where I was standing motionless, my hands on the back of the armchair, as if I were involuntarily offering him up some sort of clue. Graves paused, frowning, glancing from the armchair to the window, and back again. For a moment, he looked pleased with himself, but then his face clouded over with doubt, as if he suspected some trap.

‘Well, obviously he was afraid of something,' Graves said. ‘But the question is who?'

I nodded. ‘And if he did have something to do with those girls after all?'

‘And someone found out?' Graves said. He turned around and stared anxiously out of the window, as if he half expected to see some face staring at them through the bars. ‘God, it's all pretty grim,' he said.

I didn't reply. I stared at the gun now lying on the kitchen table, not sure if I should take it with me. Instead I left it, and Graves followed me down the hallway.

11

Graves started trying all the doors, while a clock chimed out gloomily from somewhere far away in the front of the house. The hallway light cast only a single yellow glare on to the dusty carpet. Shoved hastily against one wall was a row of battered green filing cabinets. Some of the drawers had fallen open, and what looked to be years of correspondence, bills and invoices spilt out and lay in piles on the floor.

I walked towards the stairs and looked up. The sense of cold and permanent decay was even worse here. Things had obviously got bad and very quickly. Actually, I couldn't believe how bad things had got. All the doors save one at the end of the hallway were locked. Graves opened it, searched for the light and flicked it on. I recognized the living room as we stepped inside. My eyes were immediately drawn to the two large brown curtains at the far side of the room; I knew the French windows would be behind them. Like a butler briskly performing his morning duties, Graves was already striding across the floor towards them; he drew the curtains open wide. But on the other side only the cement-smeared bricks could be seen. Graves looked shocked to see them.

A fine, round oak table occupied the centre of the room. Next to the open curtains was a dainty-looking writing desk, and beside that were more filing cabinets. Yet, unlike those in the hall, they were well organized, and no paper spilt from outstretched drawers. They looked new and solid and were painted a uniform gunmetal-grey.

‘What a mess,' Graves said, wincing, ‘and what's that awful smell?'

‘Radiator's leaked somewhere, I imagine.'

Graves drew his hand slowly along the glass of the French windows, tracing the pattern of the bricks on the other side. ‘What was the old man playing at?' he said, staring with disapproval at his now-black fingertips and looking to me, for an instant, exactly like a school prefect examining a dorm room.

‘Go and check those cabinets.'

Graves crouched down and opened the nearest one. ‘Empty,' he said.

‘Try the others. Look in all of them, and if they're locked break them open as well.'

I turned and looked around. There was just too much stuff crammed into the living room. A lot of it crockery and wine glasses and boxes full of junk. I headed towards the writing desk. ‘Used to be a nice room, if I remember rightly,' I said, sitting down. ‘Nice view of the garden anyway.'

I started to search the top drawers. There was nothing of any interest. I sighed, then pulled out a bottom drawer as far as possible before delving my hand in deep at the back of it. Dust, coloured writing paper and then something light at the back: just an old newspaper. I tossed it back towards the oak table. Of course it missed and the pages lay spread out on the carpet.

Absently, I began to pick at a loose thread on the corner of my shirt while glancing at a big brown leather armchair shoved into a corner of the room. Graves was once again staring at the huge bricked-in French windows, and I found that I was now doing the same thing, half expecting to see the snow falling outside.

Annoyed, and not at all sure what we were looking for, I stood with my hands at my sides, thinking vaguely that I might have a quick look upstairs. Graves opened another drawer. I wandered back towards the table and, without thinking, picked up the newspaper pages one by one and laid them on the table. I tensed when I saw the picture in the middle.

I quickly reassembled the paper into its right order. It was an old copy of the
Cotswold Herald
dated 14 December 1994. I pulled the torch from my coat pocket and shone it on to the pages at the back.

A black-and-white photograph took up almost half of one of the back pages. There had once been a lengthy column of text at the side of the photo and more text beneath it. But that text had been deliberately cut out.

The photo showed around thirty to forty schoolchildren posing and smiling into the camera. A school photo taken, by the looks of it, on the stage in a gym, which, I imagined, doubled as the assembly room. White rings had been drawn around the heads of two of the children, so that they seemed to have large halos behind their heads: boys of about twelve or thirteen, standing next to each other. They looked similar: both seemed rowdy-looking and one, the smaller of the pair, was pulling a cheeky face. I guessed that the photo had been taken to celebrate some prize awarded to a local school somewhere, and that the editor had had some purpose in picking out these two children for his readers. The only text that remained was a caption attached to the bottom of the photo. Two names: Ned and Owen Taylor.

They didn't mean anything to me. I stared long and hard at the photo, and it wasn't until a few minutes later that I realized that I was seeing someone I knew, or at least someone whom I thought I knew.

She was staring out at me from the bottom-right-hand corner of the page. She had a thin, pretty face. Hurst's daughter? I couldn't be entirely sure. If it was her, she would have been almost three years younger than when I'd seen her last. Like the majority of the faces in the picture, hers was not highlighted. I looked a little longer, thinking. There were bound to be other photos of her in the house. But so far I hadn't seen any.

I left the newspaper where it was. As Graves continued to search the filing cabinets, I came out of the living room and trudged upstairs.

From somewhere far off, water started to hiss and spit as the rickety old boiler began to heat up. I found the corridor's light switch and flicked it on: luminous strips along the ceiling, like those of a hospital ward, flickered on the length of the hallway. Hurst must have had them installed at some point as another security measure. Perhaps in case someone managed to get into his house and make their way up the stairs.

On my right I passed a door that was open: Hurst's bedroom. I felt along the inside of the door and, as I expected, found two more sets of locks exactly like the ones in the kitchen. I found the light switch and discovered that Hurst had also felt it necessary to bar the windows of his own bedroom, so that his room looked like a cell.

The corridor dipped left and curved along towards the front of the house. I walked on, passing yet another barred-in window, wondering if Hurst had really ‘lost the plot', as Graves had put it. I could only imagine what it must have been like to patrol these dark corridors night after night.

But, despite what was before my own eyes, I did not think Hurst had lost his mind. The bricked-in windows, the bars and the gun, although strange, had a logic to them and, combined, showed a definite sense of purpose. After all, Hurst's paranoia had proved right in the end. Whoever was after him had waited ever so patiently, and the moment he left the safety of this place they had got him.

I had arrived at the far end of the house. I moved closer and saw that there was a much narrower corridor here, leading to a thick brown curtain. I stepped in and snapped on a light switch on the side of the wall. This hall was much cleaner than the rest of the house, and the reddish carpet that lined the floor felt thick and almost new. On the wallpaper, pink roses coiled gently towards the curtain. I walked along the corridor and pushed the curtain aside. Behind it was an immaculate white staircase, which curved right and out of view. I found that I couldn't find the light to the stairs. So I took the torch out of my coat pocket again, switched it on and headed straight up.

There was a pale blue door at the top of the stairs. I pushed the handle and peeked through. For a moment the only thing I could see was what seemed to be an electric alarm clock somewhere at the back, giving out a narrow strip of light. Then the clouds outside the window cleared for a moment, and moonlight slowly began to fill the room.

I stared in. Objects in the room slowly took shape. A rocking chair beside an electric heater. Books stacked in neat piles on the floor. A snowglobe: a plastic cottage encased in a plastic dome.

Down below, I could hear Graves on the move. He walked through the corridor, pushed the curtain aside and walked up the steps. I turned around and shone the torch in his direction. In the sudden warmth of the narrow stairwell Graves took off his scarf and put it in his pocket. He had some files wedged under his other arm.

‘What's up here, sir?'

With both of us now squeezed tightly in the narrow stairwell, I felt a sudden sense of claustrophobia and nearly told Graves to go back down. Instead I said, ‘His daughter's room, I think.' And, gently opening the door wider, I added, ‘He's kept it just as she left it.'

‘God, how weird. Whatever for?'

I didn't say anything. It didn't seem to bother Graves that Hurst's daughter had abandoned him, and that Hurst had no doubt died an appallingly violent death just hours ago. It was the disruption to the order of things that seemed to bother Graves the most. All this mess. The barred-in windows. Hurst's failure to keep a gun safely secured in a gun cabinet as the law demanded.

I sighed. ‘So there
was
something in those cabinets?' I said, looking at the files.

‘Yes, sir. Not in all of them, though. He kept letters and correspondence and loads of old bills. Never seems to have chucked anything out. Ever. Supermarket receipts, petrol receipts. All of it is really muddled up. These, though, were all together in one file, and there was a bunch of old videotapes on top of them.'

‘Videotapes?'

‘Yep.'

‘Were they locked up?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And the files?'

‘Stuff from some kind of agency. A detective agency, I think. Looks like his daughter really ran out on him for good. And so he spent a packet on trying to find out where she had got to.'

I gestured towards the files and took them. Then I opened them up. There were three pale grey files and in all of them without exception the notes at the back had been written by the same hand. There were also several typewritten sheaves of paper bearing signatures in the same handwriting, along with invoices attached neatly with paperclips.

‘You want me to get any more? There're loads of files like these downstairs.'

‘No, that's probably enough for one day,' I said, making up my mind. ‘We'll take the tapes as well. And they definitely were locked up, you say?'

‘Yes,' Graves said. ‘A boxful of them at least.'

‘He must have locked them up for a reason. We'll come back tomorrow for the rest of it.'

I stayed where I was for a while longer. Disappointed. But what had I really expected to find here? I had been waiting a long time to have a proper look at Hurst's house without O'Donnell interfering, and now I'd had the chance it seemed there was nothing in it. Caged darkness and locked doors. That's all there was, really. That, and Hurst's lingering presence.

We could have a better look tomorrow. All the same, it had been a mistake coming here in the dark and so late, and I knew it. Graves had been right. But I didn't leave straightaway. Instead I stepped inside the room and found the light switch.