The Rainaldi Quartet (21 page)

‘Here,' I said.

We turned off on to a smaller, narrower road, still metalled but without white lines down the centre. The windscreen began to steam up. I turned on the fan to clear it.

‘Right at these crossroads,' I said.

‘I don't like this,' Guastafeste said. ‘I can hardly see the road.'

‘Just keep out of the ditches,' I said. ‘We go in one of those and we'll never get out.'

Guastafeste turned the headlights on full beam, trying to penetrate the swirling fog, but the light just reflected back off the mist, making it even harder to see. He dipped the lights again and eased his foot off the throttle.

‘We're looking for a sign,' I said. ‘She said it was just before the track to the house.'

I saw a pool of peaty water in a hollow beside the road, its surface black and oily. Then a pole with a weathered board on top loomed up out of the haze. I could just make out the faded white painted letters: Highfield Hall.

‘This is it.'

The track was unmade, full of deep potholes and ruts. Guastafeste took it slowly, negotiating the obstacles as if they were landmines. Tendrils of mist drifted across the bonnet of the car, clawing at the paintwork, at the windscreen, ethereal in the diffused light from our headlamps.

‘What the…' Guastafeste braked heavily as a sheep scampered across in front of us and disappeared over the heather.

We started to drop down off the plateau, the track descending into a shallow basin. The mist cleared for a second and ahead of us I caught a glimpse of a large house. Two rough-hewn stone pillars passed by on either side of the car – a gateway without gates – and then we were turning, following the track round to the front of the house. Guastafeste killed the engine and we sat for a moment, looking at the house through the sheen of rain on the windscreen. It was an austere three-storey building constructed from blocks of the same orange gritstone as the escarpments up on the plateau. The roof tiles too were gritstone, thin slices of rock coated with moss.

‘Just my idea of a cosy English country cottage,' Guastafeste said.

I pushed open my door and slid out, reaching back in for my raincoat. I buttoned it up tight against the biting wind. We'd left Rudy's house in high summer, yet somehow contrived to arrive here in what seemed like winter.

We climbed the steps to the front door. There was a palpable air of dilapidation about the house so intense that it felt as if it had long ago been abandoned, its walls and windows and roof left to crumble and return to the earth. Guastafeste glanced at me and gave a shiver.

‘I wouldn't want to be here after dark,' he said.

He lifted the big brass knocker cast in the shape of a bear's head and hammered on the door a few times. We could hear the sound echoing in the hall on the other side. We waited. Guastafeste knocked again. Moments later a woman's voice called out faintly, ‘I'm coming,' then the heavy wooden door swung open to reveal an elderly lady with a cat under each arm.

‘I'm so sorry. Have you been waiting long? It's hard to hear at the back of the house. Do come in.'

She bent down and released the cats from her grasp.

‘Off you go, Timmy. And no more mice tonight, remember.'

The cats poked their heads out of the door, took one look at the weather and scurried back into the house.

‘Ah, well, who can blame them?' Mrs Colquhoun said sympathetically. She closed the door and turned to us. She was wearing a thick woolly cardigan and tweed skirt, both glistening with silvery cat hair.

We introduced ourselves, and Guastafeste showed his police identity card.

‘How nice to meet you.' Mrs Colquhoun extended a bony hand to each of us in turn. She looked frail, but there was nothing weak about her grip.

‘You'll be wanting a cup of tea after your journey,' she said. ‘Follow me.'

We went down a long, draughty corridor to a sitting room at the rear of the house.

‘Make yourselves at home,' Mrs Colquhoun said and disappeared through a door.

We looked around for somewhere to sit. There were two large, threadbare sofas and three armchairs in the room, but every single centimetre of them was occupied by cats: black and white cats, ginger cats, tabby cats, grey and white cats, striped cats. There must have been twenty or thirty of them. They looked at us haughtily, as if to say, well, we're not moving, this is
our
house. We stayed on our feet.

Guastafeste glanced around, sniffing the air. Whatever scent of its own the room might have had was submerged beneath the sour, overwhelming feline odour. There were spreading patches of damp on the walls and ceiling, the wallpaper was peeling and green with mould in places, but we could smell none of that. All we could smell was cat.

I walked over to the windows. There were three of them – big bay windows with a view over a Yorkstone terrace. In the centre of the terrace was a raised stone pool with a statue of a woman on a plinth in the middle. There was no water in the pool, just a thick coating of moss and algae. Beyond the terrace were a couple of gnarled trees, twisted and stunted by the wind, then a lawn of yellowish grass, an incongruous man-made oasis in the moorland desert whose vegetation was already creeping in around the edges, threatening to reclaim the garden and absorb it back into the wilderness. All houses have a feeling of their own. This one seemed sad, an edifice eaten through with melancholy and decay.

‘Now, isn't this nice?' Mrs Colquhoun had come back in with a tray of tea things. ‘Please, sit down…' She looked around at the cats. ‘Oh, I'm sorry.'

‘We didn't like to disturb them,' I explained.

‘Don't worry about that. They're only cats.' She moved towards the sofa, making shooing noises. ‘Timmy, off you go. Go on. You too, Timmy. And you, Timmy.'

Three cats rose lazily to their feet, tilting their heads back with insolent pride, before slipping down from the sofa and sauntering away across the room.

‘Are all your cats called Timmy?' I said.

‘Oh, yes, every one.'

‘Isn't that a little confusing?'

‘Not to me. I used to give them all different names, but I could never remember which one was which so now I call them all Timmy. It's so much simpler. Please, sit down.'

The cushions were still warm from the cats. Already I could see hairs on the sleeves of my jacket. Mrs Colquhoun poured the tea and handed round the cups and a plate of buttered scones.

‘I made them this morning,' she said. ‘After you'd rung. Scones are so much nicer on the day they're baked, don't you think?'

‘It's very kind of you,' I said.

‘I don't get much opportunity to bake these days. It makes a change to have visitors.'

‘Do you live all alone, Mrs Colquhoun?'

‘Well, I have the cats, of course. But their conversation is very limited.'

‘It's a big house.'

‘Far too big. We used to have a small place in Castleton, over on the other side of the Peaks. Do you know Castleton? No, you wouldn't, of course, you're Italian. Charming little village. It's famous for its caverns and Blue John.'

‘Blue John?'

‘It's a type of fluorspar – rock crystal. Very beautiful. The lead miners who first found it were French.
Bleu et jaune,
they called it, because the crystal is streaked with blue and yellow veins. The English weren't very good at French –
plus ça change
– so they called it Blue John.'

‘Oh.'

Guastafeste was chewing noisily on a scone.

‘What did you say these were called?' he asked.

‘Scones,' Mrs Colquhoun said.

‘They are very good.'

Mrs Colquhoun smiled. ‘Thank you. Do help yourself to another. Then Edward – my late husband – inherited this place. That would have been about twenty years ago. It was falling apart then, but I'm afraid it's got much worse since. I simply can't afford to do anything about it.'

‘It is…' I searched for something complimentary to say about the house,' … very old.'

‘It dates back to the eighteenth century. So does the damp, I fear. And the ghosts.'

‘There are ghosts?'

‘Oh, yes. Long ago the mistress of the house had a baby. One evening the nanny accidentally dropped the child over the banisters from the first-floor landing and it was killed. Both the nanny and the mother are said to roam the house at night, calling for the dead infant. Sometimes I've heard the sound of a child screaming. More tea?'

She took my cup and refilled it.

‘So don't worry if you hear strange noises later.'

‘Later?'

‘You're staying the night, of course.'

*   *   *

We remained in the sitting room for a further hour. Mrs Colquhoun – obviously starved of conversation – seemed anxious to make the most of our visit and we were happy to keep her company. Or at least I was. Guastafeste, struggling with his English, said very little. But he did his valiant best with the scones.

Then Mrs Colquhoun said, ‘Shall I show you the letters now?'

We followed her down the corridor and up the oak-panelled staircase to the first floor. The smell of cat was less noticeable up here, but the damp was more pronounced. The high ceiling, decorated with ornate plaster mouldings, was black and mottled with fungus, the air tainted with a moist staleness that lingered in the nostrils.

The staircase to the second floor was at the back of the house, designed, I guessed, for use only by servants whose quarters would originally have been in the attics. It was steep and uncarpeted, flanked by grimy walls and a water-stained ceiling. Mrs Colquhoun led us up the stairs and along a dark, oppressive corridor to a room which was crammed with cardboard boxes and piles of junk.

‘They're in there,' she said, indicating an old wooden chest.

‘Signor Rainaldi,' I said. ‘Did he know the letters were here?'

‘Oh, no, how could he know that?' Mrs Colquhoun replied. ‘I told him about them when he rang me. He was interested in any old papers I might have had, you see.'

‘Did he say why? Or how he'd come to contact you?'

‘Only that he was doing some historical research.'

‘Research into what?'

‘Something to do with violins, I believe he said. An Italian nobleman who had had a great collection.'

‘Count Cozio di Salabue?' I said.

Mrs Colquhoun looked uncertain. ‘That might have been it. I'm very bad with names. But didn't you say on the phone that he was a friend of yours? Why don't you ask him?'

I glanced at Guastafeste. I wasn't sure how to handle this. ‘I'm afraid he's dead,' I said.

‘Dead? Good gracious me. He was hardly very old. How?'

‘An accident,' I said, deciding that the truth might be too upsetting for her.

‘How awful. He was such a nice man. He brought me a box of chocolates, you know.'

‘Yes, you mentioned that on the telephone.' I was annoyed with myself. I'd intended bringing her a gift but forgotten.

‘There isn't much of value up here in the attics, but he was very interested in the papers in that chest. I don't know why, they're just old letters.'

‘Do you know which ones he was particularly interested in?'

‘Well, he photocopied one or two of them at the village shop, in Highfield. I went down with him. But I don't know which ones they were.'

‘He returned the documents?'

‘Oh, yes. I saw him put them back in the chest. I'll leave you to it, shall I? Dinner's at eight, will that be all right?'

‘You don't need to give us dinner, Mrs Colquhoun,' I said. ‘We can go out and find something to eat.'

‘Nonsense, you are my guests. You've come all the way from Italy. The least I can do is offer you some good English hospitality.'

She went out of the room. Guastafeste knelt down and opened the lid of the chest. Inside it was almost overflowing with yellowing papers. Guastafeste lifted out one of the papers. It was brittle and brown at the edges and caked with dust. Guastafeste inclined the paper towards the window and squinted at it closely. It was almost dark outside. The window was small and smeared with dirt. There was nothing like enough light to work by. I stood up and switched on the overhead light, but the bulb blew immediately. The attic seemed dingier than ever.

‘Tomaso probably went through the entire chest,' Guastafeste said gloomily. ‘That's a hell of a lot of papers to check.'

‘Let's try to narrow it down. Concentrate on those that look as if they've been recently examined. Maybe the ones near the top.'

Guastafeste rummaged delicately through the chest, taking out the bundles of papers one by one and placing them on the floor. They were very fragile, some so discoloured with age they looked like Biblical parchment. We divided them up into piles, separating out the loose documents. One piece of paper was so cracked and ancient it fell to pieces in Guastafeste's hand.

‘Careful,' I said, collecting up the bits and trying to fit them back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

‘What exactly are we looking for?' Guastafeste said.

‘Letters, possibly in Italian. Particularly ones with a Casale Monferrato address at the top and Giovanni Michele Anselmi di Briata's signature at the bottom.'

We took a pile each. Sorting through the documents was harder than it sounded. They were all handwritten, of course, and some of the writing was so unclear it was next to impossible to work out what language they were in, never mind read the words. In addition, they were so faded and wrinkled with age that even the ones where the handwriting had originally been clear were now difficult to decipher.

Guastafeste held up a curling sheet which looked as if it had been rescued half-burnt from a fire.

‘This is impossible, Gianni. We can't even begin to read them in this light. Why don't we take the chest downstairs?'