The Start of Everything (19 page)

He would love this. He would hate that it’s been chopped into flats, cheap kitchens stuffed in wherever the bathroom pipes allowed, new walls dropped in and old doors blocked up. “It’s vandalism!” he lectured when he showed me the old plans online last night. The owner had been obliged to make a record of the original layout before converting it.

Dan knows of Ian Bennet. He bought Deeping House at auction, for what looked like a low price, but the place needed a lot of work. He put money in and he’s getting money out. Dan wants to try this sort of thing, but I’m sceptical. He would fall in love with anyplace he does up himself. He wouldn’t be able to bear the practicalities required. He’d try to restore its bygone grandeur, and not want to open the gardens to the public or rent bedsits. It’s not that he doesn’t want to share; he just wants to see a thing employed as designed.

Bennet doesn’t seem to have that sensitivity. The lighting in the car park is unapologetically modern, and a colourful plastic-and-tyre-rubber play area abuts the house.

Keene stands by what must be Richard’s car. It’s comically yellow. He watches me park. The angle makes the scene look like a film poster, house looming. That effect was designed in deliberately; the house is meant to intimidate.

Challenge accepted
. I get out of the car.

Keene and I approach the grand front door together. An anachronistic keypad and speaker cling to the wall beside it. Each button has a label beside it, which I copy into my notebook:

*Holst

*Finley

Keene says that’s the family the girls in the car said that Katja had worked for. He presses their buzzer. We wait. No response.

*Bennet

The owner himself, apparently with teenage daughters on a day out with Mum.

*Help

“Help?” I say, as if the house were begging our assistance.

“Servants, maybe?” says Keene.
Sure, maybe there’s a gardener or cleaner. But shouldn’t such a person have a name?

*_____

That one was blank. Unlet? That doesn’t bode well for Ian Bennet’s big project.

Then,
*Casey
. Stephen’s uncle. Keene presses that buzzer.

“We might be waking people,” I caution. “It’s Saturday.”

He presses the buzzer again, really leans on it with his thumb. I crack a smile.

A window to our right is raised. “What are you on about?” shouts a white-haired, barrel-chested, apparently naked man.

We jog down the steps and stand tiptoe in a flower bed to lift our warrant cards up for his perusal. Rory Casey agrees to throw on a dressing gown and speak with us.

Back up the steps, we wait with friendly smiles for him to let us in. “Richard’s car working out?” I finally ask, turning our small talk serious. Keene only grunts, so I persist: “How’s Alice holding up? Are they coping?”

“What do you—” he begins. But Rory Casey unlocks the door. He has a mug in hand, topped with steamed milk and a cinnamon flourish we can smell from the step. He’s taken his time about it, too.

The wood-panelled hall frames his glower. He looks like a portrait the sitter didn’t enjoy posing for. Behind him, a wide stairway sweeps down from the upper floor. Mock-Oriental carpet lolls down it, held in place at the back of each step by a thin brass bar. The newel post is
topped by a carved wood globe, its continental outlines worn down to suggestions.

I count seven doors: two up and five down. Mr. Casey reaches for the only door on our right. “Are you done gawping at the hall?” he wants to know. I have Dan’s printout of the original design of the house. Casey’s flat was once a “parlour.”

As Stephen had described, the flat is small. The main room is a lounge, with kitchen units against one wall and a table under a window. It overlooks, as Stephen had said, the climbing frame and swing set. A slightly open door exposes a corner of Mr. Casey’s bedroom.

We explain our concerns, and he confirms that Stephen had permission to be there at the time he’d claimed. “And I know he
was
here,” he says, “because my cupboards were rearranged. Cups stacked on plates, saucers nested in bowls. He’s a savage in the kitchen. His mother coddles him too much; a man isn’t a man until he can live by himself with a minimum of fuss. And he was gone when I returned. He’d made the bed, but I didn’t trust him. I washed the linens myself.”

Outside the window, an attractive young woman pushes a small child on a swing. Stephen had sat here, watching.

“Did you have any reason to wash the sheets, Mr. Casey?” Keene asks.

“When I unpacked I noticed he’d been in my stash of condoms. He’s a grown man; I expect he knows what a bed’s for, and that he used it as such. There’s a utility room across the hall. I washed the sheets in hot water. It’s all a person can do.”

“Who’s that out there?” Keene asks, tilting his head towards the window. The young woman who’d been pushing the swing has gone out of range. This older woman now minding the boy isn’t having as much fun.

“That’s Eleanor Finley and Daniel. He’s a lovely lad, all mischief. She’s a sour bitch. They’re on their fourth au pair, and I can’t say I blame the ones that leave.”

We haven’t even mentioned Katja yet; we’d started off simply confirming Stephen’s account. “Do you remember an au pair called Katja, Mr. Casey?” I ask.

“I don’t know their names. But I can tell you that the first one was
lazy and ginger-haired. The second one, this was before I left for Tenerife, she seemed better. More alert, in any case, as if she had a brain in her head and planned on doing what she was being paid for. Now they’ve got an Italian—”

“We’d be interested in the one that was here when Stephen was,” I say.

“Well, if she was here then, she was here when I wasn’t!” He breathes out slowly and sits down. “Has he got the girl into trouble?” he asks. Meaning pregnant, clearly.
Trouble
.

“Is he usually so careless?” Keene asks. I shoot him a look.

“He’s twenty-three,” Casey says in answer. As he’s made perfectly clear, Stephen knows what a bed’s for.

“Has he got anyone else in ‘trouble’?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t know. But he’s twenty-three,” Casey repeats. Keene waggles his brows at me. I roll my eyes in response. Mr. Casey must have had a wild year himself, forty-odd years ago.

We find small Daniel digging up a patch of garden. Earth sprays up into the air and settles on my shoes. “I know that Mr. Bennet hates it,” his mother says. “But it keeps Daniel happy. He gets bored when his sister is at gymnastics. What am I supposed to do?” She seems to mean this as a real question:
What possible alternative could there be?
She hovers near him but not close, protecting her white trainers and pink tracksuit.

A young woman swoops in as if in answer: “Daniel! You know you’re not supposed to dig. Come have a climb.” She scoops him up and places him on the ladder of the climbing frame. He accepts the sudden change and clambers like a monkey. Her arms stretch up to protect him as he travels across the top. The bottom of her shirt rises to expose a thin strip of belly.

Mrs. Finley barks sharply, “Liliana!” The mother marches over and tugs the au pair’s shirt down to overlap her jeans. Then she returns to us. “No self-respect,” she grumbles. “Spoiled, that’s what she is. She expects me to step in when she needs to run off to the loo. A youngest daughter. That never bodes well. I always say—”

I cut her off. She bristles when we ask about au pairs and Christmas, as if she only then notices that we’re strangers. “What do you want to know about Katja for?” she finally says, once we’ve identified ourselves to her satisfaction. “Good riddance to her.”

“Christmas?” I prompt. The three of us drift towards a bench facing the play area. Mrs. Finley glares at the au pair riding the seesaw with her son.

“That girl, Katja,” she says. “She was nice enough at first. Eager to please, only mildly grating accent, that sort of thing.” She waves her hand to encompass the general nature of foreign young women. “We were happy to have her at the start, I can tell you that. The first one, Leonora, had to be told how to do everything. Every little thing. And she’d never seen a tumble dryer or a dishwasher. It was like teaching a cat to play cards. Katja at least knew how things work. Daniel was happy with her, and Caitlin, too.”

“Can you describe her physically?” I ask.

“Smaller than me.” She holds her hand up around her ear, for height. Keene and I meet eyes:
too short for the fen body
. “Fair hair, choppy cut. Flat-chested, thank God.” I restrain myself from responding.

Mrs. Finley leans towards us. We lean in, too.

“And I’ll tell you the truth, because you’re police, and that’s just how I was raised. One mustn’t lie to police.”

Keene commends her.

“My husband turned forty last year. It was all very traumatic and whatnot, forty and still not yet manager, forty and still on the worst shifts. I was overwhelmed with Daniel and Caitlin, which is why we’d given in and hired help. Things were not at their best between us. He ended up having an affair with this silly woman he met at work. Blond, recently divorced, the whole stereotype. It lasted a month. Then one night I caught them in the car just outside. Can you imagine? My therapist says he wanted to get caught, though you wouldn’t know it from the look on his face when I rapped on the windscreen.”

“Forgive me,” I interrupt. “I’m not sure how this relates.…”

“I’m explaining to you the circumstances that made it impossible for Katja to stay. My husband is a weak, vulnerable man. The day that it snowed …” Mrs. Finley rubs her hands. “That day. In January. You
know it?” Yes, it had been news. Even a few inches, when they do come, stop everything. “Marcus—my husband, Marcus—somehow managed to tip our car off the edge of the icy drive trying to get to work. It had blocked the way out so there was no leaving the grounds for anyone. Rain bucketed down after the snow, so there wasn’t even any getting out of the house. We were all stuck in together, except for Hillary Bennet and her girls off on their pagan escapade, and our Daniel and Caitlin, who were at my mother’s—”

“Excuse me? ‘Pagan escapade’?”
Maypoles? Stone circles?

“Hillary Bennet took her two adolescent daughters to London to have their astrological forecasts done. And, as I was saying, our own children were with their grandmother. Therefore there was nothing for Katja to do, so she stayed in her room downstairs, so we thought.”

“Your au pairs don’t live in your flat?” I clarify.

Mrs. Finley blanches. “Certainly not! The help use the empty flat downstairs. That day, I imagined she would read or otherwise improve herself. Then the noises started. Sexual noises, from Rory Casey’s flat below our lounge. I was used to hearing the drone of television down there from time to time but … the
sounds
of male enthusiasm and … the
rhythm
of it was persistent. In the middle of the day! Apparently she’d decided to give the little writer downstairs a going-away present.” The sex had actually happened, then; Stephen wasn’t just wishing.

“We knew he had a crush on her. She and that other girl—the Holsts’ nanny—had giggled over it, which was what it deserved. I thought she had more sense. Surely you understand that our working relationship couldn’t continue.”

“You sacked her for sleeping with the writer downstairs?” I can’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.

“I sacked her,” says Mrs. Finley, rising, “because my husband had already been tempted once, and I didn’t need him to have those sounds replay in his head every time he looks at the cute little twenty-two-year-old without stretch marks with whom we share our home. I sacked her that day, and haven’t seen her since.” A breeze stirs her hair into a Medusa-like tangle to match the vicious expression on her face.

Suddenly he’s before us: Marcus Finley, forty and not yet a manager. His grey suit, beige tie, and defeated posture identify him instantly.

“Marcus,” Mrs. Finley says, surprised but not abashed, “this is the police. They’re asking about Katja.”

“I imagine my wife has told you everything,” he says. “Forgive me, the store opens at ten.”