The Red House (15 page)

If that’s how it happened, I could probably get Dora to confess to her part. I’m just not sure it would be ethical to do so, either from the side of being a friend abusing Dora’s trust, or of being an officer required to provide evidence that can stand up to challenge in court. ‘Shit, she and Fiona have been together all night.’ Maybe getting their stories straight.

‘What if Imogen was the jealous one?’ Spencer suggests. ‘Maxwell’s her fiancé. She follows him leaving the concert hall with a student, locks them in the barn out of anger. Figures she’s taught him a lesson in humiliation, and makes up this story about a long-lost brother so that we
think Maxwell was following her instead of the other way around. Protecting him from a charge of sex with a minor, and now he owes her.’

‘That’s a little convoluted. Would your first thought be making up a fake brother? Why not just say she was going to see her old house by herself?’ This is working; Spencer may yet be a decent partner. Not that we’ve found the answer yet, but it’s as if we might work well enough together to find it eventually. ‘Imogen was in Cambridge city centre when Maxwell Gant called her from the station in Cambourne, but she’d had the time to get there from Caldecote if she was trying to establish an alibi.’

Spencer leans forward. ‘Do we know she actually lived in Highfields Caldecote? The whole thing could be something she made up. Maybe she’s a compulsive liar. It’s not as if she’s attached to anyone else we’ve interviewed besides her fiancé. Maybe he’s in on it. Or maybe she lies to him, too.’

I lean in too, one hand on the small of my back to keep my balance. ‘Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that she showed up just when these bodies were ripe to be discovered. Even if the dog hadn’t done it last night, the developer was sniffing around. Do you think that could have something to do with her presence here? We need to know Morgan Davies’ stance on selling the land. Were they holding out or giving in? Who was resisting and who was pushing?’

I tear out another piece of paper, to write my version of a shopping list:

‘You made the list, you take your choice,’ offers Spencer, contrasting the gallantry with a tiny belch.

‘I’ll look into Imogen and Patrick Bell. I’ll either find something interesting or we’ll knock them out of the equation. You run the developer to ground and get him to name our dead man. If he doesn’t answer his phone, find him in his office or at another property. We’ll both go after the Davies family. Something’s not right there.’

‘You skipped one,’ Spencer points out. He touches number four on the list. Dora.

I dodge it. ‘We can’t do everything at once.’

He raises his eyebrows at me but doesn’t put his opinion into words. I turn away from him towards my computer.

I wish I could wriggle out of this suit jacket. It’s ridiculous to wear in this heat, and it doesn’t even close around my maternity blouse, but I feel exposed and lumpy without it. I search the county property database for the ownership of the properties in Highfields Caldecote. Decades past won’t be in there, but I need the property names and recent
histories to accurately request the older records.

Spencer’s listening to the developer’s phone ring unanswered. ‘What if …’ he muses out loud. ‘What if he
is
the developer? Lance Keats. If it’s his own land, that would explain him working alone sometimes, as they described. That would explain him not answering his phone …’

‘No, too young,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘You don’t have enough money to buy land at that age.’ But I try an image search. No photos of developer Lance Keats.

‘Some by that name on Facebook, but not from around here,’ Spencer reports from behind his computer.

‘Aha! LinkedIn. No photo,’ I say. ‘No personal information. Same phone number we’ve been trying.’ I absently tap a pencil on a closed book.

‘The County Council. Planning permission. They’ll have met him,’ Spencer says, rising.

‘Call me when you find out.’

His earnest thumbs-up makes me crack a smile. I bounce the rubber end of my pencil off my stretched lips.

My request for the current titles to the homes in Highfields Caldecote has spit a list onto the screen. All of them in that little area belong to March Property Group. I submit a query for the chain of ownership of Meadow View back to the eighties, to confirm Imogen’s claim, but the main interest is the recent sale of the White House, which appears to include the Red House as an outbuilding. I phone the solicitor who handled the transaction. He, of course, is not permitted to divulge much, but tells me what he can from the public record:

The former owner of the property, Rowena Davies, had been represented by her daughter with power-of-attorney,
Morgan Davies. It was Mrs Davies’ signature that gave up the land. It seems to point towards Morgan’s innocence.
Or her cunning
, I consider.
If Morgan Davies did know anything about the skeletons, she could have been setting up her mother to take the fall.

I track down Morgan Davies’ peers. It would make sense for a friend ‘in trouble’ with a pregnancy to turn to Morgan’s mother for discreet assistance. It takes half of the day to say for certain that there are no local missing persons who fit that scenario. We’ll have to cast a much wider net. Wider nets, I rue, often have bigger holes.

When my phone rings, I snatch it up, hoping that Spencer has got farther than I have. The hysterical female voice on the other end is hard to understand. I finally make out that it’s Maxwell Gant’s fiancée, and resort to a verbal slap: ‘Ms Wright-Llewellyn, control yourself! Where are you?’

Imogen sniffles on the other end of the phone. ‘I’m in Highfields Caldecote. I took a bus.’

Damn
. I hope that the officer at the scene has the sense to keep her away from it. I put on my gentle, persuasive voice: ‘I’m sure you understand that the area around the barn is a crime scene as well as private property. Perhaps I can send an officer to—’

‘You don’t understand! I think I’ve been followed.’ This is a whisper, full of breath that makes a staticky buzz through the phone.

She’s not crazy
, I have to remind myself. Just twenty minutes ago, I found the recent discussion posts from someone claiming to be Imogen’s brother, and received confirmation that she – they – really had lived where she claimed.

‘Where exactly are you?’ I ask, opting for a crisp efficiency that I hope will prompt direct answers.

‘I was in the village, trying to remember things. I thought I recognised the way home so I started walking. There wasn’t a pavement, so I had to be in the road. I was careful. But this car came around the bend too fast! I – I ended up full-length in the stinging nettles on the side. He didn’t stop, but I know the car. I’ve seen it before.’

‘Where? And where are you now?’ I ask, unimpressed but obligated.

Imogen says in a different voice, not aimed at the phone, ‘What are you—’ A click, and the call terminates.

I freeze, tilted forward. ‘Imogen?’ I say, and say again.

I call the number back. Straight to voicemail.

My phone rings. It’s Morris, calling on his way to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Fiona’s taken pills.

Fiona?
I smack my hand on the desk.
Damn, damn, damn …

I phone Spencer on my way downstairs. ‘I’m off to Addenbrooke’s. Get to Highfields Caldecote. Imogen Wright-Llewellyn may be in danger.’
Or she may be playing games
. I can’t take the chance of ignoring what may be a legitimate concern, but I can’t help wondering at the wake of drama that Imogen seems to drag behind her. ‘Alert the officer at the property. Pathologist, too, if he’s still there.’

I picture us as mirrors of one another across the county, phone to ear and hand on car door.

‘I’m on my way,’ Spencer confirms. ‘What’s happening at the hospital?’

‘Fiona Davies has collapsed. They think pills.’
Damn again.

‘Good news here.
Erik
Keats is our man. The son. His father owns the property. Makes sense that he worked overtime at it. The dad’s in France on holiday; that’s why no one’s answering the phone.’

‘Family besides the dad?’

‘Still working on that. No wife or official children. I was about to visit his address in Hardwick. The electoral roll says he lived alone.’

‘We’ll do that together, later. For now, we have fires to put out.’

In the afternoon heat, the involuntary image in my mind is less of the ‘to do’ lists and overcrowded schedules that the expression implies, and, instead, of dry, crackling flashes.

What’s gone hurts badly enough, but even what’s left doesn’t look right. The white house and red barn are marred by police chaos. Large lights flanking the barn make it look like a film set. A tarpaulin juts out, sheltering a tool case and a heap of cut-down brambles underneath it. I step closer.

An exposed skeleton below it lies face-up, skull tilted back. Small sweeping tools have left their patterns in the stubborn, clinging dirt like brush marks in an oil painting. A smaller bunch of bones, which had at first seemed to be a strange, knotty tangle, resolves into a curled figure, and I suck in a breath. I knew that a man had died, but not about this.

I stare. The remains are old, but how old? Had they been under the ground when I walked on it as a little girl? The hand with which I’m holding my phone falters. A uniformed police officer rounds the corner of the red barn and heads straight for me.

‘What are you—’ I protest.

He snatches the phone and clicks it off. ‘No photographs.’

‘I wasn’t—’

‘This is a crime scene.’

‘I’m sorry!’

‘You’ll have to leave.’ He takes me by the elbow and urges me away.

I look back over my shoulder. The red barn wall looms over the bodies.
No, the bodies are gone. What’s left is just bones.
I shiver, and the sun in my eyes makes me sneeze. The motions combine into a jolting shimmy. ‘May I have my phone back?’

‘If I see it come out, I’ll confiscate it.’ He hands it back, and I slide it into my jeans pocket. I feel vulnerable for a moment, alone and off-kilter, with this authoritative man. I’m not sure that he actually is police; how would I really know? Anyone could get police-looking clothes if they wanted to. I want to leave but I’m afraid to turn my back on him. I wonder if he came here in a green car.

An older man comes around the house. He’s wearing a white plastic jumpsuit over his clothes, and carrying a boxlike bag. He kneels by the bones, against the pulled-up berry bushes heaped beside. He appears to be the pathologist, or at least a forensic person. So the uniformed man surely is police, which is a good thing, even if he’s staring at me, suspicious.

‘I’m going,’ I say, backing up the way I came. I lift one leg, then the other, over the cursory fence marking the border between lawn and dark earth, lumpy from caterpillar tracks. I stumble, catch myself, then turn and run to the clot of dirt on which my house used to stand.

Not just ‘my’ house. Our house.
That’s the point; that’s what made it special. We all lived in it together.

I turn and look back. I try to remember the white house and its red barn. I’d seen on small signs coming in that they are actually called that: the
White House
and the
Red House
. Our house had been called
Meadow View
, properly, but had it been referred to as the ‘Peach House’ by neighbours?
Orange House
? Maybe. Probably. You would do, if your houses were all different colours, wouldn’t you?

None of the neighbours had had children my age, not that I can recall. I’d played on all of the grass, without thought to property lines, but it had been by myself or, later, with Sebastian.

An image darts, blurry, between one clear memory and another. I
had
played by the back of the barn. I remember the berries, and the red painted wall.
Had the bodies been under me then?
What if I’d chipped at the hard ground with a plastic spade? What if it had rained and I’d scooped and patted mud cakes there? I remember a hem against that colour red, and bare feet, and short, pink toenails.

A woman, yes? An adult woman. I would think ‘young woman’ now, but back then any grown-up had been by definition old. The woman had had long hair, worn loose. It had been damp from washing and she’d had a comb in her hand. I had never been allowed to leave the house with wet hair. I’d hated my mother’s hair dryer so instead washed my hair at night and slept on it. This woman, with her heavy, damp waves, had been lovely, freckled, and burnt pink on the shoulders. She’d worn a loose summer dress tied just under her breasts. She’d walked me over to the steps of the White House and asked me to help her comb
her long hair, which I’d then undertaken with solemn care. I had never been able to grow my own hair that long.

Was that the woman who died last night?
I wonder. But, no, it wouldn’t have been. Last night’s death had been an old woman, grandmother to a teenager. This memory-woman would have to be from the next generation down. The old woman’s daughter, it must have been. She had seemed, to young me, to be about twenty. The police had said that there was a granddaughter now, a girl who was in Maxwell’s singing group. Fifteen, then? Sixteen? That could fit that her mother would have been around twenty when I was little. She had been carefree, loose-haired, barefoot. She’d worn a chain round her neck, dragged into a sharp V by the painted head of a lion nestled between her breasts. That’d fit twenty. She’d been listening to the radio, I suddenly remember. ‘Walking on Sunshine’. Loud. She had turned it up. She’d had a basketball in her lap, and I’d grabbed it and tried to dribble with it, dropping it and chasing it down, down, down the grass slope. When I’d finally caught it and turned around the woman had gone.

I look around. There is no slope. The land here is flat.

Has the developer levelled it?
I consider, but I know he hasn’t. This is the land I knew. I can’t think why I pictured a tilt. Am I even in the right place?

I stand. I put my hand up as a salute-like visor and squint. Without the buildings, the land is anonymous. I could be anywhere. The only landmarks are the red and white houses now guarded by the gruff policeman and by the science-person packing up his bag and getting into a car. Not a green car.

The policeman is taking a call. He looks in my direction, at least he faces this way, and I hold still.

He goes behind the house, the white one. Is he looking for something? Is he improving his phone signal?

An urge pushes me back to the property line, the edge between the land being developed and the land that’s still lived on. I scramble over the fence that emphasises the border between the dirt and the grass. No slope. I turn to face the dirt – no slope there, either. But there, yes, our house had definitely been over there. I’m sure.

I turn towards the White House. Yes, I’d sat on those steps, with the long-haired woman. But where had I started? I allow myself to drift forward. I’d been playing over …
there
. Near the bodies? I stop myself and shudder. I’d started there, then wandered over to the barn door. The woman had taken my hand, tugging gently. I wrap my arms around myself.

Footsteps. I bolt forward, wanting to dodge the policeman. I put the barn between us, ample cover for me to get off the property.

I hesitate. The mouth of the barn hangs open.
No, not mouth, the door
, I correct myself. Just because there are windows for eyes doesn’t make it a mouth. It’s been slid to the side to allow thick electrical cords to pass through. Outside, they’re attached to lights aimed at the burial, the huge bright lights that we’d seen from Maxwell’s car last night. I gingerly step over these electric snakes.

Maxwell had said that he and the girl had been up in a loft, that it was small and crowded, which had made things ‘look bad’ to the paramedics. Having slept in a loft for a year at uni, and not always alone, I want to see this loft for
myself.
Ridiculous, the girl’s just a teenager
, I berate myself. But I slip my arm inside, just to peek.

Purposeful footsteps come around the building. My body slides in the rest of the way.

The Red House is large but surprisingly crowded, full of thick, hot air and countless
things
. Even as my eyes adjust, the piles and stacks remain in silhouette as the sun shines through sideways. It all seems skewed by the slanted light, as if the towers might fall. My heartbeat speeds. I should run away. The door is behind me, still open, the jaw of it still slack, but I push forward.

The path through the clutter turns sharply. Suddenly, the bed on which the old woman had died, the loft over it – everything that Maxwell had confessed, that the Inspector had described – comes to life in my mind, acting on this real stage. There, the fallen refrigerator. There, a cleared space, where paramedics will have worked on the body. Up above, Maxwell and that young girl in a tangle of sorts.

I stare. Nothing enticing or even forbidden about it. Just messy, crowded, horrid. No one would want to have sex up there, or in here at all. I go cold from guilt. I should never have doubted him.

He’s gone to St Catharine’s. He hasn’t told me his decision about the job, just that that’s where he needed to go. I know there’s a chance that the offer will be taken away, given the events of last night, though that would hardly be fair.
Really? If even I had qualms, however small, how can I insist that the parents of schoolgirls blithely and completely trust in him?

I back away, but my hip hits a sharp corner. The tower
that I’ve bumped into tips, then arcs, and ultimately falls, splatting across the exit path.

I clamber over the spilt boxes but another column follows suit, into yet another. The light has suddenly dimmed, and I turn my head frantically side to side to suss out why: the window that had let in the most light has been blocked by what appears to be an unusually long bolt of fabric, or maybe a rolled-up carpet, that’s fallen across it and partly unfurled. I don’t see how I can have knocked that over, even in a chain reaction. I push through the mess I created, but the path that should be just beyond isn’t clear any more, and I can’t see the light from the door.
Unless I’m facing the wrong
way. I turn in a slow circle. I cough, and assume that it’s a reaction to my panicky, shallow breaths, but then I catch an acrid smell and the prickling of nearby heat.

I plunge forward, towards that carpet roll, and mount it, trying to shimmy up. The window is big enough for me, if I can open it, or break it, but it’s got no hinge or slide, and is leaded into too-small quarter-sections. Still, I hit at the thick, wavy panes, looking to break a hole to breathe through, and to shout through. I don’t even make a crack.

No one knows I’m in here.
The policeman must have seen or smelt the smoke. He may have gone to his car to get help, or to meet the fire engines that he’s surely called, to guide them in. Is anyone else even around? I pound again, and try to shout, but the attempt dissolves into coughing. It’s better to get low, I know, but the window is up here. There’s no escaping through the ground.
Is there?
I briefly consider perhaps digging my way out, or lifting the whole building up off the foundation onto my shoulders. This ridiculous image gives me an idea, though. I climb higher,
and reach for the beams holding up the roof. I pull myself up into the criss-cross of rafters.

Through the rising smoke I detect scattered pinpricks of light along the line where the roof connects with the stone walls. These are holes where animals have once gnawed, clawed and insinuated themselves.

I slip my fingers into a fissure, wriggling them to widen it. Mortar crumbles. ‘Help!’ I call, in what seems far too feeble a voice.

Suddenly, the beam on which most of my weight is pressed shifts sideways, nearly dropping me. I hang on, shoving it harder out of line. Where it meets the wall, a loose stone next to it is tilted by the beam’s leverage. A gap appears.
Light
.