Poole hadn’t registered just how ugly and unpleasant a building the Grange was until he had to see it in the dark. Lit only by bulbs as weak and orange as own-brand squash, it had all the feel of a bad seventies horror film set but with less of the flimsiness of cheap props. There was something solidly malevolent about Essen Grange and Gallan was feeling it too, Poole had known him long enough to know when the man was seriously unsettled. ‘Attic or cellar?’ he offered.
Gallan shuddered. ‘Neither. Can’t I just opt for early retirement and a fat pension?’
Poole allowed a smile to flicker across his face. ‘Not tonight, buddy. You do the cellar. Maura Lyle said she’d found a passport and women’s clothing in a suitcase down there. See if you can find it.’
Gallan gave him a reluctant nod. ‘What are you looking for in the attic then?’
‘Magpies,’ Poole said as he walked towards the stairs. He could hear Gallan take a deep breath behind him.
Something was distinctly off about the house, not just in the atmosphere, which was thick with a brooding sense of old secrets, and not just in the creaks and groans and sighs of an old building woken up from a quiet night, but in the structure of it. The proportions were all wrong. The upstairs corridor that led to the attic felt too long and too narrow – the sensation wasn’t helped by the clusters of furniture lining the walls like a series of chicanes designed to slow progress and disorientate. The dust and gloom were cloying, and the close quarters of the attic stairs, tight, narrow and steep, gave Poole a sensation of claustrophobia he was unfamiliar with. He wouldn’t have called himself a fearless man, far from it, but neither was he a wimp. Yet this house was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
The attic itself held little that was unexpected. Boxes of junk, broken chairs, mouldering books and the general detritus of an old family who had never managed to locate the nearest landfill site. And there were spiders, lots of spiders. Again, Poole wouldn’t have called himself a wimp, but he didn’t enjoy the company of small things with more legs than sense.
Though the attic was cool, he could feel no draughts, and even when he braved it and turned out the feeble lights he could see no gaps where the moonlight shone in. The house was old, but the roof was sound – which begged the question of how a magpie had got inside. Of course, Maura could have lied about the bird, but why would she? There was no point to such a lie, no pay-off, and in his experience all lies had to have a pay-off. Evelyn Dexter hadn’t recalled the bird and he’d come away from her with the feeling that her involvement had been brief, dramatic and, other than the description of a mystery woman, entirely useless to him.
The dust on the floor had been recently disturbed. Footprints had crossed each other in skids and blurs, which Poole put down to the movements of his colleagues during their recent recce and the solicitor who had been in the house to take inventory after Gordon’s death. He should stop thinking of it as just a death and call it a murder in his mind, just as he did when he referred to it verbally. It was bizarrely difficult to equate the relatively gentle suffocation of an elderly man with the bloody and horrific mutilation of Cheryl Nixon and assume they had come from the same quarter. Yet they were linked, he had no doubt about that – linked by this house. Even in the absence of tangible evidence for that assertion he knew it as a fact, as surely as he knew his own name.
The attic was as odd as the rest of the house. It had different levels, and nooks any normal structure wouldn’t have logically possessed. It was clear the house had been extended and altered over the years, but not recent years. None of the roof supports could be described as new but some were less aged than others. Overall it was a confusing space with pockets of shadow and darkness that were wholly unnerving in the encroaching night. Despite the presence of the feeble bulbs Poole had to resort to his torch to drive the ghouls and shades out of the corners where they had disguised themselves as boxes and teetering piles of junk. It was only by doing this that he managed to discover the door, just a glimpse of it. The hint of architrave hiding behind a sagging velvet curtain.
Exploring the innards of an old house was disorientating enough, especially in the dark with nerves on high alert and jangling like a brassy wind chime at every little noise. Finding what must have been the original entrance to the attic was both thrilling and confusing. From memory Poole couldn’t place where the corresponding stairs must be on the floor below and wondered if the doorway had been blocked off at some point in the house’s history. He slid the curtain along its sagging wire and tried the door, unsurprised to find it locked.
In his pocket he carried a bunch of keys, officially signed over by the reluctant solicitor, who seemed to dislike the continued police intrusion into the Grange, but who had no choice but to concede it. All in all there were around twenty keys on the bunch, of varying sizes and degrees of age. He guessed the modern keys wouldn’t be of much use to him and focused on the older mortise types that seemed in keeping with the age and style of the door. Why people didn’t label the things was beyond him and he began to fiddle the lock with mounting frustration until the eighth key turned the tumblers and allowed him to open the door onto another narrow staircase, this one older and steeper than the one he’d used to reach the attic. It led down to an unknown part of the house that simply shouldn’t have been there at all.
As he ventured down the narrow stairs he felt as if he was entering the heart of the house. There was no light at all here, only the beam of his torch, the tilt of the old wooden treads, and stale, dry air. The staircase was shorter than the other and gave him the sensation that the room he found himself in was between the floors, a space where there should be no space. It was an unpleasant and disconcerting feeling that did nothing to settle his already taught nerves. The room itself was small and low-ceilinged, more like some kind of antechamber than a room in its own right. There were no windows in the dark-wood panelling but there was a further door and this one was also locked. He went through the keys again, finding the right one on his fifth try.
Poole was about to push it open when he heard Gallan’s panicked voice filtering down from the attic. He nearly gave the poor guy a heart attack when he loomed out of the hidden door and caught him mid meltdown.
‘Jesus H. Christ, Mike, you scared the living shit out of me!’
Poole might have laughed if his schoolboy humour hadn’t been overshadowed by his discovery. ‘Get your arse down here, I might have found something.’
Gallan puffed and heaved his way into the narrow stairwell, ‘This house is crazy!’ he said. ‘You think you know where you are with it and it throws a curve ball at you. Should have sold the place with the land and had it pulled down…’ he muttered as he followed Poole into the panelled cubbyhole that had been hiding itself all this time.
Gallan was the first one to retch when the smell hit them, Poole the first to flinch when the open door disturbed the air and sent the flies into a swarming frenzy.
Poole had to pull his jacket over his face to filter the stench and fend off the flies that had sensed fresh meat and had come to explore the viability of their next meal. ‘Get outside, call it in, tell them I think we might have found Estelle Hall,’ he said.
Gallan was already gone.
Poole stared reluctantly at the remains of the woman he believed to be Estelle Hall. The body was the right age, the clothing was similar to that which hung in Estelle’s wardrobe, and Poole had a gut feeling that the body huddled in the corner could be no one else.
Poole wasn’t sure what else they’d found, but it had been dead a while and was barely recognisable as human – most of the flesh had gone and what was left teemed with maggots. The flies had migrated to Estelle, who was sitting in a congealed puddle of her own blood that had silently ebbed from the crusting slashes on her wrists and arms. The wounds looked self-inflicted. She had to have made them herself, slicing up into the veins so they would stay open and weep out her life in some final act of desperation.
That she was dead was clear. There was too much blood for her to have survived and the flies were too confident in their exploration of the grey landscape of her face to leave any doubt. A shard of glass lay near her bloodied fingers, next to the remains of the water jug it had once belonged to. He could only guess at the desperation that must have driven her to take her own life in such a way.
As he panned his torch beam around he spotted the frenzied scratch marks on the door. Several bloody fingernails were stuck to the wood, violently detached from her frantic hands as she’d tried to claw her way out. Her death was recent. The flies hadn’t destroyed much of her and it was deeply disturbing to realise she must have been there the whole time. Trapped in a room with only the dead thing on the bed and the insects for company while the police and Maura had tramped about the place oblivious to the existence of the room.
Poole was profoundly sorry to find her there. They’d been looking for her all along and hoping she’d be found alive and able to give them some insight into what the hell had been happening inside the godforsaken walls of this hideous house. He thought about Cheryl Nixon, not because he’d had any fondness for the strange, temperamental woman with her frizzy hair and nervous disposition, but because she was the only one who might have provided an answer to the question of what had been going on at Essen Grange for all these years. They’d interviewed her twice and she’d been nothing but tight-lipped and weird. Her mother had been no better, just vicious, snide and out to save her own skin. Cheryl was lying in the mortuary fridge now, her mouth silenced by murder, and Connie’s sense of self-preservation had closed her mouth for ever on the things she might have seen. One was as useless to him in death as the other had chosen to be in life. Had they known about this room and what was in it? In that moment he despised them both and damned them to hell. They’d had the answer and kept it from him, and he didn’t have a single clue as to why.
Connie Nixon knew why. She just wasn’t saying. Where would it leave her if she did? In the shit, that was where.
She knew her rights. They couldn’t keep her much longer and they couldn’t make her talk. She’d done her bit; she’d warned the nurse to keep away. Connie Nixon had a clean conscience and they couldn’t prove otherwise.
So the bitch had got to Cheryl, had she? That was… regrettable. She knew she’d feel sad about that at some point; it was inevitable when someone who’d called you mother for all those years lost their life. Connie might have felt it more keenly if she had been Cheryl’s mother. How were you supposed to feel about a kid you’d been paid to keep and pretend was your own? She didn’t know. Grateful for the money, she supposed.
They didn’t like kids at the Grange. Kids were dirty, noisy, sick and cloying – kids were needy. Cheryl had been bloody needy and Connie felt like she’d earned every penny of what they’d paid her to take the kid on and keep her mouth shut.
And she still had to keep her mouth shut. The money had dried up the minute Estelle had disappeared but it didn’t mean Connie wasn’t in it up to her neck. There was no such thing as too old to go to prison.
Talk about keeping it in the family. Fancy taking your own kid on to keep house for you. Now that was sick.
It was that house, it made everybody sick. Sick in the head, like Jane. It had made Connie sick too, made her do things, agree to things, that she’d never have done of her own accord. It made you warped – it took your soul and made it ugly, greedy and insatiable. That house consumed you.
Did Cheryl know, every time she took a meal to that forgotten room, that she was feeding her own mother? On some level, had she known?
She couldn’t have done or she’d have resented Connie even more than she had. They’d traded on spite for years, her and her adopted daughter. Feeding on vicious little exchanges, each more bitter than the last. That had been their bond.
Oh God.
Cheryl.
Cheryl was gone.
The truth of it ripped through Connie like a chainsaw blade, hitting her heart and tearing it in half. She clutched at her chest as if the action could hold the two pieces together. This was it. Who’d have thought that Connie Nixon would die of a broken heart? She might have laughed if she’d had the breath to do it.
They were all over her like a rash now, that DI and her cronies. Pulling at her clothes, rolling her over, yelling for ambulances. They were too late. Connie knew she wasn’t coming back from this – didn’t want to, not if Cheryl was gone. It was the shock that had made her deny how much she’d loved that kid. Had loved her from the minute the nurse had taken her from Jane and put her in the nanny’s arms. No one had ever asked Connie what she’d done for the Hendersons, what her job had been. She’d been their nanny: Barbara’s nanny, and Cheryl’s.
Dying took a long time. Your life didn’t flash before your eyes – it rolled, like an old film reel. Eking your years out frame by frame. Making you see everything for the last time in black and white when all those years it had been messy blurred colour that had made sense at the time. Gordon in black and white the day he’d killed his own daughter. All of them the day they’d helped bury her. The deal they’d made to keep it quiet because without Gordon there would be no money. Connie taking the baby in case he did it again. Jane howling like a banshee, screaming for her children. That house sucking them all in and blurring the lines of good and evil, need and greed.
It took a broken heart to reveal the truth. It took a broken heart to tell it.
Connie looked up into the worried eyes of DI James. ‘You need to get the nurse.’ She gasped it out, there was no breath left.
All she heard before the dark descended was DI James saying, ‘An ambulance is on its way. Hang on, Connie, we’ll get you a nurse. Hang on.’