the corridor almost on tiptoe, he thought he heard something – a rustling or a movement behind him. He turned, hesitating whether to go forward or back. Perhaps it was someone sleeping behind one of the closed and half-closed doors that he had passed. He had no idea who else slept up here. But now all was quiet again. Softly, he moved forward, coming to a halt outside Katya’s door.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
The words of the old nursery rhyme came unbidden into his head, and he smiled as he placed the candlestick carefully on the floor, put out his hand, and opened the door.
CHAPTER 7
Detective Inspector Trave woke with a start. He’d been deeply asleep, fighting the noise of the telephone ringing insistently beside his bed.
‘What is it?’ he asked blearily, still half-inhabiting the dream he’d been having: a bad dream that had been recurring lately in which shapeless shadows were coming toward him on a cliff’s edge and there was nowhere left to hide. His Dunkirk dream he called it, remembering 1940, when the world had gone up in flames. Who was to know if it wouldn’t happen again?
‘Sorry to wake you, sir,’ said a young, brisk voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s a murder: young female shot in the head. At a place called Blackwater Hall. It’s outside Blackwater village on the London Road.’
‘Blackwater Hall,’ Trave repeated, coming fully awake.
‘Yes, that’s right. Do you want directions? I’ve got them here.’
‘No, I know Blackwater Hall. Get hold of Adam Clayton for me, will you? Tell him to meet me there.’
‘He’s already on his way, sir. He was on night duty when we got the call.’
‘Good. Thanks,’ said Trave, replacing the receiver.
Homicide at Blackwater Hall. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard those words. And people aren’t murdered in the same place twice for no reason, he thought as he got dressed, made himself a triple-strength cup of coffee, drank it in three gulps, and went out into the night.
Trave drove quickly through the empty streets and out into the dark countryside while his mind raced, remembering people and events that he’d been trying for a long time to forget. It was like the door of a lumber room had finally given way under the weight of what was stacked up behind it. Images from the past passed quickly in front of his mind’s eye like a succession of ghosts – Ethan Mendel lying dead, with the lake water lapping around his dark hair and his outstretched arms; David Swain’s hollow face collapsing in on itself as the jury foreman announced the guilty verdict; Titus Osman’s smug eyes twinkling behind his manicured beard as he entertained his guests at that dinner party after the trial, with Vanessa sitting on his left, listening to the bastard’s tall tales with such rapt attention.
Why had he taken Vanessa that night? Trave asked himself the same useless question for the thousandth time. Useless because he knew the answer. He hadn’t wanted to go. The Mendel case had left him feeling obscurely dissatisfied, a viewpoint evidently not shared by the jurors, who had taken less than two hours to convict. But Creswell, his boss, had insisted, and Trave had taken Vanessa with him to Blackwater Hall because he didn’t want to go on his own and because he felt guilty that she never went out; that he’d not been able to help her at all through those long, hard months and years after their son, Joe, died. Trave had had his job to fall back on, but she’d had nothing. Just him, and he’d been no support, worse than no support in fact. They’d grieved soundlessly and separately, trying to avoid each other in the passages and corridors of their empty house until their marriage withered away and died. Not with a shout; not even with a whimper. In a cold and weary silence.
He and Vanessa were finished long before the night that he took her to Osman’s to celebrate the end of another successful case. He realized that now. And yet she had looked so delicate, so fragile, that evening in a white dress that she hadn’t worn in years. He remembered her laughing in the bedroom before they left, saying that perhaps losing weight wasn’t such a bad thing after all, and he remembered how she’d bent her head to allow him to fasten the faux pearl necklace that he’d bought her as a present twenty years earlier, after Joe was born. His hands on her neck replaced by Osman’s hands – Osman, who could afford to pay more for a necklace than Trave earned in a year. Trave shuddered, braking hard to avoid the line of police cars with flashing lights parked in a line on the road up ahead. They must be searching the woods, he thought, as he turned through the open gate and drove up between the tall, moonlit trees to Osman’s house.
Clayton was waiting for him in the entrance hall. The whole place was ablaze with lights, and there was the sound of people running up above, although the hall itself was temporarily empty except for a uniformed policeman standing guard outside the closed door of the drawing room. It was a room that Trave vividly remembered from his previous visits to Blackwater Hall, when he was investigating Ethan Mendel’s murder. The views across the gardens and the woods to Blackwater Lake were among the most beautiful he’d seen from any house in the county. But for now the drawing room could wait; he had other business to attend to.
‘Where is she?’ he asked, dispensing with any greeting. He was a man in a hurry tonight.
‘Who?’ asked Clayton, thrown off balance for a moment by the suddenness of the question.
‘Katya Osman. I assume she’s the young female shot in the head who’s brought us all out here tonight.’
‘Yes, that’s right. She’s in her bedroom up on the top floor. It looks like she was shot while she was asleep. The owner’s in there,’ said Clayton, pointing to the door of the drawing room on the other side of the hall. ‘With the other two residents: Mr Claes and his sister.’
‘They can wait,’ said Trave curtly, making for the stairs.
‘They say it’s a David Swain who broke in here and killed her,’ said Clayton, running to catch up with his boss.
‘He can’t have done. He’s in gaol serving a life sentence. I’m the one who put him there.’
‘I know. They’re saying he’s escaped.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got Samuels making enquiries. Mr Osman thinks he was transferred back to Oxford Prison earlier this year.’
‘Oh, he does, does he? How do you know about Swain?’
‘Well, everyone was talking about his trial at the station a couple of years back when I first got posted down here. About him and this girl and the Belgian bloke he knifed – a sort of love triangle gone wrong is what I heard.’
‘You could call it that, I suppose,’ said Trave with a grimace, thinking of his own situation.
‘So when they mentioned Swain down there, I remembered that this was the place. Where it happened, I mean.’
‘Well, good for you,’ said Trave. He could feel the anger growing inside his chest as they got closer to the top floor, but lashing out at his subordinate didn’t make him feel any better. It was a useless anger born out of years of frustration. In his experience most murders could have been prevented before they happened, but by the time he arrived on the scene it was always by definition too late. He could find the killers and get them locked up in a cell somewhere, but
