The Drowning Ground (9 page)

‘Sir!' Graves shouted, his voice muffled at the bottom of the stairwell.

I strode down the steps and peered at the door.

‘It's definitely locked,' Graves said.

‘Are you sure? Give it another shove.'

Graves pushed it again. ‘It's locked, all right.'

‘Well, you'd better get on with it, then,' I said.

Graves took off his coat and handed it to me; then I went up the stairs to get out of the way. He picked up the pickaxe and started to smash at the door. I stared entranced at the odd effect of the bricked-in windows as I listened to Graves working. It struck me that I hadn't been all that pleasant to him since he arrived.

But every time I saw Graves I thought of Powell lying in that damned hospital in Warwick. I couldn't help it. Couldn't help thinking of those monitors reflected in the windows along the ward, and the strange and heavy machinery standing by his bed. The blood began to pulse in my ears and I felt a sudden futile panic. I pushed the thought away and again listened to Graves working away at the door. Then came a hesitant thud, followed by a much louder bang.

10

With a sudden loud crack the side of the door split away from the locks. Graves had made short work of it. I passed him his coat. Graves took it with his left hand and with his right pushed at the door. It wouldn't budge. So he tried again, leaning his whole weight against it and giving it a good hard shove and then another.

The door opened outwards into the bottom of the stairwell and sagged against its hinges. Graves disappeared inside. Suddenly light began to pour into the stairwell from the hallway on the other side. I went down the stairs and peered in. The corridor was wide, solid and surprisingly grand for what had once been the servants' entrance. Shoved roughly to one side by the door was a coat rack, beneath which was a pile of boots and shoes and the grass-stained end of an umbrella. Halfway along the carpeted hallway were a few stone steps leading up to another door.

A long time ago, by the looks of it, Hurst had started to paint the corridor olive-green. But the paint ended around three quarters of the way along, as if he'd just got bored one day and given up. And where the green paint ended a more general sense of disorder seemed to descend. Amongst a stacked pile of empty bags of dog food, which for some reason Hurst had felt compelled to keep, was a black bucket and an old grey Hoover, which looked like it had been standing there for years. Woven amongst the bags were long lengths of blue string, and on the floor lay a cracked jam jar full of nails and screws. Graves was staring at the mess.

‘Was it always like this?' he asked wearily.

‘I'm not really sure. I never entered this way before. I went through the French windows with Hurst after his wife had her accident. And after that it was always the front door.'

‘So you were here more than once,' Graves said, surprised.

‘I'm afraid I didn't really believe him to begin with,' I explained. ‘So I kept on coming back.'

‘I bet he didn't like that,' Graves said.

‘Made a formal complaint. Brewin had already ruled it as an accidental death.' I shrugged. ‘But he was lying about something. Hurst was old money.' I let this hang in the air for a minute, as if it accounted for everything. ‘He was used to getting his own way, and he wasn't used to being pushed around by the likes of me. So he started pushing back. Lot of good it did him. Well, not to begin with anyway. His second wife, well … she had smoothed away some of the rougher edges, but deep down he hadn't changed at all. She was very beautiful, you know. He worshipped her.'

‘So he totally lost the plot when she died,' Graves said flippantly, looking at the corridor. ‘Fell to pieces. Grieving widower loses mind,' he said, almost as if he were reading out a headline in a tabloid newspaper.

I said, ‘It would look that way, wouldn't it, unless it really was a guilty conscience. But, like I said, his alibi checked out.'

‘But old money?' Graves said. ‘You know, that doesn't fit with the idea I have of him. I mean, doing his own labouring up there on that field – I can't put it together with his background. Usually people who own houses like this get other people to do everything for them. From what I've gathered in the village, he doesn't sound … all that well-to-do, to be honest.'

‘His family have owned land round here for a long, long time. And none of them have ever ventured far away. Although they've had money, they've worked the land themselves forever. Frank never seemed much interested in anything else. I imagine his parents shipped him off to public school, but I think after that it was an agricultural college or perhaps straight back here. He seemed perfectly content. Sent his daughter to the village school. And his first wife was a local girl.'

‘So the place was a working farm until he sold up?'

‘Yes. Frank ran it along with a foreman. Used to be a big employer round here and a lot of people lost their jobs when he decided to sell up. But the family's always had plenty of money, even before he sold off the land. He must have made a fortune selling that land to developers.'

‘What about his first wife?' Graves said. ‘She was local, you say.'

‘She died when she was pretty young. Not nearly as glamorous as the second wife. Used to work in one of the pubs. That's where Frank met her.' I stooped suddenly. ‘Now that. That I've seen somewhere before.'

Lying propped against the wall near the door was a painting. It was far too valuable to be shoved back here, where no one would ever see it but Hurst. But then maybe that was the point. It was almost as if on impulse he had gone and fetched it from somewhere else in the house and put it here, so he might see it as he went about his everyday business. Part of a half-hearted attempt to brighten the place up perhaps.

I did not know who the artist was, but in the painting ships were being hurled from the top of waves and crashed against black jagged rocks; sailors clung to shattered pieces of timber amongst the churning sea. But the dim light in the hallway dulled the power of the painting, and the sea in the picture seemed restless and dreary, the fate of the drowning sailors of little consequence.

I said to myself: your wife drowns in your very own swimming pool, right in your back garden, and that's what you choose to hang on the wall. Pictures of drowning men.

It didn't make sense. Or did it? Remorse, punishment, guilt, I thought in quick succession. Or was it something else? A message, perhaps subconsciously chosen and thrown out on to the walls of the hallway: something about Hurst's own predicament. I looked again at the survivors in the painting as they clung to the wreckage and watched helplessly as those around them drowned in dark turmoil.

‘More locks,' Graves said.

The bolts, one at the top of the door, the other at the bottom, were thick, black and squared-edged, and double the size of the ornate brass locks you usually see in manor houses. They were well oiled and slid easily across before making a sharp dry crack.

Graves went ahead and found the light switch. The kitchen, after the bleakness of the exterior of the house, looked almost cosy, or at least it did until you noticed the bars lining the windows. Even then the bars weren't quite enough to make a difference to the overall determined cheeriness of the room, and thanks to a dark green Aga in the corner it was fairly warm too.

‘But what,' Graves said, his voice sounding loud in the silence, ‘what had Hurst got to do with Gail Foster and Elise Pennington?'

I paused before answering. ‘A hairpin. Probably not even that.'

‘A hairpin?'

I took a few steps towards the table, thinking. The kitchen, while not exactly spotless, was clean enough, but there was an underlying sense of male disorder to the place, and some of the things Hurst had added to it seemed random and absent-minded. There was a handful of red shotgun shells lying at the bottom of a large fruit bowl on a sideboard, a screwdriver on a microwave, and an old broken kettle on the floor. By the radiator under the window was an old dog basket: it was lined with a dirty white rug, and a huge red rubber bone lay beside it on the floor.

‘When Hurst's wife drowned, I got them to drain the pool,' I said finally. ‘Just a feeling I had at the time. I didn't really expect to find anything. Certainly nothing at all to do with those girls. Hurst never really struck me as the type. And anyway they'd been gone for over two years by then. But something down there had got caught in one of the drains. It was all rusty and bent out of shape, and you could hardly see what it was to begin with. But … well, it turned out to be a hairpin. A kid's hairpin. One of the constables left it lying there at the side of the pool after they drained it. And when I saw it I remembered. I remembered the girls.'

Absently, I ran my finger along the edge of the table and squinted for a moment in the light. ‘It had a little plastic daisy stuck on to it, though one had fallen off. We never found that one. Gail had been wearing a hairpin in the shape of a flower when she went missing. That's one of the things her mother remembered. Of course, the thing is, they're pretty common – hairpins with flowers on them. And, as it turns out, there're quite a lot of different ones all with different types of flowers stuck to them. You wouldn't believe how many, Graves. Her mother couldn't be sure what type of flower it was. So we couldn't be sure either.' I sighed heavily. ‘Of course I had to let O'Donnell know straightaway.'

‘O'Donnell?'

‘Our super back then,' I said. ‘I didn't really feel like doing it, but there you go. I had to tell him. Very nearly didn't bother, because I wanted this whole house searched, and I was all for doing it on my own if I had to. But … well, he said no, of course. He said there wasn't nearly enough to go on and it was a waste of time.' I shrugged. ‘Maybe he was right. There was only the hairpin, and that probably belonged to Hurst's daughter anyway.'

‘And did it? Did it belong to her?'

‘No, she didn't recognize it, but then that didn't really mean anything. It was so broken. She said it might have belonged to her when she was younger but she wasn't sure.'

I took a step forward to the table and winced when I remembered. ‘And then there was the press,' I said. ‘If the press had got wind of it, well, it would have been the end of Hurst and probably all for nothing. You must know what they're like. And Hurst would have been right up their street. Wealthy landowner. Glamorous wife just died tragically. Big old house. They'd have been camping outside his gates for weeks.'

‘Yes, sir,' Graves said quietly.

I noticed that he had become very still.

‘I can understand that, but surely that wasn't enough to prevent a proper search.'

‘You have to try to understand…' I said quickly, wanting to get it over and done with, but then I stopped myself. Why justify myself to Graves? I hardly knew him.

‘But you let it go?' Graves said, incredulous. ‘Just as easy as that? You didn't think it was worth trying just a little bit harder? I know it's not all that much. Certainly not enough to get a search warrant. But we're talking about two little girls here.'

Once again I had another good look at Graves. It was like I was beginning to see him for the first time. Although I had absolutely no intention of explaining my actions to him, or to anyone else for that matter, Graves had, and to my great surprise, just gone up a lot in my estimation. He seemed to have a temper on him as well as a big mouth. That could be a good thing. I waited, curious to see just how far he would take it.

‘Sir,' Graves said. He seemed to be trying to keep a lid on it. It wasn't working. ‘I said you waited all this time to come back. Just because you and your super didn't want to ruin … to ruin Hurst's reputation, in case you were wrong.' His lips turned down in distaste. ‘Because you were afraid of what the press would do to him. So you wait until someone sticks him with a pitchfork to come back and have a good nose around this house. What if you were right? What if he really did kill those two little girls?'

I nodded in a distracted kind of way and then continued to explore the kitchen.

‘Sir, I said –'

‘I know what you said, Graves,' I replied, and then forgot all about him.

The ceiling at the far side of the kitchen sloped down slightly, creating a cosy alcove. Hurst had converted that section into a kind of living room, and it looked like he had raided the other rooms in the house for the pieces of furniture he'd liked best, just as he had raided the painting and put it in the hall. In the middle of the alcove was a Persian rug. And in front of an armchair and directly behind the television was another door with two sets of industrial-style bolts.

I moved towards the bars on the window, my interest momentarily divided between the kitchen and the snow falling outside. There was a glass cabinet standing in a far corner near the windows. Inside, at the back, nestled amongst the glasses and tankards, was a small framed photograph: a much younger Frank Hurst peered out at me through the dust. Gently, I opened the cabinet doors and took out the photo.

Hurst was surrounded by other young men, all of them wearing their cricket whites and posing together in front of a pavilion. Hurst was kneeling at the front and grinning. He had a wavy, foppish mop of hair, his teeth were slightly crooked, and his trousers red-stained. He looked quite handsome in the photo. The transformation to the broken-down and hated recluse had happened so completely that it was difficult to believe it was him. I put the photo back. There were no pictures of his wives or daughter. There was just that one summer's day looking out at me from the middle shelf of the cabinet.

From outside, I could just make out the sound of the wind rushing through the branches of the trees. Cleaver still had his lights on, and I was momentarily glad for it. They were like a beacon in the blackness of the forest outside.