Authors: Kaye C. Hill
An oil painting hung on the landing wall, a portrait of a man. A rugged, distinctive-looking bloke, with silver hair, and decidedly decadent eyes. It was signed EC.
Elizabeth could do people, too.
Lexy stared at the painting for a few moments, then pushed open doors up and down the landing. A bathroom straight ahead; three bedrooms, two at the front and one at the back together with a
boxroom.
Steeling herself, Lexy went into the bedroom that looked over the rockery, ignoring the whine Kinky had set up at her heel. It must have been Elizabeth’s main boudoir. It was furnished
with a double bed, dark wooden wardrobe, tallboy and dressing table.
A photo of a stern-looking young man in army desert combats stood on the tallboy.
Lexy glanced at the dressing table. Among the usual toiletries was a pair of black binoculars.
“Odd,” she muttered.
Tail down, Kinky started a detailed sniffing of the carpeted floor.
Lexy moved towards the set of double windows opposite the bed. They were framed by white curtains, and offered a ceiling to floor vista, opening inwards. The keys were hanging on a hook behind
the curtain.
Lexy unlocked the windows and pulled them open. The sound of drumming rain filled the room. Braving it, she stepped out on to the balcony. It was standing room only out there, but on a better
day it might be pleasant to lean on the white rail and watch the sun go down. Lexy turned and stood with her back to it. Wouldn’t be too difficult to take a tumble either, if you tilted back
far enough.
Perhaps Elizabeth had been cleaning the outside of the windows and stepped back to admire her handiwork. She might have overbalanced. But if that had been the case, surely a cloth or duster
would have been found too? Anyway, the fact that the windows opened inside the room meant that she didn’t have to stand on the balcony to clean them.
Perhaps she had simply missed her step in the room while both windows were wide open. Trod back quickly, tripped on the floor-bar between room and balcony, then kept going, arse over tip
straight over the railing. But Lexy had to concede that was unlikely – she’d have to have been as clumsy as a carthorse.
Maybe it was just that Elizabeth had let herself go out backwards in a suicide bid. Lexy looked down at the rockery with a shiver. It would be an unconventional way to do it, to say the least.
Anyway, the police report, according to Milo, indicated she had no obvious reason to want to kick the bucket.
Lexy surveyed the dismal sky. Unless it always rained like this on Freshing Hill.
There was another option of course.
Perhaps someone pushed her.
Not an impartial goddess acting on a whimsical enchantment, but a real flesh and blood person who knew what was in her will.
Lexy stepped back inside with alacrity, shaking rain from her hair, pushing the unwelcome thought from her mind.
She wondered what to do next. This wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought. How could she prove to Rowana that Elizabeth had suffered a genuine accident? It was the most logical
explanation, given the alternatives, but Lexy needed to find something to back it up. Kinky was still sniffing the carpet.
“Found anything, pal?”
He looked up, large dark eyes distracted. Nothing he was going to tell her.
The rain seemed to have brought dusk early. Lexy was aware that she needed to make a decision about where she was going to stay that night.
She walked back through the bedroom and took a quick look in the other rooms. The adjacent front bedroom had an identical balcony arrangement. It seemed to be the official guest room. There was
a clean quilt and pillows on the double bed. Tempting. A stack of white towels, together with a cake of fancy soap, had been placed on a blanket chest at the foot of the bed.
The only other furniture was a wooden chest of drawers, on top of which were three small candles shaped like penguins.
At the back of the house was a single bedroom with a sofa bed, and adjacent to that was the boxroom, which Elizabeth apparently used as a dressing room. A long rail of clothes stood along one
side, with a full-length mirror opposite.
Kinky was sniffing along the hallway carpet now. Thoughtfully, Lexy made her way back downstairs to the kitchen. She pulled up a chair and sat at the table, chin in hand. She had come to Four
Winds Cottage half-intending to stay for a few days, and there didn’t seem any logical reason why she shouldn’t. The Patersons weren’t likely to return until the paperwork
concerning the cottage was sorted out and that wasn’t going to be immediate. It was isolated enough for her to be safe from Gerard. So why did the thought of staying here overnight scare the
wits out of her? Lexy shuddered. Kinky seemed to feel the same way. There was definitely something creepy about the place. The thought of returning to her friendly fisherman’s cabin on
Clopwolde quay was almost irresistible.
However, the idea of running into Gerard wasn’t, although he probably wouldn’t even recognise her if she did. The last time Gerard had seen her, Lexy had waist-length blonde hair and
killer heels. He wouldn’t be expecting a tough-looking woman sporting a black, spiky crop and a Celtic armband tattoo. Why, the only thing Lexy Lomax had in common with Alexandra
Warwick-Holmes these days was a caramel-coloured chihuahua.
Nevertheless, she wasn’t prepared to take the risk.
So, did she have any other options? She could always beg a bed for the night from Edward – he wasn’t short of a bedroom or twelve. Trouble with that idea was how to explain to him
why she didn’t want to stay in her own place, just down the road. He would find it highly odd, and anything that Edward found highly odd he would worry at like a dog with a bone, until he got
the marrow out.
Lexy cursed aloud. Sodding Gerard. Why had he taken the job of hosting the Clopwolde antiques fair? It was exactly the kind of provincial thing he’d always sneered at in the past.
Perhaps he was having to take whatever he could get these days, since his last series of
Heirlooms in the Attic
, destined to be shown on BBC Two, had been cancelled.
Lexy glanced down at Kinky, who had just joined her. “OK. You win. We’re won’t stay here tonight, we’ll go to Edward’s. Tell him the cabin’s sprung a leak, or
something.”
She pushed her chair out. Kinky darted down the hall ahead of her. Lexy locked the kitchen door, and the two of them left by the front entrance.
Just being back in the worn fabric seat was a relief.
“Right – take me to Clopwolde, car,” Lexy commanded, turning the key. The Panda made a noise like a startled pheasant. The next time she tried there was no reaction at all.
“Not quite the glorious exit I’d planned. However, let’s not panic.”
But Lexy’s heart was in her mouth. The car had just picked the worst possible place to die. And time.
Kinky shifted uneasily.
Lexy took her mobile phone out. She’d ask Milo for a lift. But he’d probably be tied up on his case, which meant, even worse, that she’d have to call Edward to come and get
her, like she was some ditsy teenager, rather than a thirty-year-old woman. Only just thirty, mind.
She flipped open her phone and waited for it to fire up. The battery icons built themselves up obediently. Just needed a signal. It took Lexy a couple of minutes to realise there wasn’t
going to be one.
A ripe Anglo-Saxon expression rent the evening air.
Lexy bundled out of the car and walked around in the rain, holding the phone up high as if the elusive satellite might spot it from the sky. It was useless.
She couldn’t even call a cab.
She tried the car once more, leaning in to turn the key. Nothing. They weren’t going anywhere.
Lexy grabbed the rucksack from the back seat.
“Come on,” she snapped at Kinky. He slunk out after her. Back into the house they went.
Lexy stopped short in the hall as she hung her damp jacket up. There was one other option. She could walk down to the farmhouse. She chewed her lip. It was at least a mile away, down that
winding track in the sheeting rain and gathering darkness. And how could she explain herself when she got there? On top of that, hadn’t there been something just slightly odd about the place
when she went past earlier? She remembered the insolent eyes of the sheep, following her along the tarmac road.
“OK, Lomax, quit with the Hills Have Eyes stuff,” she said loudly. But she didn’t put her jacket back on.
She went into the kitchen, making sure the blind was pulled right down before she put on the light. She wasn’t scared of the Gallimores of Pilgrim’s Farm. She just didn’t want
them knowing she was up here.
Lexy hadn’t thought to pack any food. She checked out the cans in the larder. Rowana wasn’t going to mind if she nicked a tin of baked beans – there were
enough of the things in there. Nothing else, mind, except an ancient-looking bottle of home-made elderberry wine.
Lexy felt Kinky’s eyes burning into her.
“Haricots?” she queried, scraping some out into a bowl for him.
Legumes in tomato sauce weren’t quite to the chihuahua’s taste.
Lexy shrugged. He might feel differently about them in the morning.
She washed down her own beans with black tea, wondering where to lay her head. She certainly wasn’t going to use any of the rooms upstairs. No – she’d kip in the living
room.
She went in, chucked her sleeping bag on the sofa, and prowled restlessly around, fighting the rising creepiness that clawed at her at the thought of the coming night. Checked through the
drawers and cupboards she’d already looked in. Went over to the piano. The keyboard was covered in a light film of dust. Lexy played a few notes, then shut the lid before Kinky started
howling. She picked up the flowered silk wrap, and lifted the lid of the piano stool. Inside, under a Chopin score, was a brown envelope, unsealed. She opened it.
It contained two photographs.
The first was of a face that Lexy instinctively knew to be Elizabeth’s. Wasn’t difficult. She’d been photographed in the studio across the hall, wearing an artist’s
smock, with a palette in one hand. She had turned to look at the photographer, her expression one of great tenderness. Made Lexy wonder who’d taken it. It was a black and white print, taken
with old-fashioned film, perhaps ten or fifteen years ago?
Lexy flipped it over. To her surprise it had Elizabeth’s name and the previous year’s date on the back. She gazed at it again.
Her vague preconceptions of Elizabeth had been of a spinsterish woman in her sixties. But the Elizabeth in the photo wasn’t sixty and spinsterish at all. Far from it. She only looked to be
in her late forties. Lexy hadn’t even thought to ask Rowana.
It almost gave a new dimension to the fall. Could there have been a love angle? Had she been spurned by someone? Or perhaps angered someone? Again, Lexy wondered who had taken the photo.
She turned her attention to the other print, which was in colour.
There were three people in it. Lexy found herself doing a double take. One of them was Rowana Paterson.
With her was a slim, rather tired-looking man with dark auburn hair, whom Lexy assumed to be her father, and a taller girl with pretty but hard features. Rowana’s sister, Gabrielle. It
wasn’t a posed photo. They were walking along a street together, a crowded street at that – seemingly unaware that the photo was being taken. Gabrielle was glancing sideways at a shop
window, Rowana was talking to her father, her mouth slightly open, her hair sweeping across one side of her face. He was smiling down at her.
Lexy turned it over. There was a date hand-printed in one corner. It had been taken just over a year ago. Nothing else was written on the back.
The Patersons might not have known Elizabeth, but Elizabeth knew them.
Lexy ran a hand through her hair. What was going on? She needed to speak to Rowana again. Lexy wondered what the girl’s reaction would be if she saw the photo. She wasn’t sure it was
something she wanted to put to the test yet.
Feeling thoroughly disquieted by this discovery, Lexy turned on the TV, needing noise and distraction. The reception was bad, but she managed to tune into a cop show.
But she couldn’t get Rowana out of her mind, and what the girl had said about her strange upbringing, and her anachronistic father, who had been acting ‘really weird’ since
he’d heard the news about Rowana’s inheritance. And who, like Rowana, hadn’t wanted to come here. Why? Anyone in their right mind would be intrigued to look at a country property
their daughter had just been left in a will. Especially if they were strapped for cash.
Lexy silently berated herself. The whole point of coming here had been to have a quick look around the cottage, assure Rowana that she wasn’t a teenage murderess, collect the dosh, and go
on her merry way. So what had changed?
It was that photo. Why would Elizabeth have a secretly-taken snap of the Patersons?
OK, fair enough, she’d left everything she owned to Rowana’s mother. That was her choice. But had she known that she’d died? That the daughter was already the beneficiary?
Even if she had, Elizabeth wouldn’t have anticipated Rowana inheriting her legacy for another thirty, maybe forty years. So, perhaps the really big question was – who else knew about
the will?
Lexy chewed her lip. The police had already carried out an investigation of sorts. Wouldn’t it be easier if she just kept her head down?
Of course it would be easier. But would it be right?
Kinky sat opposite on an armchair, fixing Lexy with an aggrieved stare. It had obviously sunk in that she wasn’t intending to take him home that night. Or even give him any Doggy
Chomps.
It made thinking very difficult.
With one last look at the photo, Lexy tucked herself into her sleeping bag. It was still raining, not in great grey rods now, but heavily enough to keep the gutters gurgling and splashing.
She turned out the tasselled lamp on the table next to her and lay in darkness, unable to sleep.
Was that clock getting louder? She stared blindly around. Where was the cold draught coming from? Surely not the patio door? She’d shut it, hadn’t she? And locked it. Perhaps it was
Elizabeth’s spirit haunting the cottage. Writhing and moaning...