Chapter 5

Dad drove down at the weekend and we met him at Wheatley House,  a few miles out of Tunbridge Wells at the edge of a quiet village.  Even now, surrounded by houses built on the land that George had sold off, the house was imposing; a solid Georgian style house, two stories, and some windows in the roof showing the existence of attic rooms at the top.  It was half hidden by an overgrown hedge.  A drive at one side was protected by a security gate with a coded entry panel, and led past the house to a separate garage block.  There was no agent’s sign, it wasn’t the sort of house that would be widely advertised.  It was sad that it was being sold, but I had never lived there, my parents were happy in London, and it was much too big for either Tom or myself to take on.

We arrived a bit early and I tapped in the code Alastair had given me.  After a few seconds the gate swung slowly inwards.  The house was set in the middle of its garden, the total plot nearly an acre.  There was no formal separation of front and back garden, but an arrangement of trees, hedges and flower beds separated the garden into distinct sections;  I knew that there was large lawn at the back, not visible as we drove in.

As we passed the hedge I could see a woman walking away from the front of the house and heading round one side of the house, towards a summerhouse I could see beyond.  Perhaps mid 20s, with tied back blonde hair.  By the time we parked she was out of sight.

“There’s someone here.  Are we expecting the agent?  Dad didn’t say anything.”

“Where?  I can’t see anyone,” said Patrick.

“There’s a woman over there.  She’s gone round the side of the house,” I gestured to where she had gone.

Dad drove up behind us a few minutes later and we did kisses and handshakes.  I mentioned the woman I had seen. 

“I’m not expecting to see anyone here.  Certainly not the agent.  Perhaps she’s a gardener?  Or a surveyor?  I didn’t see anyone as I came in.  Perhaps the buyer is having something checked over.  I’ll call the agent later.”

He produced a keyring with an old fashioned key and a smaller key for the Yale lock.  There was a burglar alarm just inside the door and he put in the code to stop the beeping that had started when he opened the door.  On the mat was a small pile of post, which Alastair picked up, glanced through, and moved to a table at the side of the hall.  We walked across the hall, past a rather rather grand wooden staircase with a carved balustrade.  It was the sort of staircase that in an older house might have family portraits climbing next to it  Here there was just some rather heavy once-fashionable wallpaper, a red floral design on an ivy background.

I heard something from upstairs, someone moving about, soft footsteps, the creak of a floorboard.  “There’s someone else here, someone upstairs.”

Alastair looked up, frowning.  “I didn’t hear anything.  But there shouldn’t be anyone here – the burglar alarm was still on.”  He called up the stairs, but no one responded and Alastair shrugged.  “We’ll go through to the kitchen.”  I wanted to go up and have a look, but the sound had gone.  Perhaps it was just the house creaking.  

Patrick was carrying the puzzle box which we had brought with us.  It was in a cardboard box and he took it out and set it down on the refectory style kitchen table.  Alastair peered at it, as if he had never seen it before.  “It is rather beautiful,” he said.  “One of George’s best pieces.  I’m glad it came to you.  It seems fitting, my mother’s only granddaughter.”  

He started touching the side, looking for the sliding panel that opened the lid.  “It’s here Dad,” I said, reaching across.  It opened smoothly with a gentle click.  I took out the bracelet and the photograph, and with it was the letter from George which I had put into the box.  I held the bracelet for a moment, and felt a compulsion to put it on.  Wary about what had happened before I tested the clasp.  It opened and closed smoothly, with a slight click, and I snapped the bracelet onto my wrist.  It fitted, and felt comfortable.  I could feel gentle warmth from it soaking into my wrist, and waking up my senses.  I felt detached from the two men at the table, as if looking down at them from a gallery.  My vision was sharper, my hearing more acute.  

And I knew that there was another person in the house with us.  I couldn’t hear anything, but I could smell old fashioned perfume, Yardley, something that my mother might have worn.  Or her mother.  The woman must have come in through a back door.  But I didn’t say anything, I had a feeling that something odd was going on, something not affecting the men.

Patrick had taken out a paperclip that he had brought with him.

“This is the clever bit.”

He probed and found the tiny hole, inserting the end of the wire into it, and the front of the box swung open showing the plain wooden drawers.

“Strange that he left the inside so plain,” said Patrick.

“Yes, “said Alastair.  “Very odd.  Perhaps you weren’t supposed to find this section – it is hard to find.  A secret compartment”.

He pulled open the first drawer.

As he did so two things happened at the same time.  Alastair gasped as he saw the hunting knife.  And from somewhere in the house I heard a woman scream.  Not a scream of someone in shock, a scream of someone in dreadful pain.

“Who was that?”  I stood, looking round, although the sound was not from this room but from somewhere else in the house.

Patrick looked at me in surprise.  “Who was what?”

“The scream.  Just now.”

He shook his head and looked from me to Alastair, who had picked up the knife and was examining it.  “I didn’t hear anything,” said Patrick.

Alastair looked up.  “I didn’t hear a scream.  But my hearing’s not so good these days.  If it was faint then I wouldn’t hear it.”

“No, it was loud.  A woman.  In pain.”  I didn’t wait for them but ran through to the hall, expecting to find someone there.  The hall was empty, and I tried to work out where the sound had come from.  I didn’t think it was upstairs, it was closer than that, so I ran through the rooms on the ground floor.  At the front of the house were three rooms, a study, a dining room and an old fashioned drawing room, not much used, with dusty leather furniture.  They all opened off the hall and all were empty.  On the other side of the hall along the west side of the house was a large sitting room, but there was no one in there.  At the back of the house were a large kitchen, a utility room and a TV room. 

The TV room was the last room I looked into, and on the far side a woman was standing.  She was facing away from me, looking out of one of the windows.  She was wearing a white shirt and jodhpurs, lust like she was in the film, and she was gazing intently out of the window, one hand gripping the casement.  Distinctly I could hear the sound of crackling as if there was a fire.  She turned and looked at me.  It was Beth, the face from the photograph.  But her face was very pale, her eyes dark, she was older than in the picture.  On her wrist was the glimmer of a silver bracelet.

I took a couple of steps into the room, but suddenly she wasn’t there.  I didn’t see her move, she just vanished.  Alastair and Patrick had come in behind me, and Patrick was looking at me with concern.  

“Jo, what is it?  Did you see something?”

I turned, holding out my hands, and he took them in his.

“It was Beth.  She screamed.  She was standing there by the window.”  I released myself and went over to where she had been standing.  “But she’s gone now.”  I was speaking slowly, trying to make sense of what had happened.  “She looked real, but it was a ghost.  Or I must have imagined it.  She was wearing the bracelet.”  I glanced down at my wrist to reassure myself that I still had it.  “And she was watching something out of the window.  Is that where the stables used to be?”

Alastair come over and looked out of the window.  You could see the garage over on one side and the boundary fence.  “Yes, just beyond where thae fence is now.  The garage is one side of what was the stable yard.”

“Jo, you’re shivering,” said Patrick.  Come back to the kitchen, you need some tea, and we can talk about this.”

The rooms at the back of the house were linked by a long corridor with a stone floor that ran the width of the house with doors into the garden at either end.  The floor had a series of natural fibre runners along it and one of them was out of place, as if something had been dragged over it and not replaced.  The corridor was familiar, I had been to the house lots of times before, and I was still thinking slowly.  So it took a moment for me to realise that i had seen the passage recently.  I was following Patrick, but I stopped, resting my hand against the wall, panting.  This was the passage I had seen on TV; the one Beth had been dragged along. I tried to work out what angle it had been filmed from, where she had been dragged.  

Patrick had turned round.  “What is it?”  I ignored him and walked away from the TV room towards the door at the end.  Next to it was the door to the cellar.  It was locked, but the key was hung with other keys on a key rack in the utility room.  I opened the door and switched on the light.

“What’s in the cellar? said Patrick?

I ignored him, I couldn’t have answered him anyway, and went down the steps.  The cellar was small, about five metres on each side.  One one side were a couple of steps leading to an old coal chute now bricked up.  One wall had wine racks with a few dusty bottles in them.  There was some cleaning equipment in one corner, but otherwise it was empty.  The floor was dry and dusty and there was no sign of a recent disturbance.

“Come on,” said Patrick.  “There’s nothing here.”

We went back upstairs.  There was no milk in the fridge, but there were teabags and while Patrick made tea I explained what I had seen.  Beth standing in the kitchen looking out of the window, watching the fire.  It seemed to match what I had seen on TV, but Beth had been killed in the fire, the order of events was all wrong and but it made no sense.  Was I hallucinating?  Or was Beth trying to tell me something?

Alastair had turned his attention back to the box.  “I’ve seen this knife before.  It’s an old hunting knife of George’s.  I don’t know whether he actually went hunting, but he used it to gut fish.  It has a sheath it usually lives in.  But I can’t think why he would put it in here.”

Alastair had taken out the first drawer and was peering into the space, exploring it carefully, first with his finger and then with the tip of the knife.

Patrick brought over mugs of black tea.  “Do you have any ideas?  George would have wanted us to solve the puzzle.  There might be a clue somewhere?”  

“What about the letter?” I said.

He picked up George’s letter and read it out.

“Read out the first bit again.”

I am giving Beth’s box to you, because I remember you admiring it when you were small.  You were drawn to it like a magnet.

“Magnet?” I said.  “That must be it.”

“There’s a strip of metal at the side here” said Patrick,  “Hang on, I can feel it.”  He was tapping the inside of the space left by the drawer with the knife.  ”I think I’ve got it.”  He took the knife out and turned it in his hands.  Inlaid into the handle was a piece of metal.  He inserted the knife, handle first, into the space.  As he touched the handle against the metal strip inside the drawer there was a gentle click.  We couldn’t see it, but the knife must have touched a magnet inside the box because the second drawer shifted a fraction and Patrick was able to slide it out.  He put it on the table in front of us.  None of us spoke, it took a few seconds for us to work out what we were seeing.  The drawer was made of the same hardwood and was divided into two compartments  One, larger, square, had nothing in it except a hole in the side, part of the opening mechanism, with a couple of tiny steps leading from the hole into the drawer.

There was a tiny door into the other, smaller, compartment opposite the steps.  It was like a section of a dolls house.  The second compartment contained 5 small bones.  Patrick picked one of them up and looked at it closely.  “They’re finger bones,” he said.  “From a human hand.”

“What does it mean?” I said.

“It’s a model,” said Alastair.  “It’s the cellar.”  He pointed to the hole and the steps.  “This was the coal chute.”

“But we were just down there,” I said.  “There weren’t two rooms.”  And then the truth hit me with the force of a car crash.  Not just what it meant, but what we would find.  “We didn’t see the second room because the door had been blocked up”.