Caroline Minuscule (11 page)

He passed the marketplace – the violin-playing vagrant had gone; Dougal had dropped some change into his cap while out shopping in the afternoon. He imagined the man snug in a public bar, his overcoat open to the warmth and a pint glass in front of him. But the glow of philanthropy which this image conjured was shortlived. It left him as he walked down River Hill towards Bridge Street – the least conspicuous way of reaching the Canons' Meadow. He passed a pub; he was tempted to go in for a drink or two and then return to Amanda with the lie that Bleeders Hall had been impossible to break into.

He forced himself onwards –
how mature of you
, commented the mocking, inner voice of unreason. No, it's not, he thought, if I were mature I wouldn't be here in the first place. Maturity was a stage you were always going to reach in a couple of years. Dougal rather doubted he would ever get there. Perhaps maturity wasn't so much a state as an illusion – a condition of social beatitude which had its only reality in the minds of other people.

The wind hit him as he turned into Bridge Street. He huddled into his duffel coat and felt like a character in one of those French films whose charm resided in the fact that you never knew quite what was happening but you did know it must be extraordinarily meaningful.

The meadow was protected by a wall of roughcast stone topped with broken glass. Dougal walked along until he came to the gate – a grandiose, mock-Gothic erection which looked as if it had strayed into the Fens from a pantomime version of Robin Hood.

He plodded into the field, his pace slowing automatically as the ground began to rise and the street lighting receded. It was suddenly very dark. He knew the cathedral was up there in front of him, though he found it difficult to tell which of his senses was supplying the information. Gradually he began to pick out lights in the nave and choir windows – probably dim at the best of times and filtered through paint and a film of dirt on the glass. Several of the visible windows of the houses in the close were alight, including two in Infirmary Lane. The patch of darkness between them must be Bleeders Hall.

He tripped over a fallen branch on the ground and swore. He made himself go more slowly. It was unexpectedly eerie out here in the open, though the feeling decreased as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light.

The wall which ran along the backs of the gardens gradually unscrambled itself from the shadows. Dougal stretched out his right hand and felt the rough surface of the door in the wall; the old paint flaked beneath his touch. He congratulated himself with disproportionate fervour. It seemed very important that, although he was as scared as ever, he was still capable of finding his way in the dark.

The evening was reassuringly quiet; the only sounds were remote, emphasizing rather than punctuating the overall impression of silence. A train was clattering along the railway on the far side of the river; car engines grumbled like urban indigestion in the center of Rosington; and the wind provided a gentle background, as undefinably present as the background hiss on a record. Dougal could hear nothing, human or otherwise, which qualified as a risk for him. He told himself firmly that, if the worst came to the worst, one of the three exits from Canons' Meadow should give him an escape route.

He pulled himself slowly up to the top of the wall, the surface of the mortar crumbling slightly beneath his touch. He sat on the top for a moment, listening and peering down at the blackness on the other side. He counted three, like someone preparing to get into a cold bath, and jumped.

The pile of wet, dead leaves cushioned his fall. The heap skidded under his impact, and sent Dougal sprawling on to grass. He stood up cautiously. The lighted windows of the houses on either side were curtained; nothing to fear there – and no one could possibly have heard his fall.

A path bisected the garden, leading up to the house. Dougal walked up it, at first on tiptoe but then ordinarily, as he realized that his boots were perfectly equipped to deal with this kind of surface.

The path led to the back door, which was locked. Dougal moved to the left and came to the first window, which was set back from the door. The window refused to budge. As far as he could tell, it served the kitchen.

There were two more windows further to the left. He pushed tentatively at the lower half of the next one and, to his surprise, it moved. So brown paper and glue wouldn't be necessary after all, which was probably just as well, since it would be a messy business, especially in the dark, and would probably leave traces. He wondered briefly whether there was any significance in the fact that the window had been left open, but dismissed the thought before it had had time to take root. The people of Rosington would be less security conscious than those of London, and presumably whoever was responsible for Bleeders Hall had discounted the risk of someone wanting to burgle an empty house.

Dougal raised the window noiselessly, swung his leg over the low sill and slipped into the room beyond.

He stood up, fumbling in his pocket for the torch, and full of a strange excitement, which carried him back to childhood explorations in empty houses. Anything might be waiting for him here. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he felt a sudden, fierce gladness that he had come.

He was in a long dining room which stretched back into the house. A quick survey of its contents, using the torch where necessary with its beam shielded, showed that the executors had not yet removed the furniture. Ornaments and pictures had gone, but the carpet, curtains, sideboard, table and chairs remained. The last three were of solid mahogany resting on claw feet. Already the table had a layer of dust which Dougal carefully avoided. The dust reminded him of his gloves and he pulled them on, wiping the surfaces he might have touched with his handkerchief. He obviously had a long way to go before reaching a professional standard of housebreaking.

The door was to Dougal's right at the end furthest from the windows. He moved towards it, diligently opening drawers and cupboard doors but only being rewarded by brittle twenty-year-old copies of the
Rosington Observer
. On reflection, a dining room seemed a most unlikely place to hide things and in any case a sense of urgency was creeping up on him.

The door wasn't locked, but it creaked as it opened which made him jump. He told himself firmly that there was no one to hear it, but he couldn't help regretting having broken the specious security of silence.

On the right was a green baize door. To the left, on the same wall as the dining room's entrance, was another door. Dougal could vaguely discern further doors opposite him, and a flight of stairs going up beyond the baize door. A faint glow filtered through the fanlight above the door, an exit to the outside world which forbade the use of the torch. Dougal decided that he would move methodically round the hall, in a clockwise direction, searching each room as he came to it. He noticed unthinkingly that the floor surface had changed from carpet to stone flags.

The door on the left led to a large, square room with two shuttered windows overlooking Infirmary Lane. The sofas and armchairs made its purpose obvious. There was a grand piano, with a forlorn aspidistra on top of it, in the corner by the left-hand window. Dougal had a sudden desire to play something on it –
Ain't Misbehavin
' would be appropriate – which he murdered at birth. He made a quick circuit of the room. It was as cold and featureless as the dining room. There was a little secretaire by the other window which seemed promising, but closer inspection showed that it was completely empty. If only he had been here earlier, before the more mobile of Vernon-Jones's possessions had been moved.

He left the drawing room and crossed the hall to the door opposite. It opened into what must have been the Canon's study: it was a narrow room, rather like a corridor lined to the ceiling with book shelves denuded of books. A leather-topped desk stood near the door, a chair behind it and a long table in front of it stretching towards the window. Dougal was disappointed – he had cherished an obscure hope that the Canon's books might provide a clue – some knowledge of his interests, at least.

He returned to the hall. It was chilly and smelt like a grave. His teeth wanted to chatter. His mind lined up reasons for him to leave: there was nothing to find, even if he knew what he was looking for; he was running a pointless risk by being here; he needed the warmth and light of the hotel, not to mention Amanda's down-to-earth company . . .

Plop!
The noise came from upstairs – for all the world as if someone had put a finger in his or her mouth, pressed it against the cheek, closed the lips to make the mouth airtight and sharply withdrawn the finger.

After what seemed like half an hour, the sound came again. Dougal tried to persuade himself that it must be the pipes in the house; old plumbing was notoriously unpredictable. The trouble was, he could hardly run away now. He could hear himself explaining later, ‘Well, I heard a plop, you see . . .' No, he would continue his methodical survey of the house, despite the plumbing.

He opened the next door and found a windowless closet, empty except for a roll of linoleum leaning drunkenly across one corner.

The stairs were next – a wide flight with shallow treads ascending into darkness. Dougal nerved himself.

The first floor contained four bedrooms, a bathroom and a lavatory. Dougal contented himself with giving the rooms the most cursory of glances. The removal process seemed to have gone further up here than downstairs – it was impossible even to work out the bedroom which had belonged to Vernon-Jones. The curtains were down; the carpets rolled up; and the mattresses lay askew on the bare springs of the beds.

A much narrower flight of uncarpeted stairs led up to the attics. As Dougal was about to climb them, he heard the noise again: plop-plop-pause-plop – it sounded like Morse code. He forced himself to go up and found two bedrooms with sloping ceilings perched under the eaves of the house. By the amount of dust, they had been disused for years. Each room had a meager, cast-iron fireplace, solid with rust. In one of the rooms was a bedstead with broken springs and no mattress; and in the corner was a small puddle. Even as Dougal stood in the doorway a drop of water fell from a sodden patch in the ceiling and sent ripples careering across the surface of the water. The plops were explained, and he returned to the hall in a much more cheerful state of mind, hardly bothering to walk quietly.

There were two doors remaining to be opened before he could legitimately depart by the dining room window. The first led to another lavatory, with the pedestal raised on a regal dais. The second, the green baize door, opened into a short passage, flanked by pantries, which ended in what must be the kitchen door. Dougal's torch rapidly swept over the pantries' shelves and found a cluster of empty jam jars and a discarded fork. He turned the beam towards the kitchen door two yards away. It took a moment for his mind to accept what his eyes were seeing.

The doorknob was slowly but unmistakably revolving.

D
ougal snapped off the torch. Sweat was breaking out under the hair on his temples. Was the door closing or opening? Fear possessed him so absolutely that movement was out of the question.

The door sighed on its hinges. A draught billowed out from the kitchen, carrying the foul smell of an unwashed body. If the owner of the smell came two paces forward, he would walk into Dougal.

Metal chinked on stone: the smell increased. The listening darkness seemed to coil itself round Dougal's mind, gripping and squeezing his thoughts like a python. The panic eliminated every other consideration except one.

The need for light.

Dougal didn't decide to switch the torch on – it seemed to happen of its own accord. There was a blur of movement in the kitchen doorway, and a frantic scuffling in the darkness beyond, as if a nocturnal animal had been disturbed in its burrow.

The light converted Dougal's panic to bravado. Without thinking, he kicked the door fully open and swept the torch beam across the kitchen. Simultaneously, his mind began to work again. Whoever was in there was more afraid of Dougal than Dougal was of him. Dougal himself must be invisible behind the light. And what was this second intruder doing in Bleeders Hall?

The beam picked out a huddle of old clothes in the space between the Aga and the right-hand wall. Dougal trained the light on the corner and moved towards it with deliberate slowness. Five feet away he stopped.

At first his eyes took in only the details: cracked and mud-stained army boots, trousers which appeared to be held together with string, the shabby black material of an overcoat, a greasy tangle of grey hair, and the top of a case of some sort.

A violin case.

The details clicked together: it must be the tramp who had been busking in the marketplace. The man's face was shielded from the light, jammed under his overcoat in a bizarre parody of the pose of a sleeping bird.

Dougal let the silence linger. The only sound was the tramp's harsh, shallow breathing. He was surprised, and rather shocked, to realize that he was enjoying the novelty of the situation. The man was demonstrably scared of him – usually it was the other way round. For the first time that evening, he felt as if he was in control.

The memory of being scared by a leaking roof seemed mercifully distant.

He took a step forward and nudged the tramp with his foot.

‘Look up.' His voice sounded huskier than usual.

The bundle in the corner rustled and gave a brief panic-stricken snuffle, but no face appeared.

‘Look up.' Dougal repeated the words, speaking slowly and unemotionally.

This time the tramp peered cautiously into the beam of the torch. Dougal recognized the thin, unshaven face, and wondered whether the man would be able to recognize him if his face caught the light. Better not to risk it.

‘I can't see,' the violinist muttered, with the suspicion of an aggrieved whine. ‘Hurts me eyes.'