Dead Men's s Boots

I walked inside and stood in the entrance hall at the foot of a flight of stairs that bifurcated at first-floor level, breaking away to left and right like an architectural cluster bomb.

‘Anybody home?’ I called. And then ‘Covington?’ No answer.

Killing time, I looked at my surroundings in a ‘Who lives in a house like this?’ frame of mind. Someone with a shit-lot of money to spend, that was for sure. The hall was bigger than Ropey’s living room, and there was polished mahogany everywhere. Over my head hung a massive chandelier that was modern, asymmetrical and ugly as sin.

Well, money can buy you love at the market price, but good taste you’ve got t»huno be born with. I counted my blessings and almost got to one.

A noise sounded from somewhere near at hand, once and then again: a muffled scuffling, like rats behind the skirting boards. I followed it to a cupboard under the stairs with a three-quarter-height door: the sort of place where in a suburban semi you might hide the Hoover and the dustpan. In this stately pile, it was probably the servants’ quarters.

More scuffling. I opened the door and peered inside, for a moment seeing only a vertical stack of fuse boxes and some folding chairs. I smelled the acid reek of urine. Then I realised with a jolt that a pair of human eyes was peering out from behind the chairs: the cupboard was deeper than I thought and someone was sitting back there in the dark. An old man with a slightly dazed, more than slightly sleepy look to him.

He didn’t seem too alarmed at being found.

He just blinked and shielded his eyes as the light flooded into his bolt-hole.

‘Hide,’ he said. His voice was thin and high, with a faint vibrato that sounded a little plaintive.

‘Right,’ I agreed.

Then the lined face opened up in a disconcerting grin that looked as though it belonged somewhere else entirely. ‘Hide and seek.’

A shiver went through me, but it came from a memory – John Gittings’s last days as relayed to me by Carla – rather than from this harmless old man’s crazy little game, which at least gave the seemingly oversized staff something to do.

‘Maybe you should come out of there,’ I suggested, as non-threateningly as I could manage. ‘Do you want some help?’

The old guy seemed to need a long time to think that through, but eventually he said ‘Ye-e-es,’ drawing the sound out into a querulous bleat.

I moved the chairs and helped him to his feet, taking care not to make him move any faster than he was comfortable with.