Apart from the damp and cold, it would have been a nice walk from Bairnfather Hall to the gamekeeper’s cottage, had the bridge not collapsed and the recent rain made the river too deep to ford. There was no sign of Tam Uist and his tractor either, so they took the car instead. Driving around to the forestry tracks and walking up through the woods took almost three quarters of an hour. Climbing the path through trees dripping with condensed fog left them both soaked, although Harrison’s coat appeared to be a lot more water repellent than McLean’s. He turned up his collar to try and stop the water going down the back of his neck, with little success. By the time he stepped into the clearing, McLean was ready to give the whole thing up as a bad job.
‘What do you suppose will happen to the place?’ Harrison asked as they approached the ruined cottage. Rain had washed away some of the soot and taken with it any smell of charred wood and burned carpet. The props holding up the ceiling inside had been joined now by some rusty old scaffolding around the most collapsed corner of the building, but it seemed a half-hearted effort at best.
‘I imagine they’ll most likely demolish it and build something new on the plot. Unless it’s a listed building, in which case they’ll probably try to get out of having to rebuild it.’
‘It’s not listed,’ Harrison said. ‘Lofty checked already. Part of the background search on Slater. Lady Cecily, I should say.’
‘I rather think she wanted to leave all that behind, don’t you? Why else live in a run-down old place like this?’ McLean walked slowly around the building, not quite sure what it was he was looking for but certain he would know it when he saw it. Only the crime scene tape remained to suggest anything more untoward than a house fire had happened.
‘What are we looking for?’ Harrison echoed his thoughts. She’d taken a few paces in the other direction from him, as if to skirt around the ruins to the back door along the path worn by countless recent visitors. Now she stood uncertain, since he’d not followed her.
‘Anything that was missed before. Some better clue as to who she was, and why someone would want to kill her. Too much to hope forensics missed a hidden security camera.’ He’d meant it as a joke, but Harrison’s face suggested she’d taken it seriously. He shooed her off in the direction she’d been going. ‘You go that way, I’ll meet you at the door.’
The side of the house was taken up by an overgrown vegetable and fruit garden. Once-tidy gravel paths linked a series of raised beds, but the weeds were reclaiming it all. McLean didn’t know much about gardening, but he managed to identify some caterpillar ravaged cabbages and what he suspected might have been brussels sprouts in among the grass and thistles, although they were purple rather than the green things he’d hated so much at boarding school. A couple of the tall sprout shoots had been broken in half, and the more he looked around, the more he saw evidence of careless feet trampling the ground. Had forensics been over this part of the scene? Stupid question, really. Of course they would have, but a week after the event when the rains would have washed any useful evidence away.
An old wooden lean-to shed had been built on to the gable wall of the house on this side. Protected from the fire by thick stone walls, it had remained unscathed. In it, McLean knew from the forensic report, were gardening tools, a potting bench beneath a window that looked out on to the garden, an elderly wind-up radio tuned to Radio 4. The details had all been meticulously logged. He didn’t remember any reference to the little cat-flap cut into the base of the shed door itself. Maybe because the door had been open then and now it was closed.
He opened it, stepped inside. There was something about the quietness of the place that calmed him. It reminded him of the ramshackle shed in his own garden. Not as it was now, but as it had been when he’d been a boy. Back when it had been the domain of Bill Bradford the gardener. Many was the time McLean had ended up in there, watching as the old man patiently dibbed seeds into pots of fresh compost, or rolled his horrible-smelling cigarettes. Like that shed, this one was a place of old tin boxes, neatly stacked terracotta pots, hand tools and bundles of bamboo stakes. The workbench under the window had been cleared, but time and lack of use had covered it in dust, spiderwebs and the husks of half-eaten insects. This wasn’t a place often visited.
A series of shelves on the opposite wall held ancient boxes of fertiliser, fish, blood and bone, more tools of the gardener’s trade. No slug pellets, poisons or weedkillers as far as he could see, but there on the bottom shelf was an empty food bowl, and beside it a bag of cat food. A pile of old hessian sacks bore a dent in the shape and size of a cat. When he ran his fingers over the surface, they came away with a few short black hairs stuck to them.
‘Thought you were going inside, sir.’
The voice startled him, and McLean almost banged his head on the upper shelves as he stood up in a hurry. Harrison stared at him from the doorway, her expression one of concern.
‘Anyone know what happened to the cat?’ he asked. Harrison’s face was answer enough.
‘What cat?’
McLean pointed at the bowl, the food, the makeshift bed, but Harrison was already pulling out her phone. She stepped away from the shed, either for a better signal or because the conversation with the incident room was likely to be embarrassing. He took another look around the shed, but saw nothing of interest, nothing that suggested it might be a clue as to why someone would come here in the night, beat an old woman to within an inch of her death, then finish the job with petrol and a match.
‘No mention of a cat in any of the reports, sir,’ Harrison said as he stepped out into the garden a moment later. McLean carefully closed and latched the shed door. He looked out across the abandoned vegetable patch, then up past the trees to the slate-grey sky overhead. Fat raindrops started to fall as if they’d been waiting for his upturned face. He turned away, pulling up the collar on his jacket against a sudden chill.
‘Come on. Let’s go have a look inside.’
A smell of damp pervaded the interior of the house as McLean stepped in through the front door. Instinctively, he reached out and took hold of the nearest steel prop, checking it was still firmly holding up the first floor before ducking under the lintel and into the narrow hall. The room where Cecily Slater had died was at the front of the house, he knew, but that was also where the worst of the collapse had happened. No point going in there, so he turned left and stepped into the kitchen.
In many ways it reminded him of his own kitchen, even if it was considerably smaller and the range cooker appeared to run on wood rather than expensive heating oil like his Aga. Marginally more environmentally friendly, maybe. The cupboards were of a similar vintage, handmade by some long-forgotten carpenter and far removed from the sleek designs he had seen in some of the glossy magazines Emma occasionally left casually open around the place. Twin green lines stained the deep Belfast sink, the marks of years of drips from a pair of ancient brass taps. McLean would have bet good money the pipes feeding them were made of lead.
He resisted the urge to bend down and look, instead going through the cupboards one by one. It was exactly as he might have expected to find in the kitchen of a lone old woman who had lived here for many years. A few pots and pans; chipped plates and cracked cups from a set that once had been both elegant and expensive; some sad-looking vegetables that had probably been past their best even before the fire; packets of dried pasta, beans, rice and enough oats to sink a battleship. Drawers yielded cutlery, cooking utensils, the sort of bric-a-brac that got put somewhere in case it might be useful someday. But then didn’t everyone have a useful drawer? He certainly did; it was the first place he ever looked for anything, even if it was rarely the last.
‘Find anything?’ Harrison asked as she appeared in the doorway. McLean went to shut the final drawer, but something caught his eye. A length of shiny red ribbon glowed as if someone had shone a torchlight on it. He reached out and picked it up, finding that it was tied around an old iron key.
‘Not exactly.’ He held up the ribbon and watched the key twist under its own weight. ‘I don’t suppose we know what this is for?’
Harrison’s shrug was answer enough, but McLean kept a hold of the ribbon and key as he pushed the drawer closed and went back out into the hall. The rainclouds had cast a gloom over the clearing, and what little light there was struggled to illuminate the hall. Even so, he could see there would be no going upstairs. A jumble of half-burned rafters and crumbled plaster blocked the way on to what might once have been a landing.
‘From what I’m told, she didn’t use the upstairs, sir.’ Harrison correctly read his gaze and pointed to a couple of doors on the opposite side of the hall to the kitchen. ‘There’s a bedroom to the front there, and the bathroom’s next door.’
McLean looked in both of them, but it was obvious the forensics team had been there before him. He caught sight of fingerprint dusting powder here and there, and all the toiletries and brushes had been moved to one end of the dressing table in the bedroom. He stood for a while, trying to imagine a ninety-year-old lady living here on her own, searching for an idea of who Cecily Slater had been, but there was nothing of her in the place. Or at least nothing he could sense.
It was only as he stepped out of the bedroom back into the hall that he noticed the cupboard under the stairs. It was locked, but the keyhole was much the same size as the key he’d found in the kitchen drawer, and when he slotted it in and turned it, the lock clicked and the door swung open. Too dark to see much, but he pulled out a pen torch and clicked it on, scanning the light over the interior.
A mop and bucket, an elderly vacuum cleaner, its flex that brittle fabric material he remembered from his childhood, two dustpans and brushes hanging from hooks on the back of the door; the little cupboard contained exactly what McLean would have expected it to. There was even a shelf with little pots of shoe polish, Brasso and a neat pile of folded polishing cloths. Wedged in under the stair, he saw an old hazel broom, handmade, its handle shiny with decades of use. He reached in and picked it up, feeling a substantial weight to the thing. A good balance, too.
‘Wow, that’s a proper witches’ broom, right enough. Reckon you could play Quidditch with that.’ Harrison stared at the broom, her mouth slightly open as if it were something far less mundane than a tool for sweeping floors.
‘Quidditch?’ McLean asked, even though he knew what she was talking about.
‘You know, sir. Harry Potter?’
‘Here you go then, Hermione. Take it outside for a spin.’ He thrust the broom at her. Startled, Harrison took it in one hand. He thought she would underestimate its weight, let it fall to the floor. He had, after all. But the moment she touched it, her hand jerked upwards a little, then steadied. She swung the handle around until she held it in both hands, but drew the line at straddling it, which was just as well. He might have tolerated that from a constable, but never a sergeant.
Turning back to the cupboard, McLean saw what looked like an old shoebox lying on the ground under the lowest stair tread. It had been hidden behind the broom, no doubt forgotten many years before. He crouched, leaned in and fetched it out, seeing as he did so that it was tied up with the same red ribbon as the key. The top of the box was thick with dust, but he could make out handwriting underneath it. He carried the box to the porch, blowing away the dust as best he could. Outside, the rain had strengthened, coming down in stair rods. What was it the Welsh said? Old ladies and sticks? He looked back at Harrison holding her broomstick, then past her to the room where the old lady had died.
‘What is it?’ the detective sergeant asked, although whether she meant the box or his sudden change in expression he had no idea. He wiped away the last of the dust from the box and peered at the writing on the top again. A single word, written in neat ink that had faded over time.
‘Burntwoods?’ Harrison asked as she leaned over his shoulder for a look. ‘What’s Burntwoods?’
‘I have no idea,’ McLean said. Outside the falling rain had begun to roar as it hit the ground and the surrounding trees. ‘But it looks like we’re stuck here for a while, so we might as well have a look.’