THE FOLLOWING morning was a Monday and the traffic was horrendous as Sholto drove Darian back up to Geug Place. When they arrived they found Vinny and Phil already there, both in street clothes. Vinny had driven them up in his car, which looked like it had finished the Dakar Rally about ten minutes earlier and had parked in the passing place across the road that Darian and Sholto had used the day before. There wasn’t room for a second vehicle so Sholto had to park in front of Simon Sutherland’s gates.
Vinny and Phil walked over and Phil said, “I managed to have a difficult conversation with Simon and Olinda, the housekeeper. They’ve both agreed we can go in, just the two of us, but there are conditions. I’m pretty sure this has already upset him, and I think what we’re doing will take him months to recover from. If it wasn’t Freya we were looking for I don’t think I’d let it happen.”
Standing on the road beside Sholto’s car Vinny said, “Yes you would. You’re a cop. You have a cop’s instincts, whether you want them or not. Whoever it was you would want to find her.”
Before Phil could think of a humble reply the gates began to slide open. The four men stood in silence and watched as Olinda Bles came into view, walking down the driveway toward them. She stood on the threshold with her arms crossed and looked out at them as though they were barbarians she had been sent to negotiate with when she’d much rather go to war with them instead.
“If you were not police you would not even get as close as you are now to the house. And you, you should know what this will do to your own cousin.”
Phil nodded slightly and said, “I do know, and I’m sorry about it, but this is very important. It’ll be me and Darian coming in and we’ll be as respectful as possible.”
She made a wordless noise that dismissed utterly the value of their respect and turned to walk up the drive. Darian and Phil followed in her furious wake. As they walked Darian noticed her slip a hand into the pocket of her black trousers and suddenly the gate began to close, so that explained that little mystery. He glanced back over his shoulder to see Vinny standing on the road, looking nervously through the bars at them, Sholto sitting on the bonnet of his car.
They went in through the front door and turned right to reach the same bare room Darian had found himself in the day before. This time Simon was waiting for them. He looked like a man wishing the room was even emptier, crushed by the weight of the new arrivals.
Phil nodded and said, “Thanks for letting us in, Simon. How are you?”
“I have been better. How are you, Philip?”
“Sorry about all this. We’ll try and make it as fast as we can, and once we’ve ruled out what we need to rule out this will be over and you won’t see us again.”
Miss Bles said, “He shouldn’t have to see you now. If you’re going to be here then you’re going to follow house rules.”
Both Darian and Phil said, “Okay.”
“You will both take your shoes off and leave them in this room. Neither of you will touch anything. Nothing, okay? You don’t lay a finger on anything you see in there. You will only go places I take you, so do not try to wander off on your own. If you don’t like those rules you can leave now.”
Darian and Phil looked at each other and nodded their agreement.
They removed their shoes and stood by the door. Miss Bles did the leading, Darian and Phil the following, while Simon Sutherland drifted around behind them looking on the verge of tears. The first room they went into was enormous, more a warehouse than a home, and all the way along the bare floor were metal shelves packed with all manner of useless items that anyone else would have thrown out long ago. Among it were three clear plastic boxes full of neatly tied up cables, another with old telephones with their cables curled up behind them. On another shelf there was an old PlayStation 1, a controller plugged into each port and neatly laid out in front of it, a memory card in its slot and a stack of old games beside it. On the next shelf along was a PlayStation 2 with a couple of controllers and a much larger collection of games. Darian leaned in close to the PS2 games, not touching them, and saw Final Fantasy 10 and Sly Cooper were at the front.
He glanced across at Simon and said, “These aren’t in alphabetical order?”
Simon looked insulted by the question, as though he thought Darian was making fun of him. “They’re all in the order I got them.”
“When was that?”
“I got those when I was about nine or ten years old.”
Darian and Phil moved around the room, taking it all in, Miss Bles always hovering within striking distance should either of them raise a hand toward the belongings. Phil looked stunned by it, his cousin’s entire life laid out on display like that. He had known some of Simon’s health issues, but family members speaking of it meant little until the scale was visible before you. Having completed a careful circle of the room Darian turned to Miss Bles.
She said, “Upstairs.”
More of the same was waiting, another long, tall room running most of the length of the extension with two smaller rooms off to the side. After a circuit of looking at what any other person would politely term unsightly garbage they were shown into a bedroom and bathroom that contained the absolute least those rooms reasonably could. Every item in every room was individually displayed so nothing could be hidden in a pile somewhere.
As they walked across a corridor to the top floor of the rear extension Darian said to Simon, “Why are all the items given so much room? Why not pile everything together?”
Simon said, “I’m not some hoarder. I give everything room.”
In the upstairs room of the rear extension they found clothes that dated back to childhood. Some were well worn, none would have fitted Simon anymore, but all were either hung neatly on racks or had been folded and placed on shelves with the sort of care usually afforded to religious relics. Darian and Phil made their way down the aisles, Miss Bles close behind and Simon holding back near the door. Toward the end of the middle lane Darian came to underwear, pants and boxer shorts, socks and vests, and then the first thing that stood out. Among the scattered remains of a life it might seem hard for any item to catch the eye but there was a bra sitting alone on the top of a shelving unit.
Darian looked back over his shoulder at Miss Bles and said, “All the other clothes are his. Whose is this?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never known, and I don’t think he does either. It’s been there for a long time, though.”
Simon came round the corner at the top of the aisle and walked toward them. He stared at the plain black bra and said, “That’s been there for more than a year, last January, I think. It just turned up. One day it wasn’t there, next it was. I’ve never touched it.”
“You never touched it?”
“No, it’s not mine. It doesn’t belong here.”
“So why don’t you throw it away?”
Simon looked at Darian as if he was an idiot, which, having seen the rest of the house and still asked the question, was not an unreasonable accusation. He said, “I don’t throw things out, even if I don’t want them here.”
Darian and Phil both stared at it for a while. It was black, small and a bit grubby, like it had been put through the washing machine too many times and not been washed again for a couple of years since. Unlike Simon’s own clothes it had been dumped in a heap instead of being laid out so it was harder to see all of it, but Phil noticed something.
He said, “The clasp is broken. Look, it’s ripped from the edge there.”
They both stared at it, thinking of a bra being forcibly removed. This one item, left to lie untouched by a man who couldn’t throw it out even if he wanted to. Both Darian and Phil had heard enough stories of perpetrators keeping mementos, but Simon had known they were coming and did nothing to hide it.
Phil said, “You don’t know who left it here?”
“I’ve asked all the people who come here. None of them know, or will admit it.”
They toured the rest of the house. They saw his late mother’s belongings, which gave them the chance to mentally compare her bra size with the one upstairs. Apart from the fact that not one of hers looked as if it had been bought at a supermarket they were also much too big to fit the owner of the mysterious one upstairs. They saw photos of the family through the years, including a group one showing a young Phil with his parents and a varied collection of aunts, uncles and cousins. Miss Bles led them through the rest of the original house, which felt like an empty home rather than the storage facility the rest of it did. There was nothing else to catch their beady eyes. When they were finished they returned to the bare white room and put their shoes back on.
Phil said, “Thanks for letting us in, Simon.”
“Is this over now?”
“I doubt it. Don’t you want to know where that bra came from?”
“Well, yes I do.”
“Okay then.”
They walked down the driveway and the gate slid open. A bored-looking Vinny and Sholto got out of the Fiat and stood expectantly.
Darian said, “We found a bra. He says it’s been there since last January, that he doesn’t know where it came from. We should call DS MacNeith.”