‘What are you thinking, Robbie? He was here under siege, waiting for somebody?’
Hoyle grinned. ‘Somebody,’ he said. ‘Or something.’ He made a ghostly face, waggled his hands in the air and moaned.
‘A man died here, Robbie, let’s not forget that.’
‘He killed himself,’ said Hoyle, suddenly serious. ‘And anyone who does that loses any sympathy I might have had. Killing yourself is the coward’s way out, Jack, because it leaves the living to clear up the mess you’ve made.’
‘You don’t know the facts,’ said Nightingale.
‘I know that he’s dumped a whole load of grief on you,’ said Hoyle. ‘He claimed to be your father but didn’t have the decency to tell you face to face. He could at least have had a sit-down with you, answered any questions that you had and then gone ahead and done the dirty deed.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘There’s no maybe about it,’ said Hoyle. ‘Only cowards commit suicide.’
‘Sometimes it takes guts,’ said Nightingale, quietly. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way out.’
‘Well, there’s no way I’d top myself and leave my girls wondering why,’ said Hoyle.
‘He did explain,’ said Nightingale. ‘That’s what the DVD was for.’
‘You’re not buying this, are you?’ said Hoyle, scornfully. ‘You don’t really think that on your birthday a devil’s going to come and take your soul?’
Nightingale scowled. ‘Of course not.’
‘There you are, then. The DVD’s a load of crap. He was a nutter and, genetic father or not, he’s just trying to screw with your mind from beyond the grave.’
‘Because?’
‘He was a nutter, Jack. There’s no “because” with a nutter.’ He nodded at the door. ‘Come on, let’s have a look downstairs.’
Nightingale followed Hoyle down the staircase. Hoyle ran his hands over the panelled wall. ‘This is quality workmanship,’ he said. ‘No Polish builders here – it’s the real thing. The wood alone’s worth thousands. How old do you think it is?’
‘The cops said sixteenth century,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was called something else then, named after the local squires.’
‘Hey, do you think owning this makes you the new squire? Maybe you’ll get to deflower the local virgins. Any idea how much land goes with it?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ said Nightingale.
‘Could turn it into a golf course, maybe,’ said Hoyle. ‘This would make a great clubhouse.’
They went into the kitchen. Hoyle opened a door to find a pantry lined with empty shelves while Nightingale opened another to reveal a tiled room that had been plumbed for a washing-machine but, like the rest, had been stripped bare. Beyond the pantry there were three small rooms. There were marks on the walls where posters and pictures had once been fixed, and Nightingale decided they had been staff quarters. A door led to the back garden. There were three locks, two bolts and a CCTV camera aimed at it. ‘That one’s not wireless,’ said Hoyle, aiming his torch at the camera. ‘See the wire there?’
Nightingale squinted up at it. A black wire at the rear of the camera unit burrowed into the plaster. ‘Which means what?’ he asked.
‘Which means that the monitors are somewhere downstairs, probably,’ said Hoyle. ‘Have you checked all the rooms?’
‘Not yet,’ said Nightingale.
‘Let’s have a look-see,’ said Hoyle. They went back to the drawing room, then along a corridor to a large room lined with teak bookshelves and cabinets. ‘The library?’ said Hoyle.
‘Looks like it,’ said Nightingale.
Beyond it there was another drawing room with a huge fireplace and then a smaller room that must have once contained a snooker table because the wooden scoreboard was still on one wall and a rectangular light fitting hung from the centre of the ceiling. There was a CCTV camera over the door.
Hoyle went back into the corridor. ‘The house is old, so the cameras must have gone in after the panelling, right?’
‘Obviously,’ said Nightingale.
Hoyle turned his torch on him, and he held up a hand to shield his eyes. ‘So they couldn’t have pulled the panelling away without damaging the wood, could they?’ He ran his torch along the pristine walnut panels. ‘This is all quality joinery,’ he said. ‘You can’t just pull them off and stick them back.’
‘So?’
‘So I don’t think they can have run the wires from the downstairs cameras along the hallway. They couldn’t have done it without damaging the panelling.’
Nightingale frowned. ‘Okay. So, wireless upstairs and wired down here. But the wires don’t run along the corridor.’ Realisation dawned. ‘There’s a basement,’ he said.
‘Exactly,’ said Hoyle. ‘They ran the wiring straight down.’
They went back to the main hallway. ‘If there were stairs to the basement, wouldn’t they be here?’ asked Nightingale.
Hoyle walked along the panelling, tapping it every few feet. Each tap produced the same dull thud.
‘Are you looking for a secret panel?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Have you got any better ideas?’ Hoyle carried on tapping.
‘Why would he need to hide the entrance to his own basement?’
‘Who knows what was going through his head? We’ve already decided he was a nutter, right?’ He carried on tapping the panelling.
‘We don’t even know if there is a basement,’ said Nightingale.
‘Old place like this is bound to have one,’ said Hoyle. ‘They used to build their foundations really deep.’ He moved along the hallway and tapped again. This time the sound was hollow. Hoyle grinned and tapped again. There was definitely a different timbre, almost an echo.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Nightingale. He tapped the wall near him. A dull thud. Hoyle tapped. The hollow echo.
Hoyle ran the tips of his fingers around the panelling, then pushed. Nothing moved.
‘Try pulling,’ said Nightingale.
Hoyle did so. There was a click and a section of the wall swung open. ‘Open, Sesame,’ he whispered. He grinned at Nightingale in triumph. ‘What would you do without me, Jack?’
12
Nightingale followed Hoyle down to the basement. The stairs were wooden and there was a brass banister on the left. He kept his hand on it and felt for each stair with his foot before trusting his weight on it. Their torches picked out books, shelves and shelves of them, mostly leather-bound.
‘Why did he put his library here?’ said Nightingale.
‘Because he was a nutter,’ said Hoyle. ‘Nutters do nutty things.’
They stopped halfway down and shone their torches around. The basement appeared to run the full length of one wing of the house. The bookshelves continued and, running down the centre of the space, there were two lines of display cabinets. There was a sitting area with two large red leather chesterfields and a coffee-table piled with more books. A huge desk was covered with newspapers. There was an antique globe that was almost four feet high and a vast oak table with more than a dozen candles on it. Molten wax had dripped down it and pooled on the floor.
‘This is just weird,’ said Nightingale.
‘It looks like he spent a lot of time down here,’ said Hoyle. ‘Come on, let’s have a look around.’
Hoyle headed down the stairs. Nightingale wrinkled his nose. There was a musty smell in the air that left a nasty taste in his mouth. It wasn’t just the smell of old books or soot from the candles, it was bitter and acrid. When he swallowed, his stomach lurched and he had to fight to stop himself throwing up.
Hoyle reached the bottom and walked between the two rows of cabinets. ‘Jack, you’ve got to see this,’ he called.
Nightingale joined him beside a glass-sided cabinet, whose shelves were filled with human skulls of different sizes, some so small they could have come only from infants, others adult-sized, yellowed with age, the teeth stained brown and ground down from years of wear and tear.
‘How sick is this?’ said Hoyle. ‘He collected skulls.’
Nightingale bent down to peer at them. Most of the skulls had small irregular holes in the back as if they had been pierced with a chisel or smashed with a hammer. ‘They didn’t die of natural causes,’ he said.