He was sitting with one hand covering his eyes, and did not respond.
‘Eric!’ she repeated, shaking her head in disbelief.
‘Ma’am.’
‘Go and see Paxton, but do not – I repeat DO NOT – scare him off, OK? Ask him politely where he was on the Saturday night. Just accept whatever he says and then check it out. Got that?’
‘Aha. Loud and clear.’
As soon as Alice entered the hallway of the India Street house, she was hit by its chilled air, the raw coldness of it. The place was now dank, unheated, unloved and unlived in. Silent. Her breath was as visible as steam from a kettle, and she crossed her arms, hunching her shoulders and trying to husband her body heat. The murdered man’s bedroom door was open and she glanced into it, a musky smell instantly assailing her nostrils. Her attention was caught by the trails of blood spattered across the faded wallpaper, now looking more like black ink than blood.
A cursory inspection of the kitchen suggested that it would reveal nothing, so she pushed open the door to the drawing-room, and entering it was surprised how shabby it now seemed. Without the presence of the normal occupants of the house, breathing in and breathing out, moving around, attending to the myriad, small, inconsequential affairs that make up a life, the room’s tiredness could not be hidden. There was nothing to distract the eye from the frayed patches on the carpet, the cracks in the glass of the cabinet or the odd broken ornament on the mantlepiece. A thick layer of dust coated the antique wooden furniture, masking its lustre and turning it grey, and the panes in the sole window were dirty, providing only the subdued light of perpetual dusk. Everywhere needed redecoration and a good clean.
A writing desk was tucked away in one corner, its sun-bleached walnut veneer beginning to part from the wood beneath, and Alice sat down at it. First she pulled out all of the miniature drawers on the desktop. Only a magnifying glass, a thimble and a couple of half-empty needle cases were revealed. The first of the larger, lower drawers seemed to be filled with the paraphernalia of Christmas: decorated paper, tinsel, hundreds of old cards and baubles for the tree, many cracked or discoloured. The middle drawer contained about forty brown envelopes, some with their contents listed on the outside: ‘Harry’s and Ella’s school reports – 1995-1998, 1999-2003, 2004-2007’, ‘Ella’s art project (Roman)’, and ‘Letters from mum’.
In case something had been misfiled and partly out of curiosity, Alice gave them all a quick check. From her cursory scrutiny of the reports a vague picture of both of the Brodie children emerged, and it largely accorded with the impression she had formed from her brief meeting with them in their aunt’s house. The boy, Harry, seemed to be intelligent, slightly nervous and immature, excelling in drama and English. Many of his teachers seemed concerned by his lack of focus, some remarking on his inability to handle pressure, particularly at exam time. Almost all of them commented that his head was always in the clouds, and criticised his absent-mindedness. Ella, in contrast, seemed to have sailed through school, collecting prizes and positions of responsibility from her earliest childhood. Great things seem to be expected of her, her last head teacher remarking on her high hopes for the girl’s future.
Putting the last report cards away, her mind drifted onto Ian as it had done periodically throughout the day. Only by making a conscious effort could she stop thoughts of him intruding whenever they liked, wrecking her concentration and making everything else seem unimportant, whirling round and round in her head but resolving nothing. Deliberately banishing him from her mind again, she turned back to the drawer and picked out one of the letters from the ‘Mum’ envelope, but it was in an impossible hand. Only ‘My darling’ on the first line could be deciphered, the rest of the writing, including the signature, being completely illegible. After wasting a further five minutes trying to read the most recent one, dated 2008, she gave them up as a bad job and bundled them all back into their envelope.
When she hauled out the bottom drawer, Alice’s spirits sank. It was weighed down with files, each one bulging, the contents overflowing into a ghastly sump of miscellaneous papers. Anticipating hours of probably pointless drudgery ahead, she gave a deep sigh and then picked up the first document in the ‘TAX’ file. Methodically, she ploughed through them all, before passing onto ‘BANK’, then five other equally dull folders. ‘HEALTH’ briefly caught her attention, documenting as it did the course of Gavin Brodie’s hopeless decline and the mass of quack remedies that they had invested in before accepting the inevitable. Wondrous crystals, exotic fruit essences, animal serums and the frozen scrotums of bulls, all promised cures. Each advert had been cut out and kept, each marked with ‘cheque for £50 sent’ or some equally poignant note.
Three hours later, and conscious that her eyes were no longer focusing properly, she opened the second last folder. It was marked ‘INSURANCE’. Inside, as anticipated, were a mass of certificates of car, house and household contents and travel insurance. Like the rest of the files, they revealed that the woman’s grip on the family’s administrative matters seemed to be slipping. Her filing was becoming progressively less accurate, many of the dates were higgledy piggledy, with papers eventually being added in no particular order at all.
At the very back of the folder, stapled onto the cover, was another certificate, a term life insurance policy in Gavin Brodie’s name. Amongst the details listed on it were the extra premium charged for an unspecified ‘Underlying Medical Condition’, the sum assured, the date on which the policy was taken out and the date of expiry. Alice put it to one side, relieved to have found something to show for all the tedium, something concrete and, surely to God, significant.
The final file, untitled and with a dark blue cover, was the thinnest. It seemed unpromising, and held a only small sheaf of papers. Picking out a five-page document from it she saw that it was headed ‘Court of Session, Scotland. Petition for Interdict against Agnes Hart’.
Hart’s address in Henderson Row was given. The aim of the document seemed to be to get the Court to prohibit her from coming anywhere near Gavin Brodie or any members of his family, his house or his possessions. Reading the numbered paragraphs that made up the petition, a picture began to emerge, and it was a disturbing one. It catalogued a campaign of harassment and intimidation waged by an obsessive woman as she worked out a grudge against Gavin Brodie and his nearest and dearest. Dog excrement had been put through the India Street letterbox, cars scratched, obscene notes attached to the front door, his children shouted at and his mother had received a gob of Hart’s saliva on her cheek. The list of hate-filled deeds perpetrated by the woman covered two full pages. Agnes Hart, whoever she was, had plainly loathed the dead man, and judging from the description of her behaviour, she was both unbalanced and highly effective in her campaign of revenge. Another document among the papers, headed ‘Extract Decree’, revealed that the Court had granted Gavin Brodie’s request that Agnes Hart’s behaviour be restrained on 5th July 2008.
Late that same evening, Eric Manson tiptoed past his open sitting-room door, straining for a minute or two to decipher the high-pitched, excitable chatter coming from it before retreating into the kitchen. He had heard more than enough. Not least the sudden change into whispers. All Margaret’s friends seemed to be there, divorcees to a woman, of course, apart from sour Helen whose interests, he felt sure, lay in another direction altogether. They would be offering advice, laughing among themselves in their venal way, eager to enlist another member into their unholy club. Nowadays, however late it was, when he got home it was never just the two of them, with Margaret waiting eagerly for his return. No, the harpies had positively taken the place over.