If she was feigning ignorance, she didn’t merely look a little like Audrey Hepburn, she was a better actor. Yet Daniel was gripped by a conviction that she could help him to unlock the mystery, even if she didn’t know where to find the key. He was tempted to cross-examine her. But did she really want the truth to come out?
His mind was made up by the roar of a car racing down the drive outside. Micah Bridge glanced through the open door and winced.
‘It seems that the first journalists have arrived.’
Sham said, ‘Are you sure they aren’t just Friends of the Library?’
‘These men do not look as if they have ever read a book in their lives.’
‘Ouch.’ Fleur raised her eyebrows. ‘Micah, I’ve never once heard you say anything bitchy before. You must be stressed. We all are, of course, but we must put on a brave face with outsiders. What happened to Aslan and Orla is nothing to do with their work at St Herbert’s.’
‘We’d better leave you to it.’ Seizing his chance, Daniel beckoned his sister to follow him down the corridor.
‘What exactly are you looking for in these archives, then?’ Louise asked as soon as they had closed the doors of the Old Library behind them.
He contrived an expression so inscrutable that she couldn’t resist the urge to giggle.
‘I want to find out about Castor and Pollux.’
* * *
It took less than thirty minutes for Daniel to trace what he was after. He spent another ten at his favourite desk, gazing at the yellowed sheets he’d borrowed from the archive downstairs, turning what he had discovered over in his mind. Testing hypotheses, in the way he’d once taught to students new to deductive reasoning, searching for answers that were not only valid but sound. After browsing for a while through the crammed bookshelves, Louise came up to join him, but soon she became bored by his reverie, and started drumming her fingers against the iron railing. She’d never been afraid to bring him back down to earth.
‘So was that a eureka moment, or not?’
He leant back in his chair. ‘You bet.’
‘Go on, then. Surprise me.’
‘John Everett Millais was a regular visitor to Keswick as guest of the Hopes family,’ Daniel said. ‘According to Sir Milo Hopes’ memoir, Millais repaid their hospitality by making them a present of this painting.’
He pointed to an old photograph of a painting in a heavy gilt frame similar to others they had seen at Mockbeggar Hall. Two labradors with huge brown eyes stood side by side, as if awaiting a command. The sunlit turrets, seen through the trees behind them, made the Hall seem like a palace from a fairy tale. Daniel suspected Millais had dashed the painting off as a thank you; he’d sought to convey the dogs’ unyielding loyalty and fidelity, yet the effect was cloying and sentimental, so that the picture was a long way short of a masterpiece. Hadn’t William Morris dismissed his fellow Pre-Raphaelite as an artist bought and sold and thrown away? He’d overdone the hasty hack work, and this was an example. But Morris’s sneer meant nothing to Milo Hopes, who wrote in his memoir that he would always owe a debt to his distinguished guest for immortalising his beloved animals, and vowed that Millais’ gift should always have a place of honour in Mockbeggar Hall.
The painting bore a caption so blurred it was barely legible.
Castor and Pollux.
‘Well, well,’ Louise murmured. ‘Go on, break it to me gently. What on earth connects a Victorian painting of family pets with Aslan Sheikh?’
Daniel lifted a lined sheet covered in tiny copperplate. ‘Milo Hopes loved his labradors. In his writings, he gives the impression they meant much more to him than his servants. Eventually, first Castor, and then Pollux, died at ripe old ages, and he established a graveyard in the Hall grounds. That’s where they were buried, and it became a family tradition for the Hopes’ dogs to be laid to rest alongside, with headstones recording their names and dates.’
‘Aaaaagh!’ Louise couldn’t contain her frustration. ‘Come on, Daniel, enough of the history, what’s the link with the here and now?’
His eyes flashed with amusement; for an instant, he was a teenager again, relishing a half-forgotten pleasure, the chance to tease his impatient sister.
‘Seriously? You still don’t see it?’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘Utterly gorgeous.’ Hannah waved towards the sun-soaked cipher garden and the slope of the fell beyond. ‘You’ll find it a wrench to leave, Louise.’
Louise, in cropped top and denim shorts — the severe business suits that used to be her uniform had been consigned to the charity shop — was bustling around the table at the back of Tarn Cottage, filling their tumblers with cranberry juice. She’d produced a chicken salad they could eat outside while Hannah and Daniel discussed what he’d found in the library. When he’d called her, she said at once she was free to come over. The invitation was Louise’s idea; hopeless as she was with managing her own love life, the control freak in her relished matchmaking for her brother.
‘I’ve inflicted myself on Daniel for long enough. He doesn’t need a sister cramping his style. It was my fault he started spending time at St Herbert’s.’
‘Just as well you did,’ Hannah told him. ‘I bet you’re right about Castor and Pollux.’
‘I’d have got there sooner,’ he said, ‘but the painting has been moved during the renovations of Mockbeggar Hall. It hung in the dining room until recently. Purdey Madsen mentioned it when we were there on Friday night — she asked where were the pooches — but I didn’t realise what she was talking about.’
‘So you reckon Callum’s body is buried in the old pets’ graveyard?’ Louise asked.
This was Daniel’s theory, the only explanation that fitted the facts. Why else would two dogs dead for more than one hundred years mean anything to Orla, and consequently to Aslan?
Hannah nodded. ‘While we were interviewing at the caravan park on Friday, the CCTV picked up a man in the grounds of Mockbeggar Hall, an area closed to the public. They assumed he was a caravan-dweller whose curiosity had got the better of him, but he looked very much like someone DS Wharf and I had seen loitering around the entrance to Lane End Farm.’
‘Aslan Sheikh?’ Louise asked.
‘I’ve seen Aslan’s passport photos, two of them, one for each of his identities. Those little snaps are hardly ever good likenesses — least I hope not, mine makes me look like Rosa Klebb — but I’m sure it’s the same bloke. Orla had told him about Castor and Pollux, and he wanted to see the pet cemetery for himself.’
Daniel chewed on a celery stick. ‘I wonder what else Orla told him? Did someone decide they had to kill him, to preserve a secret?’
‘Looks that way,’ she said. ‘So, what secret could be so dangerous?’
The three of them ate without speaking for a minute or two. The atmosphere was heady with the scent of potted lavender and roses scrambling over the trellis nailed to the cottage’s rear wall. Daniel was conscious of Hannah’s presence beside him, and her long slim legs an inch away from his. Wearing a short, semi-floral, belted summer dress, she was displaying much less flesh than Louise, but in sitting down, he’d brushed against her, and the contact sent a jolt of excitement through him, as if he’d touched a live fence at a farm.
At this time of evening, they no longer needed to shield their eyes from the glare. Barely a thread of cloud lingered over Priest Ridge, and the fell was bathed in a mellow light. The cipher garden was alive, and never wholly quiet, but the only sounds were the scurrying of squirrels in the undergrowth and up the trees, and the piping call of a redshank concealed by reeds beside the tarn.
‘When I lived in the city,’ Louise said, ‘I took crime pretty much for granted. The month before I moved out, my next-door neighbour was mugged on a tram, and a woman who lived half a mile away was dragged into a park and raped by a teenage thug with a knife. But the Lakes should be different. A place so lovely shouldn’t be disfigured by cruelty and violence, it feels like an offence against nature.’