Clementine Lavinia Hardington, daughter of Colonel Greville Hardington (d. 1963) and Audrey De Courcy Hardington (d. 1960). Last of her line.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Hardington.” Shit. “Or is it Mrs Hardington?”
“Miss.”
No “call me Clemmie” he noted, sitting down opposite her and stretching his hands out to the fire. Know your place, young man.
She had gone back to her book. He scanned the room, seeing signs of neglect everywhere now that he was inside. The plaster ceiling was missing chunks of its frieze and had a huge water stain over most of it. The upholstery was frayed on every chair, the stuffing spilling out. The silk on the walls was in tatters. Long curtains at the window were two-tone from years of exposure to sunlight. They were threadbare along their folds, torn in places, probably riddled with moths. The rug was worn to its backing in places and the pattern was hard to distinguish, coated as it was in a thick layer of dog hair. And why was it that all dogs, no matter what colour their coat, seemed to shed grey hair?
“Have you lived here long?” He’d got the tone exactly right. Innocent curiosity.
“I was born in this house.”
“Very good,” he said, as if she had done something impressive. Pure chance was all it was. Pure chance had left her sitting in her big house with the grand paintings and the high ceilings. You couldn’t respect that.
But you could respect the collection of eighteenth-century miniatures on both sides of the fireplace. And you could respect the collection of Japanese figurines on the table beside him: topsy-turvy animals, twisted people, weird things like a plum being eaten by a wasp, a mouse fighting with a lizard. He itched to pick them up for a closer look but didn’t dare. He looked around stealthily. What else? A pair of silver-mounted horns caught his eye but he could see the inscription engraved on the base: too identifiable. Blue-and-white china in various shapes and sizes, fragile and faded. Matching vases that were probably Meissen, but one was chipped. Forget it. The paintings now: they were worth a second look. Not on this trip, though. Too big, too awkward.
He turned his attention to the other side of the fireplace and choked despite himself. A pair of shotguns, the real deal, fine engraving on the silver side plates and polished walnut stocks.
She looked up at the noise and saw where he was staring.
“The guns? They were my father’s. Purdeys. Quite the best game gun there is. They were made for him in 1936.”
And nowadays they were worth about a hundred grand, easy. “Do they still work?”
“Of course.”
“Can you shoot?”
“Of course,’ she said again, turning the page. “My father taught me.” My faw-ther. And that would be him in the silver photograph frame on the table beneath the guns, he presumed. Big moustache. Heavy jaw. Small eyes.
He looked at the guns again, longingly. No point in trying to take them. Twenty-eight inches long; he’d never get them out without being spotted. Another time.
She had lit a cigarette and now, without looking, she tilted her hand to tap the ash into a vast cut-glass ashtray at her elbow. She missed and a shower of grey flecks drifted down on to the floor. Easy to see why the carpet was in a jocker. It would be a long time before anyone pushed a Hoover around it either.
She must have noticed him watching her. “I didn’t offer you a cigarette.”
“I’m grand.” He was gasping for one, but Graham Field was a clean-living non-smoker. He wouldn’t have taken a drink if she’d asked him to. Not an issue so far, it had to be said. But he was obviously making progress, because she put down the book.
“Are you hungry?”
A polite answer was no. He hesitated for long enough that he was sure she got the message he was lying. “No. Not at all.”
“Did you have your dinner?”
“No,” he said again. “No. I don’t need anything, though.”
“You can’t go to bed hungry.” She stood up. “I can make you something. An omelette.”
He couldn’t stand egg in any shape or form. “Lovely. But I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
She didn’t bother to say it wasn’t any trouble, but she didn’t sit down again either. Bending with a sigh, she tweaked the fireguard across the hearth, then switched off the lamp beside her, leaving only the dying fire to light the room. Anthony got the message and stood too, letting the dog have a head start in the race to join her.
There was a pile of fur on a chair by the door. When she picked it up and shook it out, it resolved itself into a full-length coat that must once have been beautiful. It stank of mothballs, but by the looks of things they hadn’t worked. Slinging it around her shoulders, she turned and gave him a sidelong smile. “Brace yourself.”
It was good advice. After the heat of the drawing room, the cold in the hall struck into his very bones. His clothes had dried on him, more or less, but the chill found out the patches of damp behind his knees, along his shoulders, down his back. He would catch his death, he thought, not quite closing the drawing-room door before following Miss Hardington to the back of the hall, Oscar shambling between them with an occasional wary look in his direction. There was an archway leading to a short flight of stairs that twisted into a passageway dimly lit with a weak bulb. He thought at first that the walls were decorated with more pictures, frame upon frame jostling for space, but when he looked he saw beetles and butterflies and moths lovingly mounted on rubbed green velvet.
“Who likes the bugs?”
“My grandfather was a keen naturalist.” Disapproval in her voice. A warning to him to watch himself and a timely one at that. It had been an Anthony question, not a Graham one. He, Anthony, wouldn’t fancy looking at a load of insects on his way to the kitchen, but Graham might see the point.
“Very interesting.”
She didn’t respond. She was grappling with the door handle, another brute that screeched with a nerve-shredding sound of metal on metal when it finally gave way. The door opened and he peered into the kitchen, which proved to be smaller than he had imagined and disappointingly prosaic – sterile white cupboards and a too-bright fluorescent light. No big Aga keeping the place warm, either. It was arctic. Nothing to interest him here. The gas cooker looked to date from the 1960s at the latest, but that didn’t make it an antique – just a health hazard.
“Sit down there.”
“There” was a plain wooden table with rotting feet from years of standing on a much-washed tile floor. He sat gingerly on a chair that threatened to give way under him, wondering if woodworm ever turned on humans. The table and chairs were riddled.
“Water?”
If that was all that was on offer. “Yes, please.”
A glass landed on the table in front of him, a cheap tumbler. “There’s a tap in the scullery.”
And you can get it yourself, he filled in silently, taking it and going through to the next room where he found a sink and shelves weighed down with old Waterford glass: bowls, decanters, glasses, vases. They were dusty, untouched for years at a guess, and as he washed out his own glass fastidiously and waited for the water to run cold again, he found himself eyeballing a dead fly in the wineglass directly in front of his face. One that my grand-faw-ther missed, he thought, allowing himself a small chuckle.
She had been busy; the omelette was almost done when he got back, and there was a fork and a folded napkin on the table. The napkin was starched linen, at least two foot by two foot when he unfolded it, and the folds were so stiff that it stood up in his lap as if he had an erection, which was far from being the case. The omelette was heavy on bits of eggshell and light on filling. He had an awful suspicion that the flecks in it were not black pepper but cigarette ash.