‘He’ll come too, won’t he?’ Marcus said. ‘He’ll see that no good will come of his staying here. I think he’s someone who needs to work. He’ll be better off in London with his colleagues. We just remind him of Nell.’
Polly wasn’t so sure. Ian had always been stubborn. As Marcus drove back along the track to Sletts she looked into the windows of the houses. It had become a habit now, this searching for the child in the white dress. But the visibility was so poor that there was nothing but shadow.
It seemed that Ian had decided to escape from Sletts too, because when they got back the house was empty and his car was gone. Polly switched on the lamps in an attempt to cheer up the room, but the sulphur light bounced back from the fog, only adding to the sense of isolation. She peered through the window into the gloom. ‘We could be the only people alive in the whole world.’
Marcus was back on his laptop, engrossed in answering a new bunch of emails from customers and didn’t seem to hear her. She tried to read, but found it impossible to concentrate and stood behind Marcus and began to stroke his neck. She hadn’t liked the idea of making love when Ian was around, but at last they had the house to themselves. Marcus turned and smiled at her in a distracted way and continued to tap on the keyboard. He was lying back in one chair, his feet on the rungs of another, completely relaxed, and she had the impulse to shake him.
‘I might go out for a walk,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t settle to anything.’ She hoped to provoke the same reaction as she had when she’d gone out alone before. Don’t be stupid, there’s a killer out there. Wait until I’ve finished this and I’ll come out with you.
But he just looked up briefly from the screen. ‘OK. Take care.’ It was as if he was so wrapped up in his work that he’d forgotten about Eleanor’s death altogether and seemed to have no sense of danger.
It was the first time Marcus had made her angry. Previously he’d always been so solicitous and she couldn’t see what could be so important on the screen. There was a brief flash of jealousy as she even wondered if there was an email from another woman that was holding his attention; perhaps that was why he seemed so engrossed, the reason for the self-satisfied smile. She picked up her jacket and went outside. There was a chill that she hadn’t been expecting and she was tempted to return immediately into the warm. But she could be stubborn too and instead she walked back down the track towards the old croft house. The garden was overgrown, but the grass on the way to the front door had been trampled. There was no other sign of life. No smoke from the chimney this time. No face at the window. She knocked. The paint on the door was peeling and came off in blue specks on her fist. No answer. The door wasn’t locked – there might have been a bolt inside, but there wasn’t a hole for the key. She pushed it and was surprised at how easily it opened.
‘Hello!’ But she knew nobody could be living here. From the faint light coming from the open door she saw that the place wasn’t habitable. Ahead of her was what had once been a tiny scullery. A bench with an enamel bowl standing on it. To the right the room where she’d imagined having seen the girl dancing in the candlelight. A beaten-earth floor. In one corner a small stove. She opened it and saw that there were blocks of peat inside, but the stove was cold and she couldn’t decide if any of it had been burned. She walked to the window and thought that perhaps the dust had been disturbed on the sill and there was a drop of candle wax.
Looking in at her was a face. Pale and blurred by the dirt on the glass and the gloom of the fog. She screamed. The face disappeared, there were footsteps on the scullery floor and a man appeared in the doorway.
‘What are you doing here?’ He was middle-aged and his grey hair was too long and stuck up at the front, giving him a faintly clownish appearance. Something about the silhouette he presented, the angular body and that ridiculous hair were familiar.
‘I was just looking,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought the house was derelict.’ Apology and politeness had always been her default positions.
‘Oh, nobody lives here.’ She realized now that he was English. He stepped further into the room and she backed away from him. ‘Who are you?’ he said. It was hard to tell whether he was angry or amused. The voice was flat.
‘My name’s Polly Gilmour. I’m staying at Sletts. My partner will be looking for me, if I don’t go back soon.’ She hoped that was true, but remembered Marcus as she’d last seen him, determined to be normal, to communicate with the outside world, and she wasn’t sure if he would be bothered to come after her. She found that she was shaking.
‘So you’re one of Eleanor Longstaff’s friends?’
‘Yes.’
He looked her up and down as if she were a sort of biological specimen, then gave a sly smile. ‘I think I’ve seen you around.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Charles Hillier. I run Springfield House. The detectives are staying there.’ He seemed about to say more, but suddenly headlights lit up the room.
‘That’ll be Ian,’ she said. ‘Eleanor’s husband. I should go. It’s my turn to make supper.’ The inanity struck her as crazy. She’d imagined seeing a ghost in this house and now some strange man had her penned inside it and she was talking about cooking a meal. She judged the distance between them and darted past him into the scullery. But he shut the front door with his foot and stood with his back to it, blocking her way again. She was trembling and found it impossible to think clearly at all. It felt like the worst sort of nightmare. With the front door shut, the small room was almost dark.
Suddenly someone was banging on the living-room window with the flat of his hand. ‘Polly, is that you?’ It was Ian. He must have caught sight of her in his headlights and stopped his car.
‘Yes, I’m here.’ She was surprised at how strongly the words came out: now she sounded defiant rather than scared. Hillier moved away from the door as Ian Longstaff came in. The three of them stood very close together in the tiny room. There was the smell of damp, but something else. Alcohol. Polly thought Ian must have taken off to a bar somewhere and had been sitting nursing pints and brooding. She wondered if Lowrie had been with him and, if so, how the man could have been so stupid as to let him drive back.
‘Who are you?’ Ian glared at the older man. Polly thought he looked like a gorilla picking a fight with another male for supremacy of the troop. Eleanor had always called him, with amused affection, her alpha male.
Hillier barked back his name. ‘I own Springfield House hotel. Your friend here was trespassing.’
‘So you own this place too, do you?’ Polly could tell that Ian longed for a fight and realized he’d wanted to hit someone ever since he’d been told that Eleanor was dead.
‘I know the owner.’
‘And that gives you the right to throw your weight about, does it? To intimidate women?’ Ian was bristling with aggression, so now she was almost more frightened of him than of Hillier.
‘I’m not intimidated,’ she said. ‘It was a misunderstanding. Let’s go.’ She squeezed past the older man and out of the front door, pulling Ian after her by the sleeve of his jacket. He resisted for a moment, then the fight seemed to leave him altogether and he followed her.
Hillier stood in the doorway watching them. He was still smiling and called after them. ‘Do you know who lived in this place?’
Curiosity got the better of her. Ian was walking back to his car, but she paused for a moment. ‘Who?’
‘Sarah Malcolmson,’ Hillier said. ‘The girl who was blamed for Peerie Lizzie’s death. This was her family’s house.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Time stretched and had become unimportant. The long-case clock in the corner had just struck eleven, but it was light and the team was still working, sitting in the yellow morning room in Springfield House. Occasionally they heard the drinkers in the public bar coming out to the courtyard to make their way home. Willow was uneasy. Just being here made them compromised – they were enjoying the hospitality of potential suspects after all. The remains left on the sideboard were of the supper provided by Charles and David. And earlier Perez had wandered off on his own to talk to George Malcolmson and that was unforgivable. Any information that the man provided would be uncorroborated, but it wasn’t the breach in protocol that made her so angry, it was the attitude of Jimmy Perez. His driving away on his own had felt like a personal affront. Why hadn’t he discussed his ideas with her first?