There had been a change in the wind over the last half-hour. It was still not midday, but the sky was darkening and Jack had a feeling it was going to rain later. He was standing on the edge of the meadow and picked up his camera, looking through the viewfinder at the distant water’s edge. It was a powerful zoom and he was able to zero in on the tops of some reeds that grew along the bank. He sharpened the focus and in his concentration the noise of the river disappeared.
Jack didn’t take the photo. The temporary silence was enough.
He had known there was a river; in the brief that he’d been given, there’d been a map of the property. But he hadn’t realised he would hear it at night when he closed his eyes to go to sleep.
The river was placid up here. Jack had been talking to a fellow with a narrowboat who told him there was a strong pull after storms. He’d gone along with the story, but he didn’t really believe it: there were too many locks and weirs that ran the length of the Thames for it to flow with wildness. The river might have been violent once upon a time, but it had long since been shackled and tamed.
Jack knew a bit about water. There had been a creek across the road from their house when he was growing up. It had run dry much of the time, and then when the rains finally came it would fill in a matter of hours. It would rush and tumble, angry and hungry, roaring day and night.
He and his brother Ben used to take an inflatable raft out to ride the short-lived rapids, knowing full well that in a matter of days the creek would be returned to its usual stagnant dribble.
Their dad had always warned them about the raft and about kids who went into drainpipes when the floods came. But Ben and Jack only rolled their eyes at each other and made sure to blow up the raft after they’d sneaked it out of the garage and across the road. They weren’t worried about the creek. They knew how to handle themselves in water. Until they didn’t, that is. Until the flood that happened in the summer when Ben was eleven and Jack was nine.
In the distance, the sky lit up golden, and a low disgruntlement of thunder rolled softly down the river towards him. Jack checked his watch and saw that it was almost midday. The atmosphere was eerie: that strange unearthly twilight that always settled before a storm.
He turned around and started back towards the house. The carpenter had left a light on, he noticed as he crossed the meadow: he could see it up in the attic window, and Jack reminded himself to turn it off when he opened the house for Elodie.
She was waiting for him when he reached the coach way and the iron gate came into sight. She lifted her hand to wave and then she smiled and Jack felt the same frisson of interest that he’d felt the evening before.
He blamed it on the house. He’d been sleeping poorly, and not just because of the god-awful mattress on that bed in the malt house. He’d been having weird dreams ever since he arrived, and although it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d have brought up in the local pub, there was a strange feeling in the house, as if he were being watched.
You are, you fool, he told himself. By the mice.
But it didn’t feel like mice. The sense of being watched reminded Jack of the early days of being in love, when the most ordinary of glances was loaded with meaning. When half a smile from a particular woman could cause a stirring deep down low within his belly.
He gave himself a stern word about overcomplicating his life. He was here to convince Sarah that he should be given another chance to know their girls. That was it. And possibly to find a lost diamond. If it existed. Which it most likely didn’t.
She had a suitcase with her, Jack saw as he got closer. ‘Moving in?’ he called.
A blush came immediately to her cheeks. He liked the way she blushed. ‘I’m on my way back to London.’
‘Where did you park?’
‘I’m going by train. I’m due at the station in about four hours.’
‘You’ll be wanting to see inside, then.’ He cocked his head towards the gate. ‘Come on in. I’ll open up the house.’
Jack was supposed to be packing to leave, but after letting Elodie into the house he’d decided to work through Rosalind Wheeler’s paperwork one last time. Just in case he found something he’d previously missed. Rosalind Wheeler was not a particularly pleasant person and the search seemed hopeless, but she’d hired him to do a job and Jack didn’t like letting people down.
It was one of the things that Sarah used to say to him towards the end: ‘You have to stop trying to be everybody’s hero, Jack. It’s not going to bring Ben back.’ He’d hated it when she said that sort of thing, but he saw now that she’d been right. His entire career, his entire adult life he’d spent chasing something he could do that would erase the photos that had turned up in all the papers after the flood: the big one of Jack, his eyes wide and frightened, a heated blanket around his shoulders, being loaded into a waiting ambulance. And the smaller school photo of Ben that Dad had insisted on having taken earlier that year, Ben’s hair combed carefully from one side, neater than it ever looked in real life. Their roles had been assigned by those newspaper articles and set as hard as a concrete slab: Jack, the boy who was saved. And Ben, the boy hero who’d said to his rescuer, ‘Take my little brother first,’ before being washed away.
Jack glanced back towards the door. It had been half an hour since he’d let Elodie into the house, and he was distracted. She’d stood to one side as he switched off the alarm and loosened the lock, and when he pushed the door open, she’d thanked him and been about to step across the threshold, when she hesitated and said, ‘You don’t work for the museum, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you a student?’
‘I’m a detective.’
‘With the police?’
‘Used to be. Not any more.’
He hadn’t offered anything further – it didn’t seem necessary to volunteer that the change of vocation was in response to a marriage breakdown – and she hadn’t asked. After a moment of silence, she’d nodded thoughtfully and then disappeared inside Birchwood Manor.
The whole time that she had been in there, Jack had been fighting an almost irresistible urge to follow her. No matter how many times he returned to the first page of the notes, he found his thoughts wandering, speculating as to what she was doing, where she was right at that minute, which room she was exploring. At one point he’d even stood up and gone to the door of the house before he realised what he was doing.
Jack decided to make a cup of tea, just to have a task to see through to its end, and was dunking the teabag violently when he sensed her behind him.
He guessed she was about to say goodbye and so, before she could, he said, ‘Cuppa? I’ve just boiled the kettle.’
‘Why not?’ She sounded surprised, whether by the invitation or her acceptance of it, he couldn’t tell. ‘A little bit of milk, please, and no sugar.’
Jack took out a second mug, careful to find a nice one that didn’t have tannin stains around the base. When the two mugs of tea were ready, he carried them over to where she was standing now, on the stone-paved path that ran around the house.
She thanked him and said, ‘There’s not much that smells better than a storm brewing.’
Jack agreed and they sat together on the edge of the path.
‘So,’ she said, after she’d taken a first sip, ‘what’s a detective doing picking locks at a museum?’
‘I was hired by someone to look for something.’
‘Like a treasure hunter? With a map and everything? X marks the spot?’
‘Something like that. But without the X. That’s what’s making it all a bit tedious.’
‘And what is it you’re looking for?’
He hesitated, thinking of the nondisclosure contract Rosalind Wheeler had made him sign. Jack didn’t mind breaking rules, but he didn’t like breaking promises. He did like Elodie, though, and he had the strongest sense that he should tell her. ‘You realise,’ he said, ‘that the woman who hired me could kill me for telling you.’
‘I’m intrigued.’
‘And yet, not worried for my life, I see.’
‘What if I promise not to tell a soul? I never break a promise.’
Forget Rosalind Wheeler: the urge was going to kill him first. ‘I’m looking for a stone. A blue diamond.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Not the Radcliffe Blue?’
‘The what?’