Edmund was beginning to wonder if the Land Registry could have given him the wrong information, because he had not been expecting to find himself driving into such rural isolation. Still, there was a growing trend for companies to have a country house for sales conferences, or for overworked executives to recuperate. And in the last few years ugly, severely functional industrial estates had sprung up on the outskirts of most towns and cities. He might go round a curve in the road and come to just such an estate at any minute.
He did, in fact, go round several curves in the road, and one of them turned out to be a wrong turning, wasting several miles and time he did not really have. Fortunately he realized his mistake and was able to pull on to the side of the road to check the map. Ah, that was where he had gone wrong – that big traffic island. He should have taken the second exit, not the third. It was infuriating when local authorities did not display clear road signs. He drove back to the island, quelling a stab of concern at how late it was getting.
Left, and then right, and left again at some crossroads. He passed several farms, looking as if they had been dropped down from the sky at random. The road was bumpier now, and narrower, and there were fields with the deep lines of drainage ditches in places. In the dull morning they looked like wounds in the earth.
Edmund drove on, through a couple of villages that interlocked with one another; the houses fronted on to the street and had low-browed windows and the wavy look of extreme age. Then came a village pub and a small village church. Yes, this was the right place; he drove into the shadow of the trees surrounding the church and switched off the engine. He was almost at his destination, and he had better decide what he was going to do.
As he sat in the car he was aware of Crispin strongly with him, and presently a plan began to form in his mind. Crispin’s plan was it? It did not matter. Edmund would find the house, and to whoever opened the door he would say he had a client interested in buying odd parcels of land in the south-east, and that he was retained by the man to keep his ear to the ground. After seeing the neglected condition of the Ashwood site, it had occurred to him to find out who the owner was. No, he had not wanted to make an official inquiry through Liam Devlin; he had wanted to keep the thing very discreet, very lowkey, in case there was no mileage in it.
And so he had obtained the name and address of the present owner via a standard Land Registry Search, and when a business journey had brought him to this part of England, he had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to call, to see if there was a possibility of negotiations being opened. He rehearsed this several times over, trying out different ways of presenting it, and when he thought he had it as right as he could get, he started the car again and drove along the little street, looking for the address he wanted and then at last seeing the sign that took him out of the village again, and along a hedge-fringed lane.
And then he was there.
His misgivings increased at once. The house was completely unremarkable; it was the kind of house that might have originally belonged to an estate worker in the days when there were lords of the manor. You saw dozens of similar properties the length and breadth of England, often nicely converted but sometimes crumbling into ruin. This one seemed to have been quite well looked after, but…
But surely this could not be right. Had he got the address wrong after all, or did the owner of the legendary Ashwood Studios really live in this ordinary house, in this remote Lincolnshire village? Perhaps it was some elderly recluse, or an eccentric industrialist whose private retreat this was. Yes, that was a possibility, and it might explain Ashwood’s own dereliction as well. But clearly his carefully rehearsed plan about a client and land purchase was not going to work.
It’s all right, said Crispin. This is clearly a private house, but just remember that Michael Sallis has the phone number, so he must know whoever lives here…