This was clearly nothing more than extremely distasteful gossip, but George could not think of a suitable answer so he mumbled something vague.
‘But,’ said Cormac, surveying the house, ‘all things being equal, I think we’d be within our rights to smash a window. Will I do the deed, or will you? No? I didn’t think you would.’
He found a heavy stone from the path, and smashed it against the windowpane. The glass splintered, and he reached inside to unlatch the frame.
‘This house is empty,’ he said, as soon as they had stepped through the French windows, avoiding the broken glass. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how you can tell?’
George, who did not see how you could tell if a house was empty or full of people, said they should make a thorough search. Maud might be ill–she might have tripped and fallen and be lying helpless somewhere.
‘So she might. Although if she was playing the piano half an hour ago…But we’ll take a look.’
They let Mrs Minching in through the front door, and set off.
‘It’s a curious thing about Quire,’ said Cormac as they went up the main staircase. ‘There’s all this orderly Georgian elegance’–he waved an expressive hand–‘all the smooth walls and pale ceilings–but there are pockets of deep unhappiness in some of the rooms.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said George. ‘Unless you mean damp or dry rot. There’s always a smell with that, of course.’ There had been dry rot in the roof at Toft House a year or so ago; it had cost a shocking sum of money to get rid of it.
‘I don’t mean damp or dry rot,’ said Cormac. ‘I know all about those. This is like–it’s like stepping without warning into a black icy puddle when you thought it was a warm summer afternoon. Like falling into a well. There’s a bad one in the music room, did you not feel it? There’s another in the bedroom that I think is your daughter’s.’ He glanced at George as he said this, but George had never heard such fanciful rubbish as pockets of unhappiness inside houses, and he set off up to the second floor without bothering to respond.
He had just paused on the upper landing to look out of a window–there was a clear view of Toft House’s chimneys over to the east–when he caught a darting movement down on the ground. Leaning forward he saw a shadow detach itself from the darkness and go purposefully along the carriageway.
George screwed up his eyes, trying to see better. Could it be Maud? Yes, surely that was the cloak with the hood she sometimes wore. He went plunging back down the stairs, shouting to Sullivan.
‘Are you sure it was Maud?’ demanded Cormac when George had spluttered out what he had seen, and Mrs Minching had come puffing up from the kitchens. ‘Mightn’t it have been Thomasina?’
‘Yes, I am sure it was Maud,’ said George, annoyed at the implication that he could not recognize his own daughter. ‘In any case, it wasn’t tall enough for Miss Thomasina or for your daughter, Sullivan. And no one else is likely to be wandering around the grounds in the dark.’
‘She must have been hiding outside while we were searching the house,’ said Mrs Minching. ‘But where she’d be going at such a time of night beats me.’
‘It beats me as well, but we’ll have to find out,’ said George. He looked at Cormac, not wanting to ask for further help, but was relieved when Sullivan said, ‘We’ll go after her. You stay here, Mrs Minching. Ready, Lincoln?’
‘Of course.’
George dared say Sullivan was used to slinking through the night in pursuit of game, either human or feathered, but he, George, was not. By the time they reached Quire’s gates, he was considerably out of breath and Maud was some way ahead of them. But they had both seen her turn left onto the high road.
‘Then she’s not going towards the town,’ said Cormac softly. ‘Can you see her? In this rain she looks like a wraith.’