It would not hurt to phone Nell. A friendly, ordinary call, to ask how she was getting on. Before he could think too much about it, Michael reached for the phone and dialled her mobile.
It went straight to voicemail, but if she was wandering around various rooms, looking into cupboards and even cellars, she would probably have switched the phone off. He left a casual, cheerful, message, saying he hoped she was uncovering some good finds, and he would see her later. After this he returned to work, trying to ignore the nagging unease.
I don’t think Nell should go to Holly Lodge . . . We both know who’s inside that house . . .
‘Oh hell,’ said Michael aloud, and reached for the phone again to check the times of London trains. There was one at one thirty which got in to Paddington shortly before two thirty.
On the train, he felt better. Nell would be fine and he might help her with some of the inventorying, and they would come back together and then enjoy their evening.
The taxi dropped him outside Holly Lodge. It was pretty much as Michael had visualized it: a bit gloomy, a bit neglected, with the air of having known better days. There was a light showing in one of the downstairs rooms. Michael went along the gravel drive and plied the door knocker. It echoed inside the house, but there was no sound of any movement. He tried again. Still nothing. Perhaps Nell was upstairs, or at the back of the house. She had said something about French windows, so he made his way round the side of the house. Yes, there were the French windows. Michael peered through them. There was no sign of Nell – or wait, wasn’t that her jacket thrown over a chair? He knocked on the window and called out, but the house remained silent and still. Perhaps she had gone out to get some lunch. Without her jacket, though, on a bitter January day? He found his phone and tried her number, but again it went to voicemail. Then he tried the French windows, but they were locked.
He was not exactly worried, but he was a bit uneasy. He went back to the front of the house. The front door would be locked as well, but he would try it anyway. But it was not locked. The old-fashioned brass handle turned easily and smoothly.
The minute he stepped into the hall, the unease deepened. He reminded himself he did not believe in ghosts, not even after that very strange business in Shropshire when he had met Nell. But he did believe that houses could retain atmospheres – that you could sometimes sense if their inhabitants had been happy or sad or lonely. Holly Lodge held none of those emotions; what it did hold was fear, stark and unmistakable. The feeling was so strong that if it had not been for wanting to find Nell, Michael would have left as fast as possible.
There was a small table lamp glowing in the hall, and it looked as if there was another in one of the rooms leading off it. Michael called out, hoping Nell would come out of one of the rooms, or down the stairs, laughing and saying he had given her a scare. But she did not.
He looked into the rooms at the house’s front, then went through to the one with French windows. Rather guiltily, he felt in the pockets of Nell’s jacket. Tube ticket, a tissue, an odd peppermint. And her phone. Michael frowned, then went into the other rooms, his footsteps echoing eerily. Everything was ordinary and unthreatening.
The kitchen was a large, reasonably modern room. A chair had been drawn up to an oak table, and there was a plate with a few crumbs on it, and an apple core. A sheet of notes in Nell’s writing lay at the side, with her Filofax next to it. Michael had a mental picture of Nell eating a picnic lunch, reading her notes as she did so, perhaps checking for an address or phone number to call a colleague because she had found something outside her own province. The Filofax was open at the calendar section, and today’s date was circled rather elaborately in red. In the evening section, she had written, in ordinary blue ink, ‘Michael – supper’. This did not tell him anything he did not already know, and he looked round the kitchen for further ideas. Without thinking much about it, he touched the electric kettle. It was hot – in fact it was so hot it could not be long since it had boiled. Michael stared at it. This was starting to be the classic dark fairy-story scenario: the apparently empty house with sinister signs of occupancy. A door left open so the unwary traveller could lift the latch and step inside . . . And, once inside, there were lamps burning, a kettle singing on the hob . . . Michael wondered whether, if he went into the bedrooms, he would find any of the beds occupied. With the corpse-bride out of Robert Browning’s poem, said his mind cynically? Or were you thinking of Goldilocks in the Three Bears’ cottage? Even so, as he went up the stairs, he was remembering the eighteenth-century sonnet with the old bed that thrilled the gloom with the tales of human sorrows and delights it had witnessed over the centuries.
Thrilled gloom or not, he would check the bedrooms in case Nell had fallen and knocked herself out. Michael called out again, willing her to answer, but Holly Lodge remained silent.
Most of the rooms had nothing but discarded or dust-sheeted furniture in them, so he went up to the attic floor. The rooms here looked smaller, and the passageway linking them was narrower, but again there were only odd pieces of furniture and boxes of old curtains.