*
Ryan guided his team on a walkthrough of Victor Swann’s movements the previous evening. As they moved from room to room, daylight filtered through the windows and lent the house a different character but it was still easy to imagine the forbidding atmosphere once night fell. “That’s another thing,” Ryan turned to them as they stepped outside into the courtyard where Victor’s body had been found. “I want to know why the lights failed and whether it was by accident or design.”
“You think somebody might have deliberately fused the lights and used the darkness as a cover to push him down the stairs?”
MacKenzie had always been a quick study.
“There are three possibilities, as far as I can tell,” Ryan tapped the index finger of his left hand. “First, Swann’s death was entirely accidental, as was the electrical failure. But, if that’s the case, why was his locker and house ransacked?”
“Opportunism?” Lowerson and Yates spoke in unison, then turned to one another in awkward surprise.
“It’s possible,” Ryan agreed. “In which case, we need to dig a bit deeper to understand why. None of his valuable possessions has been taken, so what did Victor have that was so important?”
He tapped his middle finger.
“Second, somebody fused the lights deliberately to provide cover for themselves. But how did they know Victor would offer to check the fuse box? It could easily have been me, or Dave Quibble…any number of people.”
“Might have been a case of mistaken identity,” Phillips put in. “Easy enough to mistake one person for another, especially in the dark.”
Ryan nodded.
“That’s another possibility, if an assailant mistook Swann for somebody else. But who?”
He shook his head and tapped the third finger of his left hand.
“Finally, the lights fusing was sheer coincidence and somebody took the opportunity to slip out and kill Victor Swann. Once again, we have to ask ourselves why.”
There was a short silence while they digested each possibility and Ryan swept his gaze over each of their faces.
“Let’s start digging.”
CHAPTER 8
By late afternoon, the rainclouds had migrated from the city to settle heavily over Cragside. They brought with them a strong summer wind that buffeted against the white forensic tents and threw up dust from the long gravel driveway. It howled through the uppermost layers of the trees until their branches swayed wildly against the darkening sky and rattled the windows of the old house which, like its master, remained defiant against the gathering storm.
Conscious that the day was slipping away, Ryan dispatched Lowerson and Yates to oversee a thorough search of Victor Swann’s house in Rothbury, always hopeful that it might turn up something useful. Phillips and MacKenzie stayed to supervise the work at Cragside, taking secondary statements from its remaining staff and the Gilberts, who looked on with mounting disapproval as their home was invaded. Crime analysts had been instructed to conduct a search of their intelligence databases, just in case Victor Swann had a sheet. The old valet might have seemed the quintessential country gentleman, too refined to have embroiled himself in anything untoward, but if Ryan had learned anything during his time as a policeman, it was that appearances could often be deceptive.
While those investigations were underway, Ryan went in search of Dave Quibble and a tour of Cragside’s electrical systems. He found the conservation manager hunched over a computer in his office, cataloguing what appeared to be a plank of wood.
Ryan rapped a knuckle against the door, which had been left open to visitors.
“Got a minute?”
Dave leaned back in his chair and removed his glasses, blinking a couple of times to clear the glare from his computer screen.
“Of course,” he said as he gestured Ryan inside. “What can I do for you?”
Ryan looked around the tiny office space. It was full to brimming with what looked like pieces of junk to the untrained eye but were probably artefacts of great historical importance.
“Working on a Sunday?”
Quibble slid his glasses back onto his nose and indicated the boxes stacked beside his desk. “Always something to keep me busy,” he said. “Alice is working on one of the family portraits upstairs and I had another couple of students cataloguing the old nursery upstairs but they’ve been sent home. What can I help you with?”
“I’d like to take you up on that offer of a guided tour of the electrics but, if this isn’t a convenient time…?”
Dave nodded sagely.
“You want to know why the lights went out last night, eh?”
Ryan inclined his head.
“That’s easy enough,” Dave said, tapping a few keys to save his work. “How much do you know about electrical circuitry?”
“Perhaps the question should be, ‘How much do I know about nineteenth-century electrical circuitry?’ In which case, my answer would be, ‘Not much’.”
Quibble laughed and drew himself up.
“Alright, let’s start from the top.”
Ryan could already feel the beginnings of a headache.
*
Twenty minutes later, Ryan found himself looking at what could only be described as a giant, fifty-foot corkscrew. A short stroll downhill from the house had taken them along a winding driveway flanked by Douglas firs, conifers and thick rhododendrons until Quibble stopped beside a stone bridge. He pointed toward an enormous turbine leading down to a narrow river which snaked through the trees.
“It’s an inverse Archimedes screw,” Dave raised his voice above the sound of the water bubbling furiously below.
“How does it work?” Ryan rested his forearms on the edge of the bridge and watched the machine in action. A swathe of mist covered his face in a fine sheen of moisture.
“Well, normally, an Archimedes screw pumps low-lying water upward but, in this case, we’re taking water from higher ground and forcing it downward,” Dave bobbed his head toward an expanse of water on the other side of the bridge. “Water from Tumbleton Lake feeds through the screw at the top and the weight of it forces the blades to turn, which allows the water to fall to the bottom and the screw rotates.”
Ryan nodded, watching the powerful blades undulating in rhythmic motion as the water made its journey through the turbine.
“Then what?”
“The energy produced by the rotational action is harnessed in an electrical generator that’s connected to the main turbine shaft.”
“How much energy are we talking about here?”
They turned away from the bridge and began to walk back toward the house, while Dave removed his glasses and rubbed the lenses against the edge of his jacket to clear them of condensation.
“If Cragside were your average house, the energy produced by that screw would be enough to power it for more than a year. That’s because the average house only has around twenty light bulbs, whereas Cragside has over three hundred.”
Ryan looked up at the mansion and stood still for a moment, considering.