“Yes.” Ryan was happy to get straight down to business. “That door takes you through the basement and up to the kitchen. The fuse box is in the corridor running beside it.”
Faulkner raised his professional camera and took a series of photographs. Lowering it again, he nodded toward the stone staircase cut into the exterior wall.
“You think he took these stairs all the way down from the drawing room on the mezzanine floor, intending to use the back door to the basement and re-enter the house to access the fuse box—isn’t that a bit of a circuitous route?”
Ryan had already considered that and shook his head.
“No, I’d say it’s just as quick to take either route. Quicker this way, perhaps, because the servants’ stairs were designed to connect with this part of the house.”
Faulkner scratched the side of his head, joggling the cap he wore.
“What if the doors were locked?”
“Victor was Lionel Gilbert’s personal valet, so it’s highly likely he had a set of keys. Besides, the door was unlocked when I found his body. I used it myself,” Ryan added.
“I can’t believe people still have valets, these days,” Phillips muttered and both men swung around to look at him. “I’m just saying, it’s a bit of an outdated profession.”
“Everybody has to earn a crust somehow,” Faulkner retorted, hunkering down to tap Victor’s pockets with gentle fingers until he heard the jingle of keys. His nose wrinkled at the sight of the dead man’s face, which was a bloodied mess of flesh and bone, and he wondered if he would have been better off as a gentleman’s valet rather than a crime scene investigator.
“What are your impressions?” Ryan folded his arms across his chest to stave off the cold wind whipping through the archway leading from the courtyard.
“As soon as the ambulance gets here and the doc makes his formal pronouncement of life extinct, we’ll transport the body across to the mortuary and see what the pathologist says. But I can’t see any obvious signs of interference,” Faulkner replied. “No injuries that look to have been caused by a man-made implement. There’s no evidence of blood spatter around the body itself indicative of blunt force, only a bit on the stairwell.”
“You think he fell all the way down those stairs?”
Phillips cast a sympathetic eye over Victor’s shrivelled body and then up at the narrow stone steps.
“It’s likely,” Faulkner agreed. “The initial impact probably gave him that gash on his head and a secondary impact broke his spinal cord at the base of his neck. He probably had a couple of drinks at the party and lost his footing. Terrible bad luck, I would say.”
Ryan waited a beat, then asked the burning question.
“Is it possible he was pushed?”
Faulkner shrugged and the plastic suit rustled across his shoulders.
“Anything’s possible.”
*
While two young police constables grappled with a group of over-tired and inebriated party guests, one person stole away from the crowd and moved quickly through the hallways of Cragside house toward the staff room on the ground floor. Ryan or his flat-footed sergeant could re-enter the house at any moment and demand to know what they were doing, which made it a very risky excursion. Unfortunately, needs must.
Pausing every now and then to check they were alone, the figure scurried through to an anteroom just off the main entrance, converted into a common space for the staff to use.
The room was lit well enough thanks to a powerful beam shining through the windows from the courtyard outside. A quick glance confirmed that Ryan and Phillips were deep in conversation with a CSI, who had rigged up a kind of freestanding film light.
There was time.
Heart racing, the figure scurried across the room to the long bank of lockers belonging to Cragside staff members. It took very little force to break into the one at the end of the row and even less time to stuff its contents into a plastic bag. It would take another few minutes to hide it but that was factored into the risk.
The figure slipped away, just as silently as it had come.
CHAPTER 3
While Ryan and Phillips debated whether Victor’s death should be classified as ‘suspicious’, Detective Inspector Denise MacKenzie fought her way through a violent nightmare. Her lungs laboured as she struggled to regain control of her breathing and her eyes darted around the bedroom, her pupils wide and unfocused. She managed to push herself upright and was stupidly grateful to find that Frank had left the bedside light on.
She raised shaking fingers to her forehead and pushed back a tangle of damp red hair, fighting the urge to crumble. Her eyes stung with unshed tears but she bore down, digging instead for the rage that festered in her gut.
No more tears.
She looked down at her hands and was unsurprised to find a line of small purple semi-circles dug into the palms where her nails had formed tight fists.
MacKenzie swung her legs off the bed and felt the familiar tenderness in her ankle. It had been four months and she knew the breakage had fully healed, as had the torn ligaments, but there was a persistent ache she didn’t need any psychiatrist to tell her was wholly psychosomatic. Her leg bore an angry pink scar where The Hacker’s knife had sliced through the muscle, missing a major artery by millimetres. Two fractured ribs had also healed and she could breathe freely again. All in all, she considered herself fortunate to be alive.
But there were deeper wounds only she could see; wounds that might never heal.
She stumbled toward the en suite bathroom in Phillips’ house, smiling lopsidedly at the fluffy pink bath mats and matching towels he’d bought to make her feel at home.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d never liked pink.
Her mind skittered back to another bathroom in an abandoned farmhouse, to icy cold showers and ritual humiliation.
Anxiety made her chest tight and she gripped the edge of the sink, willing it to pass. She told herself to concentrate on simply letting the air in and out of her lungs but she was already starting to panic. Nausea followed next and she reached blindly for the bottle of beta-blockers she kept on the bathroom shelf, fumbling with the safety cap until she could stuff a couple of tablets into her mouth.
A few minutes later, the panic receded and she found she could breathe again. The black spots clouding her vision disappeared and she no longer felt like she was going to vomit.
But she didn’t feel better.
MacKenzie stared at herself in the mirror, at a once-attractive woman in her mid-forties with lank red hair and shadowed eyes. Her skin was almost translucent and she knew a lack of appetite had made her anaemic. Clothes that used to fit like a second skin now hung limply from her bones. Her lips trembled and all the anger and fear she bottled so carefully during the day erupted from her throat in one long, keening wail.
*