The house was nailed to a sheet of hardboard streaked at the front with scraps of felt that speared between islands of dried glue. This was all that was left of the lawn that Mark Ramsay had accidentally destroyed. A detective verifying personal statements as fact, Chris also noted the missing dining room windowsill. It was all exactly as her Mum had described. Chris had never seriously believed such a house could exist. It was a toy within a toy, reducing her to a doll.
Finger-sized dolls dressed in clumps of velvet and cotton – the material stiffened with globules of glue – lay strewn in the rooms like victims of a gassing. There was one in the dining room and three on a bed in the room that had once been Gina’s. Only the lady doll had ‘died naturally’ and was covered with a blanket in the master bedroom that in real life overlooked the lawn with the willow tree.
Chris went through the house with forensic care. The miniature playroom had the same wallpaper as its life-size counterpart, which turned out to be eggshell blue with pink flowers clustered around dark leaves. This version of the playroom was furnished with only a cradle, three marbles – giant glass spheres – next to the fireplace and a set of crudely made books, each on a different alcove shelf. There was the same number of shelves as in real life. Chris was daunted by the acute replication; she almost expected to see a tiny version of herself. Then it came to her. There was no doll’s house in the tiny playroom. This Judge, who was meant to be so clever, had missed an opportunity.
Eleanor had said the doll’s house was a friend, tucked away at the top of the White House, far from her family. She had hated to leave it behind when she went back to London. Chris frowned as a gust of anger swept up her lost chances, the hours she might have spent here, the games she might have played in this room as a little girl herself. She despaired of ever losing the stomach-fizzing fury at Alice’s deception (she could not consistently think of her as Eleanor).
She didn’t notice swelling and fading of the noise as a door opened and closed two flights below and she jumped as a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway.
‘Kathleen was wondering where you were. She said to come and find you.’
Chris got up from the window seat and brushed herself down. ‘You found me.’
Her mother strode over to the other window and, cupping her hands to cut out the electric light, peered down into the night. She thumped on the bars:
‘These were put in by the Judge’s father in the nineteenth century, well over a hundred years ago.’ She gave the bars a sharp tug as if she might loosen them. ‘His eldest son fell out of this window and crashed down on to those flags when he was only seven.’
‘Did he die?’
‘Oh yes.’ She spoke with the satisfaction of someone who can’t be faulted on their facts, and added: ‘Not immediately.’
Chris went across to her. ‘Listen.’ She shook her arm. ‘I know you didn’t kill her.’
‘The swimming pool wasn’t there then, of course. That’s new.’
‘Did you hear me?’
‘You’re hurting me!’ Eleanor shrugged her off. ‘Just leave it, Chris.’
‘Why? Is that what you’d prefer?’
‘It’s too long ago.’
‘You don’t think you killed her and then forgot. There’s no way you’d be normal, well, quite normal. You’d be mad with guilt and unable to live with yourself or to face Kathleen. Or me.’
‘And you think I’m not.’
The fog thinned for a moment and Chris could just see the flagstones on the broad path along the edge of the lawn. It was a dizzying drop. She thought of the little boy pitching out and somersaulting to his death. ‘So you wanted to kill her. You’ve got imagination and reality mixed up.’
‘I hated her.’
‘Kathleen said there was a tramp. They found him drowned up the road from here…’
‘Stop it.’ Eleanor unscrewed the latch on the window and with all her strength pushed it up about six inches. They were shocked by freezing air and coughed as ribbons of fog drifted into the room, catching their throats. Eleanor squatted down and stuck her nose through the gap, holding on to the bars. The ground floor rooms cast a pale light over the grass. She could just make out Uncle Jack’s willow in the middle of the lawn where they used to have tea. It had grown to the size of a giant umbrella. She had never been clear as a child whether Uncle Jack was actually buried under it. She had not wanted to ask, because she would have been upset if he wasn’t. It had been fantastic to have tea on top of a real live corpse. Gina had remarked that they never sat under Uncle Jack’s tree after Eleanor stopped coming. She had said this to Eleanor like an acquaintance, polite and friendly, not as an admission of affection, it was just how it was once they built the pool.
‘There are no bars on the windows of the playroom in the doll’s house.’
‘What?’ Her mother was like a kid going off in all directions; this happened all the time now she was Eleanor and not Alice.
‘The Judge was anal about making an exact copy of the house. He got hold of the architect’s plans to get dimensions right, and took loads of photos. He drew quite good sketches. He made one mistake. He forgot the bars.’
‘Maybe they weren’t there then.’
‘I told you, they were put in after the Judge’s brother was killed, when he – the Judge – would have been about six. They were close in age. The bars were there.’
Knowing her mother was changing the subject, yet unable to resist verifying the accuracy of what she had said, Chris trooped obediently over to the doll’s house. There were no bars on any of the windows.
‘Dad pointed it out to the Judge; he thought it was the test. There was always a test to pass; everything had to be earned. Instead his father was furious and nearly hit him, Mum told us.’
‘He got cross over some stupid bars?’
‘They were evidence that the Judge wasn’t perfect. Strangely the Judge had made the same mistake as his parents when they turned this room into a playroom. He forgot the bars. Mum always said the missing bars in the doll’s house windows revealed that the Judge wanted his brother dead. He inherited everything including the house. When she wanted to wind Dad up, Mum only had to bring up the playroom bars. She’d say the Judge left them out as his confession of murder.’
‘That’s far fetched.’
‘Most murders are.’
Neither of them spoke.
‘I know who you’re protecting.’
Eleanor gave a hoarse laugh. ‘I don’t give a toss about the Judge.’
‘I’m going to find Alice.’
‘If Scotland Yard couldn’t, how can you?’
‘They didn’t know what to look for.’
Chris snatched a random paperback from one of the shelves and tapped it. ‘The clues are in here, or here, or here.’ She waved at the shelves. ‘Messages and answers are staring us in the face. We know about obvious clues like using plants, chemicals and insects to determine time of death and all that. But what about the other stuff that’s going on in people’s lives, that policemen with rigid ideas and closed minds would never think of? The questions they never asked and the places they never looked in because of their assumptions. Your Mum was right, the bars tell us a story all right. They are absent in the doll’s house for a reason.’