Annie breathed in the air. It was another beautiful day, fragrant and mild. DC Wilson stood waiting for instructions, hands in his pockets, and Annie turned to the house. It was an impressive sight: a walled garden with a black wrought-iron gate surrounded the gabled mansion built of local limestone, with large mullioned windows and ivy and clematis climbing up the walls.
A short gravel drive led from the gate to the front door. Just to the right stood an old coach house, the lower half of which had been converted into a garage. The double doors were open, and inside was an extremely sleek, beautiful and expensive silver Jaguar. There would be plenty of room to hide Hardcastle’s old Toyota in there, too, Annie thought. It wasn’t the kind of car the neighbors would appreciate seeing parked on their street, though the houses were generally far enough apart here, and separated by high walls and broad lawns, that the people who lived in them need have as little to do with one another as possible.
So Mark Hardcastle hadn’t only got lucky in love; he had also found himself a rich boyfriend into the bargain. Annie wondered how much that had mattered to him. It was a long journey for the son of a Barnsley coal miner, and it made Annie feel even more intrigued to meet the mysterious Laurence Silbert.
Annie banged the brass lion’s head-knocker on the front door. The sound echoed throughout the entire neighborhood, quiet but for the sounds of traffic from the town below and the twittering of birds in the trees. But from inside there was nothing. She knocked again. Still nothing. She turned the handle. The door was locked.
“Shall we try round the back, guv?” asked Wilson.
Annie peered in through the front windows but could see only dim, empty rooms. “Might as well,” she said.
The path led between the coach house and the main building into a spacious back garden complete with hedges, a well-kept lawn, wooden garden shed, flower beds and a winding stone path. On their way, Annie put her hand on the Jaguar’s bonnet. Cool. In the garden, a white metal table and four chairs stood under the shade of a sycamore.
“Seems like everyone’s away, doesn’t it?” said Wilson. “Perhaps this Silbert bloke’s on holiday?”
“But his car’s in the garage,” Annie reminded him.
“Maybe he’s got more than one? Bloke this rich... Range Rover or something? Visiting his country estates?”
Wilson had imagination; Annie had to grant him that. There was a spacious conservatory attached to the back of the house, complete with rough whitewashed walls and rustic wooden table and chairs. She tried the door and found that it was open. A small pile of newspapers lay on the table, dated last Sunday.
The door that led through to the main house was locked, however, so she knocked and called out Silbert’s name. Her attempts were met with nothing but a silence that made the hairs at the back of her neck stand on end. Something was wrong; she knew it. Could she justify breaking in without a warrant? She thought so. A man had been found dead, and a letter in his possession clearly linked him to this address.
Annie wrapped her hand in one of the newspapers and punched out the pane of glass directly above the area of the lock. She was in luck. Inside was a large key that opened the dead bolt when she turned it. They were in.
The interior of the house was gloomy and cool after the bright, warm conservatory, but as her vision adjusted and she found herself in the living room, Annie noticed that it was cheerfully enough decorated, with vibrant modern paintings on the walls—Chagall and Kandinsky prints—and light, airy colors, paint and wallpaper. It just didn’t get much light downstairs. The room was empty except for a three-piece suite, a black grand piano and a series of bookcases built into the walls, mostly holding old leather-bound volumes.
They walked through to the kitchen, which was state-of-the-art— all gleaming white tiles, brushed steel surfaces and every utensil a master chef would ever need. Everything was spotless. The cooking area itself was separated from the dining room by a long island. Clearly, Hardcastle and Silbert liked to entertain at home, and one of them, at least, probably enjoyed cooking.
A broad carpeted staircase with gleaming banisters and wainscoting led from the hallway upstairs. As they walked up, every once in a while Annie called out Silbert’s name in case he was somewhere else in the house where he hadn’t been able to hear them earlier, but she was still met with that same chill and eerie silence. The dark-patterned carpet on the landing was thick, and their feet made no noise as they padded around, checking the rooms.
It was behind the third door that they found Laurence Silbert.
Fortunately, they didn’t have to do anything more than stand at the threshold to see the body that lay spread-eagled on the sheepskin rug in front of the hearth. Silbert—or at least Annie assumed it was Silbert—lay on his back on the rug, arms spread out, making the shape of a cross. His head had been beaten to a pulp, and a dark halo of blood had soaked into the sheepskin around it. He was wearing tan chinos and a shirt that had once been white but was now mostly dark red. The area between his legs was also bloody, whether from cuts or overspill from the head injuries, Annie couldn’t tell.
She managed to drag her eyes away from the body and look around the room. Like the rest of the house, the upstairs drawing room, complete with Adam fireplace, was a strange mix of the antique and the contemporary. A framed picture that reminded Annie very much of Jackson Pollock hung over the empty fireplace. Maybe it was a Jackson Pollock. Sunlight poured in through the high sash windows, lighting the Persian carpets, antique desk and a brown leather-upholstered settee.
Annie became vaguely aware of Wilson’s grunt and the sound of him being sick on the landing before he managed to get to the bathroom.
Pale and trembling, she shut the door and reached for her mobile. First she rang Detective Superintendent Gervaise at home and explained the situation. It wasn’t that Annie didn’t know what to do, but something big like this, you let the boss know immediately, or things have a nasty habit of coming back at you. As expected, Gervaise said she would call in the SOCOs, photographer, police surgeon, then she said, “And, DI Cabbot?”
“Yes?”
“I think it’s time we called DCI Banks back. I know he’s supposed to be on holiday, but things could get very messy up here, and this is the Heights. We need to be seen to have a senior and experienced officer in charge. No criticism implied.”
“None taken, ma’am,” said Annie, who felt she could handle the situation perfectly well with Winsome and Doug Wilson. “As you wish.”
As she leaned against the wall watching an ashen Wilson sitting on the stairs with his head in his hands and picked Banks’s mobile number from her BlackBerry’s address book, Annie thought this would certainly put the kibosh on Banks’s Saturday-morning shag. Then she chastised herself for having such evil thoughts and pressed the call button.
Alan Banks stretched and almost purred as he reached for the lukewarm cup of tea on the bedside table. The sun was shining, the glorious morning warmth rolling in through the slightly open window, the net curtains fluttering. Tinariwen were singing “Cler Achel” on the alarm clock’s iPod Dock, electric guitar weaving in and out of the Bo Diddley-style riff, and all was well with the world. The little semicircle of stained glass above the main window filtered the light red and green and gold. The first time Banks had woken up in that room he had had a bad hangover, and for a moment he had felt as if he had died and woken up in heaven.
Sophia had had to go to work, unfortunately, but just for the morning. Banks was due to meet her outside Western House and go for lunch at a little pub they liked, the Yorkshire Grey, off Great Portland Street. That evening, they were hosting a dinner party, and they would spend the afternoon shopping for ingredients at one of her favorite farmers’ markets, probably Notting Hill. Banks knew how it worked. He had been with Sophia on previous occasions, and he loved to watch her choosing strangely shaped and oddly colored fruits or vegetables, an expression of pure childlike wonder and concentration on her face as she weighed them in her hands and felt their firmness and the texture of their skin, tongue nipped gently between her teeth. She would chat with the stall owners, ask them questions, and she always walked away with more than she intended to buy.