There was a pause. ‘Geoffrey, is that you?’ Eleanor sounded hesitant.
‘Oh God. I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘I should hope so,’ she said with slight admonishment. ‘I called because I have some good news for you.’
I could do with some.
‘I’ve found a copy of the photo of Millie with the foal.’
CHAPTER 13
It took the emergency plumbers forty-five minutes to arrive at Ranelagh Avenue, by which time not only had the ceiling in my sitting room collapsed but also two ceilings below. I know because I heard about it at full volume from my neighbours when they arrived home at five past nine. It was a shame, I thought, that they had decided not to eat out. They wouldn’t be able to produce much of a dinner in the flood. Only when they came upstairs and saw the state of my place did they understand that it hadn’t been a simple thing like leaving a tap running or overflowing a bath.
The police showed up at least an hour after the plumbers had successfully capped off the broken pipe and departed. Two uniformed officers arrived in a patrol car and wandered through the mess, shaking their heads and denigrating the youth of today under their breath.
‘Do you have any idea who may have done this?’ they asked me.
I shook my head. Somehow not actually speaking seemed to reduce the lie. Why didn’t I just tell them that I knew exactly who had done it. It had been Julian Trent and I could probably find his address, or, at least, that of his parents.
But I also knew that Julian Trent was far from stupid, and that he would not have been careless enough to have left any fingerprints or other incriminating evidence in my house, and that he would have half of London lined up to swear that he was nowhere near Barnes at any time during this day. If he could get himself off an attempted murder rap, I had no doubts that he would easily escape a charge of malicious damage to property. To have told the police the truth would simply have given him an additional reason to come back for another dose of destruction – of me, of my father, or, as I feared most, of Eleanor.
The police spent some time going all round my house both outside and in.
‘Whoever did this probably got in through that window,’ one of the policemen said, pointing at the now-broken glass in my utility room. ‘He must have climbed the drainpipe.’
I had changed the locks and bolstered my security on the front door after the time I’d had an unwanted guest with his camera. I now wished I had put in an alarm as well.
‘Is there anything missing?’ asked one of the policemen finally.
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem so. It’s just all broken or slashed.’
‘Mmm,’ said the policeman. ‘Mindless vandalism. Happens all the time, sadly. You should be grateful that the whole place isn’t also smeared with shit.’
‘Oh thanks,’ I said rather sarcastically. But Julian Trent wouldn’t have done that for fear of leaving some speck of his own DNA along with it. ‘So what happens now?’ I asked them.
‘If nothing’s been stolen then CID won’t really be interested,’ he sounded bored himself. ‘If you call Richmond police station in the morning they will give you a crime number. You’ll need that for your insurers.’
That’s why I had called them in the first place.
And with that, they left. No photos, no tests, no search for fingerprints, nothing. As they said, no one was hurt and nothing had been stolen, and the insurance would deal with the rest. End of their problem. They had no hope or expectation of ever catching the person responsible, and, to be fair, I hadn’t exactly been very helpful with their inquiries.
I sat on a chrome kitchen stool and surveyed my ruined castle.
Surprisingly the electrical system seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the cascade of water through the sitting-room light fitting. I had quite expected there to be a blue flash followed by darkness when I chanced turning on the switch, but instead I was rewarded with two bulbs coming on brightly. The remaining bulbs, those in the wall brackets, had received the baseball bat treatment. At least, I assumed that Trent had been accompanied by his weapon of choice. The damage to some of the fittings was too much to have been the result of only a kick or a punch. Even the marble worktops in the kitchen were now cracked right through. Young Julian clearly had considerable prowess in the swing of his bat.
Eleanor arrived at just before ten. She had been so distressed to hear me on the telephone describing the shambles that was now my home that she had driven up from Lambourn as soon as she could. She had only been back there an hour, having caught the train from London to Newbury at the end of the veterinary symposium.
I hobbled down the stairs to the front door to let her in and we stood in the hallway and hugged. I kissed her briefly with closed lips. It was a start.
She was absolutely horrified at the damage and I was pleased that she cared. For me, over the past couple of hours since I had first discovered it, I had grown somehow accustomed to the mess, anaesthetized by its familiarity. Seen through a fresh pair of eyes, the true scale of the devastation was indeed shocking.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my stuff – I cared a lot. It was just that the loss of everything fitted in quite well with the feeling I had of moving on, of starting again. Perhaps it might even make things easier.
‘Have you called the police?’ she asked.
‘They’ve just left,’ I said. ‘They didn’t hold out much hope of catching whoever did this.’
‘But Geoffrey,’ she said seriously. ‘This isn’t some random attack by an opportunistic vandal. This was targeted directly at you personally.’ She paused and fingered a tear in my sofa. ‘You must have some idea who did this.’
I said nothing. It was answer enough.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
We sat amid the wreckage of my home for two hours while I told her what I knew about Julian Trent and his apparent connection with the murder of Scot Barlow. I told her how I shouldn’t be acting in this case and how I had withheld information from the police and from my colleagues. I told her about Josef Hughes and George Barnett. And I told her about seeing Trent standing behind her at Cheltenham races before the Fox-hunter Chase. I showed her the photograph I had received in the white envelope showing her walking down the path near the hospital in Lambourn. I had kept it in the pocket of the jacket I’d been wearing, and it had consequently survived the demolition.
She held the photograph in slightly shaking hands and went quite pale.
I dug around in the kitchen and finally found a pair of unbroken plastic mugs and a bottle of mineral water from the fridge.
‘I’d rather have some wine,’ Eleanor said.
My designer chrome wine rack, along with its dozen bottles of expensive claret that a client had given me as a gift for getting him off a drink-driving charge of which he had really been guilty, lay smashed and mangled, a red stain spreading inexorably across the mushroom-coloured rug that lay in my hallway.
I went back to the fridge and discovered an unbroken bottle of champagne nestling in a door rack. So we sat on my ruined sofa next to the damp ceiling plaster and amongst the other carnage, and drank vintage Veuve Clicquot out of plastic mugs. How romantic was that?
‘But why didn’t you tell me about this photo sooner?’ she asked accusingly. ‘I might have been in danger.’
‘I don’t believe you are in real danger as long as Trent, or whoever is behind him, still thinks I will do as they say. It’s the threat of danger that’s their hold.’
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Eleanor asked. ‘How can you defeat this Trent man? Surely you have to go to the police and tell them.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said inadequately.
‘Darling,’ she said, using the term for the first time, and raising my eyebrows. ‘You absolutely have to go to the authorities and explain everything to them. Let them deal with the little horror.’