House of Small Shadows (4 page)

Catherine nodded. ‘I read that somewhere.’

‘Cut his own throat with a straight razor.’

‘God, no.’

Leonard sighed and shook his head. ‘Terrible. Hardly anything of his work has ever come up for auction, so beyond the dolls, I am very intrigued by what else Edith might have hidden in
that heap she lives in. Though after Mr Dore’s bizarre absence at the viewing, I’d hazard a guess that Edith Mason hasn’t changed her tactics one jot since our brief business.
I’m staggered she even remembers me.’

‘There was a lot of loot in that room.’

‘You think she should go bigger?’

‘What I saw will get on TV, Leonard. There’s enough for an exhibition. And if there are Mason pieces available too, well . . . Potter’s estate went for a million.’

‘And Potter wasn’t fit to tie M. H. Mason’s bootlaces. But we can handle it, Kitten. This firm once auctioned the contents of a castle.’

Catherine laughed. Leonard began to smile, too, and chuckle. ‘Oh, will you make the tea? Can’t you see I’m comfortable sitting down?’ Leonard slapped the armrests of his
wheelchair.

‘Stop it!’ She never wanted to laugh when he made jokes about his incapacity, and always felt guilty afterwards if she did.

‘Here,’ Leonard offered the letter from Edith Mason.

‘Nice paper.’

‘I know. She really shouldn’t be using stationery that valuable. She should let us sell it. That’s Crane paper with a high linen rag content. At least eighty years old. I know
a collector in Austria who’d have it off us like that.’ Leonard snapped two long fingers in the air beside his awful hairpiece. ‘But her handwriting’s not what it was. She
must be close to a letter from Her Majesty. And she’ll be madder than a mongoose by now, too. But I know you can handle her. You’ve got form, girl.’

‘I think I love my job.’

Leonard snorted in appreciation, then frowned. ‘Curious part of the world, though, Magbar Wood. I’ve been down there once or twice.’ He looked around the walls of the office.
‘Before I had this place. Even then it was the land that time forgot. Ever been? Didn’t you spend some time down that way?’

‘The Hell. Ellyll Fields. Yes. Part of my so-called childhood.’ Catherine thought of the service station and empty grey dual carriageways. ‘I went there, where I used to live.
After the viewing in Green Willow. It’s changed a lot. What I remember is gone. All of it. How did you know I was from there?’

‘You mentioned it once.’

‘Did I?’

‘Must have done. And the place has an unfortunate history. Kids went missing from a school there, before you were born I think.’

Not all of them.
Catherine busied herself with the tea things so Leonard wouldn’t see her face. Margaret Reid, Angela Prescott and Helen Teme: she could even remember their names.
Everyone in Ellyll Fields in the seventies was familiar with those small smiling faces, photographed in black and white. To an older generation they were close to icons in Ellyll Fields. Though
when Catherine was the same age the girls were when they went missing, they were icons fading on the newsprint that bore their remembered images. When her nan told her the story of the missing
girls who were never found, probably as a warning about strangers, she had shown Catherine her own yellowing cuttings that she kept in an old shortbread biscuit tin. Back in the day, only the local
nans still kept the horror alive in Ellyll Fields. No one else seemed keen on remembering the abductions. And once Catherine brought her curiosity about the three missing girls to her home, along
with the awful black danger she attributed as existing beyond their grainy likenesses, her father lost his temper with her nan for ‘filling her head with horrible things like that’.
When Alice Galloway went missing, not for the first time did Catherine attribute a great wisdom to her nan.

‘I hardly remember all that. We moved away when I was six. I had no idea Green Willow was close to Ellyll Fields. I only found out by looking on a map to find that guest house. I’ve
never been to Magbar Wood either. With the exception of a family holiday to the seaside I doubt I ever went further than a mile from our house. We were skint. My mum and dad never talk about that
time in their lives. Pretty sure they’ve never been back either.’

‘Ellyll Fields is between the two places. They’re still all aligned on a Roman road, despite town planners meddling with that whole area, in all kinds of ways. And they have been
doing so since before you came into this world, my girl. You know, I took you for a border girl the first time I laid eyes on you.’

‘Get away.’

‘It’s the fiery hair and green eyes with those astounding freckles. Even after Monmouth was shoved on the map, the valleys have always been full of beautiful girls with your
colouring. Like it or not, you are a classic example of a Dobunni maiden.’

‘A what?’

‘The tribe that was down there before the Romans. Raised merry hell.’

‘You’re old enough to know that? I never took you for a day over seventy-five.’

‘Steady. Don’t make me come over there. I could still reach you by lunchtime, and don’t you forget it, my girl.’

Laughing, Catherine came out of the kitchen with the tea things, but felt a couple of inches taller as she moved. Leonard had an eye for a strange beauty in the artefacts they valued and sold,
in the same way he noticed things about her. Little things she couldn’t possibly identify through the opaque fog that worrying about her weight often enshrouded her within. He made her feel
better about herself than she ever could, and more than any boyfriend had done too. It wasn’t that Leonard was incorrigible – he wasn’t. She always understood that he genuinely
admired her and was proud of her. Even protective. After her debacle in London, his gentle mentoring and grace had done far more for her than a course of antidepressants and a new therapist.

‘Well, I look forward to meeting the frightful Edith Mason on Friday.’

‘If you get past the housekeeper. It says in that letter that there is one of those too.’ Leonard grinned. ‘Never underestimate a housekeeper, Kitten.’

Uncomfortable with what she intuited as a scrutiny, by whomever had spoken from inside the Red House, Catherine pushed her voice inside like a shy child.
‘Hello?’

She peered around the door without touching it and blinked at the gloom to adjust her sight. Saw a narrow space with tall ceilings. A vestibule with walls papered in claret and patterned with a
geometric design that looked medieval. ‘Hello?’

All of the interior doors she could see were closed, one on her left, another one on the right-hand side of the passage. Probably cloak- and boot-rooms. The top panels of the closest doors were
made of red stained glass, as was the light shade above her head. It truly was a red house.

Framed pictures hung upon the walls near the doors, but she couldn’t see beyond the glimmers of protective glass. And she had no time to admire the red and black encaustic tiles of the
floor, all original and uncracked, because something squeaked like an old wheel that needed oil, somewhere higher up inside the building.

Squinting, Catherine realized that the end of the narrow reception opened into a wider area. With a clatter of heels against the tiles, she entered the Red House reception and crossed the
vestibule to peer into, but not enter, the hall. Her eyes found and followed four walls of an aged hardwood panelling, until her groping sight found a carved newel post at the foot of a steep
staircase on the left-hand side of the hall, with balustrades moving upwards like ribs.

Bones inside a crimson body.

‘I . . . It’s Catherine. Catherine Howard. From Osberne’s.’ Inside the hall her voice was flat, small, strengthless.

Dim reddish light fell from a distant skylight out of sight, and within the crimson haze Catherine made out a dark silhouette on the next floor. Seated in something lumpen. The top half of a
thin body and what resembled a long neck was leaning forward to see her, but remained half concealed behind a row of wooden balusters.

‘Had you used the house’s bell for its intended purpose, Maude would have greeted you. She is somewhere below.’ The voice may have been dried out by age, but the tone was sharp
enough to make her feel immediately diffident.

Catherine flinched at the rapid ring of a small handbell from where the voice had originated. ‘Shit.’ She hoped her own voice hadn’t carried through the thick air of the
hallway. Air that smelled of something chemical and pierced the odours of floor wax, varnished timber and mustiness that tried to smother it. The concealing odours reminded her of the barely
functioning antique shops and provincial museums she visited, but the sharp underlying scent was unfamiliar.

Her confusion and the dregs of drowsiness from the heat and pollen outside intensified in the stifling, almost lightless interior, enough to disorient her. She reached out and touched a
wall.

The indistinct figure upstairs regarded her in a silence that grew tense and heavy, like a strange gravity, one that oppressed Catherine so much she thought of herself as a nervous child before
a stern teacher in an ancient boarding school.

‘Maude will show you to the drawing room.’ At the same time the woman spoke, she drew back from the railings. Catherine made out a smudge too white to be a face, atop what must have
been some sort of chair. And what did she have on her head?
A hat?

The figure was wheeled backwards with an alarming suddenness. The squeak of the wheels and creak of the floorboards that the chair rolled across, carried off and away, above Catherine’s
head and out of sight.

And she was left alone, standing in the mouth of the hallway, not sure whether she was suffering from her usual social bafflement, or whether fear made her reluctant to take another step inside
the Red House. Which glowered all around her, sullen but observant, staring directly at her with a barely restrained hostility.

The sharp peal of the handbell had provoked a reaction from deep inside the crimson tunnel that began at the front door, crossed the square wood-panelled hall, and continued to what must have
been the back of the large building. Muffled footsteps approached from out of the distant darkness. A shuffle that drew closer, suggesting someone old with restricted mobility was feeling their way
towards her.

Despite her existing discomfort, she felt a fresh aversion to greeting whoever was on their way to meet her, from
somewhere below.
This Maude, she presumed.

The natural light available had either followed Catherine through the front door, or fell blood-misty from the skylight above the stairwell. And this hem of vague luminance soon revealed a white
shape approaching through the lower passageway. A form seemingly suspended above the ground, with no limbs, jerking itself towards the hall.

Before her confusion could become fear, a portly figure materialized wearing a brilliant-white apron, which in the half-light she’d momentarily taken for a ghost. It was a woman, with a
curved bonnet of hair bobbing from side to side atop a squat body that moved with difficulty. As the housekeeper struggled into the hall and was better lit, Catherine’s scrutiny of her turned
into gaping.

Every trace of the feminine had been worn from the lined skin of the round face confronting her. And Catherine couldn’t recall ever seeing a face so grim, the kind of face that appeared
behind wire during wars that were photographed in black and white. The woman’s hair, as white as a lamb’s fleece, looked as if she had cut it herself around the rim of a bowl with a
knife and fork. The apron was pressed out by her hips, belly and bosom, all of which were large. Mannish lace-up boots peeked beneath the stiff hem of a gown. At the other end a high collar
disappeared under the woman’s jowls.

Faded eyes beneath unkempt eyebrows fixed upon Catherine, though the woman did not speak. Her expression was utterly humourless, alive with irritation and what looked like disapproval.

Catherine smiled and cleared her throat. ‘I’m Catherine. Catherine Howard.’ She walked into the hall and extended her hand.

The curious figure turned and waddled to the foot of the stairs and began to climb without a word or backward glance.

She watched the woman’s wheezy ascent. The back of what she thought was a gown was actually a high-waisted skirt that dropped to a pair of thick ankles. An undecorated blouse,
criss-crossed with apron strings, was separated from the skirt by a thick leather belt. Both the skirt and blouse were tailored from an unappealing grey material as coarse as sailcloth, and the
cuffs of the puffy sleeves were stained. The clothes resembled those worn by nineteenth-century factory workers, which made Catherine wonder if an eccentricity, long cultivated in rural isolation,
because the Red House was as remote as any house could be on the Welsh border, had now become something less charming. She’d seen plenty of decline before, but never like this. Trailing from
the mute housekeeper came the acrid scent she noticed in the reception.

Halfway to the first floor the housekeeper paused, turned her pale face to Catherine and watched her in silence, waiting for her to follow. Which Catherine hesitatingly did, climbing into the
vaulted wooden interior as though she was inside a strange church tower, its walls ancient and oaken. There were two storeys above her and she could see balusters around their edges. A great
skylight of stained glass angrily watched over the stairwell.

‘Maude?’ she asked. The woman said nothing and continued up, into the Red House.

They arrived at the bottom corner of an L-shaped corridor on the first floor, also poorly lit. All of the interior doors were closed, which kept the light out, and the house upstairs remained
silent and rigid with a tension that registered as a pressure against Catherine’s thoughts.

Amidst the fragrance of polished wood and the inescapable staleness of old furnishings, a blend of jasmine, rose and lavender endured as a trace of the house’s owner, who Catherine must
have just seen wheeled along this passage. Perhaps returned to one of these rooms by the child she had seen from outside, looking through the window. Catherine thought of the doll sat in her lap at
the Flintshire Guest House. Same perfume.