Worthless Remains (25 page)

‘Wouldn't it be more like stealing from the past?'

‘Both. Which makes it worse.'

‘Okay, Socrates, let's go to work.' Tim looked about. ‘So, we have blackmailers, saboteurs, potheads and nighthawks all crawling about this place. Now I'd be inclined, if this was my place, to dig a hole, about twelve-foot deep, lightly cover it with Astroturf and see who drops in.'

‘You forgot the sharpened stakes at the bottom.'

‘They're optional. All right, since we're supposed to be kind to our fellow blaggers we'll give them their five minutes of fame on the telly instead. We have three cameras we can use for this, two with fairly good night vision. Is there any illumination here at night?'

‘None at all.'

‘Sky is clouding over. Is there a moon at the moment?' I nodded. ‘In that case we may get to see something or we may not. They're really designed to work in ambient light in cities. But we have one infrared. Nothing escapes infrared, night or day, rain or shine. As long as your night prowlers are flesh and blood, we'll see them. I'd say we get one camera looking up towards the house, one looking across the lawns towards the lake. What about the infrared?'

‘We'll have to take pot luck; there's no telling who will go where and do what to whom around here. Stick it in one of those sweet chestnuts and point it at the lower end of the lawn. The nighthawks aren't yet bold enough to dig holes right by the house.'

In order to make sure that the cameras remained a secret at least for one night we were going to install them in the dark. In the meantime I took Tim to see the invalided Annis only to find that she had recovered enough to return to the pool house. And she was painting at last. According to her, the purging of the food poisoning had inspired her. I was glad to see it had not inspired her choice of colours.

Stoneking was there on the opposite side of the pool, sipping a long drink and looking happily across the waters, though was less enthusiastic at seeing yet another new face approaching when I brought Tim to meet him.

‘Tim works for me sometimes,' I explained. ‘He's good with the electronic side of things. He'll help me set up some cameras outside to see if we can work out who is creeping around your gardens.'

‘Much obliged,' Stoneking said. ‘If you see anyone give me a shout and I'll give them a blast with my special anti-intruder cartridges.' Here he winked at me. ‘I'm just about sick of the whole palaver. I never thought it would get this hectic. But watching your girlfriend at work is quite the antidote, I could watch her for hours.'

‘So could we,' Tim said, ‘but it's getting dark. Let's get out there.'

The equipment came in an aluminium briefcase, complete with the rugged laptop they would be wirelessly sending their images to. I took Tim around the north side of the house, away from the terrace where a couple of people were still sitting and talking. The glowing tips of two cigarettes could be seen at the furthest end. We slipped past the shuttered catering van and the nests of gas bottles and vegetable crates it had spawned, then walked along the paved path that hugged the hedge which screened the greenhouse area. No one appeared to be near as I took Tim under the trees at the bottom. ‘I disturbed someone near here the other night. Perhaps this place is a good candidate for the infrared camera. Point it that-a-way.' I waved towards the dig.

‘As good a place as any. It's clouding over now; I can't see any stars. If we're unlucky we'll see bugger all.'

‘Shame they're not all infrared then.'

‘They all have their pros and cons. You might be able to clearly see the heat signature of a person but you might have trouble distinguishing between one person and another, except by shape. Especially with our camera, which is of course crap.'

‘Is it?' I asked, surprised. ‘Why did we buy a crap camera?'

‘Because it was all you could afford.'

‘Another mystery solved.'

There was no great mystery to the installation of any of the cameras either; they were so small that they were easily stuck into the crook of tree branches with a bit of putty. Getting them sited so they actually pointed in the right direction took a while longer. Tim was right about the night-vision cameras: when we tested them they showed mainly nothing. Anyone wearing dark clothing would be practically invisible. Where to site the laptop was the next question. It would be pointless sitting in the attic bedroom watching the screen, as it would take too long to get down into the grounds if I did see something. ‘How about some room on the ground floor?' Tim asked.

‘It could easily give the game away if someone from the house saw me. People do ghost about at night.'

The first raindrops were falling. ‘Looks like you'll be up a tree under a brollie then, doesn't it?'

‘I don't think so somehow.' I shut the laptop and made off with it towards the house.

The engine of the DS 21 is wonderfully quiet. I drove slowly across the grass without headlights to the extreme south side of the lawn and stopped near the mini digger. The car being black, it was virtually invisible from twenty paces away. Tim had no intention of spending the night in the car and went back to keep Annis company while I sprawled on the rear seats with the laptop open, staring at the feed on a split-screen display. If anything moved in any of them I could go to full screen for a better look. I had of course chosen the worst possible night for my vigil. It was pitch dark out there and was now raining in a half-hearted sort of way. If I were up to no good, would I choose to go out on a night like this? Which brought me to another question: never mind the weather, why do it now at all? Nighthawks went scavenging on archaeological sites because they wanted to get at valuables before the archaeologists did. But this
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dig was very limited in scale and would be over in a few days. It would be much safer to wait until the hordes of people had left and sneak into the grounds then. Why the rush? What also intrigued me was the sloppiness of the nighthawks. They appeared to dig holes and then leave valuable coins behind, which would be difficult to miss with a metal detector in your hand.

Pitch black. Lazy rain. Blank screen. The occasional hum from the laptop fan. Stomach growl. Jaw-splitting yawn. Midnight. I had no flask of coffee to keep me company – bad planning on my part – and should have insisted that either Tim or Annis took turns at this. A whole night of staring at that laptop would render me completely useless the next day. More yawns. I was bored again and this time I knew for certain there were only antacid tablets to keep me amused.

Another few minutes and my brain was screaming for me to do something, anything, to keep it from turning to jelly. Surely a brain like mine could amuse itself? After all, it was full of stuff. Decades of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Things I knew, things I had seen, people I had known, memories of where I had been, memorable journeys, memorable meals . . . My stomach growled again; it was as bored as my brain. I gave in. I set the programme to record. If something happened during the short time I was inside that was just tough, at least I might have it recorded on the computer. I dashed through the rain to the hall and let myself in.

The house lay silent. I climbed up the stairs. Tim's car was still here so perhaps I could bribe him to do a stint at the laptop and if Annis was well enough to paint she could jolly well do an hour of watching the laptop screen. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable request. Only I never got to make it. Up in the attic I opened the bedroom door. The room was dark. Through the open door the light from the corridor fell across their sleeping forms. The sheets were a tangled mass near the bottom of the bed. Annis's red hair sprawled over Tim's broad chest, one of her hands resting on his shoulder. Sweat still beaded down her narrow back. The room smelled darkly of sex and wine. Tim stirred, disturbed by the light. I gently closed the door again on Tim and his half of the girl.

Okay . . . coffee, then, I supposed. In the yawningly empty kitchen I shoved the kettle on the stove, furtled about for coffee and found a large jar of it. Beans, naturally; Annis would have approved. Even though here in the north tower I was far from the posh living quarters, the sound of the grinder made me cringe as it seemed to tear the silence apart. I caught the kettle before it started whistling and splashed water into the cafetière. Then on a whim, while I waited for the coffee to settle, I opened the little door next to the pantry. There was that narrow stone staircase, leading up, leading down. I imagined a well-stocked wine cellar below but couldn't quite imagine what I would find if I went the other way. A faint draught came up or down the steps, hard to tell which, and a smell reminiscent of empty churches. Then, far away and from upstairs came footsteps, slow at first, then speeding up. Quickly I closed the door. Now what? I grabbed the cafetière, ran to the light switch, flicked it off, skidded back past the little door and dived into the pantry and shut myself in. Didn't spill a drop. Almost immediately I heard the door to the staircase open and close. Holding my breath I quietly lifted the latch on the pantry door and opened it a crack. All I could see was the distorted shadow of a person moving towards the light coming from the corridor, then it was gone. Back in the kitchen I poured myself a mug from the cafetière, then opened the little door again. All was quiet now. On the third step up lay a light bulb and next to it stood a little rubberized torch that hadn't been there a minute ago; tied to the handle with a red ribbon was a two-foot length of garden cane. Idly I picked up the torch and flicked it on. It bathed the stairs in a filigree web of diffused green light. Eerie green glow, indeed.

I sighed. There was no time to run up and down spiral staircases now if I wanted to catch whoever was haunting the grounds at night. I topped up my mug and made my way through the rain to the car. Nothing showed on any of the three cameras; only the infrared images gave even a hint that it was raining. I reduced the size of the screens and stopped the recording, then played back the last twenty minutes at high speed. Nothing . . . nothing . . . there! Something had flickered through the infrared screen. This was more like it. I stopped, rewound and there it was, a badger waddling ghostly through the corner of the view. I let the recording run to the end but saw no more. Once more I concentrated on the three live screens. It was difficult, since there was only blackness to see and my mind kept drifting. The moon was out now as the rain lessened and the clouds broke up in the east but even so I could see precisely nothing on the screen. Then a movement made me look up. For a moment I thought I could see something through the car windscreen, a person moving across the lawn. I bent forwards for a better look and poured half a mug of coffee into the laptop. I panicked. Wasn't that one of the things you were not supposed to do to laptops? I turned it upside down so it could drain on to the spotless interior of my DS while I scrabbled around for something to mop up coffee with. Finding only one crumpled paper napkin that had come with a jam doughnut I started mopping, dabbing sugar crystals from the napkin on to the wet keyboard. ‘Would you like cream with that, Chris?' I asked myself.

The dabbing had the effect of launching half a dozen programs and dialogue boxes all over the screen. By the time I had restored a sticky kind of order to things and my three screens were back, the figure I had seen through the windscreen had disappeared. And then like magic it reappeared, there on the extreme left of the infrared screen. Was it the same figure or a different one? At the moment it was standing still. It appeared to be wearing a wide-brimmed hat à la Guy Middleton. The next moment two things happened: the figure that had been standing quite still made a sudden movement, then something dark interposed itself between camera and the person with the hat and a second later the figure was sprawled on the ground, not moving.

Another second and I was out of the car and running across the lawn into what felt like a pot of ink. I stopped, fumbled my Maglite from my pocket, then ran on by its dancing light past the spoil heap, the mosaic trench, the smaller trench and on towards the sweet chestnut trees. Then I found him. He was lying face down on the grass, not moving. In the light from my little torch it looked much worse than it had on the screen. Bright blood from his head wound mingled with the rainwater. His hat was lying nearby. I picked it up. It was Guy's, I should know; I had been wearing it the night before. I knelt down. My hand trembled as I felt around for a pulse at his bloodied neck. I felt here and there – where were you supposed to find it? And then I did.

Paul was still alive.

O
nce I knew ambulance and police were on their way I was nevertheless left with a dilemma. I needed to alert the house so that the gate might be opened but I also could not leave Paul lying injured in the rain. Whoever attacked him might come back and finish him off properly. Should I move him into the recovery position? Should you move people with head injuries at all? And what exactly did the recovery position look like? I covered him with my jacket to keep him warm.

I realized that I didn't have a single phone number to alert the
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team or the house. I called Annis on her mobile. ‘I found the cameraman badly injured and unconscious in the grounds. I've called for an ambulance. I need you to raise Carla so she can open the gates to let them in. I could also do with blankets and umbrellas and some lights would probably help as well.'

‘We're on our way.'

In my mind's eye I could see Annis, freckled and naked, next to Tim's hairy and athletic body, as they got dressed. It was the ‘we' in her response that, even in this crisis and after all these years of our strange little triangle of a relationship, managed to send a small sting of jealousy through me. I didn't have long to ponder it; lights came on all over the house, then Tim and Annis, soon followed by Stoneking, came running to where I stood waving my Maglite. They brought blankets and umbrellas and Stoneking carried a large yellow torch. We made Paul as dry and protected as was possible by putting an umbrella by his head and laying blankets over him. He hadn't stirred once or made a sound, which worried me.