Dead Men's s Boots

I walked inside and stood in the entrance hall at the foot of a flight of stairs that bifurcated at first-floor level, breaking away to left and right like an architectural cluster bomb.

‘Anybody home?’ I called. And then ‘Covington?’ No answer.

Killing time, I looked at my surroundings in a ‘Who lives in a house like this?’ frame of mind. Someone with a shit-lot of money to spend, that was for sure. The hall was bigger than Ropey’s living room, and there was polished mahogany everywhere. Over my head hung a massive chandelier that was modern, asymmetrical and ugly as sin.

A noise sounded from somewhere near at hand, once and then again: a muffled scuffling, like rats behind the skirting boards. I followed it to a cupboard under the stairs with a three-quarter-height door: the sort of place where in a suburban semi you might hide the Hoover and the dustpan. In this stately pile, it was probably the servants’ quarters.

More scuffling. I opened the door and peered inside, for a moment seeing only a vertical stack of fuse boxes and some folding chairs. I smelled the acid reek of urine. Then I realised with a jolt that a pair of human eyes was peering out from behind the chairs: the cupboard was deeper than I thought and someone was sitting back there in the dark. An old man with a slightly dazed, more than slightly sleepy look to him.

He didn’t seem too alarmed at being found.

‘Hide,’ he said. His voice was thin and high, with a faint vibrato that sounded a little plaintive.

‘Right,’ I agreed.

Then the lined face opened up in a disconcerting grin that looked as though it belonged somewhere else entirely. ‘Hide and seek.’

A shiver went through me, but it came from a memory – John Gittings’s last days as relayed to me by Carla – rather than from this harmless old man’s crazy little game, which at least gave the seemingly oversized staff something to do.

The old guy seemed to need a long time to think that through, but eventually he said ‘Ye-e-es,’ drawing the sound out into a querulous bleat.

I moved the chairs and helped him to his feet, taking care not to make him move any faster than he was comfortable with.