The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(98)
The air was slightly better in here, but still not pleasant. Most of the aroma wafted up from the large double sink, filled to overflowing with unwashed pots and crockery. The table was strewn with rubbish: empty pizza boxes; Chinese takeaway cartons, beer cans and chocolate wrappers. A bowl in the middle of the table contained several pieces of fuzzy green fruit. It was a stark contrast to the spotless tidiness of Needy’s office back at the station.
‘This isn’t what I was expecting,’ Ritchie said. McLean could only agree.
They worked their way quickly and quietly through the downstairs rooms. Most looked like they’d not been used in years, shuttered up against the light and left to moulder gently away. Patches on the walls showed where the paintings McLean recalled from earlier visits had gone, and there was far too little furniture. The smell from the kitchen subsided the further they went into the house, to be replaced with the unmistakable reek of mildew. Flicking the lights on in the large drawing room to the front of the house, McLean saw black mould creeping down the walls from the ornate plaster cornicing; brown circle stains in the ceiling and powdery, flaking paint.
Upstairs was, if anything, worse than the ground floor. The roof was obviously in dire need of repair; in places the ceiling had collapsed altogether, leaving just bare laths and daylight peeking in from the attic above. The whole place had a feel of abandonment about it, as if nobody had lived there for years. And yet the key had been in the inside of the door. Needy’s car was out the back. The man himself had to be somewhere.
It was Ritchie who found the attic rooms, tucked up in the eaves at the back. The half-hidden staircase was narrow and bare wood, designed for the servants to reach their accommodation without upsetting their master. Most of the rooms were empty, damp-spotted and water stained. One had old trunks piled up in it, covered in dust and spider webs. And one was where Needy had grown his obsession.
An old pedestal desk sat in front of the dormer window, looking out across the narrow gap to the tree-lined bank and the ironworks. It was strewn with newspaper cuttings, spiral-bound notebooks filled with neat handwriting, loose paper covered in loping scrawl and crazy doodles. A well-worn copy of Jo Dalgliesh’s book was half buried under a stack of police files, and several more boxes from the archives were piled in a corner. But it was the walls that sent a chill down his spine.
Needham had blown up photographs of Anderson: from the trial; from his shop; even the mugshots taken when he was arrested. And there were other photographs too: the victims, pinned to every available surface, in a disturbing parody of the whiteboard in the CID room. On top of them were Post-it notes and larger sheets of paper, stuck up with yellowing sellotape and with cryptic messages scrawled on them. ‘How does he choose them?’ ‘Why under a bridge?’ ‘Where’s the book?’ and at least twenty that simply said ‘Why?’
‘How long’s he been doing this?’ Ritchie asked. McLean rummaged around the desk, picking up a notebook at random. Needham’s handwriting was hard to decipher but the front page was dated over two years earlier.
‘A long time.’ He put the book down, picked up what looked like a letter. The familiar logo of Carstairs Weddell, Solicitors and Notaries Public, caught his eye.
‘What you got there, sir?’ Ritchie craned her neck to see, so close he caught the faintest whiff of her perfume.
‘It’s a letter detailing the inheritance tax due on Needy’s dad’s estate. This house, basically. Seems he owes the Chancellor the thick end of a million quid.’
Ritchie let out an explosive breath. ‘Well, that’d tip me over the edge.’
‘Oh, I think that just sped his fall.’ McLean dropped the letter back onto the desk, looked around the room once more. ‘Needy went over a long time ago. We just never noticed.’
61
Back downstairs, McLean poked around the large hallway, trying to remember the old house from when he’d last visited it over ten years ago. He was fairly sure they’d covered all the rooms, but a place this big and this old had to have a basement. None of the doors so far had opened up onto stairs, and in the semi-darkness of the shuttered hall, it was almost impossible to make out any detail.
‘Have you got a torch, sergeant?’
A short interval, then a narrow beam of light in answer. Ritchie handed it over, and he played the torch over the area under the stairs, boxed in with more of the heavy panelling. Then he saw the turned wooden door handle and well-hidden keyhole. The door opened onto darkness, but as he peered carefully into the space, he could make out a faint glow at the bottom of a short flight of stone stairs. There was light down there somewhere.
‘Do you think we should wait for back-up, sir?’ Ritchie asked.
‘Probably.’ He set off down the stairs. They brought him to a vaulted corridor about six feet wide that appeared to run the length of the house. He killed the torch, and by the time his eyes had adjusted to the glow coming from one end, Ritchie had joined him. She was about to say something, but he lifted a finger to his lips. Straining his ears, he tried to make out any noise at all but there was nothing.
They crept along the corridor past a number of closed doors until they finally came to the end and the source of the light. More steps dropped further down, and at the bottom, a wide wooden door stood partly ajar. The light beyond it flickered, reflecting off a polished flagstone floor.