The Family Upstairs(30)

‘Miller, this is Dido, my colleague—’ She corrects herself: ‘My friend. Dido, this is Miller Roe.’

They shake hands and then all turn to face the house. Its windows glow golden in the light of the evening sun.

‘Libby Jones,’ says Dido, ‘good grief. You own an actual mansion.’

Libby smiles and turns to open the padlock. She feels no sense of ownership as they cluster together in the hallway, looking around themselves. She still expects the solicitor to appear, striding ahead of them authoritatively.

‘I see what you mean about all the wood,’ says Miller. ‘You know, this house used to be full of stuffed animal heads and hunting knives. Apparently there were actual thrones, just here …’ He indicates the spots on either side of the staircase. ‘His and hers,’ he adds wryly.

‘Who told you about the thrones?’ asks Dido.

‘Old friends of Henry and Martina, who used to come here for raucous dinner parties in the seventies and early eighties. When Henry and Martina were socialites. When their children were tiny. It was all very glamorous, apparently.’

‘So, all those old friends,’ Dido continues, ‘where were they when everything turned dark?’

‘Oh God, they weren’t proper friends. They were parents of the children’s friends at school, transient neighbours, cosmopolitan flotsam and jetsam. Nobody who really cared about them. Just people who remembered them.’

‘And their thrones,’ says Libby.

‘Yes.’ Miller smiles. ‘And their thrones.’

‘And what about extended family?’ Dido asks. ‘Where were they?’

‘Well, Henry had no family. He was an only child, both parents were dead. Martina’s father was estranged, her mother remarried and was living in Germany with a second family. Apparently she kept trying to come over and Martina kept putting her off. She even sent one of her sons over, in 1992; he came and knocked at the door every day for five days and nobody ever replied. He said he heard noises, saw curtains moving. The phone line rang dead. The mother was racked with guilt that she hadn’t tried harder to access her daughter. Never got over it. Can I …?’ He’s veering to the left, towards the kitchen.

Libby and Dido follow him.

‘So, this is where the children were taught,’ he says. ‘The drawers were full of paper and textbooks and exercise books.’

‘Who taught them?’

‘We don’t know. It wouldn’t have been Henry Lamb. He failed all his O levels and didn’t go into higher education. Martina didn’t have English as her first language, so it was unlikely to be her. So, one of the mystery “others”, we imagine. And most likely a woman.’

‘What happened to all the schoolbooks?’ Libby asks.

‘I have no idea,’ says Miller. ‘Maybe they’re still here?’

Libby looks at the big wooden table in the middle of the room with its two sets of drawers on each side. She holds in her breath and pulls them open in turn. The drawers are empty. She sighs.

‘Police evidence,’ says Miller. ‘They may well have destroyed them.’

‘What else did they take as police evidence?’ Dido asks.

‘The robes. Bedclothes. All the apothecarial stuff, the bottles and trays and what have you. Soap. Face cloths. Towels. Fibres, of course, that sort of thing. But really, there was nothing else. No art on the walls, no toys, no shoes.’

‘No shoes?’ Dido repeats.

Libby nods. It was one of the most shocking of all the details in Miller’s Guardian article. A house full of people and not one pair of shoes.

Dido glances around. ‘This kitchen’, she says, ‘would have been the absolute height of kitchen chic back in the seventies.’

‘Wouldn’t it just?’ agrees Miller. ‘Top of the range, too. Virtually everything that had been in the house – before they sold everything – was bought from Harrods. The archivist in their sales department let me see the sales invoices, going back to the date Henry bought the house. Appliances, beds, light shades, sofas, clothes, weekly flower deliveries, hair appointments, toiletries, towels, food, everything.’

‘Including my cot.’

‘Yes, including your cot. Which was bought, if I recall, in 1977, when young Henry was a newborn.’

‘So I was the third baby to sleep in it?’

‘Yes. I guess so.’

They head towards the small room at the front of the house and Dido says, ‘What’s your theory? What do you think happened here?’

‘In a nutshell? Strange people move in with wealthy family. Strange things happen and everyone dies, apart from some teenage children who are never heard of again. And of course, the baby. Serenity. And there was evidence that someone else lived here once. Someone who developed the herb garden. I spent an entire month tracking down every apothecary in the UK and abroad who might have been living in London at that time. Nothing. Not a trace.’

The room in which they stand is wood-panelled and wood-floored. There is a huge stone fireplace on the far wall and the remains of a mahogany bar on the other.

‘They found equipment in here,’ Miller says gravely. ‘The police thought it was torture equipment at first, but apparently it was homemade callisthenics equipment. The bodies of two of the suicide victims were found to be very lean and hyper-muscled. This was clearly the room where they exercised. Possibly to mitigate against the negative effects of never leaving the house. So again, I spent a month hunting down every teacher of callisthenics I could find, to see if anyone knew about this technique being used in Chelsea in the eighties and early nineties. Again – nothing.’ He sighs, and then turns suddenly to Libby. ‘Did you find the secret staircase? To the attic?’