Free Footsteps on the Shore by Pauline Rowson Page B

many, like Cantelli, no time would ever be enough.
    He pushed open a door to his right and stepped into a spacious modern kitchen with gleaming white cabinets, a tan-coloured tiled floor, and a large modern range. Cantelli shivered. Horton placed his hand on the radiator. ‘Stone cold.’ It felt as though the house had been shut up for a long time.
    ‘There’s a central heating clock here,’ Cantelli said, peering at a device under a wall-mounted gas boiler. ‘It’s not set on a timer. Perhaps she switched the heating off on the first of March. Spring and all that, according to the Met Office,’ he added, opening cupboards. ‘Don’t think Charlotte would agree with that. Spring to her begins on the first of May at the earliest. She was very tidy, your Mrs Trotman. I don’t think a child has ever graced this house, leastways not like any of my five.’
    Horton agreed. There were no kitchen implements on display, no letters propped up on the work surface and no pin board with reminders and important telephone numbers on it. He found the dishwasher empty. Ditto the washing machine. He sniffed. ‘Disinfectant and furniture polish. Someone’s done a thorough cleaning job.’
    ‘Not your average toerag burglar then,’ Cantelli replied, opening the fridge. ‘Perhaps Mrs Trotman was very house proud. She didn’t eat much. No milk, butter or eggs, just some cheese and a yoghurt. And there’s hardly anything in the food cupboards. Judging by this,’ he added, waving his arm around the clinically neat kitchen, ‘it looks as though she was obsessed with cleanliness.’
    Perhaps she was, thought Horton, heading for the hall, which was also spotlessly clean. No muddy footprints on the pale blue carpet, or dirty fingerprints or worse smeared on the cream-painted walls. But why so little food? Maybe she’d intended going shopping that day.
    Beyond the front door was a half-glazed porch. Horton looked for the red and blue sailing jacket hanging there but didn’t see it, which meant it had to be on the yacht or upstairs.
    Cantelli took the room to the left while Horton entered the one on his right, clearly the sitting room. Everything seemed to be in place. The television set was the latest model and the russet-coloured leather furniture was modern and of good quality, placed on an immaculately kept parquet floor with a large tiger-skin rug underneath an ancient low coffee table devoid of magazines and containing only an empty earthenware bowl. The Adam style fireplace boasted a wood-burning stove of the instant gas variety, and a gilt-edged mirror above it, but that was the only item on the pale-painted walls apart from some uplighters. There were no bookshelves, no photographs, no letters and no dust.
    Heavy red curtains draped the ancient windows, which gave on to a front garden and a tall hedge, with evergreen trees hiding the house from the narrow lane beyond. It didn’t look to Horton as though anyone had ever sat in the room, let alone lived in it, and for a moment he found himself wondering how it might have looked when first built and furnished by the original occupant, who might have been attached to the castle close by. Although no connoisseur of period design, staring around him he couldn’t help feeling as though the heart had been ripped out of this house.
    Entering, Cantelli said, ‘The dining room’s untouched, just a table and six chairs and a cupboard with some glasses, crockery and cutlery inside it in pristine condition. No booze.’
    Horton was getting a bad feeling about this place, but defining exactly how bad and in what way he couldn’t say, apart from the fact it was too clean, too perfect and too impersonal. But there was more than that. As they headed up the stairs, making sure not to touch the banister, Cantelli expressed part of what Horton felt.
    ‘It’s like something out of an estate agent’s brochure.’
    Yes, cold and clinical. And yet the woman he’d met hadn’t struck him that