Free The Edge by Clare Curzon

It’s just as he left it,’ Z told her. ‘He seems to have packed a kitbag or something similar. See the marks on the bed?’
    They looked into his bathroom where Anna inspected the contents of the waste bin. Returning to the passage, Anna rattled the handle of a solid-panelled door at its end. ‘What’s through here?’
    â€˜Stairs to the housekeeper’s quarters.’
    â€˜Have they been examined?’
    â€˜Yes, but I haven’t been up there myself.’
    â€˜So let’s look before she returns. If, indeed, she ever cares to do so.’
    As they mounted the narrow stairs to the next floor Z explained how she had interviewed Alma Pavitt who had not questioned taking up her job again. ‘She’s staying at the local pub until she’s given permission to move back in.’
    â€˜Not an oversensitive person then? Or perhaps lacking imagination?’
    â€˜Maybe both. She appeared barely affected by the time I got her back, but different people have different ways of reacting in shock.’
    Z found herself on the point of confiding her impression of the woman, but stopped herself in time. Anna had fitted so well
into her familiarity with senior women CID officers that she’d almost been accepting her as a colleague. Now she reminded herself that the ex-Squadron Leader was an outsider, a member of the victims’ family, grandmother to young Angela whose blood still hung sourly on the air.
    The top-floor rooms hadn’t the lofty ceilings of those on the lower floors, but they were of reasonable size. In their early days several servants would have shared sleeping quarters, men at one side of the house and women at the other. The floorboards were bare and the old furniture had been removed except in one of these distempered rooms which held a collection of domestic junk and travel cases.
    Two rooms only were decorated to modern standards, the housekeeper’s bedroom with en suite bath, and her sitting room dominated by a wide-screen television and video player. There was audio equipment but no DVDs, and only a few cassettes, mostly of smooch music.
    The long laundry room was a Victorian museum. A black-painted iron stove at one end supported a robust wire cage in which several heavy pressing-irons hung ready for application to a heated griddle. A broad table some eight feet long was still thickly padded and covered by a yellowed cotton sheet drawn tight and tied at the corners with white tapes. For almost the whole length of the room, which ran from front to back of the house, wooden racks were suspended from pulleys on the ceiling, for the drying and airing of damp linen.
    â€˜Either in days past the weather was more often inclement, or the gentry were easily offended by the public sight of bloomers and stays blowing in the wind,’ Anna surmised, gazing up. Her voice was lighter, as though the break from sterner matters had come as welcome relief.
    At the rear extremity was a closed door. Z opened it to disclose a well-equipped darkroom. The developing trays were empty, as was the drying line with its row of clothes pegs. Labels on the bottles of chemicals in the cupboard bore recent dates; so one of the family had been keen on photography.
    â€˜Have you seen enough?’ Z asked. Anna was no youngster and
apparently she’d been hard at it from the early hours. Time now, surely, to take a rest.
    â€˜Enough for the moment,’ Anna allowed. She had opened a door in the outer side wall to view the iron staircase of a fire escape. ‘I think we’ve earned some lunch. Come and join me in my galley. You’ll find I’m not the worst of cooks.’
    Â 
    DCI Salmon had summoned Bertie Fallon up from Bristol where, in addition to being Hoad’s sole other director, he performed the duty of General Production Manager at the glass furnace foundry. News of the carnage at Fordham Manor had been broken to him by the scanty national