The Innocent Dead

Prologue & Chapter One

PROLOGUE

WHEN THE CAR stopped suddenly he looked up from his iPad and glanced through the front windscreen.

He knew they were close to home because he recognised the hedges and the twist of the road ahead. But the car didn't usually stop here. There was never any traffic to obstruct them. And it was the wrong time of day for cows to be herded along the road from one field to the next, the red-faced farmer twitching a long cane against their waggling backsides. That didn't take place till an hour later.

There were no cows but there was a black car angled across the narrow lane. He saw that its doors were open as though the driver had just stepped out to go somewhere and would be back in a moment.

He switched off his iPad and folded down its cover.

Harris, the chauffeur, pressed a button and there was a heavy clunk as all the doors in the vehicle locked.

Their eyes met in the rear-view mirror and then Harris' eyes flicked past him to look through the rear window. He said, 'Shit.'

Now he noticed a man had appeared at his door. He couldn't see much of him but he saw the man was wearing black gloves. Another man was standing in front of the car. He wore something over his face, a woollen mask. The man at the front was pointing a gun at Harris, through the windscreen. Then he lowered it and shot one of the front tyres. The car sagged.

The man raised the gun again and waved it twice, sideways.

The doors unlocked and Harris got out. He walked towards the man with the gun.

Then suddenly his own door was yanked open and a hand fell on his shoulder, pulling him from the back seat.

This man smelled like a dirty clothes basket and was tall.

But then everyone was tall to him.

He was ten years old.

CHAPTER ONE

A FULL FIVE minutes after passing through the entrance gates, the house came into view.

Although to call it a house was like calling Buckingham Palace a beach-hut. The driveway I was travelling along curved in a great arc between wide, scissor-cut lawns, leading towards a circular, gravel-encrusted courtyard. The obligatory stone fountain—two cupids entwined—sat in the middle of the circle, as dead as Ancient Greece. The mansion itself was faux-Victorian, but a very high-class faux. A phalanx of windows on three stories reflected the sky and its scudding clouds while to one side a large orangery, its roof white and domed, seemed to be clinging on to the main building by means of an intricate network of Virginia creeper and ivy. The place was well-tended but didn't look particularly well-loved.

As I drove closer I began to see more of the near side of the house, angling towards the rear aspect in another series of square regimented windows, some of them open to combat the effects of the stifling heat. In others I could see reflected the tops of working buildings clustered around the rear of the house—perhaps accommodation for staff, or garages, or stables or, for all I knew, camps of itinerant labourers milling about aimlessly, waiting to be let loose to tend the gardens or perform other mundane tasks.

I'd seen the estate from above, from Google Earth, and the mansion showed up as a massive brick of a place surrounded by open lawns to the front and rambling forest to the rear. I'd also found it listed in a local estate agent, where the asking price was £5.5 million. Even for Prestbury, apple of the North West's eye, that was steep. I wondered why the owner, Mark Ware, was selling. Had the cash run out? Or was he bored with all the greenery? It was a question I might not ask him—it didn't pay to be rude to clients.

I stopped my car and climbed out, then stood for a moment, stretching, turning to look over the roof of the vehicle beyond a low wall, letting my gaze fall away over the half-mile of flower beds and lawn towards the distant road. There was no traffic out here: less than two miles from Prestbury, it was isolated, cut off, a planet to itself. I rather liked the idea of being separated from people. Lately I'd been getting too close to them. It hadn't been good for me.

I crossed the gravel to the massive front door and after two minutes' searching found a cord that when pulled seemed to ring a bell somewhere deep inside. The sun beat down on the back of my neck and I felt myself heating up like a lobster in boiling water: nowhere to go but still hoping for the best.

The door was opened silently by an Asian woman in a smart pale blue jacket and skirt, her hair tied in a bun on the top of her head. She looked to be about forty though I'm notoriously bad at guessing women's ages. I think her lips were pulled in a tight scowl before she even opened the door, and my actual appearance did nothing to soften her assessment.

She lifted her chin once. 'Yes?'

'I'm Sam Dyke. Here to see Mark Ware.'

'You have appointment?'

'It's a long way to come up that drive without one.'

The scowl was unremitting. 'You wait here.'

The door closed and I continued to boil. I had little time for rich people with staff, though naturally that wasn't the staff's fault. Sometimes, however, the staff seemed to think bad manners were necessary to maintain the rich person's high opinion of themselves.

The door opened again and the woman stepped back.

'You come in, please.'

I did so and after a couple of paces came to a dead halt. My mouth had probably opened when confronted with the sheer size and scale of the hallway in front of me. Black-and-white check tiles stretched away towards a panelled wall in which there were four doors, two of them closed. A massive oak cupboard with half a dozen doors and what seemed like a couple of hundred shelves stood to my right. To my left an elaborate curved staircase ascended first to a mezzanine or balcony—I don't know the technical term—before taking a break and carrying on upwards to another floor hidden from view above. Several large oil paintings hung on the walls of the mezzanine. These weren't depictions of faded ancestors but appeared to be modern landscapes full of swirl and dash. There were more rooms up there and I could see high ceilings and large glass chandeliers.

The Asian woman had been watching me, seeing my response, perhaps basking a little in the reflected glory.

She said, 'Follow, please,' and headed towards the staircase. Our footsteps rang crisply on the tiles until we reached the carpeted stairs, where they were muffled by the warp and weft of deep Axminster. At the top of the first flight of stairs she led me past the manic landscapes and along the mezzanine, turning left to push open a panelled door nearly twice her height.

We entered a large room painted mostly in white and furnished with expensive cream leather chairs and sofas. A grand piano stood in the far corner, its lid open and with the traditional set of photographs arranged on its shiny top, and there was a fifty inch television set hanging on the wall. From where I stood it looked as big as a stamp.

More pictures were grouped on the wall between two open french doors that gave on to a wide balcony—but these were enlarged photographs, the kind you pay a specialist studio to take of you and your children against a white background, playful, fun, capturing a moment in your lives you'll perhaps never know again.

I didn't have any of those photographs. When I was growing up that kind of ostentatious 'fun' was considered indulgent and middle-class. Looking at the photos of the young couple—the man handsome but already grey at the temples, the woman a blonde beauty with large blue eyes, the child, seven or eight years old, staring frankly at the camera—I felt a surge of envy together with a growing kernel of dislike that was perfectly unfair. These were my clients, and that was their son. I had no need for any feelings whatsoever towards them.

I should have kept telling myself that.

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