in the car, let myself into the kitchen and switched on the lights. The door to the hall was closed as usual, to keep the dogs, when they were there, from roaming through the house. I opened the door to the hall and switched on the hall lights.
I stopped there briefly, looking round.
Everything looked quiet and peaceful, but my skin began to crawl just the same, and my chest felt tight from suddenly suspended breath.
The door to the office and the door to the sitting-room were not as I had left them. The door to the office was more than half open, the door to the sitting-room all but closed; neither standing at the precise narrow angle at which I’d set them every time we’d been out.
I tried to remember whether I’d actually set the doors before leaving that morning, or whether I’d forgotten. But I had set them. I knew I had. I’d picked up my saddle and other gear in the hall after doing it, and shut the hall-to-kitchen door, and locked the outside door, leaving the dogs with Arthur Bellbrook in the garden.
I hadn’t until then thought of myself as a coward, but I felt dead afraid of going further into the house. It was so large, so full of dark corners. There were two cellars, and the several unlit attic bedrooms of long-gone domestic servants, and the boxroom deep with shadows. There were copious cupboards everywhere and big empty wardrobes. I’d been round them all three or four times during the past few days, but not at night, and not with the signals standing at danger.
With an effort, I took a few steps into the hall, listening. I had no weapon. I felt nakedly vulnerable. My heart thumped uncomfortably. The house was silent.
The heavy front door, locked and bolted like a fortress, had not been touched. I went over to the office, reached in with an arm, switched on the light and pushed the half-open door wider.
There was no one in there. Everything was as Malcolm had left it in the morning. The windows shone blackly, like threats. Taking a deep breath, I repeated the procedure with the sitting-room, but also checking the bolts on the french windows, and after that with the dining-room, and the downstairs cloakroom, and then with worse trepidation went down the passage beside the stairs to the big room that had been our playroom when we were children and a billiard room in times long past.
The door was shut. Telling myself to get on with it, I opened the door, switched on the light, pushed the door open.
There was no one there. It wasn’t really a relief, because I would have to go on looking. I checked the storeroom opposite, where there were stacks of garden furniture, and also the door at the end of the passage, which led out into the garden: securely bolted on the inside. I went back to the hall and stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking upward.
It was stupid to be so afraid, I thought. It was home, the house I’d been brought up in. One couldn’t be frightened by home.
One was.
I swallowed. I went up the stairs. There was no one in my bedroom. No one in five other bedrooms, nor in the boxroom, no one in the bathrooms, no one in the plum and pink lushness of Malcolm’s own suite. By the end, I was still as scared as I’d been at the beginning, and I hadn’t started on cellars or attics or small hiding places.
I hadn’t looked under the beds. Demons could be waiting anywhere to jump out on me, yelling. Giving in, I switched off all the upstairs lights and went cravenly back to the hall.
Everything was still quiet, mocking me.
I was a fool, I thought.
Leaving the hall and kitchen lights on, I went back to Malcolm who started to get out of the car when he saw me coming. I waved him back and slid in beside him, behind the driving wheel.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said.
‘Someone may be here.’
‘What do you mean?’
I explained about the doors.
‘You’re imagining things.’
‘No. Someone has used their key.’
We hadn’t yet been able to have the locks changed, although the carpenter was due to be bringing replacements the following morning. He’d had difficulty finding good new locks to fit into such old doors, he’d said, and had promised them for Thursday, but I’d put him off until Friday because of Cheltenham.