0007464355 Read Free

it often enough. ‘What do you plan to do,’ he’d asked once, ‘if you find a psychopath lurking under the bed?’ She’d bitten back her first retort and just shrugged. She didn’t have an answer then and she didn’t have one now, but she looked anyway. Everyone had their decompression rituals.
    Doors, windows, under beds, were hers.
    Shuddering, she pushed Art from her mind. She’d feel better once she’d checked the locks, she always did.
    As she passed the door that led to the pantry, a noise stopped her. She froze on the spot, listening intently. There it was again. Small but insistent, growing gradually louder … A scraping, like a branch on a windowpane, or fingernails on a blackboard. Leaning on the handle, Helen pushed open the door and jumped back. Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t a mangy black tom glaring at her from the middle of the pantry floor, hackles up in fury. The room was dank and smelled of mould, the result of endless drizzle seeping through the missing diamond of the lead window that the cat had obviously used to break and enter.
    The two faced off.
    ‘Stay, if you want,’ Helen said after several seconds in which it became clear that the cat had no plans to back down. Her voice sounded louder than she’d expected and they both jumped.
    Eye contact broken, the cat hissed, showing yellow fangs, and darted towards the window.
    Beside the pantry, a second door led through to several outhouses, the nearest of which doubled as a utility room. Beyond was a courtyard. In one corner, below tiles that obviously leaked, was a carriage. It had probably been a prized possession once. Today it was a ghost, rendered pale by decades of bird shit from pigeons in the rafters above. An arch through the rear of the courtyard led to a walled garden with a lychgate gate onto the Dales. At least, according to the letting agents’ details.
    She’d seen pictures of Wildfell before she arrived, of course. The courtyard garden, a couple of ostentatious family rooms. It looked big, which didn’t matter, and remote, which did. She wanted somewhere she was unlikely to be bothered by neighbours. But now she was here and in, and could see the house in all its ruined glory, it was vast. Far larger than she knew what to do with. More run-down than she’d been told. And far closer to civilisation than the letting agent had let on, situated on the cusp of the moors and the Dales. Estate agents lied, it seemed, and so did photographs.
    The red-brick Elizabethan frontage was built on to something even more ancient. According to the details, it had been a prep school in the post-war period; a boarding school for boys up to thirteen, which shut for undisclosed reasons. In the eighties it tried – and failed – to become a conference centre. In the early nineties it shut again. Though the agent didn’t say so, she suspected it had been shut on-and-off ever since. Family dispute, was all he said when she asked why the house didn’t just get sold to developers. Certainly, he had seemed peculiarly keen to let it to a single woman in search of somewhere quiet to work.
    Dusk was falling as she locked the door to the outhouse, feeling its flimsy lock rattle in a way that cranked her anxiety up another notch. Then she retraced her steps to the entrance hall. Like everything else in the house it was huge and faded, several doors leading off.
    A vast dining room with a mahogany table that would seat twenty at a squeeze. A study with walls lined with antelope heads. A billiard room with a table torn to reveal a heavy slab of slate beneath rotting baize. A red ball sat alone at the side. Helen slung it into the pocket as she passed and it fell through the threadbare net, landing with a crash that made her jump, before rolling away across the marbled floor. The air of abandonment was even more apparent in the drawing room, where a chandelier, two sofas and five chairs were all shrouded under sheets. A huge, gloomy