The Hunting Ground Read Free Page A

with all the dolls inside, then?’ he asked Elliott.
    ‘I gave each of them a good hour,’ Elliott replied. ‘I knew they’d get grumpy otherwise.’
    Ben leaned forward. ‘I bet you loved it.’
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Elliott said. ‘I left them all out for you. You can sneak up there when we’re not around.’
    Dad reached for the milk. ‘’Course,’ he said airily to Elliott, ‘I still remember you playing with my old train set when you were Ben’s age.’
    ‘I was
nine
when I stopped playing with that, actually,’ Elliott pointed out, which made Dad and Ben both roar with laughter.
    Towards the end of breakfast, Elliott gazed outthrough the kitchen’s double-bay windows at the western gardens. A huge area of tiered lawns, collapsed walls and dried-up ornamental fountains met his eye.
    ‘You’ve really got your work cut out this time,’ he said to Dad.
    ‘You’re not kidding,’ Dad groaned. ‘The garden features alone will take another week. I’ve even been asked to hose down the gnomes.’
    ‘The gnomes?’
    ‘Trust me, they’re out there. The grass is so long the little fellas are hiding.’
    Ben looked up from his plate. ‘Dad?’ he said hesitantly. ‘When you got given this job, were you told anything about the house?’
    Both Dad and Elliott turned in curiosity towards Ben. He normally didn’t care about the history of a property.
    ‘Why do you ask?’ Dad said.
    ‘No reason. It’s just … the portraits.’ Ben stared self-consciously around him. ‘They’re weird, aren’t they? But sort of interesting as well. Do you know anything about him? The man in the pictures, I mean?’
    ‘Not really,’ Dad said, rubbing his stubbled chin. ‘But you only have to look at the paintings to know there was something wrong with him. All those animals he was so proud of killing. Plus, well, I’ve never come across anything like the East Wing before.’
    ‘It’s not a standard build, is it?’ Elliott said.
    ‘No,’ Dad answered. ‘It’s a bespoke job. A truly nasty bit of construction. Now that it’s been conveniently opened up’ – Dad didn’t avoid looking at Ben – ‘I’ve had a chance to check around in there. It’s a labyrinth. Deliberately underlit and confusing throughout. Literally hundreds of criss-crossing corridors that all lead back on themselves.’
    Ben stared down at the table and, glancing at him, Elliott thought,
You really did get lost in there, didn’t you
.
    ‘From the outside the East Wing looks innocent enough,’ Dad said. ‘Inside’s another story. It’s full of nearly identical rooms. One half is all bedrooms, the other half all bathrooms. And the longer corridors look as if they run in a straight line, but don’t. They bring you in a circle, only so gradually that you can’t tell. I used a compass to navigate, and I still nearly got lost inside there.’ Dad chewed his lip. ‘I did a bit of research on it before we got here, actually. The East Wing wasn’t part of the original property. The seventeenth century owner who appears in all the portraits constructed it about ten years after he built the rest of the estate. He also seems to have had a raw love of the hunt. The East Wing’s full of his vicious portraits.’
    Ben kept his face lowered, but he was listening closely to Dad.
    ‘I didn’t know there were portraits in the East Wing as well,’ Elliott said.
    ‘More if anything.’ Dad pulled a sour face. ‘And it’s not only birds and animals he’s hunting in there, either. I’m not sure what fantasies he was entertaining when he had the paintings done, but they’re not canvases you or I would hang on a wall. If you ask me, that whole part of the house should have been bulldozed into the hillside centuries ago. Pulled down and sent up in smoke.’
    Elliott blinked in surprise. He’d never heard Dad react so strongly against a property. The owners, occasionally, but never the buildings themselves.
    ‘It was an odd commission,