The Moth Catcher Read Free Page B

someone to take care of the animals.’ She wondered if she might persuade Percy to take them until the family got home. Though it might be more a case of persuading Susan.
    There was a big scrubbed pine table. The kitchen was tidy and everything gleamed, but it wasn’t
Homes & Gardens
. None of the chairs matched and the crockery on the dresser was old and some of it a bit chipped. The rug on the tile floor was made of rush matting. Presumably the cleanliness was Susan’s work. If Randle had lived in the flat in the attic, Vera supposed that he’d have his own kitchen there.
    They wandered on through the house. There was a formal dining room, which felt cold and looked as if it was hardly ever used. Dark paintings of Victorian gentlemen in dull gilt frames. French windows led to a terrace of flagstones and then to a lawn. Vera wondered if cutting the grass was part of the house-sitter’s job description. Then a family living room. A fireplace with bookshelves in the alcoves on either side, old sofas scratched by generations of dogs, photos on the mantelpiece. One of a handsome young man in uniform standing next to a young woman in a floral dress; others of the same people as they got older: with two children on a beach, standing outside a college at a son’s graduation, in smart clothes at a daughter’s wedding. The last picture must be recent and showed the two of them sitting on a white bench outside this house. They were probably in their mid-seventies, but wiry and fit. The man looked at the woman with the same adoration as in the first picture.
    ‘The portrait of a happy marriage,’ Joe said.
    ‘Man, that’s a bit profound for you.’ Vera kept her voice light, but she was moved too. A tad jealous. She didn’t have any personal experience of happy families. ‘It’s easy enough to be taken in by appearances.’
    A wide polished staircase led to the first floor. The bedrooms were big and airy. Old-fashioned furniture, sheets and blankets and floral quilts. None of that duvet nonsense, with cushions on the beds that you only had to throw off before you went to sleep. Two double rooms and two twins – the twin rooms still decorated for children. One with a train set on a big table and a moth-eaten rocking horse. Vera wondered if there’d been grandchildren. There’d surely have been photos, and they hadn’t seen any downstairs. Perhaps the Carswells were waiting in hope for their children to produce offspring. They found one family bathroom with a deep old enamel bath, and a more recent shower room, built in what might once have been a cupboard in the main bedroom. The only gesture towards modernization. No toiletries in either room to indicate they were used by a young man. And still there was no sign of disturbance, nothing that could be considered a crime scene.
    ‘Where did our victim live then?’ Joe was getting impatient, but Vera didn’t mind taking her time over this stage of the investigation. It was getting the feel of the place. Like setting a scene in a story. You learned a lot about people from the place they lived, and the Carswells might have been halfway around the world when this man was killed, but he was staying in their house.
    Joe looked across the bannister and down to the hall below. ‘I mean, you said he lived in the attic, but I can’t see any way up.’
    He was right. There were no stairs leading from the first floor. But there definitely
was
an attic. Vera had seen the windows from outside. ‘They’ll go from the kitchen,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘The staff quarters. You wouldn’t want to see the minions in the main body of the house. Not when this place was first turned into a domestic residence.’ She hoped the Carswells wouldn’t hold that attitude. She liked their house and had a picture of them as friendly people. Open-minded. Though, as she’d told Joe, appearances could be deceptive and she needed to keep an open mind too.
    They found the stairs