The next day was a Tuesday and I was off to the magistrate’s court for a bail hearing, as nervous as you might expect.
“Chin up, this should just be a formality,” Tarquin said as he arrived, wearing a new tie but with faded remnants of permanent marker all over his face. “Kids caught me sleeping on the job. Literally.” He smiled and the lines stretched across his face.
Bail wasn’t as easy as he made it sound. The prosecution started by saying I was a significant flight risk: I was made of money and could go anywhere in the world. I whispered to Tarquin, who whispered to our barrister that I didn’t have a passport, and I wasn’t made of money, I only had my allowance. That was two points to us.
Then the prosecution barrister talked about James at length, about his money and his reach in the business community. About how easy it would be for me to slip away…
I nodded dolefully as we told them that I wasn’t well liked in the village, and I had no connections outside the area. In fact, I’d hardly ever been out of the county. That drew a raised eyebrow from the magistrate and a comment about narrow horizons.
In the end, Tarquin’s children had done me proud. With a solicitor like that, the magistrate found it hard to take me seriously as a hardened criminal, which I wasn’t anyway, and let me out on bail.
He finished with a warning for Tarquin, “If you appear beforeme again looking like that, Mr. Noble, I shall find you in contempt of court.”
I arrived home to find that the Nevada-bought coat of arms James had had installed above the front door had fallen off and lay broken on the doorstep. Normally the crumblings and crackings of Langley Hall left me dismayed, but the sight of that atrocity lying in shards on the ground cheered me. I hoped it was an omen. I picked the pieces up and scattered them across the gravel of the drive.
But inside, I looked at the grand staircase, the steps that were once varnished and polished now dull and scuffed. I made my way toward them and up and up and up to the third floor, a place I had not been to since I collected the buckets the night after the storm that had washed Lennie’s body away. I didn’t know how seriously the situation had deteriorated since then.
There were nine bedrooms on that floor; of those nine, the ceilings of three were now collapsing in, with plaster on the floor and wooden beams visible through the gap. In another, the ceiling was sagging. I didn’t go into that one, but as I stood looking, a tile fell from the roof, passing by the window on its way down.
My beautiful, beautiful Langley Hall—home of my ancestors, loved by generations—had been left to rot by a Ponzi fraudster.
The work needed to rescue it from this would be immense. It wouldn’t be habitable. It might not be safe for me to be in now, but, having nowhere else to go, I made my way back down the stairs to the first-floor rooms we lived in. That night I lay in bed, listening to the creaks and moans of the house and wondering if they were the sounds of the building coming down and if that wouldn’t be such a bad way to end it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In all the turmoil, I’d somehow forgotten about Arty and I was caught by surprise when he knocked on the door at nine o’clock that Wednesday morning, dressed conservatively in a dark-gray T-shirt.
“I didn’t want to risk spoiling the nice tops,” he said when he saw me looking at him. “I’ve been storing them in the microwave to keep them fresh, like you said.” He carried a toolbox in one hand and a packet of Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers in the other, which was lucky because since James had discovered the priest hole, the only snacks I’d had were what I could eat while Mrs. Billings was here. “What do you want me to do?” Arty asked.
That was a good question and one that I still hadn’t decided on. I looked around me. There was so much, he could hardly make a dent in a day. Could he fix the roof or the guttering? Probably not. Could he clean some of the unused rooms? Probably, but it seemed a waste if he had handyman skills. I still had the etched room plates I’d beenforced to buy at the Bone Bonanza—maybe he could stick those to the doors. But I didn’t want them put up and, should I change my mind, it seemed like something I could do myself.
All jobs were either too big or too small. I could probably find him something to do in the garden, although Mr. Billings would take that as an afront. Even more so if he knew we’d paid £18,000 for the privilege when Mr. B got £12.50 an hour. In the end I asked him to look at some minor restoration work.
“Can you do anything about this?” I asked, rattling a banister rail that was loose. He gave it a shake, then peered into the hole it sat in. He poked his finger into it, then took out a penknife and dug out a piece of cloth I had stuffed in years before, to try to steady it, his expression bemused.
“I had a go myself,” I said. “Can you do something?”
“I should think so,” he said.
“You have to be careful because it’s old. We can’t just patch it up with new stuff,” I told him.
“It’s OK, we can keep this railing.”
I’d had a go at fixing a few things over the years, but my efforts had been feeble: I showed him cracked tiles that had come loose from the floor. I kept them in a drawer in a side table, along with bits and pieces I had tried to replace them with.
“I can make some improvements,” he said. “But where they’re broken or missing, I can’t magic new ones in.”
I showed him warped, creaky doors.
“Yeah, I can do something about that,” he said.
I left him to it for an hour or so, happy that a tiny piece of Langley Hall’s grandeur was going to be returned to it, regardless of the disaster upstairs. When I came back, with refreshments and biscuits, therail in the banister was fixed in place and he was examining the tiles.
“You’re a lifesaver,” Arty said, reaching for a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer and settling himself down on the stairs.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked, taking a seat on the other side of the staircase.
We drank and munched in silence for a while, until Arty addressed the elephant in the room.
