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‘I should clear up the kitchen,’ she says, though she knows it’s immaculate.
Olly and Sasha disappear into his study and shut the door behind them.
Voices are audible from behind the Yellow Room door, but not what’s being said. But there’s something she can do about that. There are secret spaces in this house that only she knows about.
She walks down the hall and into the Music Room, which shares a wall with the Yellow Room. A grand piano fills most of the space. She walks around it to the corner of the room and releases a mechanism hidden in the panelled wall. Two of the panels move and she slips behind them, into a narrow space between the walls, closing, but not locking, the panels softly behind her. She can hear the detectives and Nicole perfectly from there.
She knows she shouldn’t be snooping, and it’s not that she wants to learn Nicole’s secrets; she just wants to make sure that the police treat her right, and it’s extremely hard to resist because there are places in the Manor House that were built for hiding in and for spying from. There’s a priest hole here, and other hidden passages like this one, dating from the sixteenth century. She can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to hide in these walls while you were being hunted, back then.
But she also knows how it’s possible to use these secret places to your advantage, and it’s time she stopped being passive.
She kneels, her ear to the back of the panelling that lines the Yellow Room. The female detective gently asks question after question, but Nicole’s so distraught that she can barely answer. She manages to give them permission to review the Barn’s security cameras and to search the Barn and take any of Tom’sdevices they can find. She writes down passwords for them, but she never stops crying. It feels like a mercy when they stop the interview after a short while.
As she climbs out of the wall and secures the panel back in place, she finds herself wiping tears from her face.
Poor, poor Nicole, she thinks. She didn’t deserve any of this, and nor did I.
7
SUNDAY
Nicole
Nicole feels cold to her bones in spite of the early-morning warmth and the shaft of sunlight penetrating the leaded windows in the Manor House kitchen. She spent last night here. The police asked her to keep away from the Barn while they investigate. Olly and Sasha have been incredibly generous letting her stay, and it’s just as well, because she had nowhere else to go.
‘The detectives are back,’ Sasha says. Nicole nods. She heard them arrive. Yesterday’s interview was hopeless because she couldn’t stop crying. Today she wants to get through it as quickly as possible, to get it over and done with so they leave her to grieve. Tom’s death was surely an accident. It’s impossible to think of it being anything else.
She stands as Sasha ushers them into the room because she’s not sure what else to do. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ she says.
‘It’s not a problem at all,’ the female detective says. Nicole remembers her name: Jen Walsh. The man is Hal Steen. Jen looks to be in her mid-thirties – about the same age as Nicole – and Nicole feels an affinity with her. Jen presents as straight-talking but not aggressive. Nicole’s unsure what to make of the male detective. He’s quieter but his stare is unnerving, and he has a pent-up quality about him, a restless energy.
They sit around the kitchen table. It feels more relaxing than the formal room they were in yesterday. Nicole finds the Manor House daunting. It’s so old, and grand. Kitty keeps it immaculately clean, but still the air smells musty and there’s this sense that you could never scrub the history out of it.
‘Did Tom have any accidents before he died, that you’re aware of?’
‘What kind of accident?’
‘A fall, maybe. Or something like that.’ He’s looking at her intensely.
‘No. Not that I know of. Why?’
‘We observed an injury on his head.’ He touches his forehead, at the hairline.
‘What kind of injury?’ She didn’t notice it when she was trying to save him, but those were frantic, awful minutes.
‘A bump,’ he says.
She stares at them. ‘He must have tripped by the pool and hit his head, on the edge maybe. He could have knocked himself unconscious and fallen in. Don’t you think?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Detective Walsh says.
‘I should have persuaded him to come out with me,’ she says. This possibility has been tormenting her. If she’d convincedTom to come to the County Show he’d still be alive, but he doesn’t share her love of farm animals; he wasn’t interested in seeing the livestock shows or the horse jumping.
‘Our technical team tried to access your security system on your husband’s laptop,’ Detective Steen says. ‘But unfortunately, it seems it wasn’t working either the night before or the morning of your husband’s death.’
‘What? Are you sure?’ she says. This seems unbelievable, but also very believable. Another system that’s malfunctioned. They have cameras all around the perimeter of the property. If they’d been working, they would surely have picked up what happened to Tom.
‘We’re sure. Nothing was recorded.’
