Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘Keep off! Go away!’ said the house to me.

‘Deus tute me spectas,’ said a stone inscription in the parapet. ‘Thou, Lord, see’st me.’

All too likely, I thought.

I didn’t want to be here. It wasn’t my job. I paused for a moment to curse my boss, Charles Hastings. The words ‘spoilt’ and ‘manipulative’ were as closely associated with his name in my mind as were ‘rosy’ and ‘fingered’ with dawn in Homer’s. I ought to have seen this coming. Well, the truth was – I had. So why had I gone along with it? For the joy of seeing a gem of a house I had never visited before and the satisfaction of arriving by myself and saying, ‘Hello, I’m the architect, Eleanor Hardwick.’ By myself, not scuttling in Charles’s wake carrying the files and the hard hats and answering to the name of ‘little Miss…er…’

We do a lot of work for the English Country Houses Trust. Of the grandees who run it, Charles appears to have been at school with the few to whom he is not related. And, as our region of East Anglia is thickly strewn with great houses, the practice is a busy one. It was one of the reasons – it was my main reason – for applying for the job of his architectural assistant. Charles calls his Trust work the office ‘bread and butter’. I would call it the ‘strawberry jam’. I’m mad about ancient buildings. I always have been. And if you’re lucky enough to get a job working for an expert in this field and you’re based between Cambridge and the North Sea, you’ve died and gone to heaven!

The lush, rolling countryside seamed with narrow overhung lanes is rich in ancient churches, cathedrals, and even a castle or two, as well as the old domestic buildings. Down one of the overhung lanes in the middle of the county of Suffolk is Charles’s house, a wing of which masquerades as his office. Latin Hall is a fine though eccentric showcase for Charles’s skills. For a start, it’s thatched, and to go on, it was built in the late thirteen hundreds. Yes, thirteen hundreds. There was still a Roman emperor on the throne when the foundations were being dug, Charles told me at my interview. A rather debased emperor, perhaps, and ruling out of Constantinople, but it made a good story for the clients. They were intended to draw the inference ‘If this bloke can keep this building standing, he might be able to do something for mine.’

My first autumn working at Latin Hall was miserable. The weather was exceptionally wet and the medieval house leaked badly. The rain-swollen doors stuck, the windows funnelled the icy draughts that knifed down from the Arctic. Charles laughed at my complaints. ‘Keep you healthy, Ellie,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing like a low temperature and a constant air circulation to kill off the bugs! Much better for you to inhale air straight from Siberia than that pre-breathed rubbish they fill your lungs with in London.’

Rain fell in torrents, torrents were followed by gales, tarpaulins blew off roofs, and water rose in cellars as it never had before. Every time I looked out of the window thinking that the rain could get no heavier, it redoubled its maniacal and mindless persistence. But there was one source of cheerful amusement for me in all this gloom. Charles had caught a very bad cold! I came in one morning to find him hunched over his desk, clutching a box of tissues.

‘For goodness’ sake, Charles,’ I said, ‘go home! You don’t have to stay here!’ I pointed to the wall chart. ‘You’ve got no meetings today or tomorrow and then it’s the weekend. Go home, have a bath, find a good book, and go to bed. I’ll man the main brace.’

He winced.

‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘Just had a call from the Trust. Felthorpe Hall. Main staircase. There’s a problem. I’ve just been looking up my last quinquennial survey report.’ He paused and pretended to run a critical eye over it. ‘It’s rather good, I think. Listen to this, Ellie, and mark the style.’ He began to read:

‘The condition of the main staircase has been mentioned in previous reports and its stability is now a matter of concern. A newel stair with four quarter-space landings, its strength is dependent on the support each flight derives from the flight below. Provided tenons are sound… .’ He droned on and I switched off. ‘… is due to more than shrinking and old age.’

‘Well, what do you think?’

‘I’d say you’d covered yourself pretty well, there, Charles…all those provided-that’s and suspicions-ofs,’ I began to say, but he interrupted.

‘It is always my concern, Ellie, to have a care for the building as well as my own neck. I go on: I would suggest that where shrinkage gaps are to be seen, small hardwood wedges be lightly inserted, and if the distortion referred to increases, these wedges will fall. Should this happen, further structural investigation would appear imperative.’

‘Don’t tell me! Your wedges have fallen?’

‘They have. Luckily, the house is closed to the public for end-of-season cleaning, but they’ve got some sort of anniversary shindig coming up at Christmas. So they ring me. “Is this staircase safe?” they want to know. What can I say? “Leave it to me. I’ll come up and have a look.”‘ He blew his nose dolefully once more, pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead, and rubbed his reddened eyes.

His partner was on holiday. There was only one thing I could say. ‘Look, tell them you can’t come until next week, or if there’s a panic on, I’ll go for you. Why not? I don’t think you’ll make much sense in your present condition.’

Charles blinked and shivered theatrically for a moment, looked doubtful, and then said, as though my offer was all so unexpected, ‘Well, if you’re sure, Ellie, that would be a godsend…and it’s not as though you could do any real damage…I mean, I’ve laid on a carpenter – Johnny Bell will meet you there at half-past two. He’s very experienced and -’

‘Just give me the file, Charles! But – Felthorpe Hall? Where is it, incidentally?’

‘Er…north Norfolk,’ he had mumbled apologetically.

The house may not have welcomed me, but the carpenter, Johnny Bell, greeted me warmly enough in the hallway from which a fine newel stair climbed its way to a dim upper floor. I needn’t have come, really. Mr Bell was perfectly capable of taking up a few boards, dismantling a few stair treads, and, indeed, diagnosing the problem and solving it. The architect is very often the third wheel on the bicycle. This was one of those occasions. He knew it, and so did I. But with kindly East Anglian courtesy he explained the situation and even managed to make it appear he was hanging on my words.

‘Didn’t like to start until you got here, Miss Hardwick. Thought if we took up a couple of treads here and a floorboard on the landing and perhaps the riser off the step up into the pass door, we ought to see what we’re up to.’

I was about to say, ‘Nails must be cut and punched…’ but almost before I could speak he had slipped a hacksaw under the first stair tread and had started to cut the nails which held it in place, When he’d slipped the stair treads out of the strings, the risers followed with no more difficulty. We knelt together on the stairs and peered into the cavity we had created. I held the torch while Johnny Bell felt inside.

‘Carriage has gone,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be bird’s-mouthed under the trimmer and…’ feeling along the wall, ‘the wall string’s gone in the same place.’

I reached into the hole, broke off a section of timber, and brought it into the light.

‘Deathwatch beetle,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’ said a voice behind us.