Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

I was most puzzled by the sketches and oil paintings that hung in every room. They were a mish-mash of styles-abstracts, life drawings, eccentric representations of buildings with roots anchoring them to the ground and foliage growing from their windows-but they were all signed by the same artist, Nathaniel Harrison. Some were originals and some-the sketches-were prints, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would collect so much of a single artist’s work simply to hang it in a rented house.

When I asked Jess about it, her mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “I expect they’re only there to hide the damp.”

“But who’s Nathaniel Harrison? How come Lily bought so much of his work?”

“She didn’t. Madeleine must have imported them after she stripped the house of her mother’s paintings. It would have been cheaper than having the house redecorated.”

“How did Madeleine get them?”

“The way she gets everything,” she said caustically. “Sex.”

Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16-19/05/04”

…I can’t separate specific events anymore. I’m not sure if I’ve shut my memory down or if I was too disorientated for it to function properly. Everything’s fused into time inside the cage and time out of it. I described the cage to Dan and the police, and I said it was in a cellar, but the rest…

…The police thought I was being deliberately evasive when I said I couldn’t tell them anything else. But it was the truth. When Dan asked me what happened, I couldn’t tell him either. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. The police weren’t going to arrest a man on the evidence of smell. What sort of identification is that?

…The artist Paul Gauguin once said, “Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.” I dream of revenge. All the time.

THE ONLY INFORMATION Jess gave me about the Aga was that the oil tank was outside and needed to be kept at least a quarter full. She took me to the back door and pointed to a wooden lean-to at the side of the garage. “The tank’s in there and there’s a glass gauge that shows the level. There’s also a valve that controls the flow, but I’ve turned it on and you shouldn’t need to touch it. If you allow the oil to drop too low, you could run into trouble. The supplier’s phone number is stuck to the side of the tank but if they’re busy they may not come for a few days. It’s better to order a refill early rather than later.”

“How full is it at the moment?”

“Up to the top. It should last a good three to four months.”

“Do I have to close the valve if I want to turn off the Aga?”

“You’ll have cold baths if you do,” she warned. “There’s no immersion heater in this place. It means the kitchen’s fairly unbearable in the summer but the Aga’s the only way to heat the water. The house is pretty antiquated. There’s no central heating and no boiler, and if you’re cold at night you have to light a fire.” She indicated a wood store to the left of the outhouse. “You’ll find the number for the log supplier on the tank under the oil company.”

I think Jess was disappointed that I took all this in my stride, but it wasn’t so different from the way I’d grown up in Zimbabwe. Wood was our primary fuel rather than oil, but we didn’t have central heating, and hot water had been at a premium until a day’s sunshine had heated the tank on the roof. Our cook, Gamada, had coaxed wonderful meals out of the wood-burning stove, and, having learnt from her, I’d never been comfortable with electric ovens that offered more touch controls than the flight deck of the Concorde.

I was a great deal less complacent about the single telephone point in the kitchen. “That can’t be right,” I said when Jess showed me the wall-mounted contraption beside the fridge. “There must be phones somewhere else. What happens if I’m at the other end of the house and need to call someone?”

“It’s cordless. You carry it with you.”

“Won’t the battery run down?”

“Not if you hook it up at the end of the day and recharge it overnight.”

“I can’t sleep without a phone beside my bed.”

She shrugged. “Then you’ll have to buy an extension cable,” she told me. “There are places in Dorchester that sell them, but you’ll need several if you want to operate a phone upstairs. I think thirty metres is the longest DIY cable they make but, at a rough guess, it’s a good hundred metres to the main bedroom. You’ll have to link them in series…which means adaptors…plus another handset, of course.”

“Is it a broadband connection?” I asked, dry-mouthed with anxiety as I wondered how I was going to be able to work. “Can I access the Internet and make phone calls at the same time?”

“No.”

“Then what am I going to do? Normally I’d be able to use my mobile as well as a landline.”

“You should have gone for a modern house. Didn’t the agent tell you what this one was going to be like? Send you any details?”

“A few. I didn’t read them.”

I must have looked and sounded deeply inept because she said scathingly: “Christ! Why the hell do people like you come to Dorset? You’re frightened of dogs, you can’t live without a phone-” she broke off abruptly. “It’s not the end of the world. I presume you have a laptop because I didn’t see a computer in the car?” I nodded. “What sort of mobile do you have? Do you have an Internet contract with your server?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not going to work without a signal, is it?”

“How do you connect? By cable or Bluetooth?”

“Bluetooth.”

“OK. That gives you a range of ten metres between the two devices. All you have to do is raise the mobile high enough-” she broke off abruptly in face of my scepticism. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself. Just give me your bloody phone and bring your laptop upstairs.”

She refused to speak for the next half hour because I hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm for groping around the attic every time I wanted to send an email. I squatted on the landing beside a loft ladder, with my laptop beside me, listening to her stomping about the attic before she came down the steps and repeated the exercise in the bedrooms. After a while she started shifting furniture around, angrily banging and scraping it across the floors. She sounded like an adolescent in a sulk and I’d have asked her to go if I hadn’t been so desperate for Internet contact.

She finally emerged from a bedroom at the end of the landing. “OK, I’ve got a signal. Do you want to try for the connection?”

It was a Heath Robinson set-up-a stepped pyramid built out of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers and some chairs-but it worked. It meant crouching under the ceiling to make the link but, once established, I was able to operate the computer at floor level.

“The signal’s stronger in the attic,” said Jess, “but it’ll mean climbing up there every time the battery runs down or you want to log off. I didn’t think you’d want to do that…and you’d probably get lost, anyway. It’s not very obvious which room you’re above.”

“How can I thank you?” I asked her warmly. “Perhaps you’d like a glass of wine or a beer? I have both in the car.”

She showed immediate disapproval. “I don’t drink.” And neither should you, was the firm rebuke that I took from her expression. She was even more disapproving when I lit a cigarette as we went back downstairs. “That’s about the worst thing you can do. If you get bronchitis on top of a panic attack, you’ll really be struggling.”

Delayed maturity and pointy-hat puritanism made a lethal combination, I thought, wondering if she’d cast me as dissolute Edwina from Absolutely Fabulous with herself as Saffy, the high-minded daughter. I was tempted to make a joke about it, but suspected that television was a focus of disapproval as well. I had no sense that there was room for fun in Jess’s life or, if there was, that it was the sort of fun anyone else would recognize.