Nicola Cornick - House Of Shadows

At the motorway roundabout she turned right towards Wantage then left for Lambourn. She knew the route quite well, but the road looked deceptively different when the only detail she could see was picked out in her headlights. There were curves and turns and shadowed hollows she did not recognise. She was heading deep into the countryside now. A few isolated cottages flashed past, shuttered and dark. She took the right turn for Lambourn and plunged down into the valley, the car’s lights illuminating the white-painted wooden palings of the racehorse gallops that ran beside the road. The little town was silent as she wove her way through the narrow streets. As the stables and houses fell away and the fields rolled back in, Holly had the same feeling she always had on approaching Ashdown; a sense of expectancy she had never quite understood, a feeling of falling back through time as the dark road opened up before her and the hills swept away to her right, bleak and empty, crowned with a weathercock.

She and Ben had raced up to the top of Weathercock Hill as children, throwing themselves down panting in the springy grass at the top, staring up at the weather vane as it pierced the blue of the sky high above. The whole place had felt enchanted.

Ben. Her chest tightened again with anxiety. She was almost there. What would she find?

The lights picked out a huge advertising hoarding by the side of the road. The words flashed past before she could make out more than the first few:

‘Ashdown Park, a select development of historic building conversions …’

Trees pressed close now to the left, rank upon rank of them like an army in battle order. There was a moment when the endless wood fell back and through the gap in the trees Holly thought she saw a gleam of white; a house standing tall and foursquare with the moonlight reflecting off the glass in the cupola and silvering the ball on the roof. A moment later and the vision had gone. The woods closed ranks, thick and forbidding, swallowing the house in darkness.

The left turn took her by surprise and she almost missed it even though she had come this way so many times before. She bumped along the single-track road, past a bus stop standing beside the remains of the crumbling estate wall. The old coach yard was off to the left; it seemed that this was where the majority of the building work was taking place, behind the high brick-and-sarsen wall. Even in the dark Holly could see the grass verge churned up by heavy machinery and the crouching shadow of a mechanical digger. There was another sign here, a discreet one in cream with green lettering, giving the name of the developers and directing all deliveries back to the site office on the main road.

The lane turned left again, running behind the village now, climbing towards the top of the hill. A driveway on the right, a white-painted gatepost flaking to wood beneath and a five-barred gate wedged open by the grasses and dandelions growing through it.

Ashdown Mill.

She stopped on the gravel circle in front of the water mill and turned off the engine. Bonnie gave a little, excited bark. Holly could hear the thud of her tail as the dog waited impatiently to jump out of the back. There were two other cars on the gravel, a small saloon car and Ben’s four-by-four. The exhaustion and relief hit Holly simultaneously. Her shoulders ached with tension. If Ben was here and it had all been a big misunderstanding she would kill him.

She opened her door and slid out, her legs stiff, an ache low in her back. Outside the car the air had a pre-dawn chill to it. The daylight was growing slowly, trickling through the trees and washing away the moon.

Bonnie was running around with her nose to the ground, released from the captivity of the car, a bounce in her step. She chased around the side of the whitewashed mill and disappeared from view. Holly slammed the car door and hurried after her, pushing open the little gate in the picket fence and running up the uneven stone path to the door, calling for Bonnie as she went.

All the lights were on inside the mill. The door opened before she reached it.

‘Ben!’ she burst out. ‘What the hell—’

‘Miss Ansell?’ A uniformed policewoman stood there. ‘I’m PC Marilyn Caldwell. We spoke earlier.’ She had kind eyes in a pale face pinched with tiredness, and there was something in her voice that warned Holly of bad news. Her heart started to thump erratically again. A headache gripped her temples.

She noticed that one of the door panels was splintered and broken.

‘We had to break it to get in.’ There was a note of apology in PC Caldwell’s voice. ‘The handle is too high for Florence to reach.’

‘Yes.’ Holly remembered that the door had a heavy, old-fashioned iron latch. So Ben had not been there when the police had arrived and there was no sign of him now. Her apprehension was edged with something deeper and more visceral now.

She fought back the terror; breathed deeply.

‘Is Florence OK?’

‘She’s fine.’ Marilyn Caldwell laid a reassuring hand on Holly’s arm. She shifted a little so that Holly could see through into the mill’s long living room. Florence was sitting on the sofa next to another female police officer. They were reading together, although Florence’s eyes were droopy with tiredness and puffy with her earlier tears.

Holly’s heart turned over to see her. She took an involuntary step forwards. ‘Can I go to her, please—’

‘Just a moment.’ The note in PC Caldwell’s voice stopped her. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t found your brother, Miss Ansell.’ She was looking at Holly with forensic detachment now. ‘We’ve searched the house and the woods in the close vicinity, also all the roads nearby. There’s no sign.’

Holly was taken aback. Fear fluttered beneath her breastbone again. This was not right.

‘Is that Dr Ansell’s car outside?’ PC Caldwell asked.

‘Yes.’ Holly rubbed her tired eyes. ‘He can’t have driven anywhere.’

‘Perhaps a friend came to pick him up,’ PC Caldwell suggested. ‘Or he walked to meet someone.’

‘In the middle of the night?’ Holly said. ‘Without his phone?’

PC Caldwell’s expression hardened. ‘It’s hardly unknown, Miss Ansell. I imagine he thought Florence was asleep and slipped out. Perhaps he’s lost track of the time.’

‘That would be ridiculously irresponsible.’ Holly felt furious and tried to rein herself in. She was tired, worried. She had driven a long way. She needed to calm down. Evidently PC Caldwell thought so too.

‘We fully expect Dr Ansell to turn up in the morning,’ she said coldly. ‘When he does, please could you let us know? We’d like to have a word.’

‘You’ll have to stand in line,’ Holly said. Then: ‘I’m sorry. Yes, of course. But …’ Doubt and fear stirred within her again. The emotions were nebulous but strong. Her instinct told her that Ben had not simply walked out.

‘He left his phone,’ she said. ‘And all his stuff’s scattered about. It doesn’t look as though he planned to go out.’

PC Caldwell was already signalling discreetly to her colleague that it was time to leave. She seemed completely uninterested.

‘We’ve traced Mrs Ansell,’ she said. ‘She’s on her way back from Spain but might not make it until tomorrow night. Apparently she’s been,’ she checked her note pad, ‘helicopter skiing in the Pyrenees?’ She sounded doubtful.

‘Very probably,’ Holly said dryly. ‘Tasha works for a travel show – Extreme Pleasures?’

‘Oh yes!’ Marilyn Caldwell’s face broke into a smile. ‘Wow! Natasha Ansell. Of course! How exciting. Well—’ She stopped, realising that the situation did not really merit celebrity chit-chat. ‘We’ll be back tomorrow,’ she said. She turned on an afterthought. ‘Do you know what your brother was doing here, Miss Ansell?’