vowels that September morning. ‘Kate? Henry Naismith,’ he started. I leaned back in my chair, expecting the usual cheery chat about his recent exploits before we got down to the nuts and bolts. Not today. ‘Can you come over to the house?’ he asked.
I straightened up. This sounded like the kind of start to a Monday morning that makes me wish I’d stayed in bed. ‘When did you have in mind, Henry?’
‘As soon as you can. We ah…we had a burglary in the night and a chap from the police is popping round for more details. He’ll want to know things about the security system that I probably won’t be able to answer, and I’d be awfully grateful if you could take a run over.’ All this barely pausing for breath, never mind giving me the opportunity to ask questions.
I didn’t have to check the diary to know that I had nothing more pressing than routine inquiries into the whereabouts of a company chairman whose directors were rather eager to ask him some questions about the balance sheet. ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘What’s missing?’ I prayed it was going to be the TV and the video.
No such luck. There was silence on the end of the phone. I thought I could hear Henry drawing in a deep breath. ‘The Monet,’ he said tersely.
My stomach clenched. Birchfield Place was the first security system I’d designed and watched installed. My partner Bill Mortensen is the security expert, and he’d checked my work, but it was still down to me. ‘I’m leaving now,’ I said.
I drove out through the southern suburbs to the motorway on automatic pilot. Even the inevitable, ubiquitous roadworks didn’t impinge. I was too busy reviewing Mortensen and Brannigan’s involvement with Henry Naismith. When I’d seen his original appointment in the office diary, I’d thought Shelley was at the wind-up, especially since I’d been having one of my periodic anti-monarchy rants only the day before, triggered by the heir to the throne asserting that what was wrong with the country was not enough Shakespeare and smacking of small children. Once I realized the appointment was for real, I’d expected some chinless wonder with the sort of inbred stupidity that’s only found among the aristocracy and the population of isolated mountain villages. I couldn’t have been more wrong, on both counts.
Henry Naismith was in his late twenties, built like an Australian lifeguard with the blonde hair to match and with more than enough chin to provide a boxer with a target. According to Who’s Who, his only listed recreations were sailing and ocean yacht racing, something I could have guessed for myself the first time I saw him. He had sailor’s eyes, always looking beyond me to some distant horizon only he could see. His face was burnished a ruddy brown by wind and sun, apart from the white creases round those dark blue eyes. He’d been educated at Marlborough and New College, Oxford. Even though I’d grown up there, I didn’t think his city of dreaming spires and mine of car factories would give us much in common to reminisce about. He had the same clipped accent as Prince Charles, but in spite of that and everything else, I liked him. I liked anybody who was prepared to get off their backsides and graft. And Henry could graft, no messing. Anyone who tells you yacht racing is a holiday doesn’t know an anchor from a wanker.
The newspaper archive database that we use had coloured in the outline. Henry had inherited his title, a black and white Tudor manor house in Cheshire, a clutch of valuable paintings and not a lot of readies a couple of years before when his parents had been caught in an avalanche in some chic Alpine resort. Henry had been sailing in the Caribbean at the time. Life’s a bitch, and then you marry one. Only Henry hadn’t. Married, that is. He was right up there in the gossip columnists’ lists of eligible bachelors. Maybe not in the top twenty, on account of the lack of dosh, but the good looks and the tasty gaff put him in the running nevertheless.
Henry had come to us precisely because of the serious deficiencies in the cash flow area. Because his father hadn’t anticipated dying at the age of forty-seven, he hadn’t got round to the sort of arrangements the landed gentry usually make to avoid the Exchequer getting their mitts on the widow’s mite. Having done his sums, Henry realized the only way he was going to be able to hang on to the house and the art collection and still spend half the year at the helm of a racing yacht was to bite the bullet and open Birchfield Place to the day-trippers.
The great British public are notoriously sticky-fingered on the stately home circuit. You wouldn’t think it to look at the coach-loads of little old ladies that roll up on bank holidays, but they’ll walk off with anything that isn’t actually nailed down, and one or two things that are. This makes insurance companies even more twitchy than usual when it comes to providing cover, which in turn makes the security business a nice little earner for private investigation agencies like us. These days, security makes up about a quarter of our annual turnover, which is why Bill and I had decided I needed to learn that side of the business.
It’s impossible to make any building impregnable, unless you brick up the doors and windows, which makes it hard to get a decent light to do your petit point. The best you can do is make it obvious that you’ve made it as hard as possible to get in, so the prospective burglar goes away discouraged and turns over the next manor down the road. To make sure I got it right, as well as picking Bill’s brains I’d consulted my old friend Dennis, himself a recovering burglar. ‘You know the one deterrent, Brannigan?’ Dennis had demanded.
‘Heat-seeking thermonuclear missiles?’ I’d hazarded.
‘A dog. You get a big Alsatian, give him the run of the place and your professional thief doesn’t want to know. When I was at it, there wasn’t an alarm system in the world that I wouldn’t have a pop at. But dogs? Forget it.’
Unfortunately, clients aren’t too keen on having Rottweilers running around on their priceless Oriental carpets. They’re too worried about finding dog hairs – or worse – on the Hepplewhite. So Birchfield Place had relied, like most stately homes, on a state-of-the-art mix of hard-wired detectors on doors and windows, passive infrared detectors at all key points and pressure-activated alert pads in front of any items of significance. Given the fail-safes I’d put in place, I couldn’t for the life of me see how anyone could have got through my system undetected without setting off enough bells to drive Quasimodo completely round the twist.
I turned off the motorway and headed into the depths of the leafy Cheshire stockbroker, soap star and football player belt. As usual, I almost missed the gap in the tall hedgerow that marked the end of Birchfield Place’s drive. The trippers’ entrance was round the back, but I had no intention of parking in a field half a mile from the house. I yanked the wheel round just in time and turned on to an arrow ribbon of road curling between fields where placid sheep didn’t even glance up from their chewing as I passed. I always feel slightly edgy out in the country; I don’t know the names of anything and very quickly develop anxiety about where my next meal is coming from. Give me an urban landscape where no sensible sheep would think for even a fleeting moment it might safely graze. The field gave way to thick coppices of assorted trees that looked like they’d been on the planet longer than my Granny Brannigan. Then, suddenly, the drive took a sharp right-hand bend and I shot out of the trees to a full frontal view of Birchfield Place.
Built by some distant Naismith who had done some unmentionable service to his monarch, the house looked as if it should be on a postcard or a jigsaw. The passage of time had skewed its black beams and white panels just enough to make sure no self-respecting building society would grant you a mortgage on it. It never looked real to me.
I pulled up beside an anonymous Ford which I assumed belonged to the police on account of the radio. A peacock screamed in the distance, more shattering to my composure than any amount of midnight sirens. I only knew it was a peacock because Henry had told me the first time one had made me jump out of my skin. Before I could reach out for the ancient bell-pull, the door swung open and Henry smiled apologetically at me. ‘I really appreciate this, Kate,’ he said.
‘All part of the service,’ I said reassuringly. ‘The police here?’
‘An Inspector Mellor from the Art Squad,’ Henry said as he led the way across the inner courtyard to the Great Hall, where the Impressionist paintings hung incongruously. ‘He doesn’t say much.’
We