The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

“The boatman is just there, at the foot of the water stairs. Jesse is his name. He’ll see you there and back without any trouble.”

“You said you knew the last of the family to live there. What do you remember about him?”

“He was troubled with gout and often ill-tempered,” the bookseller answered. “But catch him in good spirits, and he could tell sea-stories that were marvellous to hear.”

Rutledge thanked Hillier, and walked on towards the harbour. He found the water stairs and the small boat tied up just under them. Jesse was nowhere to be seen. Rutledge turned to look back at the town, just as a man popped out of the pub on the corner, rolling down in his direction, a wide grin on his unshaven face.

“Morning,” he said. “Going sommers?”

“I’d like to hire your boat for an hour or so. Are you willing?”

“I come with the boat,” he said, close enough now for Rutledge to smell the gin on his breath. He began to cast off, gestured to Rutledge to step aboard, and sat down to pick up the heavy oak oars.

“Where to?”

“The house you can hardly see behind the trees over there.”

“The clinic that was? Why do you want to go there? Not much to see, now.”

“Nevertheless …”

Nodding, Jesse moved out of the shelter of the water stairs, pulled into the current, turned smartly, and headed upstream. “We’re against the tide,” he said. “It will cost you more to go up than to come down.”

“I understand.”

It was cold down here on the water, wind sweeping down the chute between the high ridge on which Dartmouth sprawled, and the lower one on the opposite bank. In the distance he could hear a train whistle, and, soon after, the white plumes of a steam engine could be seen coming into Kingswear. As they reached mid-harbour, Rutledge buttoned his coat up to his collar against the bite of the January air. But Jesse, in shirt sleeves, seemed not to feel the cold, plying his oars and glancing over his shoulder from time to time to take stock of any other river traffic that morning. A quarter of an hour later, Jesse drew up by what had once been a fine private landing, rotting now and slippery with moss.

“Going to explore, are you? Watch where you step or I’ll be fishing you out of the river.”

As he clambered out on what was left of the private landing, he saw that it would be precarious at best to make his way across the broken boards. Moving gingerly, he finally gained the tree-line and stepped ashore. The trees had grown unhindered for fifteen years or more, he thought. He needed an axe really, to fight his way through the undergrowth that blocked any semblance of a path.

Eventually, he’d made it to the garden beyond — itself a thicket of dead plants, weeds, and vines. Above it was a terrace, and he climbed the broad steps to the long French doors that let into the house. To his surprise, one of them was unlocked, and after the briefest hesitation, he went inside.

It was out of the wind, but the house was cold, only in a different way: unused, unheated, winter seeping into the very bricks. The room in which he found himself had once been beautiful, with a pale green paper on the walls — a pattern of Chinese figures in blues and reds and deep gold, sitting in a formal garden. But it was stained now, and torn in places. A temporary wall, still there, divided the spacious room in half. If there had been any of the original furniture here, it had certainly now gone.

He made his way to the door, found himself in a passage, and began to explore. The stairs had been battered and bruised by the comings and goings of staff and patients, and the only furniture he saw were the remnants of cots in a few rooms, mostly with legs missing or springs broken. Not worth removing, he thought, when the clinic was closed. He wondered if Sir John had been aware of the state of the house, or didn’t care. He walked though the rooms, noting how they had been used, and how they had been left. A broken window on the ground floor had allowed leaves and rain to ruin the floorboards, and a desk in what must have been Matron’s office lay on its side, a nest of mice or squirrels in one half-opened drawer.

He found nothing of interest — except for signs that someone had been here before him, footprints in the dust, a bed of worn blankets and quilts by the coal stove in the kitchen, and indications that someone had also cooked there; a dented teapot still on the cast-iron top, and a saucepan on the floor.

Who had been in this house? A vagrant, looking for shelter against the winter cold and happening on it quite by accident; or someone who had come to this house because he knew it was there? A former patient? Or someone else?

Hamish said, “Look at the dust.”

And he lit a match, studying the pattern of footprints hardly visible in the pale light coming through the dirty window panes.

The person who had been here had left his mark. Two shoes, one dragging a little as if the ankle didn’t bend properly. And the small round ferrule of a walking stick. Or a lame man’s cane.