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‘Yeah. Got pictures of her coming out of the lover’s flat this morning. Visiting her mother, my arse. Maybe I should’ve strung it out a bit. We’re not going to make much out of this one.’
‘Good word of mouth, though,’ said Strike.
‘Shall I get Pat to notify the next on the waiting list?’
‘Let’s give it a week,’ said Strike, after a sight hesitation. ‘The Frank job needs twice the manpower now we know it’s both of them. Listen, Midge, while I’ve got you – is there anything up with Pat and Littlejohn?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘There hasn’t been a row or anything?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘She was a bit odd when I asked her what she thought of him, this morning.’
‘Well, she doesn’t like him,’ said Midge. ‘None of us do,’ she added, with her usual candour.
‘I’m putting out feelers for a replacement,’ said Strike, which was true: he’d emailed several contacts in both the police and the army for possible candidates the previous evening. ‘OK, good work on Mrs Thing. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
He drove on through the relentlessly flat landscape, which was having its usual lowering effect on his mood. The Aylmerton Community had forever tainted Norfolk in his mind; he found no beauty in the seeming immensity of the sky pressing down upon the level earth, nor for its occasional windmills and marshy wetlands.
His satnav guided him along a series of narrow, winding country lanes, until he finally saw his first signpost to Garvestone. Three hours after he’d left London, he entered the tiny village, passing a square-towered church, school and village hall in rapid succession and finding himself out the other side barely three minutes later. A quarter of a mile beyond Garvestone he spotted a wooden sign directing him up a track to his right to the hall. Shortly thereafter, he was driving through the open gates towards what had once been home to the Stolen Prophet.
38
Six at the top…
Not light but darkness.
First he climbed up to heaven,
Then he plunged into the depths of the earth.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The drive was bordered with high hedges, so Strike saw little of the surrounding gardens until he reached the gravel forecourt in front of the hall, which was an irregular but impressive building of grey-blue stone, with Gothic windows and a front door of solid oak reached by a flight of stone steps. He paused for a few seconds after leaving the car to take in the immaculate green lawns, the topiary lions and the water garden glimmering in the distance. Then a door creaked and a croaky but powerful male voice said,
‘Hello thah!’
An elderly man had come out of the house and now stood leaning on a mahogany stick at the top of the stone steps to the front door. He was wearing a shirt under his tweed blazer, and the blue and maroon regimental tie of the Grenadier Guards. Beside him stood an immensely fat yellow Labrador, wagging its tail but evidently deciding to wait for the newcomer to climb the steps rather than descend to greet him.
‘Can’t get down the damn steps any more without help, sorry!’
‘No problem,’ Strike said, the gravel crunching beneath his feet as he approached the front door. ‘Colonel Graves, I presume?’
‘How d’yeh do?’ said Graves, shaking hands. He had a thick white moustache and a slight overbite, faintly reminiscent of a rabbit or, if you were being unkind, of the standard impersonation of an upper-class twit. The eyes blinking behind the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses were milky with cataracts, and a large, flesh-coloured hearing aid protruded from one ear.
‘Come in, come in – here, Gunga Din,’ he added. Strike took the last exhortation to be an invitation to the fat Labrador now sniffing at the hems of his trousers, rather than himself.
Colonel Graves shuffled along ahead of Strike into a large hall, cane thudding loudly on the dark polished floorboards, the panting Labrador bringing up the rear. Victorian oil portraits of what Strike didn’t doubt were ancestors looked down upon the two men and the dog. The place had an aged, serene beauty enhanced by the light flooding through a large leaded window over the stairs.
‘Beautiful house,’ said Strike.
‘M’grandfather bought it. Beerocracy. Brewery’s long gone, though. Graves Stout, ever heard of it?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘Went out of business in 1953. Still got a couple of bottles in the cellar. Nasty stuff. M’father made us drink it. Foundation of the family’s fortune and what have yah. Hyar we are,’ said the colonel, by now panting as loudly as his dog as he pushed open a door.
