There was none.
He struggled to recall a map of the house in his mind’s eye, then spotted a rack of guide books sitting on one of the hallway tables. Gratefully, he snatched one up and studied a diagram of the house printed on the inside cover, then headed for a nearby servants’ corridor.
He found the fuse box easily enough and fiddled with a few switches until the small bulbs lining the dank corridor beside the kitchen blinked on again. A cheer sounded from upstairs and a smile played around his lips before his face fell once again into focused lines. He shed his playful persona for the evening and was, once again, all cop.
The hairs on the back of Ryan’s neck prickled as he walked slowly through the maze of rooms, scanning every corner.
There was still no sign of Victor.
Stepping inside the mammoth kitchen, his polished dress shoes clicked against a stone floor that had been worn smooth by the tread of countless feet. The windows were darkened by the night sky and against the glow of the lamplight he saw his own reflection from every angle; a man whose skin was drawn tightly across the hard planes of his face, eyes darkened to a stormy grey as he stalked around the room. A vintage clock on the wall chimed the quarter hour, its tinny sound magnified by the silence surrounding it.
Quarter-past eleven.
Swinging around again, Ryan spotted a narrow staircase leading down to the basement and he started down into the cellar, setting aside any feelings of natural self-preservation. Before he’d reached the third step, he faltered and was forced to throw a hand out to save himself from a nasty fall.
His heart slammed against his chest in one hard motion as visions of broken legs—or worse—flooded his mind.
“Close shave,” he muttered.
Moving more cautiously, Ryan shivered as he entered one of the oldest parts of the house. The basement was another network of small spaces, all decked out for tourists with realistic models of raw meats in the game larder and lifelike waxwork mannequins propped against the wall in the scullery, their eyes staring at him unseeingly. His stomach quivered but Ryan moved past them, spotting the old lift shaft that had once been operational and the information boards explaining its mechanism, now rusting with age.
Eventually, he let out a long sigh and was about to retrace his steps when he spotted a back door leading to a courtyard area. Through its dusty panes, he could see a solar-powered light shining an eerie greenish-white glow onto what appeared to be a heap of old clothes. Narrowing his eyes, Ryan tugged open the door and felt a cold rush of air against his face as he stepped outside.
It wasn’t old clothes.
Victor lay crumpled at the bottom of a flight of hard stone steps, his body twisted and broken. His hat had rolled a few feet away to reveal a skull crushed like an eggshell, blood and brain matter spattered against the gravel beside him.
*
Ryan stopped several feet away from Victor’s body and wished fervently for more light. He risked contaminating the scene to check for a pulse but he knew death when he saw it. There was a deep gash on the man’s temple and blood seeped in a slow trickle across his chalky face, pooling in the hollows of his eyes and mouth. That was the most likely cause of death, Ryan thought, but it could equally have been a break in the neck bone which jutted against Victor’s skin at a sickly, unnatural angle. Ryan used his phone again, this time to take some photographs of the scene in the absence of a forensic team. While there were no obvious signs of attack, it was too dark to determine cause of death without an expert and you never knew what sins remained invisible to the naked eye.
Next, he shone his torch onto the stone staircase and spotted a small clump of matted hair and blood clinging to the edge of one of the steps. Turning back to Victor, he thought of a man who had seemed so vital despite his advancing years. Tripping down a flight of stairs seemed such an ignominious way to die.
Accidents happen every day.
Yet, the staircase was lit by a series of solar-powered exterior lights that would have been unaffected by the power failure inside the house. Together with the little LED torch Victor had used, there should have been sufficient light to move safely downstairs, particularly since weather conditions were dry and mild.
How, then, did Victor fall?
The seed of doubt was planted and Ryan decided to put a call through to Tom Faulkner, the Senior Crime Scene Investigator attached to Northumbria CID. Ordinarily, the services of their most proficient forensic specialist were reserved for priority cases already deemed ‘suspicious’ but it paid to be sure.
After a brief conversation with Faulkner and the Control Room, he kept to the extreme edge of the staircase and retraced Victor’s steps back inside the house, scanning the stonework as he went. Ryan took a further two flights upward using the servants’ staircase until he re-entered the house and emerged onto the same floor as the drawing room.
Stepping into the carpeted corridor, he heard muted, angry voices. Ryan remained perfectly still, head cocked to one side until he could determine the direction. At the top of the servants’ staircase, the corridor forked. To his right, it led to the closest doorway to the drawing room, which had been used throughout the evening. To his left, it skirted around to a billiards room and, from there, continued toward an alternative entrance to the drawing room at its southern end. To his knowledge, nobody had used that doorway during the evening but now there were voices coming from that direction and possibilities began to roam his mind.
Soundlessly, Ryan took the left fork and padded along the plush hallway until he reached the closed door of the billiards room. A thin strip of light shone beneath and the voices grew louder as he approached.
“You must be out of your mind!”
Ryan frowned, trying to place an unfamiliar female voice.
“Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”
The estate manager’s tenor held an unmistakable, obnoxious quality that carried through doors and walls. Ryan craned his neck to hear the rest of the conversation but the voices became distant and he pushed open the door to the billiards room, hoping to surprise whoever was in there.
It was empty.
Ryan stored the information away and turned on his heel to deal with more pressing matters.
*
As the grandfather clock in the drawing room struck quarter-to-midnight, Ryan addressed the staff and volunteers of Cragside house, many of whom appeared worse for wear and ready to turn in for the night. He was sorry to disappoint them.