The Dead Room

Chapter 10 #2

We walk up the drive, and Chloe unlocks the door with an iron key. She opens one half and loosens the bolts to open the other. “First reaction?”

“My honest first reaction would be ‘Where’s the catch?’”

“Oh come on, Lindsay! First reaction?”

“Okay, how’s this? ‘Gosh, Chloe, it almost feels too good to be true that this lovely house could be in my budget.’ That do you?”

I expect her to snap but she surprises me with a grin that makes her eyes dance. “Perfect,” she says. “Let’s go in.”

Saint Helen’s is less of a warren coming at it from the front door, or maybe it’s because I was half asleep, wholly jet-lagged, the last time.

There’s a drawing room, panelled and pillared, on one side of the hall and a dining room on the other.

Someone has gone to town with the paintbrush, filling in the panels in crimson and picking out the thistles on the ceiling medallions in green and purple: representational but misguided.

I don’t say that to Chloe, though. To her, I say, “Wow!”

Through a butler’s pantry from the back of the dining room we get to the kitchen, sad and empty with all the furniture gone but big enough to dance in.

“There’s a utility that would be a big kitchen in most houses,” Chloe says, ushering me through. “This door in the curved wall here is like a cloakroom, and check out the stairs.”

I dutifully check them out. The paint is a bright egg-yolk yellow on the panels, and the plaster is the same white as all the other rooms, but the woodwork—the doors and skirtings, the deep pediments and ornate banisters—have never been painted in their long life.

They’re the same warm honey-coloured wood they were when the carpenter first polished them.

I remember Mrs. March saying “not Georgian, not even Victorian.”

“Edwardian, isn’t it?” I say to Chloe. “The stairs are amazing.”

“Finally!” she says. “A bit of enthusiasm. But don’t go up just yet, there’s more to show you.”

Then we are in the garden room where I slept so soundly, the floorboards showing wear and tear where Peggy’s chair was positioned. I rub the marks with my toe, imagining her feet resting there over the decades.

“That just needs a buff,” says Chloe. “Overall, I’d say the place has been carefully looked after.”

“I agree,” I say. “You can tell it hasn’t churned through lots of hands. Whoever lived here stayed a long time and loved it.”

“You’re right,” Chloe says. “The last owner stayed for donkeys and only left when she got too frail to manage the place. The downside of that is no Jacuzzi baths and no kitchen island. The upside is all the original features survived unscathed.”

I don’t know why I’m so loath to tell her that I know this house.

Maybe I don’t want to dilute how proud she is of showing it to me.

Or I don’t want to set her off again when she’s been so touchy.

I manage to work out a halfway point. “I’ve been here before, you know,” I tell her.

“Just once. I came to tea here. I got to choose a chocolate biscuit out of a tin.”

“Are you sure? There’s a lot of big old houses in Dunblane.”

“Positive,” I say. “It was a Mrs. March.”

She doesn’t look annoyed exactly and Chloe’s never been one to call a coincidence spooky, but she’s definitely bothered. The things that bother her seem so random sometimes.

“Well, speaking of the good old days,” she says, still pretty sour, “all the chimneys are still working. And these French doors lead to the back garden. Suntrap patio, mature trees, shed and greenhouse. Upstairs first though.”

I follow her up and through four bedrooms—spacious, empty, dowdy and grand—and peek round the door of the only bathroom, then up again on a smaller staircase to two attic rooms and a boxroom in between them.

There’s a French window up here that gives roof access.

We open it and edge out onto something that’s not quite a balcony but definitely a bit more than a parapet, looking down at the garden.

The lawn is cut in stripes and all the bushes around the edge are clipped into tight little mounds.

“The way I see it,” Chloe says, turning away and pulling me back inside; she’s never had a head for heights, “is you sacrifice the little room and the big cupboard—remind me to show you the big cupboard off the second bedroom—so you get an en-suite for every bedroom on the first floor, and you’ve still got five in total. It’s hardly squalor, is it?”

“Oh, just casually put in new bathrooms all over the shop using the fifty pence that would be left in my budget?”

Chloe comes and stands in front of me with her hands on her hips.

“I thought you were pretending you didn’t know the price.

” She spins on her heel. “Let’s try that again.

” And she repeats her lines word for word.

Then I say, “What a great idea. Depending on my budget, that is. I wonder how much this house would cost me?”

“Could you sound any less sincere?” says Chloe, but she’s smiling.

“Anyway, I couldn’t sacrifice all the small bedrooms for showers,” I remind her. “I would need a dead room.”

“Oh of course,” Chloe says. “A house isn’t a home without a dead room.

” And just for a moment, as I look at her, I remember the day she told me her parents were getting a divorce.

Except, no. It’s not that day I’m suddenly reliving.

It’s the day she stopped pretending the divorce was a bore and no biggie.

It was the day she sat in a toilet cubicle at school, hunched on the shut lid, blowing her nose with toilet paper, and whispered, “I’m scared, Lindsay. Why does everything have to change?”

I don’t understand what’s wrong with her today, but I still care. “Let’s call it the audio pod,” I tell her. “You don’t need to hear that phrase ever again.”

“Sap,” Chloe says. The moment is over and I can tell she means to make out like it never happened. “One dead room coming up. Follow me.”

She leads me down the attic stairs, across the landing, down the big stairs, across the hall, into the kitchen and out the far end to the back lobby, then she opens a door to reveal steps leading up and ushers me ahead of her.

At the top is a room about ten feet square with one small window and a low, plank-lined ceiling.

“Maid’s room,” she says. “What do you think?” I walk in. Chloe hovers by the door.

“Ideal,” I say. “Do these shutters still work? Yeah, ideal. I reckon I could convert a room this size for about seven hundred quid not including the equipment.”

“Seven again, eh?” Chloe says with a ghost of her troubled look drifting over her face. I would make a joke about deadening sound, if it was anyone else, or even the usual Chloe.

“And I’ve already got the equipment,” I say instead. “If it survived packing, transport and storage.”

“It’s surely insured with the mover,” says Chloe, unmistakably latching onto a preferred topic. “I’d help you deal with them if they get arsey. I’ve dealt with plenty of those guys when I’m doing buy-sell cleaning.”

I turn away so she can’t see me smiling.

Chloe truly believes that cleaning a house while it changes hands makes her a property expert, like she believes cleaning a house after a death makes her practically a coroner.

God help us all if she ever breaks into the crime scene cleaning game, like she’s been trying to.

“There’s not many plugs,” I say, as this strikes me.

I can only see a single outlet tacked onto the skirting board under the window and my computer and sound gear need at least four.

I crouch down for a closer look, thinking maybe if the wire’s painted onto the top of the woodwork it wouldn’t take much to put in a board.

“Poor housemaids,” Chloe says. “Nowhere to plug in their straighteners if their phone was charging.” She waits. “Come on. Not even a chuckle? That was funny!”

But all my attention is caught by something I’ve just seen under the windowsill. There is something scraped into the thick, many-layered white paint there. It’s a message. Or words, anyway. It’s crudely done and hard to read but I’m sure the first word is Help.

I turn to tell Chloe, but she’s gone.

“Lindsay?” she calls from halfway down the stairs. “Are you coming? I want to show you the garden.”

I bob up from my crouch and follow her. Some kid locked in the maid’s room as a punishment?

Or two kids, playing at kidnap. Maybe this little attic was given over as a playroom once maids were a thing of the past. Or it might have been a maid, away back in the day, overworked until she thought she was going to drop.

I will myself to stop thinking about it, even though there’s a niggle somewhere that I can’t quite put my finger on and, if I get distracted now, it’ll escape me permanently.

Anyway, I tell myself, picking my way down the narrow stairs, in a house this age, a melodramatic maid or kids playing pretend aren’t the worst that must have happened.

In a hundred plus years, at least one person must have died here.

“Richard” probably died in the biggest bedroom, the one I’d take for myself if this was real.

Chloe has found a prime spot, in the full sun against a backdrop of something I’d say was a passion flower if this was Hawaii. She’s all in on the idea that we’re doing a property show. “So, Lindsay,” she begins, in a presenter voice. “What did you think?”

“Beyond my wildest dreams,” I say. “I’m guessing you’ve gone way over my budget, just to mess with me.”

“Would I!” Chloe shoots back. “Oh ye of little faith. Would you care to take a stab?”

“All this house in this location? Nine hundred and fifty thousand pounds,” I say. “More likely well over a million. But I love it, so my question for you is, Will you lend me a tenner?”

Chloe’s laugh is clear and high. She’s delighted with me for playing along properly now.

“I’ll lend you a fan,” she says, “to revive yourself after hearing the news that this lovely house has just hit the market at a fixed price of seven hundred thousand pounds. That’s bang on your budget, Lindsay!”

“Well, that’s certainly a lovely surprise,” I say, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice any longer.

“I’m going to buy it.” Then I shove her, not that hard but hard enough to let her know I mean it.

“Right, you’ve had your fun,” I say. “I’m guessing you couldn’t resist giving me a look round.

But can we go and see the real one now? And can you tell me how much this one actually costs? ”

“Eh?” says Chloe. “I just told you. Seven.”

I am staring at her with my mouth open. “Seriously?”

“It’s kind of sweet that you love it so much you can’t believe you can afford it,” she says.

She goes back to her presenter voice. “Guessing too high is a sure sign of true love. Some people would be put off by the lack of upgrades and the old-fashioned style. It’s wonderful that you seem to have taken to it.

” She laughs again and I know she carries on talking but I can barely hear her.

If I maxed out my budget and bought this place, I could have Mrs. March round for tea anytime she wanted to come, after I find her.

She could stay the night. I still don’t believe her health has changed so much so quickly that a visit would be beyond her.

I could make it a happy move all round. As well as these giddy plans, though, I’ve got to admit there’s still a trace of something else.

“Do you want to go for another look round, now you know it’s in your price range?” Chloe says.

I’m on the move before she’s finished speaking. But it’s not only to pirouette in the grand spaces or dance up and down the soaring stairwell. It’s also because I want to see that scratched paint again. I’m pretty sure my eyes passed over something else without me taking it in.

I pad through the empty rooms, listening to my footsteps, much louder now without Chloe’s chatter.

Drawing room, dining room, garden room, cloakroom, up the stairs.

One, two, three, four bedrooms, the dressing room that Chloe called a cupboard, the bathroom, up again.

One attic room and then the other, the boxroom between them, all the way to the ground floor again and through the butler’s pantry to the kitchen, the utility room, the back lobby.

Finally up the crooked little stairway to the maid’s room, my dead room.

I look out of the window again and run my fingers over the message scratched into the paint under the sill. I crouch and close one eye.

Help. They are going to kill m—

I scrabble backwards, heart hammering. Seven dead. I can almost hear the words, although I know they’re inside my head. Seven dead in the dead room. Stop it, Lindsay! Help. They are going to kill m—

And I can’t pretend this is a symptom of grief or illness. This isn’t stress. I wish it was, but this is a physical fact. I can feel it on my fingertips, under my nails.

Melodramatic maid, I remind myself. Kids playing.

I stand up. Chloe is looking at me from down in the garden.

She must have been watching the window, waiting for me to appear.

I brush my fingertips on my jeans and wave to her.

I tell myself again that, in a house a hundred years old, of course there’s history.

Lives have been lived here. Games have been played.

More than one person has probably died here.

Seven might be a conservative estimate. I should concentrate instead on the fact that more than one person has probably been born here. Or reborn, like me.