The Girl in the Picture

Chapter 1 A House of Secrets

My heels clicked on the pavement as I followed the line of the high stone wall. I was looking for the rusty locked gate that I remembered from childhood, the gate I used to believe hid a house of secrets.

When I reached it, I stared in surprise. The iron bars, with their pattern of metal flowers, had once been battered, but now they shone with black paint. And a smart wooden sign saying ‘Farthington House’ had replaced the old rotten one. Things had certainly changed.

Across the road the church clock began to strike. Ten o’clock, the time of my appointment. A quick check of my phone in case of last-minute messages and I was ready.

The gate opened easily at my touch, and I did what I’d always longed to do and stepped inside. The day was sunny, but in here it was chilly. High, clipped hedges on either side cast the garden in shadow. Coils of early autumn mist rose from a dewy lawn coated with fallen leaves.

As I stood there, intrigued, the gate behind me swung shut with a clang.

A blackbird flew off uttering cries of panic.

A squirrel bounded with quick movements up the trunk of an oak tree.

I waited as the garden settled into a watchful silence, before turning my attention to the red-brick house before me.

Its three storeys towered over the misty garden, lending it a sinister, closed-in feel.

A straight gravel path ran up to a porch whose white pillars framed a forbidding black front door.

I felt as if ghostly fingers from another world – a world of the past – were clutching at me.

At last, I thought, with growing excitement, I might discover the secrets of Farthington House.

As a journalist on Our Heritage magazine, I was here to interview the house’s new owner.

The week before, an email from a Kyle Rutherfurd headed ‘Farthington House to Open to the Public’ landed in my inbox.

I’d felt an immediate prickle of interest and clicked open the attached press release at once.

There had been a time when I’d known the Norfolk town of Farthington quite well.

My beloved gran had lived in a nearby village and when I stayed with her as a child, we’d sometimes come in to do some shopping.

On Saturdays there was a street market where I liked to spend my pocket money on sweets and cheap jewellery.

The town being busy, Gran used to park in a side street a little way out.

On our walk into the centre, we had to pass the intriguing rusty gate with its wonky sign.

One day, I’d hung back to peer through the bars. ‘Who lives here?’ I asked Gran.

‘The Rutherfurd family,’ Gran said briskly, not slowing her pace. ‘High and mighty lot, they are. Come on, girl,’ she called, marching on. ‘Don’t drag.’

I had to hurry to catch up.

I hadn’t the courage to ask her again, though we often passed the house. Then, when I was twelve, Gran died suddenly, and I was devastated. There were no more visits to Farthington, but I always remembered the rusty gate decorated with metal flowers and wondered what secrets it hid.

Today, I hitched my bag onto my shoulder and set off up the path.

But as I reached the porch, something surprising happened.

The front door to the house swung inwards and a small woolly brown dog bounded out, barking.

Its tail was wagging, but it still spooked me. I gasped and nearly lost my balance.

‘Jess! Here!’ a young man called from the doorway. Jess gave me a final yap, turned tail and ambled back inside. The man straightened. ‘I’m sorry, that’s not a good start,’ he said, glancing at me nervously. ‘Amy Collins, I think? I’m Kyle Rutherfurd.’

‘Hi.’ I recovered my cool. ‘Don’t worry, I’m usually okay with dogs.

’ We shook hands rather formally. He was about my age, thirty, perhaps a couple of years older, with a shy manner.

Thick, cropped fair hair, clean-shaven, wearing a blue shirt that brought out the colour of his eyes.

As I followed him inside, I noticed that his navy jacket was patched at the elbows.

He closed the heavy door and I gazed round a dark, wood-panelled hall.

The air smelled of roses, presumably from a bowl of pot-pourri next to the vase of dried flowers on a narrow table under a gilt-edged mirror.

‘Jess isn’t mine exactly,’ he said, as we watched the dog bound away upstairs. ‘She came with the house. Belongs to Aunt Julia. She came with the house, too.’ His eyes crinkled at his own dry joke, then he looked at me more closely.

‘It sounds complicated,’ I offered. His gaze made me uncomfortable.

‘Families can be complicated, don’t you think?’ he said gloomily ‘Hey, I should say thanks for coming.’

He took my coat then opened a door situated towards the front of the hall.

‘I don’t know how you like to do things, but shall we sit and have a chat before I show you round?

’ he asked, more cheerily than before. He stood back to let me enter a formal drawing room.

‘Make yourself comfortable while I grab us some coffee. Is coffee what you’d like? ’

I assured him that it was and he closed the door as he left me.

I looked round with interest. The room was wood-panelled like the hall and crammed with tall bookcases and overstuffed sofas.

A bright fire burned in a cast-iron grate.

I wandered round, examining the pictures of countryside scenes on the walls and a collection of china statues on a shelf until Kyle returned bearing a laden tray.

‘Everything’s perfect!’ I pointed to the vintage cups and saucers he was setting out on the coffee table. ‘This room. It’s like being in Victorian times.’

He beamed with pleasure. ‘That’s exactly the impression I’m trying to give. My vision for this place is…’

‘Just a moment,’ I broke in, pulling out my phone. ‘Do you mind if I record the interview?’

‘Go ahead.’

When phone and notebook were ready, I looked up to find him watching me with that puzzled expression again.

‘Sorry,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘It’s just that you look familiar, but I can’t think why. We didn’t meet in London, did we? I used to work for a design agency in Covent Garden.’

I bit my lip, then shook my head. ‘I’m sure I would have remembered if we had.’ I had indeed worked on magazines in London before my present job and met many designers, but not Kyle.

‘Odd.’ He took a sip of his coffee. ‘Sorry, do start.’

I thought for a second, then began the interview.

‘I was so pleased to receive your email. I was always intrigued by this place,’ I said, going on to tell him about my trips to Farthington as a child.

‘I expect it sounds silly, but it always seemed like a house of secrets to me.’ I didn’t tell him what Gran had said about its owners being ‘high and mighty’. That would have sounded rude.

Nor did I tell him that Amaya, my boss on Our Heritage, hadn’t been very interested in an article about Farthington House.

Her words echoed in my mind. ‘No one’s heard of the place.

I trust you can get a good story out of your visit.

’ This was the reason there was no photographer with me today.

I first had to write something to deserve the expense of one.

‘A house of secrets!’ Kyle repeated, with a dry laugh.

‘Well, every family has skeletons in the cupboard, but you’d have to ask Aunt Julia about ours.

I’m only a distant cousin of the Rutherfurds of Farthington House.

’ He finished his coffee and sat back in his chair.

‘Let me explain. My several times great grandfather George built this house in 1870. He had two sons, John and Stephen, and when he died he left it to the elder boy, John, who left it to his son Andrew. Then Andrew’s son Christopher had it.

Christopher never married and when he died in 2022, his lawyer had to go all the way back to Stephen to trace the next male heir – me!

It was a great surprise, I can tell you. ’

‘It had to be left to a man, not a woman?’ I asked tentatively.

‘That is how old George Rutherfurd set things up when he built the house and there’s no evidence that Christopher tried to change it. Christopher was a bit old-fashioned, by all accounts.’

‘You mean… he might have left it to your Aunt Julia?’ I’d never met this woman and didn’t know anything about her. But I wondered how she felt about Christopher leaving Farthington House to a virtual stranger given that it was her home.

‘Perhaps. But Julia – who’s my distant cousin, rather than my aunt – is in her eighties. Perhaps he thought it would be too much for her. It’s been quite a project doing the repairs.’ Kyle glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘Shall I take you round now? We can chat on the way.’

As I gathered my things he said, ‘We’re in the old drawing room, of course. The ceiling was grimy with soot so it had to be repainted. I bought the chairs at auction but the bookcases were already here and…’

Still talking, he led me back to the hall.

I kept my phone recording as he took me through the ground-floor rooms. First, a grand dining room with a dozen chairs round a long table.

Kyle pointed to some of the portraits on the walls.

‘This is George Rutherfurd, who built the house,’ he said of a severe Victorian gentleman glaring down at us.

‘And here’s John, his elder son, Christopher’s grandfather.

And John’s brother Stephen, my great-great-grandfather who died in the First World War. ’

‘Will you have a guidebook?’ I asked as I sketched a chart of the names.

‘It’s in preparation, but I can send you a draft.’

We moved on to a pretty sitting room at the back of the house, with a piano and more china figures in a display cabinet.

A half-finished tapestry on a frame stood by the sofa.

Kyle unlocked one of a pair of French doors and we stepped out onto a terrace where we stood for a moment looking out across the garden.

Kyle pointed to a brick building beyond.

‘That’s where I live. I’ve converted the old stables. Part of it I use for my design work.’

I was shivering without my coat, so we went back inside. We visited a study next, filled with ancient volumes and dark leather chairs. A box of cigars lay open on the huge desk next to a letter rack. If the sitting room had felt feminine, this room felt exclusively male.

‘Are there any ghosts?’ I enquired, sounding brighter than I felt. I could almost sense the presence of the men who’d inhabited this room, with its faint scent of tobacco and old books.

‘Not unless you count… no, that’s unkind,’ he smiled.

I wondered if he’d been going to say ‘Aunt Julia’ and liked the fact that he hadn’t. Instead, he led me into a large kitchen where autumn daylight reflected off a rack of shiny copper pans.

The study had felt haunted; this kitchen was silent and spiritless. I gazed round at the cold cast-iron range, the scrubbed stone sinks, the empty shelves in the pantry. It was all too clean. ‘It looks as though nobody’s cooked anything in here for years,’ I remarked.

‘Christopher lived on ready meals. He had a kettle, a microwave and an old fridge. Julia has her own kitchen upstairs.’

By now I was trying to imagine the shape of my article. I’d describe the way that following the death of the elderly owner, Christopher, Kyle had carefully restored the house to its authentic Victorian state. Accurate, but a bit dry.

I wondered exactly where Aunt Julia lived, but before I could ask this, Kyle had moved on.

He’d opened a door in the inner wall of the kitchen to reveal a narrow flight of wooden stairs.

‘This was for the servants,’ he said, standing aside.

I craned my neck to see the steps wind up into darkness.

‘Aunt Julia uses it, but we’ll go up the grander way. ’

I followed him back to the hall and up the wide, carpeted staircase to a galleried landing. Here he showed me a series of bedrooms. They were all set out in Victorian style, with patterned rugs and heavy mahogany furniture. We poked our noses into a bathroom with a huge claw-footed bath.

Next, Kyle took me past the entrance to a gloomy corridor. I glanced down it, wondering where it led, but he didn’t explain.

Instead, he opened the door to a small room, which I saw was a children’s nursery. There were iron safety bars on the windows, a crib and two small beds.

We stood for a moment, looking at the pattern of zoo animals on the wallpaper, a line of picture books on a low shelf. ‘This is how it was,’ he murmured. ‘I didn’t change much in here.’

He started to retreat, but I paused. Something had caught my eye.

It was a small, framed painting on the wall in a dark corner.

I moved closer. It was a portrait of a young woman.

The size of a laptop, it glowed out of the shadows.

I stepped towards it to take a better look.

And behind me I heard Kyle draw a sharp breath of surprise.

‘That’s where I’ve seen you,’ Kyle said, his voice full of wonder.