The House in the Woods (Atticus Priest Book 1) Read online

  “I did send you an email,” she said. “You said I should come and talk to you. Four o’clock? Don’t you remember?”

  Atticus frowned. He didn’t remember the woman, nor the email that she had professed to have sent him, nor the appointment that he had apparently proposed. It wouldn’t have been the first time that he had messed something up. Organisation was not his strong point, and there was no money in the budget for someone who might have been able to keep his diary for him.

  “I need your help,” she said. “Your professional help. I’m willing to pay for it, obviously.”

  That was encouraging. Atticus knew that unless he found a paying customer quickly, the landlady would send someone to unscrew the plaque before evicting him.

  “Of course, Ms. Mallender. Sorry—is it Miss or Mrs?”

  “Mrs.”

  “I do remember, of course I do. I’m sorry—Bandit needed a walk, and I thought he was going to tear the place up unless we got out. Time got away from me.”

  “Is it still convenient?”

  “Of course it is. Absolutely.” He took his key out of his pocket and unlocked the door. “Please. Come upstairs. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  6

  Atticus unlocked the door, unclipped Bandit’s lead and let the dog lead the way up the stairs. He looked down at the floor and saw the six months’ worth of pizza leaflets that had been shoved inside, crumpled and dirtied as both he and Jacob—the upstairs tenant—had trod on them, always meaning to clean them away but never quite getting around to it. The paint had been scuffed and chipped, and the carpet hadn’t been vacuumed ever since he had moved in. The lackadaisical attitude extended to the rest of the common space; neither Atticus nor Jacob had taken responsibility for keeping it tidy.

  He started up the stairs in the hope that if he moved fast, then Allegra might not notice. The staircase was narrow, with shallow treads and a sharp turn to the right before they reached the landing. If you turned back on yourself, you could reach the bathroom that came as part of Atticus’s lease; he said a silent prayer of thanks that the door was shut. There was a smoked-glass door on the left that offered access to Jacob’s flat on the second floor. Two doors opened into Atticus’s two rooms, one to the office and one to the room he was using to sleep: he unlocked the former, let Bandit inside and then invited Allegra to go through.

  The rooms were in a mess, too. He stepped around Allegra and went to close the door to the bedroom before she could look inside; it was the more cluttered of the two, and he worried that it would look unprofessional if she realised that the rooms weren’t exclusively used for business.

  The office was furnished with a desk, upon which were perched his laptop and two monitors. There was a coffee table, with a spare keyboard for the laptop, a roll of one-dollar bills from his recent trip to the United States, and a pile of correspondence, most of which he had never opened. There was an antique chess set that was laid out to mirror one of the several games that he was currently playing online. Next to the table was a leather sofa that he had picked up while it was on special at World of Leather, and a small fridge sat in the corner.

  “Please,” he said, indicating the sofa. “Take a seat.”

  The sofa was in the bay window that extended over the pavement below. Allegra sat down. Atticus had tossed a box of new business cards onto the sofa yesterday; the lid had come off and the cards were spilling out. Allegra picked up one of the cards.

  “A. Priest and Co.,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Where’s the ‘Co’?”

  “It’s just me, actually.”

  She frowned, and he realised that that might make him look a little dishonest.

  “Well, I say it’s just me—I have people who work with me, of course. There’s my secretary, for one. And other people I can call on for specialised help. Contractors.”

  She turned the card around. “And what does the A stand for?”

  “Atticus.”

  “Atticus?”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s unusual.”

  “I don’t think I’ve met anyone called Atticus before.”

  “My parents are a little eccentric.”

  “From To Kill a Mockingbird? Atticus… Atticus…”

  “Finch. That’s right.”

  “Atticus Finch. Of course.”

  He had no interest in discussing the origin of his name or his parents’ peculiarity, and, to his relief, Allegra moved off the subject. She opened her handbag, took out a set of keys, and then put them back in an inner pouch together with the business card.

  “Can I get you a coffee?”

  “Please,” she said.

  He told her he would be right back and went out to the landing. There was a small cupboard beneath the stairs that led up to the flat above. His landlady, at some point in the past, had seen fit to install a tiny kitchen in the cupboard. She might have imagined that it would have meant that she could charge more—two rooms, bathroom, kitchen, central location in Salisbury—but to call this a kitchen was a disservice to the word. There was a counter, a sink, a lightbulb above, a switch for the light and, fitted into the smallest possible space, a hot water heater. Atticus flicked the switch and, while the water boiled, he went into the bathroom.

  He had left his medication on the cistern. He picked up the bottles of Ritalin and Cipralex and put them in his pocket, then, when he decided that they were too bulky, he opened the cabinet over the sink and put them in there. He checked his reflection in the mirror. He looked tired. His dark hair was thick and unruly, reaching down to the top of his collar. At least he had shaved when he woke up that morning, and there was just the faintest sign of growth on his chin. His eyes were blue and clear, something of a miracle given the fact that he had been drinking all night, the evidence of that written in the dark pouches above his prominent cheekbones. He took off his coat and shirt and stared at his naked torso, at the sleeves of tattoos down both arms. He spritzed himself with deodorant. His last clean white shirt was on a hook behind the door, and he put it on, putting his suit jacket on over the top of it.

  The water was ready. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink. He had several mugs, a box of tea bags, and a jar of Nescafé. He took the jar, unscrewed the lid and looked inside. It was nearly all gone. He found a spoon, scooped enough for one mug, put a teabag in the other mug, and then filled both with hot water.

  Allegra was standing next to the large whiteboard on the wall that bore his scrawled notes on Alfred Burns, the paedophile who had been acquitted before disappearing off the face of the Earth.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “A case I’m looking into.”

  “Alfred Burns? I remember the name. The paedophile?”

  “He was found guilty,” Atticus said.

  “And then disappeared,” she said. “I remember.”

  Atticus had investigated Burns for six months, bringing the case to prosecution and then watching, aghast, as he had walked free thanks to a procedural error on the part of the Crown Prosecution Service. He had continued to investigate the case to the point that Burns had complained to the Independent Police Complaints Commission that he was being harassed. Atticus had been reprimanded, and then, a week later, Burns had disappeared. His house was empty; he didn’t go to work; none of his friends knew where he was. He had just vanished. Atticus knew what had happened. He was abroad, exporting his depravity to a vulnerable audience who had no idea who he was, misery trailing in his wake.

  Atticus had been trying to find him ever since.

  He stood the mugs on the table and took a bottle of milk from the fridge. He opened it and sniffed it surreptitiously; it was just about acceptable.

  He carried both mugs back into the office area. Allegra took the coffee; thankfully, she drank hers black. Atticus sloshed milk into the other cup, found a sachet of sugar from the table next to his Bluetooth speaker, and tipped the contents into the brew. He swirled his finger
in it and sat down in the reclining chair at his desk.

  “So,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  7

  Allegra looked at Atticus with an inquisitive, appraising eye.

  “So you’re a private investigator?”

  “I am.”

  “Are you a very good one?”

  She was smiling, but Atticus could tell that it was an important question and that his answer would determine whether he was given any work.

  “You’re married,” he said. “You run, but you’ve had a painful injury in the last two years. You took up running because you wanted to lose weight.”

  Her mouth fell open a little.

  “You’ve had some bad news today that has upset you. You lost a dog a little while ago, but you’ve replaced him with a puppy.”

  “That’s remarkable.”

  “Not particularly.” He downplayed his demonstration with a smile. “I have an eye for observation. I see the small details that other people miss, and then, when I see those details, I draw conclusions based on them.”

  “But how did you guess all that about me?”

  “They weren’t guesses,” he corrected. “They were deductions. Your legs show excellent muscle definition, suggesting that you run, yet you walk with a very slight limp to the right. I would guess that it was a problem with your Achilles?”

  “I tore it ten months ago,” she said. “I’ve only been able to go out again the last month or so. Go on.”

  He held up his left hand. “The fact that you are married is simple enough.”

  “My ring,” she said. “Obviously. But losing weight?”

  “There is a very slight indentation on your finger where the ring used to be a little higher. Your fingers have become more slender since you lost the weight, and the ring can now be worn lower down.”

  She grinned as she realised how he had performed his parlour trick. “And the bad news?”

  “The fact you have come to enquire about hiring an investigator is suggestive, of course, but I can do better than that. You have black smears on the insides of your right index finger and your right middle finger. I suspect that is mascara—you’ve been crying, and your makeup has smudged.”

  “And the dog?”

  “When you took your keys from your bag, I noticed that you have a dog tag for a key ring. The fact that it is not attached to the dog’s collar would seem to signify that the dog no longer has need of it. That, and the fact that you have it somewhere where you can see it, suggests that he or she might have died. Now, the puppy. You have stray hairs on the hem of your coat. Cats tend to climb—if the hairs had been on your upper body, I would have suggested you had chosen a cat, although I might have discounted that on the basis that I don’t know anyone who would buy a cat after losing a dog. The hairs on your coat are lower, from where the dog has nuzzled your legs. They are below your knee, too, which is suggestive of a smaller dog. You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who would choose a miniature breed, hence my suggestion that you have a puppy.”

  “Jasper,” she said, then pointed at Bandit. “He’s a pointer. Like him.”

  “Very good,” Atticus said.

  She shook her head. “I’m impressed.”

  “All simple enough,” Atticus said with a self-deprecating wave of his hand. “I was a police detective for several years, until quite recently. Ever since then, I’ve applied my talents, such as they are, to developing my private practice.” He sipped his tea and then wiped his hand over the damp circle that the cup had left on the table. “Now—if that’s enough to persuade you that I’m the right person for your particular problem, how can I help?”

  “I mentioned it in my email…”

  “Best to go through it again now, if you don’t mind.”

  She paused, as if fumbling for the right words to say what she wanted to say. “I’m sorry. This is all a bit delicate. You were right about me being upset. I am. It’s been hard the last few months.”

  “You can speak freely. Everything you say in this office will be treated in confidence.”

  “Have you been reading the newspapers?”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “The Christmas Eve Massacre.”

  She wrinkled her lip in distaste as she spoke the words. The case was infamous and something of a cause célèbre, one of the higher-profile stories of the year and, seemingly, about to reach its conclusion. The appellation had been chosen by the seamier elements of the national press and it had stuck.

  “Of course,” he said. “Doesn’t the trial start soon?”

  “It’s tomorrow.”

  Atticus felt a quiver of anticipation as to the unexpected direction the conversation might end up taking. Atticus went to the coffee table and liberated the copy of the Sun that he had buried under a stack of other papers. The story was covered on the front page and two further pages inside. Atticus looked at the photograph of the man on the front page and then lowered the paper, looking at her in a different light.

  “That’s my husband,” she said.

  8

  Atticus stared at the photograph on the front page of the newspaper. Ralph Mallender was in his late thirties with a mop of black hair that fell down over his forehead and dark eyes. There was something a little haughty about the way he was looking into the camera.

  “He didn’t do it,” she said.

  “Of course…”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m obviously going to say that. But he didn’t. I know my husband. And there’s just no way.”

  Allegra said it with a passion and conviction that Atticus found persuasive. He stood, took the chair from behind his desk and wheeled it around so that he could sit closer to her.

  “How do you think I might be able to help you?”

  “I need someone to review the evidence. The police case is circumstantial. At best. There’s no forensic evidence, for a start.”

  “But he was there? I read what the papers said. He found the bodies.”

  She exhaled. “Ralph had gone back to try to mend an argument from earlier that afternoon. But they were all already dead when he got there. He saw his father in the kitchen and called the police.”

  “Didn’t they originally think his brother had done it? Cameron?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And we think he did do it, as hard as it is to say that. There’s no other explanation. Cassandra was quiet—wouldn’t say boo to a goose. His mother and father—well, they had their issues, God knows, but they wouldn’t have been able to do this. Kill their kids? Impossible.” She stabbed her finger against the photograph of the farmhouse where the bodies had been found. “No. The only explanation that makes any sense is that Cameron shot his parents and his sister and then shot himself. The police came to that conclusion themselves. It was only when the rest of the family got involved that they looked at it again, and now they say that they have evidence that Cameron didn’t do it.”

  “I remember.”

  “Hugo’s relatives—Hugo is Ralph’s father—caused such a stink, the things they said… They persuaded the press and the TV that the case against Cameron was flimsy, and the press started accusing the police of botching it. And the police buckled. They just caved in. They decided Cameron didn’t do it, but, once they did that, they needed to find someone else they could put it on. Ralph was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was unlucky. That’s all he’s guilty of. Just bad luck.”

  She swallowed and, for a moment, Atticus thought that she was going to cry. He picked up a roll of toilet paper from the desk and handed it to her.

  “I don’t know what else to do, Mr. Priest.”

  “Atticus,” he said. “Call me Atticus.”

  She looked up at him through wet eyes. “Ralph’s solicitors mean well, but they’re completely reactive. I told Ralph that we should’ve gone to someone more experienced, someone from London, maybe—the case would never have got this far. There’s no spontaneity, no drive to fin
d the evidence that’d show that Ralph couldn’t have done what they say he did, but we didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Neither of us thought that it would get to this. I mean, kill his family? Come on—he obviously didn’t, not in a million years, and we just assumed that the police couldn’t possibly think that he could’ve. I suppose there was an element of inertia in it. By the time we realised things were running away from us, it felt like it was too late to change.”

  “And that’s why you’ve come to me?”

  She nodded. “We need someone to look at everything, to interview witnesses, to find the evidence that shows that my husband is innocent. That’s what we need you to do.”

  Atticus looked at her. She was earnest, regarding him with hopeful eyes. He assessed her more closely: she was well dressed; her coat and shoes were expensive; the purse beside her on the sofa looked like it was Louis Vuitton. It looked like she had money.

  “I’d be happy to help, if I can.”

  “Is this the sort of thing you’ve done before?”

  Atticus nodded, trying to look convincing. He had experience from the other side, investigating criminals in his short and inglorious career as a police detective, but he had no experience of the kind of work that Allegra needed him to do. The only cases that he had taken on since he had gone into business for himself had been investigations to provide evidence of cheating spouses and proof for insurance companies that customers who had claimed whiplash in road traffic accidents were, in fact, faking their injuries in order to take a payout. He had followed self-proclaimed victims to golf clubs where walking sticks were exchanged for pitching wedges, laid up in bushes and taken photographs of illicit trysts—the kind of grubby sleuthing that had given his own family so much to chuckle about—but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

  She looked at him and then nodded, encouraging him to provide her with examples of relevant experience.

  Atticus thought quickly. “Like I said, I used to work for the police,” he said, at least beginning from a position of truth. “I was a detective in the CID.”