Stacked in the corner and carefully wrapped in brown paper and string were a series of canvases, painted in oils. These included a number of still lives, a rather amateurish portrait of a young woman whose discomfort was palpable, despite the sloppy execution. The next was much more professional – an Edwardian gentleman reclining in the same wickerwork chair I’d found under a dust sheet earlier. The man was holding a silver-topped cane and for a moment I thought he might be Nightingale, but the man was older and his eyes were an intense blue. Nightingale senior, perhaps? The next, probably by the same painter, was a nude with a subject that so shocked me I took it to the skylight to get a better look. I hadn’t made a mistake. There was Molly, reclining pale and naked on the chaise longue, staring out of the canvas with heavy-lidded eyes, one hand dipping into a bowl of cherries placed on a table by her side. At least, I hope they were cherries. The painting was in the impressionist style so the brush strokes were bold, making it hard to tell: they were definitely small and red, the same colour as Molly’s lips.
I carefully rewrapped the paintings and put them back where I’d found them. I did a cursory check of the room for damp, dry rot and whatever it is that makes wooden beams crumbly and dangerous. I found that there was still a shuttered loading door at the courtyard end of the room and mounted above it, a hoisting beam. Presumably to serve a hayloft for the coach horses.
As I leaned out to check it was still solid, I saw Molly’s pale face in one of the upper windows. I didn’t know what I found stranger, that somebody had persuaded her to get her kit off, or that she hadn’t changed in appearance in the last seventy years. She withdrew without apparently seeing me. I turned and looked around the room.
This, I thought, will do nicely.
At one time or other most of my mum’s relatives had cleaned offices for a living. For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal. My mum had done a stint herself and had often taken me with her to save on babysitting. When an African mum takes her son to work she expects her son to work so I quickly learnt how to handle a broom and a window cloth. So the next day after practice, I returned to the coach house with a packet of Marigold gloves and my Uncle Tito’s Numatic vacuum cleaner. Let me tell you, 1,000 watts of suckage makes a big difference when cleaning a room. The only thing I had to worry about was causing a rift in the space-time fabric of the universe. I found the window cleaners online, and a pair of bickering Romanians scrubbed up the skylight while I rigged up a pulley to the hoisting beam, just in time for the TV to be delivered along with the fridge.
I had to wait a week for the cable to be hooked up, so I caught up on my practice and started narrowing down the location of Father Thames. ‘Finding him will be a good exercise for you,’ Nightingale had said. ‘Give you a good grounding in the folklore of the Thames Valley.’ I asked for a clue, and he told me to remember that Father Thames had traditionally been a peripatetic spirit which, according to Google, meant walking or travelling about, itinerant, so not really a lot of help. I had to admit that it was expanding my knowledge of the folklore of the Thames Valley, most of which was contradictory but would no doubt be helpful at the next pub quiz I took part in.
To inaugurate my re-entry into the twenty-first century I ordered some pizza and invited Lesley round to see my etchings. I had a long soak in the claw-footed porcelain tub that dominated the communal bathroom on my floor and swore, not for the first time, that I was definitely going to install a shower. I’m not a peacock but on occasion I like to dress to impress, although like most coppers I don’t wear much in the way of bling, the rule being never wear something round your neck that you don’t want to be strangled with. I laid in some Becks because I knew Lesley preferred bottled beer, and settled in to watch sports TV while I waited for her to turn up.
Among the many other modern innovations that I’d introduced to the coach house was an entryphone installed on the garage’s side door, so that when Lesley arrived all I had to do was buzz her in.
I opened the door and met her at the top of the spiral staircase – she’d brought company.
‘I brought Beverley,’ said Lesley.
‘Of course you did,’ I said.
I offered them beer. ‘I want you to make it clear that nothing I eat or drink here puts me under obligation,’ said Beverley. ‘And no mucking me about this time.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Eat, drink, no obligations, Scout’s honour.’