In Blue and Yellow

He got there earlier than expected, considering how little sleep he’d had, bedding down on the settee at Glenda’s house, and the state of his head during the night, the visions, the strangeness of his dreams. He’d taken too much stimulus in too short a time. He was fighting it still as he stood in the room on the top floor of Bridlemere, looking around at the peeling wallpaper and the bare floorboards. This was the room with the wardrobe of dresses, where they had found the dress pinned to the floor, after the funeral of Leonard Graves. Hobbes let a picture form in his mind of Nicholas Graves pushing the drawing pins through the cloth into the floorboards. He was attempting to atone for Adeline’s death, even after all these years had passed, a need brought on, no doubt, by the suicide of his father. The torn-up letters found in the wastepaper bin at Nicholas’s bedsit seemed to confirm this: one last attempt to talk to his daughter, across the years, through the barrier between life and death. Conversations with a ghost.

The only decoration in the room was a playbill fixed to the chimney breast. It depicted Mary Estelle Graves dressed as Anna Kreeley in The Moon Awakes. The famous attire, the same pose Hobbes had seen in so many other images around the house. But this playbill was signed by the actress, and dated.

19 October 1954.

He should have read this earlier, on a previous tour of the house, and maybe the story would have come to light. Leonard Graves had killed himself on the same day of the year. And on the anniversary of that day, from 1954 onwards, a torn and bloodied dress had been laid out in a different room of the house. Twenty-seven dresses all told, made by Camilla on her sewing-machine, then hand-stitched where necessary. He could see her clearly, a young woman hard at work to make this symbolic funeral gown for her dead niece, Adeline. Such abstract belief, and all to perpetuate the memory of a girl born in sin, the ultimate sin to which a family could fall prey. A poor, damaged child, hidden for so many years, slowly going mad in her own solitude. He felt like weeping at the pity of it.

He unhooked the playbill from the wall.

For a second he was confused.

There was a hole, a tiny hole, less than half an inch in diameter. Made by a drill bit, from the look of it. Adeline’s bedroom was next door: could this be a spy hole, looking into her room? But no: when he put his eye to the aperture, he saw only darkness. It looked through into the hollow of the chimney, nothing more. Another detail in the case, as yet unexplained.

Latimer and Fairfax were waiting for him in the corridor, with the work team standing close by. It was five past nine on 29 October 1981. He gave the order and the men moved into the room. Almost immediately he heard a sledgehammer smashing into the wall, and his ears rang with the noise of it, yet the sound was dulled inside his head, as though his skull was lined with cotton wool or, worse, with the spores of the musk.