The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [122]
She kept the smile in place. Just. “It’s the family home.”
I nodded. “You told me last time.”
She opened her mouth as if to say, “Well then,” but seemed to think better of it. “The papers said this man—MacKenzie—held three people captive then escaped before the police arrived. Was Jess one of the three? You said her dogs were here.”
“I said they had a fight,” I corrected mildly.
“While MacKenzie was here?”
“Jess’s mastiffs are better guard dogs than that.”
Her impatience got the better of her. “Then who was here? You must see how worrying it is for me to know that a man broke in so easily with three people on the premises. Did one of them let him in? What did he want? Was he after something in the house?”
“Why don’t you ask your mother’s solicitor?” I suggested. “I’m sure he’ll be able to set your mind at rest. Or even the police. I can give you the name of the detective leading the inquiry.”
“I already know it,” she snapped. “I’ve asked to see him this afternoon.”
“Then there isn’t a problem,” I pointed out reasonably. “He’ll tell you as much as he can.”
She stared at me for a moment, trying to assess if there was any mileage in continuing, then with a shrug reached for her bag. “You’d think the crown jewels had been stolen the way everyone’s behaving.”
“Well, you can be reassured on that front at least,” I said with a small laugh. “MacKenzie didn’t think there was anything worth stealing…so your husband’s paintings are still here.”
She threw me a look of dislike. “Perhaps he was targeting my mother’s antiques. Perhaps he didn’t know she’d left.”
“That was Inspector Bagley’s first idea,” I agreed, “which is why he wanted a list of anything that had struck me as unusual since I took over the tenancy. I said there were several things…but I didn’t think they were connected with Saturday’s events.”
Madeleine froze. Only briefly, but enough for me to notice. “Like what?”
I blew a ring of smoke towards the ceiling. “The water had been turned off.”
It was a guess, much like the guesses I’d made about MacKenzie’s mother, but as I’d said to Jess the previous evening, why stop at turning off the Aga? Why not the water? I couldn’t get it out of my head that Jess had found Lily beside the fishpond. Or that memory might have told her there was a well under the logs in the woodshed. What was she doing outside at eleven o’clock at night? And why did she go to other people’s houses to clean her teeth and have a cup of tea?
“That wasn’t me,” Madeleine said abruptly, searching through her bag so that she wouldn’t have to look at me. “It must have been the agent. The stopcock’s under the sink. All you had to do was turn it back on again.”
“I didn’t mean it was off when I arrived,” I told her. “The taps in the kitchen were fine. The problem was upstairs. There was so much air in the water pipes to the bathroom taps that they all started banging. It scared the living daylights out of me.”
“It’s an old house,” she said carefully. “Mummy was always complaining about the pipes.”
“I called in a plumber because I was so worried, and the first thing he did was check the stopcock. According to him, air gets into a system when the main supply is interrupted and people keep trying the taps because they don’t understand why nothing’s coming out. Water runs out downstairs and air fills the void upstairs. He said it could only have happened while someone was living here…and that must have been your mother because the house was empty till I took it on.”
She took a tissue from her bag and touched it to the end of her nose. “I don’t know anything about the water system. All I know is that Mummy said the pipes were always banging.”
I was relying very heavily on the fact that she knew nothing about the water system. Or any other system. My “oddities” were courtesy of Jess. “Try Madeleine with the electricity as well,” she had said. “The night I found Lily, the house was in darkness and I couldn’t get the outside lights to work. That’s the main reason I took her back to the farm. I didn’t want to waste time trying to find