The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [41]
This was the seventeenth-century heart of the building and I could well believe it had remained untouched for years. The only natural light came from a window halfway up the stairs, but it wasn’t enough to brighten the gloom of the dark oak panelling around the walls. The ceiling was furrowed with ancient beams and the flagstones worn into a visible curvature between the front door and the stairs.
The two rooms leading off the hall dispelled any sense of a house frozen in time. One, which was clearly Jess’s office, had filing cabinets, a desk and a computer, and the other an old sofa and piles of beanbags that smelt powerfully of dogs. Against the longest wall was a steel grey designer hi-fi system with shelf upon shelf of CDs, DVDs, videos and vinyl records framing a plasma screen. I hadn’t thought of Jess as a music, film or television buff, but she clearly was. She was even connected to Sky digital, if the unmistakable black remote on the sofa was any guide. So much for a shrine to the past, I thought enviously, wishing Barton House had more to offer than four terrestrial channels on one miserable little screen in the back room.
I almost stopped there. It’s one thing to be offered free rein of someone else’s house, another to exercise it. I was trespassing out of curiosity or, even worse, a childish desire to put one over on Winterbourne Barton by being able say I’d been invited in. It was the mismatch between what I saw and how it was described that drew me on, for I couldn’t see where the ideas of morbidness had come from until I found a corridor full of photographs of Jess’s family.
There was tier upon tier of the same four laughing people—a man, a woman, a boy and a girl—with variations on the same pictures occurring every two or three feet. Poster-size portraits. Postcard-size snaps. Enlarged headshots extracted from group photographs. Single prints of the children pasted alongside their mother and father to create a laughing group. It was a collage of black, white, sepia and vibrant colour on the continuous canvas of the corridor walls, and it was a glorious expression of life.
I thought of the pictures I had of my parents, the formal ones of their wedding, and holiday snapshots showing awkward smiles or squints of reluctance to be caught on camera. There was only a handful, taken unawares, when they were being entirely natural, and I thought how much better to duplicate the laughing ones than fill the spaces with self-consciousness and solemnity.
“What do you think?” asked Jess’s voice behind me.
I hadn’t heard her approach and turned a startled face in her direction. “Brilliant,” I said honestly. “It’s the way I’d like to be remembered.”
“You don’t look very impressed.”
“Only because you crept up on me. Who took them? You?”
“Yes.” Her dark eyes roamed across the pictures. “Lily hated my gallery. She said it was unhealthy…kept telling me to let my memories go.”
Standard advice, I thought, but I couldn’t see that it applied to pictures. My mother had photographs of her dead parents on her bedside table, and I’d never felt they shouldn’t be there. “Why didn’t you put yourself into any of them?”
“I did. That one.” She pointed to a postcard-size shot at the beginning, showing her parents arm-in-arm with a girl whom I’d taken to be her sister.
I moved back to look at it. “I didn’t recognize you. When was it taken?”
“On my twelfth birthday. Mum and Dad gave me a camera and I let Rory use it to take that photograph.”
“How old was he?”
“Eight then…fifteen when he died. Sally was two years younger.”
“What about your parents?”
“Both in their late forties.” She pointed to a poster-size photograph halfway down the corridor. “That’s the last picture I took of them. It was about three weeks before the accident.”
I walked past her to stand in front of it. It was in colour, there was no sea in the background, but the composition and the way the sunlight lit the sides of the couple’s faces reminded