The Boat House

NINE

Even though he was still only sixteen, Wayne had been driving the yard's vehicles around the quiet back roads in the off-season for the past two years. There was nothing unique in this; it wasn't uncommon in the lanes to find oneself stuck behind a slow-moving tractor with a twelve-year-old in the cab, using public highways to get from one piece of a farm to another. Ross Aldridge, the 'newcomer' policeman, must have been pretty well-briefed by his predecessor, because he restricted himself to friendly off-the-record warnings when the practice occasionally became too obvious. He couldn't really complain too much; not after the time that he'd run his patrol car into a ditch only three weeks into his new appointment, and the Middlemass girl (14) had turned up with a chain and towed him out.

Wayne was driving now as they left the last of the houses behind, following the lake shore for a while until the wooded hillside of the Step rose up and screened it from their sight. Liston Hall was about a mile and a half further on, reached by its own private drive. The gates to this were kept permanently locked but there was a less conspicuous entrance, hardly more than a mud road, amongst the trees a hundred yards along.

They pulled in onto a white gravel forecourt. The place wasn't huge by country house standards — two storeys, twenty-something rooms — but its main entrance was a covered carriage porch with stone pillars and broad steps leading up to the doors. The house wasn't run-down, either, but there were touches here and there betraying the fact that it hadn't been lived in for a couple of years; the windows that weren't shuttered weren't clean, and there were weeds pushing up through the gravel.

"Wayne," Pete said as he opened the wagon's door to get out. "You're already driving without a license. Don't you think that the Dixie horn's pushing it a bit?"

"I know," Wayne said sadly. "The devil makes me do it."

Pete walked over to the steps. Seen from close-to, the columns were peeling; they were also heavily stained with pigeon crap. It was hard to think of a place like this as somebody's home. It looked more like a public building or a sanatorium. This was mostly a matter of scale; Pete's feeling was that you couldn't own such a place, you could only be owned by it. You could die or go bankrupt and the house would stay basically unchanged, still mouldering slowly and running up a ransom of a heating bill… unless you were so fabulously rich that you could afford not to give a shit, in which case all arguments foundered. The latter category could hardly include Dizzy Liston; otherwise, why would he consent to selling off his toys to cover his expenses?

Pete found the bellpush, and pressed.

Nothing seemed to happen, so he pressed again.

Still no response. He glanced over at Wayne, and Wayne pointed helpfully to the Dixie horn.

"Do you want me to..?" he said, leaving the offer hanging.

"No," Pete said quickly. "No, thanks. Wait here, I'll check around the back."

There was a brick path down the side of the house, and he followed it. There had to be somebody around, although from the state of the path he wouldn't have laid any bets on it being a gardener. The path brought him out into the rest of the grounds.

This was obviously the side of the house that was meant to be considered as the frontage, with its six-foot windows and its first-floor parapet and views over formal gardens. It was, however, as lifeless as the forecourt area.

Well, at least the place had atmosphere. It had something of the look of a decaying Italian palazzo, stone urns and all.

"Anybody home?" Pete called out, and then two things happened very close together.

Firstly, a couple of birds were scared up out of a nearby bush by his call; and secondly, there was a detonation so loud that he almost felt it as a physical shockwave. The birds squawked and flapped, and the very top of the bush seemed to be flicked by an invisible hand which knocked a few shreds of leaf out into the air. Pete didn't know whether to duck or run, and the choice was fairly academic anyway as for the moment his body seemed to be about as responsive as a sack of rocks.

A woman with a shotgun stepped out onto the path some way ahead.

Diane Jackson, the woman he'd come to see.

"Sorry about the bang," she called, much as someone might apologise for slamming a car door too loudly, and she started to walk towards him. "It's the bloody pigeons. They've been driving me mad ever since I moved in, but as soon as I come out with a gun they all disappear. See up there?" She pointed. "Pigeon shit," she went on, without waiting for Pete to reply. "The roof's covered in it. I was going to blast a couple and then string them up to scare the others. Do you think that would work?"

"It would with me," Pete said.

He was pretty sure that she hadn't recognised him.

Well, what could he expect… he'd been no more than another face around the yard on the two or three occasions that she'd been by, no reason that he should have made any lasting impression on her at all. She'd been polite, and he'd been too quick to imagine that it might signify something more. No big deal, it had happened in his life before; but suddenly he was intensely, intensely relieved that Wayne had stayed in the van and couldn't see this. And better he should get the hard lesson now, than later.

She breezed on by, presumably expecting him to follow; she was heading for a side entrance to the house that was reached through an overgrown kitchen garden. At the second attempt, he got himself moving. His ears were still ringing from the gunshot. On the evidence of her marksmanship so far, the safest place to shelter would probably be squarely before the target.

"I tried the bell at the front," Pete said as they went in through a whitewashed scullery. This led into a Victorian-style kitchen with a tiled floor and copper skillets hanging in the middle of the room.

"It doesn't work," Diane Jackson said. "Like most of the estate staff who were supposed to have been keeping the place straight. I seem to be doing nothing but making lists of things that need fixing."

She kicked something in the gloom, and stopped briefly to pick it up. It was a Speak amp; Spell.

"Jed's," she explained. "He's going to be a litterbug when he grows up."

There was more evidence of Jed's presence on the pinup noticeboard alongside the kitchen door. It was covered in paintings and crayon drawings, obviously by a child of preschool age. The largest and most colourful of them showed a woman with a shotgun, blasting away at Red Indians.

Stopping to look was a mistake. By the time that he'd stepped out of the kitchen and into the main hall, he'd lost her.

The hallway was of a fair size, high ceilinged and with an oak stairway that led up to a gallery style balcony. The floor was of black and white marble tile, some of them cracked and none of them even. The few pieces of furniture looked old, solid, and unprepossessing, the kind of stuff that Pete would have expected to see at the bargain end of a market-town auction. The light, as soft and grey as evening snow, came from an ornate wrought-iron skylight at the ceiling's centre.

Her voice led him to her. "I'm not a great shot," she was saying, "but I'm getting better. There's an old clay range up in the woods, and I've been practising on that. I'll turn myself into a countrywoman yet."

She'd gone on into a book-lined room which appeared to be in use as an office, and she was placing the shotgun along with two others in a locking steel cabinet. From the doorway, Pete watched her turn the key on it with a certain relief.

"Now," she said, turning to him. "Shall we go upstairs and get this out of the way?"

"Upstairs?" Pete said.

Diane Jackson was already on her way past him, and heading for the wide stairway.

"I am desperate," she admitted. "It's getting so I can't even think, let alone sleep. I've told Dizzy that I want the whole works, and I don't care what it costs him."

"What exactly were you expecting me to do?" Pete said uncertainly.

She stopped on the third step, and looked back at Pete. She looked good in the soft light, he was thinking, but then she had the kind of face that you didn't need to flatter. She looked good in country clothes as well; in fact she looked pretty damned good all round, and right now it was the world's greatest pisser that he was no more than a rough-at-the-edges motor mechanic whose chances with her had to rate at somewhere close to zero.

There was a growing puzzlement in her expression. She said, as if she was seeing the possibility of doubt for the very first time, "You are the man from the pest control?"

"No," he said, "I'm the man from the auto-marine. I'm here to do an inventory on your cruiser."

If she'd stung him before then he got his revenge now, and in spades. Her mouth fell open, and she clapped a hand over it. She went pale, and then coloured up red.

And when she could speak again, she said, "I thought you'd come about the pigeons! Oh, god, what must you be thinking?"

He was tempted to tell her.

But he didn't.

Wayne's antennae went onto visible alert when he saw the two of them emerging from the Hall. The ice not so much broken as dynamited and blown out of the water, they were both giggling like kids out of school. Pete went over to the wagon, and as he was taking out the inventory clipboard he explained that they'd be going down to the boat house in Diane's pickup truck.

"Big treat, Wayne," he added. "You get to ride in the back."

"Wow," Wayne said, obviously wishing that he could stay in the front and eavesdrop.

Her Toyota was a big red Hi Lux with four wheel drive, much easier for her to manage than the estate's lumbering ex-army Land Rover. As they bumped down the narrow track from the house to the lake shore, Pete asked her exactly what her job entailed.

"Basically it covers just the house and the immediate grounds," she said. "All the woodland's leased to the forestry people. I want to get sorted and ticking by the time that Dizzy and his pals arrive. Sometimes I feel as if I haven't even started."

"What's he like to work for?"

She looked at him, and half smiled. "You want the truth, or the reputation?"

"I already know the reputation."

"You, and everyone else around here." She returned her attention to the track, just as a couple of low branches took a swipe at the cab roof. "He's fine. A bit self-centred, but nothing like most people seem to think. It was my ex who got me fixed up with the job; Dizzy owed him, and he owed me maintenance for Jed, and I wanted to get away from town and get involved in something where I could start to respect myself again… everything kind of fitted into place. Balancing the books has been the toughest part. The estate income's pretty regular, but it can't handle big bills that all come in at once. So if the furnace needs an overhaul and Dizzy wants to throw a party for the locals to improve his image, then Dizzy's Princess might just have to go."

"The party idea's for real, then?"

"So he tells me."

Most people in Three Oaks Bay were awaiting Dizzy Liston's return with mixed feelings; mainly apprehension, mixed with trepidation. Rumours of a social evening at the Hall with the entire village being invited hadn't exactly dispelled all worry, since it was his summer parties that had made him so unpopular around the area in the first place. Free booze for the locals was all very well, but what would happen when the famous charmer got too well oiled and started to proposition all the schoolgirls?

But when Pete mentioned this — in rather more diplomatic terms — Diane said, "That's the point, he can't. He can't drink for six whole months, that's why he has to get himself away from town and temptation and live out in the country. Otherwise he's been told that he won't even be able to sell his liver for cat food. It's perfect."

And with that thought in mind, they reached the boat house.