The Hanging Wood

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Unbelievable.’ Mario Pinardi yawned as he took a weary swig from the polystyrene coffee cup, and spilt as much as he drank. Lucky the carpet tiles were the colour of mud. ‘Two bodies found on the same farm inside a week. I mean, what are the odds on that being a coincidence?’

‘When the deceased are a woman and her long-lost half-brother? When they both worked together? When the farm belongs to their father?’ Hannah bit into the Cox’s Orange Pippin she’d stuffed into her bag before driving out to Keswick. ‘A zillion to one, I’d say.’

After a night without sleep, Mario’s face was as grey as the fells in winter. His eyes had a haunted look, as if he kept replaying in his mind the vision of the crime scene at Lane End. Big mistake. The first time Hannah ever saw a butchered body, Ben Kind advised her that some sights are best forgotten, if you want to stay sane. One horror was all it took to send some people into a tailspin. And it didn’t get any worse than watching as a corpse with a crushed skull was dredged out of a slurry tank.

Mario tossed his cup towards the waste-paper basket. Short by a clear six inches. ‘The stench soaked into my sinuses; it feels like I’ll never breathe fresh air again,’ he muttered. ‘Christ, what a way to go.’

‘You could do with a couple of hours’ kip,’ she said. ‘Must be twenty-four hours since you last saw Alessandra.’

‘No time.’ Mario gritted his teeth. ‘Got to keep going.’

She didn’t try to talk him round; he had to show a lead. Keswick’s incident room scarcely ever buzzed like this, let alone at one o’clock on a summer Sunday, but all available staff had been hauled in at short notice to help out. An admin assistant chewed her biro as she listened to a voicemail message from the coroner’s officer; the fingers of her colleagues raced across keyboards, inputting data from the crime scene. A printer spewed out pages of typescript; in the corner, a scanner whirred. They were already more than halfway through the crucial first twenty-four hours of the murder enquiry, and nobody was agonising about the overtime bill. Yet.

Hannah and Mario perched on plastic chairs either side of a whiteboard on which he’d scrawled a crude map of the farm with a red marker pen. This morning the brass had confirmed Mario as SIO in the Lane End murder enquiry. A no-brainer, given his involvement in the Orla Payne case, and the absence through holidays and sickness of more senior officers, even though he was only a DI. He’d feel the pressure of overpromotion, nagged by the knowledge that if he didn’t achieve a quick result someone was bound to be brought in over his head. When she’d called to suggest they share intelligence, Mario didn’t think twice before saying yes.

‘Sheikh had a bedsit in Crosthwaite. So far, we’ve found two separate sets of ID. Fake papers in the name of Aslan Sheikh, which he used to get into this country. Another has his first name as Nuri Michael Iskirlak.’

‘Michael?’

‘Yeah, seems like his mum named him after Hinds, even though the feller dumped her.’ Mario sighed and said again, ‘Unbelievable.’

Why is life so often one unbelievable thing after another? Hannah wondered. Aloud, she said, ‘Any leads from Crosthwaite?’

‘Not a lot. Plenty of stamps in both his passports, real and false. We’ve established that he grew up first in Turkey and then in Germany. He travelled light, and he didn’t give much away about himself to anyone. His landlady lives on the ground floor, but she’s a turn-a-blind-eye sort who thinks he’s brought one or two women back since he moved in, but doesn’t know if any of them stayed overnight. She can’t help us with his movements yesterday, and her other tenant is off trekking across Europe. Thanks for nothing, eh?’

‘Anyone talking to the people he worked with at St Herbert’s?’

‘My DS is there now — apparently the library is open seven days a week. I’d no idea people still read so much. What we’ll learn, God knows. Sheikh doesn’t sound the bookish type to me. There are no books at Crosthwaite except a battered copy of one of the Narnia books and a paperback of On the Road. His iPod holds some crap music and no photographs. Thirty years old, but never settled down. Bit of a chancer, if you ask me.’

‘Last night he took one chance too many.’

Aslan had made two 999 calls. The first cut off after three seconds, with nothing said. In the second, moments later, a man had shouted something. It was wild and unintelligible and on the recording it sounded to Hannah like a bitten-off yelp. A crashing noise was followed by a low groan that reminded her of the air hissing out of a punctured tyre. Another crash, then the line went dead. By identifying the mobile phone mast which picked up the strongest signal from the phone, the call had soon been tracked to the vicinity of Lane End Farm. The same area from which Michael Hinds had called earlier in the week to summon the emergency services after he discovered his daughter’s corpse in a tower of grain. But the call had not come from the same phone.

Mario was finishing his shift when he was alerted, due to his familiarity with Lane End Farm. He’d decided to call there himself, along with a young DC. The lights were on behind curtained windows, but Hinds and his wife took an age to answer the door. When they did, it was clear they’d been interrupted in the middle of a drunken sex session. They denied any knowledge of a 999 call, and insisted they’d heard nothing. The Polish workers had long since finished for the day and headed back to their rooms in Keswick in Hinds’ van. Leaving Lane End to just the farmer, his wife and their animals.

Hinds wasn’t happy about being disturbed, but he didn’t have his scythe to hand, and it’s difficult to get too stroppy when you’re naked under a grubby old dressing gown. Mario insisted on taking a look around outside, and after a short argument, Hinds bowed to the inevitable. When Mario climbed a ladder to shine a flashlight into the slurry tank, he saw that the crust on top of the slurry had been smashed through.

‘When I realised there must be a body in the tank,’ Mario had said, ‘I watched Hinds, to study his reaction. Fear, horror, shock, guilt? Not a muscle in his face moved, I swear. Not so much as a twitch. He might have been the Man in the Iron Mask, for all the emotion I saw.’

They’d needed to summon support and special equipment to fish the body out of the tank, and it wasn’t recovered until the early hours. By then, Mario had obtained a provisional ID. There had been some sort of struggle on the cobbles close to the slurry tank, and a bank debit card had slipped out of the dead man’s pocket. It bore the name of Aslan Sheikh.

‘Would have been nice if the killer had dropped a credit card instead, but life’s never that simple, is it? We also found a butterfly knife nearby.’

‘You think the victim took it with him for protection?’

‘I guess so, given that it’s not the murder weapon. Sheikh must have dropped it when he was attacked, and either the killer didn’t see it in the dark, or wasn’t bothered about it.’

‘Any sign of Sheikh’s mobile?’

‘In the slurry tank, along with its owner.’

Hinds had insisted on taking a look at the body once it had undergone some rudimentary cleaning up, so that the bloodied features were discernible. He claimed he’d never seen the dead man before in his life. Nor did he have the faintest idea why an unknown corpse should have turned up at Lane End, days after his daughter had chosen the farm as the place to end her life.

Either he was guilty, or very, very unlucky.

Events moved fast following the discovery of the corpse. Hinds called Gareth Madsen for a recommendation to a shit-hot lawyer, and when his old friend heard that the body probably belonged to Aslan Sheikh, he dropped the bombshell that Aslan had told Purdey of his true identity. At that point, even the iron mask crumpled with shock. But Hinds refused to say anything more until the legal eagle showed up.

Mario had interviewed Hinds for a second time that morning, this time in the presence of a sharp-suited criminal solicitor from Carlisle, to be met with flat denials that Hinds knew his son was in the country, far less that he called himself Aslan Sheikh and that for the past few weeks he’d been working at the library across the fields from Lane End. Despite tough questioning, Hinds gave nothing away. He’d never had any further contact with the boy’s mother after he’d paid her to have an abortion and leave the country. He said she and her pregnancy were a nuisance that had cost him an arm and a leg to dispose of, and that he’d not given her any further thought from that day to this. Let alone imagined that his son was back in the Lakes.

‘Hinds is a hard man,’ Mario said. ‘No doubt who is the real bastard in that family, for sure, but is he hard enough to have murdered his own flesh and blood?’

‘Forensics reckon Sheikh was killed at the farm?’

‘Looks that way. There are bloodstains and clothing fibres close by the slurry tank, plenty for us to work on. This looks like a crime of desperation. The head wounds were severe, and it seems unlikely he was transported from somewhere else.’

‘Was he dead when he went into the tank?’

‘Not sure yet. He was hit on the head several times, hence the blood splatter — a single blow wouldn’t have done it.’

Sunday, very bloody Sunday. ‘So the culprit and the victim arranged a rendezvous at or close to the farm?’

‘Apparently. Assuming a prearranged meet, it looks like we’re not talking about a crime carefully planned out to the last detail.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘We’re spoilt for choice at present. Whether the blows to the head killed him straight off, or he died after he was inside the tank, we won’t know until the PM results are available. Just our luck it’s Sunday. Seems he had a thin skull, but if by any chance he wasn’t dead when he was bundled into the slurry, he’ll have inhaled the slurry into his lungs and drowned, or found it impossible to breathe under the weight of the stuff and suffocated.’ Mario grimaced. ‘I thought dying in a mountain of grain was bad enough, but …’

‘No sign of the murder weapon, you said?’

‘No, our culprit may have missed the things that the victim dropped, but he wasn’t considerate enough to leave his weapon lying around for us to fall over. The preliminary view is, it was a dumb-bell or something similar. Maybe from a gym.’

‘Plenty of people exercise with them at home. I do myself, though much less often than I ought to. Do Hinds and his wife have a set of dumb-bells?’

‘That isn’t how they get their exercise, apparently. The living room stank of booze and sex when we arrived. We found pornographic DVDs, and Deirdre was wearing a basque. She had a yellowing bruise around her left eye. When I asked about it, she said she’d walked into a door on Friday night. She’d shoved a mask and a couple of nipple clamps under the cushions on the sofa and I found them as soon as she asked me to sit down. I’m still trying to figure out whether she meant me to see them or not.’

‘So they were too busy to realise what was happening — literally in their own backyard?’

‘That’s their story, and if the legal eagle has anything to do with it, they will stick to it like limpets. A middle-aged married couple enjoying themselves on a Saturday evening in the privacy of their own home, too preoccupied with connubial bliss and a Swedish movie about orgies in a convent to hear someone being battered to death in the dark outside.’ Mario gritted his teeth. ‘Somehow the nipple clamps seem like a detail which make it just about credible.’

‘Or is that what we are supposed to believe?’

‘Yeah, for all I know, the sexy set-up was concocted in the space of five minutes to give Hinds an alibi.’

Hannah lobbed her apple core straight into the bin. Greg Wharf would have had a lot of fun with the vision of Deirdre wearing nipple clamps. Just as well he wasn’t here. Time to push him out of her mind.

‘And what do you believe, Mario?’

‘Wish I knew.’

‘Would Deirdre protect him if she thought he’d killed a man?’

‘He’s her husband.’

Hannah made a face. She wouldn’t lie to save Marc in similar circumstances. But what if their relationship hadn’t hit the buffers, what if she had nothing else in her life but him?’

‘She’s frightened of Hinds, but I’d say there’s still a spark between them too. God knows what she sees in him.’ Mario winced. ‘Terrible what some men do to women. Would she perjure herself on his behalf? You bet. All the same, the thought of a man killing his own son …’

‘He might not have known Aslan was his son.’

‘Isn’t that stretching things too far? The question remains — why murder him? And why ignore the oldest rule of all — don’t shit on your own doorstep?’

‘Suppose Aslan turned up at the farm, and announced himself as son of Hinds. Maybe he wanted to soak his dad for cash. Payback for leaving his mother in the lurch. Hinds would have been stunned. What if he lost the plot?’

‘And beat his own boy to death before tossing him into an iron box full of shit? You really think he’s capable of that?’

A picture came into Hannah’s mind of the sun catching the blade of Mike Hinds’ scythe. Never mind that he didn’t have a criminal record; he was no stranger to violence. Niamh had felt the rough edge of his temper, and so had Deirdre. Maybe he’d even hurt Callum, the boy who kept his name. What chance for a swaggering stranger who threatened to turn his life upside down?

‘I’d say he’s capable of pretty much anything.’

‘You haven’t told me if you’ve arranged to see Hannah again,’ Louise said.

Daniel blinked. ‘She took a message about the discovery of a dead man at a farm linked with a cold case she’s investigating, and she had to shoot off home. For all I know, she’s needed to go into work today. Not the ideal moment to consult our social calendars.’

‘Excuses,’ she snorted.

With a lavish sigh, she started to attack her dessert. Vanilla panna cotta with gooseberries. Daniel had found himself unable to resist the sticky toffee pudding, with toffee sauce and clotted cream. You might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb; at least he’d had a green-leaf salad to start.

Sunday lunch at The Tickled Trout, a welcome respite from a morning spent house-hunting for Louise. A cottage in Elterwater had looked perfect, with roses clambering around the door, but the rising damp would cost a fortune to eradicate. A swish apartment in Ambleside boasted every labour-saving gadget you could wish, but the block had been shoehorned in between a microbrewery and a garage, and if the exhaust fumes didn’t poison her, the smell of beer would make sure she had a permanent hangover. With houses, as with people, appearances deceived.

The Tickled Trout was an upmarket pub-restaurant down the road from Ambleside. Last January, in the car park on the other side of the window he was facing now, Daniel had kissed Hannah for the one and only time. He hadn’t planned it, and neither had she. But Marc found out about their meeting, and soon all hell broke loose, and Hannah found herself personally ensnared in a case of multiple murder. Louise didn’t know the full story about Marc and Hannah, and at times she seemed to take it personally that her brother was testing her patience. In her black-and-white lawyer’s mind, Daniel was wimping out of the chance of happiness when he should have moved on from Aimee’s death and the mistake that had been Miranda.

Must it always be this way between siblings? He cared for Louise more than anyone in the world, yet sometimes he wondered why sororicide was rare. Probably she was tempted to fratricide once in a while. Now their adolescent arguments were a fading memory, they would fight to protect each other, but prolonged exposure to each other’s company sometimes stretched their nerves to breaking point.

Daniel savoured the taste of toffee. Clearly Aslan had taken the job at St Herbert’s with a view to getting to know his sister, and picking the right moment to introduce himself to his father. Lane End Farm was a good size and located in a beautiful part of Britain. It must be worth plenty, even in these straitened times, and Aslan would be more interested in money than orchestrating a sentimental family reunion. But Michael Hinds’ reputation was as Cumbria’s very own Mr Angry. Had Aslan provoked his father to such rage that he’d committed another of those rare — you might be tempted to say, astonishingly rare — crimes: filicide?

Louise put down her spoon and narrowed her eyes. ‘You look as though you’ve wandered into a different country. What’s going on in that brain of yours?’

‘I’m thinking about families, what holds them together, what drives them apart.’

She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. ‘We’re hardly experts on family life, you and me, after what happened with Dad.’

‘Or maybe we are. We’ve seen the ups and downs, more than most.’

‘I don’t remember that many ups after Dad walked out on us.’ She frowned. ‘Yet Hannah cared for him. I bet she sees something of you in him.’

‘I’m nothing like him. He was a hardened cop, spent his life turning over stones and seeing what lay beneath. Dangerous work. Academe is cosy, you know yourself — the main risk is RSI from writing too many articles in learned journals that hardly anybody wants to read.’

‘You are absolutely like him,’ she said. ‘Neither of you could ever let go without finding what you were looking for. My only question is this — have you any idea what you are looking for?’

St Herbert’s was open to residents and Friends of the Library and their guests on Sundays, and when Daniel said that he wanted to call in, Louise insisted on coming along for the ride. Whatever she said, she was every bit as nosey as him. Driving past the narrow reservoir of Thirlmere, he listened to the news on local radio. The main story was the discovery of a man’s body at a farm near Keswick, but he was not named.

‘You think you know who it is?’ Louise asked.

The road was clear, and he put his foot down. ‘Hope to God I’m wrong, but …’

Soon they were parking at St Herbert’s. As they jumped out of the car, Daniel spotted Micah Bridge trudging towards the front entrance. The principal’s stoop was more pronounced than ever, and as they came up to him, a defeated look clouded his watery eyes. Daniel felt a gnawing sadness. Aslan may not have matched the profile of the typical habitue of St Herbert’s, but he’d been young and full of life. Less than a week ago, he’d shinned down that drainpipe from the parapet up on the first floor, seemingly without a care in the world. To picture him lying on a mortuary slab made Daniel’s stomach churn. No matter what Louise said, he could never have done his father’s job. How had the old man coped, dealing with violence as a way of life?

After introducing Louise, he said, ‘This latest death at Lane End Farm …’

Speaking in little more than a whisper, the principal said, ‘The victim is Aslan Sheikh, he was murdered. Daniel, I can scarcely believe what is happening. My God, two members of staff dead within a few days of each other.’

‘What have you heard?’

‘Very little.’ The principal mopped sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. ‘The policeman wanted me to tell him about Aslan. What work he did, the people he dealt with. Whether he had any enemies.’

‘They aren’t suggesting an accident or suicide this time?’

Micah Bridge shook his head. ‘Surely you are not implying that Orla was murdered as well?’

‘I’m not implying anything, but hatred isn’t the only motive for murder.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Perhaps Aslan was killed because of something he found out, or witnessed.’

‘Such as?’

‘He was here on Friday morning, wasn’t he? Sham told me he spent time in the library. She thought he was looking something up.’

The principal stared. ‘I find that hard to credit. He showed so little interest in our collections.’

‘Looks as though he stumbled across a reason to take an interest.’

‘For heaven’s sake, what could it be? This library is a place for quiet, scholastic research. We have nothing to do with the grubbiness of murder.’

Some have grubbiness thrust upon them, Daniel thought.

‘Are the police still here?’

‘They left an hour ago, once they had finished speaking to Sham.’

‘She’s working today?’ Daniel was surprised. ‘I thought she only-’

‘Works Monday to Friday, and then with the utmost reluctance?’ The principal sniffed. ‘She claims her aunt sent her, saying she ought to be here to lend a hand, given that the press may turn up at any moment with their flashbulbs and their prying questions. I’m not sure I believe her. It’s almost as if she’s … gloating over Aslan’s death.’

To spite Purdey, because Aslan had confided the truth about his identity to her and not to Sham? Daniel wondered.

‘Where is she now?’

‘On reception, as usual. Checking her lipstick so as to present her best face to the arriving media, no doubt.’

The principal couldn’t conceal his bitterness. He seemed to take the deaths of Orla and Aslan as a personal attack on himself and St Herbert’s. Come to think of it …

‘When were you first appointed principal, Micah?’

‘Seventeen years ago. Though for some years before that, I regularly gave lectures and undertook academic work here.’

‘Were you around when Orla’s brother went missing?’

The principal pursed dry cracked lips. ‘As a matter of fact, yes. It was a dreadful time; that poor young boy who disappeared, never to return. Not that I ever met the lad. And to this day, I’ve barely exchanged a dozen sentences with his father. I made the mistake of seeking a donation to our funds on one occasion.’

‘So you know Fleur from way back?’

‘We were barely acquainted in those days. I knew her father better. He wasn’t a man of letters, but he did support the library. Noblesse oblige, I suppose. He was keenly aware of Sir Milo’s legacy, and that after Jolyon’s accident, the Hopes name would soon be dead. He was bitter that the money had run out, and that the only reason his daughter lived so well was that she’d married for money, rather than love. It wasn’t just that she married into a family that sold caravan pitches to the common herd. She picked the brother who held the purse strings, even though her father disliked him.’

‘Alfred Hopes was a snob, then?’

Micah Bridge coloured, and Daniel realised he’d struck a nerve. The principal’s academic elitism was as snobbish as Alfred Hopes’ condescension about class. ‘You might say so, but at least he wasn’t ruled by profit-and-loss accounts and balance sheets. But why do you ask?’

Daniel waved the question away, realising he didn’t have a sensible answer. He’d become lost in a maze, taking one wrong turning after another in trying to make sense of the fates of Orla and Aslan. Time to start thinking like a historian again. Gathering all the scraps of evidence, seeing if they contradicted assumptions he’d already made. How often had he preached to students the importance of asking the right questions? He believed with a passion that understanding history helped you to make sense of the present, and so it must be with murder. The reasons for the deaths were rooted in the past, he was sure of it. Ask the right questions about what happened twenty years ago, and he’d find the right answers.

A squeal of brakes made him swivel round. An open-top sports car was screeching to a halt at the end of the drive. Fleur Madsen was hunched behind the wheel, dark glasses masking her eyes. The wind had tangled her hair; he’d never before seen her looking a fraction short of elegance personified. The principal, looking as though the arrival of his chair of trustees was all he needed to make his misery complete, dragged himself forward to greet her.

With a wave to Fleur and a nod to his sister, Daniel opened one of the double doors and came face-to-face with Sham Madsen, admiring her reflection in a compact mirror.

‘Didn’t expect to see you today, Daniel!’ Her eyes opened very wide. He thought she’d overdone the mascara. ‘Or you, Louise! Have you heard the dreadful news?’

‘I don’t know any details.’

‘Apparently,’ Sham lowered her voice, as if imparting a state secret, ‘poor Aslan’s head was bashed in and he was dumped in a slurry tank. Yuck, can you imagine? Dad is worried sick about Mike Hinds. He wants to make sure he has the best defence.’

‘Why? Does he think Hinds is guilty?’

‘No, I’m not saying that, but it stands to reason the police think so. What if Aslan turned up at Lane End and demanded money? Old Mike would go apeshit.’

‘Killing his own son would be a bit of an overreaction, wouldn’t it?’ Louise asked.

Sham made a throat-slitting gesture. ‘Hey, you don’t know Mike.’

‘What was Aslan researching on Friday morning?’ Daniel asked.

She frowned. ‘Search me.’

He’d do better to search the archives instead, but before he could head off for the library, Fleur trotted through the door, Micah Bridge trailing in her wake. She had taken off the sunglasses; her eyes lacked their usual sparkle and her make-up didn’t disguise the pallor of her cheeks. She was wearing a plain white blouse and black trousers, and an expression as severe as her outfit. As they exchanged greetings and shock-horror exclamations about Aslan Sheikh’s death, he remembered Aslan describing her as a cougar. Had she flirted with him? Or even gone further? Today, for sure, she wasn’t in flirtatious mood.

‘What brings you two here on a Sunday?’ she asked. Unspoken was the rider: I didn’t have you down as a rubbernecking sensation-seeker.

‘The day before he died,’ Daniel said, ‘Aslan checked something out in the library. I was curious about what it might be.’

Fleur looked at him in bewilderment. He’d never before noticed the faint worry lines around her eyes. ‘I simply cannot imagine.’

If she was feigning ignorance, she didn’t merely look a little like Audrey Hepburn, she was a better actor. Yet Daniel was gripped by a conviction that she could help him to unlock the mystery, even if she didn’t know where to find the key. He was tempted to cross-examine her. But did she really want the truth to come out?

His mind was made up by the roar of a car racing down the drive outside. Micah Bridge glanced through the open door and winced.

‘It seems that the first journalists have arrived.’

Sham said, ‘Are you sure they aren’t just Friends of the Library?’

‘These men do not look as if they have ever read a book in their lives.’

‘Ouch.’ Fleur raised her eyebrows. ‘Micah, I’ve never once heard you say anything bitchy before. You must be stressed. We all are, of course, but we must put on a brave face with outsiders. What happened to Aslan and Orla is nothing to do with their work at St Herbert’s.’

‘We’d better leave you to it.’ Seizing his chance, Daniel beckoned his sister to follow him down the corridor.

‘What exactly are you looking for in these archives, then?’ Louise asked as soon as they had closed the doors of the Old Library behind them.

He contrived an expression so inscrutable that she couldn’t resist the urge to giggle.

‘I want to find out about Castor and Pollux.’

* * *

It took less than thirty minutes for Daniel to trace what he was after. He spent another ten at his favourite desk, gazing at the yellowed sheets he’d borrowed from the archive downstairs, turning what he had discovered over in his mind. Testing hypotheses, in the way he’d once taught to students new to deductive reasoning, searching for answers that were not only valid but sound. After browsing for a while through the crammed bookshelves, Louise came up to join him, but soon she became bored by his reverie, and started drumming her fingers against the iron railing. She’d never been afraid to bring him back down to earth.

‘So was that a eureka moment, or not?’

He leant back in his chair. ‘You bet.’

‘Go on, then. Surprise me.’

‘John Everett Millais was a regular visitor to Keswick as guest of the Hopes family,’ Daniel said. ‘According to Sir Milo Hopes’ memoir, Millais repaid their hospitality by making them a present of this painting.’

He pointed to an old photograph of a painting in a heavy gilt frame similar to others they had seen at Mockbeggar Hall. Two labradors with huge brown eyes stood side by side, as if awaiting a command. The sunlit turrets, seen through the trees behind them, made the Hall seem like a palace from a fairy tale. Daniel suspected Millais had dashed the painting off as a thank you; he’d sought to convey the dogs’ unyielding loyalty and fidelity, yet the effect was cloying and sentimental, so that the picture was a long way short of a masterpiece. Hadn’t William Morris dismissed his fellow Pre-Raphaelite as an artist bought and sold and thrown away? He’d overdone the hasty hack work, and this was an example. But Morris’s sneer meant nothing to Milo Hopes, who wrote in his memoir that he would always owe a debt to his distinguished guest for immortalising his beloved animals, and vowed that Millais’ gift should always have a place of honour in Mockbeggar Hall.

The painting bore a caption so blurred it was barely legible.

Castor and Pollux.

‘Well, well,’ Louise murmured. ‘Go on, break it to me gently. What on earth connects a Victorian painting of family pets with Aslan Sheikh?’

Daniel lifted a lined sheet covered in tiny copperplate. ‘Milo Hopes loved his labradors. In his writings, he gives the impression they meant much more to him than his servants. Eventually, first Castor, and then Pollux, died at ripe old ages, and he established a graveyard in the Hall grounds. That’s where they were buried, and it became a family tradition for the Hopes’ dogs to be laid to rest alongside, with headstones recording their names and dates.’

‘Aaaaagh!’ Louise couldn’t contain her frustration. ‘Come on, Daniel, enough of the history, what’s the link with the here and now?’

His eyes flashed with amusement; for an instant, he was a teenager again, relishing a half-forgotten pleasure, the chance to tease his impatient sister.

‘Seriously? You still don’t see it?’