House Of Shadows: Discover the thrilling untold story of the Winter Queen

‘You can’t shoot off to Wiltshire at this time of night,’ he said. ‘What a bloody stupid idea.’

‘It’s Oxfordshire,’ Holly said automatically. She checked the clock, pulling on her boots at the same time. The zip stuck. She wrenched it hard. Two twenty-seven. She had already wasted ten minutes.

She had rung back repeatedly but there had been no reply. The mill house, Ben and Natasha’s holiday cottage, did not have a landline and the mobile reception had always been patchy. You had to be standing in exactly the right place to get a signal.

‘Have you tried Tasha’s mobile?’ Guy asked.

‘She’s working abroad somewhere.’ Ben had told her but Holly couldn’t remember exactly where. ‘I left her a message.’ Tasha had a high-powered job with a TV travel show and was frequently away.

‘Ben’s probably turned up again by now.’ Guy sat down next to her on the bed, putting what she supposed was meant to be a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘Look, Hol, don’t panic. I mean maybe the kid got it wrong—’

‘Her name’s Florence,’ Holly said tightly. It irritated the hell out of her that Guy seldom remembered any of her family or friends’ names, mostly because he didn’t try. ‘She sounded terrified,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do?’ She swung around fiercely on him. ‘Leave her there alone?’

‘Like I said, Ben will have turned up by now.’ Guy smothered a yawn. ‘He probably crept out to meet up with some tart, thinking the kid was asleep and wouldn’t notice. I know that’s what I’d be doing if I was married to that hard-faced bitch.’

‘I daresay,’ Holly said, not troubling to hide the edge in her voice. ‘But Ben’s not like you. He—’ She stopped. ‘Ben would never leave Flo on her own,’ she said.

She stood up. The terrified pounding of her heart had settled to an anxious flutter now, but urgency still beat through her. Two thirty. It would take her an hour and a half to get to Ashdown if there was no traffic. An hour and a half when Flo would be alone and fearful. The terror Holly had felt earlier tightened in her gut. Where the hell was Ben? And why had he not taken his phone with him wherever he had gone? Why leave it in the house?

She racked her brains to remember their last phone conversation. He’d told her that he and Florence were heading to the mill for a long weekend. He’d taken a few days off from his surgery in Bristol. It was the early May Bank Holiday.

‘I’m doing some family history research,’ he’d said, and Holly had laughed, thinking he must be joking, because history of the family or any other sort had never remotely interested her brother before.

She was wasting time.

‘Have you seen my car keys?’ she asked.

‘No.’ Guy followed her into the living room, blinking as she snapped on the main light and flooded the space with brightness.

‘Jesus,’ he said irritably, ‘Now I’m wide awake. You’re determined to ruin my night.’

‘I thought,’ Holly said, ‘that you might come with me.’

The genuine surprise on his face told her everything she needed to know.

‘Why go at all?’ Guy said gruffly, turning away. ‘I still don’t get it. Just call the police, or a neighbour to go over and check it out. Isn’t there some old friend of yours who lives near there? Fiona? Freda?’

‘Fran,’ Holly said. She grabbed her keys off the table. ‘Fran and Iain are away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘And the reason I’m going—’ she stalked up to him, ‘is because my six-year-old niece is alone and terrified and she called me for help. Do you get it now? She’s a child. She’s frightened. And you’re suggesting I go back to bed and forget about it?’

She picked up her bag, checking for her purse, phone, and tablet. The rattle of the keys had brought Bonnie, her Labrador retriever, in from her basket in the kitchen. She looked wide-awake, feathery tail wagging.

‘No, Bon Bon,’ Holly said. ‘You’re staying—’ She stopped; looked at Guy. He’d forget to feed her, walk her. And anyway, it was comforting to have Bonnie with her. She grabbed Bonnie’s food from the kitchen cupboard and looped her lead over her arm.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ In the doorway she paused. ‘Shall I call you when I know what’s happened?’ she asked Guy.

He was already disappearing into the bedroom, reclaiming the space she had left. ‘Oh, sure,’ he said, and Holly knew she would not.

Holly rang Ben’s number every couple of minutes but there was never any reply, only the repeated click of the voicemail telling her that Ben was unavailable and that she should leave a message. Eventually that stopped, too. There was no return call from Tasha, either. Holly wondered about calling her grandparents in Oxford. They were much closer to Ashdown Mill and to Florence than she was, though the car was eating up the miles of empty road. The mesmerising slide of the streetlights was left behind and there was nothing but darkness about her now as she drove steadily west.

In the end she decided not to call Hester and John. She didn’t want to give either of them a heart attack, especially when there might be no reason to worry. Even though she was furious with Guy, she knew he might be right. Ben could have returned by now and Florence might be fast asleep again and, with the adaptability of a child, have forgotten that she had even called for help.

Holly had not wanted to call the police for lots of reasons ranging from the practical – that it could be a false alarm – to the less morally justifiable one of not wanting to cause problems for her brother. She and Ben had always protected each other, drawing closer than close after their parents had been killed in a car crash when Holly was eleven and Ben thirteen. They had looked out for each other with a fierce loyalty that had remained fundamentally unchanged over the years. Their understanding of each other was relaxed and easy these days, but just as close, just as deep. Or so Holly had thought before this had happened, leaving her wondering what the hell her brother was up to.

She pushed away the unwelcome suspicion that there might be things about Ben that she neither knew nor understood. Guy had planted the seed of doubt, but she crushed it angrily; she did know that Ben and Tasha were going through a bad patch but she could not imagine Ben being unfaithful. He simply wasn’t the type. Even less could she imagine him neglecting his child. There had to be some other reason for his disappearance, if he had actually vanished.

But there was Florence, who was only six, and she had been alone and terrified. So it was an easy decision in the end. Holly had called the local police, keeping her explanation as short and factual as possible, sounding far calmer than she had felt. If anything happened to Florence and she had not done her best to help, she would have failed Ben as well as her niece.

The sign for Hungerford flashed past, surprising her. She was at the turn already. It was twelve minutes to four. Ahead of her the sky was inky dark, but in her rear-view mirror she thought she could see the first faint light of a spring dawn. Perhaps, though, that was wishful thinking. The truth was that she didn’t feel comfortable in the countryside. She was a city girl through and through, growing up first in Manchester and then in Oxford after her parents had died, moving to London to go to art college and staying there ever since. London was a good place for her glass-engraving business. She had a little gallery and shop in the mews adjoining the flat, and a sizeable clientele.

At the motorway roundabout she turned right towards Wantage then left for Lambourn. She knew the route quite well, but the road looked deceptively different when the only detail she could see was picked out in her headlights. There were curves and turns and shadowed hollows she did not recognise. She was heading deep into the countryside now. A few isolated cottages flashed past, shuttered and dark. She took the right turn for Lambourn and plunged down into the valley, the car’s lights illuminating the white-painted wooden palings of the racehorse gallops that ran beside the road. The little town was silent as she wove her way through the narrow streets. As the stables and houses fell away and the fields rolled back in, Holly had the same feeling she always had on approaching Ashdown; a sense of expectancy she had never quite understood, a feeling of falling back through time as the dark road opened up before her and the hills swept away to her right, bleak and empty, crowned with a weathercock.

She and Ben had raced up to the top of Weathercock Hill as children, throwing themselves down panting in the springy grass at the top, staring up at the weather vane as it pierced the blue of the sky high above. The whole place had felt enchanted.

Ben. Her chest tightened again with anxiety. She was almost there. What would she find?

The lights picked out a huge advertising hoarding by the side of the road. The words flashed past before she could make out more than the first few:

‘Ashdown Park, a select development of historic building conversions …’

Trees pressed close now to the left, rank upon rank of them like an army in battle order. There was a moment when the endless wood fell back and through the gap in the trees Holly thought she saw a gleam of white; a house standing tall and foursquare with the moonlight reflecting off the glass in the cupola and silvering the ball on the roof. A moment later and the vision had gone. The woods closed ranks, thick and forbidding, swallowing the house in darkness.

The left turn took her by surprise and she almost missed it even though she had come this way so many times before. She bumped along the single-track road, past a bus stop standing beside the remains of the crumbling estate wall. The old coach yard was off to the left; it seemed that this was where the majority of the building work was taking place, behind the high brick-and-sarsen wall. Even in the dark Holly could see the grass verge churned up by heavy machinery and the crouching shadow of a mechanical digger. There was another sign here, a discreet one in cream with green lettering, giving the name of the developers and directing all deliveries back to the site office on the main road.

The lane turned left again, running behind the village now, climbing towards the top of the hill. A driveway on the right, a white-painted gatepost flaking to wood beneath and a five-barred gate wedged open by the grasses and dandelions growing through it.

Ashdown Mill.

She stopped on the gravel circle in front of the water mill and turned off the engine. Bonnie gave a little, excited bark. Holly could hear the thud of her tail as the dog waited impatiently to jump out of the back. There were two other cars on the gravel, a small saloon car and Ben’s four-by-four. The exhaustion and relief hit Holly simultaneously. Her shoulders ached with tension. If Ben was here and it had all been a big misunderstanding she would kill him.

She opened her door and slid out, her legs stiff, an ache low in her back. Outside the car the air had a pre-dawn chill to it. The daylight was growing slowly, trickling through the trees and washing away the moon.

Bonnie was running around with her nose to the ground, released from the captivity of the car, a bounce in her step. She chased around the side of the whitewashed mill and disappeared from view. Holly slammed the car door and hurried after her, pushing open the little gate in the picket fence and running up the uneven stone path to the door, calling for Bonnie as she went.

All the lights were on inside the mill. The door opened before she reached it.

‘Ben!’ she burst out. ‘What the hell—’

‘Miss Ansell?’ A uniformed policewoman stood there. ‘I’m PC Marilyn Caldwell. We spoke earlier.’ She had kind eyes in a pale face pinched with tiredness, and there was something in her voice that warned Holly of bad news. Her heart started to thump erratically again. A headache gripped her temples.

She noticed that one of the door panels was splintered and broken.

‘We had to break it to get in.’ There was a note of apology in PC Caldwell’s voice. ‘The handle is too high for Florence to reach.’

‘Yes.’ Holly remembered that the door had a heavy, old-fashioned iron latch. So Ben had not been there when the police had arrived and there was no sign of him now. Her apprehension was edged with something deeper and more visceral now.

She fought back the terror; breathed deeply.

‘Is Florence OK?’

‘She’s fine.’ Marilyn Caldwell laid a reassuring hand on Holly’s arm. She shifted a little so that Holly could see through into the mill’s long living room. Florence was sitting on the sofa next to another female police officer. They were reading together, although Florence’s eyes were droopy with tiredness and puffy with her earlier tears.

Holly’s heart turned over to see her. She took an involuntary step forwards. ‘Can I go to her, please—’

‘Just a moment.’ The note in PC Caldwell’s voice stopped her. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t found your brother, Miss Ansell.’ She was looking at Holly with forensic detachment now. ‘We’ve searched the house and the woods in the close vicinity, also all the roads nearby. There’s no sign.’

Holly was taken aback. Fear fluttered beneath her breastbone again. This was not right.

‘Is that Dr Ansell’s car outside?’ PC Caldwell asked.

‘Yes.’ Holly rubbed her tired eyes. ‘He can’t have driven anywhere.’

‘Perhaps a friend came to pick him up,’ PC Caldwell suggested. ‘Or he walked to meet someone.’

‘In the middle of the night?’ Holly said. ‘Without his phone?’

PC Caldwell’s expression hardened. ‘It’s hardly unknown, Miss Ansell. I imagine he thought Florence was asleep and slipped out. Perhaps he’s lost track of the time.’

‘That would be ridiculously irresponsible.’ Holly felt furious and tried to rein herself in. She was tired, worried. She had driven a long way. She needed to calm down. Evidently PC Caldwell thought so too.

‘We fully expect Dr Ansell to turn up in the morning,’ she said coldly. ‘When he does, please could you let us know? We’d like to have a word.’

‘You’ll have to stand in line,’ Holly said. Then: ‘I’m sorry. Yes, of course. But …’ Doubt and fear stirred within her again. The emotions were nebulous but strong. Her instinct told her that Ben had not simply walked out.

‘He left his phone,’ she said. ‘And all his stuff’s scattered about. It doesn’t look as though he planned to go out.’

PC Caldwell was already signalling discreetly to her colleague that it was time to leave. She seemed completely uninterested.

‘We’ve traced Mrs Ansell,’ she said. ‘She’s on her way back from Spain but might not make it until tomorrow night. Apparently she’s been,’ she checked her note pad, ‘helicopter skiing in the Pyrenees?’ She sounded doubtful.

‘Very probably,’ Holly said dryly. ‘Tasha works for a travel show – Extreme Pleasures?’

‘Oh yes!’ Marilyn Caldwell’s face broke into a smile. ‘Wow! Natasha Ansell. Of course! How exciting. Well—’ She stopped, realising that the situation did not really merit celebrity chit-chat. ‘We’ll be back tomorrow,’ she said. She turned on an afterthought. ‘Do you know what your brother was doing here, Miss Ansell?’

‘It’s his holiday cottage,’ Holly said. ‘We co-own it.’ She rubbed her eyes again, feeling the grittiness of them. Suddenly she was so tired she wanted to sleep where she was standing. ‘He was down here with Flo whilst Tasha was away working,’ she said. ‘He said he was doing some research. Family history. It’s quiet here. A good place to think.’

PC Caldwell nodded. ‘Right,’ she said. Holly could see her wondering how on earth someone as glamorous as Tasha could be mixed up in a messy situation like this with a man whose idea of fun was family history research.

‘Well,’ the policewoman said. ‘We’ll call back to chat to Mrs Ansell tomorrow.’

I bet you will, Holly thought.

She felt utterly furious, livid with PC Caldwell for being more interested in Tasha’s fame than in Ben’s disappearance, angry that Tasha hadn’t even bothered to ring her to make sure it was OK for her to look after Flo until she got back, and most annoyed of all with Ben for vanishing without a word. The anger helped her, because behind it the fear still lurked, the sense that something was wrong and out of kilter, that Ben would never voluntarily disappear leaving his daughter alone.

Bonnie, picking up on Holly’s mood, made a soft whickering noise and Holly saw Florence look up from the storybook. Her niece’s eyes lit up to see them and she scrambled from the sofa.

‘Aunt Holly!’ Florence rushed towards her, arms outstretched. ‘You came!’ Holly scooped her up automatically, feeling the softness of Florence’s cheek pressed against hers, inhaling the scent of soap and shampoo. Florence clung like a limpet, her hot tears scalding Holly’s neck. Holly could feel her niece’s fear and desolation and her heart ached for her. Security was such a fragile thing when you were a child. She understood that better than most.

‘Hello Flo,’ she said gently. ‘Of course I came. I’ll always come when you call me. You know that.’

‘Where’s Daddy?’ Florence was wailing. ‘Why has he gone away?’

‘I don’t know,’ Holly said, hugging her tighter. ‘He’ll be back soon. I’m sure of it.’ She wished she were.

Later, when Florence had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep, Holly carried her niece upstairs in the pale light of the May dawn and put her gently on the big double bed in the main bedroom with her toy rabbit cuddled up in her arms. Then she went over to the window seat and leaning her head back against the panelled wall, closed her eyes for a moment.

Although as children she and Ben had shared the smaller bedroom next door, this was the room she had been drawn to every time. She loved the way the light poured in from the high windows.

So early, the room was still full of morning shadow. Ben’s stuff was scattered all around; a shirt discarded over the arm of the chair, his watch on the chest of drawers, the bed half-made. It looked as though he had just stepped out for a second and would be back at any moment and that disturbed Holly more than it reassured her. This was all so out of character.

Nostalgia and a feeling almost like grief caught her sharply in her chest. She remembered how, as children, she and Ben would imagine the bed as a flying carpet taking them to faraway lands. They had told each other stories more spectacular, adventurous and exciting than any they had read in books. It had been magical. There had even been a little compartment hidden beneath the cushion on the window seat where they would leave each other secret messages …

The breath stopped in her throat. Softly, so as not to wake Florence, Holly slipped off the seat and lifted the cushion up. The little brass handle she remembered was still there. She pulled. Nothing happened. The box lid seemed wedged shut. She tugged a little harder.

The wood lifted with a scrape that she was afraid for a moment would wake Florence, but the child did not stir. Holly knelt down and peered inside.

There was nothing there except for a receipt for some dry cleaning, a dead spider and a misshapen yellow pebble.

Holly felt an absurd sense of disappointment and loss. What had she imagined – that Ben would have left her a secret message to explain where he had gone? No matter how wrong it felt to her that he had simply vanished into thin air, she had to believe that the police were correct. Come morning Ben would walk in full of anxiety for Flo and apologies and relief, explaining … But here Holly’s imagination failed her. She could not think of a single reason why he would do what he had done.

Eventually, when she felt calm enough, she went and curled up next to Florence on the big double bed. She didn’t sleep but lay listening to Florence’s breathing and felt a little bit comforted. After a while she fell into an uneasy doze, Bonnie resting across her feet.

She was woken some time later by an insistent ringing sound. For a moment she felt happy before the memory of what had happened rushed in, swamping her consciousness. She stumbled from the bed and down the stairs, making a grab for her bag and the phone, wondering if it was Guy calling to see what had happened.

But it wasn’t her mobile that was ringing. She found Ben’s phone halfway down the side of the sofa and pressed the button to answer the call.

‘Dr Ansell?’ It was a voice she didn’t recognise, male, slightly accented, sounding pleasant and business-like. ‘This is Espen Shurmer. My apologies for calling you so early but I wanted to catch you to confirm our meeting on Friday—’

‘This isn’t Ben,’ Holly said quickly. ‘I’m his sister.’

There was a pause at the other end. ‘My apologies again.’ The man sounded faintly amused. ‘If you would be so good as to pass me over to Dr Ansell.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Holly said. ‘He’s not here. I …’ She could feel herself stuttering, still half-asleep. She wasn’t sure why she had answered the call and now she didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m afraid he’s disappeared,’ she blurted out.

This time the silence at the other end of the line was more prolonged. Just when she thought Espen Shurmer had hung up, and was feeling grateful for it, he spoke again.

‘Disappeared? As in you do not know where he is?’ He sounded genuinely interested.

‘Yes,’ Holly said. ‘Last night.’ She was not sure why she was telling this man so much when he was probably no more than a business acquaintance of Ben’s. ‘So I’m afraid I don’t know if he’ll be able to make your meeting … I mean, if he comes back I’ll tell him, but I can’t guarantee he’ll be there …’ She let her voice trail away, feeling an absolute fool.

‘Miss Ansell,’ the man at the other end said, ‘Forgive me for not introducing myself properly. My name is Espen Shurmer and I am a collector of seventeenth-century artefacts, paintings, glass, jewellery …’ He paused. ‘I had arranged to meet your brother on Friday night at 7.30pm after a private view at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He contacted me a couple of weeks ago to request the meeting.’

‘Oh.’ Holly was at a loss. ‘Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, Mr Shurmer, but I have no idea what Ben wanted to talk to you about. Actually I’m very surprised he got in touch. Art isn’t really his thing …’ She stopped again, realising she was still babbling even if what she was saying was true. Ben had zero interest in the arts. He had always supported her engraving career and had even bought a couple of her glass paperweights for his surgery, but she had known it had only been because she had made them herself. She had loved him for it but she was under no illusions about his interest in culture.

‘I know what it was that your brother wished to discuss, Miss Ansell,’ Espen Shurmer said. ‘He wanted some information on a certain pearl, a legendary stone of great worth.’

Holly sat down abruptly. ‘A … pearl?’ She said. She thought she had misheard. ‘As in a piece of jewellery? Are you sure? I mean …’ It was possible that Ben might have been buying a gift for Natasha, but she was certain he would have bought a modern piece rather than approaching an antiques collector. Such an idea would never even have crossed his mind.

‘I think we should meet to discuss this,’ the man said, after a moment. ‘It is most important. If your brother is unable to keep the appointment, would you be able to come in his place, Miss Ansell? I should be extremely grateful.’

Holly hadn’t even thought about what would happen beyond the next few hours, let alone on Friday. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Shurmer, but Ben will probably be back by then and anyway, this is nothing to do with me.’

‘Seven thirty at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,’ Shurmer said, cutting in so smoothly she barely noticed the interruption. ‘I should be greatly honoured if you choose to be there, Miss Ansell,’ he added with old-fashioned courtesy.