The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Elizabeth Speller, Georgina Capel Page A

nanny, nursemaid’s room, schoolroom. All in a row.’
    ‘I imagine so.’ William was next to him. ‘So from there she left the house by either the front or the back stairs.’
    ‘The back, I imagine,’ Laurence said. ‘Much nearer.’
    ‘You are probably right, except...’ William stroked his moustache. ‘If she simply woke up and wandered off, she might be more likely to try to find her mother.’
    Laurence was about to agree when William said, ‘Except personally I much preferred my nanny to my mother.’ He smiled. ‘But then I was the fourth child of six—five boys and my sister, Lilias, and I think the novelty of motherhood had worn off by the time I arrived. My mother longed to be an artist and was rather perplexed by all these children around the place.’
    ‘Is she still—?’
    ‘Yes. Seventy-two. Indomitable. I think I went up in her estimation when I captured Eleanor. Military heroics rather passed her by but she was a great one for the modern woman.’
    ‘And your father?’
    ‘We lost him a few years ago,’ William said, more sombrely. ‘My eldest brother was gassed at Ypres. Died, rather slowly, in a convalescent home at Hastings not long before you met us. Bad year. My father had always suffered from bouts of melancholia. He never really got over losing his first-born and went into a decline. Set out walking one January day, fell through the ice on a nearby pond and drowned. The rest of us all made it through. Well, the youngest, Gordon, was still at Harrow, but it had never seemed to console my father.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘My mother seems to have an easier time of it without him. She has a gallery near Berkeley Square.’
    Then, more briskly, he returned to the plans in front of him, waving away the smoke from his pipe.
    ‘Once she was downstairs, there were any number of ways Kitty could have left the house.’ He tapped the various entrances and french windows. ‘She could even have been bundled out by a window.’
    ‘I assume the doors were locked?’
    ‘Julian’s certainly a stickler for it now.’
    They both looked up as David opened the back door and smiled tentatively.
    ‘Ah, forgot the time,’ William said. ‘We’re going to check the maze.’
    David seemed relaxed as he stepped behind William and moved to manoeuvre the chair over the step. ‘The yew’s shooting up. We’ve lost only four plants,’ he said, ‘and a couple of maybes. I reckon by the time my little one can walk, there’ll be a proper hedge there. I wish my ma could have seen it.’
    ‘Was she from West Overton? Isn’t that where you come from?’ William asked.
    ‘Born, bred and buried,’ David said. ‘Never even been to Swindon—and proud of it.’ He laughed.
    ‘She must have missed you when you went to London.’
    ‘It would’ve broken her heart or had her take me for a lunatic, but she was dead before then. Perhaps that’s why I went. It took a war to make me see I’d been a lunatic to leave.’
    Laurence remained behind, looking at the plans stuck to the wall. The two men were still chatting easily as David rolled the chair unevenly across the stable yard. A dog, presumably Scout, barked in the garden. Somewhere in the house there was the muffled squeak of a sash being raised.
    He thought that while he was alone he would go over to the church and make a more serious assessment of it. Going up to his room, he fetched his torch, measure, compass and a small notebook, and stuffed them in his pocket. As he came downstairs he found a man standing in the hall, holding his hat in his hand and looking around as if trying to recognise where he was. A battered leather case stood by his side. In the split second before the stranger realised he wasn’t alone, a certain wariness crept over his face. Even though the man was unknown to him, his expression was one that Laurence had seen before.
    He went over to the stranger with his hand out.
    ‘Laurence Bartram,’ he said.
    The stranger smiled