For His Eyes Only(56)

                But this was a tiny crack and through it other questions flooded in. Not just what had caused the rift, but where could a hurting teenage boy with no family have gone?

                She tried to imagine herself in that situation. Imagine that instead of hiding out in the shed, she’d run away. It happened every day. Teenagers running away from situations they couldn’t handle.

                Where would she have run to? How would she have lived?

                How would she have felt returning home after sixteen years, a stranger, changed beyond recognition from the cossetted girl who’d painted her nails, pinned up her hair, put on a new dress and sparkly shoes to go to a school disco?

                He’d shown no interest, no emotional attachment to the property until that security guard had ordered him to leave but then the claim had been instinctive. Possessive.

                ‘This is my land...’

                She looked around her. Darius had lived here while he was growing up, going to school. All his formative years had been spent roaming the estate. In this house. It had made him who he was, given him the strength to survive on his own. She would have expected a photograph on the desk, on the bedside table. There was nothing, but there had to be traces of him here. His room...

                When she’d visited the Chase in order to prepare the details for the kind of glossy sales brochure a house of this importance demanded, there had been a team of them from Morgan and Black, walking the land, detailing the outbuildings, the cottages, the boathouse. Inside, she had concentrated on the main reception and bedrooms while junior staff had gone through the minor rooms, the attics.

                She arranged the desk to look as if the writer had just left it for a moment, took photographs of that and the view from the window, then picked up the folder and went in search of the room which had been Darius Hadley’s private space.

                She found it at the far end of the first floor corridor. Grander than most bedrooms, with a high ceiling, tall windows looking out over the park and furnished with pieces that had obviously been in the house for centuries. And yet it was still recognisable for what it was. A boy’s bedroom. Unchanged since he’d abandoned it.

                Her brother Tom was about the same age and he’d had the same poster above his bed, the same books on his shelves.

                The similarity ended with the books and posters. Tom had always known what he wanted to do and by the time he was seventeen he’d had a skeleton in his room, medical diagrams on the walls.

                Darius, too, had been focused on the future. There were wall-to-wall drawings, tacked up with pins, curling at the edges.

                One of them, the drawing of a laughing retriever, each curl of his coat, each feather of his tail so full of life that he looked as if he was about to bound off the paper after a rabbit.

                On a worktable lay a folder filled with watercolours. Distant views of the house, the hills, the birds and animals that roamed the estate. The faint scent of linseed oil still clung to an easel leaning against a far wall. She opened a wooden box stacked beside it. Brushes, dried up tubes of paint. He’d moved on from sketches and watercolours to oil, but none of those were here.

                She turned to the wardrobe and a lump formed in her throat as she saw his clothes. A pair of riding boots, walking shoes, battered old trainers bearing the shape of his youthful foot lined up beneath shirts, a school uniform, jackets, a suit and, in a suit bag from a Savile Row tailor, what must have been his first tux, never worn.

                What kind of a life had he had here? Privileged, without a doubt, and yet he’d apparently walked away from it, leaving everything behind. His clothes, his art, his life.