To get to the front door of Rannoch, the Arts and Crafts-style house always described as a mansion, you drive down a private lane. The house is shrouded from view by dense planting. It says, like the houses of any very rich person, that this is a private place, a sanctuary. As you wind up the driveway, there are glimpses of sculptures, of the house. In retrospect, given what we now know about its owner, it seems to be a shadowy place, a place where ill-kept secrets were concealed. There is an air of the Gothic about Rannoch.
In 2011, I knocked on the front door and Sir James Wallace answered. I was there to talk to him for a newspaper er profile. He almost never gave personal interviews.
