The House of a Hundred Whispers Read online

  Rob looked around. The same paintings still hung on the walls – dreary landscapes with overcast skies, mostly of Dartmoor and the Walkham Valley. One of these paintings Rob had always found deeply unsettling. In the middle of a dark grove of trees twenty or thirty figures were gathered, all wearing white robes with pointed hoods, as if they had assembled for some pagan mass, and were waiting for Satan to put in an appearance.

  ‘Let’s see if there’s anything to drink in the kitchen,’ said Vicky, and took Timmy out through the door on the right-hand side of the fireplace. Martin, meanwhile, sat down in Herbert’s throne, briskly chafing his hands together, while Katharine perched herself like a kestrel on the arm of the throne beside him.

  Rob remained standing on the other side of the fireplace, staring unfocused at the logs as they started to smoulder. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t allow Martin to irritate him, but it wasn’t easy. Everything Martin said and did got on his nerves – even the way he crossed his legs to expose his yellow socks.

  ‘Bit early for a drink,’ said Martin. ‘But later on we could shoot down to The Royal Oak at Meavy, if you fancy it.’

  ‘Let’s get this house business over first, shall we? How much do you think Allhallows is worth now?’

  ‘Oh… not a lot more than one and a half million, I’d say. Dad couldn’t get planning permission for the upper field, could he, and let’s face it – this is the arse end of the back of beyond. That’s assuming we put it on the market, of course.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t we?’

  ‘For a start, one of us might want to live here.’

  ‘Well, Vicky and I certainly don’t. Don’t tell me that you and Katharine do. You couldn’t possibly commute to the City from here, and Petulia’s still at school at Tormead, isn’t she?’

  ‘Gracey might want to. Who knows?’

  ‘Why would Gracey want to live in an eight-bedroom house with three and a half acres of land to take care of? It’s not even as if she and that Portia will ever have any children.’

  ‘They might adopt. Plenty of gay couples do.’

  ‘Get real, Martin. They’re going to adopt seven children? Besides, I can’t see Portia leaving her job, whatever it is. Gender equality führer for Islington Council, something like that.’

  ‘Well, yes, but it seems a pity to sell it. Historic houses like this are always a good investment. We could let it out, couldn’t we?’

  ‘I suppose so. But it would probably cost more to keep it up than we could charge in rent. And we’d have to install smoke alarms and fire doors and God knows what. And I can’t think who on earth would want to rent it.’

  Vicky came back into the drawing room.

  ‘I found Timmy some tonic water in the fridge. Now he’s gone exploring.’

  ‘Martin doesn’t think Allhallows is worth more than one-point-five million,’ said Rob.

  ‘Only as little as that? Oh, well, I suppose you can’t complain. You’ll all get five hundred thousand each.’

  ‘Now, hold on,’ said Martin. ‘We haven’t seen Dad’s will yet.’

  ‘Surely he’s divided his assets equally among the three of you.’

  ‘We don’t know yet, do we? Gracey was always the apple of his eye.’

  Rob was about to say that, yes, Herbert had doted on Grace; but at the same he had made it no secret that he had favoured Martin over Rob. Maybe it was because Martin had inherited his bullish looks, and had chosen to pursue what he considered to be a ‘pragmatic’ career in finance. He had shown little or no appreciation of art and had dismissed Rob’s paintings and drawings as ‘daubs and doodles’. ‘Even Van Gogh was poverty-stricken, while he was alive.’

  Then again, Herbert’s preference for Martin could be connected to a blazing argument that Rob had once overheard from his bedroom window when he was about thirteen years old. His father had shouted at his mother, ‘Of course he’s nothing like me! And we both know why that is!’

  He had never dared to ask his mother what his father might have meant.

  4

  Grace and Portia arrived shortly after eleven. Martin opened the front door for them and helped them to carry in their overnight case, and then he ushered them into the drawing room. Rob immediately had the impression that the two of them had been arguing. Portia was usually holding Grace’s hand or wrapping her arm around her waist and giving her affectionate but also proprietorial squeezes – I love her, and she belongs to me.

  ‘Good trip?’ asked Katharine, still perched on the arm of Herbert’s throne.

  ‘Bloody awful, as a matter of fact,’ said Portia. ‘Some idiot had decided to throw himself in front of a train at Tisbury, and that held us up for over an hour. I honestly don’t know why they don’t build a special branch line for people to commit suicide, so they don’t inconvenience the rest of us.’

  ‘Dad’s solicitor will be here in a minute,’ said Martin. ‘I asked her about funeral arrangements but she said they won’t be releasing his body until they’ve completed the post-mortem, and that’s going to take at least another three or four days.’

  ‘I suppose we could hold the funeral service here, at St Mary’s,’ said Grace. ‘I know Dad wasn’t religious, but it’s close to the prison, isn’t it, if any of his old wardens want to pay their respects.’

  ‘Not religious?’ said Rob. ‘Pff! That’s the understatement of the century. The only god he worshipped was himself.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Martin. ‘The last time I came down, he seemed to be quite worried about something. He asked me if I thought he’d led a good life.’

  ‘Oh, you mean he was worried that he might go to hell. He gave me that impression, too, once or twice.’

  ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’ asked Grace.

  Vicky went up to Grace and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. ‘Of course, Grace. How are you? We haven’t seen you since that Leonardo exhibition.’

  ‘We’ve been busy decorating our new flat,’ said Portia sharply. ‘We’ve made a start but we still have so much to do.’

  In other words, thought Vicky, don’t expect to see us for quite some time in the future, either.

  Like Rob, Grace strongly resembled her mother, but she had more of her father in her than Rob. She was tall and full-figured in her olive faux-fur-collared anorak, with coppery hair and green feline eyes and a squarish chin. Vicky could picture her leading an army of Scottish rebels over the border, wearing an impressive iron breastplate and waving a claymore. In reality, though, she was gentle and softly spoken and shy.

  Portia was wearing a brown leather biker jacket and tight black leggings and brown leather boots. She was pretty and slim, with large hazel eyes and a little turned-up nose and short black razor-cut hair. There was no question who was the dominant partner in their relationship. Rob and Vicky knew from experience that if they wanted to invite Grace and Portia to visit them, or even to find out what either of them wanted for Christmas, they had to ask Portia.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Grace, as Vicky went back towards the kitchen. ‘Does anybody else want tea?’

  Before she had reached the door to the kitchen, it suddenly burst open, and Timmy came out. He stopped and looked at them all in bewilderment.

  ‘What’s up, Timmy?’ asked Rob. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Who’s that upstairs?’

  ‘There’s nobody upstairs, darling,’ said Vicky. ‘We’re the only people here.’

  ‘There had jolly well better not be anybody upstairs,’ put in Martin, rising from his throne. ‘The last thing we want is squatters.’

  ‘You saw somebody?’ said Rob. ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘I didn’t see them. Only heard them.’

  ‘Oh yes? And where were they?’

  ‘In one of the rooms, right down at the end, by the coloured window.’

  Martin turned around and said to the rest of them, loudly, ‘He must mean the stained-glass window,’ as if none of t
hem could guess.

  ‘I was looking through the different-coloured glass, so that the garden went red, and then it went blue, and then it went yellow.’

  ‘And that’s when you heard them? How did you know it was more than one? What – were they talking?’

  Timmy nodded. Rob had rarely seen him look so serious, with his wide eyes and that little sprig of hair sticking up at the back of his head.

  ‘Did you hear what they were saying?’

  Timmy said, ‘No. I couldn’t. I pressed my ear up against the door, but they were whispering.’

  Martin turned to Rob. ‘Right! I think we’d better take a shufti, don’t you, Rob. Can’t have uninvited guests!’

  *

  Rob and Martin climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. Rob hadn’t been up here since the day he left for art college, and he had forgotten how low the ceilings were, and how the floorboards creaked, and how strongly the corridors smelled of oak and wood polish and dried-out horse-hair plaster.

  Two corridors led off from the landing: one directly ahead of them, with three bedroom doors on the left-hand side and the large stained-glass window at the end. The other led off to the right, with another five bedroom doors and a door at the end to the bathroom.

  ‘I still find it hard to believe that we’ll never see Dad again,’ said Rob, pausing at the top of the stairs. ‘I keep thinking that at any minute I’m going to hear him shouting up at us to stop making so much bloody noise up here.’

  ‘I think a lot of people misjudged him,’ said Martin. ‘He meant well. He didn’t have such an easy childhood himself.’

  ‘Just because he didn’t have an easy childhood himself didn’t mean that he had to take it out on us. Or Mum, God bless her.’

  ‘Well, let’s go and see if we’ve got any unwelcome visitors, shall we?’

  They walked along the corridor towards the stained-glass window, and Martin opened each of the first two bedroom doors. They had dark oak dados all around them, and stained-glass windows, too, although these were much smaller and glazed with diamond patterns in red and yellow and green. Ventilation and a little more illumination came from skylights in their sloping ceilings; both were streaked grey with lichen and bird droppings.

  There was nobody in either bedroom, only antique beds with faded cotton quilts, and bedside tables with dusty lamps on them.

  ‘Shh,’ said Martin, cupping his hand to his ear. ‘Do you hear any whispering?’

  They waited in silence, their faces lit up by the harlequin patterns of coloured light shining through the stained glass.

  The window depicted Walkham Valley under a dark-blue sky, with a leat running through it. Beside the leat, with his back turned and his arms spread wide, was an impossibly tall man wearing a long black cloak with a high collar turned up. All around him, bristling black hounds were standing in a circle on their hind legs, their fangs bared and their red tongues hanging out.

  According to the previous owner of Allhallows Hall, the man in the black cloak was Old Dewer, which was the Dartmoor name for the Devil. The story went that on certain nights of the year, Old Dewer would mount a huge black horse and take his pack of ferocious hounds out hunting across the moor, searching for young women who hadn’t been able to reach home before it grew dark.

  Whether it was true or not, the window had apparently been installed to make Old Dewer believe that he was respected by the owners of this house, and so that he wouldn’t come snuffling around it looking for souls to steal, especially the souls of their daughters.

  ‘I’ll bet you it was the wind that Timmy heard,’ said Martin. ‘Or maybe the plumbing. The front and the back doors were both locked when we got here, and the burglar alarm was still on. I can’t see how anybody could have got in.’

  ‘Martin, there’s no wind. And the plumbing has never sounded like whispering. It sounds more like somebody slaughtering a pig.’

  Martin opened the last door. There was no bed in here, only an assortment of half a dozen spare chairs, some of them stacked on top of each other, and a wine table crowded with tarnished brass candlesticks and inkwells, all of which were draped with dusty spiderwebs.

  Under the window there was an oak window seat, with a hinged lid covered in cracked green leather. Rob went over and lifted the lid. It was full of nothing but legal documents, all rolled up and tied around with faded red ribbons.

  ‘See? Nobody here. And it doesn’t look as if Dad’s been in here for years.’

  ‘Oh, well. Maybe Timmy imagined it. He does have quite an imagination. He won a prize at school for a story he wrote about a bad egg that fell in love with a bullying centipede.’

  ‘Takes after his father then. Always making things up.’

  Martin closed the door. But as soon as they started to walk back along the corridor, Rob heard what sounded like a man’s voice, talking in an urgent whisper.

  ‘Stop, Martin! No, stop! Can you hear that?’

  Martin stopped, and listened.

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘It was definitely somebody whispering.’

  Martin waited a few moments longer, but then he said, ‘No. I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Really. I’m sure it was somebody whispering.’

  ‘Did you hear what they said?’

  ‘No. They weren’t speaking loud enough. But they sounded – I don’t know – panicky.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Rob. I think you and Timmy have both caught a dose of Allhallows-itis. You remember that old woman who used to live across at Wormold’s Farm? She used to tell us this house could drive anybody who lived in it “maze as a brush”.’

  ‘You mean old Mrs Damerell. She was a couple of sausage rolls short of a picnic herself.’

  Downstairs, they heard knocking at the front door.

  ‘Come on,’ said Martin. ‘That’ll be Dad’s solicitor. Let’s go down and find out who’s inherited what.’

  Rob followed him downstairs. ‘Knowing my luck, it’ll be the headless cherub.’

  5

  When they came downstairs, they found that the drawing room was hazy with acrid smoke. The logs in the fire were well alight now, but it looked as if the chimney was blocked. Katharine was flapping her hand in front of her face and Timmy was coughing.

  ‘God, that’s Dad all over,’ said Rob. ‘Too tight to have the chimneys swept.’

  ‘I can’t breathe!’ Timmy squeaked.

  ‘Open the windows, will you, Rob,’ said Martin. ‘I’ll go and let Ms What’s-her-name in.’

  The smoke was billowing out of the fireplace, thicker and thicker. Rob managed to force all the windows open, even though some of them were jammed with decades of rust and dirt, and he had to shake them several times before they gave way.

  ‘We’ll meet in the library!’ Martin called out.

  ‘Let me put this bloody fire out first!’ Rob called back.

  He went through to the kitchen. The last time it had been modernised was in 1911, and it still had a monstrous black iron range and reddish marble worktops and high copper taps over the sink. Long-handled ladles and whisks and spatulas were hanging in a row from the ceiling, all tangled together with cobwebs.

  Rob found a grimy white plastic bowl in the bottom of the sink and poured water into it. The taps juddered and knocked because there was air trapped in the pipes, and as usual the plumbing started to groan like an animal in pain. Once the bowl was full, he carried it into the drawing room and tipped it slowly over the fire. The logs sizzled and poured out smoke and when Rob breathed in he felt that he was going to choke, but at last the fire was out. With all the windows open, a chilly draught gradually cleared all of the haze away in a series of shudders, although the drawing room still smelled strongly of charred wood.

  Rob dropped the plastic bowl back into the sink and then went through to the library, which was on the left-hand side of the hallway. It was less than half the size of the drawing room, with bookshelves on two sides and a small stone fireplace. The
window overlooked what had once been the walled kitchen garden, but which was now a jungle of dead thistles and drooping grass.

  Margaret Walsh was already sitting at the oak writing table in the middle of the library, with a leather-bound folder in front of her. She was a sturdy, big-bosomed woman in a red tweed suit with red and white feathers in her trilby hat. She looked as if she had dressed to go out on the moor, shooting grouse.

  Grace and Portia were sitting on the two-seat leather sofa next to the fireplace, holding hands, so whatever they had been arguing about, they seemed to have made up. Vicky sat in an upright chair by the window, while Rob and Martin remained standing. Vicky had buttoned up Timmy’s yellow jacket again and sent him out to play, and Rob could see him in the kitchen garden, swishing a stick from side to side to knock the heads off dead thistles.

  ‘Well, you’re all here, good,’ said Margaret Walsh, and opened up the folder. ‘Before I go into detail, I have to tell you that your father changed his will two and a half years ago, and changed it quite radically.’

  ‘Don’t tell me he left everything to the dogs’ home,’ said Rob.

  ‘No, not exactly. He had twenty-eight thousand pounds left in his Barclay’s Bank deposit account, but an overdraft of three thousand seven hundred in his current account at Lloyd’s. He also had considerable debts. He owed approximately thirteen thousand to HMRC, six thousand three hundred to Ladbrokes the bookmakers and four thousand two hundred and fifty to Paddy Power.’

  Martin had been counting in his head. ‘You must be joking. That leaves only seven hundred and fifty pounds. Two hundred and fifty each. You can’t even buy lunch at The Ivy for that.’

  ‘The very last time I saw him, he swore blind to me that he’d given up gambling,’ said Grace. Portia gave her a quick sympathetic hug.