The House of a Hundred Whispers Read online

  ‘What the hell is that lot?’ asked Martin. ‘I don’t remember seeing them before. All that used to be up here was our old toys and Gracey’s cot.’

  Rob went over to the pile of suitcases. Some of them were leather and looked expensive, even though they were scratched and battered. All of them carried luggage labels around their handles, and he turned one over and read it.

  Ronald May, HMP Dartmoor, Tavistock Road, Princetown, Yelverton PL20 6RR.

  He picked up another label. This one carried the name Mohammed Baqri. The next belonged to Thomas Friend. Yet another belonged to Lukasz Sokolowski.

  ‘These are all prisoners’ belongings. What are they doing up here in Dad’s attic?’

  He picked up one of the suitcases, laid it down on the attic floor and clicked open the catches. When he lifted the lid, he found that it was filled with neatly folded clothes: a navy-blue jacket, at least five shirts of different colours, socks and underpants. There was even a black leather washbag, with a razor and a toothbrush and a Gillette stick deodorant inside it.

  He opened up another suitcase, and another. They were all filled with men’s clothes. One of them had two pairs of good-quality leather shoes in it, wrapped in tissue paper.

  ‘I don’t get this at all. It looks like these prisoners were all packed up to go away somewhere. But if they didn’t go away, where did they go? Back to the prison? But if that’s where they went, why did they leave their suitcases here?’

  ‘We can easily check with the prison,’ said Martin. ‘If they did go back, maybe some of them are still banged up there, and they can throw some light on why Dad kept their stuff.’

  Rob looked around. ‘Meanwhile, there’s no sign of Timmy up here. We need to go back down and start searching around the village. I only hope he hasn’t gone anywhere near the well.’

  ‘That’s covered over, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but he was really fascinated by it, the last time we brought him down here, just before Mum died. He’d been reading some fairy tale and he kept asking if trolls lived down there.’

  7

  They buttoned up their raincoats and lifted the three large umbrellas out of the elephant’s-foot umbrella stand by the front door. The smoke had cleared out of the drawing room now so that Rob could close all the windows, but the house was so cold that they were stamping their feet and rubbing their hands together to keep warm.

  ‘First priority after we find Timmy is to call a chimney sweep,’ said Martin. ‘And maybe go into Yelverton and buy ourselves a couple of electric heaters.’

  They left the house, opening up their umbrellas, and walked along the driveway to the steep winding road that led up to St Mary’s church and the village. The wind had risen and it was drizzling almost horizontally now. Vicky’s umbrella was blown inside out with a loud clap.

  ‘I’m trying to think like Timmy,’ said Rob, as he helped her to bend the spokes back again. ‘He might have gone to the well, but then again he might have gone to the churchyard. You remember how interested he was in some of the statues, and the carvings on the gravestones. You know what boys of that age are like – full of morbid curiosity.’

  ‘I’m praying that you’re right, Rob. But I still think he would rather have stayed indoors, playing Angry Birds on your phone.’

  ‘Look – if he’s not in the village, I’ll call the police. It starts getting dark by four, so we need to find him before then.’

  They reached the intersection of three narrow lanes and the triangular green in between them. Four large houses stood on one side of the green, and two on another, and that constituted the ‘village’. The houses looked empty. Their front gardens were overgrown, their fences were broken, and their walls were streaked with damp. The well stood in the centre of the green, with a mossy tiled roof. Its borehole had been covered over years ago with a heavy oak lid, although an old wooden pail still rested on top of it, with a rope attached to its handle.

  ‘He couldn’t have fallen down there,’ said Rob. ‘He wouldn’t have been strong enough to pick up that lid, for starters, and even if he had, he couldn’t have put that bucket back on top of it, could he?’ He didn’t allow himself to think that some abductor might have dropped Timmy down the well, and replaced the pail afterwards. That was Grimms’ fairy-tale stuff.

  ‘All the same,’ said Martin. He rolled the pail off to one side, and then he heaved the lid up high enough for them to be able to peer down inside the shaft. Rob shone his flashlight down it, but all they could see was the mass of tangled roots that had grown between the brickwork, and the glint of water, at least twenty metres below. The air smelled like bad breath. But there were no trolls, and no Timmy.

  Martin lowered the lid. ‘Right, then. The churchyard.’

  The six of them crossed the green and went through the lychgate that led into the churchyard. The church itself was built of granite, with a tall square tower at its western end, dappled with grey and orange lichen. The graveyard sloped steeply downhill, with twenty or thirty gravestones leaning at various awkward angles, as well as two grand Victorian mausoleums closer to the church, one of them for several members of the Wilmington family.

  Apart from the pattering of the rain on their umbrellas, the churchyard was silent. Rob hesitated for a moment, and then shouted out, ‘Timmy! Timmy! Can you hear me, Timmy?’

  His voice sounded strangely flat, and there was no echo. Neither was there any reply.

  Vicky said, ‘We’ll go and look inside the church.’

  Together, she and Katharine walked along the path that led to the church doorway, followed by Grace and Portia. The crunching of their shoes on the gravel was curiously muffled. Meanwhile, Rob and Martin made their way between the graves. Rob had a chilling premonition of finding Timmy lying between the kerbstones in front of one of the graves, white-faced, his jumper soaking wet, his hands laced together.

  Martin stopped and read out the inscription on one of the memorials. ‘Lieutenant William Staines, 1817. Resurgant. What do you think that means?’

  ‘Resurgant? That means “I shall rise again”,’ said Rob.

  ‘Oh. I was never any good at Latin, not like you. So you’re going to rise again, are you, Lieutenant Staines? I won’t hold my breath.’

  He moved along to the next memorial. ‘Elizabeth Chase, 1864. In Coelo Quies.’

  Rob stopped beside him. ‘Roughly translated, that means “Peace in Heaven”.’

  ‘She’ll be lucky. What with all those angels sitting on clouds and strumming away at their harps.’

  Vicky and Katharine came back out of the church. Vicky shook her head. ‘We looked everywhere,’ she called out. ‘Even the toilet in the vestry.’

  The graves along the second row were obviously much older – some so old that their inscriptions had been either weathered away or completely obscured by lichen. But at the end of the row there was a larger headstone with an inscription that was still mostly readable.

  ‘Matthew Carver, can’t read the date, but it looks like sixteen-something. Stat adhuc tempus. That’s something about time, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’ said Rob. He was growing increasingly stressed, his eyes darting all around the graveyard for any sign of Timmy.

  ‘Tempus. That’s something about time, isn’t it? Like tempus fugit.’

  Rob turned around and frowned at the headstone. ‘“Time stands still”, that’s what it means.’

  Vicky and the other three women, meanwhile, had been looking into the two mausoleums and searching the weedy overgrown area at the back of the church. As Rob and Martin reached the end of the third row of gravestones, Vicky came back up the path in tears, and Rob went across to hug her.

  ‘Oh God,’ she wept. ‘Where is he? Please don’t let him be hurt.’

  ‘Come on, darling, he’ll be all right. He’s just wandered off somewhere and got himself lost. He’s definitely not here, though. I’m going to call the police.’

  He took out his phone and dialle
d 999, and the emergency operator answered immediately.

  ‘Our five-year-old son’s gone missing around Sampford Spiney. We’ve been searching for over an hour but we still can’t find him. We’re getting seriously worried.’

  ‘Hold on a moment, sir, and I’ll put you through to Crownhill police station.’

  As he waited to be connected, Rob looked down to the lower end of the graveyard, where the granite wall was overshadowed by oak trees. At first he couldn’t be sure, but when he lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the drizzle, he thought he could make out a figure standing there, wearing a grey overcoat and a trilby hat with a wide drooping brim, similar to the hat their father used to wear when he let his two Staffordshire bull terriers, Max and Bullet, out of their kennels and took them walking on the moors. He was about to point out the figure to Martin when a voice said, ‘Crownhill police, how can I help you?’

  Quickly, trying not to sound panicky, he told the duty sergeant that Timmy had disappeared and that they had searched for him everywhere they could think of, without success. Next to him, Vicky kept her hand pressed over her mouth to stop herself from sobbing out loud.

  When he looked down to the end of the graveyard again, the figure had gone. Maybe his stress had led him to imagine it. The wind was blowing the trees so that every now and then a gap appeared between them that resembled a human shape.

  ‘The police should be here in less than twenty minutes,’ he announced. ‘We’d better get back to the house to meet them.’

  8

  The rain had cleared away by the time the police arrived at Allhallows Hall, although a blustery wind was still blowing and a silvery sun kept playing hide-and-seek behind the clouds.

  Two squad cars were parked in the driveway, as well as a van with three officers in dark-blue overalls and a dog handler with an Alsatian.

  ‘Well, you’ve come out in force,’ said Martin, as he opened the front door for them.

  ‘Sergeant Billings,’ said the leading officer, in a strong Devon brogue. He was stocky and short, with a buzz cut that was going grey at the sides, and a broken nose like a jug handle. ‘When a young person goes missing, the sooner we start looking for them the better. ’Specially this time of year, when it gets dark so early.’

  ‘Come in,’ said Rob. ‘It’s our son, Timmy, who’s missing. He’s only five but he’s quite grown-up and independent for his age.’

  ‘We’ve searched the whole damned house from top to bottom, and the church,’ put in Martin. ‘We’ve even looked down the well, God help us. And my good lady and I were supposed to be heading back to London by three.’

  ‘Has he ever gone missing before? Did you have an argument with him, or tell him off for something?’

  Rob shook his head. ‘Never, and no. We don’t have to read him the riot act very often, but when we do, usually he sulks and shuts himself in his bedroom and plays video games. But that never lasts for long. He’s not the kind of kid who bears grudges, especially when it’s teatime and there’s beans on toast.’

  ‘Do you have a picture of him?’

  Rob dug his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and took out the latest photograph, which he had taken when they were on holiday in Portugal.

  ‘Thanks. And do you have an item of his clothing for the dog to take a sniff at?’

  ‘Here,’ said Vicky, picking up Timmy’s yellow jacket from the back of the chair in the hallway.

  Sergeant Billings turned around and called out, ‘Jones! Do you want to fetch Axel in here?’

  A lanky ginger-haired dog handler came across the courtyard with his Alsatian. At first the dog was eagerly trotting forward with his tongue hanging out like a pink silk cravat, but as it neared the front door it slowed down, and when it reached the first step of the porch it stopped. Its ears and its tail stood up erect and its fur bristled as if it had been electrocuted.

  ‘Axel! Come on, boy!’ snapped its handler, tugging at his lead. He managed to drag the dog a few more inches forward, but almost immediately the dog scrabbled its claws on the granite steps and pulled back again.

  ‘Axel! What the flaming Nora’s the matter with you? Come on, boy! Now!’

  ‘Get your skates on, Derek!’ called Sergeant Billings. ‘We haven’t got all day! We’ve got a little lad to find before it gets dark!’

  Axel’s handler pulled at the dog’s lead again and again, but it still refused to move.

  ‘It’s no use, sarge! He won’t budge! Something’s spooked him!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something’s frightened him. I don’t know what. He’s never done this to me before.’

  ‘Can’t you give him a dog biscuit or something?’

  ‘He’s scared shitless, sarge. A dog biscuit’s not going to make any difference.’

  Sergeant Billings turned back to Vicky. ‘Well, I don’t know. For some reason the dog doesn’t want to come into the house. If you can hand me that jacket, I’ll take it outside and see if he’ll sniff at it there.’

  Vicky gave him Timmy’s jacket and he took it over to the dog handler, who had retreated with his dog now to stand beside the headless cherub. The dog handler bunched it up and held it under the dog’s nose.

  ‘Okay,’ said the dog handler. ‘He’s got that now.’

  ‘Take a look around the garden first,’ Sergeant Billings told him. ‘Meantime, we’ll give the house another search.’

  ‘I can tell you, sergeant, we went over it with a fine-tooth comb,’ said Martin. ‘The boy’s not in there. We even looked up in the attic, just to make sure, even though there’s no way he could have climbed up there.’

  ‘Is there a cellar?’

  ‘There is, but for some reason it’s been bricked up. It was bricked up before we came to live here.’

  ‘Very good, sir. I appreciate that you’ve gone through the house already, but we have to make a thorough search ourselves so we can record that we’ve carried it out. And – no offence – we can sometimes spot something that a civilian might have overlooked.’

  ‘All right, then, fine. Go ahead.’

  The police officers trooped into the house, and once they were gathered in the hallway Sergeant Billings split them up and sent them off to different rooms.

  ‘If he’s not here on the property, sir, he’ll have left his scent outside, and Axel will pick it up, I can assure you of that. He’s the best tracking dog we’ve got, by far.’

  ‘It’s been raining buckets, though,’ said Martin. ‘Won’t that have washed any scent away?’

  ‘Not so much that Axel can’t follow it. I’ve even known him follow a trail when there’s snow a foot deep.’

  The family waited in the drawing room while the police searched the house. Because it was so cold they all kept their coats on, although Vicky couldn’t stop herself from shivering. They hardly spoke, but sat and listened to the heavy footsteps above them as the officers went into each of the eight bedrooms. Through the latticed window they could see the dog handler circling around the garden, with Axel sniffing the pathways and the grass borders.

  The dog handler disappeared from sight, but after a few minutes they heard him calling out to Sergeant Billings from outside the open front door. Sergeant Billings went to see what he wanted, and they heard them talking together in the porch. Eventually he came back into the drawing room, holding up a polythene evidence bag. Inside it, they could see a claw hammer with a wooden handle. The hammerhead was tarnished almost black and frayed string was tied around its handle.

  ‘Axel just sniffed this out. Apparently it was wedged down the side of the retaining wall by one of the flower beds, so it’s hardly surprising that it wasn’t discovered when we searched the place before – you know, after Mr Russell was found fatally injured.’

  ‘What does that have to do with finding Timmy?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Well, nothing, sir. But it might throw some light on what happened to Mr Russell. I’ve seen the preliminary report from the forensic p
athologist, and she suggested that he was probably struck on the back of his head with a blunt instrument of some kind. He had a circular indentation in the parietal bone, which would suggest it was a hammer. So we’ll be taking this away with us to run some tests on it. You never know.’

  ‘But what about Timmy? Wasn’t there any trace of him?’

  ‘Sorry, sir – no. But Constable Jones hasn’t taken Axel the full circuit around the house yet. Don’t you worry. Like I said before, if anybody can track where your little lad’s strayed off to, he can.’

  ‘You really think that hammer could have been used to murder our father?’ said Martin.

  ‘It’s not for me to say, sir. But a fingerprint and DNA test should tell us, one way or another. I don’t know the full facts of the case, but I do know that there were no signs of any intruder… no sign of forced entry and no footprints. So this might give us an idea what actually occurred. On the other hand, maybe it won’t. Maybe it’s been lying in that flower bed since your father fell downstairs.’

  Sergeant Billings hesitated, suddenly realising what he had said. ‘Sorry. My apologies. Bad choice of words there. What I meant was, maybe it’s been there for donkey’s years.’

  *

  One after the other, the police officers who were searching the house returned to the hallway to report that they had looked everywhere without finding any sign of Timmy. A few minutes afterwards, the dog handler called out to Sergeant Billings again, and Sergeant Billings went outside to talk to him. He came back with a serious face to say that Axel had picked up Timmy’s scent from the time when he had been knocking the heads off thistles in the kitchen garden, but nowhere else. If he had left Allhallows Hall and wandered off, he would have left a trail that Axel could follow, but there was none.

  ‘What if somebody picked him up and carried him away?’ said Vicky. ‘He wouldn’t have left a trail then, would he?’