The House of a Hundred Whispers Read online

  12

  They were both still awake when they heard a Land Rover crunching to a halt in the driveway, and its door being slammed, and after a few seconds there was a knock at the door.

  Rob looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes to six. The search and rescue team was early.

  He hurried down the stairs, with Vicky following close behind him. When he opened the front door he saw that it was only John Kipling, in his crimson anorak and a black knitted bobble hat. Behind him, it was still raining, although softly and quietly.

  ‘No luck?’ asked Rob.

  John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. We searched nearly eight hundred hectares. All we found was a broken-down Toyota and a dead sheep.’

  ‘Why don’t you come inside and have something hot to drink?’ said Vicky. She looked over his shoulder towards the Land Rover in the driveway. ‘Are you alone or is there anybody with you?’

  ‘No, I’m alone. And a hot cup of tea would go down a treat.’

  He stepped into the hallway and pulled off his bobble hat. Although he must have been forty-five or older, he looked as fit as a much younger man. He had high cheekbones and a snub nose that made him look Swedish or Polish. His accent, though, was pure Devon.

  He sat down and eased off his wellington boots. ‘There’s a hole in my sock but my feet don’t smell.’

  ‘After what you’ve been doing all night, smelly feet would be forgiven, don’t you worry about that.’

  Vicky went through to the kitchen to make John a mug of tea while Rob led him into the drawing room and switched on the lights. The fire had burned down to a heap of grey ashes, but Rob set about shovelling them out and lighting a fresh fire with crumpled-up pages of the Tiverton Gazette that he had found in the scullery, and ash twigs.

  ‘Always comes out on Tuesday, the Tiverton Gazette,’ said John. ‘Unusual day for a weekly paper to be published, but it coincides with market day, when there’s more people in town to buy it. It’s been going since 1858, believe it or not. The fellow who started it was only twenty-two, but he died three years later.’

  ‘Well, you know your local history,’ said Rob, striking a match.

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact. I’ve lived here all my life and it’s a fascinating part of the world. There are so many legends and fairy stories about it – spooks and demons and witches. That’s natural, I suppose, considering the landscape. You can go out on a foggy morning and imagine that you’re the only human being in the world, but you can hear weird animal noises quite close by and see shadows flitting around, behind the fog.’

  ‘What do you think our hopes are of finding Timmy?’ Rob asked him.

  ‘Like I said before, we’ve never failed to find a missing person yet. Not if they’re out on the moor. But it could be that your lad’s wandered off somewhere else, or that somebody’s seen him walking along the road on his own and picked him up.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking. But surely if somebody had picked him up, they would have taken him to the nearest police station.’

  ‘Perhaps they have, but then maybe your boy wasn’t able to tell them where you are. But there’s no point in speculating, Mr Russell. That’s one thing I always tell my team before we start searching. You can predict from experience which way your missing person is most likely to have strayed off to, but sometimes you find them in the most unlikely places. Last month we were looking for a woman rambler who was trying to find her way back to Langstone Manor caravan park. Eventually we found her stuck down a crevice in the rocks at Pew Tor, miles out of her way.’

  ‘Maybe she was pisky-led,’ said Vicky, as she came in from the kitchen with three mugs of tea on a tray.

  ‘Oh, you know about the piskies?’ said John.

  ‘I was reading about them last night in a book about Dartmoor. I was trying to see if it had any clues to where Timmy might have gone.’

  ‘The king of the piskies is supposed to live under Pew Tor. But in all my years I’ve never caught sight of him. Nor any other pisky, for that matter.’

  At that moment Martin came in, puffy-eyed and unshaved. He was wrapped in Herbert’s brown check dressing gown and was still wearing his yellow socks.

  ‘I didn’t realise it was six o’clock already. God, I feel rough. Any news?’

  Rob shook his head. ‘John and his team have been searching all night but there’s still no sign of him.’

  ‘I’ll be checking in with Sergeant Billings in a minute,’ said John. ‘Since we haven’t been able to find Timmy, he’ll be putting out a bulletin on the local television news and Twitter.’

  He blew on his tea to cool it, and took two or three sips. Then he said, ‘I know this might sound more than a bit condescending, but you have made a thorough search of the house?’

  ‘Of course we have,’ Martin retorted. ‘And the police have, too. What – do you think he might be hiding under one of the beds and we haven’t noticed?’

  ‘Sorry – I didn’t mean to imply that you haven’t searched properly. But these houses have all kinds of funny little alcoves and recesses that you wouldn’t find in a modern house. That’s because they were built without plans, and sometimes the upstairs rooms didn’t quite fit with the load-bearing walls, and so there’d be a niche left over, which was plastered over.’

  ‘If it was plastered over, how could anybody get into it?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I do know that this house has a priest’s hole, or priest’s hide, as they’re sometimes known.’

  ‘I’ve heard of those,’ said Vicky. ‘Those were secret rooms, weren’t they, where Catholic priests used to be hidden during the Reformation, so that the priest hunters couldn’t find them.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said John. ‘The Wilmingtons, who built this house, were Catholics, and when they were approached by a priest to give him shelter, they asked a fellow called Nicholas Owen to construct a priest hole for them. Nicholas Owen was a Jesuit lay brother. He was also an incredible craftsman. He’d already made priest holes in at least five country houses. In Harvington Hall, in Worcestershire, he made at least seven, and there could be more in the same house that nobody has been able to find because he concealed them so brilliantly.’

  ‘We never knew there was a priest hole here, at Allhallows Hall,’ said Martin. ‘Surely it would have been mentioned in the title deeds, or the property information form, or whatever.’

  ‘I only found out about it three or so years ago when I was researching the Wilmington family,’ said John. ‘The existence of a priest hole would only have been known to the owner of the house and Nicholas Owen himself. And when I say they were brilliantly concealed… some of them were quite amazing. He would build them under staircases, and over fireplaces, and behind panelling. Even down drains. He was caught eventually, and tortured, and executed, but he was canonised and became the patron saint of escapologists and illusionists.’

  ‘Did your research give you any idea where in the house this priest hole is?’ Rob asked him.

  ‘No… only that there must have been one, because the priest hunters came here looking for a Catholic priest. Apparently they were acting on a tip they’d been given by a local villager from Yelverton, who bore some kind of a grudge against the Wilmingtons. They searched the house without finding him.’

  ‘So how did they know that there was a priest hole?’ asked Martin.

  ‘Ah – they’d got wise to their existence by then, and how difficult they were to discover. They went away, but the same afternoon without any warning they came back, and by that time the priest had come out of his hole and they caught him on the road to Yelverton. He was tortured to make him renounce his Catholic faith and pledge allegiance to the Church of England, but he refused and they hanged him.

  ‘The Wilmingtons could have been in serious trouble, too, but they denied knowing the priest. Even though it was almost certain that they must have been hiding him somewhere in Allhallows Hall, the priest hunters still couldn’t find a priest hole, an
d so they had no evidence to charge them with.’

  By now, both Grace and Portia had appeared, wearing thick sweaters and jeans – Grace in pink and Portia in purple. Rob introduced them to John Kipling and quickly explained what he had just told them.

  ‘If there is a priest hole, we weren’t able to find it, either,’ said Portia. Her studded denim jacket made her look even more boyish. ‘And anyway, if we weren’t able to find it, how could Timmy have found it? And even if he had, surely he would have come out of it by now.’

  ‘He could be stuck inside it and he can’t get out,’ said Grace.

  ‘But he’d be starving hungry by now. He’d be shouting out and banging on the walls, wouldn’t he?’

  Vicky was about to tell them about the childish cries that she had heard coming from the end bedroom, and the way she had been violently knocked over when she went to investigate, but Rob squeezed her hand and gave her a concentrated stare that cautioned her to stay silent. In the unlikely event that either Martin or Grace had somehow arranged for all this whispering and crying, he didn’t want them to know that they had heard it, and that it had disturbed them – although he still couldn’t understand how Vicky had been pushed.

  ‘How do you go about finding priest holes?’ asked Rob. ‘I mean, if you take a look around the house, John, do you think that you might be able to work out where it is?’

  ‘I could try,’ John told him. ‘I’ve seen two of them already – one at Grimstone Hall and the other in a house in Tavistock. The one at Grimstone Hall was under the staircase and the priest had to pull out the riser from one of the stairs and slide himself sideways into the chamber that Nicholas Owen had built underneath. At Tavistock, a section of the wall over the fireplace was hinged upwards, and the priest’s hole was a narrow space behind the chimney. But, like I said, Nicholas Owen was such an expert craftsman that they’re very hard to find.’

  ‘And what if you can’t find one here at Allhallows Hall?’ asked Martin, with a slightly aggressive tone in his voice. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then we don’t give up. We bring in one of our sniffer dogs and if our sniffer dog can’t find it then one of our team works for a company that insulates cavity walls. He can drill a neat hole in any wall that he thinks might have a priest hole behind it, and take a look behind it with a borescope.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Martin. ‘But let’s start with the dog first, shall we, before we start turning the house into a sieve?’

  13

  After he had finished his mug of tea, John Kipling stood up, peeled off his crimson anorak, and started his search of the house. He went around the ground floor first, rapping with his knuckles on the dark oak panelling to see if it sounded hollow anywhere. Then he measured the walls in each room to compare them with the walls of the rooms next to it, to see if there was any disparity.

  Outside, the rain had eased off, and three fresh search and rescue teams had spread out over the moors in their continuing effort to find Timmy. Grace and Portia went out to help them, although Rob had to stay behind because his ankle was still swollen and he could only hobble on it, and Martin had to catch up with more than twenty urgent business calls.

  While John slowly tapped his way from the kitchen to the library, Rob and Vicky sat in the drawing room watching the television. The local BBC News had already shown a picture of Timmy, with an urgent request for anybody who had seen him or who had any information about his whereabouts to get in touch with the police at Crownhill. An appeal had also been posted on Twitter.

  ‘Do you think I should tell John about that child I heard crying and my getting pushed over?’ asked Vicky. ‘Perhaps we should tell him about all that whispering, too. He seems to know all the Dartmoor myths and legends.’

  ‘Let’s hold off until he’s finished on the ground floor,’ said Rob. ‘We don’t want him heading straight upstairs until he’s made a thorough search down here. This priest hole could be anywhere and we don’t want him to miss it.’

  ‘But we both heard something strange up in that end bedroom. I heard that child and you heard those people whispering.’

  ‘We don’t know if those noises came from a priest hole, do we? And if there is a priest hole and Timmy somehow managed to get himself stuck inside it… well, maybe he’s too weak to call out any more. Or… I don’t know.’

  ‘Or what? You think he could be dead?’

  ‘Vicks… I didn’t say that. To be honest with you, I don’t believe that he’s here in the house at all. But we have to think of every place that he might have found himself and everything that might have happened to him.’

  John came into the drawing room, running his hand through his bristly blond hair. He looked tired.

  ‘There’s no sign of a priest hole down here. I’ll be taking a look upstairs now, if that’s okay.’

  ‘We’ll go up with you. We didn’t tell you before, but we’ve been hearing some odd noises and we think they come from one of the bedrooms.’

  ‘Odd noises such as what?’

  ‘Like a child calling out, and people whispering. But very faintly, so we couldn’t quite tell for certain if that’s what they really were, or if it was the wind, or the plumbing, or some fox outside on the moor making a mating call.’

  John frowned, and then he said, ‘Okay. Perhaps you’d better show me this bedroom. I mean, I know where they are, most of the priest holes around the country, but there’s no record of anybody ever hearing voices out of them. Not even at Grimstone Hall and that’s supposed to be haunted by at least three ghosts.’

  They went upstairs, with Rob grabbing at the banister rail so that he wouldn’t put too much pressure on his ankle.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to take a look around Allhallows Hall,’ said John. ‘It has a fair old history, I can tell you. I’m only sorry that I’ve had to come here under such unhappy circumstances.’

  Vicky led him along the corridor to the stained-glass window of Old Dewer. John stopped and stared at it, and he was obviously fascinated.

  ‘The Devil,’ said Rob. ‘One of the previous owners of this house had this window installed to keep him away.’

  ‘Understandable,’ said John. ‘There’s still a few folks believe that Old Dewer goes out hunting in the middle of the night. It’s unbaptised babies he’s looking for. Chrisemores they call them, round here. Anybody else he chases to the top of the Dewerstone so that they fall over the edge, plunge down into the River Plym and die.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what we were told when we first came to live here. As if this house isn’t creepy enough without stories like that.’

  Rob opened the bedroom door. Nothing had changed since he had last looked around it. Here they were, exactly as before: the odd collection of spare chairs and the cobwebby candlesticks. None of them had been moved.

  John stepped into the middle of the bedroom, turned around and sniffed. ‘Bit fusty,’ he said. ‘I can smell something but I’m not sure what it is.’

  Rob sniffed too. ‘I can’t smell anything, but then Allhallows Hall has always smelled fusty. I suppose I’m used to it.’

  ‘No, there’s something else. It’s really familiar but I can’t put my finger on it. Cinnamon? Oranges?’

  Vicky sniffed, and frowned, and said, ‘I can smell it, too. Maybe it’s just the leather seats of those two chairs.’

  Rob shook his head. ‘I still can’t smell it. But then I can never smell toast burning, either.’

  John paced the length of the bedroom, toe to heel, to measure it, just as the priest hunters used to. ‘Just over twelve feet, I’d say. Let me go next door and see what that room comes out at.’

  He left the bedroom and came back a few seconds later. ‘It’s about the same. I thought there might be a hidden compartment at the end of this room, but it doesn’t look like it.’

  John went slowly around the room, tapping on each panel of the dark oak dado and shifting the stacked-up chairs beside the window so that he could reach the dado there. Wh
en he had gone all the way around, he came up to Rob and Vicky and said, ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t hear any cavities. But that Nicholas Owen was such an ingenious bugger he might have worked out a way of muffling the sound. My friend the cavity wall contractor could find out for certain with a borescope.’

  Vicky looked around and shuddered. ‘There’s definitely something weird about this room, even if it doesn’t have a priest’s hole. I didn’t just fall over so something must be hiding here. I was pushed really hard.’ With that, she pulled down the neck of her sweater to show John the crimson bruise on her shoulder.

  ‘You’re right,’ said John. ‘I don’t reckon a ghost could have done that.’

  They left the end bedroom and John looked into the other seven bedrooms, rapping at the dados and pacing out their dimensions. Rob knocked at the door of the master bedroom because Katharine was still in there.

  ‘Katharine? Are you decent?’

  ‘Of course I’m decent. What do you want?’

  ‘John from the search and rescue needs to take a look around your room. He’s looking for hidden hidey-holes.’

  ‘All right. If he must.’

  They went in. Katharine was sitting at the dressing table, brushing her hair. Rob had never seen her without make-up before and was surprised that she looked much younger than forty-two. It could have been the dim light in the bedroom, or the fact that he could see only her face in the mirror. Maybe the mirror was the opposite of the portrait of Dorian Gray – your reflection always stayed young while you grew older.

  ‘We think there must be a priest hole somewhere in the house,’ Rob told her. ‘John here knows all the local history and everything points to the possibility that the Wilmingtons had one built in.’

  ‘Well, you’re welcome to look. But surely your dad would have known about it, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said John. ‘Their existence was always kept a very close secret. The punishment for hiding a priest could be severe. You could forfeit your house and be sent to prison and tortured on the rack or even hanged.’