The House of a Hundred Whispers

by Graham Masterton

  Katharine looked at him with her eyes narrowed as if he were totally deranged.

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘I know it sounds absurd, but that’s what happened. It’s that room. It has what you could call a particular charisma. If you enter it and certain words are spoken, you become trapped in time. You don’t die, but you disappear, because you’re no longer in the same time as all the rest of us. The train pulls away but you’re left behind on the platform, so to speak.’

  Katharine turned to Vicky.

  ‘Do you believe this?’

  Vicky nodded. ‘Yes, Katharine, I do. Francis is going to do some more research into it, but at the moment we can’t think of any other explanation. We all saw those men, and when Rob and Francis tried to stop them pulling Ada away, they knocked both of them down onto the floor. And we all saw poor Ada disappear into that wall. One second she was there, the next she was gone.’

  Katharine frowned. ‘You don’t think – you don’t think the same thing could have happened to Martin, do you? I know he’s gone off in a huff before, but apart from leaving his phone behind he hasn’t made any attempt to get in touch. He hasn’t even rung me from some pub to tell me what a bitch he thinks I am. And Timmy. You don’t think these men could have pulled Timmy into a wall, do you? Perhaps that’s why we can’t find him.’

  She hesitated, and then she said, ‘No – no – it’s all too ridiculous. It’s like some fairy story. Are you absolutely sure that’s what you saw? It wasn’t some trick of the light, something like that?’

  ‘Katharine, she disappeared into the wall,’ said Rob. ‘We’re going to search the house again. I was wondering if there might be some cavities behind the walls, and she’s trapped in there. It could be that Timmy’s trapped in there, too. I know it all sounds like madness, but they have to be somewhere, even if Timmy’s still stuck in Wednesday and Ada’s stuck in – well, five minutes ago.’

  Katharine looked at her mug of tea, and then she stood up, walked over to the sink, and tipped it down the drain.

  ‘I’ll help you look. We need to find out what’s going on in this house for good and all. And I need to find out where Martin’s disappeared to, just like you need to find Timmy.’

  *

  They searched the house again, room by room, as thoroughly as they had searched it twice already. They looked in the wardrobes and under the beds and tapped on the walls. Rob climbed back up into the attic and Francis went back into the witching room.

  ‘Nothing there?’ Rob asked him.

  ‘Nothing visible. But there’s no question that feeling’s still there. That tension. That frisson. Otherwise – no.’

  They went back down to the drawing room. The fire had burned right down to the grate, so Rob jabbed the glowing ashes with the poker and stacked three fresh logs on top.

  Vicky said, ‘You’re right, Rob, we’ll have to call the police, even if they do think we’ve all gone barmy.’

  She turned to Francis, who was still ruefully massaging his elbow. ‘I know you’re going to try and find out how that witching room works, Francis, but three people have disappeared now and how are we going to explain it? If we don’t tell the police, they’re going to start suspecting that we’ve got something to hide, aren’t they – that we made them disappear. You remember that case of those two young girls who were murdered in Soham, what were their names? And before the police realised it was him who had killed them, that Ian Huntley went out and helped to look for them.’

  ‘I don’t think that the police have a better chance of finding them than we do,’ said Francis. ‘In fact, I don’t think they’ve got a hope in hell, to be honest with you. My bicycle was stolen last month and they never caught the fellow who took it, even though I had him on CCTV. But I’m inclined to agree with you. It would look suspicious if we didn’t report them missing. The difference between us and Ian Huntley is that we didn’t have anything to do with their disappearance, so we don’t have anything to worry about. Hopefully, anyway.’

  21

  They were still talking when there was a loud postman’s knock at the front door.

  ‘Grace and Portia,’ said Rob. ‘I’ll get it.’

  When he opened the door, he found Grace and Portia standing in the porch in their muddy wellingtons, looking exhausted, but standing close behind them was DI Holley, as well as another detective in a raincoat, and two uniformed officers.

  ‘Mr Russell?’ said DI Holley. ‘All right if we come in?’

  ‘What’s wrong? You haven’t found Timmy, have you?’

  ‘Still no sign of him yet, Mr Russell, I’m sorry to say. But we need to ask you a few questions about another matter.’

  ‘Really? What other matter?’

  ‘If we can come inside and you can find us somewhere to talk in private.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Come on in. Are you all right, Grace? You look knackered.’

  Grace was wiping her nose on a crumpled tissue. ‘Oh, God. I don’t know how many hills we’ve climbed up and down. And it’s freezing out there. I’m just about ready to drop.’

  ‘Thanks, anyway. You too, Portia. Thanks. Why don’t you two go into the drawing room and get yourselves warm?’

  ‘We will, yes. Just let us pull these boots off.’

  Rob said, ‘Come into the library, detective inspector. We won’t be disturbed in there.’

  He led the way into the library and DI Holley and the other detective followed him, while the two uniformed officers remained in the hallway.

  ‘This is Detective Constable Cutland, by the way,’ said DI Holley. Rob gave him a nod. He thought he looked more like a local farmhand than a detective. He had jet-black short-cropped hair, bulging eyes and a chin as deeply cleft as a stag’s hoof. He also smelled faintly of stale sweat.

  Rob closed the door and the three of them sat down around the library table.

  ‘Is your brother here?’ asked DI Holley. ‘You might want him to sit in while we talk to you.’

  ‘Martin? No, he’s not here just at the moment. But what’s this all about?’

  ‘I need the answer to one or two questions, Mr Russell, but if you lead me to believe that you’re being evasive or non-cooperative then I may be forced to give you a formal caution.’

  ‘Why? What am I supposed to have done?’

  ‘Can you account for your whereabouts between the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth of last month?’

  ‘The twenty-ninth? That was the day my father was found dead, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. And I’m asking you if you can tell me where you were on that day, as well as the day before it.’

  ‘Where do you think I was? At home, in Hersham. Number fifteen, Larkwood Close. I’m an animator and I work at home. I was finishing off a commission for Lancaster Home Insurance.’

  ‘Have you any way of verifying that?’

  ‘You can check my phone. You can check my PC. You can ask my next-door neighbour, Nigel Pardoe. I met him in the local shop when I went to buy a paper that morning. Simpler still – why not go through to the drawing room and ask my wife?’

  ‘It’s more than likely that we’ll be taking you up on all of those suggestions, Mr Russell. You see, the thing is that we’ve had the preliminary results back from the DNA samples that we took from you and your other family members.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Our forensic examiners found numerous fingerprints on the handle of the hammer that was discovered by our GP dog in the garden here on these premises. Unfortunately they were too smudged to be able to make a positive identification. However they were able to collect a DNA sample, and it turned out that it’s an exact match for your DNA.’

  ‘What? That’s impossible.’

  ‘No question about it. It’s a ninety-eight-point-nine per cent match. And our forensic experts in Exeter have now conclusively established that it was that very hammer that was used to strike Mr Herbert Russell a single blow on the back of his head, resulting in a fa
tal brain haemorrhage.’

  ‘This is insane. I didn’t even know of that hammer’s existence until your police dog found it, and I certainly never touched it. Quite apart from the fact that I was two hundred miles away when my father was killed.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Mr Russell, the preliminary DNA test does appear to show beyond any reasonable doubt that it was you who was the last person to be holding that hammer.’

  ‘Wait a minute… surely my brother and sister have the same DNA? Although I’m not suggesting that either of them killed our father.’

  ‘Your sister wouldn’t have the same DNA – no,’ put in DC Cutland. He may have looked like a farmhand, but the way he spoke was dry and technical, with little licks of his lips and sideways rolls of his bulging eyes in between sentences. ‘Humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes and when you compare the first twenty-two pairs you can’t tell the difference between males and females. But when it comes to the twenty-third pair, the sex chromosomes, males have an X and a Y chromosome, but females have two X chromosomes and no Y. And as far as your brother is concerned – well, we’re still waiting on a final report from the lab, but their initial analysis showed that you and your brother don’t share identical genomes.’

  ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

  ‘In your case, you both had the same mother, apparently, but not the same father.’

  Rob stared at him. Suddenly he was thirteen again, hearing his father shouting at his mother outside his bedroom window. ‘Of course he’s nothing like me! And we both know why that is!’

  DI Holley cocked his head to one side, in that hawklike way of his.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Russell. Did you not know that?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes. Of course I did. It’s just never been tested before. You’ve thrown me, I’m afraid. I never expected—’

  ‘You never expected what?’

  ‘This – this accusation that I killed my father. Of course I didn’t kill him. As I’ve told you, I wasn’t anywhere near here when he was attacked. I never laid a finger on that hammer. And in any case, why would I kill him?’

  ‘There’s this house to be inherited after his demise.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You don’t seriously think I’d murder my own father for this dump? A grade-one listed building like this is more trouble than it’s worth. In any case, his solicitor has told us that it’s not going to be passed directly to any of us – neither to me nor to Martin nor to Grace. It’s going to be held in trust for our son, Timmy.’

  ‘Your son, Timmy, who is sadly still missing.’

  Rob was growing angry, as well as confused. His father might have been accusing his mother that night of conceiving him during an adulterous affair, but he had never heard either of them mention it again. Over the years he had grown to accept that his father must have simply been having one of his rages, which were frequent, and boiling, and usually bizarre. When she was only eleven, he had shouted at Grace for waiting by the gate for the postman, so that she could ‘snog’ him. The postman had been about fifty years old, with hair like a scrubbing brush and no front teeth.

  Yet this DNA test seemed to have proved that Herbert Russell had been right, and that he was his mother’s love child, by another man. He suddenly felt as if he shouldn’t even be sitting in this house, answering questions about a father that he certainly hadn’t killed. A father who wasn’t even his real father. He suddenly felt like a stranger.

  ‘What are you trying to suggest about Timmy? That I murdered him, too, so that I could have the house to myself?’

  ‘Children have been done away with for far lesser reasons than that, Mr Russell, and I speak from experience.’

  ‘That’s an outrageous thing to say to me. Who’s your superintendent? I’m going to make a complaint.’

  DI Holley appeared to be unruffled by this. He rubbed his hands together as if he were Pontius Pilate absolving himself of all legal responsibility.

  ‘As DC Cutland here has told you, we’re still waiting for a confirmatory autosomal test on your DNA, Mr Russell. We expect to receive that later today or tomorrow. Until then I won’t be taking this investigation any further.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You’re not going to arrest me? Not yet, anyhow?’

  ‘No. But I’m requiring you to remain here in this house and not attempt to evade any further questioning.’

  ‘In other words, you’re telling me not to do a runner?’

  ‘If you want to put it that way, Mr Russell. Also, I would recommend if you have a legal representative to contact him or her without delay.’

  Rob sat back with his hands flat on the table and stared at the two detectives in disbelief.

  ‘Do you honestly, seriously think that I drove all the way down here from Hersham one night so that I could hit my father over the head with a rusty old hammer? Or should I say stepfather?’

  DI Holley gave him a one-shouldered shrug. ‘If I’ve learned only one thing from my twenty-year career in the force, it’s that “impossible” is only a word.’

  *

  Rob saw the officers out and then went into the drawing room.

  ‘My God, you look serious,’ said Vicky. ‘What was all that about? You told them about Ada and Martin?’

  Rob shook his head. ‘No. I’m under enough suspicion as it is. I didn’t want them to start thinking that I did for Ada and Martin as well as Dad. They even hinted that I might have killed Timmy so that I could inherit the house.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. But what do you mean, “as well as Dad”? They don’t suspect that you had anything to do with him being murdered, do they? They can’t!’

  ‘They can and they do. They’ve proved that hammer they found in the flower bed was used to kill him, and they’ve found my DNA on the handle.’

  ‘How on earth could they have done that?’ said Grace. ‘They showed it to us in a plastic bag and you never touched it.’

  Francis said, ‘Conceivably you held it years ago when you lived here, and that’s where your DNA came from. But I don’t think that’s likely. DNA that could be a million years old has been found in fossilised insects, but it breaks down quite quickly if it’s exposed to sunlight or water. Even if your DNA was still on it, whoever used it to kill your father might have worn rubber gloves.’

  ‘Well, they seem to be pretty sure about it. They’re doing some extra tests to make certain, but they’ve told me not to leave here until they do.’

  ‘We weren’t going to go, anyway, were we?’ said Vicky. ‘Not until we’ve found Timmy, and Ada. And Martin’s showed up.’

  Rob went to stand in front of the fire. His mind was churning over and over. If only his mother were still alive, and he could ask her outright. Who was it, Mum? Why didn’t you ever tell me? If Herbert Russell wasn’t my father, why did I have to come down here to Allhallows Hall and lose our Timmy? Who’s that whispering? What in the name of the bloody imaginary God that I don’t believe in am I doing here?

  Vicky came up to him and laid her hand softly on his shoulder. She had that concerned, searching look in her eyes, and he knew why. She could tell that he was holding something back.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, even though she hadn’t said a word. ‘But not here. Later.’

  Portia stood up. ‘I think we could all do with some lunch, don’t you? Pizza, anybody? And I don’t know about anybody else, but I could do with a drink. Francis?’

  The longcase clock chimed and Francis looked at his watch. ‘I’d love to, but the best thing I can do is go back home now and see if I can dig up more about witching rooms. I’ll call John Kipling, too, and tell him about Ada. It could be that he has some ideas about what might have happened to her – how she could have disappeared into the wall like that. I don’t think there’s anybody in the country who knows as much about priest’s holes and secret hideaways as he does.’

  22

  Ada opened her eyes. She felt as if she had just woken up from a deep and wine-saturated sleep, and at first she could
n’t focus. She was sitting upright on the floor of a dimly lit room, her back against the wall, and she could hear rain stippling the window close beside her. Her spine ached and her right shoulder felt sore.

  Gradually, the room began to take shape. It was the witching room, with its stained-glass windows and its thick brown horsehair matting. The same room from which she had been dragged through the wall. Yet here she was, back again. And as she turned to look around, she could see that she wasn’t alone.

  Halfway down the room, seven men were sitting or standing. One of them had flowing white shoulder-length hair and a sallow face and he was bony as a clothes horse beneath a black ankle-length cassock. A heavy silver crucifix was hanging on a chain around his neck. The man standing next to him was broad-shouldered and russet-bearded, with a countryman’s rugged features, and he was wearing a long brown doublet and knee breeches, as if he were rehearsing for a seventeenth-century play. The others were all scruffily dressed in grey or blue sweatshirts and tracksuit pants or jeans. Three of them were bald. Two had short tousled hair. One had the sides of his head shaved but his black hair greased up into a shark’s fin.

  One of the bald men realised that Ada had opened her eyes and nudged the man standing next to him. ‘’Ere, look, she’s come to,’ he whispered, in an East End accent.

  They all turned to look at her, and then the bony priest walked across and crouched down next to her. He was handsome in a sad-looking way, with a long nose and large dark eyes like an abandoned mongrel. Ada could smell stale incense on his cassock, and when he leaned close to her and whispered, she could smell his bad breath, too. His lips were crusted with cold sores.

  ‘I hope you forgive us for taking you,’ he told her. He was whispering so softly that she had to read his lips to understand everything he was saying to her. ‘We had no choice, I’m afraid, because we have to protect ourselves.’

  Ada was so frightened that she was finding it difficult to breathe. The priest reached out and laid his hand on hers, and his long, thin fingers were so cold that she felt as if strips of raw fish had been draped across her knuckles.