The Secret of Crickley Hall

circle. But Mr Pyke suggested that watching the top spinning—listening to the humming noise it made as it spun fast, seeing the colours turn to white—might have caused me to hallucinate.'

'Who's Mr Pyke?' Lili asked, curious.

'He came yesterday. He calls himself a ghost-hunter, a psychic investigator, and he convinced Gabe he could prove the house wasn't haunted. He's here now, upstairs in the old dormitory arranging his equipment. Loren is with him.'

Eve realized that Pyke and her daughter had been gone a long time. Mr Pyke may have been charming, but what did they know about him? She began to grow anxious.

The psychic took the toy from Eve and inspected it.

'Maybe the children did play with it before it was taken away and put in the storeroom.' Lili lightly ran her fingers over the top's brightly coloured surface. 'I can feel a connection with them.'

'And here's a photograph Gabe found. It was hidden behind a false wall in a cupboard upstairs.' Eve proffered the old black-and-white picture.

Lili placed the spinning top on the floor at her feet and accepted the photograph. She felt her heart leap when she held it in her hands, for at last she could see the children who had come to Crickley Hall as evacuees, she could know what they looked like.

She examined each face in turn, beginning with the back row, frowning once, then moving on. She came to a pretty young woman whom Lili assumed was one of the teachers; there was something infinitely sad in her countenance.

In the middle of the front row of smaller children and seated on chairs were a man and woman of similar features to each other. They both looked hard, mean, and they seemed to regard the camera with hostile suspicion. A disturbing flutter ran through Lili and she quickly looked away.

But her eyes returned to the one child—although he looked more than a child and was certainly older than the others—that she had frowned at before. The boy was grinning, the only person in the photograph to do so, but his eyes did not match the grin. They were sly, mad eyes. Lili sensed it.

She swayed unsteadily and Eve thought the psychic was about to faint again. But Lili caught herself.

Pointing at the grinning boy in the photograph, she said: 'D'you know anything about him?'

'As a matter of fact, I do,' Eve replied. 'The gardener here has worked for different owners of Crickley Hall for ever, it seems. Percy was even here when the evacuees came down from London to stay. He told us about that particular boy and it was nothing good. The other children didn't like him, but apparently he was a favourite of the Cribbens. I think his name was Maurice. Maurice something-or-other. Stannard? No, it was Stafford. Maurice Stafford.'

'I sense bad things about him.' Lili frowned again and this time it was more deeply, more concentrated. 'There's something wrong with him. I think he was very wicked.'

'He was just a boy,' Eve said. 'He was too young to be wicked.'

'This one was born that way. It wasn't something he learned. There's some kind of connection between him and the two adults at the front. You called them the Cribbens—husband and wife?'

'Brother and sister.'

'Yes, the likeness is obvious. This boy, Maurice Stafford, he learned evil from those two. I can feel it so strongly. Oh God—' the photograph shook in the psychic's hands—'it's becoming clearer. He did the children great harm.'

She closed her eyes.

'They're trying to tell me, the children are trying to speak to me. They're here. Eve, the children are still in this house. They've never left it.'

Her eyes opened.

'Can't you sense them?' she asked Eve.

And Eve could sense something. No, she could hear something. A susurration of whispers. Growing in volume, filling the corners of the hall. She gasped when the colourful top on the floor began to turn slowly.

The sounds were of young voices, all whispering words she could not understand because one overlaid the other, all mixed together so that they were incoherent. But she knew they were frightened voices. The clamour rose, but still only in whispers, and the top spun faster. Eve looked at Lili, confused and mystified.

'They're trying so hard,' said Lili as she gazed in wonder around the vast room. 'But there's something preventing them.' She gave a shiver. 'There's another entity here, but it won't come forward. Not yet.'

The psychic stared down at the spinning top whose colours were beginning to blend, to become murky, and then to become a white blur. A humming sound came from it that was neither musical nor harsh, but which ascended to a steady thrum. And the whisperings now sounded like the soft flurry of distant birds on the wing.

But then a voice, a real voice, a man's voice, interrupted everything, even though it was just a murmuring coming from the landing above.

The spinning top began to wobble as it slowed down and its humming grew deeper in tone. Colours appeared on its tin surface once again and the dancing figures started to become clearer. Suddenly, the toy lurched, faltered, then fell onto its side to roll away in an arc, coming to a stop behind Eve. The whisperings ceased.

Lili inclined her head, searching for the source of the new voices. Loren came into view from a doorway along the landing, followed by a tall man, and it was his voice they could hear. The girl kept looking round at the man, as if taking in every word he said.

The couple paused and through the balcony's railings, Lili saw Loren pull open a cupboard door. The man's voice was strong and clear enough to be understood from below.

'We'll come back to it after I've had a word with your mother about the attic. I shouldn't like anything to be disturbed up there now I've set up.'

'That's Gordon Pyke,' Eve told Lili. 'He's the investigator.' Then, as if she had only just noticed: 'Lili, what happened to those sounds? The whisperings.'

The psychic continued to look up at the two people on the landing, who were now making their way to the stairs.

'Lili?''

The psychic dropped her eyes to find Eve staring at her. 'They've gone. Something disturbed them. I think they were frightened away.'

'It was the children, wasn't it? The orphans who drowned in this place all those years ago.'

'Yes. Yes, I believe—I'm sure—it was.'

Pyke and Loren were descending the stairs and Lili saw that the man, who had a small goatee beard, was very tall. Something—an intuition—seemed to click in her mind as she watched him, but the thought hadn't yet made itself apparent. Pyke had left something at the top of the stairs; it was a large suitcase.

Leaving the stairs, the so-called 'ghost-hunter' walked round the puddles with Loren. 'You appear to have been flooded,' he remarked needlessly as he looked around the hall. He craned his neck to peer up at the ceiling. 'Don't worry, I'll find its root cause and then we'll be able to stop it happening again.'

Something about the man was bothering Lili as he and Loren came towards them. As Pyke approached, she gazed intently into his eyes.

The sensing hit her like a physical blow, almost taking her breath away.

Oh my God! she thought. Then, urgently and aloud: 'It's him, Eve! He was the boy in the photograph. The one you called Maurice Stafford.'

68: OBSTRUCTION

Gabe brought the Range Rover to a sliding halt, the bonnet nodding at the leafy fallen tree one foot away.

Hell! This can't be happening!

Travelling too fast, he had almost smashed into the obstacle that sprawled across the country lane, seeing it only just in time to slam on the brakes. He thanked the Lord for quick reactions and EBA—Emergency Brake Assist. Electronic traction control had helped also, preventing the vehicle from going into a skid.

The Range Rover's full-beam headlights lit up the blockage and Gabe quickly surveyed it. Lightning