As best she could, Amanda took her mind back to time just before her scuffle with Mary. She remembered a cry and the sound of something breaking. How could she have forgotten? A question suggested itself to Amanda that perhaps she was mistaken, perhaps her memories of the night of Peter’s discovery and of the night before had merged with one another, creating the false impression in her recall of the events that something had been broken on both occasions. But she rejected the doubt, she was certain that she had heard a smashing sound just before she had raced through the kitchen. Once again, she looked down into the hidden room and found the flagstone floor to be spotless. She also inspected the piece of hardboard that Mary had placed in front of the small pane of glass that had been broken on the evening before the woman had to leave her home. There was only one hole.
All of this suggested that it seemed very unlikely that Peter had used something to attempt to break this window even further, returned the hardboard to its spot in front of the hole in the glass, then hidden away once more in his secret chamber. Indeed, how could he have replaced the floor covering over the trap door even if he had managed to perform all his other implausible tasks?
Though very reluctant to do so, Amanda knew she had to return out into the rain. So as to save herself from having to find something else new to wear, before she exited through the kitchen door, she slipped back into her wet clothing. Once outside, to her relief, Amanda quickly discovered what she expected to find. Beneath the broken window, lying on the patchy lawn that came up to the house were the broken remains of a terra cotta pot. Though there was no way for Amanda to prove for certain that the pot had not been broken before she had even first visited the house, combined with the lack of any broken material within the house, it was enough evidence to fuel her suspicions that there had been a fourth person at the house that night. Furthermore, if her suspicions were right, this person had not only been in the garden on the night before she had discovered Peter, he had also acted in such a way to help Amanda uncover Mary’s secret.
When she was back in the house and in her dry borrowed clothing, Amanda settled herself down on one of the living room’s sofas to ponder over why neither Mary nor Peter had made more of a protest over the fact that they had seemingly been given away. From what she had heard from the mutterings that had circulated around the school after the two had been sentenced, many believed that Mary held the opinion that Peter had given himself away. Furthermore, there were whispers that the two were not talking because of what Mary thought Peter had done. While it was difficult to take such gossip as evidence for what Mary may have truly felt, it was certainly clear to most of those gathered at the sentencing that the man had been glad to have been freed from his hole in Balfour Lane, so perhaps even in Mary’s eyes, he had motive. There was even the possibility that the two had not talked to each other about the issue, for fear of what they might find out, leading them to adopt the typical relationship defence of silence over the matter. Nevertheless, Amanda still did not think this explained why the two had not even mentioned the possibility of being given away to her, or to each other, on the journey to the school after they had been caught. All she could come up with was the idea that the two might just have been too exhausted and unconcerned with the details of how they had ended up at the school. The world they had existed in for so many decades - whether they held it dear or desired its end - had gone. How their life in Balfour Lane had come to be destroyed would, therefore, have been of minor significance: what was important was that this life was no more and that they were headed for the tunnels.
The only thing that Amanda was fairly certain of was that she would most likely not find out the truth from either Peter or Mary. Ever since she had arrived at the school with the couple, Mary had maintained a distance from Amanda, either in keeping herself as far from her as she could or by adopting a cold silence whenever she could not avoid being in the younger woman’s company. Furthermore, since being freed from his home, Peter seemed happy to just follow the lead of Mary, and while he did respond to Amanda on the very few occasions when she was able to address him, he just deflected any questions she asked with simple apologies. Soon enough, the two would
