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. When 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.’
Katharine said nothing to that, but went on brushing her hair, although harder this time, as if it had done something to annoy her. John went around the bedroom, knocking at the dado panels. The tester bed was still unmade, so he lifted the pillows away and took a close look at the carved wooden bedhead, which was elaborately decorated with fruit and flowers. He tried sliding it from side to side, and then tugging at it, to see if he could dislodge it. If it could be removed, it would certainly have opened up a wide enough space for a priest to squeeze himself through.
He tugged at it again and again, but eventually he put back the pillows and shook his head. ‘Solid elm. Only a bedhead. Pity. Would have been quite ingenious, wouldn’t it?’
He paced the length of the bedroom to measure it. ‘Thirteen feet, the same as the room next door. There’s no priest hole in here, either.’ Turning to Katharine, he said, ‘Thank you… sorry if we disturbed you.’
Katharine shrugged. ‘Personally, I think you’re wasting your time searching the house. Timmy’s probably miles away by now.’
‘Oh, we’re still combing the moors. And if we haven’t found him by lunchtime we’ll have at least two dozen more volunteers out this afternoon, before it starts getting dimpsey.’
Katharine said nothing, but put down her hairbrush and leaned forward to stare at her reflection in close-up.
When John had finished checking all the bedrooms, he took a look in the bathroom. When Allhallows Hall was built, long before hot running water and flushing toilets, this would have simply been another bedroom, so it was
