‘Let’s check the bedrooms again. I was only tapping at the dado last time, to see if it sounded hollow, which it didn’t. But maybe the panelling can be opened up somehow. If there’s a cavity there, there must be some kind of access to it.’
They went back to the first and second bedrooms. John switched on the bedside lamps, as well as taking out his own pocket flashlight. He inspected the dado panelling inch by inch, occasionally tugging at the beading in between the panels to see if it came loose, and trying to slide the dado rails right and left.
‘Nothing that I can see so far,’ he said, as they stepped back out into the corridor. ‘But I have the strongest feeling that there’s a recess behind there.’
‘I don’t see how there can be,’ said Rob. ‘Those are outside walls.’
‘But there’s a seven-foot discrepancy between the length of the landing and the length of all three bedrooms.’
‘It could be just an optical illusion. I mean, the whole house is wonky. They didn’t build them with plans in those days.’
‘A few inches out of line, yes, I can go along with that. But seven feet?’
Rob could only shrug in resignation. He was at a loss to explain how the landing could be so much longer than the bedrooms beside it, but the bedrooms had windows in them, so there was no possibility that there was any kind of priest’s hole behind their end walls.
John went back into the third bedroom. Again, he went all the way around the dado, tapping and tugging and sliding.
‘This is driving me insane,’ he said, when he had finished.
Vicky had been looking around, too. She lifted the lid of the window seat, even though she knew that Rob and Martin had already looked inside. She leaned over and picked up some of the rolled-up bundles of legal documents. Underneath them she found a white pennant with a red cross on it, frail with age, like the pennant carried by Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God. When she lifted that up, she uncovered even more rolled-up documents, but she could also see something metallic glinting right at the bottom of the chest. She cleared aside more rolls of paper and saw that it was a mottled brass crucifix, a little less than a foot long, with an irritated-looking Jesus nailed onto it.
‘Anything interesting?’ asked Rob, peering over her shoulder.
‘No… just a lot of old deeds and wills by the look of it. And this.’
She tried to pick up the crucifix, but the foot of the cross was hinged to the floor, and she could only swing it upright. It swung up quite easily, as if it had been oiled.
‘This is peculiar, Rob – look,’ said Vicky. She folded the crucifix back down flat, and then swung it up again so that he could see.
‘Wow. I wonder why on earth it’s stuck to the floor like that.’
He was interrupted by a sharp scraping sound, followed by a series of plaintive creaks. He turned around to see that the three central panels of the dado at the end of the bedroom were slowly opening up, like the lower half of a stable door. Behind them was another room, dimly illuminated with reddish light.
John had been texting on his phone, but he stopped, too, with his finger poised over the keys.
‘Well, bugger me,’ he said. ‘That Nicholas Owen. Even more cleverer than I thought he was.’
He dropped his phone back into his pocket and went over to the window seat.
‘Do you know what? This crucifix isn’t a crucifix at all. It’s a handle. It’s probably attached to a lever, and when you lift it up, it must activate some arrangement of strings and pulleys and weights under the floorboards, and the dado opens up. There’s a similar set-up at one of the priest holes in Tavistock – a warming pan hanging on the kitchen wall. You tilt the warming-pan handle to one side and a door opens up in the brickwork beside it. It’s cunning, but not quite as cunning as this.’
‘You mean to say this crucifix has been lying here for four hundred years and nobody has found out what it’s for?’
‘The likelihood is that the Wilmingtons knew exactly what it was for. But Allhallows Hall was passed down from one generation of Wilmingtons to the next. Your father was the first to own it who wasn’t a Wilmington.’
Vicky took hold of Rob’s hand and squeezed it tight. ‘Do you think there’s anybody in there? You don’t think that—’ She didn’t say, ‘Timmy’s in there, unconscious or dead?’
‘One way to find out,’ said John. He went to the end of the room and crouched down by the opening in the dado. ‘Anybody in there?’ he called out. Then, even louder, ‘Is there anybody in there because if there is you’d best be coming on out as quick as you like!’
He waited, but there was no answer. He looked back at Rob and Vicky, and then, with his head down and his knees bent, he shuffled inside. When he stood up straight, they could see him only from the waist down.
‘Everything okay?’ Rob asked him.
‘Gobsmacking. That’s all I can say. You both need to come in here and see this. You won’t believe your eyes.’
14
Rob and Vicky crouched down to enter the room and then stood up. The room had roughly plastered walls and the floorboards were covered in coarse brown horsehair matting that felt as if it were two or three inches deep. The air was stale, but the faint hint of cinnamon and oranges was slightly more distinct, so that even Rob could smell it.
At the far end of the room lay a heap of dirty wool blankets, as if several people had been sleeping there, but the room was empty. There was no sign of Timmy, and no sign of whoever or whatever
