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 couldn’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
