Now that Rob had been ordered by DI Holley to stay in the house, they had to give up on that plan. Grace and Portia made some sandwiches with Sharpham Rustic cheese and they all sat around the fire, drinking Herbert Russell’s Jail Ale out of the bottles and saying very little.
Katharine was still feeling hungover and tired, so she took herself upstairs to bed. There had still been no word from Martin, and they agreed that if they hadn’t heard from him by the time it started to grow dark, they would report him missing.
Rob sat on Herbert’s throne, prodding at his phone to see if he had any messages and to catch up on the latest news on the Devon Live website. A teenage girl had been found naked and dead in the River Tavy, under Harford Bridge. It was not yet known if she had been sexually assaulted, but a pentagram had been carved into her back with a knife.
Vicky was sitting on the floor next to him. She poked at the fire and then she looked up at him and said, ‘Perhaps we should take another look in the witching room. I still can’t believe how Ada disappeared into the wall like that.’
‘You think she might have come back? If she has, she would have shouted out to us, wouldn’t she?’
‘I don’t know. If she went through the wall one way, maybe it’s possible that she’s been able to come back through it the other way. But maybe after doing that she’s too weak to shout out.’
‘Ten out of ten for imagination, darling.’
‘Are you joking? After those ghostly men we saw, pulling Ada through the wall, and all that whispering, and both of us being pushed and kicked by people we couldn’t even see? For God’s sake, Rob, who needs to have an imagination?’
‘All right. You win. Let’s go and look. But I don’t think we’re going to find that it’s any different.’
Grace said, ‘I’ll come with you. Portia?’
Portia was sitting on the sofa with her feet up, playing a game on her phone.
‘No, thanks. You go. I’m trying to de-spook myself.’
They climbed the stairs and walked along the corridor to the end bedroom. Grace said, ‘This witching room… there’s no danger that we could be pulled into the wall, is there?’
‘We’re only going to take a quick look, just to make sure that Ada hasn’t managed to come back,’ Rob told her. ‘Those men we saw when she threw that dust all over them… I think they grabbed her because she upset them. They were only whispering, but they sounded furious, didn’t they?’
He lifted the lid of the window seat, reached down inside and pulled up the crucifix. For some reason it was stiffer than it had been before, and the dado opened more slowly, with an anguished creak that sounded like a grieving grandmother, and a dry clanking of cogs.
They bent down and went inside. The room appeared to be empty. There was no sign of Ada, nor anybody else who was visible.
Grace inhaled and said, ‘Yes… you’re right… it’s Old Spice, isn’t it? That’s so creepy! I can really smell it. Ooh. Can we go now?’
‘Wait a second,’ said Vicky. ‘What’s happened to those blankets? They were all piled up before, weren’t they? Now they’re all folded back.’
‘Yes, but Ada was kicking them about like mad when she was trying to stop herself from being pulled through the wall.’
‘I know. But after she disappeared they were still lying in a heap. It was almost like there was somebody hiding underneath them.’
‘John looked. There wasn’t.’
‘Can we go now?’ Grace repeated. ‘I’m sure I felt somebody breathing against the back of my neck.’
‘Hold on,’ said Rob. ‘I’ll take another look.’ He went down to the end of the room, picked up the blankets one after the other and shook them. They were heavy and damp and dirty and woven out of coarse unwashed wool. Gingerly, he lifted up the corner of one of the blankets and held it under his nose. It had the lard-like reek of sheep’s grease but also the musky odour of stale human sweat.
Grace, by now, had already crouched down so that she could back out into the bedroom.
‘Go on, Gracey,’ said Rob. ‘But I’m taking one of these blankets with me. It smells like somebody’s been sleeping in them. I’ll ask Sergeant Billings if he can get one of his police dogs to sniff it.’
‘What good will that do?’
‘I’m not sure. But maybe they can identify whose scent it is, and where in the house we can find them, even if they are invisible.’
*
Katharine had drawn the curtains so that the master bedroom was dark, taken off her skirt and climbed under the heavy embroidered quilt. She thought she could still faintly smell cheesy vomit on the pillows, but she had changed the sheets and the pillowcases and she guessed that it was just her guilty imagination.
She had tried to appear nonchalant about Martin’s disappearance in front of the others, even cynical. There were many times during the course of their marriage when it had taken only the slightest of provocations for him to lose his temper and storm off for hours or even days. But she had learned that he had inherited these bursts of rage from his father, both genetically and from the way that Herbert had brought him up. He may have appeared to be domineering and full of himself, but she had come to realise that his anger was set off by frustration and a lack of belief in his own self-worth, and an irrational feeling that everybody was demeaning him behind his back.
She knew that he loved her, and even more than that, how much he depended on her. He would never have been such a success in the City
