‘Not yet, but we’ll have to. And about my brother, Martin, too, if he doesn’t show up. Listen – you know those blankets that were lying on the floor in the “witching room” or whatever you want to call it. It looked as if somebody had disturbed them, so I’ve brought one down. I was going to ask Sergeant Billings to send a police dog up here to see if it could pick up a scent from it, but since you’ve got one of your search dogs here already – maybe he could have a sniff.’
‘Well, yes. Sure. Why not?’
John was about to call to his companions in the courtyard when Katharine appeared halfway down the stairs. Her blonde hair was sticking up as if it had been lifted by static electricity and her face was as pale as oatmeal.
‘Katharine! What’s wrong?’ asked Vicky, going over to the foot of the stairs. ‘You haven’t been sick again, have you?’
Katharine came slowly down the last remaining stairs. ‘It’s Martin. He came into the bedroom and he whispered to me, but he wasn’t there.’
‘What? Come and sit down. I’m sorry, but you look terrible.’
They went into the drawing room. Grace and Portia stood up so that Katharine could sit down on the sofa. She was shaking uncontrollably and Vicky sat beside her and took hold of her hands.
‘My God, Katharine, you’re freezing! Rob – would you fetch her coat for her?’
Katharine looked at her in desperation. ‘I was nearly asleep and then I felt him touch me. He said that he was trapped in that priest’s hole and he didn’t know how to get out. He pleaded with me to help him. I don’t understand how he could have been trapped in that priest’s hole but yet he was whispering to me in the bedroom at the same time. I thought for a moment that I must be having a bad dream or going mad. But Vicky, I felt him, and I heard him, I swear it. I heard him as clear as anything! And then I heard more of them whispering outside the door, and it sounded as if they were looking for him.’
Rob came back in with Katharine’s overcoat and draped it around her shoulders. She clutched it tightly around her, still shaking as if she had Parkinson’s.
Vicky looked up to Rob. ‘Martin’s still here in the house, Rob. I know it’s crazy, but he must be. And if he’s still here, what are the chances that Timmy’s still here, too, and Ada?’
John said, ‘After what Francis was telling me, I believe now that there’s a very good chance of that. And I’m not saying that because I believe in half the stories that folks around here tell about hobgoblins and piskies and ghosts and Old Dewer. I’m saying that because the DSR have never conducted a search as thorough and as wide-ranging as the one we’ve been carrying out for your Timmy and never found not the slightest trace at all. We always find something – a footprint, or a fragment of wool that’s got snagged on a brimmel. But this time, nothing at all. Even supposing somebody drove right past the front of the house here and collected him, the dogs didn’t pick up even the faintest scent going out from here to the road.’
‘But – Jesus – we couldn’t have gone through the house more thoroughly if we’d demolished it stone by stone,’ said Rob. ‘What I can’t work out is how these people can be here and yet not here. Francis said they might be nothing but energy. All right, supposing they are, how do we find them and how do we get them back to reality? That’s if it’s even possible to get them back.’
John raised both eyebrows. ‘Right now, your guess is as good as mine. And Francis didn’t seem to have too much of a clue either. But there are so many stories about Nicholas Owen and the priest’s holes he built. There are still at least a dozen of them that have been written about in the histories of the various houses where he fitted them, but which nobody has ever been able to find.
‘What I’m asking myself now is: why can nobody find them? Is it because his carpentry was so clever, or did he discover some way of installing them in what you might call a different dimension? You know, like a sort of a parallel universe. That’s what Francis was trying to explain to me, more or less, although he was pretty sure that the priest’s hole in this house might have been changed into a witching room later on, by somebody else.’
‘Yes, he told us that Nicholas Owen would never have used a crucifix,’ said Rob. ‘He reckoned that whoever did it mixed some kind of strange chemicals into the plaster, so that if somebody went into the room and they said this special incantation, that person would get stuck in time for ever. It sounds bonkers, doesn’t it? I mean, it sounds utterly and completely bonkers. If Timmy and Ada and Martin weren’t missing and if Vicky and me hadn’t felt and heard those whispering people for ourselves, I think we’d turn ourselves in to the local mental hospital and beg to be sectioned. Katharine, too, after what she’s just been through.’
‘Let’s make a start, anyway,’ said John. ‘I’ll have Bazza bring his dog in, and he can have a good snuffle at that blanket.’
He went back to the front door and Rob followed him. The volunteers out in the courtyard were flicking their cigarette ends away and they looked as if they were getting ready to leave.
John called out, ‘Bazza? Do you want fetch Pluto into the house here for a moment?’
‘Okay – but I warn you, John, his paws are proper gacky!’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Rob. ‘This is a lot more important than a few muddy footprints.’
‘So
