The Secret of Crickley Hall (27 page)

Eve closed the Punishment Book and put it back on the table. Gabe slipped a hand round her waist, aware of her distress.

'So, they were all badly treated,' she said grimly, 'but little Stefan suffered most of all just because of his race.'

Percy nodded, then picked up the photograph that had been lying on the table in front of him. He held it out to Eve. 'You only had to see Cribben an' his sister to know they was wicked. This were took afore Nancy left Crickley Hall. You can see fer yourself how unhappy the orphans was.'

Eve was almost reluctant to take the photograph; she already had enough grief of her own without looking for more. Her hand trembled slightly as she examined the old creased black-and-white picture, and she realized her heart was racing. It had been a traumatic and disappointing morning, and now this.

Percy came round the table to stand beside her so that he, too, could look at the photograph. Gabe dropped his hand from Eve's waist, although he remained close to her. He had seen the photograph earlier, but he was still drawn towards its images.

It was an eight-by-six print, probably taken with an old-fashioned glass-plate camera, the negative as large as the picture itself, and it showed two rows of children, the taller ones at the back, with two adults sitting on chairs in the centre of the front row. The orphans and their guardians were outside on the lawn, Crickley Hall's big front door plainly visible behind them. The images were extremely sharp and the contrast stark, the black areas quite dense.

Eve suppressed a shudder when she gazed at Augustus Cribben and his sister Magda.

The man could have been anywhere between forty and sixty years of age. His hair, which was bushy on top, but apparently razor-shaved at the sides, was completely white, while his bushy eyebrows were dark. He sat ramrod-straight on his chair, a lean man with high cheekbones that emphasized hollow cheeks. Large ears, accentuated by his cropped hair, stood at right-angles from a severe face. His nose was prominent above a grim slash of a mouth. Beneath those bushy eyebrows were deep-set black eyes that stared stonily at the camera. There was no humour in that harsh, sober face and no softness, and perhaps because of what she already knew of the guardian, there appeared to be no pity.

Cribben wore a tight-fitting tweed suit, one button done up at the chest so that the sides of the jacket fell away to reveal the shiny buckle of a thick leather belt. His shoulders were narrow and the hands that rested over his knees were big-knuckled, arthritic-looking. The tidy knot of his plain tie did not quite reach the stud of the high, white, detachable collar of his striped shirt; the jaw above the collar was strong and square, although the little that could be seen of his neck was thin and scrawny.

Next to this slight yet formidable figure sat a hard-faced woman, who presumably was Cribben's sister, Magda. There was a resemblance between them, for the eyes were black and deep-set, and seemed to regard the camera with suspicion. Like her brother's, Magda's nose was prominent, as was her chin, and her lips were thin and severe. High cheekbones and rigidity of posture completed the similarity.

Her matt black hair was parted in the middle and scraped back over her ears, presumably into a bun at the back of her neck. She wore a long black dress that was gathered at the waist, and hemmed just above black lace-up ankle boots.

Eve allowed her eyes to roam away from Augustus Cribben and his sister, both of whom seemed to dominate the assemblage, and they fell upon the girl—the young
woman
—at the end of the back row.

'Is this the teacher you told me about?' she asked Percy, her thumb indicating. 'You called her Nancy…'

'Aye, that's Nancy Linnet, may her poor soul rest in peace.'

'You think she
is
dead?'

'I know she is.'

Eve looked at the girl whose shiny hair fell in tumbling locks round a sweet childlike face. Over her shoulders she wore a shawl, the ends of which covered her forearms, and Eve remembered Percy telling her that the teacher, his sweetheart, had a withered arm: was Nancy deliberately covering up the deformity? The teacher's eyes were large and pale and, although she wasn't smiling, there was no meanness in them—but no joy either.

In fact, no one in the photograph was smiling. All the children were like little waifs, solemn before the camera, no spirit to their expressions or their stance. But wait—there was one boy with not a smile but a grin on his long face that revealed a missing front tooth. He stood at the back near the middle of the line and was taller than all the other children, as tall as Nancy Linnet.

Eve pointed as she angled the photograph towards the old gardener. 'Is this the boy called…' She tried to recall the name Percy had mentioned.

'Maurice Stafford,' Percy replied. 'Yers, he could afford to smile, that boy.'

'He's the only one who looks happy,' observed Gabe, leaning over Eve's shoulder.

Percy nodded. 'His is the only name yer won't find in that Punishment Book. He were old for his age, he were, and the only one that Nancy never liked, said he were a sneak and a bully. Maurice were treated different from the others. I don't say he had it easy, but fer some reason Cribben an' his sister favoured him.'

'Which one is the Jewish boy Stefan?' Eve asked, although she was sure she had already spotted him.

Percy confirmed her choice. 'Right there in the front row, the smallest of 'em all. He's standin' in front of the tall girl, Susan Trainer, who looked out for the boy, sorta took him under her wing, like. See, she's got her hand on his shoulder.'

Stefan Rosenbaum wore baggy short trousers that covered his knees, his socks round his ankles. He was a thin child and his jacket, which was done up at the front with three buttons, was at least two sizes too big for him. His thick dark hair hung low over his brow and his eyes were wonderfully deep but melancholy. He had an elfin look. Like the other orphans, his face was solemn, yet there was a beauty about him that reminded Eve of her lost son, Cameron. Even though this boy was dark in looks where Cam was fair—yellow hair, bright blue eyes—they both possessed the same kind of innocence. As renewed despair struck her, she quickly gave the photograph back to Percy. She turned towards Gabe who, although taken aback, held her gently.

To Percy, he said: 'Those two kids—what was it, Maurice…?'

'Stafford,' the aged gardener filled in for him.

'Right. Maurice Stafford. I don't remember seeing his name, nor Stefan Rosenbaum's, among the headstones down at the cemetery.'

'No, yer wouldn't. It's 'cause they was the two whose bodies was never found. It's reckoned they were swept out to sea by the river that runs underneath Crickley Hall. The Low River.' Percy shook his head gravely. 'They jus' disappeared,' he said. 'The sea never gave 'em up.'

32: LILI PEEL

Lili brought the glass to her lips and swallowed the wine rather than sipped. Its fruity sweetness failed to elevate her mood.

The room in which she sat was lit by only a single corner lamp, so that shadows filled the other corners. Her living quarters were above the crafts shop: three main rooms, one of them a bedroom, another, the smallest, used as a stockroom for goods not yet displayed in the shop downstairs; the third was her living/dining room where she relaxed or worked on delicate stone, shell or crystal jewellery and trinkets, using the dining table as a workbench. Both the kitchen and bathroom were tiny, the latter accommodating a small sink, toilet and shower basin (there was no room for a bath). The walls throughout were painted in soft pastel shades, and oddly, given Lili's profession, there were no pictures adorning them, nor ornaments or statuary on shelves to take away from the plainness of it all.

Listlessly, she rested the stem of the wine glass on the arm of the brown leather chair she occupied and closed her eyes for a moment.

Why did this woman have to come to her? she silently asked herself with a bitter kind of anger.

Lili had curbed her psychic abilities eighteen months ago, frightened by her own powers and their consequences. Some things were best left well alone; some things could bite back. How strange that the woman, this Eve Caleigh, should come from the same house that Lili had stopped to observe on her way out of Hollow Bay two years ago. Crickley Hall. People in these parts maintained it was haunted, the woman in the village shop had confided. The two women who cleaned and dusted the place every month would only work the rooms together; neither one was willing to be alone in any part of the house. They claimed that Crickley Hall had an 'atmosphere', a creepy mood to it that made a person feel jittery. That was why no tenants had ever stayed long in it over the years. The house didn't welcome people.

At the time, Lili had mentally rolled her eyes. It seemed to her that every community postulated its own haunted house and it was usually for no other reason than that something tragic or traumatic had once occurred within its walls (often a cruel murder or a dramatic suicide) and now a ghost roamed its corridors. In truth, Lili did believe in ghosts because of her own experiences with the supernatural, but she also knew that many people exaggerated or embellished such phenomena for the vicarious thrill that came with the telling.

Nonetheless, Lili had not just noticed Crickley Hall when she left the harbour village, as she had told Eve Caleigh. No, she had parked her car and studied the house across the bridge for several minutes. She had sensed its chill.

It was not merely the ugliness of the building itself that weighed upon her, but it was because there seemed to be—or at least, she sensed—something bad at its very core. The unease remained with her for some time afterwards.

That was one of the more unpleasant sides of being psychic: the inability to prevent bad vibes from penetrating one's own psyche. It was an affliction she had borne since childhood.

Lili first became aware of her sixth sense when she was seven years old, although there may well have been earlier psychic occurrences that she regarded as perfectly natural when she was even younger. She had moved with her family into a large Victorian house in Reigate, Surrey, and her bedroom had been at the very top of the three-floor building. Soon after moving in, the spirit of a girl, no more than nine or ten years old in appearance, had manifested itself as Lili played with her dolls in her bedroom. Although so young—or perhaps
because
she was so young—Lili had immediately, and without any fear, accepted that the girl, who wore old-fashioned clothing, was neither of Lili's own world, nor of her own time. It was all perfectly reasonable to her, even though she could not recall any similar event in her past. Being an only child, she welcomed this new playmate into her home. The stranger never touched anything of Lili's, but would sit attentively on her heels while Lili showed and named every one of her dolls and cuddly fur animals and related little stories about them. Sometimes Lili sang her ethereal friend a short song and then the other girl would sing one of her own. Some of these Lili had heard before, for many nursery rhymes are timeless.

The girl informed Lili that she was called Agnes and that she had died in this same room from something they called diphtheria a long time ago, and ever since she'd been dead, she hadn't known where she was supposed to go. Her death had been sudden after only four days of the illness and she had risen from her proper body to see her mother wailing on her knees beside the bed as her father stood stiffly by with just one teardrop running down his cheek. Agnes had been confused and frightened for a long while afterwards and she had not dared to leave the house for fear of becoming lost. She had gradually come to accept her condition and, although no longer afraid, she still preferred to keep within the walls of the only home she had ever known.

Eventually, her parents went away and other families lived there for long intervals at a time. But none had ever noticed her, even though she had done her best to make them aware. Lili was the only person Agnes had been able to talk to and be seen by, and she was pleased finally to have a companion.

Lili's parents had often heard her talking to an invisible friend in her room and they questioned their daughter about it. In her innocence, Lili had told the truth. Her mother and father, however, assumed the girl wearing old-fashioned clothing was inside Lili's own head, a figment of her lively imagination, and had left it at that, believing she would soon grow out of it. After all, lots of little children had imaginary friends, didn't they?

For at least six weeks the ghost of the Victorian girl continued to appear to Lili, always when she was by herself and in the same upstairs room. They played and giggled together, enjoying each other's company, although Lili sometimes became frustrated because Agnes could never catch a ball, or use a skipping rope, or pick up a toy. Apart from that, they got along fine.

It was only when Lili told her spectral friend about a place called Heaven that there came about a subtle change in Agnes. Lili's daddy had told her this was where the angels lived and where good people who had died went to. Agnes's image began to falter; she was not so clearly defined any more. Still they continued to play together, until one day, soon after she had learned about Heaven, Agnes declared she had two important questions to ask Lili: 'Shouldn't I be in Heaven too? Am I a bad person?'

Lili had readily assured Agnes that she was a
good
person, otherwise Lili wouldn't have liked her. And yes, probably she should go up to Heaven, although Lili would miss her terribly.

The Victorian girl came back to Lili only once more after that and Lili could barely see her, so transparent had Agnes become. She told Lili that she kept hearing someone calling her and that she could feel herself slipping away. She implored Lili not to be sorrowful if she left because Agnes would always remember her. She said she had the same sort of feeling when Father used to tell her that they were all going on a journey; she felt happy because she knew they would travel to somewhere that was different and exciting, but sorry because she always hated leaving her lovely home. So she felt happy and sad at the same time. But she wasn't afraid any more, not since Lili had told her about Heaven.