‘Been here before, methinks.’
‘Aye…but they’re open and honest enough, you can walk up to the gate and ask to be shown round. We’re satisfied that they’ve nothing to hide, they’re just a bit soft in the head and are wasting valuable years, if you ask me.’
‘Well, I’ll go and have a chat with them. If I don’t come back, send a search party for me.’
‘Will do, sir.’ The sergeant smiled.
Yellich drove out of Malton into steadily closing countryside, until he came to a narrow lane which had once, many years earlier, been metalled, now it was cratered after many years of ice and rain action. He drove gingerly, trying, not always successfully, to avoid the potholes. The foliage on either side was close, overwhelmingly so. He came to two large stone gateposts with wrought-iron gates which were held shut with a heavy padlock and chain. A painted sign on the gate showed a robed, Christ-like figure with outstretched palms against a celestial background, standing above the planet earth, with the Americas dead central to the planet as it was depicted. A brass bell, similar to a ship’s bell, was fastened to the gate. Yellich got out of his car and rang the bell loudly, causing the birds in the nearby trees and bushes to take to flight. There was no response, and calm and tranquillity, birdsong and insect chirruping returned.
Yellich waited for a minute, perhaps, he thought, nearer two, then he rang the bell again, and again birds in the nearby greenery took to flight.
Still no response.
Then a robed figure, a male, approached the gate from within the grounds. He wore a long white robe, sandals, and walked with his hands crossed in front of him. He walked up to the gate and held eye contact with Yellich. He had a calm manner, his skin was clean, very clean, as though the pores had been cleaned by steam, Turkish-bath style. His eyes had a glazed expression which unnerved Yellich. ‘Can I help you, my brother?’ he said softly. Yellich thought the man to be the same age as himself.
‘Police.’ Yellich showed his ID. The man made to reach through the bars of the gate to get hold of the plastic card but Yellich withdrew it. ‘No, you can look at it but you can’t hold it, that’s the rule.’
‘Very well. What can I do for you, my brother?’
‘I’d like to look inside the house.’
‘Why?’
‘Police business.’
‘You have some concern about the house?’
‘No, nor about you or your friends. It concerns a matter which took place before you took up occupancy. I want to examine the scene of an accident.’
‘Well, we have nothing to hide and welcome all visitors.’
The man took a key from his pocket and unlocked the padlock. He opened the gate and Yellich stepped inside. He turned and watched the man lock the gate behind him. The man turned to Yellich. ‘We have nothing to hide and welcome visitors, but we do like to control egress and exit, it’s no more than you keeping your front door locked.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Shall we go up?’ The man began to walk up the wide, curving driveway. ‘We try to keep ourselves to ourselves in order not to antagonize local people but we don’t succeed. When we first came here we would find padlocks and chains round the gate extra to the one we put on. We took our wagon and oxen into the community but stopped when the local children would not stop throwing stones at us. It’s the nature of prejudice, people are frightened of anything that is different, anything they don’t understand. You know, it amuses me that the British can get on their high horse about racism and human rights issues in other countries, but if a group of Neanderthals had escaped the march of time and still lived a Neanderthal existence in the Scots lowlands or Thetford Forest, do they honestly think the same kind of prejudice would not exist here?’
‘I imagine it would,’ Yellich conceded.
‘It is, as I said, the nature of prejudice. How is my brother called?’
‘Yellich. DS Yellich.’
‘I am Pastor Cyrus. D? S? David? Simon?’
‘Detective Sergeant.’
Pastor Cyrus, nodded and the two men walked side by side in silence up the drive and emerged from the trees into a lawned area in which stood a large house of blackened stone. Clearly, thought Yellich, early Victorian as had been reported, squat, uncompromising, very ‘new money’ of its day, not here is the graceful architecture of the classicism of a century earlier, here was the representation of the beginning of the sweeping aside of the English aristocracy, a process, mused Yellich, which is not yet complete.
On the lawn, a group of children in robes sat cross-legged in a circle listening to a young woman, also robed, who spoke to them. Yellich noted that not one of the children, nor the young woman, even glanced at him, clearly a stranger in city clothing. He felt invisible.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About seven years. We had a haven in the East of London but had to endure violence and intimidation. It was a testing time for us but eventually our leader had a vision of a large house surrounded by trees somewhere in the North of England, and I and another were sent to seek it. We found it and money was forthcoming, and Oakfield House as it was, is now “the British Temple of the World Union of God”.’
‘So the house had been vacant for some time before you bought it?’
‘It had, and vandalized. Not a pane of glass remained intact. Village lads, you know.’
‘You’ve made a good job of its repair.’
‘I thank my brother for that comment.’
‘What do you know about the last occupant?’
‘Little, though doubtless it was he that sustained the accident which interests my brother?’
‘He is, or was, or whatever.’
‘Well, our first impression was that he was a brother of restricted growth, all the doors in the house had handles set low down, at about waist level to the average person.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything.’ Yellich turned to Pastor Cyrus. ‘That was the Victorian fashion, it just made sense to have door handles which were at hand height if the adult was standing with his arms by his side. It was only in the twentieth-century that we thought it would be a good idea to put door handles at shoulder height.’
‘Oh…but even so, there were, and still are, other indications: the sink in the kitchen, well, one of them, was lowered, there was also a small cooker very low on the ground and some wooden steps by the bath and a sort of platform in the bath on which to sit or stand. We have retained them because we find it useful for the children.’
‘I’d be particularly interested to see the bathroom.’
‘The bathroom with the steps and the platform? I ask because we have three bathrooms.’
‘Yes, that one.’
Yellich and Pastor Cyrus approached the steps of the house and as they did so the large door with a highly polished brass handle swung open silently. A girl of about eighteen years, full white robe and sandals, hands crossed in front of her at waist height, stood in the doorway.
‘This is Lamb,’ said Pastor Cyrus.
Yellich smiled at Lamb, who said nothing but cast down her eyes in a gesture of humility.
‘Lamb,’ Pastor Cyrus addressed the girl, ‘please escort our brother to the children’s bathroom and also anywhere else he wishes to go.’ Then he turned to Yellich. ‘Lamb is a recent convert, she has been with us for only a month now and so is still a novice. Please don’t ask her questions because she has taken a vow of silence which she must keep for three months, except for one hour each evening when she may ask questions of the elders as part of her training. Apart from that she may not utter at all except in an emergency.’
‘So she can yell her head off if the house catches fire?’
But Pastor Cyrus simply smiled and said, ‘If you’d like to follow Lamb.’
Lamb took Yellich into the cool, dark, spacious interior of the old house. In the front hall men and women, all in robes, read in silence. Lamb climbed an angled staircase and walked along a narrow corridor. In one room off the corridor, Yellich saw rows of children sitting in front of computers with determined concentration. Not one looked up as he passed the open door of their room. Presently Lamb came to the bathroom in question, stood on one side of the door, bowed her head and with a fluid wrist action, bade him enter the room.