He's shaking the little boy, screaming at him, and the boy is wailing in terror, which only makes the man more angry and the shaking more violent. There are other children around, but they are frightened too and so they run away to hide, to hide from the man whom Lili now recognizes from the old black-and-white photograph, the children's guardian, the man Eve had called Augustus Cribben. He is picking up the howling boy whose trousers are bunched around his ankles. The man is taking the boy into a room where there are tables and benches set out like a schoolroom. He lays the boy on the main desk, the teacher's desk, and tells the woman—the woman must be Magda Cribben, Lili realizes—to hold the boy there and wait.
Augustus Cribben soon returns and Lili cries out in her semi-conscious trance, for in his hand he holds a gleaming cutthroat razor, no doubt the very one he uses himself for shaving.
Magda Cribben brings up a hand to her throat and she pleads with her brother not to do this, that the authorities will find out if anything happens to the boy. But her brother is undeterred: he reaches for the boy's tiny penis.
To one side stands a tall boy, one of the orphans yet not one of them. There is an excited glint in his eyes.
Cribben calls for him to help pin the dark-haired boy down and Maurice Stafford eagerly comes forward. He leans his strong upper body on the younger boy's legs so that they are trapped, and his hand presses down on the little boy's chest, holding him flat on his back against the table.
Augustus slashes with the razor.
But the cut is too hasty, too imprecise, too deep, and the blood spurts from the little boy's penis…
•
'Stefan bled and bled,' Pyke went on and Eve felt nauseous. How could a man do that to a child? 'But Augustus didn't care. He tossed the severed flesh into the wastepaper bin and left the room as though anything else that happened was nothing to do with him.'
Pyke stretched his left leg and forcefully rubbed his thigh as if to encourage circulation.
'Magda did her best to save the boy, but the bleeding just wouldn't stop. In his pain, Augustus had cut away too much of the penis itself, not just the foreskin.'
He sighed as though there were some regret over what had occurred, but Eve was soon to realize it wasn't because of the harm done to poor young Stefan.
'All that followed was because of the Jewish boy.' Pyke scowled with resentment, as if events might have turned out otherwise but for the bodged 'operation'. 'Magda ordered me to bring towels, and then more towels, but nothing could staunch that bleeding. The boy was draining of colour before our eyes because of blood loss. Naturally, taking him to a hospital or calling a doctor wasn't an option; how could we have explained the injury? No doubt Augustus would have been imprisoned for what he had done and Magda too, probably, for being an accomplice. I didn't care for my own chances either: they had special places for naughty boys in those days. All the other children would have ganged up on me, they would have told the police what a bad person I'd been. They never liked me.'
Eve could hardly believe what she was hearing. Pyke was now wallowing in self-pity. But while he was preoccupied she took a sly glance up the stairway behind her. If she and Loren could only reach Cally's bedroom there might be a chance to barricade themselves in…
Light in the vast room dipped and she wondered if the generator in the basement could take the strain of running all the electrics in Crickley Hall. Perhaps Gabe hadn't done such a good job on it after all, and if the lights went out once more, it might give them another opportunity to get away from Pyke. But then the lights came up again, although their glow was weaker than before.
In the darker regions of the hall there seemed to be a slight movement, lighter shadows shifting inside the darker shadows again. The air was heavy, oppressive, the kind of heaviness that usually came before an electrical storm. The fine hairs on Eve's arms bristled and there was an uncomfortable creeping sensation along her spine, the arctic breath of ungovernable fear. Oddly, although the source of light came from high above—the iron chandelier and the landing light—it was much darker round the ceiling, as if a blackness were hanging there, a kind of murky fog that was pressing down on the room below.
Pyke appeared not to have noticed, or if he did, he was ignoring it. Rain rattled the tall window.
He began to speak again, revisiting a past that was obviously important to him. 'Magda knew we couldn't save the boy, although by God, she did try. Stefan was fading away fast and she realized what we had to do. We had used the well to get rid of the teacher's body before; we could use it again.'
Despite her terror, Eve was aghast. Magda Cribben and Pyke—or Maurice Stafford as he was then—had murdered Nancy Linnet and thrown her corpse into the well, knowing that it would probably be swept out to sea by the subterranean river. Then they had decided to do the same with Stefan.
'Magda said that we would tell the authorities that Stefan Rosenbaum had wandered down the cellar alone—which was strictly out of bounds for the children, of course—and had accidentally fallen into the well. The wall round the well is very low so it could easily happen. In all likelihood, his body would never be recovered and none of the other children had witnessed what Augustus had done to the boy, although they must have heard the screams. Magda was sure they'd be too scared to speak out.'
My God, thought Eve, was Pyke insane even then, as a boy? All three of them—the brother and sister and Maurice Stafford—must have been crazy to imagine they would get away with such a crime.
Pyke flexed his knee to loosen the joint. 'So that's what we did. We dropped Stefan's body down the well. To be perfectly frank with you, I wasn't sure he'd bled to death by then. I don't think Magda was sure either.'
The revelation seemed to numb both Eve's body and her mind. She had to stop this madman getting his hands on her daughters.
Pyke gave a laboured shake of his head as if chiding himself for something. 'We had underestimated the interest that had been aroused in the disappearance of the teacher, though. She had been gone several weeks and could not be traced, despite the efforts of the education authorities to find her. We had assumed she wouldn't be missed, not with the kind of disruption a war brought to the country.'
He studied Eve, then Loren, with half-hooded eyes. 'The very day after we rid ourselves of Stefan Rosenbaum, we received notice that government inspectors were to visit Crickley Hall. Oh, it might well have been a routine call, something the inspectors were apt to do from time to time, but Magda thought not. She thought suspicions had been kindled by Nancy Linnet's abrupt departure.'
His gaze was momentarily on Loren, although his mind seemed elsewhere.
'Magda was in a state of panic,' Pyke continued, 'while Augustus was merely outraged that the authorities should even presume to inspect his province. The stress only made his pain worse and the usual method of relieving some of it had no effect whatsoever. In fact, it hadn't worked for some days, which was why Augustus finally lost all reason.'
The lightning and thunder came again and it was as though those elements were chained to the house itself; the storm just did not seem to be moving on.
Pyke changed position on the landing, sitting on its lip, thick wrists resting on his knees, head turned to take in Eve and Loren. His back was to the cane, which lay across the landing.
'Are you growing tired of my reminisces, Eve? It gets more interesting, I assure you.'
Tentatively, she said: 'My husband will be home soon.' It was a feeble warning.
Pyke responded almost cheerfully. 'No, you told me he'd gone off to London. Even if he were on his way back, he'd have stopped somewhere to avoid the worst of the storm. Nobody sane travels in this sort of weather.'