The Secret of Crickley Hall

She came back at him. 'Time has nothing to do with it. Look, even Chester's nervous of this place.'

'He's not used to it yet.'

Eve ignored him. 'It's as if the house has a memory. I can feel it.'

'You're talking crazy.' Gabe's voice was low and even, but he was becoming impatient. 'You're saying the place is haunted, there's ghosts running around? Sure the house is spooky, but there are no ghosts, no such thing.'

'Of course there aren't any ghosts. But somehow some places are forever marked by their own history. Remember the first time I took you to the Tower of London, how you actually shuddered when we went into the Bloody Tower? You told me it was because you could feel its brutal past, as if the memory of murders and executions still lingered.'

'Ah, c'mon, Eve…'

She turned away from him to make the coffee.

'I can sense something bad about Crickley Hall,' she tried to explain, her back towards Gabe.

'It's in your imagination.'

'Those children died in this house. They all died in the flood.'

It was a terrible story, a deeply tragic one, relayed to them by the vicar himself, his wife frowning all the way through the telling of it.

During the Second World War, when the German Luftwaffe was constantly bombing London and other English cities, many young children were evacuated without their mothers—most of the menfolk were overseas fighting for their country—to safer havens in countryside towns and villages. Eleven boys and girls had been sent to Hollow Bay for the duration from a south London orphanage. They came to live in Crickley Hall, which, because it was empty, had been appropriated by the Ministry of Health with the consent of the owner at that time who rarely used it as his personal residence anyway. There they would be cared for and resume their education.

On the night of the Great Storm, as the vicar had called the 1943 flood, and after the high moors had, sponge-like, absorbed six weeks of continuous rainfall so that they could accept no more, they had disgorged their load into the already rising local rivers and streams around them. The Bay River was a natural conduit more or less straight down to the sea.

Debris and fallen trees had been blocked by the bridges along the river's length, and when these finally gave way under the pressure, the floodwaters were disastrously released. Some houses on the riverbank were demolished, others badly damaged, as the floodwaters had poured down to devastate the harbour village. Although Crickley Hall, built so solidly, was left standing, all the evacuees and their guardian perished. Because the children were orphans, there were no relatives to mourn them, not even uncles and aunts, but the surviving villagers took them into their hearts and grieved for them along with their own lost. A special area of the church grounds that had never been used before became the burial plot for the children and the other members of the community who had died on that terrible night.

When Gabe had asked Trevellick who maintained the children's graves so caringly, he had received a surprise. It seemed it was Percy Judd, Crickley Hall's own caretaker and gardener, who tended them, laying pretty wild flowers under each stone in October every year, the anniversary of the orphans' deaths.

At the time, Gabe refrained from asking the vicar about the neglected grave, the one that stood apart from the rest, overgrown with grass and weeds and left unkempt. It could be that Augustus Theophilus Cribben, who was buried there, was just a local who had died of natural causes (although the marker claimed he was only forty-two when he'd passed away) in the same year as the flood. Maybe he had been buried at the back of the cemetery because he wasn't a popular figure among the locals and hadn't anyone to mourn his passing.

'Gabe, your coffee.'

Eve was standing before him, a steaming mug in her hand.

'Sorry, hon. I was thinking on something.'

'About the house, Gabe. I don't want to stay here.' Her voice was soft, not nagging. She was sincere, genuinely troubled.

'Eve, we've only been here one night and a day.' He took the coffee from her and quickly put it down on the table. He blew at his fingers. 'We gotta at least give it a chance to work out. The job's important.'

She leaned into him, a hand going to the back of his neck. 'I'm sorry. I know it seems stupid, but can't you sense it too? There's… there's a mood about Crickley Hall. Loren said she heard crying coming from the landing cupboard yesterday.'

'She heard a sound like crying. Coulda been a trapped animal.'

'But there was no animal inside when you looked.'

'Mouse or, God help us, a rat. Maybe even a squirrel. Found its way out the way it got in.'

'And the shadow she saw.'

'Trick of the light. What else could it be? Whoever heard of a white shadow?'

'What if it was a memory of someone, a person—a child—who died here in traumatic circumstances? The house has stood empty a long time, we've been told. Don't you wonder why?'

'Yeah, because it's too big, it's too cold, and it smells of damp. I just never realized it when I found the place in the summer. And you're emotionally worn out, Eve.'

She flinched at that, but said nothing, because she knew it was true. Gabe hadn't made her confront it until now. Then: 'Perhaps Loren saw a ghost.'

'I was afraid you were gonna say that. Eve, Loren might believe in that kinda thing, but we're adults—we should have more sense.'

'Meaning I'm being irrational.'

He didn't want to start anything with her; her emotions were too fraught, she'd been hanging on the edge for too long now.

'Crickley Hall isn't haunted,' he said evenly.

'Isn't it? How do you know?'

'Like I said, there's no such thing as ghosts.'

'Gabe, a few years ago I wrote a piece on celebrities and models who used psychics and clairvoyants, people who wouldn't make an important decision without first consulting their personal oracle. It was one of the psychics I interviewed who told me about houses that sometimes held on to memories, usually when something traumatic has happened in them. Like the Bloody Tower. The psychic told me this was often the cause of hauntings, images released into the atmosphere by the house itself.'

'And I guess your psychic had a direct line to ghosts, huh?'

'You can be cynical, Gabe, but three out of the five I interviewed were totally convincing.'

'So the other two were frauds.'

'Not necessarily. They explained to me that occasionally their powers let them down. It didn't mean they were fakes.'

Gabe suppressed a groan. 'Look,' he said patiently, 'let's give it two weeks and if you're still uneasy I'll find us somewhere else to rent. Deal?'

She did not reply immediately and her fingers slid away from his neck down to his shoulder. 'I don't know…' she said eventually.

'Give it a try, Eve.'

'Just two weeks?'

'Guaranteed.' His own hand slipped round her waist. 'If you're still unhappy living here by then, we move on.'

Chester's muzzle pushed into his lap. The dog whimpered as if displeased with the arrangement.

12: SECOND NIGHT

It was night and rain continued to hurl itself against the windows. Heavy clouds concealed a gibbous moon.

Eve lay awake next to Gabe, listening to his gentle snoring, the soft sound reassuring rather than annoying. She would have turned and laid a hand over his hip, but she did not want to disturb him. Gabe was tired; he'd worked hard that morning and afternoon, finishing the unpacking with her, moving furniture so that rooms suited them better, the only break being the trip down into the village. The walk back up the hill in the rain had been pretty tiring. The girls were fast asleep next door, having gone to bed much earlier than usual without complaint.