The Secret of Crickley Hall

'The answer is no, I haven't been on my own in the house this morning. I told you—we took our other daughter to see a doctor.' He couldn't tell if the policeman was satisfied or not.

'You're saying the place was empty after you left at around seven thirty? No one else has been staying with you, a relative, or a friend?'

Gabe shook his head. 'No one.'

Kenrick considered this for a moment. He said: 'Does anyone else have a key to the property, anyone other than yourselves?'

'The realtor—' Gabe caught the policeman's frown. 'Sorry, the estate agent would obviously have a set. I guess the cleaners must have a set too.'

'They only have the kitchen-door key. Which is how the victims gained entry. The girl stole her mother's key, the mother being one of the cleaners.'

'I don't get this "victims" thing.'

Eve butted in. 'Officer, it's time you told us what this is all about. If there have been trespassers in the house, then it would seem we're the victims.'

'I was coming to that, Mrs Caleigh.' PC Kenrick slipped his notebook into the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. 'Earlier this morning while, it appears, you were out, two children—well, the boy is a youth, thirteen or fourteen years of age—say that a man exposed himself to them inside Crickley Hall.'

Eyebrows raised in astonishment, Gabe and Eve looked at one another again. Gabe turned back to Kenrick.

'Say what?' he said incredulously.

'A naked man came down the hall stairs and frightened them. They said he was carrying a thin stick that he beat himself with.'

The same thought whirled around inside both Gabe and Eve's head. The punishment cane. It couldn't be: Gabe had stashed it away in a kitchen cupboard along with the book and the photograph. But what man could have got into Crickley Hall? Eve's face paled.

'Hey, wait a sec,' Gabe suddenly said. There is another person who I'm sure will have a key, maybe the whole set.'

'Who might that be, Mr Caleigh?' The policeman was interested.

'Percy Judd. He's Crickley Hall's gardener and handyman.'

'Gabe!' Eve was shocked.

'Yeah, I know. It's unlikely.' Gabe addressed the constable: 'Look, he's in his eighties and I don't think he's the kinda guy who'd wander around without any clothes on.'

'Do you have an address for this Mr Judd?'

'No. He lives further up the hill, I think, somewhere off the road. I'm sure anyone down in the village would know—it's a pretty tight community. Or try the local vicar; Percy works around the church.'

'I'll follow it up.'

'You'd be wasting your time,' commented Eve. 'I'm certain he'd never do anything like that.'

'You know him well, Mrs Caleigh?'

'No, not well. But he's a harmless old man. A nice man. It's just not possible.'

'As I said, I'll follow it up. Can you think of anyone else who might have got inside the house in your absence?'

Gabe and Eve shook their heads.

'Nobody,' affirmed Gabe. 'Have you searched the place?'

'Yes, we've done that, sir. We found the house empty.'

'You looked everywhere?' Gabe was worrying about the safety of his own family.

'Top to bottom. Basement too. By the way, have you had any flooding in the house recently?'

Gabe immediately thought of the pools of water he'd found around the hall and stairs on their first night at Crickley Hall. But he wouldn't call that flooding.

'We've had some leaks,' he replied, 'but nothing serious.'

The policeman looked puzzled. 'Well, we found no evidence of flooding actually, but the boy and girl told us the whole ground floor was covered in water.'

'That's crazy.' Gabe rubbed the back of his neck. This is all crazy. Is the house flooded now?' He peered past the policeman into the hall and his own question was answered.

Nevertheless, PC Kenrick replied, 'No, sir. Like I said, we didn't find a drop of water anywhere it shouldn't be, not even in the basement where the well is located.'

'Did you find anything when you searched?' asked Eve.

'No. All we did discover that was peculiar was a dead rat inside a plastic bag in the middle of the hall. But the kids owned up to that. Some kind of practical joke, apparently.'

Gabe remembered the dead wood pigeon on the doorstep; he'd mentioned it to Eve.

Eve spoke: 'One of these children wasn't called Seraphina, was she?' Loren had told her mother the unusual name of the bully she'd punched.

PC Kenrick thought before he answered. They had to be informed sooner or later. 'Er, yes, Mrs Caleigh. Seraphina Blaney. The youth is her older brother, Quentin. Their mother is Patricia Blaney; she was the one who called us after her kids came home in a terrible state. They told her they'd seen a naked man in Crickley Hall. They also said the place was flooded. And oh yes, there was something nasty in the cellar.'

'I'm losing this,' said Gabe.

'What did they mean by something nasty?' Eve had gripped her husband's arm. Cally was no longer hiding but had squeezed between her mother and father to gaze up at the blue-uniformed stranger.

'Well… they couldn't describe it, actually. They said that something—a figure, an animal, we don't know yet—came out of the dark; the kids were too upset to get much sense from them. Anyway, it scared them enough to make them leave the cellar.'

'They were in the cellar?' asked Gabe, still trying to take it all in.

'Not down in the cellar; they were hiding behind the cellar door, they told us. Whatever it was—and my sergeant thinks it's only their imagination running wild—it scared them so much it drove them from their hiding place.'

'But what were they hiding from?' Eve was as mystified as her husband.

'Someone they heard upstairs. This was the naked man.'

'With a cane,' said Gabe.

'Holding a stick,' replied the constable.

'And then what?'

'They ran. They left Crickley Hall and scooted back home. According to their mother, both were crying hysterically, and she was so alarmed she rang us. What she did get out of them was that a naked man was involved. Because of that we considered it a significant incident'

'Significant?'

'Not a major one, but an incident that required immediate investigation. We pay special attention where children are concerned. Unfortunately, the boy and girl were difficult to interview because they were both still in shock.'

'Could they identify the person they saw?' asked Eve.

'Yeah,' muttered Gabe. 'Maybe it was a local…'

'I wish it were that simple. You see, the kids said it wasn't really a man at all.'

'I don't get it.' Gabe was frowning again, his blue eyes fixed on the policeman.

PC Kenrick looked slightly embarrassed. They said he wasn't clear. He appeared to, uh, to fade in and out. Of course, we didn't search the house on that basis—we were looking for a man who had deliberately exposed himself to children. But according to them, what they saw on the stairway wasn't real. They claimed it was a ghost.'

38: THE SWING

Eve finished washing Cally's lunch plate (Eve hadn't felt like eating) and laid it on the draining board where it could dry itself. As she pulled off the yellow Marigolds she looked out of the window with blank eyes, observing the narrow river that swept under the bridge and past the brief expanse of lawn with its oak tree near its centre. There was no breeze today to stir the swing that hung from a stout limb of the oak, but her thoughts were introspective, her gaze inwards, so that she did not notice.

Gabe had gone off to Ilfracombe shortly after the policeman had left and she had not felt comfortable alone in the house with just Cally for company. At that moment, her youngest daughter was in the grand hall, playing with her dolls on the stairs. Eve could hear her small voice as Cally talked to, and for, her eternally smiling, glazy-eyed 'friends' and the sound, distant though it was, was somehow reassuring. The word 'ghost' meant nothing much to Cally because she had only seen the cartoon kind, the Caspers and the rather stupid phantoms Scooby-Doo had to deal with on a regular basis. She was too young to wonder how and why dead people might haunt the living; she merely accepted it as an actuality of no particular importance.