Deadlight-Hall(103)

‘I understand that,’ said Nell, torn with pity for the small boy he had been.

‘Go on,’ said Michael.

‘Sophie and Susannah thought someone was watching the house where they had been placed. Battersby, I think the name of the family was – odd how things like that come back to you, isn’t it? And on that night in Deadlight Hall, they thought they were going to be dragged into the ovens. When I saw – when I thought I saw them with that nursing sister, I assumed they were acting in self-defence. But in light of that journal,’ he said, ‘I’m no longer sure if what I saw was real.’

‘What happened to the twins?’ asked Nell. ‘To Sophie and Susannah?’

‘I never knew. They simply vanished that night. I suppose I could have tried to find out what happened, but I was very young, and I was in a foreign country with strangers.’

‘Did you ever return to your home?’

‘No. But I heard – at second or third hand – that the Nazis did march in,’ he said. ‘So I don’t think there’s much doubt about what happened to my family and the people I knew there.’ He said this with such humility and such acceptance that Nell’s heart twisted with pity.

‘Then, when I was eleven,’ he said, ‘I was taken to the Hall by Simeon Hurst, and I saw the twins again. I knew with my head and my brain that it wasn’t the real Sophie and Susannah I was seeing – of course I did, it was five years after they vanished – but my emotions kept telling me otherwise. Perhaps I wanted them to be still there.’ A pause. ‘And on that day I saw it all happen again,’ he said. ‘Only this time it was Simeon Hurst they killed. I tried to save him, but I couldn’t.’ Again there was the quick expressive gesture with his hands. ‘It sounds like the wildest flight of fantasy,’ he said, ‘but—’

‘You thought you were seeing the murder of the nursing sister replayed?’

‘Yes. I found I could believe that the … the hatred and the terror that Sophie and Susannah had felt that night had remained inside that house.’

‘Printed itself on the walls,’ said Nell.

‘In a strange, child’s way, I even thought I might be being given a second chance to stop it all happening. But tonight, listening to that journal, I have to ask whether it was a different replay altogether I was seeing.’

‘A replay of a much older tragedy,’ said Michael, softly. ‘The burning of Esther.’

‘Tomorrow I may argue against you on that,’ said Leo. ‘But tonight … yes, tonight I can believe that.’

‘What happened about Simeon’s death?’

‘It was put down as a bizarre accident. And eventually I managed to … not forget it exactly, but to put it to the back of my mind. Life went along, and other things overlaid his death. School and study and then Oxford. I came here as a young man,’ he said. ‘And I never left. But the years have been good to me, you know. I like my work and my students. I like being part of Oxford. I enjoy the research and the friendships. Even the little feuds and power struggles that go on. But then I read that Deadlight Hall was being restored – that people would be living in it again – and I couldn’t get rid of the fear that the old hatred – the twins’ hatred and their terror – might somehow reactivate. So I came to you for help,’ he said, looking at Michael.

There was a brief silence, then Michael said, ‘There’s something more, isn’t there? Something you haven’t told us. Is it to do with the twins?’

Leo hesitated, then said, ‘A long-standing nightmare. On the night we were smuggled out of our village, we heard some of the grown-ups talking about the Todesengel. The Angel of Death.’

Nell looked at him questioningly, and it was Michael who said, ‘Josef Mengele. That was what they called him, wasn’t it? My God, yes, of course. Mengele experimented on twins in the concentration camps.’

‘Yes. I didn’t know at the time, of course, but I’ve come to know since, that Dr Mengele was deeply interested in telepathy between twins. He was hunting for case studies. Sophie and Susannah were strongly telepathic. I think he was hunting for them.’

‘Did you find out what happened to them?’

‘No. But that night in Deadlight Hall I heard – and the twins heard – someone prowling through the house, calling for the children.’

‘Children where are you? I will find you, you know,’ said Michael softly. ‘Was it Mengele’s agents, do you think, or … or was it the voice I heard? That the nineteenth-century children heard?’