Deadlight Hall (Nell West/Michael Flint #5)(30)
‘I do hope there will,’ I said, and I meant it more than she could have known.
‘Mr Battersby took it very badly. There’s nights he goes out and walks the lanes – even though walking any distance is a sore trial to him, having taken a bullet in the last war – but he can’t get rid of the idea that he might come across some clue that’s been missed. “Girls,” he’ll call, just softly like, not wanting to alarm them if they’re in earshot, which of course they aren’t. He knows it’s illogical to call for them, but he says he can’t seem to help it. “Girls,” he calls. “Where are you?”’
I wanted to tell her who we were and how we, too, were trying to find the twins, for the thought of that poor man wandering the lanes calling for the lost girls was almost more than I could bear. Sch?nbrunn sent me a warning glance.
‘Folks said it was the infirmary’s fault they went,’ said Mrs Battersby, ‘but I never believed that, for those doctors and nurses were good as gold to those children, and you’d maybe like to put that in your forms as well, Mr … er … I did hear the Sister in charge left the place almost immediately afterwards, though. I don’t know what happened to her – there was some story that she couldn’t face having lost two of her charges, and that she simply walked out that same night or it might have been the next day.’
Sch?nbrunn frowned, and I could see he was wondering if this might be a useful line of enquiry. But he did not say anything, and I managed to ask about the infirmary itself. Had it been near here?
‘Oh, yes. Ugly old place it is, just a few miles away. If you’re going back to Oxford you’ll likely see it across the fields. The nurses scrubbed out a few of the rooms and disinfected them to use as wards, and the men carried in beds and suchlike.’ She shivered. ‘I dare say the children’d be too ill to notice much, but I wouldn’t want to be in that house. A gloomy place it is, built more than a hundred years ago, and an odd history it’s got, if you can believe all you hear. At one time it was made into some kind of orphanage – Victorian days, that was – and they say all manner of cruelties went on there. But you can’t believe all you hear.’
I was about to ask outright for the name of the place, but Sch?nbrunn forestalled me, saying, ‘It sounds something of a landmark.’
‘Oh, it is. You ask anyone hereabouts about it and they’ll tell you that Deadlight Hall is a real local landmark.’
On that note, we made good our escape, thanking Mrs Battersby for her hospitality. Sch?nbrunn shook her hand and assured her the details she had provided would be used in a responsible and discreet fashion. I said they would be of immense help to the government.
‘I’m a black liar,’ I said, glumly, as we careered back to the high road. ‘And so are you.’
‘But in a good cause.’
‘We deceived that good, trusting woman.’
‘Are you sure she was all she appeared?’
‘For pity’s sake, you aren’t telling me she might have been a German agent? Or working for Mengele?’
‘I’ll admit it’s unlikely,’ he said. ‘But we trust no one. You’ll have to square the deceit with your conscience as well as you can.’
‘I shall have my just deserts one day,’ I said, resignedly. ‘And when I die, I shall very likely be cast into Gehenna.’
‘What—?’
‘The place of fiery torment.’
‘I know what Gehenna is,’ said Sch?nbrunn. ‘I was going to say what did we do with the road map, because if we’re going to find Deadlight Hall before it gets dark, we should start looking out for it.’
It was then that we rounded a bend in the road, and saw it across the fields. The house with the bad history. Deadlight Hall. I stared at it with a feeling of cold dread gathering at the pit of my stomach. If ever the Jewish Gehenna existed – if ever there really is a place of torment for sinners and non-believers, a place where the worshippers of Moloch burned their sons and daughters in fires – then it would look exactly like this grim dereliction.
And now, of course, as you read this, you’ll be saying, ‘Oh, dear me, here’s old Maurice Bensimon being dramatic again,’ but I promise you, my friend, this place was as menacing and as forbidding as anything that ever came out of the Torah’s darker pages, or, indeed, out of a Gothic tale of horror. (No, I do not read such books, but I have eyes, also ears, and I know about such things.)
Sch?nbrunn stopped the car and we both sat looking at the Hall for several moments. Then he said, ‘I think we had better go inside.’
I had never felt less inclined to enter any building, but he said, ‘This is where the twins vanished from, remember. There could be all kinds of clues.’
‘That ward sister.’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘At least the place is empty,’ I said, but Sch?nbrunn pointed to a long window on the side of the main doors.
‘It isn’t empty,’ he said.
The window, like all the windows, was almost glassless, but jagged shards still clung to the stone lintels. Framed in the opening, its outline distorted by the broken glass and blurred by the dying afternoon light, was the shape of a figure. Its head was tilted away from us, as if it was looking for something within the house. Then, as we stared, it turned and looked outwards, as if watching our approach.