The House of a Hundred Whispers

suitcases, chaotically heaped up one on top of the other, as well as three or four khaki haversacks and two bulging duffel bags.
‘What the hell is that lot?’ asked Martin. ‘I don’t remember seeing them before. All that used to be up here was our old toys and Gracey’s cot.’
Rob went over to the pile of suitcases. Some of them were leather and looked expensive, even though they were scratched and battered. All of them carried luggage labels around their handles, and he turned one over and read it.
Ronald May, HMP Dartmoor, Tavistock Road, Princetown, Yelverton PL20 6RR.
He picked up another label. This one carried the name Mohammed Baqri. The next belonged to Thomas Friend. Yet another belonged to Lukasz Sokolowski.
‘These are all prisoners’ belongings. What are they doing up here in Dad’s attic?’
He picked up one of the suitcases, laid it down on the attic floor and clicked open the catches. When he lifted the lid, he found that it was filled with neatly folded clothes: a navy-blue jacket, at least five shirts of different colours, socks and underpants. There was even a black leather washbag, with a razor and a toothbrush and a Gillette stick deodorant inside it.
He opened up another suitcase, and another. They were all filled with men’s clothes. One of them had two pairs of good-quality leather shoes in it, wrapped in tissue paper.
‘I don’t get this at all. It looks like these prisoners were all packed up to go away somewhere. But if they didn’t go away, where did they go? Back to the prison? But if that’s where they went, why did they leave their suitcases here?’
‘We can easily check with the prison,’ said Martin. ‘If they did go back, maybe some of them are still banged up there, and they can throw some light on why Dad kept their stuff.’
Rob looked around. ‘Meanwhile, there’s no sign of Timmy up here. We need to go back down and start searching around the village. I only hope he hasn’t gone anywhere near the well.’
‘That’s covered over, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but he was really fascinated by it, the last time we brought him down here, just before Mum died. He’d been reading some fairy tale and he kept asking if trolls lived down there.’

7
They buttoned up their raincoats and lifted the three large umbrellas out of the elephant’s-foot umbrella stand by the front door. The smoke had cleared out of the drawing room now so that Rob could close all the windows, but the house was so cold that they were stamping their feet and rubbing their hands together to keep warm.
‘First priority after we find Timmy is to call a chimney sweep,’ said Martin. ‘And maybe go into Yelverton and buy ourselves a couple of electric heaters.’
They left the house, opening up their umbrellas, and walked along the driveway to the steep winding road that led up to St Mary’s church and the village. The wind had risen and it was drizzling almost horizontally now. Vicky’s umbrella was blown inside out with a loud clap.
‘I’m trying to think like Timmy,’ said Rob, as he helped her to bend the spokes back again. ‘He might have gone to the well, but then again he might have gone to the churchyard. You remember how interested he was in some of the statues, and the carvings on the gravestones. You know what boys of that age are like – full of morbid curiosity.’
‘I’m praying that you’re right, Rob. But I still think he would rather have stayed indoors, playing Angry Birds on your phone.’
‘Look – if he’s not in the village, I’ll call the police. It starts getting dark by four, so we need to find him before then.’
They reached the intersection of three narrow lanes and the triangular green in between them. Four large houses stood on one side of the green, and two on another, and that constituted the ‘village’. The houses looked empty. Their front gardens were overgrown, their fences were broken, and their walls were streaked with damp. The well stood in the centre of the green, with a mossy tiled roof. Its borehole had been covered over years ago with a heavy oak lid, although an old wooden pail still rested on top of it, with a rope attached to its handle.
‘He couldn’t have fallen down there,’ said Rob. ‘He wouldn’t have been strong enough to pick up that lid, for starters, and even if he had, he couldn’t have put that bucket back on top of it, could he?’ He didn’t allow himself to think that some abductor might have dropped Timmy down the well, and replaced the pail afterwards. That was Grimms’ fairy-tale stuff.
‘All the same,’ said Martin. He rolled the pail off to one side, and then he heaved the lid up high enough for them to be able to peer down inside the shaft. Rob shone his flashlight down it, but all they could see was the mass of tangled roots that had grown between the brickwork, and the glint of water, at least twenty metres below. The air smelled like bad breath. But there were no trolls, and no Timmy.
Martin lowered the lid. ‘Right, then. The churchyard.’
The six of them crossed the green and went through the lychgate that led into the churchyard. The church itself was built of granite, with a tall square tower at its western end, dappled with grey and orange lichen. The graveyard sloped steeply downhill, with twenty or thirty gravestones leaning at various awkward angles, as well as two grand Victorian mausoleums closer to the church, one of them for several members of the Wilmington family.
Apart from the pattering of the rain on their umbrellas, the churchyard was silent. Rob hesitated for a moment, and then shouted out, ‘Timmy! Timmy! Can you hear me, Timmy?’
His voice sounded strangely flat, and there was no echo. Neither was there any reply.
Vicky said, ‘We’ll go and look inside the church.’
Together, she and Katharine walked