The House of a Hundred Whispers

‘Jones! Do you want to fetch Axel in here?’
A lanky ginger-haired dog handler came across the courtyard with his Alsatian. At first the dog was eagerly trotting forward with his tongue hanging out like a pink silk cravat, but as it neared the front door it slowed down, and when it reached the first step of the porch it stopped. Its ears and its tail stood up erect and its fur bristled as if it had been electrocuted.
‘Axel! Come on, boy!’ snapped its handler, tugging at his lead. He managed to drag the dog a few more inches forward, but almost immediately the dog scrabbled its claws on the granite steps and pulled back again.
‘Axel! What the flaming Nora’s the matter with you? Come on, boy! Now!’
‘Get your skates on, Derek!’ called Sergeant Billings. ‘We haven’t got all day! We’ve got a little lad to find before it gets dark!’
Axel’s handler pulled at the dog’s lead again and again, but it still refused to move.
‘It’s no use, sarge! He won’t budge! Something’s spooked him!’
‘What?’
‘Something’s frightened him. I don’t know what. He’s never done this to me before.’
‘Can’t you give him a dog biscuit or something?’
‘He’s scared shitless, sarge. A dog biscuit’s not going to make any difference.’
Sergeant Billings turned back to Vicky. ‘Well, I don’t know. For some reason the dog doesn’t want to come into the house. If you can hand me that jacket, I’ll take it outside and see if he’ll sniff at it there.’
Vicky gave him Timmy’s jacket and he took it over to the dog handler, who had retreated with his dog now to stand beside the headless cherub. The dog handler bunched it up and held it under the dog’s nose.
‘Okay,’ said the dog handler. ‘He’s got that now.’
‘Take a look around the garden first,’ Sergeant Billings told him. ‘Meantime, we’ll give the house another search.’
‘I can tell you, sergeant, we went over it with a fine-tooth comb,’ said Martin. ‘The boy’s not in there. We even looked up in the attic, just to make sure, even though there’s no way he could have climbed up there.’
‘Is there a cellar?’
‘There is, but for some reason it’s been bricked up. It was bricked up before we came to live here.’
‘Very good, sir. I appreciate that you’ve gone through the house already, but we have to make a thorough search ourselves so we can record that we’ve carried it out. And – no offence – we can sometimes spot something that a civilian might have overlooked.’
‘All right, then, fine. Go ahead.’
The police officers trooped into the house, and once they were gathered in the hallway Sergeant Billings split them up and sent them off to different rooms.
‘If he’s not here on the property, sir, he’ll have left his scent outside, and Axel will pick it up, I can assure you of that. He’s the best tracking dog we’ve got, by far.’
‘It’s been raining buckets, though,’ said Martin. ‘Won’t that have washed any scent away?’
‘Not so much that Axel can’t follow it. I’ve even known him follow a trail when there’s snow a foot deep.’
The family waited in the drawing room while the police searched the house. Because it was so cold they all kept their coats on, although Vicky couldn’t stop herself from shivering. They hardly spoke, but sat and listened to the heavy footsteps above them as the officers went into each of the eight bedrooms. Through the latticed window they could see the dog handler circling around the garden, with Axel sniffing the pathways and the grass borders.
The dog handler disappeared from sight, but after a few minutes they heard him calling out to Sergeant Billings from outside the open front door. Sergeant Billings went to see what he wanted, and they heard them talking together in the porch. Eventually he came back into the drawing room, holding up a polythene evidence bag. Inside it, they could see a claw hammer with a wooden handle. The hammerhead was tarnished almost black and frayed string was tied around its handle.
‘Axel just sniffed this out. Apparently it was wedged down the side of the retaining wall by one of the flower beds, so it’s hardly surprising that it wasn’t discovered when we searched the place before – you know, after Mr Russell was found fatally injured.’
‘What does that have to do with finding Timmy?’ asked Rob.
‘Well, nothing, sir. But it might throw some light on what happened to Mr Russell. I’ve seen the preliminary report from the forensic pathologist, and she suggested that he was probably struck on the back of his head with a blunt instrument of some kind. He had a circular indentation in the parietal bone, which would suggest it was a hammer. So we’ll be taking this away with us to run some tests on it. You never know.’
‘But what about Timmy? Wasn’t there any trace of him?’
‘Sorry, sir – no. But Constable Jones hasn’t taken Axel the full circuit around the house yet. Don’t you worry. Like I said before, if anybody can track where your little lad’s strayed off to, he can.’
‘You really think that hammer could have been used to murder our father?’ said Martin.
‘It’s not for me to say, sir. But a fingerprint and DNA test should tell us, one way or another. I don’t know the full facts of the case, but I do know that there were no signs of any intruder… no sign of forced entry and no footprints. So this might give us an idea what actually occurred. On the other hand, maybe it won’t. Maybe it’s been lying in that flower bed since your father fell downstairs.’
Sergeant Billings hesitated, suddenly realising what he had said. ‘Sorry. My apologies. Bad choice of words there. What I meant was, maybe it’s been there for donkey’s years.’
*
One after the other, the police officers who were searching the house returned to the hallway to report that they had looked everywhere without finding any sign of Timmy. A