The House of a Hundred Whispers

We’ll find your boy, don’t you fret.’
*
After twenty minutes, the dog handler came back to the team leader to say that he had circled all around the house and had only picked up Timmy’s scent in the kitchen garden, just like the police dog handler. There was no trace of him leading away from the house.
‘Well, no worries, sometimes the dogs find it hard to follow a scent in wet weather, and this driveway is all shingle, which doesn’t help. We’ll just have to get out there onto the moor and carry out a systematic search on foot. He’s only five, so his little legs couldn’t have taken him that far – not in the dark.’
Rob and Martin and Grace each joined one of the three search and rescue teams. Vicky and Katharine would stay in the house in case Timmy returned, and to wait for the chimney sweep. Portia had volunteered to borrow Rob’s car to drive into Tavistock and buy food and wine and two electric fan heaters, as well as a fresh inhaler for Grace’s asthma. The dampness in the house had made Grace short of breath, but she was determined to stay here until Timmy was found. ‘Portia – he’s my little nephew, and I’m never going to have a child of my own, am I?’
‘There’s always IVF,’ Portia had retorted, but almost immediately she said, ‘Sorry – sorry.’ Yesterday she had made no secret of her impatience to return to London, but whatever argument they had settled between them, it was apparent that she had made some concession to Grace. She had made no mention of it this morning, and on the whole she was being much more conciliatory.
As the day went on, the fog thickened, rather than clearing, and the search parties looked like ghostly shadows as they walked down the lanes and crossed over the fields and climbed up the steep granite tors. They called out ‘Timmy!’ over and over, and then they would stop for a few moments and listen, but there was no response before darkness began to creep over the moors.
They combed woods and hedgerows and ditches. They followed the Grimstone and Sortridge leat all the way up to the Windy Post Cross, peering into the running water to make sure that Timmy’s drowned body wasn’t trapped below the surface.
They looked as far as Merrivale in the north, and Whitchurch to the west, and even as far as the Burrator reservoir to the south. They talked to the few local people they came across out on the moor, and knocked on several doors to ask if anybody had seen a small boy wandering out on his own, but nobody had. Rob was beginning to wonder if some passing motorist might have come across Timmy, picked him up and driven him away. For what purpose, he dreaded to think.
Eventually, at about half past five, they returned cold and weary to Allhallows Hall. Although they had given up for the day, the search would continue throughout the night, with replacement teams who specialised in looking for missing people in the dark. The search area would be widened, too.
*
The chimney sweeps had visited that morning and cleared out the flues in the drawing room, the kitchen and the library, and Vicky had lit fires in all of them. For the first time since they had arrived yesterday, the house felt welcoming and warm.
Rob collapsed into Herbert’s throne by the fire. He had wanted to go back out onto the moors after a short rest, but when he was climbing over a pile of rocks under Pew Tor he had twisted his ankle and it was starting to throb. He switched on the West Country news on television and silently prayed that there would be no items about a five-year-old boy found dead around Sampford Spiney.
Vicky brought him a bottle of Jail Ale and stood beside him, looking bereft.
‘What if they never find him? What then?’
‘They will, darling. We can’t give up hope.’
‘Tell me this is all a bad dream. Tell me we never came here.’
Rob tried to stand up but winced and sat back down again. Vicky knelt down beside his chair and rested her head in his lap. He stroked her hair, but that was all the comfort he could give her.
Martin, meanwhile, had gone through to the library to see if he could find any notebooks or diaries that might throw some light on why their father had been killed. The police had taken all the invoices and receipts that had been scattered on the stairs when Herbert Russell was found dead, as well as his laptop, and had yet to return them. When Martin had been helping to search the house for Timmy, however, he had lifted the lid on the window seat and found six or seven dog-eared Racing Post diaries, as well as other books. Now he lifted them all out and set them down on the writing table, and he saw that they were Herbert’s accounts books for the nine previous tax years.
He sat down and began to leaf through them – the diaries first and then the accounts. The diaries had no day-to-day accounts of Herbert’s life. They were crammed with nothing but notes about race meetings and odds and horses that he must have fancied.
It made him feel strangely abandoned to see his father’s idiosyncratic handwriting again, with its thick upright strokes and its heavily crossed ‘t’s. His father had always made him feel valued, much more than Rob or Grace, and had constantly promised him that he would be someone special when he grew up – someone who took no nonsense from anybody. He had lost count of the number of times his father had said to him, ‘Remember – no matter how much anyone disagrees with you – you’re always right and they’re always wrong. Full stop.’
Most of the entries in his accounts books were mundane. Travel expenses. TV licence. Car