The House of a Hundred Whispers

said before, we’ve never failed to find a missing person yet. Not if they’re out on the moor. But it could be that your lad’s wandered off somewhere else, or that somebody’s seen him walking along the road on his own and picked him up.’
‘That’s what I was thinking. But surely if somebody had picked him up, they would have taken him to the nearest police station.’
‘Perhaps they have, but then maybe your boy wasn’t able to tell them where you are. But there’s no point in speculating, Mr Russell. That’s one thing I always tell my team before we start searching. You can predict from experience which way your missing person is most likely to have strayed off to, but sometimes you find them in the most unlikely places. Last month we were looking for a woman rambler who was trying to find her way back to Langstone Manor caravan park. Eventually we found her stuck down a crevice in the rocks at Pew Tor, miles out of her way.’
‘Maybe she was pisky-led,’ said Vicky, as she came in from the kitchen with three mugs of tea on a tray.
‘Oh, you know about the piskies?’ said John.
‘I was reading about them last night in a book about Dartmoor. I was trying to see if it had any clues to where Timmy might have gone.’
‘The king of the piskies is supposed to live under Pew Tor. But in all my years I’ve never caught sight of him. Nor any other pisky, for that matter.’
At that moment Martin came in, puffy-eyed and unshaved. He was wrapped in Herbert’s brown check dressing gown and was still wearing his yellow socks.
‘I didn’t realise it was six o’clock already. God, I feel rough. Any news?’
Rob shook his head. ‘John and his team have been searching all night but there’s still no sign of him.’
‘I’ll be checking in with Sergeant Billings in a minute,’ said John. ‘Since we haven’t been able to find Timmy, he’ll be putting out a bulletin on the local television news and Twitter.’
He blew on his tea to cool it, and took two or three sips. Then he said, ‘I know this might sound more than a bit condescending, but you have made a thorough search of the house?’
‘Of course we have,’ Martin retorted. ‘And the police have, too. What – do you think he might be hiding under one of the beds and we haven’t noticed?’
‘Sorry – I didn’t mean to imply that you haven’t searched properly. But these houses have all kinds of funny little alcoves and recesses that you wouldn’t find in a modern house. That’s because they were built without plans, and sometimes the upstairs rooms didn’t quite fit with the load-bearing walls, and so there’d be a niche left over, which was plastered over.’
‘If it was plastered over, how could anybody get into it?’
‘I don’t know. But I do know that this house has a priest’s hole, or priest’s hide, as they’re sometimes known.’
‘I’ve heard of those,’ said Vicky. ‘Those were secret rooms, weren’t they, where Catholic priests used to be hidden during the Reformation, so that the priest hunters couldn’t find them.’
‘That’s right,’ said John. ‘The Wilmingtons, who built this house, were Catholics, and when they were approached by a priest to give him shelter, they asked a fellow called Nicholas Owen to construct a priest hole for them. Nicholas Owen was a Jesuit lay brother. He was also an incredible craftsman. He’d already made priest holes in at least five country houses. In Harvington Hall, in Worcestershire, he made at least seven, and there could be more in the same house that nobody has been able to find because he concealed them so brilliantly.’
‘We never knew there was a priest hole here, at Allhallows Hall,’ said Martin. ‘Surely it would have been mentioned in the title deeds, or the property information form, or whatever.’
‘I only found out about it three or so years ago when I was researching the Wilmington family,’ said John. ‘The existence of a priest hole would only have been known to the owner of the house and Nicholas Owen himself. And when I say they were brilliantly concealed… some of them were quite amazing. He would build them under staircases, and over fireplaces, and behind panelling. Even down drains. He was caught eventually, and tortured, and executed, but he was canonised and became the patron saint of escapologists and illusionists.’
‘Did your research give you any idea where in the house this priest hole is?’ Rob asked him.
‘No… only that there must have been one, because the priest hunters came here looking for a Catholic priest. Apparently they were acting on a tip they’d been given by a local villager from Yelverton, who bore some kind of a grudge against the Wilmingtons. They searched the house without finding him.’
‘So how did they know that there was a priest hole?’ asked Martin.
‘Ah – they’d got wise to their existence by then, and how difficult they were to discover. They went away, but the same afternoon without any warning they came back, and by that time the priest had come out of his hole and they caught him on the road to Yelverton. He was tortured to make him renounce his Catholic faith and pledge allegiance to the Church of England, but he refused and they hanged him.
‘The Wilmingtons could have been in serious trouble, too, but they denied knowing the priest. Even though it was almost certain that they must have been hiding him somewhere in Allhallows Hall, the priest hunters still couldn’t find a priest hole, and so they had no evidence to charge them with.’
By now, both Grace and Portia had appeared, wearing thick sweaters and jeans – Grace in pink and Portia in purple. Rob introduced them to John Kipling and quickly explained what he had just told them.
‘If there is a priest hole, we weren’t able to find it, either,’ said Portia. Her studded denim jacket made her