The Lost Child (17 page)

‘Mr Person,’ the maid announced as she led him into the room.

‘Thank you Pavla that will be all,’ Ada said graciously from her elegant perch on a faded brocade chair.

‘You will want tea?’ Pavla asked.

A flicker of irritation passed over Ada’s face, ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, I don’t think Mr Pearson will be staying long.’

Pavla looked relieved. ‘I go finish in the kitchen.’

The fixed smile stayed in place while Pavla extracted herself and shut the door. When she was gone Ada turned her gaze to Jack. ‘Inspector Pearson, what brings you back after so very many years?’

‘Not inspector any more Miss Gardiner-Hallow, just plain old Jack, I’m retired now,’ he said. He didn’t wait to be invited to sit down and selected a comfortable seat opposite to Ada. A move that accomplished exactly the right level of disconcertion in the woman, just as he had intended it should.

‘Well, that makes me doubly curious about your visit, is there something you think I can help you with?’ Her imperious smile had slipped a little.

‘Perhaps.’ He launched into the story of the toy dog, watching to see if her dispassion faltered at all. When he had finished speaking she rose and wandered over to the window. He was sure he could detect a frisson of discomfort in her demeanour.

‘Well, Mr Pearson, those are some very old coals you have decided to rake over, and I must say I don’t know what to tell you.’ She had her back to him, as if the view of the garden would offer some inspiration. ‘I can’t account for my brother’s strange gift, you know what he’s like, God knows what unutterable junk he has collected over the years. I try to ignore it – it seems the best way. How he came into possession of that item I simply don’t know, but you do realise he’s not terribly reliable don’t you? I can only repeat what I told you then, to the best of my knowledge the child came nowhere near the house that day.’ She paused and turned to face him, her composure re-established. ‘I fail to see what you hope to gain from reinstating the enquiry; it’s been over thirty years. What could you possibly hope will be revealed now?’

Jack showed her an unperturbed face, and brushed an imaginary thread from the arm of the sofa, ‘Oh, I don’t know Miss Gardiner-Hallow, perhaps the truth?’

Ada gave a weary sigh, ‘I’m afraid the matter will always remain a mystery. It’s tremendously sad for those involved but a mystery nonetheless. I’m sorry I can’t help you further and that you’ve had a wasted journey.’

Jack was about to argue, and point out that she was being as evasive now as she had been then and that he didn’t believe in the veracity of her cool detachment for one minute. However, he was interrupted by a resounding crash from somewhere in the bowels of the house.

Ada Gardiner-Hallow paled visibly as the noise echoed through the building.

He watched with interest as she caught her breath and clutched at the pearls which adorned her age sagged neck. She had been fiddling with them on and off throughout the whole encounter. She seemed frozen to the spot by the sudden interjection of what had sounded like an explosion in a china factory.

Jack rose from the sofa, ‘I think we’d better go and find out what that was, don’t you?’

Ada hesitated, ‘I expect Pavla has dropped something in the kitchen.’ Her conviction seemed as feeble as her explanation.

Jack merely frowned and led the way out of the room.

*

Brodie and Dan trudged along the track, which led through the woods towards Hallow’s Court. Brodie couldn’t explain why she felt the need to go in this direction, or why she felt that Elaine had taken this path. Something primal was feeding her instincts and leading her towards the ruined chapel.

The one thing she was sure of was that she was worried. The last time she had set eyes on Elaine it was clear that her friend was in no fit state to be wandering about on her own.

She had yet to work out why Dan had chosen to turn up out of the blue on this strangest of strange days, though she was grateful to him for rescuing her from the pit of misery and guilt where he had found her drowning. She was also ashamed of having spilled her innermost fears and that the leakage had illustrated how weak she really was. She was not a fan of looking weak. Consequently they had walked in silence for what felt like hours, but had in reality only been a few minutes. Brodie couldn’t bear the weight of the silence. ‘So do you like her then?’ she asked, glad that he was behind her and that she couldn’t see his face.

‘Elaine? Yeah I like her, I wouldn’t be here otherwise would I?’ he said after a moment’s pause.

‘Well, she likes you too, so don’t go hurting her or anything when we find her. She’s a really nice lady and she deserves someone nice to be with.’

Dan chuckled at this, ‘I agree, but I wasn’t quite on the brink of proposing. Why don’t we just find her first eh?’ He shook his head in an attitude of disbelief at the cheek of the forthright child.

They broke out of the woods and entered the clearing where the crumbling chapel stood, ‘What makes you think she would have come here?’ Dan asked, peering at the squat ruin.

Brodie shrugged, ‘Dunno, just a feeling.’ She jogged across the rough grass and began to scramble over the fallen masonry.

Dan followed, his heavy rigger boots making him less nimble on the rough terrain than Brodie was in her trainers, ‘Hold up, where are you going?’

‘Down here,’ Brodie called, pointing to the rotting trapdoor, still propped open from when she had explored the crypt earlier.

Dan was dubious, unable to fathom why the kid thought Elaine would be lurking around some old ruin, but as he was none the wiser he followed her anyway.

‘Jesus, this place is a bit rank.’ He wrinkled his nose as he joined her in the crypt.

‘She’s not here,’ Brodie’s voice sounded small, constricted by unfathomable disappointment. She had seemed so sure this was the place.

‘Hang on, let’s shed some light on the subject.’ Dan fished in his pocket for the torch that he always carried, in case he needed to pry into dark corners. He played the beam around the walls of the empty chamber, finally letting it come to rest on Brodie’s pinched and miserable face. ‘I think we can safely say she’s not down here kid.’

Brodie looked as if she was on the point of tears again. Looking frustrated, defeated and just a little bit overwhelmed she threw herself back against the wall seemingly with the intention of slumping there and sulking. The bricks moved.

‘What was that?’ Dan demanded. The grating sound of moving masonry had drawn his attention away from the girl’s face.

Brodie shoved back again, the wall gave a little under her touch. Freaked, she shot forward and hid behind Dan.

He played the torch beam over the area where she had been standing, ‘Clever bastards,’ he said with a chuckle.

‘What?’

He moved across to the wall and pushed it, ‘Look, whoever built this place put in a false wall, this is a hidden door. Clever stuff.’ He showed her the solid piece of masonry that moved reluctantly under his touch. ‘I wouldn’t have even noticed if this stone hadn’t been caught under the mechanism.’ He pried out the small stone that had caused the grating noise. ‘It must have prevented it shutting properly which is why it gave when you leaned on it.’

Brodie shuddered, ‘It’s effing creepy,’ she announced.

‘Not really, quite a few old places have secret passageways and the such. I did a job a while back on an old place that had a priest hole, nobody knew anything about it until we had to replace half the staircase, and there it was, hidden away for years.’ Dan was fascinated by this latest find and warmed to his theme. ‘In a place like this, it probably connects the church to the house, built so the family can get to the church unseen, or dry in bad weather. They’re a lot more common than you’d think. I saw a place for sale recently, up in Derbyshire, that had two secret passages.’

Brodie had gone quiet, her mind making connections nineteen to the dozen. ‘We have to go in, I think Elaine’s inside.’ She grabbed the torch and pushed past him.

Dan’s protestations died in his throat as he was forced to follow her. It was either that or remain completely in the dark, literally and metaphorically.

*

They found her about a hundred yards in, lying on a marble bench, which had been built into the side of the tunnel. For one horrifying moment Brodie thought Elaine was dead. Her tentative fingers had reached out to touch the woman’s skin and found it ice cold and clammy to the touch. It was only when Dan pushed past her and grabbed Elaine up that Brodie realised the woman was still alive. The jarring movement of Dan’s intervention had elicited a moan from Elaine’s cold, enfeebled lips.

Dan was panicking. He crouched on the dirt floor and cradled Elaine. With only the dwindling beam of the torch to illuminate his endeavours, he tried to rouse her and got only feeble groans in return for his efforts, ‘We have to get her out of here, she’s freezing.’ His words caused Brodie to run back down the passage towards the crypt.

‘It’s shut behind us, I can’t get it open,’ Brodie cried, her voice rising to fever pitch.

‘Come back, we’ll have to go the other way.’ He was clinging on to the limp body which lay in his arms.

The passage seemed to go on forever. Brodie led the way, trying to illuminate their steps with a torch that was dimming by the second. Behind her she could hear Dan’s heavy breaths as he carried Elaine’s dead weight.

‘Stop a minute, I think there are some steps here.’ Brodie halted him and shook the torch as if the action would recharge the batteries. Hesitantly she probed the burgeoning darkness with her foot and found that she was right. A flight of stone steps led upwards. Step by faltering step she climbed until her hands found a wall of wood, lined with dust and cobwebs which she couldn’t afford to let herself worry about. ‘It’s just a wall, I can’t shift it!’ she called, unsure of Dan’s whereabouts in the darkness.

‘Come down and take Elaine.’ Dan waited while she tentatively retraced her steps. Everything that happened in the dark made time feel like an eternity.

He left her crouched in the pitch-black tunnel cradling Elaine’s head in her lap. Brodie was terrified and she was trembling. If the friction from her shaking could have powered the torch it would have lit the place up with a thousand lumens.

At the top of the steps Dan felt around the door, because it had to be a door. To his relief he found hinges. Huge, heavy hinges thick with rust and rimed with cobwebs, but still essentially intact.

‘Please God don’t let them have bricked this up,’ he prayed as he put all his weight against the wood and pushed. It gave, but only an inch.

‘Is it moving?’ Brodie called, her voice barely penetrating the darkness and sounding tiny and terrified.

‘Just,’ he grunted as he shoved the door again, managing to shift it another inch. The space on the top of the steps was limiting him, but he knew if he could keep shoving he might be able to open it enough for a least Brodie to squeeze through. He took a huge breath and leaned his weight and effort against the door again. He gave out an almighty roar as he pushed. His voice echoed back down the passageway in an ever dwindling and disembodied plea, passing Brodie and the inert Elaine and disappearing into the darkness.

The rusting hinges finally gave up their hold and the door burst outwards in an explosion of breaking glass and china. Dan was thrown forward in the momentum. In one surreal move he found himself sprawling on his hands and knees in a mess of glass, smashed china and books. There were hundreds of books. He didn’t have time to work out where he was. Wedging one of the books under the door he turned back and re-entered the tunnel.

*

Jack Pearson opened the door of the library onto a scene he had to look twice at to believe. A large, filthy man and a small dusty girl, who he recognised as Brodie, were hauling what appeared to be a body through a hole in the bookshelves. Around their feet lay the shattered remains of Albert’s collection.

‘Call a bloody ambulance,’ the big man bellowed, breaking the mesmeric silence in which Jack, Ada and Pavla stood as still as tombstones.

Both Pavla and Jack sprang into action, Pavla making room for Elaine on the cluttered sofa and insisting that they warmed her up slowly, while Jack rang an ambulance and started to clear the shattered collection out of the way.

Brodie noticed that Dan was bleeding from a deep gash in his hand, an injury sustained when he’d burst through the door and landed amidst the chaos. Ever practical, Pavla bound it with a strip of fabric torn from her apron. She asked Ada to fetch the first aid box. Ada ignored her and stood unmoving, fiddling with her pearls as if they were worry beads.

Most of the attention was focused on Elaine, who lay on the sofa looking like a limp facsimile of her normal self. Pavla piled on blankets and throws and eventually bustled off to find hot water bottles. She had dealt with cold people before, she informed them, back in the Czech Republic where winter could kill you if you weren’t careful. Pavla was careful.

Eventually Elaine began to shiver, her eyes flickered open and colour began to return to her cheeks. When Pavla came back with the hot water bottles she suggested that someone should lie down with Elaine and use their body heat to keep her warm. Jack looked horrified at the suggestion, and there was so little meat on Brodie she couldn’t have warmed a pencil at close quarters. Somewhat embarrassed, Dan slid under the blankets and folded Elaine close into his body, willing her to get warm. The chill of her skin seeped into his bones and it felt like a case of touch and go as to which of their body temperatures would win out.

It took the ambulance half an hour to arrive, by which time Elaine was back to consciousness though still drowsy and disorientated. At first she had tried to fight Dan off, rambling and squirming against him with weak limbs. As full consciousness returned she calmed down with the help of Brodie, who knelt on the floor and held her hand.

The paramedics fussed around, both curious and perturbed at the circumstances that had caused Elaine’s condition. Both eyed the door in the bookcase suspiciously and only backed off from their suspicions when Jack told them who he was, or rather who he had been. Taking Elaine to hospital was mooted, but she was reluctant to go – claiming that she was fine and that everyone was making too much fuss.