by Sarah Rayne
Schönbrunn said quickly, ‘But they were found in the end?’ I could feel him willing her to say the twins had turned up – that news had been received of them since he and I had arrived in England.
‘No, they weren’t found,’ said Mrs Battersby. ‘Not hide nor hair nor whisker. There were all kinds of suspicions and rumours that some nasty-minded person might have taken them. Some folk said they had seen a stranger hanging around, offering children sweets. But the police thought it unlikely anyone took the girls. They were in the hospital, you see, with other children, and nurses and doctors all around – very strict isolation it had to be, and they kept all the doors locked and didn’t allow anyone in apart from the doctors and nurses. They wouldn’t even let the parents in.’
‘An isolation hospital,’ said Schönbrunn, thoughtfully. ‘Yes, it would certainly have been difficult for anyone to get in there.’
‘It’s my belief the girls weren’t as poorly as we thought, and they ran away to get back to their homes. I can only trust to the good Lord that they found their way there, and that some Christian soul helped them, for the thought of them out there in the snow and ice … I keep hoping we’ll hear something. I wake up many a night, thinking I can hear them chattering away to one another in their bedroom – although Mr Battersby believed they didn’t always need to speak to understand one another, if you take my meaning. And then I think, well, perhaps tomorrow there’ll be a letter or a telephone call to say they’re all right.’
‘I do hope there will,’ I said, and I meant it more than she could have known.
‘Mr Battersby took it very badly. There’s nights he goes out and walks the lanes – even though walking any distance is a sore trial to him, having taken a bullet in the last war – but he can’t get rid of the idea that he might come across some clue that’s been missed. “Girls,” he’ll call, just softly like, not wanting to alarm them if they’re in earshot, which of course they aren’t. He knows it’s illogical to call for them, but he says he can’t seem to help it. “Girls,” he calls. “Where are you?”’
I wanted to tell her who we were and how we, too, were trying to find the twins, for the thought of that poor man wandering the lanes calling for the lost girls was almost more than I could bear. Schönbrunn sent me a warning glance.
‘Folks said it was the infirmary’s fault they went,’ said Mrs Battersby, ‘but I never believed that, for those doctors and nurses were good as gold to those children, and you’d maybe like to put that in your forms as well, Mr … er … I did hear the Sister in charge left the place almost immediately afterwards, though. I don’t know what happened to her – there was some story that she couldn’t face having lost two of her charges, and that she simply walked out that same night or it might have been the next day.’
Schönbrunn frowned, and I could see he was wondering if this might be a useful line of enquiry. But he did not say anything, and I managed to ask about the infirmary itself. Had it been near here?
‘Oh, yes. Ugly old place it is, just a few miles away. If you’re going back to Oxford you’ll likely see it across the fields. The nurses scrubbed out a few of the rooms and disinfected them to use as wards, and the men carried in beds and suchlike.’ She shivered. ‘I dare say the children’d be too ill to notice much, but I wouldn’t want to be in that house. A gloomy place it is, built more than a hundred years ago, and an odd history it’s got, if you can believe all you hear. At one time it was made into some kind of orphanage – Victorian days, that was – and they say all manner of cruelties went on there. But you can’t believe all you hear.’
I was about to ask outright for the name of the place, but Schönbrunn forestalled me, saying, ‘It sounds something of a landmark.’
‘Oh, it is. You ask anyone hereabouts about it and they’ll tell you that Deadlight Hall is a real local landmark.’
On that note, we made good our escape, thanking Mrs Battersby for her hospitality. Schönbrunn shook her hand and assured her the details she had provided would be used in a responsible and discreet fashion. I said they would be of immense help to the government.
‘I’m a black liar,’ I said, glumly, as we careered back to the high road. ‘And so are you.’
‘But in a good cause.’
‘We deceived that good, trusting woman.’
‘Are you sure she was all she appeared?’
‘For pity’s sake, you aren’t telling me she might have been a German agent? Or working for Mengele?’
‘I’ll admit it’s unlikely,’ he said. ‘But we trust no one. You’ll have to square the deceit with your conscience as well as you can.’
‘I shall have my just deserts one day,’ I said, resignedly. ‘And when I die, I shall very likely be cast into Gehenna.’
‘What—?’
‘The place of fiery torment.’
‘I know what Gehenna is,’ said Schönbrunn. ‘I was going to say what did we do with the road map, because if we’re going to find Deadlight Hall before it gets dark, we should start looking out for it.’
It was then that we rounded a bend in the road, and saw it across the fields. The house with the bad history. Deadlight Hall. I stared at it with a feeling of cold dread gathering at the pit of my stomach. If ever the Jewish Gehenna existed – if ever there really is a place of torment for sinners and non-believers, a place where the worshippers of Moloch burned their sons and daughters in fires – then it would look exactly like this grim dereliction.
And now, of course, as you read this, you’ll be saying, ‘Oh, dear me, here’s old Maurice Bensimon being dramatic again,’ but I promise you, my friend, this place was as menacing and as forbidding as anything that ever came out of the Torah’s darker pages, or, indeed, out of a Gothic tale of horror. (No, I do not read such books, but I have eyes, also ears, and I know about such things.)
Schönbrunn stopped the car and we both sat looking at the Hall for several moments. Then he said, ‘I think we had better go inside.’
I had never felt less inclined to enter any building, but he said, ‘This is where the twins vanished from, remember. There could be all kinds of clues.’
‘That ward sister.’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘At least the place is empty,’ I said, but Schönbrunn pointed to a long window on the side of the main doors.
‘It isn’t empty,’ he said.
The window, like all the windows, was almost glassless, but jagged shards still clung to the stone lintels. Framed in the opening, its outline distorted by the broken glass and blurred by the dying afternoon light, was the shape of a figure. Its head was tilted away from us, as if it was looking for something within the house. Then, as we stared, it turned and looked outwards, as if watching our approach.
Schönbrunn restarted the car and drove it on to a small patch of grass near the front of the house.
‘Are we still going in?’ I said, and saw the gleam in Schönbrunn’s eyes I had once seen in the shadow of Buchenwald, when he faced a dozen Nazi guards and shot most of them.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, softly. ‘We’re going in.’
TEN
The lock was broken on Deadlight Hall’s massive doors – not just rusted away, but clearly torn from the frame, splintering the wood in the process. There could have been a perfectly innocent explanation for this – a tramp wanting to break in for a night’s shelter – but there could also be several less innocent explanations.
There was no particular need for stealth – if challenged, we had only to say we were strangers to the area and curious about a local landmark – but we both moved quietly and cautiously. Schönbrunn and I have been in some strange places and menacing situations during the last two or three years, but I don’t think either of us had ever encountered anywhere as eerie as Deadlight Hall.
As we paused in the doorway, I said, very softly, ‘There’s no sign of the figure we saw. It was at that window by the door, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ Schönbrunn pro
duced a torch and shone it warily. ‘There’s thick dust on the floor,’ he said. ‘But it’s undisturbed, as if no one has walked in this hall for a very long time.’
‘No footprints,’ I said, and as I spoke, I felt as if something cold and unpleasant twisted at my stomach. ‘And yet to get to that window a person would have to cross the floor.’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Perhaps we didn’t see anyone after all. Perhaps it was a trick of the light.’
‘I think there was someone there,’ said Schönbrunn. ‘He – it could even have been a she – was standing in that window recess, looking out.’ He frowned, then said, with decision, ‘We mustn’t become distracted. We’re here to search the house, nothing more. Because if we’re believing that woman’s story, it’s from here that the twins vanished that night. So we need to find out if there are any clues.’
‘The police searched the house,’ I said, uneasily. ‘Mrs Battersby said so.’
‘Yes, but the police wouldn’t have been looking for the kind of clue we’re looking for.’
‘What kind of clue are we looking for?’
‘I don’t know until we find it,’ he said, which was exasperating, but Schönbrunn can be very exasperating sometimes.
‘But it was the depths of winter when they vanished. If they wanted to run away, wouldn’t they have waited for better weather?’
‘It would depend on why they ran,’ he said, then, with a note of near-violence, ‘I hope they did run away,’ he said. ‘Because if they didn’t, it means they were taken.’ Taken by Mengele’s people … Taken because he wanted Sophie and Susannah Reiss inside Auschwitz, and his agents had specific orders … The thought was in both our minds.
‘So,’ said Schönbrunn briskly, ‘it’s imperative that we pick up their trail. You marked what the Battersby woman said about people thinking there’d been a stranger hanging around – offering the schoolchildren sweets?’
‘Oh yes.’
Neither of us needed to say more. Both of us were aware of Dr Mengele’s behaviour inside Auschwitz; of how he played the part of a kindly uncle, securing the children’s trust by giving them sweets and sugar lumps, all the time luring them closer to the door of his laboratories.
Forcing the images away, I said, ‘Where shall we start?’
We surveyed the hall. I suppose we had expected to encounter a scene of dereliction, but although the plasterwork was peeling and the floorboards were dull and scarred, it was not as bad as we had expected. There was a stench of damp and mildew, but there was none of the miscellaneous, often squalid rubbish so frequently seen in abandoned buildings. You and I, my friend, have seen too many of those since our country was ravaged. I sometimes think I shall never wash away the clinging stench of bomb-damaged, smoke-blackened ruins.
Schönbrunn said, ‘They’d keep the children together, I think, so it’s likely they’d use the biggest rooms.’
‘Here on the ground floor.’
‘Yes. Let’s start here, at any rate.’
I don’t know what we expected to find, but what we did find, in an inner room, at least confirmed Mrs Battersby’s story. Carved on a wall, low down, at child height, was the Jewish symbol for S. I do not need to describe it to you, my friend, but to both of us, that mark was as clear as a curse. Sophie and Susannah Reiss had indeed been here – they had left their initial.
‘It’s reassuring on one level and terrifying on another,’ I said, straightening up from examining the mark. ‘And why would they leave their initial here?’
‘It needn’t be sinister,’ he said. ‘Did you never carve your initials on a schoolroom desk?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You must have been an inordinately well-behaved child. We’d better explore the upper floors.’
‘Still no footprints,’ I said, as we reached the first floor.
‘No. So the figure we saw didn’t come up here. But why hasn’t he – or she – come out to challenge us? We haven’t been particularly noisy, but we haven’t tiptoed around.’
‘He might be hiding,’ I said. ‘There could be all kinds of perfectly innocent reasons for that, though.’
We looked into all the first-floor rooms, then we went up to the second floor ones, which were smaller. All the rooms were empty – some had a few pieces of furniture, and some of them were draped in dust sheets, making strange ghostly outlines in the dimness. Schönbrunn pulled the dust sheets away, but nothing lurked or crouched beneath any of them.
‘There’s nothing,’ I said. ‘In fact—’ I broke off as Schönbrunn grabbed my arm. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, instinctively lowering my voice.
‘Listen,’ he said.
At first I could not hear anything, then, between one heartbeat and the next, came a soft voice.
‘Children, are you here?’
There was silence, and I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I was aware of Schönbrunn listening intently. The voice came again.
‘Children, where are you?’
It’s difficult to convey in a letter how extremely disturbing that soft voice and those words were. There was almost a fairy-tale quality – a grim echo of all those wicked stepmothers and witches in gingerbread cottages – all the hungering ogres who hunted little children, and carried them off to dark castles. I remembered again Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, who stalked children and carried them off to his own dark castle: the fortress called Auschwitz, where he performed his experiments. Experiments that included amputations, chemicals injected into eyes to change their colour, the attempts to create conjoined twins by sewing sections of their bodies together … Twins.
‘It’s coming from above,’ said Schönbrunn.
‘Attics?’
‘There’s nowhere else it could be.’ He was already going towards a small, narrow flight of stairs. I followed slowly. I will not use the word reluctant.
The attic stairs were steep, and I was slightly out of breath when we reached the top, but Schönbrunn was already exploring. Those attics were dark and dingy, oppressive from the closeness of the roof directly above, and thick with a dreadful despairing loneliness. I must have flinched, because Schönbrunn said softly, ‘Whatever happened here, happened a long time ago.’
‘I hope it did. I can’t make out very much anywhere, can you? Unless – is that a door in that corner?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Take the torch, while I try to open it.’
The door resisted at first, but it eventually yielded, and swung inwards.
I cannot quite say that something was in that room, for we did not actually see anything, but there was the strong sense that it was not empty. I moved the torchlight slowly over the cobwebbed walls, seeing an old bed frame and a marble washstand. But for a moment my heart bumped with fear, because surely there was someone standing at the far end, immediately where the wall met the roof slope – someone wearing pale draperies, the head turned to watch us …
‘Children, are you here? If you’re here I’ll find you …’
The whisper came again, as faint and insubstantial as the drifting cobwebs, and we both spun round. But there was no one there, and when we turned back to the room the outline had gone, and there was only a fall of tattered curtain, moving slightly in the ingress of air from our opening of the door.
‘There’s nothing here,’ said Schönbrunn after a moment, but for the first time ever I heard a note of concern and puzzlement in his voice. ‘Nothing,’ he repeated, more loudly, and closed the door, turning the handle so firmly I think it probably jammed. ‘Let’s go back downstairs and see where else to look.’
‘There was a door under the stairs,’ I offered. ‘Probably it leads to a scullery and store rooms. Places where a child – two children – might have hidden and left more clues.’
‘Indeed so.’ He sent me an approving glance.
The door, which was set well back in the hall, opened with a scratch of sound – it was not a particularly loud noise, bu
t it was enough in that old house to make me look nervously over my shoulder. But nothing moved – or did it? For a moment I thought I saw the figure in the window recess again, but when I shone the torch it was only the silhouette of an old tree immediately outside, dipping its branches towards the window.
‘There’s a flight of steps,’ said Schönbrunn, peering through the door. ‘I can’t see much else. There’s a disgusting smell, though. Where’s the torch?’
The torch’s beam cut a triangle of cold light through the darkness, and Schönbrunn began to descend the steps without hesitation. There was no indication that this would lead to sculleries, or that it would lead anywhere at all, but we had to make sure.
At the foot of the steps was a narrow passageway, and Schönbrunn pointed to the ground again.
‘Still no footprints,’ he said, then stopped and turned to look back along the dark passage.
‘Something there?’ I said, but even as I spoke I could hear it.
Footsteps. And the sound of someone breathing – doing so with difficulty, like a sufferer from asthma might.
‘Whoever it is,’ said Schönbrunn, very softly, ‘is in this passage with us. Between us and the door leading to the hall.’
Fear clutched at me all over again, but Schönbrunn called out, and his voice was perfectly steady.
‘Hallo? Who’s there? We’re down here. Two of us. We’re exploring the house.’
That ‘two of us’ was clever. It indicated that we could put up a fight if necessary. Not that I was ever much use in a fight. Masterly inactivity has always been my strength.
We waited, shining the torch back towards the door.
‘There’s no one there,’ I said, after a moment, but still speaking softly.
‘I can’t see anyone. No – look there!’
But I had already seen it. A shadow cast on the wall at the end of the passage, as if someone was standing there, just out of sight, but had not realized its shadow was visible. It was not particularly tall and there was a deformed look to it. The shoulders were hunched, and the head was bent to one side.