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 produced 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, but 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.
Schönbrunn called out again, and the figure seemed to listen intently. And then it vanished. One minute it was there, the next it had gone. It was as if it had been made of a cluster of spiders’ webs, and as if something had blown chill breath on it, causing the webs to shrivel. The reality, of course, would simply be that whoever was there had darted silently away.
I said, in a determinedly practical voice, ‘Whoever that was has gone.’
‘It was calling for the children. And,’ said Schönbrunn, ‘who were we told does that? Still calls for them, weeks after they vanished? Who is it who constantly walks the lanes around here, trying to find them?’
‘Battersby,’ I said, eagerly. ‘Of course. Except …’ I looked back uneasily, remembering the broken lock on the main doors. ‘That figure was misshapen,’ I said.
‘Yes, but Mrs Battersby told us that walking any distance was a trial to her husband, because he had been shot in the last war. There’s no one else it could be.’
‘Of course there isn’t.’ I felt a surge of gratitude. ‘You,’ I said to Schönbrunn, ‘are probably the sanest, most logical person I’ve ever known.’
‘Logical? I hope so. Sane? I sometimes wonder.’ But the edge of the torchlight caught his face, and he was smiling. ‘We’ll leave Mr Battersby to his sad search, and we’ll see what else Deadlight Hall can tell us.’
The passage was dark and dank, but opening off it was a series of small, separate rooms. I went into the first of them, and that was when I knew we were not in Gehenna at all – that we had never been in Gehenna, for Gehenna, if it ever did, or ever will, exist, will be blisteringly, soul-shrivellingly hot. Those rooms were cold: a deadly coldness that would seep into your bones if you were in them too long and destroy you. I went into each one, and in every one I felt the misery and the loneliness soak down into my bones. I thought: people lived here, slept here, despaired here. So strong were the feelings that in the last room, I swayed, and had to put out a hand to the wall for support. It was with real gratitude that I felt Schönbrunn’s hand close around my arm.
‘It’s all right, you know,’ he said, very quietly. ‘There’s no one here.’
I wanted to say, Oh, but there is. There are fragments of people still here – tiny splinters of lost, forgotten people, and although I have no idea who they were, I know they experienced terrible things – unhappiness, fear, deep aching loneliness – and I know it because those emotions still live.
I did not say any of it. Indeed, I surprise myself to see I am writing it now, even to you, my oldest friend. I shall leave it as I have written it, though, and no doubt when you read it, you will think once again, ‘Ah yes, poor old Maurice Bensimon, he is certainly growing fanciful as he gets older.’
‘One more room,’ said Schönbrunn, leading the way to the very end of the corridor. I wanted to say we should not bother, that we should go back to our lodgings, but of course I followed him.
At the end of the short passage, facing us square on, was a black door, bound with thick iron strips. Set into the upper half was a round window, like a single unblinking eye. I had the feeling it was trying to stare at us, that lidless eye, but that it could not quite see us because its surface was smeared and filmed with grime, as a man’s eye can become smeared and filmed with a cataract. I stared at this dead, blind eye, and thought, So this is the ‘dead light’ of this house. But Schönbrunn had taken the torch and he was shining it on to the door, and I forced myself to stand next to him.
‘It’s a furnace room,’ he said. ‘If you stand close to the glass you can make out the furnace itself.’
He lifted up the torch and I wanted to tell him not to wipe the eye clear of its cobwebby film, to leave it in its semi-blind state so that nothing could look through at us, but instead I peered through the glass. The furnace was there – black and crouching and ugly. Thick pipes snaked away from it and the surface around its door was scarred and pitted with heat. I hated it instantly, but I said, ‘Yes, I see. It doesn’t tell us anything about the twins though, does it?’ I thought: so now, let’s go back upstairs, and get away from this place as fast as possible.
But Schönbrunn was already reaching for the heavy handle and if the door was unlocked we should have to go inside. But before he had turned the mechanism his expression changed, and he spun round, directing the torch on to the incomplete stone wall behind us. This time there was no need for him to tell me to listen, for I could hear the sounds clearly.
Footsteps – not the slow, difficult steps we had heard earlier, but firm, heavy footsteps ringing out on the cold stones.
There was no time to think who the footsteps might belong to, or how we would deal with this new situation, because he was already there, stepping through the narrow opening in the wall. And this was no elusive, amorphous shadow spun from spider webs, or forlorn figure calling for two lost girls; this was a solidly built man in his forties, with a jowly face and small mean eyes. And in his hand was a gun which he was pointing at us.
He said, ‘Schönbrunn. They told me you were coming.’
At his smoothest and most urbane, Schönbrunn said, ‘My companion and I are merely exploring this unusual building.’
‘We’ll forget the rubbish about you being travellers or men from some nameless ministry,’ said the man. ‘I know perfectly well who you are.’ He studied Schönbrunn for a moment. Me he seemed to hardly notice. He said, ‘It’s a remarkable moment to meet such a well-known figure. You aren’t in the least what I was expecting.’
Schönbrunn said, politely, ‘You, on the other hand, conform exactly to the pattern of Nazi spies. Even to the stench. Corrupt and rotten.’
His voice was polite and not emphatic, but his eyes were glowing with that reckless courage.
The other man’s eyes snapped. He said, ‘I do know why you’re here, of course. You’re here to find out what happened to the Reiss twins. I’m here to prevent you drawing attention to the fact that they disappeared – which in turn might draw attention to my own activities.’
‘May we know your name?’ said Schönbrunn.
‘My name is Porringer. Paul Porringer.’
The courtesy dropped from Schönbrunn as if it was water running off oiled feathers. In a voice like iced steel, he said, ‘Porringer, where are the Reiss girls?’
‘No longer here.’
‘I know that. Mr Porringer, we do not bandy words. You are a German sympathizer and a Nazi spy. You are also British, which makes you a traitor to your country.’ This last was said with such contempt I almost expected the man, Porringer, to shrivel. He did not, of course. ‘I suppose,’ said Schönbrunn, ‘that you pass here as an ordinary Englishman.’
‘I am an ordinary Englishman,’ said Porringer, at once. ‘I’ve lived here all my life. I run my family’s pharmacy business. I’m a pillar of the local church, friendly with my neighbours, and accepted by them all. None of them has the least idea of what I am. And once you’re dead, they’ll never know the truth.’
‘Ah, but “What is truth?” as jesting Pilate once asked. What, for instance, is the truth about the Reiss twins?’
‘They were wanted for research. To help with important work.’
‘We knew that already. We think you took them away, although we don’t know how.’
Schönbrunn waited, and Porringer, as if he could not resist boasting about his own cleverness, said, ‘Several of the children developed meningitis – they were brought here. It became a temporary isolation hospital. No one was allowed in, except for medical staff. And,’ he said, ‘a helpful chemist who had a well-stocked shop and could bring various drugs.’
‘You?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you got into Deadlight Hall?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you took the twins? Where are they now?’
I thought there was an unmistakable hesitation, and I thought Schönbrunn marked it as well, because he made as if to move. Then Porringer said, ‘Their whereabouts need not concern you.’ He gestured with the gun towards the furnace room. ‘And now put down the torch, let its light shine into the furnace room, then open that door and get inside.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I shall shoot you and leave your bodies down here.’
‘You’ll be found out,’ I said. ‘Our bodies will be found – it will be traced back to you.’
‘Believe me, gentlemen, I will not be found out. You won’t be found, either,’ he said. ‘No one ever comes to Deadlight Hall. After I’ve shot you, your bodies will lie down here for years, and they’ll quietly and slowly rot.’