THERE WERE DARK patches on the patio at the back of Haglin House. Could they be from the blood of Mungo Peers, the innocent child, ruthlessly slaughtered for his good intentions, or poor Sheba, Poynder’s English Setter?
They are rust from that leaking drainpipe, Hefty diagnosed.
He had made a study of corrosive stains, following the wrongful conviction of his grandmother for amputating an engineer’s toe.
The key, as Matilda had written, was under the mat from where Gerrund retrieved it to unlock the back door. We found ourselves in the kitchen.
I was not aware that you had lost yourselves, Ruby quipped, only for Hefty to explain patiently what I had meant.
It was almost as unnervingly quiet as it had been in the attic when I was re-en-ottomaned – another word I intended to send to the Oxford Dictionary. I had never thought of the place as noisy, but there were no footsteps, no voices, no clatter of pans as we made our way through. At least, though, I had the footfalls of my companions and the rustle of their apparel as we passed; it felt as if we were making a rumpus during an especially sacred part of a church service.
The kitchen was much like any other – quarry stone slabs – a large, scrubbed pine table, scarred by knife wounds and burns from pots. The twin Belfast sinks were marked by iron rubbing on the ceramic surfaces. Copper pans dangled from a rack and jelly moulds hung on the walls.
To our left was a closed door marked Pantry and, straight ahead, an open door to a corridor.
It all reminded me of the times I would sneak below stairs at Thetbury to cadge raw pastry, which my mother had warned gave one worms. Sometimes I would be allowed to scrape out the cake mix from a huge brown bowl. Cook took my small stature and skinniness as a personal insult.
You do be ganty-gutted as a mawkin – which meant thin as a scarecrow in the official language of her county – she was telling me as I toyed with a wooden spoon.
‘This way, milady,’ Gerrund was calling, and I put the spoon back with its companions in a large old marmalade jar.
The kitchen maid’s room was first, plainly furnished, the bed unmade.
The door to the butler’s pantry was unlocked and I stepped in to see a neatly made bed, a pine table with two brown account books upon it and a chair tucked underneath.
Agnust opened a wardrobe to find it empty and Gerrund peered into the silver cupboard. It had been cleaned out.
‘Don’t blame you,’ he muttered as he closed it again.
There was a housekeeper’s room though, to my knowledge, there had been nobody fulfilling that role in the short time that I was there. Increasingly, many an employer saved money by getting their other employees to share those tasks, it being well known by masters, but less well known by their underlings, that servants have little to occupy their time.
Up the wooden stairs we went, past the study, the window repaired and the desk set out tidily again with a fresh blotting pad. Agnust ran her fingers proudly over the bullet-crater in the wall and wandered off. Gerrund was looking into the room opposite when we heard a sharp breath.
‘Lady Violet,’ Agnust called urgently.
I heard footfalls and followed.
‘Jesus!’ Gerrund breathed, and I do not remember what I gasped.
Dr Edward Poynder was spreadeagled on his back in what must have been his consulting room on an operating table. It surprised me that he had had one, for I understood that he only carried out minor procedures there, but that was the least of my concerns. There were cords tight around his wrists and ankles running to each of the four wooden legs. He was naked, his torn clothes thrown in a pile in the corner. He had been cut open from ribs to groin and his intestines pulled out, hanging from his abdomen onto the floor in a coiled slimy mess. His limbs all bore multiple wounds from scratches to deep incisions. His face was mutilated with his nose cut off and his eyes gouged out, but less hacked than I might have suspected.
‘They wanted us to recognise him,’ Gerrund answered my unspoken question.
Agnust rattled a kidney dish and I saw that it had broken teeth in it, and I could only assume that they came from that gaping, clot-filled mouth.
‘They weren’t lying about hurting him,’ Gerrund said grimly and pointed to Poynder’s right hand. Every plate had been torn out of his fingers. I peered over and found the same had been done to the left and all his toes.
‘Oh God,’ I breathed.
‘Satan more like,’ Agnust corrected me and I could not argue with that.
I knew he had murdered two wives, Mungo Peers, Sheba his dog, his ex-maid Edwina, Beryl Walker, Danny the Diamond King, the laundress and Wally Hopkins, not to mention the waitress who he had attacked, but even so, I was shocked.
‘How could they have been so cruel?’ I whispered.
‘They loved him,’ Gerrund stated, walking slowly around the table.
‘You mean her,’ Agnust corrected him.
‘No,’ he stated flatly. ‘They were fond of her but they loved him.’
Nothing kills like love, Ruby whispered as I gazed about in fascinated disgust.
I thought that I had witnessed terrible things in the Poynders’ home with the imprisonment and slow murder of an innocent woman. I could not have known, the last time I left, that the true horror of Haglin House had yet to begin.