‘Yes. I think so.’

Julie spun the wheelchair around and headed towards a door at the far end of the room, the wheels crunching in the debris. As she eased the chair through the doorway, the old man suddenly called out.

‘Je reviens, Miss Louisa. Je reviens.’

By the time Lou had collected her thoughts enough to realise what he had said, Julie and her uncle had disappeared. How had he known her name? She must have told him.

Turning the beam of the torch on the vast room, Lou found it followed the depressing pattern of destruction – no fireplaces, no decoration, walls stripped back to bare brick and tainted by scorch marks and mould. She directed the beam to the ceiling and saw that huge sections of plaster were missing, leaving the joists above naked, like ribs in a dead man’s chest. If Hill House were a dog, it would have been put out of its misery years ago. Surely there was only so much punishment a building could take. It could be only a matter of time before its structure became compromised so completely that it collapsed in on itself. Or was razed to the ground by a fire at the hands of vandals.

Lou picked her way back out to the hall. If this was to be her only chance of exploring Hill House before the Council locked it again, then she knew exactly where she wanted to go. Sweeping the torch around, she found the door she was looking for. It was small and narrow. An entrance designed with function, not form in mind.

Passing though the doorway, she relied on the beam of the torch to make her way in the inky blackness. The plaster crumbled beneath her fingertips as, with her free hand, she felt her way along the damp wall. She plunged deeper into a network of narrow, low passageways, into the part of the house that had never known wood panelling or elaborate furnishings. These passageways were utilitarian and modest, like the people who had once passed through them, unseen and unknown to the family they served. Lou imagined the servants moving from room to room, floor to floor; housemaids struggling with buckets of steaming water; footmen running from the kitchen to the dining room, desperate to deliver hot food upstairs; the hall boy struggling with scuttles of coal to the upper floors in the dead of night, ready for a maid to make up the fires in the bedrooms before the family woke.

Lou thought back to her dissertation in her final year at Sheffield – To assess the impact of nineteenth and early twentieth century global conflict on the politicisation of women in Britain. As part of her research, she had visited countless historic properties – including Caxton Hall, the grand stately home across the valley – in an attempt to immerse herself in the conditions of working women of that era. Each property had proved disappointing; sanitised for visitors, with whitewashed walls, gleaming brass pots, tour guides warning you not to touch, printed bookmarks in the gift shop, and cream teas in the café. She should have broken in here sooner to find out what it was really like, instead of playing at understanding peoples’ lives.