No reason. C U Soon xx

Even Dean had found his comfort elsewhere.

Lou had been gone for days, and neither of her brothers had missed her. Katie and her workmates had been too busy living their own lives to notice that she had disappeared from hers. Played out against the background of the High Street, the very thought that she had spent the last few days in Hill House was incongruous. But she had to find out if she had helped Tom and the rest of the Mandevilles. And there was only one way she could think of to do that.

Ignoring the freezing rain, Lou retraced her steps, heading away from town. At the parade of shops on the estate and just past a sign advertising the lead story in the local newspaper – Police hunt for metal thieves continues – she bolted into an alleyway. Navigating the maze of passageways, she dodged rubbish bins and came to the exit giving out on to the pavement. Instead of turning on to her street, she crossed the road, re-joining the alley until it came to an end on the road behind her house.

It was growing darker, but a security lamp bolted to the ancient brickwork guided her past the porch of St Mary’s. Crossing the churchyard, she made her way through the crooked, moss-covered gravestones to the statue of a soldier. His head was bent, his hands rested on the butt of a rifle, a century of filth and pollution had collected in the folds of his stone uniform. Lou wiped away the beads of rain from the brass plaques mounted on each side of the plinth on which the soldier stood. With the light from her phone, she illuminated the regimented list of engraved names. Coming to the end of the Ls, she paused, bargaining with every power and every god she had ever heard of. Let him have lived. Please, let him have lived. Just two names into the Ms, the beam of light began to shake.

She steadied herself against the memorial. She’d left Tom and the Mandevilles behind, and for what? To spend an afternoon in a world where she was not missed and not wanted. Her departure hadn’t saved him. The evidence was there before her eyes: the name Thomas Mandeville, engraved in perpetuity, along with the other names of “Our Glorious Dead of the Great War 1914-1918.”

Twenty-five years after Tom’s death, Edward had abandoned Hill House forever. What horrors had befallen the Mandevilles in those years between the First and Second World Wars? Had Charlotte married Caxton? Had he destroyed the Mandevilles as he had promised Tom he would?

Something shifted inside Lou. She was behaving as though she had just returned from a rainy weekend in Scarborough when she had actually travelled to the past and back again. Travelled to the past and back! Get it, Lou Arnold. People don’t defy the laws of physics for no reason. They can’t go into a travel agent and book a ticket to go bouncing around through time because they need a holiday from their mundane or awful life.