Descending the flight of stone steps from the bare, peeling scullery into the lower regions of the house was like dropping into an icy black ocean. A miasma of dampness, rotten wood and fungoid dankness touched Paul’s nostrils unpleasantly. The torches splashed their light off dirty discoloured brick walls, once whitewashed crumbling stone pillars supporting huge floor beams, unfamiliar dark shapes that turned out to be old chests, or sticks of long-discarded furniture. Down here it was obvious that damp and neglect had worked in collaboration to undermine the stability of the house. Like an elderly, chronically ill person, Ardvreck House existed on the edge of final dissolution. Paul found snatches of property agent’s jargon rising in his edgy mind – ‘a house with character’ . . . ‘needs a little attention,’ . . . ‘splendidly situated in quiet, country surroundings’.

Part of the space under the house was divided into three store-rooms, empty now, a wine cellar – the wooden racks were still in position, cobwebbed and dirty – and a fuel cellar. The last place contained a small hill of logs, a pile of coal, grey and dull with its layers of dust, and some drums of paraffin. All these premises occupied the rear half of the available space. The front half of the house basement had never been partitioned. An outcrop of rock over most of the area pushed up to within a metre of the ground floor. Paul and Fletcher, crouched like miners in the dark enclosed space, explored the area before them, their torch beams penetrating to the front of the house or being reflected from the short, massive stone pillars set in the solid rock.

Nothing was found.

Paul recognized the relief he felt when they finally ascended the stone steps to the ground floor. It was understandable in a way but it still worried him. Certainly it was nasty downstairs but he wondered if he was over-reacting, if he perhaps had a thitherto unsuspected tendency to claustrophobia. He remembered the story Meredith had told of the Frasers’ youngest child screaming that he had been attacked by a monster in the cellars. If the child had sleepwalked down through the house to the cellar region, and then wakened in that stifling darkness, it was not at all surprising that he had been catapulted into hysterics.

Under Pollard’s direction, the groups continued their search. They cleared and sealed the ground floor, with the three women stationed in the hall to cover the stairs. Paul was in the two groups who did the billiards-room and conservatory. The billiards-room doubled as a library. Apart from the full-sized billiards-table occupying the centre of the floor and the rack of cues against one wall, one or two warped with age, the only other furniture consisted of two leather-covered armchairs one on either side of the empty fireplace. Unless one counted the seven-foot-high rows of bookshelves along the outside wall of the room. Huge sections of the rows were devoid of books.