A rumbling, scraping sound – the trunk dragged across a wooden floor noise – came from above. He dropped the curtain, crossed to the bedside table, retrieved the big rubber-covered torch. After checking his memory of the bedrooms’ occupants from the chart, he opened the door. The hall was a black well.

Pollard and Hunt were in bedroom five, in the opposite corner of the floor; Meredith and Smith in bedroom four. Paul, his way illuminated by the cone of torchlight, walked round the gallery. He tapped on the doors of bedrooms four and five in succession and waited, shivering with excitement.

Both bedroom doors opened in quick succession. Pollard and Smith appeared. Paul’s tension lessened slightly.

‘The noises have started again. Footsteps and the dragging noise.’

‘Right.’ In the low illumination, Pollard’s face was alert. Smith, yawning, was not as eager. Behind them Paul saw Hunt and Meredith.

‘Give us a second to get something on,’ said Pollard.

They disappeared, leaving the doors ajar. Paul remained on the dark, icy gallery, his tension rebuilding itself. Supposing the noises had stopped by the time they got upstairs to the room. He’d look a proper idiot. A dismaying thought struck him. Supposing they were still going on, but only he could hear them. He thought of Carol lying asleep in their bed and hoped she wouldn’t wake up. She hadn’t the previous night. Did that mean it was true? That only he could hear the noises . . .

The four men joined him, equipped with torches. Hunt also carried a battery-operated tape-recorder. Pollard seemed to have assumed command.

‘Meredith, you and I will go up the stairs on this side, make our way along the servants’ corridor. Jeremy, you and Ted and Wilson will go up the other flight. We’ll meet outside the tower-room door.’

Paul found himself padding along the corridor to the foot of the narrow flight he had already climbed twice in the past twenty-four hours. The three men halted at the dark passageway with its bare, narrow steps leading upwards and listened. Paul could hear Hunt’s open-mouthed breathing beside him. And something else. From somewhere upstairs, faintly but quite definitely, sounds came. He swallowed dryly. Could the others not . . . ?

‘Ha!’ The sergeant’s breath was released. ‘I hear it. Come on!’

They followed him as quietly as they could up the steep stairs. The sounds became clearer. Scraping sounds. At the top they saw the torches of the other men cascading light along the low passageway. In a pool of light cast by a single torch the five men listened. A rasping, scrabbling sound came from the end of the short corridor leading to the door of the tower-room.

‘Hunt!’ Meredith’s whisper was urgent. ‘Get the recorder on.’