‘Yes. Oh yes!’ The television producer’s fingers fumbled at the buttons, lit from the torch held by Smith. The green magic eye blazed and the cassette spools began to turn. For two minutes that seemed as long as hours the men stood rigid as more noises, gasps, raps, throbbing sounds insinuated themselves on their hearing.

‘All right,’ said Meredith tensely. ‘Let’s go in. Hunt, keep the recorder running.’

The narrow passage seemed to crowd in upon them as they approached the door; the darkness seemed intent on suffocating their torch beams. Pollard, in the lead, turned the handle and pushed open the door.

They stepped into the seven-sided room, shone torches over walls, floor and ceiling, opened cupboards, examined the red seals on the uncurtained windows. The seals were intact. The room was empty, cold and morbidly depressing.

They stood round the octagonal table looking at each other, searching their torch-illumined faces for guidance.

‘We did hear those noises from here,’ said Hunt. ‘Didn’t we?’

Pollard nodded.

‘We did. We all heard them. So at least we know that Wilson’s story is . . . no story.’

Meredith moved.

‘Hunt, play back the tape. Just to make sure.’

Startled, Hunt pressed the necessary buttons. And again the eerily irrelevant noises filled the room. At least, Paul thought, it was objective. His eyes narrowed. It was different somehow. Concentrating, he listened. Something was added. The hair bristled at the nape of his neck and the bitter cold of the room was suddenly even more sapping of his body heat.

‘Turn it off!’ he gasped. ‘Listen!’

The recorder snapped silent. But something else remained, faint, elusive, so difficult to hear that he had to listen in total concentration. The others heard it too, the quiet, subdued lost sound of a woman weeping.

‘For God’s sake,’ Smith muttered.

‘It’s not in this room,’ Pollard stated. Meredith turned and faced the black chasm of the open door.

‘No, it’s down the stairs. Or along the passageway.’.

The distant sobs continued, declaring utter misery and hopelessness.

‘All right.’ Meredith’s voice was too steady. ‘We’d better get downstairs in any case. If we can hear this up here, it’s probably very loud downstairs. I suggest we retrace our steps, meet on the first-floor gallery. Hunt, turn that recorder on again.’

They left the room to itself, found their way down the narrow, steep flight of steps. They met the others on the gallery. So far no one else seemed to have been wakened by the low sobbing, still audible, still nerve-scraping in its wretched loneliness.

And now it seemed to come from the dark vault of the hall beneath them. It was insistent; it called on its listeners’ stores of pity and humanity, it tugged at each man’s natural desire to help a fellow being in distress.