Twenty-seven

Outside the Shafers’ apartment the smells of Barrington House clouded: wood polish, carpet shampoo, brass cleaner, and dust. And something else. A hint of sulphur. Of something recently burnt, like gunpowder.

Descending and ascending on either side of the elevator, the stairwells were lit by the electric lights, but the very air was gloom. Half-lit like a photograph taken in poor light. It made Apryl uneasy, but strangely apathetic too. Unless she kept moving and focused on specific tasks, she could imagine herself just lying or sitting in silence and waiting, alone, in here. But waiting for what?

At the thought of knocking on the Shafers’ door, her stomach went hollow with nerves. They were old and difficult and didn’t want to be disturbed. Stephen and Piotr had said as much. Their rejection of her request to meet them was down to their connection to Hessen and what they had done to him. With her great-uncle Reggie leading the way. Only under emotional stress had Mrs Roth confided in her. Maybe she had even expected her own end was near. The thought made Apryl deeply uncomfortable, as she must have been one of the last people to see Betty Roth alive. Stephen confirmed as much that morning when she arrived.

But the elderly resident had confided enough, and Lillian herself had hinted at the same ghastly series of events occurring half a century ago. But in her fear of interrupting Mrs Roth’s scant and haphazard disclosure, she had failed to ask about Reginald’s death. Not even Lillian had been able to share those details, because the final truth of what happened back then was too unpalatable for Mrs Roth and her great-aunt to recount. And so she was left with suggestions of Hessen’s evocations of unnatural powers and terrifying sounds, of hideous paintings and a plague of nightmares that even direct confrontation with the man had failed to erase. Things she too had glimpsed and was terrified of encountering again in these dim halls and wretched rooms, where the shadows were all wrong and where every mirror she looked into suggested a presence. She looked about, anxious when her eyes moved over the mirror on the landing.

But there had been a conflict and it had ended badly for Hessen. Of that she was certain. A murder they had kept secret all these years. A secret that drove them apart and into isolation and madness. But it was a story she would have retold now. She would know how Reginald died, and how Hessen had been murdered, and she would know this afternoon.

She raised her hand.

Her index finger met the cold brass of the door buzzer.

She pressed the button softly, too softly. It made no sound. She depressed it more firmly and held it down within the decorative brass surround.

What did you do here?

There was a pause and then the buzzer vibrated against the tip of her finger. At the same time, behind the heavy wood of the front door she heard a faint chime.

And across the greyish glass of the window in the stairwell, the weak sun must have moved its face further behind the ever-present cloud, because she felt the air cool and darken about her.

She stepped back and waited. And waited. Because no one came. She leant forward and pressed the bell button again. And again.

And then she heard footsteps rapidly descending from the floor above, down the communal stairwell, and felt the guilty urge to run away like a kid. The waiting was draining her confidence, her purpose. A shadow reared up the wall and she turned to greet the figure coming down in such haste. It must be a child, to move with such alacrity and speed. But could a child cast such a shadow?

To her right voices eventually came forward from deep inside the apartment. They gathered around the sound of the chime. A woman’s voice, sharp and anxious. Though Apryl could not make out the words. And then much closer. Close enough to be directly on the other side of the door, an elderly man’s voice came to life. ‘Well I’m trying to find out.’ It was raised in annoyance and directed back down the hallway towards the distant cries of the woman.

Apryl looked back at the staircase. The shadow grew larger but thinner and dissipated up near the ceiling. The footsteps on the stairs stopped. No one came around the bend in the staircase. ‘Hello?’ she said, her voice weak. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Who is it?’ For an old man, the voice on the other side of the Shafers’ front door was surprisingly strong, his American accent still detectable, though tempered by decades spent in London. His voice was directed at her, so she guessed he was peering through the little spyhole in the door. She could hear the rasp of his breath from the exertion of moving.

She looked away from the stairwell, suddenly eager to get inside the apartment with the elderly couple. ‘Hi, my name is Apryl. I just wanted—’

‘Who? I can’t hear you?’

She sighed with exasperation. ‘Apryl Beckford, sir! Can I come in, please?’

‘I can’t hear you.’ And then he shouted behind himself again, at the woman. ‘I said I can’t hear them. So how do I know? Would you just quit it! I said I’d take care of it. Don’t bother. Don’t bother getting up. I said I don’t need you.’

‘I just wanted to. ’ Apryl began to say. No use, he wasn’t listening and couldn’t hear her even if he was.

Old fingers scraped and fumbled at the latch as if it were the first time they had performed the operation. Tom Shafer’s breathing grew louder and more strained, as if he were lifting something heavy.

When a gap appeared between the edge of the door and the frame, the man was so tiny she had to look down to see his face, which nudged forward. Severely lined baggy skin, dotted with bright white stubble, hung about a wet mouth, from which the lips had withdrawn. A rivulet of clear drool shone in a deep ravine at the corner of his mouth. Thick glasses magnified his watery eyes. They were so dark as to appear black in the moist discoloured whites. A blue mesh baseball cap was perched untidily on the little figure’s head.

‘Yes?’ Like that of a cigar smoker, his rough voice seemed to emerge from somewhere behind his breastbone and was liquescent but incongruously deep and bone dry at the same time.

‘Hello sir. You don’t know me.’ She spoke loudly, but not at a volume that would carry to the woman back inside the apartment who she assumed was Mrs Shafer. ‘I’m the great-niece of Lillian from apartment thirty-nine and I really need to speak with you, sir. Please, just for a few minutes.’ The door was partially open, but she instinctively felt it could close very quickly. She cast a final nervous look over her shoulder at the staircase, suffering the feeling that whatever had thrown such a shadow and moved so swiftly was now waiting just out of sight, and listening.

Occasionally blinking, Tom Shafer looked at her in silence. His expression crumpled into an anxious suspicion that she felt was a near-permanent feature. Slowly, he shuffled his body about to look behind him, down the hall, as if making sure his wife was not visible. Then turned back to face her. ‘You look just like your aunt. But I can’t see you. I’m sorry. We told Stephen. He should have made that clear.’ He began to close the door.

Apryl stepped forward, surprising herself. ‘Please, sir. I have to know what happened to my great-aunt and uncle. They were your friends. Your neighbours.’

He breathed out noisily. ‘That was all a long time ago. We don’t remember anything.’

‘I know about Felix Hessen.’

At the mention of that name, he looked up, his wet eyes startled into an animation they’d previously lacked.

‘I just need to know if what my great-aunt wrote is true. That’s all. Some closure on her life. Please sir, it’s just for me and my mother. We won’t tell a soul.’

Tom Shafer squinted at her. His heavy glasses moved up his small nose. ‘Young lady, your great-aunt was as crazy as a snake. And you’re starting to remind me of her. She used to come up here with just the same attitude. We don’t want to be bothered by any of that.’

That? What did he mean? She smarted at his flippant remark about Lillian. ‘She had her problems. I know that. But you know why too. Mrs Roth told me. She told me what happened. Before she died.’

The door reopened, wider than before. ‘Betty wouldn’t say a word. She was many things, but she was no gossip.’ Despite his wizened body and little head in the ludicrously oversized hat, she was again surprised by the power of his deep voice. It suddenly made her feel foolish and guilty, like a kid caught misbehaving and bothering adults.

She cleared her throat. ‘Mrs Roth didn’t tell me everything. But she was very frightened before she died. And she needed to confide in someone. In me. She felt she was in danger. That something in the past was having repercussions right now. She told me about the paintings, sir. And about Hessen’s accident. What he did here. How he changed things for all of you. My great-aunt wrote of it too, in her diaries. Between them they’ve told me a lot of things. Including what happened after Hessen came back here and started tormenting you all over again.’

Tom Shafer didn’t speak for a while, but the tension of the space between them was filled with his raspy breath. He suddenly looked ill and terribly frail as if he could easily fall and not get up again.

‘I just want a few minutes of your time. That’s all. I have to know.’

‘I can’t. I’m sorry. My wife. ’

This aged and fragile man suddenly made her think of Lillian, alone and afraid and abandoned, but never relenting in her struggle to escape the ghosts in her memories that had become the terrors of her every day. She’d never given up. Not like Mrs Roth and the Shafers, imprisoned here until death with their nurses and pettiness and powerlessness. Apryl wiped at the tear that tickled her cheek.

Without looking at her, as if he was too ashamed to meet her eye, Tom Shafer opened his front door and then hobbled away into the darkened hallway. He paused after a few unsteady steps and turned his head to the side. ‘You coming in or what?’

Dabbing at her nose, Apryl walked behind him. But now she was inside she wasn’t even sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.

‘Keep your voice down,’ he whispered. ‘If you disturb my wife you’ll have to leave.’

She nodded, but wondered whether he’d said this out of protectiveness for his wife or out of fear of her.

She followed him between the bare and stained walls of the hallway and into a large living room. It appeared the couple only used the one little corner of this space, the part with the television and the two worn armchairs huddled together about a little table on wheels, covered with small Evian bottles, tissues, sweets, a half-eaten bunch of purple grapes and scattered packets of medication. The rest of the room was empty save for an ancient sideboard and a dinner table piled high with cardboard boxes, faded towels and wrinkled bed linen. It was another poorly lit and miserable little pocket of Barrington House. With all their money they lived like bums in one corner of a penthouse. The carpeted floor was covered with crumbs and bits of paper. There were no pictures on the walls. No mirrors. Only the outlines of frames that once hung there, the paper bleached around the dark rectangles and squares.

The Financial Times was spread over one of the two chairs. ‘Take a seat. I can’t offer you a drink. It’d take me an hour to get to the kitchen and back. And we don’t have that much time.’

‘Please, don’t apologize. I’m sorry to disturb you. I really am. I know I came here uninvited. I don’t want anything but a few words. An explanation. It’s just—’ She swallowed the tightness in her throat. ‘—I’ve found out so many things since I’ve been here. Things I now wish I didn’t know. But I can’t go home without knowing the rest of my great-aunt Lillian’s story.’

After falling into the chair and panting to get his breath back, Tom Shafer peered up at her. His aged face was calm now, his stare unfaltering, resigned, with no time for social discomfort despite the squalor of his surroundings. ‘You really do look like Lilly,’ he said, and finally smiled. ‘She was a very beautiful lady.’

Apryl’s face suddenly suffused with warmth at what he’d just said. Not because he thought her attractive, but because he’d confirmed the connection between her and Lillian. ‘Thank you. She really was, wasn’t she? I’ve seen the pictures of her and Reginald.’

Tom Shafer kept on smiling. ‘Sometimes it hurt just to look at them. They were something else.’ He looked away, at nothing in particular. Just out there into the scruffy room he occupied every day. ‘But things change. Enjoy what you have when it’s there. Don’t go looking for trouble.’ It sounded like a warning. He looked back at her. ‘I hear you’re going to sell that place of Lilly’s. Well I’m going to ask you to do it, right away, and to get out. Don’t waste any more of your life here than you have to.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I thought you knew.’

She avoided his eyes and looked instead at her hands clasped in her lap. ‘I know some things. But not everything. I can’t put all the pieces together.’

‘And you think I can?’

‘But you were there. Back then.’

He shook his head. ‘But who can say what happened? I’m not sure I can. Betty sure couldn’t. Nor Lilly. And the others aren’t with us any more. It was not something in the normal course of a person’s experience. Not something we were prepared for, or could deal with. It should never have happened. We just got caught up in it because we were too proud and too damn stupid to get out when we had a chance.’

‘But caught up in what?’

He let out a long sigh. ‘I don’t suppose it makes a goddamn bit of difference who knows now. I can’t believe Betty told you anything. I really can’t. But who would believe a damn one of us old fools? And I have no idea what the hell Lilly was writing. She wasn’t herself. Not for a long time. It all beats the hell out of me, but something happened for sure. By God, we’ve paid our dues for it. We all have.’

Apryl looked down at her lap again, feeling herself fill up with a familiar frustration and despair. ‘But you can tell me how Reginald died. Lillian couldn’t bear to write it down.’

Tom Shafer looked up at her. ‘You ever heard the expression that two people can love each other too much? Well that was Lilly and Reggie. We never thought she’d survive Reggie’s passing, and I guess we were right in some ways about that.’

‘But how did he die?’

His stare hardened. ‘He killed himself. Jumped from the living-room window of their apartment.’ He spoke without a pause, blink or stutter.

‘Where the roses were,’ Apryl said. ‘Where she put the roses. It was a memorial.’ She looked deep into Tom Shafer’s eyes. ‘Because of Hessen. Because of the way he tormented them and drove them crazy. But how did he do it?’

Tom Shafer shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You must. My great-uncle was a war hero who flew missions over Europe. I have his medals. He survived and came back here to the love of his life. And then killed himself over a dispute with a neighbour? And in the process broke his wife’s heart so badly she went crazy from it. I can’t accept that no one knows the reason why he would do that. You were close to him once.’

Tom Shafer shook his head. ‘Now you are getting ready to understand why we don’t speak of it and never have done. Beside your aunt, who never let it go. Maybe she had more cause than the rest of us. But how can I explain it? You can’t understand unless you were there. Reggie wasn’t the only person to take his life. Mrs Melbourne did too. She was the first. Went right off the roof and hit the damn fence. They had to cut her from the railings. And then there was Arthur. Betty’s husband.’

‘No.’

He nodded. ‘Oh they covered it up with some damn bullshit about heart failure, but he took an overdose.’

‘But why did none of you leave? Why can’t you leave? Lillian died trying. I don’t get it.’

Tom Shafer’s voice rose in anger. ‘Don’t you think we damn well tried? But we can’t! And that’s all there is to it. Can’t go further than a damn block in any direction and we don’t know why.’

‘The paintings. The Hessen paintings. It’s about the paintings. My great-aunt said it was all connected.’

Tom Shafer’s little body seemed to shrink further into the large chair. Now he looked like he was just bone and skin inside a plaid shirt and sweatpants. His gnarled hands trembled on the armrests. He closed his eyes and soon his entire body was shivering. Apryl felt an urge to go to him, like she had done with Betty Roth, and to hold him. To go to this tired and broken-down old man and to comfort him as no one had comforted Lillian. ‘I don’t want to remember them if I can help it,’ he murmured.

‘Lillian dreamed of whatever was inside those paintings. Then she started to see it. Around her.’

‘We all did. Somehow it never stayed inside those damn paintings.’

‘It’s why Reginald took his own life. And the others.’

Tom Shafer nodded. ‘Maybe they were the lucky ones who had the guts to get out of this. But we suffered too you know. We never had any children because of it. She miscarried every time.’

‘I’m sorry.’

A silence thickened around them in that dusty little corner of nowhere. Tom Shafer broke it and spoke as if to himself. ‘My wife still thinks she can protect us in here. She doesn’t know any better. I can’t afford for her to be upset. Not in here. So you’ll have to go soon.’

‘You burned them.’

Tom Shafer never said a word or even nodded.

‘And killed Hessen. Together. I know you did. You and Arthur Roth and Reggie. I don’t want to make trouble with this. I just need to know why Lillian couldn’t come home to us. It’s what she wanted. She said so in her journals. But something was done here that drove her husband to kill himself. The same thing that kept her here until she died. I want to know how Felix Hessen could make all this happen after his death. Can you tell me?’

Tom Shafer shook his head in despair. ‘You have no idea what he was. I don’t know what Betty told you, but he brought things here. We didn’t know what. Or how he did it. I still don’t. None of us ever did. Lilly had some crazy ideas, but we weren’t buying it. But whatever it was, it was more than us. All of us together or individually. We soon found that out. And it was the end of Reggie and some other good people too. Including your aunt and now Betty. I’m pretty damn sure. That woman had a strong heart. I don’t believe it failed. Me and my wife are all that’s left.’ He stopped talking and swallowed. Perspiration had begun to make his forehead shiny and he began to look grey in the thin light as if he was seriously ill.

‘Are you OK, sir?’ She reached for his arm.

‘Don’t believe a damn thing they’re saying downstairs’ he said, his voice a whisper. ‘Something’s not right down there. Just get yourself out of here, girl. Like we should have done.’

Tom Shafer then shook his head and sighed as if reluctantly accepting bad news. It was the weariest sound she’d ever heard come out of a person’s mouth. ‘The whole damn building used to shake. It came out of his apartment. About a year after he moved in here. Make no mistake, he was a crazy bastard before all this started. Never left the building. Not once, I’m sure of it. You’d bump in to him on a staircase, or down where the staff used to live, making his weird signs in the air like he was drawing. Messing around with the pictures on the walls. Talking to himself, and not in English or any goddamn language I ever heard. The porters used to catch him all the time. They kept an eye on him. They never liked him.

‘And at night he was doing things in his apartment that could dim the lights on the other side of the building. Used to fill the air in Betty’s apartment with something you couldn’t see, but could tell was there all the same. And if you listened real hard you could hear voices. Not like you and I are speaking, but a hundred voices. All going round and round down there with him.

‘We all heard it for the first time in Betty’s place. We were having dinner and we heard it coming up out of the apartment below. In Hessen’s place. And once you heard it you never stopped hearing it.

‘Whatever he had in that damn place came out. It came out of there and got into everything else. Came through the building. Got behind the walls and inside mirrors and pictures. You saw things in them that weren’t there before. Even if you were the only damn human being in a room you suddenly knew you weren’t alone when you looked into a mirror. Sometimes it was one of them things, sometimes more than one. But you saw them. Moving. And then they came into our dreams. They got inside our sleep.

‘I don’t know how he did it. I made a hundred million on Wall Street. I’m good with what I can see and explain. But not with this. We had no defence against it. Neither did he.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He lost his own goddamn face down there. He lost his whole face and his whole goddamn mind in whatever he had moving around down there. Something he couldn’t control once he got it started.’

Apryl swallowed. ‘What happened to his face?’

Tom Shafer kept his eyes lowered. He thought for a while and then swallowed. ‘Arthur called Reggie and Reggie called me. Betty and Arthur had heard screams. Hessen screaming. So we went down with the head porter and let ourselves in. And found him in the living room. All on his own with all the rugs pulled back to the wall. But you could see how messed up his face was. Like frostbite, Reggie said. Black and burnt-looking, with the flesh gone down to the bone and eyes. But there was no fire. No chemicals. No blood. And he sure as shit hadn’t been to the North Pole, though we may have wished it on him. We had no idea what caused those injuries.

‘An ambulance took him away. And we thought that was the end of it. But he survived and when he came back, he just started it up all over again. All them noises, circling. Like a whirlpool. All down in his place.’ Tom Shafer broke his train of thought and looked at her. ‘How did Betty die?’

‘In her sleep, Stephen said.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s a damn lie.’

‘Betty said he’s come back. Do you think he could really come back?’ Apryl prompted him, terrified he’d stop talking, like Betty Roth had done.

‘Back? He never damn left. He’s kept us here and he’s been waiting for something to start it all over again. He’s still here for us. Which makes me as crazy as Lilly for just saying such a thing. He’s been biding his time. Until now, he couldn’t do much else beside scare the shit out of us if we went near a picture or mirror. Or make us sick as a dog if we tried to leave the neighbourhood. But things have changed again. Now it’s different. Like he’s got some help.’

Apryl struggled to control her voice. ‘And Reginald. You all killed Hessen.’

Tom Shafer shook his head. His voice was barely audible. ‘It wasn’t a case of killing a man. Reggie just put him in there with it. We did nothing to stop it. And that crazy bastard never came back out again.’

‘Put him in with what?’

‘I don’t know. None of us did. But it sounded the same as whatever was in them paintings on his walls, or filling that room that must have been the size of a football field.’

‘I don’t understand. ’

Tom Shafer swallowed, noisily. ‘Second time we went down there, we took the keys from the head porter’s safe ourselves. Reggie took a pistol too. We let ourselves in and Hessen was waiting for us in the hall. So damn thin he looked like he could barely stand on his own two feet. Just wearing his dressing gown with this mask over his face. Made from something red that went over his head like a hood and tucked into his collar. But you could still see through it. See that fool’s messed-up face.

‘Reggie demanded to know what he was doing. What he had in that room, making all that noise. The living room. And Hessen just laughed at us. Like we were nothing. Like we were pointless. That’s how he made you feel.

‘And Reggie lost his temper. Got him by the collar and mixed it up with him. Knocked him down over a chair that busted right from under him. We tried to hold your uncle back while all the time trying not to look into those pictures on the walls. But your uncle was a strong man and he just shrugged us off and dragged Hessen by an arm across the hall floor. Right up to that room he dragged him, and opened the door.’

Tom Shafer stopped talking and began shaking. He reached for a bottle of water, which Apryl quickly uncapped for him.

‘Well, Hessen really started struggling then. And carrying on like he did the time he lost his face. Screaming like a lunatic. But Reggie tossed him into that dark space. With all the cold coming out of it. And those noises. All them voices speaking at once and crying out for help. A room where you couldn’t see much beside the bit of the damn floor with all them markings on it. Voodoo shit or something, right behind the door. But it was a place you knew went on forever. And Reggie threw Hessen in there. Like he was a doll. Just picked him up and threw him through the damn door.

‘And we all held that door shut on him.

‘We heard him carrying on for a while. Screaming and banging and begging for us to open the door. And then just bumping against it, like he had no strength left. Until he stopped that too. Until it all stopped.

‘It was like he faded away, with all them other voices in the wind and cold. Don’t ask me what it was. None of us had a goddamn clue. But we all felt about twenty years older the day after.’

Apryl gulped. Her voice was only a whisper when she spoke. ‘Hessen was dead?’

Tom Shafer shrugged. ‘When we opened the door, the room was empty. Not a soul in there. Just them four mirrors and the candles that were still burning in the middle of all the marks on the floor. I swear to God almighty that’s what we all saw. But he wasn’t there. He’d vanished. Hadn’t gone out the window either. They were all locked, and anyway, no one would walk away from a fall from the eighth floor.’

‘The paintings. You. ’

‘Every damn one of them. Took them down from the walls in the hallway and in all the bedrooms. Burned them to ash. Bust them out of the frames and burnt that crap he’d done and all the strange markings under them. Put them all in the furnace they used to have here to burn coal.’

From the hallway outside the lounge door, a shrill voice suddenly destroyed their whispered sharing. ‘Is there someone in here? I can hear ya’ll talking through that damn wall! It’s driving me crazy.’ The voice was breaking down into tears and hysteria.

Tom Shafer suddenly broke out of the miserable trance he’d fallen into while recounting the story. His face was now stricken with panic. The door handle turned. He struggled to his feet. Apryl stood up quickly too and turned to face the doorway, her own discomfort turning to fear. In this place it was contagious. The door opened.

A huge bulk of a body filled the gap between the lounge and the hallway outside. The moon of Mrs Shafer’s face was terribly old, but the skin had a curious sheen to it, as if she were wearing a thin plastic membrane over her features. It must have been some kind of face cream. Coils of black hair were piled under a blue headscarf that was sloppily pinned in place. It was squashed flat on one side where she must have been lying against a pillow. The small black eyes were ferocious.

Mrs Shafer clasped each side of the doorway as if to support herself from the shock of seeing this stranger in her home. Immediately her lips began to tremble, whether from rage or grief it was hard to say. ‘What is going on in here?’

Tom Shafer raised two thin arms that wavered out in front of his little doll body. ‘Now don’t go getting all upset.’

‘I. I. I. ’ She stared at her husband in astonishment, as if the greatest betrayal of their entire time together had suddenly been revealed. ‘She’s got to go! I’m telling you. I want her out of here! I don’t believe my eyes! I mean, what were you thinking? God damn you for bringing trash into my home!’

She was insane. Apryl understood this in a heartbeat. ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. I never meant to disturb your rest.’

Without even looking at her, without breaking her stare from her husband, as if the sight of Apryl was intolerable, she began to speak in a deeper and more controlled voice that was somehow worse than the shrieking, ‘We don’t want you here. You’re not welcome. I told Stephen and you pushed your way inside here. You took advantage of this dear old man.’

‘Now dear. All she—’

‘I’m not talking to you!’ she suddenly shrieked at the tiny figure in the crooked baseball cap, her face flushing a dark crimson. ‘I surely don’t want to be speaking to you for a long time!’

‘It’s not his fault. I meant no harm.’

‘Leave here now! I won’t have such, such, such things in my home. How dare you! How dare you! I’m calling Stephen.’

‘You won’t call a damn soul!’ Tom Shafer suddenly roared at his wife.

Apryl fled for the door. ‘Then excuse me and I’ll leave,’ she said to Mrs Shafer, who still wouldn’t look at her for even a moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom Shafer said to Apryl in the hallway, as he hobbled after her. ‘She’s not herself. Not today. It’s all very hard for her.’

‘Can I call you?’

‘No you cannot call! Or come up here again!’ Mrs Shafer shrieked. She would follow them, stop, then follow some more and clasp her hands over her mouth. As her little husband shuffled in front of her, Apryl half expected to see Mrs Shafer reach out and seize her diminutive mate, before dragging him into the great belly that pressed through the stained front of her floral housecoat.

Tom Shafer reached out and touched Apryl’s elbow by the front door. She turned about and looked into his frightened eyes.

‘I can’t believe this is all still going on!’ Mrs Shafer had recovered her voice. ‘I wonder how long it has been going on!’ And now she had begun to cry, while crowding behind them, her great body hovering protectively and threateningly behind her tiny husband.

‘For the love of Christ,’ Tom Shafer whispered to himself. Then turned and shouted, ‘Would you shut your damn fool mouth!’

It made Apryl shake and want to be out of this terrible place without delay, but the old man’s crooked fingers dug into her arm. He was breathing so hard now she thought he could die at any moment. His lips were moving. She leant down towards his wet mouth.

‘Don’t trust them,’ he said. ‘None of them downstairs. They’re helping him.’ And with that he released her arm and turned back towards his weeping wife.