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THREE

      When they reached the bottom road they thought they’d better get a move on. They’d got an appointment with Hugo Grierson who was going to show them round the house. He’d told them to come at two-thirty but nobody had a watch on. It felt later than that.

      They hurried past the crumbling gateposts, with their disapproving stone owls perched on top, and plunged into the gloom of the drive. It was bordered with great pine trees. The pinnacles and chimneys of the enormous house were just visible above them, and above those a dark cloud lowered. Oliver had already christened the place Castle Dracula.

      “I wouldn’t like to come along here after dark,” said Colin. “No wonder the servants are always leaving. It’d give anyone the creeps. I wonder what Mr Grierson looks like? Do you think he’s got fangs?”

      The two boys giggled but Prill didn’t join in. She wasn’t at all keen on being shown round. She wanted to skip this visit and get down to the sea, to stand on a great lonely beach with nothing between her and the endless waves, taking big breaths of deep, fresh air. Lagg’s woodland frightened her. There was a heaviness in the atmosphere that weighed down on her like some invisible burden, as if she’d been carrying Alison on her back for a very long time.

      At the curve of the drive Aunt Phyllis met them. She was agitated and attacked them all with soap and a flannel. “This won’t do at all,” she snapped. “It’s well past half two and Mr Grierson’s been out on the steps looking for you. Now come on! He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

      Colin really objected to the flannel treatment, but his aunt had already disappeared, dragging Oliver after her and leaving the Blakeman tribe to follow. Prill slipped away and shut Jessie up in the stone kennel outside the kitchen – Grierson wouldn’t allow her to come in the house – then pelted back after the others. She found them all in the great front hall of Lagg, waiting to start the tour. Her father looked rather uneasy. Hugo Grierson seemed to have the same effect on everyone. Mr Blakeman had already told them he was a very suspicious character who didn’t trust anybody and thought the whole world was out to do him down. Duncan Ross had implied that he was nothing more than a pompous old twit, and that it wasn’t a castle at all. Until about ten years ago it had simply been called “Lagg”, or “the big house” by the people round about. Grierson lived in it all alone “wi’ naither kith nor kin”, according to Granny MacCann, building up his riches, seeing no one but business people. Prill, staring up at his face from the front doorstep, thought he was the unhappiest-looking man she’d ever seen.

      “An ugsome auld de’il.” That’s how Duncan Ross had described him. Colin found the face neither ugly nor old. Grierson was tall and rather distinguished in appearance, with silky reddish hair flecked with grey. He surely couldn’t be much more than sixty, though he’d got a married daughter and a four-year-old grandson. Where was his wife?

      “Well, you’ve seen the basement already, of course,” he began, flashing a strained half-smile at the nervous little group. They certainly had. Dad had been given a comfortable bedroom and bathroom on the second floor, with a dressing room off it, but everyone else was below stairs. It was chilly and damp down there and the rooms were small and meanly furnished. What a place to put guests; they were more like dungeons. Perhaps Lagg Castle wasn’t such a silly name after all.

      Grierson explained that he couldn’t spare them very much time. A business associate was due in an hour, and he had some figures to go through, so they were hurried through the hall with no time to inspect its treasures properly; the priceless-looking rugs, roped off as in some kind of stately home, the great oriental vases by the huge fireplace, the stags’ heads on the walls and the feet of elephant and bison set in silver and marked with engraved brass plaques.

      Colin hung back to look at a painting as the others followed Grierson up the stairs. It was labelled “Grierson of Lagg in his old age, 1732”. The face was horribly fat and the mass of greyish hair must once have been jet black. The man’s skin was so dark it looked like beaten leather, but the long straight nose and the mean piggy eyes that emerged from the blubber might have belonged to Hugo Grierson himself, and he had the same thin, unforgiving mouth. Take six stone of fat away and dye his hair and this would be Grierson to the life.

      No comment was made on the portrait. They climbed higher and higher, up more flights of stairs, with Grierson giving a bored running commentary on the history of the house, something he’d obviously done many times before. As they climbed, various doors were opened briefly. “The blue room … the purple room … the chintz room …” the man parrotted flatly, then, “Helen’s room”.

      Alison saw something, tugged her hand free of her father’s, and darted in. They found her clambering up on to an exquisite antique rocking horse and looking round in greedy wonder at the shelves of toys and books. She didn’t want to see any more of this funny old house. Helen’s room was paradise.

      Grierson was looking most disapproving. Mr Blakeman quickly extracted Alison and shut the door firmly. There were loud wails all the way up to the tower suite on the fifth floor, a set of rooms where Grierson lived and where Dad was doing the portrait. She was clearly annoying Grierson. He didn’t like spoiled little toddlers and that unbearable noise they all made, but she only stopped crying when they went into his private drawing room. She saw things there that made her forget the rocking horse for a while, and so did the others.

      The main room was enormous. You could have made four separate ones out of it, none of them small. Doors led off it into various offices. Even in his own house Grierson talked like an estate agent. The room at the front of the house was a library, at the other end was a master bedroom, a bathroom and a dressing room. Everything was on a very grand scale.

      “You could fit our whole house into this,” Prill whispered to Colin. “Isn’t it gloomy though?”

      Off the dressing room was a second vast bedroom which had been cleared out to make a studio. Grierson disappeared into it with Dad. Now the tour was over he seemed to have forgotten all about the children and they wandered about looking at things on their own.

      “For heaven’s sake don’t touch anything,” Prill’s father muttered to her as Grierson swept him off to discuss progress so far. He was obsessively interested in his portrait.

      Prill went straight over to the library window with Alison in her arms. You could see the sea from there, and that was where she wanted to be, not here in this unlovely, silent house stuffed with all its dusty relics. The tide was out and the sand gleamed, peach-coloured and glistening in the afternoon sun. It was a wide, wide beach with dark woods sloping down to it, and a strip of whitish stones where the sand began. Some way out from the trees she saw a great blackened stake. It was hard to tell how tall it was, from this distance, but it looked like the trunk of a very large, straight tree, and it was driven right into the sand like a gigantic nail.

      Grierson, coming through from the studio for a minute to check that nothing was being tampered with, saw her staring down. A strange, blank look came into his eyes, then his mouth twisted into a little smile. “No doubt you’re wondering what that is? It’s an old family memorial. Not ours, mind you. Now there are Rosses round here again they waste my time keeping it standing. They go down there sometimes, scraping the barnacles off. Hub!” He gave a loud, unpleasant laugh. “Best oak that was, from my woodland. Rosses … huh.” He spat the name out as if it was poisonous.

      He went back into the studio and shut the door, leaving Prill by the open window, clutching Alison, and shaking. Grierson’s presence had had the most extraordinary effect on her. She’d felt almost suffocated by him, and by the sheer weight of malice and loathing in his voice. He really did seem to hate the poor Rosses, and that stake on the beach obviously had some strange significance for him. What could be wrong with the man to speak so savagely to a young girl he hardly knew?

      Alison had burst into tears when she saw that thin mean face close up. She’s struggled in Prill’s arms and waved her little pink paws at the open window, pointing down urgently.

      “Yes, beach,” Prill murmured soothingly. “Sand.

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