House of Small Shadows Read Free

larger collection’.
    Her camera flash exploded white light into the room as if the miserable guest house had been struck by lightning. Unaware of the time, Catherine photographed each item from a variety of
angles.
    Mr Dore remained a no-show.
    When she finished the viewing she packed away her notes and camera, turned out the lights, closed and locked the door to the room. Downstairs her dinging of the bell failed to summon the old
receptionist, who possibly doubled as the owner. She left the keys on the counter of the reception alcove. Unlatched the door and let herself out. As she pulled the door shut she noticed the CLOSED
sign faced the street. Forgetting she was upstairs, the unsociable proprietor must have locked up.
    Catherine wondered if Edith Mason had insurance to cover what she now estimated to be half a million pounds’ worth of antique dolls left unsupervised in a bedroom of a dingy guest house
with no online listing.

 
THREE
    Before she headed back to Little Malvern, to tell Leonard about her extraordinary find, Catherine detoured to a place she was once very familiar with, Ellyll Fields, or
‘The Hell’. A village between Green Willow and Hereford, where she’d endured the first six years of her life. A place she’d never returned to and had tried to forget.
Because the scene of the abduction and probable murder of a child she had known well was a part of the world she’d not felt inclined to revisit in the following thirty-two years of her life.
The thought alone of returning had always been enough to make her feel sick. When visiting clients in Herefordshire, she’d even become adept at not seeing that part of the page in her road
atlas.
    This afternoon would mark a return to a time in her life she’d never shared with anyone besides three therapists and her parents. That morning, for an unpleasant moment, merely driving
close to ‘The Hell’ to get to Green Willow had felt like a trap. And a fate predestined. One she had hitherto suppressed. But as advised by her most recent counselling, returning to the
scene would reveal the place to be innocuous and bereft of the poignancy of her lingering childhood dread.
    She had been prepared by a cognitive behavioural specialist to identify and repel outbreaks of paranoia. Which she duly did, because coincidence was rarely conspiracy. She knew her feelings
about her birthplace were irrational. And these days, she had to keep in mind, the distant part of her memory that ‘The Hell’ occupied only really intruded upon her thoughts when she
was confronted by compatibly tragic news stories about missing children or bullying.
    Despite her own reassurances, and those of others, for the first time since she began working for Leonard Osberne, she wished her boss was able-bodied. Were he not confined to a wheelchair
Leonard could have attended to the Mason account in person and she could have maintained her distance from ‘The Hell’.
    She’d never seen Leonard so excited about the prospect of a new account either. ‘This could be big, my girl. If Edith has any of her uncle’s work still hanging around out
there, we’ll probably make the papers. And I’m not talking about the locals. Didn’t I promise I’d make you a star! You wouldn’t get this kind of work in
London.’
    Running away was rarely graceful, or even satisfactory, and Catherine’s departure from London still harnessed the power to warm her with shame, and occasionally freeze her with panic.
Reliving the memory of a particular
incident
that ruined her professionally in the capital still stretched her mental resources beyond a healthy tension. Only once she’d reached her
parents’ house in Worcester, eighteen months before, did she feel she’d passed beyond the range of her enemies in London, along with the unfortunate reputation she’d fled. But her
afternoon in Green Willow and her current journey to Ellyll Fields forced her to acknowledge that by leaving London