Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Catherine turned about and began fumbling her way back towards the village.

On the other side of the village, in the lane that would return her to the Red House, only when she had grasped the unruly intrusions of the hedgerows did she stop hobbling.

She knew at once that her own car was no longer where she had left it.

They had stolen it with the same spiteful intent with which they’d emptied her bag. But when did they steal it, and how, let alone why? She’d not heard a car engine anywhere near the village. And surely the population was too old for car theft.

Had they taken Tara’s car too?

None of them were allowed to leave.

Stop it!

Catherine glanced back at Magbar Wood. She’d just run through it, huddled into herself, too afraid to look up and about. But she’d known the night’s celebrations were far from over.

As she’d run through the village, she’d hoped the effigy in the glass cabinet would have been returned to the church and that the pageant crowd would have begun dispersing. But the crowd appeared to be regrouping. Perhaps for the next stage of the pageant. A notion reinforced by the formation of one purposeful mass in the main lane, and what now appeared to be a lit procession about the relic that had been mounted onto the float.

Horrified, she stood and watched the glass casket glitter amidst a haphazard concentration of candles at the intersection of the two lanes, no more than twenty metres away from where she stood shaking.

She was sure the veiled face inside the transparent case was now watching her.

Catherine turned and ran.

Every step further away from Magbar Wood became one step closer to what she guessed was the destination of the ghastly parade: the Red House.

Behind her, the discordant rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ fog-horned and twisted its horrible ditty into the air.

The newspaper cuttings beneath the plastic coverings in the album were either yellowing or fragmenting. Grease from his fingers and crumbs from his desk had further tainted the paper whenever it was brought out for his delectation.

Leonard raised the metal shade of the desk lamp further from the album. With expertise in the preservation of old precious things he wondered at his carelessness in the matter of this newsprint, but also remembered that had the police investigations ever neared him, he may have been required to dispose of his interest in certain local matters.

Maybe the original stories from the newspapers had been archived somewhere. Or had been, what did Catherine call it, ‘digitized’? Or was it ‘digitalized’? He couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t entirely out of the question that he might replace his copies one day. Though inquiries might still carry a risk.

Leonard briefly looked to the drawn blinds. Outside the office the street had fallen silent. He had not heard a car for over twenty minutes.

Even though he could recite the best part of each article from memory, he bent to his reading. And started at the beginning of the album featuring the first of the ridiculous Pied Piper stories and the initial rumours of ‘the green van’. The stories began in 1959 and lasted until 1965.

Leonard wiped a tear from his face when he saw the photographs of Margaret Reid and Angela Prescott smiling back at him. The portraits were taken at the children’s home the two girls resided in, until their leaving of it in 1959 and 1962 respectively. A long time ago their pictures were displayed in every national newspaper.

Margaret had Spina Bifida, Myelomeningocele. Poor Angela was born blind. They’d both been abandoned young. The Magnis Burrow School of Special Education was the closest thing to an actual home they’d ever known. A place where they made the kind of friendships that lasted for ever. And the place in which they found the path to salvation.

No arrests were ever made after the disappearance of Margaret Reid. But two male care-home workers, who were lovers, were interviewed after the abduction of Angela Prescott, and later released. At the time of Angela’s disappearance the green vehicle was described as a tradesman’s Morris Minor van with no signage, then briefly the vehicle even became an ice-cream van in some news reports.

Leonard moved on and read the front-page story from a long extinct newspaper about the Magnis Burrow School of Special Education’s closure in 1965. Then he progressed through the album to find the news stories of Helen Teme, a Down Syndrome girl local to Ellyll Fields, who vanished from the reopened and refurbished Magnis Burrow School of Special Education in 1973.

In the Helen Teme pages, Leonard paused to treasure each photograph of the holiday snaps of the hapless Kenneth White, beloved of those distant Sunday tabloids. In each picture, strands of White’s comb-over rose in the breeze that came off the water of a choppy sea in Rhyl. The same three bleached pictures supplemented every story of the sex offender’s arrest for the suspected abduction and murder of little Helen Teme. There were pages about his release, rearrest, re-release, and subsequent suicide by asphyxiation in his white Austin Princess outside his council flat in 1975. Case closed.

Kenneth White had been a volunteer with disabled children, from whom he’d once taken his pick. And Ken was prolific with Down Syndrome girls, which led to him being investigated when Helen Teme disappeared. But Magnis Burrow was an institution that White had never worked at, nor had any contact with, and probably never laid eyes upon when he was active in Leominster during the sixties and early seventies. He had form.

One paper even tried to resurrect the Pied Piper story of the sixties around White. Leonard marvelled at the ignorance of the press. The Pied Piper led able-bodied children away and left the lame behind. But surely this story was the complete opposite.

The Magnis Burrow abduction cases weren’t consistently picked up by anyone but the American journalist, Irvine Levine, who wrote a series of stories for the News of the World, while working in England at the time Helen Teme’s abduction made headlines. Levine was a tenacious man and the first hack to champion the link between Helen Teme and the two earlier cases of missing children, the all but forgotten Margaret Reid and Angela Prescott. Three abductions from the same home across its two incarnations.

Leonard remembered that summer being one of great personal unrest. But it seemed the press at the time hadn’t much stamina for the story of a handicapped girl’s abduction. After making his brief link Levine became busy with a bestselling book about something else entirely. Case forgotten.

As with Margaret Reid and Angela Prescott, Helen Teme was never found. The school that all three girls had been taken from was closed for a second time in 1975.

When Alice Galloway was said to have been abducted from out of the disused Magnis Burrow School’s grounds in 1981, after climbing through a hole in the perimeter fence, the story made the nationals for a week, and the locals every day for three months. ALICE ISN’T IN WONDERLAND.

Plenty of people were interviewed by the police that time, though none were arrested. Leonard read of the hopes and then the dashing of these hopes with renewed relish. Alice Galloway’s parents campaigned for the police to do more in their search for the missing girl.

The next time the Magnis Burrow School made the headlines in Leonard’s clippings, but only at local level, came with the decision to demolish the derelict school buildings, in 1988, along with most of the surrounding residential area of social housing in Ellyll Fields.

The last part of the album dealt with the human remains found by labourers after earthworks were conducted to level the Magnis Burrow School to build a dual carriageway in 1989. Briefly, the smiling faces of Margaret Reid, Angela Prescott, Helen Teme and Alice Galloway reappeared for a week, as did the Pied Piper name once given to the child snatcher who had never been caught. But this time, the green van, and ice-cream van, weren’t mentioned.