House of Small Shadows Read Online Free PDF

was familiar with those small smiling faces, photographed in black and white. To an older generation they were close to icons in Ellyll Fields. Though
when Catherine was the same age the girls were when they went missing, they were icons fading on the newsprint that bore their remembered images. When her nan told her the story of the missing
girls who were never found, probably as a warning about strangers, she had shown Catherine her own yellowing cuttings that she kept in an old shortbread biscuit tin. Back in the day, only the local
nans still kept the horror alive in Ellyll Fields. No one else seemed keen on remembering the abductions. And once Catherine brought her curiosity about the three missing girls to her home, along
with the awful black danger she attributed as existing beyond their grainy likenesses, her father lost his temper with her nan for ‘filling her head with horrible things like that’.
When Alice Galloway went missing, not for the first time did Catherine attribute a great wisdom to her nan.
    ‘I hardly remember all that. We moved away when I was six. I had no idea Green Willow was close to Ellyll Fields. I only found out by looking on a map to find that guest house. I’ve
never been to Magbar Wood either. With the exception of a family holiday to the seaside I doubt I ever went further than a mile from our house. We were skint. My mum and dad never talk about that
time in their lives. Pretty sure they’ve never been back either.’
    ‘Ellyll Fields is between the two places. They’re still all aligned on a Roman road, despite town planners meddling with that whole area, in all kinds of ways. And they have been
doing so since before you came into this world, my girl. You know, I took you for a border girl the first time I laid eyes on you.’
    ‘Get away.’
    ‘It’s the fiery hair and green eyes with those astounding freckles. Even after Monmouth was shoved on the map, the valleys have always been full of beautiful girls with your
colouring. Like it or not, you are a classic example of a Dobunni maiden.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘The tribe that was down there before the Romans. Raised merry hell.’
    ‘You’re old enough to know that? I never took you for a day over seventy-five.’
    ‘Steady. Don’t make me come over there. I could still reach you by lunchtime, and don’t you forget it, my girl.’
    Laughing, Catherine came out of the kitchen with the tea things, but felt a couple of inches taller as she moved. Leonard had an eye for a strange beauty in the artefacts they valued and sold,
in the same way he noticed things about her. Little things she couldn’t possibly identify through the opaque fog that worrying about her weight often enshrouded her within. He made her feel
better about herself than she ever could, and more than any boyfriend had done too. It wasn’t that Leonard was incorrigible – he wasn’t. She always understood that he genuinely
admired her and was proud of her. Even protective. After her debacle in London, his gentle mentoring and grace had done far more for her than a course of antidepressants and a new therapist.
    ‘Well, I look forward to meeting the frightful Edith Mason on Friday.’
    ‘If you get past the housekeeper. It says in that letter that there is one of those too.’ Leonard grinned. ‘Never underestimate a housekeeper, Kitten.’

 
SIX
    Uncomfortable with what she intuited as a scrutiny, by whomever had spoken from inside the Red House, Catherine pushed her voice inside like a shy child.
‘Hello?’
    She peered around the door without touching it and blinked at the gloom to adjust her sight. Saw a narrow space with tall ceilings. A vestibule with walls papered in claret and patterned with a
geometric design that looked medieval. ‘Hello?’
    All of the interior doors she could see were closed, one on her left, another one on the right-hand side of the passage. Probably cloak- and boot-rooms. The top panels of the closest doors