“No, of course not,” Charlotte said. “I never wanted him to know that he has a half sister, you see.”
A stark silence gripped the room. Amity looked at Benedict.
“We must go to Hawthorne Hall,” she said.
“Yes.”
Charlotte stared at them. “My son—”
“If you have any notion of where he may be hiding, you must tell us,” Benedict said.
“I swear to you, I don’t know. I believed him to be at Cresswell Manor.” Charlotte looked genuinely bewildered. “Mrs. Dunning claims to be well aware of my son’s nervous affliction. I was paying the blackmail. Why would she set him free?”
Thirty
Mrs. Warwick asked an excellent question,” Benedict said. He surveyed the high wrought-iron gates of Hawthorne Hall with a sense of grim certainty. There were answers to be found here, he thought. “Why would the director of the orphanage take Warwick out of Cresswell Manor?”
He and Amity had set out for the Hall soon after ending the interview with Charlotte Warwick. He had allowed only a brief stop at Exton Street so that Amity could collect her cloak and a few necessities for the train trip. There had been no time for a visit to Logan. Penny had promised to convey the information they had gained to the inspector as soon as possible.
The village where the Hall was located was, indeed, an hour from London by train, just as Charlotte Warwick had said. The cab trip from the station to the old orphanage, however, took another forty minutes over bad roads.
Hawthorne Hall proved to be an aged mansion that was slowly crumbling into the ground. It loomed, dark and isolated, at the end of a long lane.
Benedict glanced back over his shoulder. He had paid the cab to wait. The horse and driver were only a short distance away, but they were slowly being swallowed up by the fog that had set in with oncoming night.
“We won’t know why Dunning removed Warwick from Cresswell Manor until we ask her,” Amity said.
He contemplated the gates. “You make a very logical point.”
The gates were unlocked—probably because there was little to protect, Benedict concluded. In a few spots the grounds were overgrown with weeds, but for the most part there was nothing left of the gardens except bare earth.
The last of the orphans had been removed years ago, according to the cab driver. He had explained that Mrs. Dunning was the only current occupant of the house. There was no permanent staff. A woman from the village went in twice a week to clean. She had told everyone that Mrs. Dunning lived on the ground floor. The upper floors had all been closed, the furniture draped in dust cloths. Mrs. Dunning went into the village to shop occasionally and sometimes took the train to London, where she stayed for a week at a time. But aside from those meager facts, she was a mystery to the locals.
Benedict pushed open one wing of the iron gates. It moved ponderously and with a great deal of groaning.
He took Amity’s arm. Together they walked toward the front steps of the old hall. The paving stones were cracked and chipped. The windows of the upper floors were dark, but weak lamplight leaked out from around the edges of the curtains on the ground floor.
At the top of the steps Benedict clanged the knocker. The sound echoed inside the house, but there was no immediate response.
“Someone is home,” Amity observed. “The lamps have been turned up.”
Benedict banged the knocker louder than before, but again no one came to the door.
“She is in there and we are not leaving until we have spoken with her,” he said. “Perhaps she cannot hear our knock. Let’s try the back door.”
“What good will that do?” Amity asked. “If she doesn’t want to see us, she won’t answer it, either.”
“You never know,” Benedict said.
He kept his tone deliberately casual but he saw understanding in her eyes. She knew exactly what he intended to do.
“Oh,” she said. She lowered her voice still further. “I see. You do realize that entering a house without permission is quite illegal.”
“That is why we are going around to the rear of the house where the driver of the cab cannot see us.”
Amity smiled. “You always have a plan, don’t you?”
“I try to formulate one whenever I can.”
