THREE
Dr Francis Sexton sat in his car and stared through the windscreen at the forbidding building before him. Even on a bright day in March when the sky was making every effort to shrug off the greyness of winter and allow little patches of blue to appear, Newfield House looked bleak and gloomy. To Sexton the building, stark against the bright sky with drab stonework marked with the strands of long-dead ivy, and the strange acute angles of the gables, along with the blank shuttered windows, made the place look like an illustration from a work by Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher – maybe. The house, an early Victorian monstrosity, stood in isolation in its own grounds, now uncared for and neglected, like the inmates within.
Sexton shifted his gaze to the paint-peeling not
