Free A Kind of Vanishing by Lesley Thomson

the grimy windows, a giant concentrating crow perched on his high stool, shrouded in his jacket.
    Deep among the plum and apple trees where the Judge couldn’t hear the incessant squall of children, and – before she died when her eldest child, Mark, was nine – the high pitched call of Rosamund his wife, he would work into the night. At last with reluctance, he had presented the doll’s house to two catarrhly bemused children whom he had expected to be semaphorically appreciative of his gift. His son’s reaction particularly enraged him. Mark walked around the butcher’s block on which the house was placed, his hands behind his back, the nonchalant pose actually a desperate demonstration that he recognised its significance. At last Mark had gleefully pointed out the clue. There was always a clue. The Judge didn’t approve of unfettered generosity so every present he gave them was a test. In each of the two playroom windows in the big house there were six bars giving the long wide room the oppressive air of a prison cell. But in the doll’s house playroom windows there was none.
    Mark Ramsay never forgot the look of contemplative fury his father gave him for revealing his mistake. The Judge had not imagined the playroom with bars on the windows because he had avoided the room once his parents had made the gardener install them, thus making them pointless for the rest of his childhood as he was the only surviving child. Now his own son had unmasked his father’s apparent labour of love as a labour of atonement. Although only ten years old, Mark Ramsay knew utterly that an irrevocable severance had taken place. From that moment, until his own death, he was the Judge’s greatest champion. His defence reached evangelical fervour in the face of Isabel’s scorn.
    Mark and Virginia could only play with the house under the Judge’s supervision; they did so with the highly tuned attention of bomb disposal experts. Soon they dreaded the sight of it standing on its grisly plinth in the playroom like a body on a slab.
    Judge Ramsay had constructed each storey separately to slot into the frame of the house like a shelf into a fridge. He spent days reproducing the fretted stonework that hung like a web between octagonal pillars to recreate the geometric shadow on the wall of the actual house. The Ionic pillars supporting the pediment of the front porch were particularly hard to get right, and took him months. The front and back were effectively large doors, and he saw that his first idea of using hardboard was impractical, for it would quickly deteriorate with constant opening. In the end he chose pine, with fascias of oak where dark paint wouldn’t do. He became skilful on a lathe despite a discouraging start, which included severing an Ionic column in half along with the top of the middle finger of his left hand. One obituary incorrectly attributed this injury to a letter bomb sent by a relative of a man who had been hanged. Thus did myth become truth.
    The Judge was most proud of the priest hole that ran from the minute study on the second floor to emerge behind a wood panel on the landing. It was operated by pushing a knob in the centre of a Tudor rose to the right of the mantelpiece exactly like its real counterpart. It comprised a tiny chamber behind the study wall with a narrow airless passage leading away from the study along to the landing. It had been particularly complex to construct, but after several weeks the Judge had achieved it. He didn’t tell Mark and Virginia. This well-kept secret was his big test. He hadn’t known of the existence of the priest hole until finding the plans. He would reward whoever discovered his clue.
    If one of them did, they never confessed.
    Until his son exposed his error of the windows without bars, the Judge had considered the plasterwork his one failure. Time was lost as he wrestled with tiny renditions of the intricate mouldings for the ceilings on the ground floor. Eventually he