Free The Hunting Ground by Cliff McNish

Ben’s room earlier. It was meant to be hidden under magazines in Elliott’s own bedroom. Ben had obviously taken it from there and added it to his personal collection of portraits. That collection seemedto be growing. No less than six paintings of the owner gazed down from the walls now.
    ‘Why did you put the picture of the pike up?’ Elliott asked him nervously.
    Ben just shrugged.
    Feeling his pulse quicken, Elliott turned to the diary. The first entry started the day after the last. Nothing was missing. But the tone was different. Previously the diary had contained jokes, unusual facts, as well as occasional references to events taking place in the village. Now only two subjects retained the attention of the increasingly frightened diarist, Theo Stark.

JANEY
     
    9th November. No matter what Mum and Dad say to her, Eve keeps going inside the East Wing. ‘It’s no accident,’ Janey told me this morning. ‘It’s not the mystery of the dark Eve finds so alluring. She’s not being naughty, Theo. It’s
him
. It’s Cullayn, murmuring from inside. Always the hunter.’
    ‘Cullayn?’
    ‘The original owner,’ Janey said grimly. ‘The man who built the East Wing and did all those paintings your mum’s starting to admire so much. Vincent Cullayn. The murderer of Alice, Sam, Leo and Nell. And a lot more adults.’
    While I stood there blinking in shock, Janey took my hand and walked us across the estate. On the way she told me about Alice Everson. Alice died in 1689. Officially she fell down some stairs while delivering a message to a labourer in one of Cullayn’s outbuildings. But what really happened, the ghost version of Alice told Janey, was that Cullayn carriedher off to his hunting ground. He let her loose on it, counted slowly to
one thousand
and then went after her.
    Nell Smith was found lifeless in the kitchen of the main house. Everyone thought she’d been working alone there for hours. In fact, Cullayn had snatched her out, carried her to the hunting ground and brought her back to the kitchen while she was still freshly dead.
    ‘But … but why did he kill them?’ I asked, unable to believe what Janey was telling me.
    ‘He liked killing,’ Janey said evenly. ‘Who can say why anyone enjoys something like that? Sam thinks it started with the animals – Cullayn had always brutally hunted those. Then one day a troublesome farm hand disappeared, and doing away with him seems to have given Cullayn a taste for murder. The deaths and disappearances gradually escalated after that. The four kids Cullayn took made a nice change for him from the adults. Easy prey, of course, but it also gave Cullayn the opportunity to be creative. He invited Leo Jenkins into his study. While he was there Cullayn offered him a little gift: a bright blue cape. Leo was a bit surprised when Cullayn began hanging heavy bits of metal on his own legs and shoulders, though. Cullayn loaded himself down with so many weights for Leo that he couldbarely stagger up the slope of his own hunting ground.’
    I stared in horror at Janey. ‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why … why wasn’t he stopped?’
    ‘Because he was careful,’ Janey explained. ‘Cullayn owned several estates in this part of the country, and he made sure there was never more than a victim or two per season. Nothing too obvious. A drowning. Someone burning in a fire. A man falling unseen from his horse, and then crushed to death.’ Janey shrugged. ‘Some people just went missing. A wife disappears, but her husband is known to be violent. A young man vanishes, but so what? He was the ambitious type, and not liked anyway. Cullayn kept his eyes and ears open for opportunities like that.
    ‘But Sam became suspicious, and followed Cullayn one time,’ Janey went on. ‘Saw him hunting on the slope. There was still no proof, though. The woman involved just
disappeared
. It was Sam’s word against Cullayn’s. Sam himself disappeared shortly after. No one