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an estate agent and put it on the market. I don’t want it. It’s bad enough having to sit here now.” The kids agreed with her on that one. “I don’t know who would possibly want to buy this place though. It’s awful” she said as an afterthought. “But I suppose when people see the history of this house they might decide to use it for something else.”
    Debbie knew that neither Aiden nor Lisa had any clue as to what she was talking about so she explained; “My father used to be a psychiatrist, had his own practice in Birmingham where he was born. He met my mother when she was there on a family holiday. She was just sixteen, he was twenty-nine and she fell madly in love with him.” Seeing the shock on the faces of her children Debbie insisted “Age didn’t matter so much back then. It wasn’t frowned upon like it is now. It was quite acceptable for a girl of sixteen to be married to an older man. He wasn’t always like you and I knew him otherwise my mother wouldn’t have given him the time of day. She was so beautiful and caring; she could have had any man she wanted. As it turned out she wanted him. They started dating, but when her family found out they made her choose; them or him. Of course she chose him. Her parents couldn’t get over the age gap so she left. They bought a small house near Liverpool and stayed there for three years. They didn’t have a lot of money or a lot of space in their home but they were happy. My father took a job at a local hospital and he earned enough to keep them going. They thought they were set up for a life in Liverpool until my father learned of his uncle who had passed away. He was a doctor and he owned this house. My father was the only living relative to him so he left him this place in his will. So my mother and father moved their lives here and as it was already pretty well set up as a surgery from when his uncle owned it, my father just adapted it a bit to make it a psychiatric hospital. My mother told me at first she didn’t like the idea of living here when it was a hospital for the insane but she got used to it and it was practical. It kind of killed two birds with one stone. They lived in this part, but through that door” she motioned to the heavy wooden door that stood solid and domineering at the end of the kitchen “is a passage that leads to the other part of the house were the patients lived.”
    After a pause to take a sip from her coffee she continued with her story, all the while subconsciously twisting her hands round the mug as though trying to banish a chill from deep inside. “My father fell in love with the house. He never considered selling it. It has a rich history going back centuries. It used to be a courthouse and a prison at once stage. In the nineteenth century I think it was. I’m surprised my parents wanted to live here.” The thought of them living in the house gave Lisa a cold shiver that ran the length of her spine.
    Pausing again to sip her coffee she gave them both a sad smile as she added “Those parts were never used. They’re locked off. Anyway,” she continued, wanting to finish what she started saying and be done with the whole subject “everything was going well for a few years until my father started to act strangely. I remember hearing him talking to my mother so horribly, which, she said he had never done in all their married life. She was so shocked she begged him to go see his doctor but he wouldn’t have it saying there was nothing wrong with him. She wanted to believe him but it became more difficult when he started being violent towards her. She was scared and so she kept quiet and tried to keep him happy. She read in one of his medical books about a person acting strangely may be suffering from a brain tumour. She was scared she would lose him so she kept making that excuse every time he did something to her. It went on like this for a while until things started happening to his patients. A lot of them were