The Home Orphanage sits on the corner of Mill Street and Potters Way – a two-storey building with shuttered windows, barred on the ground floor, its upper doors and bedchamber locks good enough to hold at night. By day the ground floor runs on a controlled kind of chaos: children underfoot, chores in progress, the occasional sharp word from a member of staff enough to settle any real trouble before it starts. Headmistress Chrisjen – late forties, a stern chiselled face, hair kept in a tight bun – runs the front desk herself, warm enough with visitors right up until the questions get specific.

FILE NOTES

Two disappearances put the Orphanage on Section 18’s radar rather than the other way round – Andre, a stocky eight-year-old with a scarred face, and Janice, a thin blonde seven-year-old, both gone within days of each other, with Caleb following not long after. Caleb’s own room told its own story once anyone looked properly: the door still locked from outside, but the window unlocked, and fine scratch marks on both that had nothing to do with normal wear.

Nothing about the staff read as anything worse than overworked and underinformed – Chrisjen, the janitor Rossak, a assistant named Siobhan keeping the noise in order. Nobody on site appears to have known where their “unusual” wards actually ended up once they left through a window rather than the front door. That the trail led straight to Griffiths’ operation at Get Stuffed was not, as far as any interview established, something the Orphanage itself had any part in beyond being an easy, unwatched place to take children from.

STATUS: Filed under Locations. Still operating, still under a standing watch order. Filed as a supply line rather than a source – complicit only in not asking where its missing children went.