Property of a Lady (7 page)

I’ll take the heavy torch with me, too. Its light will be a comfort, and it’ll also be a good weapon if this turns out to be a flesh and blood prowler. Oh God, if only it’s a living human intruder, after nothing more sinister than money.

1.30 a.m.

As I went out of the library, my nerves were jangling like piano wires. The camera clanked against the torch as I opened the door. In that listening silence it was loud enough to waken the dead, although it was starting to seem as if the dead needed no waking – they were already rampaging around the house.

As I stood in the hall, everywhere was silent and cold moonlight trickled through the narrow windows, lying across the dusty oak floor like flecks of silver.

I looked into each of the rooms in turn. The dining room was silent and still, but when I opened the door of the morning room, something reached down to brush soft, light fingers across my face. I gave a half-scream and nearly dropped the torch, but then I realized it was simply the long cobwebs drifting down from above, disturbed by the current of air from the open door. I brushed them away, shone the torch on an empty room, and went along to the scullery. It seemed unlikely that with the whole house at its disposal, a ghost would choose to hide in extreme discomfort in a dank, evil-smelling scullery, but I still checked. But nothing was moving in the kitchens, unless you count the presence of several healthy-looking black beetles in the copper washtub and some lively mould working its way across the windows. I shone the torch on it with distaste and wished myself back in my flat in Peckham, with everything clean and organized and unthreatening. Actually, I wished to be anywhere in the world other than in this house.

Eventually, I stood at the foot of the stairs. They were in semi-darkness, but some light came in from a tall window on the half-landing. A hundred years ago, ladies would have sat there to recover their energy after the effort of rising and dressing each morning, or to rest on the way up the stairs in the evening. No one was there now, of course. Or was there? My heart began to bang against my ribs, and I peered through the gloom, hesitant to advertise my presence by shining the torch. But, of course, there was no one there. It was the large, damp stain on the upper wall that was creating the illusion of a figure again – the stain that earlier on had looked so much like a thickset man.

But it was not the discoloured patch at all. Someone
was
there. A man – his features in deep shadow – was standing at the head of the stairs, his head bowed as if looking down into the stairwell.

I bolted back into the library and slammed the door shut. It resounded like the crack of doom, and plaster showered down from the ceiling. A ridiculous thing to do, of course, for when did a closed door ever keep out a ghost . . . ? Particularly one with the spell to open doors . . .
Open lock to the dead man’s knock . . .

It’s a few minutes before two a.m. and I’m sitting here with my eyes on the closed door, trying to make some order of my tumbling thoughts. There’s no doubt in my mind that I really did see that figure at the top of the stairs.

I’ll finish this sentence, then I’ll tear these pages out of the notebook and fold them inside the old clock – the oak floor inside the case is slightly loose, and a section tips up like an insecure floorboard. I’ll wait until the clock has chimed the hour though. For some reason I flinch from touching it while it’s chiming.

It’s not at all like me to do something so whimsical as hide a diary, but I’d like to leave a record of sorts for people to find. Just in case something happens to me tonight . . .

Nell’s skin was prickling with horror. It’s Beth’s rhyme, she thought. The rhyme about the dead man knocking on the door, and the spell that opened all the locks.

Open lock to the dead man’s knock . . .

She was just reaching out for the glass of wine at her hand when screams rang out from Beth’s room.

SIX

B
eth was huddled against the wall in the bedroom, clutching the pillow against her as if to shield herself from something, and staring in wild-eyed terror at the far corner.

Nell was across the bedroom in two strides, scooping up the small, frightened figure and hugging it to her.

‘Darling, it’s all right, whatever it is, you’re absolutely safe. I’m here, you’re safe, you’re safe.’

Beth was shaking so violently that Nell was afraid for a moment she was having some kind of fit, and she seemed scarcely to recognize her mother. Nell sent an uneasy glance to the corner, where Beth was still staring. Was there something there that had frightened her? A spider? But Beth would not scream and shiver like this for a spider. She held on to the small figure, repeating the words about being safe, praying the reassurance would get through, and at last Beth drew a deep shuddering breath and clutched her mother’s hands so tightly that Nell nearly cried out.

In a faltering voice, Beth said, ‘There was a man in the room.’

Nell’s pulse skipped a beat or two, then she said, ‘Bethy, there’s no one here. You had a nightmare.’

‘He was here,’ said Beth. ‘I woke up and he was standing there, watching me.’

‘There’s no one here, sweetheart. You’re safe and no one can get in, and I’m here.’

The fear was gradually fading from Beth’s eyes. She sat up a bit straighter and looked about her. ‘There’s nobody here, is there?’

‘No, nobody at all.’

‘He couldn’t be – um – hiding anywhere, could he?’

‘No, but we’ll look so you know for sure,’ said Nell. She opened the door of the wardrobe and then the cupboard built into one side of the old, blocked-up chimney breast. ‘All right?’

‘Um, yes.’

Nell said, ‘How about if we put your dressing gown on and you come downstairs and I’ll make some hot milk.’ Beth liked it if she ever had to be downstairs after her bedtime. She said it was being allowed into the grown-ups’ world.

But tonight she hesitated.

‘I could bring the milk up to you, and we’ll read a bit of your book together,’ said Nell. ‘You can tell me about the nightmare if you like. Telling a thing makes it go away.’

This seemed to help. Beth said, ‘He
really
isn’t here now?’

‘No one’s here,’ said Nell. ‘He was in the dream.’

‘No, he was in the room,’ said Beth, and Nell felt her shudder again. ‘He got in ’cos he knocked on the window. The dead man’s knock, like in the rhyme.’

Nell glanced involuntarily to the window, which was closed.

‘An’ he stood in the corner an’ that’s when I woke up,’ said Beth. ‘He was looking for me.’ She was making a valiant effort not to cry, and Nell’s heart contracted. ‘Could I come downstairs after all, Mum?’

‘Of course you can.’ Nell reached for the dressing gown and wrapped it round the small, shivering figure. She would crush a junior paracetamol in the hot milk. That would calm Beth down and help her to go back to sleep.

‘The bad thing,’ said Beth as they went down the stairs. ‘The really
bad
thing—’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s frightening to say it.’ Her lower lip trembled. ‘It makes it real if you say it.’

‘No, it doesn’t. Saying a thing shoos the fright away. Sit by the fire and tell me.’

‘He had no eyes,’ said Beth, thrusting a clenched fist into her mouth. ‘That man who got into my room. He was trying to find me, but he couldn’t because he had no eyes.’

No eyes. How had Beth known something so macabre and so deeply distressing? Because when Brad was killed, skidding on that patch of ice so that the tanker smashed into his car, the impact had driven one of the tanker’s splintered wheel arches straight through the car’s side. His eyes had been shattered – Brad’s dear lovely eyes that smiled with such love and life. . . . His brain had bled out through the eye sockets while the ambulances tried to get to him through the motorway pile-up.

Beth had never known about the injuries, of course. Somehow Nell had managed to make Brad’s death sound smooth and clean to her. They had discussed what might happen when somebody died; Nell, who had never really sorted out her own beliefs in that direction, had tried to give Beth a child’s outlook on reincarnation, which seemed to her one of the happier theories, and which, for Beth, could be likened to plants that died in the autumn, but came up again the following spring, bright and new.

But the only people who had known what the tanker’s huge metal struts had done to Brad were Nell herself, their GP in London, and the coroner’s office.

And no one in the world knew about Nell’s own nightmares, in which Brad, his face shredded, his eyes torn away, tried to fumble his blind way back to find her.

The photograph of Charect House showing the woman at the attic window had bothered Michael in a low-key way for several days, but he managed to push it to the back of his mind. He also managed to ignore the nagging memory of the shadowy figure he had glimpsed on the stairs.

Michaelmas term went amiably along its well-worn tracks, enlivened here and there by various college activities. Michael gave a paper to the Tolkien Society, which seemed to be well received, and was guest speaker at a Students’ Union debate – the topic was the relevance of romanticism in the modern world, which made for some lively discussion. Afterwards, some of his students bore him off to the Turf Tavern, where inordinate quantities of beer were drunk and huge platters of seafood risotto circulated. Michael finally managed to extricate himself on the grounds that he had a faculty meeting at nine next morning and should get an early night. This was received with derisive hoots, and somebody started a limerick on the subject of faculties. Michael grinned, waited until the second verse was boozily completed, joined in the applause, then dropped an extra twenty-pound note into the drinks kitty before making good his exit. He reached his rooms shortly before midnight to find that Wilberforce had left a dead mouse on the step, which had to be disposed of in the incinerator in the basement. By the time he had dealt with this it was a quarter to one when he finally got to bed. Still, it had been a good evening, and it was nice that the students were so friendly.

It was during the first week of November when Jack Harper emailed again about the Shropshire house.

Michael—

Can you possibly find time to drag yourself away from your ivory tower again and make another journey to Marston Lacy? We need a reliable account of what’s actually been done to Charect House so far. The builders went in three weeks ago, but they keep sending terrifying letters and faxes about planning restrictions, and admonitory notices relating to Listed Buildings, and asking if we know the true condition of the windows and the roof. If the surveyor’s report can be trusted, the Georgian windows are infested with
coniophora puteana
, and the roof has
merulius lacrymans
. That’s wet rot and dry rot respectively to the likes of you and me.

But we’re staying with the plan to spend Christmas in the house – Liz has ordered camp beds and oil lamps and says it will be the greatest fun to eat picnic meals and dine by candlelight and we won’t even notice the rubble and the mess. Also, it will be a good reason not to spend the holiday with the cousins. Personally, I’d rather have the cousins or even Liz’s godmother for the winter solstice than camp out in an English ruin, however elegant it might be.

So you’d better let me have the phone number of that place you stayed (Capering Cow? Prancing Bullock?) because I’m blowed if I’ll eat sandwiches on Christmas Day.

Still, the efficient Ms West emailed to say she bought the long-case clock and the rosewood table at the auction, so at least we’ll be able to tell what time of day it is.

Anyway, here’s the thing. I dare say you’re knee-deep in students – do they still ask you to their parties, and if so, do you
know
how rare that is? My students here would be dismembered in slow stages before they’d ask me to have so much as a cup of coffee, but then I’m a slightly balding, becoming paunchy, married man, and even in my youth I never looked like Keats, preparing to starve with romantic intensity in his garret.

So if you could abandon the students again I’d be forever in your debt. (I’m in everybody else’s, so one more won’t make much difference.) I need to be sure they aren’t wiring the electricity into the septic tank just for the fun of it, or installing the heating plant in the roof so it crashes through the ceilings one night like the falling mountain in Gilgamesh’s nightmare. Talking of nightmares, Ellie is still having those God-awful dreams, poor little scrap. One of the things that helps her, though, are your stories about Wilberforce. Last night she fell asleep smiling after Liz read the latest episode of how Wilberforce went on his holidays, but the mice sabotaged his luggage and towed the train off the track so he ended up in Oswaldtwistle instead of Devon, and with no swimming trunks. Where the hell is Oswaldtwistle, by the way? And did you ever try writing kids’ books? I bet Wilberforce would outsell Harry Potter.

But most nights Ellie wakes in a sobbing panic, apparently frantic with anxiety for ‘Elvira’. From which you’ll see we haven’t been able to get rid of Elvira yet. Two nights ago Ellie told Liz someone was trying to find Elvira, and when Liz asked to know a bit more – sort of going along with the fantasy in case she could find a way to dispel it – Ellie said it was the man with holes where his eyes should be. I don’t know about you, but that was enough to give me the creeps, never mind a seven-year-old.