Ghost Song (26 page)

‘Oh yes,' he said at length. ‘Yes, I see now what you mean. There's no question about it. Human remains for certain. It's very odd, isn't it?'

‘Yes, very,' said Robert.

‘It's half under that structure—what did you call it?'

‘It's a grave trap. It works on the principle of a lift shaft, I think. But if you shine the torch all the way up, you can see where the platform—the floor—is bolted to the underside of the stage.'

Treadwell shone the torch and nodded, then glanced down at Robert. ‘It must have been a bit of a shock to you, suddenly seeing a body in there.'

‘It was.'

‘You were intending to check—what did you say it was?'

‘Underpinning and also evidence of river seepage into the foundations,' said Robert.

‘I see. Well, I think,' said Treadwell, getting down off the skip, ‘that we'll have to dismantle a lot more of this wall, although we're not going to do that tonight, of course. You're sure there's no other way of getting into that part of the cellar?'

‘No. I went all over this place. That whole area is sealed off. You can't even get down from the stage through the trap opening.' Robert was glad to remember that he and Hilary had replaced the wooden section over the trap fairly neatly.

‘Well, whoever our body is, or was,' said Treadwell, dusting down his jeans, ‘it looks as if someone took a lot of trouble to make sure it wouldn't be found for a long time. I can't tell if it's male or female from here, but we've got a department who deals with this kind of cold case. They'll need to bring in spotlights and forensics and so on; I'll crank up the machinery for that as soon as we get back. It may be a natural death, although the circumstances are peculiar. Oh, we'll need you to supply an official statement, Mr Fallon.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘But first off, we'll have to contact the owner.' He looked around him. ‘Weird old building, isn't it?'

You don't know the half of it, thought Robert, but he said, ‘I dealt with the Harlequin Society who act as agents for the owner. I can let you have the address and phone number.'

‘If you would. We'll get in touch with them first thing tomorrow.' He led the way back upstairs. ‘What we'd better do now, though, is make sure you get home all right. We'll hop you back to your car now—you're all right to drive home, are you? Where is home, by the way?'

Robert gave the address of his flat for about the fifth time that night, and said he was perfectly capable of driving home but would appreciate the hop back to his own car.

‘No problem,' said Treadwell. ‘How about if we get you to come back to the station tomorrow to make a proper statement? Say around two?'

Robert said two o'clock would be fine, and drove home with the car windows wound all the way down to dispel the musty claustrophobia of the cellar. As he unlocked his own front door, he thought he would ring Hilary as early as possible in the morning to explain what had happened. It would be better not to tell her all this while she was at her office, but presumably she would not leave her flat until around quarter past or twenty past eight, so he would phone just after eight.

He showered away the ancient dust that clung to him and thought soap and shampoo had never smelt so good in his whole life. Falling gratefully into bed, he hoped he would not dream about the unknown man or woman who had lain in the dark for all these years.

As he slid down into sleep, he wondered what on earth he was going to say to Hilary. He also wondered what he was going to say to Shona Seymour.

S
HONA HAD REACHED
home at half past six that evening which, given the average London rush hour, was almost a record.

Her flat was in a small wharf conversion near Allhallows Lane. The conversion had been done in the property conscious era of the yuppies about fifteen years ago; the flats were smart and sleek and Shona could not possibly have afforded to live here if her ex-boss had not given her the down-payment to buy the lease. She had initially refused it, but had managed to do so without any real conviction, intending him to renew the offer. He had done so, of course, and she had accepted because she was fed up with her cramped rooms in Tabard Square and anyway her boss could easily afford it. Once she moved in she made it a rule to invite him to dinner and bed at least once a month. She usually had the food sent in—there were several small restaurants in the area which would put together a meal and deliver it—but she always served everything on her own plates and left an apparently used saucepan or casserole dish in the kitchen, because her boss liked to think that as well as being an inventive and enthusiastic lover she was a good cook, and there was no point in spoiling the image.

She enjoyed living in the new flat. People said, ‘Oh, what a nuisance for you to have to drive across the river to your office each day,' but Shona did not mind in the least. She liked driving in London; it confirmed that she now belonged to a world that had nothing to do with Grith House. The Shona who wore sharp modern clothes and zapped confidently along London streets had nothing to do with the Shona who had lived at Moil.

She had bought her first car with a small bank loan when she was twenty (Grandfather would have been shocked, and quoted the old line about neither a borrower nor a lender be), and her boss had paid for her driving lessons. He said it would be useful to the Harlequin if she could drive, so he would charge the lessons against his expense account and Shona need not feel guilty about accepting the money.

Shona had not felt guilty in the least, and after she passed her test she devised saucy little trips into the country for the two of them, and parked in remote areas so they could make love on the back seat. On these occasions she wore hold-up stockings under her skirt and nothing else. Her boss found it immensely arousing, and the danger of being seen added to the excitement for him. Shona did not much care if they were seen; what she did care about was paying her dues. It did not matter whether you paid your dues in cash, or whether you did so by stripping off in a secluded corner of Epping Forest: the important thing was never to owe anybody anything in life. Grandfather would have approved of this principle, although he certainly would not have approved of the form the payment took.

The Allhallows flat was on the second floor and had large windows with views over the Thames. This alone made it worth the hassle of negotiating Southwark Bridge each day. Shona liked to sit on the balcony on summer evenings, drinking a glass of wine and watching the river traffic; it was another of the things that distanced her from Grith House. She enjoyed thinking how dourly disapproving her grandfather would have been if he could see her enjoying what he would have called the fruits of sin. The sinning with her boss was not, in fact, particularly fruity, and as far as Shona was concerned it was money driven rather than passion driven. Even so, her grandfather would have called her a Jezebel and a painted whore of Babylon. He had been a humourless old martinet, and Shona was very glad to think he was safely dead and would never appear in her life again. She was glad that the boring pair, her mother and her cousin, would never appear in her life again, either.

The view from her flat's windows changed all the time. Tonight there was a faint mist rising from the river; it was not as thick as the mists that used to lie over Moil Moor when she was a child, but it was sufficient to stir the surface of her memory slightly. Shona could remember how she used to kneel on the windowseat in her bedroom watching the mists form, seeing ghost-figures inside them, frightened something was creeping towards the house…
You were always frightened that it was me, weren't you?
whispered Anna's voice.
You thought I was stealing through the mists towards you…

It was extraordinary how clear Anna's voice still was at times, even after so many years. Shona frowned, closed the curtains on the Thames and its troublesome mistiness, and went into the bedroom to change out of her suit. It was an expensive suit, a sharp charcoal grey with a narrow skirt, and she had worn a fuchsia-coloured silk shirt under it. She had only left two buttons of the shirt unfastened for the office because at the moment there was no one there worth seducing, but she had unfastened an extra one for the doe-eyed researcher. It was a great pity the unfastening of this third button had been a waste of time and it was also a pity Shona had put on her new ivory silk underwear that morning. Grandfather, had he ever seen the ivory silk, would probably have condemned it as harlot's wear, and Mother and Cousin Elspeth, if told how much it had cost, would have been shocked to their toes and called it a wicked waste of money, quite apart from Shona catching her death of cold in such flimsy things. But they would have approved of it being put carefully away in the wardrobe, because they would not have thought it right to sit around the flat in office clothes. Shona did not think it right, either; it was one of the very few Grith House tenets that had stayed with her. She was not going out this evening so she pulled on jeans and a loose sweater.

Jeans had never been remotely considered as suitable garments at Grith House and would not have been tolerated. Edna and Mona Cheesewright on their twice weekly visits to Grith wore print overalls, and Mona sometimes wound a woollen scarf round her neck because Grith was a right old shocker for draughts and if she got a stiff neck it ran all down her arms. Shona, entering her teens, had pleaded to wear jeans and trainers like everyone else but was not allowed. She had to wear her school uniform during the week, jumpers and skirts at weekends and her afternoon dress on Sundays with her good coat over it for church. Looking back, she often thought it was as if Grith had got stuck around 1940, and never quite caught up with the modern age. Even in the relaxed late-1970s her mother still followed the practise of wearing second or third best in the mornings, with an afternoon dress for when lunch was over.

Mother had been wearing one of her afternoon dresses the day the water main burst somewhere in the valley, and men from the Water Board came out to Grith House because of it. Shona had not really understood what it was all about, but she had pretended to know because of being thirteen, which was practically grown up.

The Water Board men said the problem was caused by all the heavy rain after the long dry summer, and they would need to get to the mains water pipe. The man who had introduced himself as the foreman asked if there was a Mr Seymour and indicated he preferred to have a man to deal with. Mother said, with a tight-lipped expression, that there was no Mr Seymour; there had been a Mr Ross, who was her father, but he had died quite recently. Elspeth chimed in, saying they knew all about Grith House and could answer any questions about its structure perfectly well.

‘What we need is to get to the mains pipe,' said the foreman again. ‘They'll likely be in the cellar—'

Mother bleated something about the cellar always being locked on account of it being dangerous and no one ever going down there, and Shona saw her eyes go nervously to the screen halfway across the door in the corner of the hall. The foreman saw it as well and said, ‘Is the cellar entrance over there? Yes, I see it is. Just behind the old screen. We can easily move that to one side. And if you'd kindly get the key, Mrs Seymour.'

Elspeth was saying something about a lot of upheaval, and Mother made ineffectual little darting movements at the men, trying to stop them moving the screen, making stupid excuses about not expecting this, no warning and everywhere in such a mess, oh dear me.

‘We'll put everything to rights afterwards,' said the foreman firmly. ‘But it won't do to let all that pumping water flood the whole of Moil. More than our jobs are worth.'

Shona thought he sounded a bit sarcastic when he said that about putting everything to rights, which was understandable; you could not say Grith was a palace, what with the sooty rooms and leaky gutters and the draughts whistling in under the rattly doors.

‘I'm not at all sure I know where the key is after all these years,' said her mother, to which the foreman said that was unfortunate, because it meant they would have to smash the lock to get down there.

They were polite but unstoppable and in the end the key had to be fetched and the door had to be unlocked. Mother was quite a long time getting the key, when she came back there was a faint smell of whisky. Shona was sent into the dining room, because surely there was homework for her to be getting on with—or
something
for her to be getting on with? She went obediently, but she could smell the Moil Moor odour coming up from the cellar already. Like bad drains on a hot day. She left the dining-room door partly open so she could watch and hear everything. The Water Board officials clattered down the stone steps with Shona's mother following, while Cousin Elspeth went mutteringly away to get buckets and mops and cloths because you could not trust men not to make a mess.

Shona waited until Elspeth, carrying a pail of hot soapy water and hung about with brooms and cloths, had gone down the steps as well, then she came out of the dining room, hoping that if she was very quiet and careful no one would notice her. As she stepped warily through the cellar door the nightmare stirred faintly and there was the warning lurch of sickness at the pit of her stomach. But she went on because this might be the only chance she would ever get to find out what was behind that wall.