Ghost Song (28 page)

‘Ah. And where exactly…'

‘We always stayed at a little bed and breakfast place in Whitby. I can let you have the address: I dare say they'd confirm it. We haven't been for about three years—certainly not since my father died—but if it's still the same people they'd remember.' She did not say that Grandfather had decided there was no need for these holidays and their own home was good enough for them.

‘But you did go to this Whitby place four years ago? With your father and your daughter?'

‘Yes. I could probably check the exact year but I'm sure it was four years ago.'

‘That means the house would have been empty while you were away?'

‘Yes.'

‘Would anyone come in during that time? Had anyone a key?'

‘One of the Cheesewright sisters would have come up one of the days, just to make sure everything was all right. They help with the cleaning and cooking. They have a key.'

‘But no one else? No workmen?'

‘Oh no.'

The inspector and his sergeant exchanged a look, and it was immediately clear to Shona—she supposed it was clear to her mother and Elspeth as well—that the police were deciding the killing and the walling up had been done while they were all at Whitby: perhaps that Anna had returned to Moil unknown to her family, and had had someone with her who had killed her and then hidden the body. It was a pretty far-fetched thing to have happened, but then the whole situation was far-fetched.

The Cheesewrights were surprised that Shona did not remember her mother's sister. ‘Your aunt,' said Edna Cheesewright. ‘You must remember her. Very lively, she was.'

‘A pretty girl,' put in Mona.

‘A bit artificial, of course. All that make-up she'd put on her face.'

‘And slimming all the time so she'd have a good figure for all the modelling and photographing she got paid for. Cottage cheese, that was what she ate—sloppy tasteless muck. And she'd have that stuff like chopped-up straw for breakfast instead of a proper Christian plate of bacon and eggs. Muesli or some such she called it.'

‘No one else ever touched it,' put in Edna.

‘I should think not, it looked like bird food.'

‘Your aunt was a one for the men as well, the little madam,' said Edna. ‘But there, we won't speak ill of the dead.'

‘Indeed we won't. But don't you remember her at all, Shona? She'd take you out many a time, and go to all your school concerts. You'd have been seven—maybe eight when she went away.'

‘When we
thought
she went away,' corrected Edna. But Shona had no memory of this pretty lively aunt who had apparently liked make-up and bright lights and men, and been careful of her figure for the modelling work. And whom everyone believed had gone to London, but had turned up behind a wall in Grith's cellar twenty-four hours earlier and had been part of an old nightmare.

‘Just imagine,' said Edna, ‘we all thought she was in London all these years, but all the time Anna Ross never left Grith.'

Anna Ross.
Anna
. As soon as she heard the name, it seared through Shona's brain like a white-hot knife.

Anna was no longer a shadow in the mirror or a whispering voice in the dark, she was a real person—she had been Mother's sister—and she had been here all along, standing behind that wall. ‘You must never go into the cellar,' her mother had always said, and her grandfather had locked the door and pulled the screen across it so people would forget the door was there.

Shona wanted to ask her mother about what she had seen that night four years ago, but she did not dare. Over the last couple of years Mother had developed a way of staring coldly at people if she did not like what they said: she quite often stared at Shona in this way and Shona hated it. But what would be far worse than Mother's frosty stare was if Mother confessed to being a murderess. Was that possible? Might she say, ‘Yes, your grandfather and I killed Anna four years ago and bricked up her body in the cellar so no one would know. Your grandfather said she was wicked and immoral so we punished her.'

Shona thought she could just about cope with having an aunt who had been murdered, but she was not sure if she could cope with having a mother and a grandfather who had done the murdering. The plan she had always had to one day leave Grith House suddenly seemed more important than ever. She had thought Elspeth was stupid when she talked about locking bedroom doors, but now Shona took to locking her own bedroom door every night, and to be careful never to be on her own with her mother, unless Elspeth or one of the Cheesewrights was within shouting distance.

But the thing she found most puzzling of all—the thing she did not dare mention to anyone—was why, if Anna had died when Shona was eight years old, she had no memory of her.

But you do have a memory,
said Anna's voice.
It's only that it's buried right down at the very deepest part of your mind. It's a bad memory, Shona, the worst memory of all…

The worst memory of all. Something that must never be allowed to thrust its way into the light.
Never
… Shona did not dare look at this deep memory, but she knew it was there. Anna knew as well.

It was after this that Anna started to get into Shona's dreams. This was far worse than the shadowy shape in the mirror or the whispering voice, because in the dreams Anna screamed and writhed in agony behind a brick wall, begging to be let out. Several times Shona woke from these dreams crying and terrified, and her mother came to see what was wrong. The nightmare could not be told, of course, so Shona mumbled something about monsters and being chased. Mother said there was nothing to worry about; she would fetch a nice soothing hot drink from the kitchen. Everyone had nightmares at times, she said, and Shona would grow out of them.

But Shona did not grow out of them. At times they went away—for weeks and even months on end, and then, just as Shona was thinking they had finally stopped altogether, they would start again. Sometimes they came three or four times a night. When, years later, she came to London she thought the dreams would stay behind at Grith, but they followed her, like the spiteful ghosts they were.

Shona hated the nightmares, and now she was grown up with a proper life and a smart job with the Harlequin Society, she found them vaguely shameful. ‘It's a child's thing to have nightmares,' she said to her GP, when a particularly bad bout finally drove her to seek help. ‘Not something for an adult.'

‘Not necessarily.'

‘But to have them night after night,' said Shona, who was tired and jumpy and headachy, and fed up with not being able to concentrate properly on her work.

‘Yes, that is perhaps more unusual. Have you thought about talking to someone—no, I don't mean a psychiatrist, I mean one of our counsellors, to see if there's anything at the root of them? Sleeping pills would just deal with the effect and I'd rather get at the cause if we could. I see from your notes you've only been in London a few months. And you're very young to be here on your own, as well. Just nineteen. I expect you're still finding your feet, making new friends, working hard. That'll mean a certain degree of stress, which won't help. I could make an appointment with one of our people—they're very helpful and discreet.'

‘I don't think I will,' said Shona. ‘Not at the moment, anyway.' Not ever, she thought. ‘I'd really rather just have a sedative or some sort of sleeping pill for when they get out of hand.'

He was reluctant, but in the end agreed, emphasizing that she must only take the pills if absolutely necessary. ‘They're apt to become habit-forming,' he said. ‘That's why we tend to fight shy of them for patients.'

Shona said she understood and promised not to go over the top with them.

Nor had she. Three or four times a year she had to resort to the pills, but no more than that. A couple of times, returning to the surgery for a repeat of the prescription, the doctor talked again about an appointment with a counsellor, but Shona always declined. The second time he did this, she switched to a different surgery. Nearer her place of work, she said, when asked the reason for the change. It would be easier for her to get there. She did not say she disliked the searching way the doctor looked at her. The new set-up was a big impersonal health centre, where she hardly ever saw the same doctor twice and where no one talked about underlying causes or finding the root of the nightmares.

She continued to be strict about taking the pills because she did not want to draw attention to herself by repeating the prescription too often, but on the night before she and Hilary were to drive to Somerset to meet Madeleine Ferrelyn, she woke abruptly at three a.m., with her heart pounding and a feeling of dizziness.

It had been the familiar nightmare of screaming from behind the brick wall, of course, and Shona finally struggled out of sleep with the screams still echoing in her head. As she woke up to her familiar bedroom her heart was pounding and her head felt dislocated, as if something had wrenched it in two then put it back together, but had not quite lined up the two halves. She listened to see if Anna's hateful whispery voice was in her mind, but it was not. Anna liked to keep her guessing about that: she could be silent for weeks—even months—then just as Shona was starting to think she had gone for good, she returned.

Shona got up to make a cup of tea, which she drank looking out of the big window with the view of the old wharf. Even at this hour there were people about which she found comforting.

After she had finished the tea she got out road maps and spent fifteen minutes or so studying the route they would take to reach Fosse Leigh and Madeleine Ferrelyn. It did not look like a very long journey.

T
HE JOURNEY TO
Bosnia and Sarajevo was going to be a very long one indeed, and from what Sonja Kaplen had said, it sounded as if it might be a rather uncomfortable one as well. Toby contemplated the prospect with mixed feelings.

He had mentioned casually to his mother that he was thinking of running over to Paris while the theatre was being spruced up during June. Just a week or two with Frank and old Bunstable, he said, hoping a week or two would be sufficient duration for Tranz's expedition. They wanted to get a bit of local colour for a musical comedy sketch Frank had in mind, said Toby, and when his mother expressed interest and enthusiasm, he felt like the lowest worm in creation. He felt even worse when he realized he would have to drag in Frank and Bunstable and ask them to keep out of circulation.

I'm hating this, thought Toby. I'm sprinkling enough lies round to make me feel like Ananias and I'm spinning enough deceptions to rival Judas, but I can probably tell them the truth when I get back. And part of him was starting to feel excited about what was ahead. He had never done anything like this before, and the farthest he had travelled was to France on a couple of occasions, and Italy on another.

Three days after he had attended Tranz's meeting with Alicia, Toby was summoned to a restaurant in Soho. He had expected this; he had thought Tranz's people would want to meet him properly before including him in the protest party, but he was rather pleased that it was Sonja who brought the message. She delivered it to the Tarleton where, as luck would have it, Toby was rehearsing. He broke off and persuaded her to come into the green room, routing out Bob Shilling to make tea for them.