Watching the Ghosts (2 page)

The thought that Daisy might have wandered off while she'd been talking on the phone or being questioned by Chris Torridge brought on pangs of guilt. How could she have turned her back like that and left the confines of the playground? How could she have let her precious Daisy out of her sight?

The mothers quickly organized themselves into some sort of search party and, while some stayed to keep a close eye on their own offspring, they fanned out, calling Daisy's name and accosting passers-by to ask if they'd seen a child matching her description while Melanie stood by the climbing frame, paralysed and feeling strangely detached from the situation. She felt as though she was a spectator watching a scene of immense horror and all she could do was stand there and stare ahead, useless and powerless, scanning the faces of any children in view in the hope that one of them would be Daisy. She couldn't pray and she couldn't cry as the numbness took hold. Daisy. All she wanted was to see her running across the grass towards her.

When she spotted a fair-haired child of around Daisy's height, her hopes were raised for a second. But despair took hold as soon as she realized the resemblance was slight. Daisy was nowhere to be seen.

Warm tears of frustration trickled down her cheeks as one of the park bench mothers, a plump woman with cropped hair, put a comforting arm around her shoulders and led her to the bench. ‘You're in shock, love. If we don't find her in the next few minutes we'll call the police. Try not to worry, eh.' Her last words didn't sound convincing. She could hear the anxiety in the woman's voice.

Melanie nodded and as mucous began to drip from her nose she fumbled in her bag for a tissue. As soon as the bag was open her phone rang, loud and insistent. She stared at it, unable to move.

‘You should answer it,' her new ally said. ‘It might be news. She might have found her way back home.'

Melanie's hand was shaking as she pressed the key and held the phone to her ear. She could hardly utter the word ‘hello' but it didn't matter because Jack didn't wait for her to speak.

‘I've had a call,' he said. ‘Someone's got Daisy.'

‘I only took my eyes off her for a few seconds. I . . .'

‘Shut up and listen.' Jack sounded angry. More than angry . . . furious. ‘They want money or they say we'll never see her again. They say they're going to call later.'

Melanie's hands, suddenly clumsy, refused to obey her panicked brain and she dropped the phone, sending it clattering down to the cold, unforgiving ground.

P
erhaps it was a good thing that Eborby's Tourist Office was always busy. When you're busy you don't have time to think and brood and although the nightmare had broken her sleep, Lydia hadn't felt too bad at work.

She enjoyed working in the elegant eighteenth-century building near the cathedral and she'd managed to fix a smile to her face as she'd handed out the glossy leaflets advertising Eborby's many tourist attractions and looked up the times of sightseeing buses and river cruises. But when she'd visited the little staff cloakroom and looked in the mirror above the sink, she'd seen dark smudges of blue-black beneath her eyes.

Even in her busiest moments she could never quite banish the memory of that clock with its watchful, swivelling eyes. She'd had that same dream so many times that she'd begun to wonder whether it was some sort of warning. Or perhaps some terrible suppressed memory – she'd read about such things in magazines but had never quite believed them.

At five thirty the working day was over and Lydia headed towards Boothgate, passing the Eborby Playhouse, an old theatre with a recently added glass frontage. The red and black posters outside announced that the latest production was called simply
Mary
. It had received good reviews and she'd read in the publicity leaflets in the rack at the Tourist Information Centre that the play had been inspired by the building now known as Boothgate House – the building where she lived – so maybe one day she'd make the effort to see it . . . even though the subject matter didn't really appeal.

The July evening was too warm for the cardigan she'd stuffed into her bag that morning – just in case – and she felt somehow lighter and more optimistic as she made her way home. She passed the shops and pubs at the city end of the street and soon she reached Boothgate's rows of elegant Georgian houses, many now converted into offices. She paused to look in an estate agent's window, purely out of habit, before waiting at the pedestrian crossing for the lights to change and interrupt the stream of cars flowing out of the city down the straight Roman road at the end of the working day.

Then she carried on walking and soon Boothgate House came into view. It was an impressive eighteenth-century building of elegant proportions set well back from the main road behind an expanse of lawn and from the street it had the look of some urban stately home. Perhaps that's why she'd found it so attractive when she'd come to view the new apartment with its bright modern kitchen, its high ceilings, its long sash windows and its reasonable price tag. But now she knew that the place had a different, grimmer, history.

At one time it had been known as Havenby Hall and there had been a forbidding seven-foot wall around the grounds, now reduced to half that height by the developers. Once its stone had been blackened by Eborby's myriad smoking chimneys but now the wall and the building had been sandblasted to an unthreatening pale gold. Havenby Hall had begun life as a charitable foundation, an asylum for lunatics and the mentally disordered, renowned in the nineteenth century for its enlightened and experimental treatments in an age when such patients were rarely treated with understanding or kindness.

Later in its history it had been taken over by a private trust as a hospital for the treatment of various mental conditions, chronic and acute. Then in the 1960s one section had been set aside as a secure unit for the more serious cases, the cases judged a danger to the patient – or others – and, as a consequence, in its last days Havenby Hall had acquired a fearful reputation in the town. The hospital had closed in 1981 and had been derelict for years before the developer, Patrick Creeny, had gutted and renovated it beyond recognition. Only one wing round the back lay untouched now. But she had been assured that it was only a matter of time before that too was transformed from ruined utility to twenty-first-century luxury.

Lydia slipped down the side road and through the decorative iron gate that had replaced its secure and solid predecessor before making for the grand front door.

She let herself in and passed the grand central staircase, the sort that might conjure childhood fantasies of being a princess – Cinderella at the ball maybe. But she was just past thirty-two – far too old for such things.

When the door of her flat came into view she readied her key for the lock. It was a handsome mahogany door, one of the originals. The developer had made a great thing of retaining some of the more attractive original features. To date only half the flats had been finished and, of them, only half had been sold. She assumed it was something to do with the recession. But there were times when she wondered whether it was something else. Maybe it was the building's past history and the accompanying taint of madness that put potential buyers off.

She was about to open the door when the sound of a voice saying hello made her swing round. The woman who stood there was large but solidly built rather than fat. She wore a red T-shirt with faint sweat patches under the arms and a flared floral skirt which emphasized the dimensions of her hips. Her long hair was mousy and pulled back into a pony tail and although her chin merged into her neck, her skin was clear and flawless. It was difficult to guess her age, which could have been anything between thirty-five and fifty.

‘Lovely day.' The woman smiled, showing a row of perfect teeth.

Lydia responded with a bland remark about the weather. It was good to have a friendly neighbour and Beverley was more than happy to take in parcels and keep a spare key in case of emergencies.

‘How's your mum?' she asked. Beverley had moved up to Eborby from the Midlands with her frail, elderly mother a few months ago. Both of them had visited Eborby and liked it so they'd made the decision to sell up and relocate when Beverley gave up her job in her local council offices to care for her mother full time. Lydia considered this a noble sacrifice, and one that she didn't think she herself would be capable of making.

‘She has her good days and her bad days. You know how it is,' she said. Her voice was high pitched, almost girlish.

Lydia nodded sympathetically and turned to put her key in the lock.

‘I had a visitor before.' The way Beverley said the words, as though she was harbouring some delicious secret, made Lydia turn back. She sensed gossip. And, knowing her empty flat was waiting for her on the other side of that door, a bit of gossip was just what she felt like at that moment. Besides, she felt that Beverley must be lonely so she'd also be doing a service to a fellow human being.

‘A man called. He left his card with me. Hang on a moment.' Beverley disappeared through her flat door which she'd left ajar. Lydia had always been struck by the way she moved so gracefully for someone of her build. She returned after a few seconds and handed Lydia a small white business card.

Lydia studied it. ‘Dr Karl Dremmer. Eborby University, Department of Psychology. Researcher in Parapsychology and Paranormal Phenomena.'

‘He asked me if I'd noticed anything strange about this building,' said Beverley.

‘What did you tell him?'

‘I told him that, apart from that problem with the drains when we first moved in everything's been fine.'

Suddenly Lydia was grateful for Beverley's lack of imagination. But their conversation had given her a small, nagging feeling that something wasn't right; that her dream had somehow been triggered by something in this place that was impossible to explain.

‘He said one of the builders contacted him. Said things had been happening.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘I don't know.' Beverley's open face suddenly clouded. ‘I'd better get back to Mother.'

As Lydia let herself into her flat and made for the kitchen, she found the news that she wasn't the only one who'd sensed something amiss in that place strangely comforting.

‘When did he say he'd call back?'

‘He didn't specify a time. I don't even know whether it was a he. The voice was put through one of those machines . . . sounded like a robot.'

The words sent a shudder through Melanie's heart as she paced the polished wooden floorboards. The prospect of sitting down on the soft leather sofa seemed unbearable. To sit would seem as if she was admitting defeat . . . as if she was doing nothing. She stopped moving and looked Jack in the face. He appeared to be mildly concerned but not worried like she was. Not frantic, primitive worried. But Daisy wasn't his own flesh and blood. She was the child of Melanie's first, ill-advised marriage and Jack had had to accept her as part of the package.

She kept replaying the scene at the park in her head. The way she'd lied to the other mothers when she'd told them that Daisy had found her way home. But if they had scented the truth, they'd have insisted on calling the police immediately. And the last thing she'd wanted was a patrol car turning up, sirens blazing and making whoever had Daisy panic. A frightened criminal is a dangerous criminal and under no circumstances was she going to gamble with Daisy's safety.

She tried desperately to recall every detail of the scene, cursing that call from the senior partner, cursing Chris Torridge and his presumption that he could take up her private time with what was really a work matter, although she did find the case intriguing. If she hadn't been distracted, if she'd been watching Daisy as she should have been, this nightmare wouldn't be happening. The mothers had been quite adamant that no lone man had approached the playground – in the current climate of suspicion they would have noticed – which left the possibility that the abductor was a woman; someone whose presence created no suspicion. Jack had thought that the caller might have been a woman. But kidnapping didn't seem like a woman's crime somehow. Unless the woman was the accomplice. Unless Daisy had been taken by two abductors.

Melanie stared at the phone on the sideboard, willing it to ring. She needed to know Daisy was safe. She needed to know what she had to do to get her back.

Suddenly she felt out of her depth. She needed help. She needed someone to tell her what to do . . . and her instincts told her that Jack was hardly going to be a tower of strength. ‘We can't cope with this on our own.' She hesitated. ‘I've been considering all our options and I think we have to tell the police.'

‘They told us not to. I'm surprised you'd even think of risking Daisy's life.'

His words annoyed her . . . the implication that she didn't care. ‘I wasn't thinking of calling nine nine nine. We need to go about it discreetly. I know someone who might be able to help . . . someone I can approach unofficially. She'll know what to do. She'll be used to dealing with things like this.'

‘They knew where Daisy would be when they took her so they're probably watching us. We mustn't take any risks.'

‘But I need some advice . . . some support.'

Jack put a tentative arm around her shoulder but she shook it off. She saw the look of annoyance on his face but she didn't care; she wanted to hit out at someone – to make someone suffer the way she was suffering. His sin was to argue with her reasoning . . . and she felt a strong desire to punish him for it.

The moment was broken by the insistent bleating of the telephone and the shock of the sudden noise breaking through the awkward silence made Melanie jump.