Ghosts from the Past

by Sally Spedding

  *

  An hour later while we were boxing up our various papers and setting aside the last cottage rent to deliver later, there came a sharp knock on the front door.

  “Don’t answer it!” Will snapped at me. “Pretend we’re not in. I know who it is.”

  He’d got up, still unsteady on his feet. “This way. To the yard.” He held out his hand to me, glancing at the small window beyond which Mollie and Buck were playing shuttlecocks, making too much noise. I refused it, and more knocking, followed by a shout.

  “I’ll smoke you out, you vermin!” shouted a man’s rough, northern voice, too close. Too real. “You’ll see, William Parminter and your pretty wife. I’ll be back.”

  Pretty wife?

  I shivered. Were chickens about to come home to roost?

  “I’ll sort him out for that remark,” said Will, making for the front door.

  “Leave him,” she begged. “He’s dangerous.”

  I’d listened for traces of a Yorkshire accent, but no. Perhaps our caller was clever at disguising it.

  “If it’s not the Verderer, who is it?” I whispered.

  “Can’t tell.”

  I was already feeling flames around my feet, sensing too, he was lying

  “We can’t wait till tomorrow,” he said. “We have to go now.”

  And, as my husband of thirteen years who by one impulsive act of folly, had brought an unnamed enemy to the door, silenced his children and brought them inside, I saw that same, bullying giant hover by our front window. His face as dark as the basalt rock which lines Eype’s Mouth Bay.

  *

  I didn’t recall much of the next turbulent hour. It seemed to pass as quickly as last Wednesday’s sudden storm, driven by anger, regret and fear. Buck understandably, didn’t want to leave his little bed, nor his special friend, James from school. Mollie had to choose just one doll from her family of ten and leave behind the little rocking chair that Will had made once he’d shed his uniform for good. There’d be barely enough room for us four on our little trap, never mind extra souvenirs.

  While Will harnessed Silver, our grey cross-bred Welsh cob, the three of us, loaded our few belongings, pushing them deep beneath the two wooden benches. I had to shut my ears to the youngsters’ mournful goodbyes to their favourite things. There wasn’t even time to call in at the Vicarage to shake the Reverend Boyd’s hand for the last time, or explain why we, his most loyal of parishioners, were leaving as criminals.

  *

  By a quarter past ten, with the rent money still folded in my skirt pocket, we were on Hangman’s Lane. Not the quickest way out of the Forest, but the most hidden. Silence, as stride by muddy stride, Silver took us beneath the joined crowns of oak and beech that blotted out the sky until the plantations thinned out, letting the view ahead unravel like a coloured sheet. A swathe of sunlit green dotted with grazing ponies and a few skittering foals.

  A view we were unlikely to see again.

  “Don’t cry,” I comforted Mollie, putting my arms around her heaving shoulders. “We’re together, that’s what you both must remember, and your father and me can work anywhere. The one good thing that came from that terrible war is that there’ll be plenty of jobs to choose from? Won’t there, Will?”

  Yet even as I spoke, I felt dread nibbling at my heart like a hungry mouse with a piece of cheese.

  “But he had a good job,” Buck spoke before his father could reply. His normally wideawake eyes were also red and puffy. “And you loved it, too. You always said so.” He sniffed and wiped away the tears with his jacket cuff. “I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

  At this, he slid towards the end of the bench he was sitting on and began climbing out. I grabbed the belt of his short trousers and almost broke it. Pulled him back even closer next to me and ruffled his thick, fox-coloured hair. “If you reach thirty-five without having made one mistake,” I said, “I’ll give you fifty pounds.”

  He turned to me. Red eyes glaring as Mollie whistled at mention of that vast sum.

  “You’ll be dead by then,” she then said strangely. “You and him.”

  *

  Midday, and I’d never missed my parents so much as on our journey through to Lyndhurst where they’d both been born. I could hear their voices, almost feel their touch as that village’s old sign came and went. But even if they’d still been alive, we wouldn’t have stopped. Couldn’t have stopped, not with a man like Matthew Crane possibly on our trail. Why had I thought of him all of a sudden? Because I’d not believed Will when he’d denied he’d been his attacker. Call it a woman’s instinct, or what you will, but it was that dark crag of a face I’d seen at our window earlier, that wouldn’t leave me alone.

  Silver kept up a steady trot, as if he too knew we couldn’t loiter. The product of a Welsh cob mare and a Connemara stallion, born too late and too small for the Hampshire Yeomanry to use him in France, he’d at least been spared the fate of other half-breds felled in the mud or filling French dinner plates.

  I shuddered, despite the warm sun making my clothes cling to my skin.

  As for Buck, he sat hunched up alongside me, sticking his tongue out at the back of his father’s hatted head, while Mollie dressed and re-dressed the one doll she’d been allowed to bring, as if by doing so, the journey might pass more quickly. This procelain-headed creature had been a Christmas gift from my mother just before she died. An ugly thing to my mind, with its pale, glass eyes and red, chipped lips. But she loved it, and that was all that mattered, as our horse wove his way through Shaftesbury with its considerable traffic.

  “Are you keeping a look out?” Shouted Will.

  “Who for? Matthew Crane?” I ventured.

  “No, woman, damn you! The sign for Romsey.” He slapped the whip on Silver’s rump, making him break into a canter.

  “Whoa!”

  The children screamed as the trap lurched from side to side, causing our few belongings to rattle around beneath us. My mother’s cooking pot. Four of her plates passed down to me; a few toys and even fewer clothes including our Sunday Best.

  Passers-by stopped to stare in astonishment. Some pulled their children away from the kerb while I held ours tight against me as we hurtled towards the main road, busy with every kind of vehicle under the sun. Towards a future tainted already, like the bruised apple that lies unseen at the bottom of the box. And it was then that I prayed yet again, with every nerve, every juddering particle of my body.

  7. JOHN.

  Sunday 13th November 1988. 9a.m.

  After a welcome supper of stuffed peppers and too many glasses of a 1983 St Émilion, Catherine had shown me to their first-floor landing then indicated a further short flight of old, wooden stairs with no bannister.

  “You’ll like it up there,” she’d smiled. “We call it the Crow’s Nest’ because you can see for miles around from the skylight. “Oh, and by the way,” she touched my arm just as I was wondering if I could make it to the top step. “Thank you.”

  I turned to face her. Half in half out of shadow, her pale, grey eyes seemed larger than ever. Her skin remarkably smooth like that of a nun, I thought. Someone kept from the sunlight…

  “For what?”

  “Cheering Stephen up. I just wish he’d tell me what exactly he’s discovered in that university of his.”

  Was ‘university’said with a frisson of resentment or something else? I wasn’t sure.

  “Perhaps he has to keep things close to his chest,” I explained, all too aware of how near to me she then was. A floral scent combined with her cooking that could - in a different situation - have proved tricky. I was the guest, I reminded myself. And she’d married someone else…

  “Research is a competitive business these days,” I edged away. “There’s always the danger of academic rivalry. Of professional backstabbing.”

  “You mean as in industrial espionage? Even theft?”

  “I saw something of it in my last job. Sadly, not uncommon. So perhaps he�
��ll tell you when he’s ready.”

  I’d begun climbing the tiny stairs, gripping the thin bannister as I went.

  “Thanks for a lovely meal,” I added, without risking a fall by turning around. “You went to a lot of trouble.”

  “My pleasure. Have a good night. And we’ll see you at breakfast. You’ve got to try the local bacon…”

  Breakfast?

  My rocking brain couldn’t even digest that word, never mind the prospect of fried pig. There was still a night to get through with that church spire’s deadly tip and its spinning weathervane, poking upwards beyond my room’s one skylight.

  *

  On a scale of 1 to 10, my hangover next morning scored 5. Not so bad I couldn’t shave, dress and make my way downstairs to the aroma of the promised bacon, but not so good as to notice the growing tension between my hosts.

  While Catherine served Stephen amd myself, I noticed she’d had nothing. In fact, there wasn’t even a place set for her at the wooden kitchen table. Another room with no evidence of anything other than themselves. Except for one thing. The day’s Sunday Times lay open near Stephen’s left elbow, and a glance showed a colour photograph of a ruddy-faced cleric taken in front of a substantial brick house. The sun had made him squint, and his dog collar to glow like fresh snow, while his half-open mouth showed a set of irregular teeth. The caption above this read, POPULAR RECTOR TIPPED FOR BISHOP’S POST. And below came the name Nicholas Beecham, 57 years. Diocesan curate of Snodbury in Suffolk, much-respected by his flock.

  That Beecham name again…

  When Catherine caught me studying the details, she leant over, closed the newspaper and briskly removed it.

  “I was always told it was rude to read at table,” she snapped.

  “Sorry I’m sure,” countered her husband, pulling at the frilly edge of his fried egg. “But it is your dear brother…”

  With that, she busied herself by noisily cleaning the cooker and washing the frying pan. Steam and fat rose up from the sink.

  “Nice to see some sun,” I said, to thaw the now palpable frost grown from the previous evening’s coolness. “Perhaps we can look round Longstanton. Have a decent walk…”

  Yet all the while, I imagined my own newly-re-furbished kitchen with its photo of Alison McConnell in that sparkling, halter-necked evening dress. Carol too. Our dead parents and Granny Lyon with her home-grown gladioli, all overlapping each other on the cork notice board I’d brought from my office in Nottingham.

  I did wonder how I might politely leave, but Dr Vincent Lovell’s odd disappearance had been my last thought before sleep. A conscientious professional who’d served his community during the Great War and beyond. More and more I felt drawn into those testing times, where work was scarce; where most young men had gone to war and not come back. Where any rebuilding - in the widest sense - had passed much of the region by.

  “Yes, it is,” said Catherine suddenly in reply to my remark about the sun. She’d stopped her vigorous scouring. “And it’s a pity someone sitting not so very far away, can’t even crack the teeniest smile.”

  Stephen glanced up at me as if to say, “What now?” But I bottled up my first reaction to mention that threat and said instead, “perhaps this research of yours is taking over. I mean, when did you two last go off anywhere together like you used to do? Even to dinner?”

  Catherine’s sour laugh took me aback. And without giving Stephen a chance to respond, she crashed the frying pan back into its drawer and walked out.

  Seconds later, came the slam of the front door.

  *

  “Bad, isn’t it?” the academic pushed his half-empty plate away. “But you wait till she realises what Doctor Lovell’s letters really contain.”

  He pushed back his chair and began rummaging in the waste bin. The smell which rose from its depths made me cover my nose. It was the same as I’d experienced earlier, and nothing to do with ordinary household waste.

  “Where the fuck’s she put that newspaper?” He brought the metal lid down with a bang.

  “Damn her!”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  But my mind was straying in two opposing directions. One towards the church of St. John the Martyr, and a possible visit to Hecklers Green. The other, to leave for home right now. Yes, I was already hooked into the mystery, but not at the expense of my life being turned over yet again.

  “Why not try and get her back here?” I suggested, draining my now lukewarm mug of tea. “Put your cards on the table. You may be pleasantly surprised.” I set down the mug on its crocheted mat. “It may also be your last chance.”

  “What?”

  “If anyone can sniff the end of a road, it’s moi.”

  Stephen crumpled up his paper napkin into a tight ball, threw it into the air and got up. He seemed to have aged yet again overnight, tempting me to advise him to chuck the whole research thing in. After all, what was preferable? An empty bed or hungry, old ghosts?

  *

  I lifted my still-damp trench coat off the hall stand and followed my slightly-stooped host outside into a preturnaturally bright sunlight, burning between solid-looking clouds. Extraordinary for mid-November, I thought, and like the Reverend Nicholas Beecham, I had to squint against it as I reached the fingerpost pointing towards the church. Here mud became grass. The thick, wet variety. No Catherine.

  And where on earth was he?

  The silence was also unnatural. Even more so, because like yesterday, that same multitude of birds perched like so many black, unopened buds on every branch, made not a sound. Even when I shouted Stephen’s name, they just seemed to look down on me in cold amusement.

  It was then as I pushed open the slimy green lych gate and took my first steps alnong the church path’ mossy slabs, that I sniffed and looked down.

  Bloody dogs…

  But no. That familiar smell snaking upwards, was intensifying, making my recent breakfast churn over. Rotting flesh? Excrement? Surely not. But why had it occurred earlier in my car? In the Vickers’ morning room? Why here?

  “Stephen?” I called again, moving into the church’s shadow. “You there?”

  Nothing replied. Just the slight squelch of my soles against the sodden moss underfoot, and those same, barely-audible bells I’d heard earlier. Once they’d faded, I looked up, also still puzzled that the ancient, wooden noticeboard by the gate, was empty, promising no service or celebration, no comfort to its few parishioners living nearby. Even the few gravestones clustered to the right of the church door lay almost buried amongst heaps of rain-battered weeds. No fresh flowers or kind message. Could what lay beneath be why I was holding my nose, scouring the grim surroundings?

  Then I spotted him beyond the church’s east wall standing in a pool of sunshine. Lost, it seemed in his own thoughts. Even more shrunken inside his weekend clothes.

  “She’s not anywhere,” he said once I reached him. “It’s a mystery.” He gestured towards the soulless landscape that stretched to an unbroken horizon beyond the boundary wall. “There’s nowhere for anyone to hide.”

  My thoughts exactly as a slowly-drifting cloud blocked out the sun and that smell thankfully faded.

  “Her car’s still at the house,” I said. “So, I’ll check down the lane to the road. Are there buses on a Sunday?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Stephen then touched my arm. “Sorry, Johnny, that was rude. No buses. She hates them anyway. Even driving on that Longstanton Road. There’s a fatality almost every month. No exaggeration.”

  Another unwelcome possibility crossed my mind, and I cast around for any kind of opening wide enough for an average-sized vehicle to come and go, But no. The footpath to the church gate was all there was, and as far as I could tell, there were no recent tyre marks.

  “Are you sure she doesn’t know what you’re digging into?” I said. “Do you keep the rest of your research under lock and key? In a safe perhaps?”

  “Yes. In my office at the university.”
>
  “Who knows its code, apart from you?”

  That question seemed to throw him. He glanced up at the soaring spire and its unusual, winged weather vane, as if perhaps for reassurance. “Greg Lake, our Archive technician. Solid as a rock. Utterly reliable.”

  “Does your green folder live in that safe too?”

  “When I’ve finished with it here.” He then paused, frowning. “Hang on, there is something, though. On Friday night, I remember, I had to answer our phone in the hall because for some reason, the one in my study wasn’t ringing. Damned nuisance…”

  “Where was Catherine?”

  “Fuck.”

  I waited while he pulled a hand through his hair, letting it flop back in disarray.

  “Next door, in our bedroom. She’d been changing the sheets. Always does at the end of each week.”

  My own previously slack habits came to mind, but not long enough to break the thread…

  “How long did this call take?”

  “Roughly ten minutes.”

  “Anything missing when you got back to your study?”

  “I’m still checking.”

  “And your caller?”

  “Greg Lake. Saying his name has made me remember. He’d just noticed someone suspicious hanging around in the staff car park after everyone had gone home. Also, that car park adjoins our Archive Centre.”

  “Any description?”

  “Some middle-aged bloke who said he was lost. Quite well-spoken, apparently.”

  That ruddy face in today’s Sunday Times flickered at the back of my mind.

  “Do you get many strays like that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Are the campus entrances and exits manned?”

  A nod then a frown.

  “Until 8p.m.”

  “And this was when?”

  “Half past.”

  “No CCTV? I heard West Norfolk’s investing in them after their success story at Kings Lynn.”

  “You’re clued up.”