by Jane Adams
‘But what if he’s still alive?’
‘You looking for a posthumous medal? I’ve seen you swim. He’s floating better than you do.’
Peterson took the point. He stood, helplessly, on the towpath while Josephs lifted the radio and called in, staring at the turned-up collar of the light blue jacket and the sandy hair, blackened by the filth of the canal.
Chapter Four
Kitty came to me again last night. I feel so sorry for the poor girl.
Frowning, Ray skimmed the brief reference again. The clock told him that it was three a.m. and he should be sleeping. He stretched wearily, ready for bed now, but reluctant to move.
Kitty? Who the hell was Kitty?
He’d read through three of the books, skimmed others, but could remember no other reference to Kitty amongst the enthusiastic accounts of the visits to friends, to the theatre, to shop in Edgemere or whatever else Mathilda had taken it into her head to record.
She had an odd way of making her entries. A few lines recording the bare facts of the day from rising to late evening. Then a fuller account of some aspect of her day, chosen with the randomness of someone sticking a pin into a list.
But Kitty. Who was Kitty?
He picked up one of the, so far, unread volumes. Flicked through the neatly written pages in the hope of finding some new reference.
There seemed to be nothing, though tiredness, merging with coffee-soaked alcohol, probably wasn’t helping.
He reached down and scooped up one of the others. Halfway through, one more note about Kitty. He looked at the date, it was 30 September three years before.
Kitty came again last night, she spent a long time just sitting in my room as though she found it a comfort just to have me there. Poor soul. Will she ever find real peace?
This second reference, so like the other. Mathilda had been a kindly soul. Ray could well imagine all kinds of waifs and strays coming to her attention. Wearily, he put the book down, conscious that he couldn’t even think straight anymore.
He pushed himself to his feet, a sudden attack of vertigo forcing him to grab the desk for support. He must have really overdone things today, or rather, yesterday. He glanced at the clock again, the slow-swinging pendulum mesmerizing as it caught the light. Three thirty. God. No wonder he was tired.
On impulse, as he passed the telephone, perched precariously on a low stool at the foot of the stairs, he picked up Mathilda’s address book, flopped down on the bottom step and squinted sleepily at the alphabet decorating the page edges.
Kitty what? He didn’t even have a last name to look for. Hopefully, he looked under ‘K’. No luck. He began to read through page by page. Still nothing.
He dropped the book down beside the telephone once more, used the newel post to haul himself to his feet and began the slow climb up the stairs to bed. This time at least, he managed to crawl out of his clothes and under the covers before falling into a deep, alcohol-aided sleep.
The next three days passed more swiftly than Ray could have imagined. He’d spent most of them just getting himself organized in the cottage. Working in the garden, driving into Edgemere, the nearest large town, for supplies he couldn’t get in the village and fending off what seemed like an endless stream of visitors who had come to see how he was settling in.
At least, he thought wryly, the natives were friendly. He guessed he had the influence of Evie Padget to thank for that. She was evidently the first line of village defence.
Her second ‘couple of hours’ had him tidying up in a kind of frenzy beforehand and then taking the opportunity to shop while she did whatever she did. He arrived back in time for the obligatory cup of tea though, and found that she’d been entertaining a stranger in his absence.
The young man sitting at the kitchen table and listening with courteous interest to Evie got up as Ray entered the room. He looked to be in his early thirties, with a shaggy head of unruly sandy curls and amused grey eyes. His mouth seemed created for expressiveness. At the moment, it was twisted into a wry smile, which expanded rapidly into a broad grin as he stepped forward to greet Ray.
Mrs Padget made the introductions.
‘This is John Rivers. He’s our curate, you know.’
Ray shook his hand. ‘Curate? That’s a sort of trainee vicar, isn’t it?’
The man laughed. It was a warm, welcoming sound. Ray found himself disposed to like him.
‘Something like that,’ he admitted. ‘None of the privileges of rank and twice the amount of work.’ He moved back to allow Ray access to the table.
‘Can I offer you some of your tea?’
‘Thank you.’ Ray smiled, then noticed that Evie seemed to be about to leave.
‘Er . . . you’re going, Mrs Padget?’
Evie nodded enthusiastically and gave him one of her broad smiles. ‘I’ve done for the morning. John will tell you all you need to know.’
‘Need to know?’
‘Yes, dear, about what you asked me. You know. I bumped into you out shopping the other day and you asked about your aunt’s friend. Well, John will be able to tell you, nothing’s more certain. Spent hours with her, John did. He’ll know all about her friends.’
She took her leave with her usual effusiveness, leaving behind an almost tangible void.
John Rivers sat down with a relieved sigh, and picked up the teapot. ‘Shall I pour?’
Ray nodded, knocked a little sideways by Evie Padget’s announcement. He remembered now, the day after he’d found the mysterious entries in Mathilda’s diaries, he’d met Evie and asked her, in passing, if she knew a friend of his aunt’s by the name of Kitty. He’d forgotten all about it until now.
‘Shall we go through?’ he suggested, picking up his cup and indicating the living room. John Rivers smiled and nodded.
‘You mustn’t mind Evie,’ he said, ‘she always means well. Look, I didn’t mean to barge in on you like this. It was just a courtesy call really, but Evie was here . . .’
‘And you found yourself Shanghaied.’
John laughed again. ‘Something like that.’ It seemed to be a pet phrase of his. They settled themselves, like firedogs, in opposite chairs either side of the fireplace.
‘So you knew my aunt well?’ Ray asked. ‘I wasn’t aware that she was especially religious.’
‘I don’t know that she was,’ John said, ‘but, yes, I think I got to know her fairly well. I lodged here for a while when I first came to the area; in fact, I was here right up until the time she died.’
‘Oh,’ Ray said. ‘I didn’t know that.’ He frowned and covered his confused emotions by sipping his tea. So this stranger had been with Mathilda, closer than he had been. Knowing her better, spending more time with her. The mixed emotions of guilt and jealousy, both, he realized, completely needless, took him somewhat by surprise.
‘Evie said you were asking about a friend?’ John said, offering Ray a bridge to cross the awkward moment.
Ray eased himself slightly in his chair. He’d done more walking and more physical work in these last few days than he’d done in months and a dull ache seemed to permeate his entire frame.
‘It was a note I found. Well, not a note really, an entry in one of her journals.’
John’s smile was non-committal. ‘She was as precise about that as she was about everything else. Every night, last thing, just before she wound the clocks. What was the friend’s name? You’d probably find them in the address book, the one by the telephone.’
‘No, I looked there. Her name was Kitty. I don’t know her surname, but from what my aunt said about her, she seemed important.’
John was looking at him curiously, a slight frown creasing between his eyes. Puzzled, Ray went on. ‘It could be short for something, I suppose. Katherine, perhaps. To tell the truth I’d given it no thought, not since asking Mrs Padget.’
John placed his cup and saucer carefully on the floor beside his feet. ‘What exactly did your aunt say about Kitty?’
&nb
sp; ‘Well, I could show you, I suppose.’
Ray crossed to the desk and rummaged for the right books. It took him some time to find the passages. He’d been too tired the night he’d read them to think of marking the pages and too busy to think of it since. He handed them over to John, who read them in silence. ‘Did you notice the dates?’ John asked. ‘That they were the same, I mean?’
Ray hadn’t, only that the text was similar.
Carefully, John closed the books, laid them on the arm of the chair.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know who Kitty is and,’ he laughed lightly, ‘why she isn’t in the address book.’
‘Oh?’
John gave him a speculative look, as though wondering just how to express what he had to say. ‘The thing is,’ he said slowly, ‘I should say, I know who Kitty was.’
‘She’s dead then?’ Ray guessed.
‘Oh yes,’ John said. ‘She’s well and truly dead. The fact is,’ John Rivers went on, ‘Kitty’s been dead for the last three hundred and fifty years.’
Chapter Five
The Video Wall was preparing for its grand reopening. The refurbishment of what had been the Sphinx until two months before was all but complete and it was up to the cleaning crew to put the final polish on the place.
Alex Pierce was reported to be well pleased with the results and no doubt Mark would be just as happy when he finally got out. Brother Mark was still on remand, but the evidence was getting thinner by the day. If something wasn’t pulled out of the bag soon Mark would be back in business and eighteen months of investigation would be down the drain.
And, so far, the Video Wall was legit, straight down the line.
Peterson watched the entrance. Three of the girls were just going off shift when Alex Pierce himself came out and called out to one of them. ‘Hey, Sally, you got a minute?’
Peterson watched as Alex Pierce talked to the girl. He wasn’t shouting now and Peterson couldn’t hear what had been said, but he could see the girl preening, relishing the attention from her boss.
Pierce held a purple envelope in his hand, the kind that might have had a birthday card inside. Peterson could just make out a line of silver writing on the front but he was too far away to see more. Peterson saw the girl giggle and then turn away after awarding Alex a brilliant smile and a glimpse of cleavage. He watched her walk to the T-junction and go left. Alex Pierce had already gone back inside. Peterson got out of his car and began to follow the girl.
Chapter Six
‘Her name,’ John said slowly, ‘was Katherine Hallam, but, as her mother’s name was also Katherine, the family generally called her Kitty.’
‘How do you know about her?’ Ray wanted to know. ‘And what’s her connection to my aunt?’
‘Well, the main connection is this place, this cottage. Kitty lived here for a while. Early 1640s that would have been.’
‘I’d no idea this place was so old.’
John nodded. ‘Oh yes. This whole row dates from earlier than that but most have been altered. New windows put in, that sort of thing.’
‘So, how did my aunt become so interested? And the entries in her journal. What the hell did she mean, Kitty came to her? Mathilda was the last person in the world I’d have said believed in ghosts.’
John smiled wryly at that. ‘I take it you dismiss such things then?’
‘Yes, of course. Don’t you? Haunted houses belong at the funfair, there’s no truth to them.’
He spoke somewhat more harshly than he’d meant. The truth was, he was not so much a disbeliever as someone who had, on occasions, come very close to believing and was far from comfortable with it.
He frowned again, rubbing the scarred side of his face reflectively. The new skin still had a tendency to dry out quickly and become sore and itchy.
‘I don’t think Mathilda thought of herself as being haunted,’ John said. ‘More, that she had an occasional visitor of a slightly unusual kind. She thought of Kitty more as a bewildered foreigner having problems with the local language than a ghost.’ He pulled the shaggy curls back from his forehead. ‘Kitty was certainly real to your aunt and, as you’ve seen from her journals, someone she felt very sorry for. I was interested enough to do a little poking around. Kitty was quite infamous in her time, poor woman.’
‘Infamous? Why?’
‘I’m sorry to say that one of my distant predecessors took exception to her.’ He smiled a little sadly. ‘Kitty Hallam was accused of witchcraft, tried, and found guilty. She was sentenced to hang. It’s all in the parish records if you’re interested. I had bits and pieces photocopied for Mathilda, they’re probably around here somewhere.’ He pushed himself to his feet. ‘I should be going now,’ he said. He smiled again, a half-shy, half-embarrassed smile that made him look more like a small boy than a grown-up priest. The jeans and overlarge sweater he was wearing doing nothing to amend the image.
‘Do you have to go?’ Ray found himself asking. ‘Look, I was about to have lunch. If you’d join me . . .’
‘And sing for my supper?’
Ray returned the wry smile. ‘Something like that,’ he said.
‘Her name, as I told you, was Kitty Hallam and until she was eighteen life must have been pretty good. Her father was well off, ran an apothecary’s shop over in Edgemere, and had plans, it seems, to open a second once Kitty finally married. He’d taught her a good deal of the business. We tend to think of women in those days as having low status, and in some ways they did. But for a family business to survive, I suppose everyone had to pitch in. Anyway, by all accounts, Kitty was pretty and clever, and certainly not short of prospective husbands. The world must have been sweet for Kitty. Then, well, it all went terribly wrong.’
‘What happened to her?’ Ray prompted him.
‘There was a fire. It started in the kitchen and spread rapidly. The house was one of those half-timbered affairs. I’d guess it went up like kindling. The alarm was raised and everyone ran for their lives, all except Kitty who’d been ill and was sleeping in an upstairs room. The fire had devoured the stairs before anyone could reach her. Her father wrote a letter to relatives, telling them about it. Kitty climbed out of her bedroom window. They saw her standing on the sill, the flames from the burning room rising up behind her. Before she had the nerve to jump, her nightgown had caught fire and her hair was blazing.
‘It must have been a terrible sight. And the pain . . . Well, against all the odds, Kitty lived. She broke her leg in the fall and it never really set properly. She limped for the rest of her life and the scarring on her face and hands saw off her one-time suitors. It must have been a horrifying thing for a girl like Kitty. She must have felt she’d lost everything.’
‘It’s a horrifying thing for anybody,’ Ray said quietly. He touched the side of his face. He might not be an eighteen-year-old girl but he could still relate to the scars.
John went on. ‘The fact was, Kitty survived, lived to prove that she was made of sterner stuff than anyone gave her credit for. To my mind, her erstwhile suitors didn’t know what they were missing. From all the accounts we have, she was quite some lady.’
He rose from the table, began to clear away the remnants of lunch. ‘She moved then, to this village.’
‘To the cottage? Here, I’ll put that away.’
‘No, not to the cottage at first. Where do you keep the washing-up liquid? Ah. No, she moved in with the rector, Matthew Jordan, a cousin of the Hallams, and became his housekeeper. His friend too. He thought a great deal of her, even spoke up for her at the trial, which must have taken some courage under the circumstances.’ He paused to gather the rest of the pots and dump them into the foaming water. ‘It was a good arrangement. Kitty had a home, a place in the scheme of things, and the skills her father had taught her made her a valuable member of the community. I understand she even ran some sort of informal school. Then, when she’d been here about six or seven years, the Reverend Jordan became ill. Ill enough to force him to retire
. He went off to live with his niece and Kitty moved here. The new man arrived, complete with wife and household, and took up residence in the rectory — that’s gone, of course, it was where the village hall is now.’
He gave the plate he was holding another dunking in the water, scratched ineffectively at a fault in the glaze. ‘Then Kitty’s problems really started. That was in 1642, the summer. The Civil War hadn’t quite got under way, but there was enough turmoil for no one to be in any doubt that big changes were on the way. Jordan was what you’d call a High Church man. A real traditionalist. This new man, Randall, was Puritan to the core. A real fire and brimstone Bible thumper. He and Kitty didn’t exactly hit it off, and Randall’s wife, well, it was her testimony really that ensured Kitty’s conviction.’
‘Her testimony?’ Ray wiped the plates thoughtfully, and replaced them carefully in the cupboard.
‘Yes. She claimed she saw Kitty consorting with the devil in Southby wood. Testified that Kitty had bewitched the village children as well, that they followed her around, whispering the devil’s secrets or some such thing.’
‘Superstitious nonsense.’
‘That may well have been so, but she was believed. You’d have to go and look through the court records, if they still exist, to get details. That would have been my next port of call, but Mathilda fell ill and it sort of lost its importance.’
Ray nodded slowly. ‘I might just do that. So, your information — where did you get that from?’
‘Ah, now there I was lucky. You know, maybe, that there’s no resident curate here anymore. There’s a pool of us serving about six parishes. When the residency ended here, all the records and a quite extensive library were transferred to Edgemere and a lot of it was then sent off to the records office. I was asked to help with the cataloguing, and, lo and behold, the Reverend Jordan kept journals, recorded just about everything he ever did. For some reason, when he died, his personal papers were sent back here together with some church property. That was my starting point.’
