THE APOTHECARY’S DAUGHTER an absolutely gripping crime thriller that will take your breath away

by Jane Adams

  ‘How?’ Beth asked.

  ‘I don’t know really. But it’s like, whenever you go somewhere you kind of change that place for ever. You leave an impression of yourself, like an invisible fingerprint. If you think that we’re all made of atoms,’ he was flying blind now and hoping he could land, ‘if you think that everything is vibrating, all the time, then maybe if two vibrations get interlocked . . .’ He was losing her, losing himself for that matter. ‘It’s just a theory,’ he said.

  Beth nodded, looked thoughtful. ‘So, why am I seeing her?’ she asked. ‘You live in the place she lived so you can play the recording. Why can I?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ray confessed. ‘Maybe, when one person starts to look. Starts to play the tape, then it’s similar to switching on a television or a radio. It only takes one person to switch it on but a lot of people can share it. Maybe the more people who look at it the stronger the signal gets. I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you going to help her? Daddy says that people believe that ghosts are souls that can’t rest, but that’s not the same as you’ve told me.’

  ‘There are lots of different ideas, and sometimes even grown-ups don’t know which one’s right. Several might be, all at the same time.’

  Beth absorbed this. ‘Are you afraid of her?’

  ‘Of Kitty? No, not at all. I feel sad for her.’

  ‘So do I,’ Beth said. ‘It’s not Kitty that’s giving me bad dreams, you know. It’s that man.’

  ‘Man? Which man, sweetheart?’

  ‘The man that hated her. He told her that she was going to burn in hell and he was going to send her there.’

  * * *

  ‘I told her that I didn’t believe in hell,’ Ray told the others later. ‘And that I didn’t think you did either.’

  ‘I don’t,’ John told him. ‘I believe in punishment for evil but that’s a very different thing. I don’t have anything that tells me that Kitty was evil any more than I believe that she was a witch.’

  ‘And if she was, would that have made her evil?’

  John sighed. ‘There are certain doctrines I abide by, Ray. Evil, no, not in my book. But a lost soul, certainly.’

  * * *

  Ray and Sarah returned to the cottage late in the evening. Ray was clearly still troubled and Sarah tried to help.

  ‘We should try to find out why she’s suddenly become so intrusive,’ she said. ‘Maybe the old stories are true and someone’s disturbed her grave.’

  ‘If that were true, we’d have packs of wild ghosts roaming the streets whenever they build a new road or tidy up an old cemetery. No one would be able to move without falling over pissed-off spirits. Anyway, we’ve no idea where she was buried so how would we know if she’d been disturbed?’ He sighed. ‘Maybe George was right. I should be focusing on the here and now, not something so long gone.’

  Sarah was frowning. ‘There must be a record somewhere of her execution and where she was interred.’

  ‘And if she wasn’t executed? What if she proved herself innocent or escaped somehow?’

  ‘We know she was found guilty. That is in the records. Though, if by some miracle she had escaped, she couldn’t have chosen a better time to disappear. The whole country was in turmoil. People must have been on the move all over the place.’

  ‘What I don’t get,’ he said, ‘is what she wants. I don’t see how we could reopen the case at this late stage.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘God, listen to me. I’m really losing it, talking like this about a bloody ghost.’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago you would have bet everything on there being no such animal.’

  ‘I know, and I still don’t believe she’s a restless spirit. It’s like I told Beth, we stumbled on the switch somehow and started the playback. I don’t know how, but that’s what it is.’

  Sarah just smiled. ‘Well, Einstein,’ she said, ‘I wish someone would hurry up and find the bloody “off” button.’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  There would be no May Day celebrations that year. Edward Randall would not countenance such pagan worship. The whole village knew it and the idea was never even forwarded.

  Kitty felt sad for that. She knew full well that there was nothing Christian in the festival, but to see the children dancing, dressed in their best clothes and garlanded with ribbons and flowers was something that gave her great pleasure. Like many of the festivals that the village had traditionally kept, it was more an affirmation of solidarity and friendship than of worship and Kitty felt that this was being further undermined.

  As a child, she had gone with her father and brother and her friends to gather flowers with which to make garlands. Her father loved to celebrate and any excuse for music or sugar cake or any kind of enjoyment was enough for him. Kitty realized now that hers had been an idyllic childhood in so many ways and that security had helped her cope with her injuries when it would have been so easy, particularly in the early days, just to curl up and die. Life with Matthew Jordan had simply been an extension of her childhood. For all the responsibilities that there had been, there was also contentment and the knowledge that she was valued. It was a hard lesson to learn that she now meant nothing.

  Early on the May Day morning, Kitty and Mim walked away from the village and into the woods. It seemed so sad not to acknowledge the festival in some way that they had decided, the two of them, to steal an hour or two away. The sun was low enough for dew still to be on the ground, soaking the hems of their skirts as they crossed the meadow.

  ‘Kitty, Mistress Hallam, wait for me.’

  Kitty turned around. ‘Hope!’

  Breathless, the girl caught up with them. The linen ties of her skirts were only half fastened and her bonnet had been pulled onto uncombed hair.

  ‘Hope, child. Just look at you. If your mother should see you like this.’

  Kitty knelt and began to set the girl to rights, fastening the ties on her skirt and trying to ease the tangled hair into some kind of order.

  ‘I saw you from the window,’ Hope told them. ‘The morning was so bright I could not bear to be inside.’

  Kitty exchanged a glance with Mim. ‘Well, you may come with us,’ she said. ‘But only for a little while. You know your mother does not wish that you should speak to me.’

  Hope pulled a face.

  ‘I’ll take her back in through the kitchen,’ Mim said. ‘Then if she’s missed I can say she ran some errand for me.’

  ‘We shouldn’t encourage the child to lie.’

  ‘Many things shouldn’t be encouraged,’ Mim said comfortably, ‘but it seems to me they are. What harm can there be in the child being here?’

  Kitty sighed and held out her hand. Hope clasped it quickly, dancing beside her as they walked on.

  ‘Where are you going, Mistress Hallam? My father says that it is May Day. That in pagan times people danced to please their gods and committed acts that should not be spoken of. He’s going to preach about them on the Sabbath.’

  ‘Even though they should not be spoken of?’ Kitty laughed. ‘We had a maypole here, in this village, every year until this one. I don’t think it encouraged so many unspeakable acts.’

  ‘Really. The Reverend Jordan allowed such things? I wish I could have seen it.’

  Hope’s eyes were round and her expression caught between horror and excitement. ‘Wasn’t he afraid that he might go to hell?’

  ‘For permitting children to dance on the green? No, I don’t believe he feared judgement for that.’

  They turned into the cool avenue between the trees and then took the narrow path deeper into the woods until they came to a clearing circled with oak and birch.

  ‘I’ve never been this far,’ Hope said. ‘It’s beautiful, Kitty.’

  ‘I think it is my favourite place,’ Kitty told her. ‘The trees are so old. Master Jordan told me that people used to worship in places like this before they had churches built.’ Then she laughed, seeing Hope’s expression. The child looked at her as
though she had gone completely mad.

  They sat in the sunny clearing on grass dotted with early daisies and talked of the years past and Hope made a chain of the white flowers, which she hung proudly around Kitty’s neck.

  ‘How do you make garlands, Mistress Hallam? Would you teach me how?’

  Kitty looked around her. ‘Really, we should use willow,’ she said. ‘The withies are more flexible and easy to work. Ah, that will do instead.’

  Honeysuckle wove around the trees. It was not yet in flower but last year’s vines, brown but still flexible, clung to the branches. Kitty pulled some free, twisting one vine into a ring and then weaving the others around it until she had a framework strong enough to circle the girl’s head. She took twigs of birch and newly opened oak leaves, still bright spring green, wood anemones from beneath the trees, late bluebells and the chain of daisies Hope had made, binding them tight with split and twisted honeysuckle vine. Then she took off the girl’s bonnet and placed the garland on Hope’s tangled hair.

  ‘You look like a princess,’ she said and watched with pleasure as the child danced about the clearing, bowing to imaginary courtiers, the flower crown bouncing upon her soft brown curls.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  On the Monday morning Ray drove to see Frank Jones’s wife. Her address had been in the file that Mahoney had provided him with.

  Helen Jones still lived in the council flat that Frank had moved to six years before. Their child was almost seven and Ray arrived when his mother was still not home from the school run.

  Ray waited, parking his car in front of the block of flats and watching the procession of young mothers, many with pushchairs, make the morning trek home. He had only the slightest idea as to Helen Jones’s appearance. Blonde, someone had told him, and Ray tried not to stare at every blonde woman that passed him by. He needn’t have worried, she stood out a mile when he finally saw her, a young woman walking alone, dressed in faded blue jeans and a tight black top. It was her face that gave her away, the strain that shadowed the eyes and put lines where no woman that age should have them. He waited until she had gone into the block and then followed, aware of the stares he got from the mothers still chatting on the street. Their interest had little to do with his scars, it was pure recognition and he had faced it a thousand times. The ‘he’s a copper’ look, and the buzz of interest as to what he was doing there. Ray had long since learned to live with it, but it seemed strange after so long a break to have slipped back into the invisible uniform. But then, George Mahoney had been retired from the army for almost a decade and, if you looked at the way he moved you’d never have known.

  He didn’t bother with the lift. Hated them, anyway, Helen Jones only lived on the third floor. Even so, he was panting by the time he’d reached the top of the stairs. Got to get back in shape, he told himself, pausing to catch his breath before knocking at Mrs Jones’s door.

  ‘Helen Jones?’

  ‘Yes?’ She studied him for a moment. ‘You’re police,’ she said.

  ‘DI Ray Flowers.’ He still had his ID card, it was out of date but he waved it at her anyway.

  ‘You’d better come on in.’

  She stepped back, waiting for him to close the door, then led the way through to the living room. It was clean and tidy and, he guessed, not long decorated in pale blue paper with a flower border at dado height. The suite was covered in worn blue velour but the TV and video were new. Ray remembered the report in the file about Frank Jones’s spending.

  Helen gestured to a place on the sofa, but she didn’t sit down. Instead, she stood across the room, staring out of the picture window at the street below. She was far too thin, Ray noticed, and far too pale, the bright lipstick she wore only accentuating the whiteness of her skin.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘I’ve already told the other lot I don’t know nothing.’

  ‘I came to say I was sorry, about Frank,’ Ray told her, though something inside him despised the deceit. ‘Frank was, shall we say, helpful to me once or twice.’

  She looked sharply at him and for a moment he wondered if she would ask him for money, say Frank was owed and he should be paying. Instead, she picked a half-empty pack of cigarettes off the windowsill and lit one with nervous fingers, before shaking her head at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, mister, but Frank was no one’s grass. He was going straight. Had been for years. All this,’ she gestured vaguely at the flat, ‘all this and me and the boy, we meant too much for him to play the fool.’

  All this, Ray thought. She’d said it with such pride. He got up, joined her by the window. ‘My mum’s place was like this. Looking at the block from the outside, it might have been the same building. You think the councils have a countrywide master plan? This is how you build social housing.’

  He glanced sideways at her but she hadn’t moved. ‘His record says they could pin nothing on him, not that he was going straight. That nightclub he worked for, you know who runs that place?’

  ‘He worked as a doorman. And before you ask, the stuff he bought for the flat, he won the money. Your lot already checked that.’

  ‘Horses, was it?’

  ‘Lottery.’ She almost spat the word. ‘He won the bloody lottery. Five numbers. It got us eighteen hundred quid. Or didn’t your lot tell you that?’ She stubbed the half-smoked cigarette, screwing the butt into the ashtray.

  ‘I’ve been on the sick,’ Ray told her. ‘Like I say, I came to offer sympathy, not to accuse him.’

  ‘Oh sure. Well, you’ve done that so you can go now.’

  She looked at him again, staring as though making a connection. ‘You’re that pig they attacked,’ she said. ‘The one they burned.’

  ‘Unless there’s another poor bastard looks like me, though I was never what you’d call handsome anyway.’ It almost raised a smile.

  ‘Not exactly well named, are you? Flowers, I mean.’

  Her voice had softened, the abusive tone had never sat easily anyway. He guessed she had just grown used to being hurt lately and preferred to attack first. He decided to try telling her the truth.

  He touched the scarring on his face. ‘Someone’s trying to tell me that your Frank did this.’

  ‘Frank!’ Her outrage, he felt, was genuine. ‘Now look here, mister, my Frank wouldn’t hurt a fucking fly. You ask anyone round here, they’ll tell you the same. Even at that frigging nightclub, it was Frank who used to talk the punters down, when the others just wanted to kick shit out of anyone making trouble, and he was going legit in the new year, enrolled in that doorman’s course the council runs and everything. You think my Frank would do something like that . . .’

  She broke down and began to cry.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Ray told her quietly. ‘But someone wants me to and I need to know why.’

  He found a box of tissues beside the sofa and put them close to her, then went and found the kitchen and set about making them both some tea. She made no objection and when he came back with the tray she took the mug he handed to her.

  ‘You don’t believe it?’ she said.

  ‘No. I’ve looked over Frank’s record and it doesn’t fit. I’ve tried to fit Frank’s face onto the face of the man who attacked me and that doesn’t fit either.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I. Tell me, Helen, did you know a detective called Guy Halshaw?’

  ‘Halshaw. That bastard. Came here once looking for drugs. I told him, anyone brings drugs into my house and they’d be out that fucking window. We’ve got a kid to take care of.’

  Ray wasn’t sure he saw the logic, but he let it pass.

  ‘Frank’d warned me about him too. I let the others look where they liked but I never left Halshaw alone. Not for a minute. Frank said he planted stuff. So I watched him. I never let his hands out of my sight once. And do you know what that bastard said, just when they were leaving?’

  Ray was beginning to think that he could guess.

&
nbsp; ‘He told me that if Frank went down I’d never have to worry about being lonely. He’d make sure of that.’

  ‘Did you report it?’ Ray asked her.

  ‘Bloody right I did. They said they’d be looking into it. Sure. Police-speak for fuck off and mind your own business.’

  Ray sipped his tea, thinking deeply. Twice in a few days he’d heard the same things about Halshaw. He’d worked with the man for years, but never closely. Halshaw had taken a fast track into vice and Ray had always been CID. A general-purpose copper and quite happy with that.

  ‘Helen, did he try to contact you again after that?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, but they wouldn’t leave Frankie alone. Every week it was after that, at least once a week they’d pick him up on some excuse or other. Frank joked about it. Said now he knew what it was like to be black.’ She stared down into the mug. ‘Nice tea,’ she said. ‘Mine’s never that good.’

  ‘It’s all in how you warm the pot.’

  ‘I never use the pot now. Not just for one. The lad, Ian, he doesn’t like tea.’ She sniffed, blinking to clear away the tears. ‘He misses his dad,’ she said.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Hope had been unable to sleep. At church that Sunday her father had preached the wrongness and evil of pagan practices and Hope had felt that somehow he was speaking most directly to her.

  ‘Hellfire and damnation await those who turn aside from God’s will. Hellfire and damnation both in this world and the next. Not even death will bring respite from the wrath of God.’

  His words had echoed around her dreams and she had awoken in the early hours with them still in her thoughts.

  Kitty didn’t seem to reckon much as being evil. She was patient and accepting of difference and, Hope thought, she was the wisest and most comforting person that she knew.

  But what if Kitty was wrong? What if, even by just making garlands on May Day and talking about the festivities they had attended in earlier times, they were condemning themselves?