Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
The Dark Water chapter 1
The Dark Water Chapter 2
Praise for Helen Moorhouse
Newspaper and Magazine reviews
“Compulsive reading . . . a brilliant first novel, guaranteed to send shivers down your spine” – Irish Independent
“If a ghost story can be measured by its ability to scare the daylights out of you then this is very good indeed . . . Not for the faint-hearted” – Sunday Independent
“A classic chiller” – The Irish Times
“Helen Moorhouse has a fresh, original voice. She has created a satisfyingly scary page turner” – The Irish Examiner
“Read it” – Sunday World
“Helen Moorhouse has applied skill, knowledge and respect to every word in this book, creating the connection between the past and the present and making the squeaks and scratches in our homes take on a whole new meaning!” – The Evening Echo
“Satisfyingly chilling from start to finish, this is a deeply haunting book from an exciting new author” – Woman’s Way
“If you enjoy a good ghost story, have a foible for romance and new beginnings or if you just like to curl up with an unusual tale, then The Dead Summer is the right read for you” – Suburbia magazine
“Thoroughly enjoying this suspenseful tale” – New Books magazine
“Atmospheric” – U magazine
Online reviews
“An excellent debut. I had tingles down my spine as I read this and I couldn’t read it fast enough” – bookshelf.com
“A chilling and sometimes heartbreaking read . . . fans of Linda Kavanagh will love this new author” – chicklitclub.com
Book Trade reviews
“The Woman In Black has met her match! Deep within this terrifying and sinister tale lies a sad story of loss and regret. I could not put The Dead Summer down” – Eason reviewer
“I would recommend to anyone who enjoys gothic, ghostly and atmospheric stories. It has a similar feel to that of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, The Place of Secrets by Rachel Hore and House of Echoes by Barbara Erskine. I look forward to more from this author and more of this type of book from Poolbeg” – Waterstone’s Drogheda reviewer
Author reviews
“An exhilarating, enthralling and spooky read. A great debut novel that leaves you eagerly awaiting the next one” – Linda Kavanagh
“A poignant historical thread is woven through this story of a haunting” – Martina Devlin
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,
characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the
author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published 2013
by Poolbeg Press Ltd
123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle
Dublin 13, Ireland
E-mail: [email protected]
www.poolbeg.com
© Helen Moorhouse 2013
Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook
© Poolbeg Press Ltd
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781781991374
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.poolbeg.com
About the Author
A native of Mountmellick, County Laois, Helen Moorhouse lives in Dublin with her husband and two young daughters. She works as a freelance writer and voiceover artist. Her interests include movies, TV – especially subtitled murder mysteries – reading and music. Her previous books, The Dead Summer (2011) and The Dark Water (2012) are also published by Poolbeg. For more, see www.helenmoorhouse.weebly.com.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to:
Paula Campbell for her wisdom, encouragement and support – thank you, as always, for the amazing opportunity to write.
The team at Poolbeg – Ailbhe, Sarah, David – for such hard work and constant support.
My editor, Gaye Shortland, who takes the efforts that I serve up and turns them into something that somehow works!
My former teachers at the Brigidine Convent, Mountrath, especially Mary Holden who gave me the first taste of seeing my name in print.
My parents, my in-laws, my family near and far, and my friends who are always behind me.
The readers – the buyers, the borrowers, the Tweeters, the Facebookers – thank you all so much.
And to Daryl, Daisy and Florence who are my world.
For DM. The best person I have ever known.
“In this big world I’m lonely, for I am but small,
Oh angels in heaven, don’t you care for me at all?
You heard my heart breaking for it rang through the skies,
So why don’t you sing me lullabies . . .”
Kate Rusby
Part One
Jenny
Chapter 1
June 1998
Jenny
I’m sitting at my kitchen table. It’s Saturday morning and it’s raining, a steady downpour, noiseless except for the steady drip-drip of water from the gutters just outside the back door. It’s a nice rain. A stay-indoors rain. Even though it’s June, the kitchen lights are on and it’s cosy – there’s a warm smell of coffee and toast and Ed’s popped on the new Moby album. The washing machine is humming gently in the background – a gentle swish-swish sound. Adds to the atmosphere. Makes all this a moment.
I’m watching Ed do his usual Saturday-morning routine – standing at the countertop
and going through the week’s post in detail. He’s always done it: stood there with his diary by his side, filling in any appointments that have arrived, filing the bank statements, binning the junk mail.
Sitting beside him on the work surface, helping, is our daughter, Bee. She’ll be three in a couple of months. A fireball of energy at home, all ginger curls and green eyes and porcelain skin. Outside the front door of 17 Pilton Gardens, it’s a different story – she’s a serene little thing, silent and angelic. She’s ripping up the envelopes for Ed as he empties them of their contents and flattens them into piles: bills, statements, correspondence, notifications.
I can’t help but laugh as he wrestles a still-sealed C4 envelope from her hand.
“Bee!” he exclaims. “Give that back to Daddy – I haven’t read it yet.”
Bee giggles and tries to tug it back. “But I’m helping Daddy!” she counters. “I’m the Ripper, you said! I’m Bee the Ripper!”
Ed responds by tickling her exposed armpit, then nestling his head in her warm little neck and blowing a loud raspberry, at which she shrieks with delight, relinquishing the envelope and grabbing his arm, making a scrabble-handed tickle gesture of her own.
Making sure she’s secure, Ed withdraws from her, smiling, and returns his attention to the envelope.
It’s then that Bee turns to the kitchen table and sees me. I’m sure of it. A smile plays on her lips. “Mummy,” she says softly.
I smile back.
At the same moment Ed opens the envelope and groans softly before being momentarily distracted by Bee.
“Mummy,” she says again. Her eyes are completely focused on me.
Bee can see me.
Ed follows her stare to the kitchen table where I sit. He sees nothing of course. “Please, Bee . . .” he begins, and I see the start of tears in his eyes.
Please don’t, Ed. Not in front of her. Not again. But he can’t seem to help it.
My name is Jenny Mycroft, née Adams, and my husband can’t see me because I’m not there. Because I died in a car crash on the 23rd of December 1997.
I watch as he takes my daughter, our only child, in his arms. He is crying silently into her hair while she struggles to look back at the table where I am sitting. Except I don’t think she’ll be able to see me now. Because the moment has gone. Because it’s all broken.
I watch as my husband slumps down to the floor where he sits with his arms wrapped tightly around little Bee. A sob escapes him and he is helpless. And I am helpless too. I long to put my arms around them both. To somehow touch them, but I can’t because I’m not really there.
And then I see what has fallen to the ground from the envelope with which they struggled in their little game and I know why he’s crying. It’s a wet Saturday morning in June and my husband has found, among the week’s post, a letter wishing to know if I would like to renew my subscription to House and Home Magazine for another year. It’s such a simple thing . . .
“Jenny,” I hear him whisper into Bee’s neck.
Her skinny little arms have snaked around his neck and she’s hugging him back. It’s not the first time that she’s done this.
“Jenny,” sobs Ed again, helplessly, into Bee’s neck. “Why did you leave us? Why did you go?”
For all he knows, there is no one there to hear him. A louder sob escapes, his whole body surrendering to the tears, shuddering, convulsing with distress.
And there is nothing I can do. I didn’t want to die, Ed. You have to believe that. But I’m here now and I’m not leaving. Please don’t cry. I’m not going to leave you this time. Not ever.
Chapter 2
November 1989
Ed and Jenny
Jenny Adams pulled her chunky mustard cardigan closer around herself. Another late night at college and she was freezing again – the heating in the library would have been switched off at six, of course. Some of her friends had gone to proper uni. With proper study facilities. Heat. A library in an actual building instead of ‘temporarily’ in a Portakabin. But no, not Jennifer Adams. Well, it wasn’t possible just now, was it?
She could have gone to Cambridge of course, she knew that. But The Eleanor Darvill Academy of Art and Design in Chelsea offered courses that were just as good, the prospectus said. Jenny’s History of Art lecturers were among the finest in the British Isles, apparently. And it was, according to the student information officer, easily accessible by Underground and bus, therefore saving extensive accommodation fees. And there were the grants for tuition and materials. Which didn’t go amiss.
It had all made sense. Jenny’s dad had begged and pleaded with her to go down to Cambridge but she knew, and he knew, that this – attending Darvill’s – was the best thing all round. Who would look after him if she went away, for heaven’s sake? She shuddered at the thought of what might happen to him. In his pyjamas all day every day – the grey ones with the burgundy stripes that he wore under an ancient blue sweater – and the slippers that had holes in the soles. Mum had bought them for him. Like the sentimental old fool he was, he refused to part with them, despite the numerous replacements he had been given at birthdays, Christmases and on Father’s Days. He hadn’t been in much of a mood for new things since he’d come home after her mum’s funeral and announced that he couldn’t go on. Eight years before.
It had been up to Jenny to take care of him then. Who else was there? At eleven years of age, she had made sure that he had porridge for breakfast, even though it went untouched six days out of seven. School had been close enough for her to pop back at lunchtime and make them both a sandwich and then she did her best to cook a meal every evening. In some cases it had been just beans on toast, if, say, she’d had a lot of study to do, or, later on, some coursework for her portfolio to complete. She’d always made it up to him though with a stew or some fresh fish the day afterwards.
She’d try her best to get him out once a week as well. Sitting silently through Chelsea matches in the freezing cold while everyone around them cheered and chanted. She even dragged him to the pub every now and again. It wasn’t much fun, sitting there drinking Coke while he stared miserably into a pint of bitter . . . and people were inclined to avoid John Adams since his wife had passed away and he’d gone a bit funny. But it got him out of the house and if it meant she had to work a little later into the night to get her homework done, then so be it. It was Jenny’s job to take care of her dad now.
Of course part of the idea of going to Darvill’s instead of moving away to uni had been so she could be there for him in the evenings, but lately that hadn’t been working out so well. She’d gone and selected medieval art as one of the course modules – and there was only over a thousand years of art to cover with that one. The paper on ‘Animals in Medieval Art’ that was due by the beginning of December, a subject with which Jenny was quite frankly struggling, was going to be the death of her, she was sure. At least Darvill’s had a pretty big library – even if it was freezing and portable – where she could do some of the research in peace and quiet.
And Darvill’s was where she found herself on a Thursday night in November, starving, on her way to the canteen to see if there might be something she could eat before it closed for the night.
Jenny looked at her watch – her mother’s. Seven thirty, it read. She hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime when she’d had a small sandwich. No wonder her concentration had started to stray. Her thoughts flashed to her father as she pulled open what had originally been the servants’ entrance of the great Georgian house in which Darvill’s had been established in the 1960s, and made her way along the dark, tiled corridors to the original servants’ quarters where the canteen was housed. Jenny wondered if her dad had eaten anything at all that day and immediately worry set in. She’d better hit the road home soon, she thought to herself as she walked, her second-hand Doc Marten boots squeaking out every second step on the red tiles. She’d be out again tomorrow night, she realised. Friday nights were her long shift at M
ovie Kingdom – she needed every penny that she could make from that job. She had to save for Cambridge, because they’d said they’d hold the place open for her and she was sure that she’d be able to take it soon, that maybe in the next while her dad would finally come right and get back into the land of the living. It was all a question of being patient. After Christmas maybe. And that was only a month away.
A quick snack, she thought, then another half an hour on bloody tapestries of unicorns and she would get off home. She’d videoed a travel documentary that her dad might like. He loved Monty Python, used to love listening to the records when she was younger. Maybe he’d enjoy seeing Michael Palin go around the world in eighty days?
Jenny could hear a TV set as she turned the final corner on the route through the college basement and walked through the open archway into the canteen. She knew its layout with her eyes shut. The kiosk, closed by now, just inside the door on the left, which sold single, polystyrene cups of coffee, chocolate, newspapers and cigarettes. Beyond that, running the length of the wall was the service area where, behind a glass screen, food was kept warm in bain-maries over the course of the day.
Jenny picked up a sticky red-plastic tray from a pile and slid it along the metal piping of the tray rack, peering in to see what was left. There were chips and there was curry sauce. That was enough for her. She ordered and then accepted the steaming plate from a white-clad server that she didn’t know. Norma, the usual dinner lady, jovial, cheeks red with broken veins, always finished at half past five on the dot. Jenny then slid her plate along to the cash register, where she helped herself to a glass of tap water from a scratched old glass jug while she waited for the server to follow her so that she could pay. She fished in the pocket of her faded dungarees for her small red purse and counted out the one pound ten needed to pay for the snack. One pound for a plate of chips and ten pence for the sauce. Every student at Darvill’s knew this price. Along with forty pence for a cup of coffee and fifteen for a Tunnock’s teacake. The diets of the college students were pretty basic.
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