by Kate Mosse
Salt Mill House loomed suddenly up out of the mist. Was I safe? For a fleeting instant, I considered banging on the door and asking for help. But, then, what would I say? That I’d seen a girl on the path and got the wind up? And the foul smell hung about me, on my clothes, my hair, seeping through my skin, and I couldn’t stop. Didn’t dare stop.
I was out on the mudflats now, treacherous in the dusk. My boots sank lower at each step. The mud was like clawing hands around my ankles, trying to drag me down. Out here, pockets of swamp lay concealed amongst the reeds, sinking mud and false land where a person could be pulled down into the estuary. Flecks of grass, of seaweed, of sludge splattered up onto the back of my legs and skirt and hem of my coat. My throat was sore from running, burning like a slug of whisky in a child’s mouth, but panic kept me going, deeper into the marsh. On across the eel grass, where the savannah sparrows nested, over the samphire, faded at the tail of the year, past the creek, until finally Mill Lane was in sight and the solid, familiar outline of the library. My refuge then, a refuge now.
I stopped running, put my hand against the familiar bricks, to catch my breath. At last, I turned and looked behind me. Nothing was there, no one. I realised the smell had gone and the mist, too, was beginning to lift.
I don’t know how long I stood there, only that already embarrassment was replacing fear. How easily I’d let my imagination get the better of me. I’d been hoping to run into her, then, when I did, I turned tail like a rabbit. The girl herself, whoever she was, what must she think? She’d think I was off my rocker. So what if she was dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes? And as for the marks on her wrists, just a trick of the light in the fading afternoon. She’d hardly have been walking around otherwise, would she?
I hesitated a moment outside. I was late home already and I looked a sketch. Salt water splashed up the back of my raincoat, my gloves stiff with mud. Mrs Sadler would be sure to pass comment, she was the type who didn’t let anything go. But there was something I had to do, read, before I went home. I wouldn’t rest else. Mrs Sadler would have to wait.
I ran up the steps and into the library. To my relief, Albert was still on the front desk, his glasses perched on the tip of his red nose. Saying I’d forgotten something, and he wasn’t to worry, I headed through the stacks to the archive room at the back of the building, where back issues of local and parish newspapers were kept. Floor-to-ceiling hanging files and oversize drawers, nothing had been put onto film yet. In the middle there was a large central desk with drawers, large enough to accommodate ten people working at any one time. I scanned the years, months, weeks, until I found the box I wanted:
My heart going nineteen to the dozen, I flicked through until I found the edition I was after. Saw what I didn’t want to see. I stared at the black and white photograph in the newspaper, looking into the eyes of the murdered girl. Her hair curled out beneath the cap, the belted jacket and pleated skirt, shirt and tie. I caught my breath. And beneath, the description of the murder: her throat cut and marks on wrists suggesting she’d been kept captive for a while before her body was found in Cornmill House.
I slumped down on the chair, the photograph bringing it all back. The whispers, the pointed fingers, the speculation. Remembering when the police had gone, hearing Mum and my stepfather arguing in whispers, so the neighbours wouldn’t hear through the walls. She took Harry’s side, of course. Tried to defend him. Said they were talking to every man over sixteen, nothing sinister about it. Bound to be one of the soldiers billeted at Oakwood or Goodwood. Besides, what respectable girl would go on her own, to a place like that? Asking for trouble.
I put the newspaper back in the box and the box back in the stacks, then turned off the light. I waved to Bert on the way out and held up my bag, proof that I’d found what I was looking for, then I went out into the fading afternoon. Cold, dark, ice underfoot. Proper December weather. Back up Mill Lane, over the road to the row of terraced cottages where we lived. The back door was unlocked. I took off my boots and hung my coat, inside out, on the back of the door, before calling out.
‘It’s only me,’ I said, going through to the hall. ‘Sorry I’m late. I got held up.’
Mrs Sadler was dressed for outside, hat and gloves on, hands folded in front of her. She glanced pointedly at the clock on the window sill by the sink.
‘How’s he been?’
‘Same as usual,’ she said in a tight, clipped voice.
‘Has he had his tea?’
‘At four. He’s asleep now.’ Her voice was begrudging, hard done by. ‘He’s been agitated all afternoon, mind you. Talking about some girl. Your brother Harry, too, though it’s hard to know what he’s saying. The language.’
‘I’m sorry if he’s offended you, Mrs Sadler,’ I said, more sharply than I intended. ‘Thanks for staying on. I’ll see you Monday, as usual?’
A sly look crossed her broad face. ‘I don’t know. Mr Sadler doesn’t like me coming here, you know. He’s not one for talk.’
I was tempted to say, no I didn’t know, to make her come out with it. Admit that she’d heard the rumours about my stepfather, about our family. At least then I could say something in our defence. But I was more shaken up than I cared to admit and, besides, who else would come in and sit with him? So I just suggested we should perhaps come to a new financial arrangement, to compensate for any inconvenience. I got a note out and put it on the table. Would that help matters indoors? I could see her thinking about it, totting up the extra few bob. She held out a moment longer, then reached and pocketed the ten shillings.
‘See you Monday,’ she said.
After she’d left, I locked the back door and since there was no one about to see, stepped out of my skirt and sponged the mud as best I could. While it dried, I put on my old gardening skirt that was hanging over the back of the chair where I’d been mending it earlier. I looked at the clock. Five o’clock and it was pitch black. The idea of the long evening ahead was almost more than I could bear, but I knew I’d get on with it just the same. Just as I always did.
I leaned over the sink and pulled on the curtains to shut out the dark. The wire was old and the fabric too heavy, so they stuck halfway, as they usually did, leaving a slat of silver coming in from the light in the alley that ran along the back of the cottages. I knew I should go in to the front room and see how he was, but I couldn’t face it. I was still turning the events of the afternoon over in my mind.
Taking a tin of soup from the larder, I put a saucepan on the stove, cut a couple of slices of bread and buttered them, then put two pieces of cheddar on the side of our plates. All the time, turning over what had happened in my mind. I didn’t come to any firm conclusion either way – had I seen someone at all or just imagined it? – only that I would steer clear of the marshes for the time being.
We ate our meal in silence. The hours crept by. I put on the wireless to keep him company and picked up the novel I’d been reading, Marjorie Morningstar. Set in 1930s America, about a girl who wants to be an actress, I’d liked the sound of it so much I’d bought a copy, rather than waiting for the library to get it in, but tonight it didn’t hold my attention. My stepfather was restless, talking as he drifted in and out of sleep.
As I glanced over at his ruined face, I wondered at how I’d once been so scared of him. He’d been a big man in his day, working at the Anglesey Arms in Halnaker after we’d moved from Fishbourne, until that job, like all the others, fell through. Every time, he called them ‘misunderstandings’, said everyone was out to get him, but the plain truth was he was a drunk. After that last dismissal, he never worked again. He just sat about the house with a bottle in one hand, cigarette in the other, picking fights with any of us stupid enough to get in his way. Now, he hardly knew who he was. Thin as a rake, hardly able to speak or see, too frail to stand unaided.
Only me left now. Only him and me.
At nine o’clock, I began the business of getting him to bed. He slept down here now, to save him
the stairs, but it still took a good half-hour to undress him, put him in his pyjamas, get him settled.
Once he was sorted out, I went back to the front room to get things straight for the morning, as if it mattered. Nobody but Mrs Sadler and the vicar ever visited. I turned off the table lamp, then walked through to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Except for the corridor of light coming in through the gap in the curtains, the room was dark. The cold tap spluttered, the pipes complaining, so I let it run a moment.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move in the yard. A shadow, or reflection, I couldn’t say. My stomach lurched. I put down the glass on the draining board, the water slopping over the side, and peered out. Nothing. Not a cat, not a soul about, nothing. I knew I’d locked the back door earlier, but I checked again, just to be sure. The key, which I always left in the lock, was gone.
I crouched down and ran my fingers over the coarse mat and was absurdly relieved when my fingers connected with the cold metal. Silly to get the wind up. I shot the bolts top and bottom, just to be sure. After the events of the day, my nerves were bad. I picked up my glass and headed out into the cold hallway, then stopped dead.
My stepfather was standing in the corridor. Somehow, without making a noise, he’d got himself up and out of bed on his own. My heart sank. It didn’t happen often, but on the odd occasion when he did wake in the night, not knowing where he was, it could take hours to get him settled again.
‘What are you doing up?’ I said, not expecting an answer. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
He was rocking from side to side, old legs that could barely hold him. His hands were balled into fists. I felt a wave of revulsion, though I knew I ought to feel pity. Then I saw his eyes. They were sharp for the first time in years, unclouded, and fixed at a point behind me.
‘She’s here.’
His voice was thin, quavering, but the words were clear.
‘What?’ I blurted out, shocked that he’d spoken at all.
‘She’s here. Come for me.’
‘Who’s here?’
But even as I said it, of course I knew. I could feel the prickling on my skin at the back of my neck, my hands. And the smell of the shore at low tide. Seaweed and sulphur and mist, the foul breath of the grave. I didn’t want to look round, but I couldn’t stop myself. Taking my eyes off him, for a second, slowly I turned. To face the girl I knew was standing behind me. The skin at her wrists, rubbed raw where the wire had cut through. The ragged red seam where his knife had dragged across her throat, left to right. The work of a right-handed man. Not Harry. Harry was left-handed. For all his faults, not Harry.
For an instant, time seemed to stop and I saw her clearly, a terrible melding of both the girl she had been and the girl she now was, a girl fifteen years dead, lying in the churchyard with a headstone at her feet.
I wanted to speak, to reach out to her, but terror had stolen my voice from me. Then, slowly, she began to lift her head, the same steady and deliberate movement as on the path earlier. This time, I held my ground. Saw her brown eyes, determined face, the brown curled hair kissing her chin.
All at once a rush of air, cold and damp like the mist on the marshes, as if someone had opened a door and let the night in. And a dreadful howling, like a deer caught in a steel trap. For a split second, the girl appeared to smile as she gazed upon the face of the man who had murdered her. Then, before my eyes, her face began to change. Her features, pretty printed on the front page of the newspaper all those years ago, started to collapse in upon themselves. Her brown eyes became red, then rolling white, her rouged lips shrivelled to black, her skin turning to a spider’s web of veins and sinew.
Suddenly, without warning, she leapt.
At the hour of his death, she had come to claim him. I screamed, beating the air with useless hands, trying to protect myself or him, I can’t say. But he didn’t resist. Her bloody, broken body seemed to cover him, bones and blood, taking him with her. His legs buckled and he fell forward, arms by his side, making no attempt to break his fall.
Then silence.
I sank to the ground, knees drawn up to my chin, oblivious to the blood seeping across the tiles and soaking into the hem of my skirt. I heard nothing, was aware of nothing, until someone started banging on the front door and I heard them calling my name.
Later, they told me it was the sound of my stepfather screaming that alerted the neighbours. That, and a strange smell of rotting seaweed permeating through the thin cottage walls.
The doctor said it was a heart attack. A blessing, he called it, that he went so fast. One minute here, the next, gone. The blood from where he’d hit his head. Just like that. But I understood now. I knew he had been dying for years. Rotting from the inside out.
Waiting, all that time, for her to return.
And what of me? I found, after all that, I was happy in Fishbourne, now I was at no one’s beck and call. I stayed in the cottage, painted it top to toe, discovered I liked living on my own. Every spare minute I spent researching, checking every tiny detail, until I was ready to write about the case. A famous unsolved murder in November 1940, the brutal killing of a WAAF girl in Cornmill House. Cleared my brother’s name. Although Harry was never charged, suspicion hung over him – over us all – rightly as it turned out. My mother had gone to her grave never knowing the truth.
Or had she? From time to time, I wonder.
In my own small way, I became quite well known. An interview in the Observer and a few talks to the WI. My book sits on the True Crime shelves in the library where I still work. The church warden at St Mary’s tells me that people often come to leave flowers at the girl’s grave.
And on winter nights, the lights still shine through the windows of the library and out across the marshes. A sanctuary for anyone who needs a place to go.
Author’s Note
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in a small village, Fishbourne, in West Sussex. To the east, the spire of the cathedral dominates the landscape. To the west are the bigger towns of Portsmouth and, further still, Southampton. To the north, the folds of the Sussex Downs – the estates of West Dean and Goodwood, the remains of an Iron Age fort on the Trundle looking down to the estuary. There is a Roman palace in Fishbourne, a small nineteenth-century church (expanded from its medieval origins), the Old Toll House at the site of the Fishbourne turnpike as well as many older cottages and houses dating back hundreds of years. Looking back, I see this is where my earliest interest in history came, simply living in a place where it was so evident in day-to-day life.
More important, though, was what lies to the south – the sea. Not the yellow sands of West Wittering and Bognor Regis, but rather the muddy and tidal estuary of Fishbourne Creek. My sisters and I played at the Mill Pond, hid in the reed mace and high grasses that towered over our heads. When I was older, rather solitary by nature in those days, I’d take a book out to the old flint sea wall and sit reading in the sun. The names of the houses and buildings around the estuary reflected the former industry of this part of the creek – Salt Mill, the Corn Mill, Paper Mill – buildings that are all gone or converted into flats, which still speak of the working landscape. There was, however, no lending library in Fishbourne. That is a ghost of my own imagining.
When I came across the idea of a ‘revenant’ – a visible ghost, or animated corpse, believed to return from the grave to terrorise or take revenge on the living: often their murderer or someone who had done them wrong in life – the story started to take shape. In particular, the idea that derelict or vanished buildings haunt a landscape in the way that a spirit might haunt a person. The word ‘revenant’ comes from the Latin revenans, meaning ‘returning’.
A version of this story first appeared in two instalments in The Big Issue, December 2009.
ON HARTING HILL
South Harting Village, West Sussex
October 1961
On Harting Hill
On such a night, when Air has loosed
/>
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again;
from ‘Low Barometer’
ROBERT BRIDGES
Friday, 27th October, 1961. That afternoon, I was late getting away. A burst water main in Tolworth, and down to one lane in Kingston, meant the going was slow and the traffic was heavy. It had been mild, but in the last few days the weather had turned unsettled. There was a light drizzle and the road was slippery and wet. Leaves, fallen, on the pavements.
All the same, I was comfortable enough in my Morris Minor, the heating rattling on full, rime on the inside of the windscreen as I crept forward in a stream of cars leaving London by the old Portsmouth Road. I half listened to the news on the wireless: unrest in the Paris suburbs, the last British troops leaving Kuwait, another stand-off between Soviet and American tanks at Checkpoint Charlie. The traffic inched forward.
A friend from my school days had invited me to stay for the weekend. A few like-minded chaps, Bill said, all of them single or, like me, recently divorced. All very informal, he’d said. Country walks and a pub lunch, a few hands of cards. A round of golf on Sunday morning. I hadn’t seen Bill for years, but the thought of a change of scene was welcome and I’d accepted. Now, what with the traffic, I was in two minds about whether I’d done the right thing.
‘Traffic’s always bad Fridays,’ Bill said. ‘All the weekenders choking up the road.’
‘Adding to their number,’ I’d said, and we’d both laughed in that slightly awkward way of friends who had once known each other well.
