While I waited, I tried to get a feel for the personality of the man who lived in this house. Everything was ... terrifyingly normal, if I’m honest. The porch was clean and tidy. There was a comedy boot-scraper in the shape of a hedgehog, and a cheerful yellow pot full of primulas to one side of the welcome mat. The glass to either side of the door was frosted and I couldn’t see through it.
But there was certainly no one at home.
I rang again and waited. It was nearly six o’clock. It wouldn’t be dark for another few hours – sunset was due just before nine. Anne’s ghost wouldn’t walk until midnight. I was sure that was the first rule of being a ghost. Midnight was the time to haunt the earth. It was harder to be scary at three-fifteen on a damp Wednesday.
Gloria had been watching from a distance but she came over to me when I turned around and walked away from the door.
“Now what?” she said.
“I don’t know. They can’t have gone to Blickling yet. What are they going to do for six hours?”
“Set up a really elaborate ritual?”
“The Hall is open to the public.”
“Visit the gift shop?”
I shook my head. “Even if it’s closing now, there will be staff around for some time, surely.”
We stared at one another blankly. Finally we did what anyone would have done in such a situation, and went to a pub.
NOT TO DRINK, OBVIOUSLY. I was driving and we both needed clear heads. We decided that we may as well eat, and go over all the twists and turns once more, trying to discover what we might have missed.
I phoned Bernie to get the latest on the arrest of Charlotte, but the news was gloomy. She told me that the Crown Prosecution Service was building a case and that there was potentially enough evidence to even convict Charlotte. I was appalled, and so was Gloria when I relayed this information to her.
“DNA?” she exclaimed, thumping the table and making the other pub-goers stare at us. “What nonsense. Okay, so her DNA is on the murder weapon and she owns the murder weapon and it was found in her house and she has a history with the victim and a reason to hate him and no alibi at all but surely they can’t assume from all that, that she’s guilty!”
“Good god,” I said, “you’d be a rubbish defence lawyer. I think you’ve pretty much convicted her in one long sentence.”
“It doesn’t look good for her at all, then?”
“No, it doesn’t. The only glimmer of hope is that she wasn’t on the CCTV from that night. Unfortunately, they don’t rely as much on that sort of thing, because it’s not perfectly clear, and witness testimonies are notoriously inaccurate.”
At nine o’clock we left the pub and returned to Ian’s house, and this time we didn’t bother parking in the industrial estate. I brazenly drove right up the lane to his house. I had worked myself up into such a mood about Charlotte’s predicament that I nearly drove right into the car that was coming the other way. They slammed on the brakes and swerved to one side. I lurched to the other and my nearside wheel ended up on the grass verge. I pressed the button to lower my window, and the other driver did the same.
“Ian,” I said, glaring at him.
He smiled affably. “Good evening, Ms Hardy.” He was violently polite and inoffensive, I thought angrily, and fought the urge to call him Mr Poopyhead or something equally puerile.
I peered past him. “Vincent Paston! How do you feel about your sister being charged with a crime you have committed?”
Vin was just a dark shape in the passenger seat. His eyes glinted. “I am innocent, and I am not responsible for my sister. You wanna leave us all alone, all right? Leave it to the police. It’s nothing to do with you.”
“How can you?” I said. “She’s suffering in a cell because of you! What sort of monster are you?”
Ian put out his left arm across Vin’s chest. I wasn’t sure if it were a reassuring gesture or he was holding him back. Ian said to me, “Such emotive language – suffering, monster, that sort of thing – it’s really not helpful, under the circumstances. Please try to be less hysterical. But Vincent is right. This needs to be left to the relevant authorities. It is not our business and it certainly is not yours.”
“Where are you going? What are you doing? Where is the book?” I reached out with my arm and flailed around, hunting for my handbag without taking my eyes from Ian. Gloria pressed the handle of my bag into my hand.
Ian smiled at me with a condescending air, and spoke in a slightly different voice. Less professoring, more menacing. “You know where we’re going, and I rather think you ought to keep up.”
I grabbed the door handle and tried to leap out of the car, but that’s hard when your car is quite small, and you’re dragging a handbag of assorted honestly-officer-not-weapons behind you. I tried to pull out a hammer and a spiked tent peg, with the frankly ludicrous intention of hammering it through one of his car tyres.
It turns out that you can’t do something like that quickly, and you certainly can’t do it as the car is driving away.
Ian called out of the window as he pulled away. “Come along, then!”
I was left standing in the road, a hammer in my hand, watching the red lights of his car disappear.
Gloria leaned across the front seats. “You okay?”
“No. I am bloody angry. Why is that man so reasonable? It makes me feel more and more silly and erratic. Hysterical? I’ll give him hysterical!”
“Well, you are standing in the road trying to hammer tent pegs into moving vehicles.”
“Damn it!” I threw the hammer and tent peg back into my bag and swung back into the car. Then I made the world’s most awkward and convoluted three-point-turn to get us facing the right way.
Gloria said, “This is a trap, isn’t it?”
The music I’d been hearing began to fade.
“Of course it’s a trap,” I muttered grimly, accelerating down the lane and back towards the town. “But what choice do we have?”
Apart from the clear and sensible choice, obviously, which was to go home and leave it to the police to sort out.
THE DARK UNLIT LANES of rural Norfolk became a nightmare of twisting and turning, like a rollercoaster of horror, with the ever-present danger of deer leaping out of the hedges, and oncoming drunk-drivers, and inexplicable narrowing of the road to one lane then widening again for no reason at all. Sometimes the roads came to unmarked cross-roads, where the signs had been taken down to thwart potential invaders in the Second World War, and never replaced again. Perhaps we were still trying to keep people out.
I caught glimpses of things glowing, which I hoped were just the eyes of night time predators and nothing more sinister than that – foxes and badgers, cats and stray dogs perhaps.
The music and singing was long gone. Gloria could not hear it either, but she complained of a rising humming that I could not hear at all.
The phone in my bag started to ring, and I asked Gloria to answer it for me. “It’s Clare,” she said, as she looked at the screen. “Hi, Clare, this is Gloria on Jackie’s phone. She’s driving. We didn’t manage to sabotage Ian’s car. She had the hammer but she couldn’t burst his tyres as he was driving.”
I gripped the steering wheel tightly. I hadn’t told Clare of those particular plans. I knew she would not be happy. From the high-pitched squeaking I could hear, she was definitely not.
Gloria listened and tried to calm her down. “I know, no, no, it’s fine. No one got hurt! Yes yes, he drove away. What’s that? ... mmm, okay. Thanks, yes. I will.”
She shoved the phone back in my bag. “Clare was not happy about the sabotage thing.”
“I bet she wasn’t. It doesn’t matter. What did she want to tell us?”
“She said, we mustn’t look at the coach.”
“The one that Sir Thomas Boleyn drives before he fights Sir Thomas Paston?”
“That’s the one. I think Anne rides in it. Regardless, we mustn’t look at it.”
“Why? Wha
t will happen?”
Gloria was flat and strangely calm as she said, “Anyone who witnesses the coach as it passes will be dragged right down to hell.”
Ahh.
Okay.
Hell?
I had to slam on the brakes as I nearly missed a turn in the darkness. I swung the car around and carried on. I said, “I don’t believe in hell, so I can’t go there.”
“No,” said Gloria, “neither do I, but it still can’t be a good thing. I do believe in curses and the destruction of parts of the soul and stuff like that. Hell or not, we should not look at the coach.”
“Okay, so here’s a logical question,” I said. “If seeing the coach dooms you, how do people know what it looks like? The legend talks of headless horses – still haven’t worked that out, by the way, and I’m kinda curious to have a look and see what that really means – and of the coach going over bridges and all that. So someone has seen it, right?”
“Maybe they looked at it in a mirror, like that legend of Theseus.”
“Medusa, and I think it was Perseus, using his shield.”
“That’s what I said. The snakey woman, anyway. Or smoked glass? Like with vampires? I saw that in a film. He had these glasses on. He was hot, for an undead person.”
She was probably thinking about Gary Oldman. I let it drop. She might have had a point, anyway. I said, “I have an assortment of weapons but nothing I think we can use on ghosts and demons, and nothing like a massive mirror or shield. And no, we’re not going to rip the wing mirrors off the car to use them. We’ll have to be very careful, that’s all. Now then! We’re nearly here.”
We parked in the pub car park. The lights from the building spilled out in a welcoming arc and I felt a pull to enter. I wanted to be among people, and laughter, and warmth.
We had a job to do. I emptied all the paraphernalia of weaponry out into the footwell of the back seats. We could well be apprehended by security guards or the police, and I didn’t want to add “going equipped” to the inevitable charge of trespass. I kept the tissues and hand sanitiser, a box of matches and my usual handbag detritus but there was no way I could explain the presence of a hammer or a breadknife.
“It’s a trap, it’s a trap,” Gloria moaned and I could see she was even more nervous than I was. This meant I had to be the strong and capable one, and project confidence, because if we both went to pieces, that would surely spell disaster.
I said, “But if we know it’s a trap, is it still a trap?”
“Er, yes, if it traps us.”
“But it won’t have the element of surprise,” I said. “I think we’ve been lured here precisely because Ian believes that the sight of the coach will doom us in some way. Maybe we’ll get dragged to hell or the mythical underworld of your choice, or maybe just some terrible curse will fall upon us.”
“Oh, just some terrible curse? That’s all right then!”
“So what we’ll do is not look at the coach, and we’ll grab the book from whatever they have planned to do with it.”
She looked at me.
I tried to avoid her gaze.
But I could not.
“Yeah,” I said at last. “As far as plans go, it does have some holes.”
IT WAS NOW NEARLY TEN o’clock, and totally dark. We walked up from the pub car park towards the main gates that stood at the end of the driveway to the hall. We stopped by the white stone pillars, and I said, “You know, we really need to be sensible about this. We must not put ourselves in danger and we can’t run in blind or put anyone else in danger. We have to accept that we might fail tonight.”
Gloria nodded nervously. We stood under an orange streetlamp, one of the few out here in the sticks. We knew that Ian had expected us to follow, so there seemed little point in hiding in shadows.
“We are here in the full knowledge that he is trying to trick us,” I went on, feeling my way through the problem as I spoke. “We are here because we have to be. In a sense perhaps we’re just here to bear witness to whatever happens. Like Quakers do.”
“Except witnessing the coach,” she put in. “We can’t do that.”
“Yes, well, except that bit. If something dreadful happens – I dunno, maybe I watch too many films but just suppose he opens some kind of portal and a heap of strange evil winged demons or whatever come out, then we can’t do anything about that. We must run and hide, not engage with them. Except, we can watch, and report back to Evangeline, and hope that she has some kind of plan.”
“If we survive the winged demon thing.”
“We will, because we’re not going to get too close and take risks. But,” I added, with a determination that I had never felt before, “but if we get any kind of chance, we must get hold of that book, because I still believe that they are using it to drain Charlotte’s life force and I want her to fight back. I want her to stand up for herself. I want justice for her.”
“Yes. Yes!” Gloria said, and there was a growing determination in her voice too. “What magic can we use? Can we prepare anything?”
“It’s a book,” I said, thoughtfully. “So, I’m guessing paper magic ... can you hear that? The music. It’s back.”
Gloria nodded. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s beautiful until you listen to the words,” I said. It was the song about death again, the one said to have been written by Anne on the night before her execution. It rose around us as if we were surrounded by a choir of many voices. I couldn’t help it but I started to become entranced as my ears fixed on one rising melody after another. The notes spiralled around us in the most achingly bittersweet pain. Loss and love wrenched at us. I could not bear it, but I could not stop listening, hanging on the crescendos, anticipating the next rise and crushing fall, each drop overlaid by a new peak.
Gloria saved me. She was used to dealing with sensory overload, after all. She grabbed me and hauled me backwards into a bush next to the pillar. “Close your eyes!” she gasped.
I heard it then, too. Underneath the song of death and redemption, I could hear the approach of wheels crunching on the rough road and the clopping of horses’ hooves. It had to be the coach. I wanted to look – I desperately did – but Clare’s message had to be heeded. She was the most logical and sensible person I knew. If she told me not to look, then I must not look. I squeezed my eyes closed in an exaggerated manner, like a child playing hide and seek.
“I have closed them. Have you?” I said.
“Yes. Oh god.”
We clung to one another. The song was screaming like a blizzard now but the coach was louder too, and we heard it roll past us, quite distinctly. As it went, the singing also faded. My ears were ringing.
“Can I open them again yet?” I said.
“I don’t know. I’ll go first.”
“No,” I said. “Let me. I got us into this, after all.” I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. We plunged out of the bushes and looked around.
“I can’t see the coach.”
“Nor me,” I replied. I breathed out heavily. We looked up towards the hall which was in darkness. “There’s nothing. Not a single light on. Can you hear anything?”
“Yes. Metal on metal,” Gloria said. “And distant yelling.”
“Right. Let’s go.”
And against all good sense, we ran in the direction of the shouting.
I FOUND MYSELF SCANNING the gravel driveway for any marks of the wheels, as if a ghostly coach would leave a trail that I could follow, or in this case, avoid. Of course there was nothing. It was hard to see anything but the area was lit by very low security lighting.
The clash of metal upon metal came from the right, around the corner of one wing of the hall. We went that way but then stopped before we rounded the edge.
“What if we see the coach?” Gloria said.
“That’s what I was thinking. But ... it’s not moving anymore. We know that the coach has been seen, and people survived to tell the tale. So I’m going to make a guess that co
uld go wrong and doom us to an eternity in torment but it’s an educated guess. What if the curse only works if you see the coach thunder past? What if it only curses you when it’s moving?”
“That is one hell of a leap,” Gloria said, shakily. “I don’t want to risk it. What about a mirror? I have a mirror in my bag.” She pulled out a small compact mirror and unfolded it. “Try it.”
I took it from her and tried to use it to see around the corner, but it turned out to be fiendishly difficult. The mirror was small and the angle was wrong. Anytime I got it into the right position, the only thing it reflected back to me was my own big head, firmly in the way. But Gloria was scared, so I said, “There’s no coach there as far as I can see.” This was true. I could not see. “But you wait here just in case.” And with a steadying breath, I peeked around the corner.
There was no coach.
There were, however, two men battling it out with swords.
This, then, was the annual fight between the ghosts of Sir Thomas Paston and Sir Thomas Boleyn. They didn’t look like insubstantial wraiths playing out a well-worn ritual, though. They seemed very solid to me, and big, and rather intent on literally killing one another, except that they were already dead. I beckoned to Gloria. She gasped as she came to my side.
“Which one is which?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you think it matters?”
After all, we could hardly get involved. They weren’t prancing about duelling like I’d seen fencers do in the Olympics. Instead they were hacking at one another, and lurching around, and rolling off to one side or another in an effort to avoid the crushing blows of the heavy swords that they were wielding.
One of the men, a heavy-set man with a ginger beard, was beginning to weaken. The other man, who was younger, had torn right through the puffed sleeves of the doublet that the ginger man was wearing. The ginger man staggered and the younger one stabbed him in the upper thigh, causing the older one to fall to his knees.
Wine, Witches and Song (The Everyday Witches of Wildham-on-Sea Book 1) Page 17