‘Rufus is back at the house,’ says Nessa. ‘That’s the good news. At least there’s no more waiting around to be done.’
I sit down. I hardly dare ask. ‘How does he seem?’
‘Awful. He’s lost almost as much weight as you have. He’s spent most of the day shut away in your room. By the looks of him, I’d say he hasn’t slept much lately. Oh, and he’s been crying.’
‘Oh God.’ The thought of Rufus crying makes me want to do the same.
‘Don’t you join in,’ says Nessa.
‘What have I done to him?’
‘Steady on,’ says Roly. ‘Not you, remember? Other people. Where’s your phone?’
‘Here.’
‘Well, sling it over.’
I hand him the phone and everyone does a quick check to make sure they’re identical. I know they all think it would be best if we used the original, but where I’m going I’m not going to be parted from my lifeline, however essential the authenticity. Roly starts ploughing through the menus on the new one.
‘Listen,’ he says, ‘don’t want to put flies in ointment and all that, but isn’t Rufus going to smell a rat?’
‘How so?’ asks Nessa.
‘Well – wife gone five days, find her in a lockup and she’s walking and talking?’
‘Naah,’ says Nessa. ‘Stick her back in there overnight and she’ll be wambly enough to pass.’
‘Overnight?’ I’m not happy about this. I’d sort of imagined four or five hours.
‘Sorry, love,’ she says. ‘Got to go for a bit of authenticity.’
‘I’m sorry, too,’ says Tilly. ‘But she’s right.’
‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be total authenticity,’ says Nessa. ‘As long as you’re looking a bit desperate and your hair’s messed up and you’ve got no makeup on, he’ll be so fired up by his own heroism the chances are he won’t notice the rest of it. Simple creatures, men. Throw ’em a stick and they’ll go chasing after it. Bit of misdirection, they’ll believe the moon’s made of cheese.’
‘Thanks,’ says Roly.
‘Not an insult, darling, just an observation. Paul believes to this day that if they play music it means the ice-cream van’s run out of stock.’
‘Daddy,’ says Tilly, ‘believes that Mary Fulford-Ffawkes came along and rescued him when no-one else would have him.’
This sort of puts the kibosh on the joking.
‘Bugger,’ says Roly, ‘It doesn’t seem to have “Delilah”.’
‘No,’ I say wearily. ‘I downloaded it.’
‘Bit of a stumbling block.’
‘Honestly,’ says Nessa, ‘you Amish. We’ll just infrared it across.’
She switches on my phone and she and Roly start aiming the two sets at each other like schoolkids playing with rayguns. Quietly, but not quietly enough, my voicemail tone bleeps.
‘Oop,’ says Nessa. ‘Here you go.’ Throws it to me.
I lay it down on the table.
‘Aren’t you going to get that?’
‘I’ll do it later.’
‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Might be something important.’
‘I very much doubt it.’
‘Don’t mind us,’ says Roly.
I start to protest, think: oh God, might as well just do it rather than attract attention.
It’s Costa. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Well, you’ll be glad to know the old man’s actually crying. Old girl is swearing like a macaw, but Dad’s blubbing away in the garden, going on about how you called him a murderer. Shit, Melody. What is your problem? Everybody does their best for you and you can’t even—’
I hit three to erase the rest of the message.
‘OK?’ asks Tilly.
‘Double glazing,’ I tell her.
No-one believes me.
‘Listen, are you feeling up to this?’ asks Nessa.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I reply. ‘If you think it’ll work.’
And then I burst into tears. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to be alone in the dark again. I’m so afraid.
‘I’m so afraid,’ I say. ‘He won’t want me. It won’t work.’
‘Ah, come on, sweetheart,’ says Nessa. ‘Rufus loves the spots off you.’
‘Not any more. Not after everything that’s happened. He hates me.’
‘Bollocks,’ says Roly. ‘You’re knackered and things look iffy. Stiff upper lip. Always darkest before dawn. That sort of thing.’
‘He doesn’t hate you. He just feels awful. He’s had his heart broken, but that’s not the same as hating you.’
‘I’m a ball-busting, foul-mouthed bitch. You’ve no idea. You’ve no idea the things I said …’
Roly hums and hahs a bit and says something about having a fair idea, actually. Oh, arse. I thought he said they didn’t talk. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘better a ball-busting bitch to the face than a sneaky assassin creeping about in the dark, what?’
‘He needs,’ says Nessa, ‘to know you need him. They’re simple that way, men.’
‘But I do! I do need him!’
‘And that,’ she says, ‘is how come you’ve got to go back in there.’
‘I don’t want to go back in there.’
‘I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to myself.’
‘Chin up,’ says Roly. ‘Faint heart never won fair wossname.’
‘Someone get her a drink,’ says Nessa. Has a feel of my pulse for good measure and says: ‘Look, Melody, we’re all in this together. You’re just going to have to trust us, OK? Believe me. Forty-eight hours and the whole thing will be over.’
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Two Can Play at that Game
And first up, I pay a visit to Beatrice.
Roly, of course, knows where all the secret passages are. He shows me the way into our bedroom, through which the Hilary-Mary-Roberts spectre found its way the night they walled me up: a lath-lined corridor that runs the length of the Georgian corridor, parallel to it and only eighteen inches wide. He shows me how to get all the way from the Victorian wing to the Queen Anne without showing myself in the public parts of the building. And it’s Roly who knows the way into Beatrice’s lair.
I don’t really know what to expect. I was never exactly invited in for a visit before. I wouldn’t be surprised to find her tucked up in a silk-lined coffin. But, of course, it’s a room like any other at Bourton Allhallows: dusty, dark, filled with the sort of furniture they use as props for the bi-annual rerecord of A Christmas Carol.
I step silently through the door, which is hidden, like the one in my and Rufus’s room, in the shadows beyond the drape of the four-poster. I can’t see Beatrice yet, propped against her pillows, but Nessa is on the other side of the room, busying herself with tidying the pots of Polyfilla and the jars of heavy-duty chalk on the dressing table. She catches sight of me in the mirror, tips me the wink. Picks up a bottle of something pink and industrial-looking and calls: ‘What’s this, Mrs Wattestone? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.’
This, while Beatrice has her head turned away from me, is my cue to step out and stand beside the bed. Three or four feet back so that the combination of her aged eyesight and the forty-watt miser’s bulb in the bedside lamp will make the hammy makeup job we put together in the Blue Bathroom look more or less authentic.
I have blue-white skin, and magenta lips. Shadows beneath my eyes and a tracery of purple veins running across my cheeks and down my throat to plunge into the décolletage of my nightgown. My hair is dried and coarse, hangs in knots down my back. I look, well, dead.
It’s not so difficult to haunt an old person. There you go: I’ve said it. If Beatrice were younger – if she were eighty, even – my crude disguise would be unlikely to fool her for more than a moment. I am relying on her hundred-year-old senses. That, and shock tactics, and the fact that somewhere, buried deep even in that gnarly old heart, must be a conscience of some description.
So I just stand there, hands hanging down by my sides,
and wait until she notices me.
It doesn’t take long. Nessa directs her gaze over to where I am standing by the simple expedient of crossing the room and walking round behind me, pretending all the while that everything is as it should be. And I don’t find it hard to fill my face with contempt and dislike, for that is what I feel. An evil, evil old woman: ruthlessness slathered over with the cosmetic unguents of age and aristocracy. A creature beyond my comprehension: one who would kill to maintain the status quo.
Beatrice’s eyes follow my friend, who continues chatting about the weather and the time of year and what Beatrice might like to eat in the morning without once glancing in my direction. She is, of course, pretending that I’m not there. And as she rounds the foot of the bed, Beatrice catches sight of me out of the corner of her eye and her head jerks round to take me in in all my glory.
Nessa stops talking. Goes into the wardrobe and busies herself with organising the clothes.
‘Boo,’ I say.
The effect is gratifying. If eyes really had stalks, Beatrice’s would be standing out a full inch from her face. The mouth, teeth removed to a tumbler at the bedside, has formed a round black O of shock and fear.
You weren’t expecting that, were you?
‘Lucy says hello, Beatrice,’ I say.
This is the first time I’ve seen her without a hat. It’s only now that I realise that she is almost bald. A bald, pathetic, vicious old woman. I saw the expression on Lucy’s face. She didn’t die well, and that’s the fate Beatrice wanted for me.
The mouth attempts to form words but nothing comes.
‘She says she’ll be seeing you soon,’ I tell her. ‘Very soon. Both of us. We’ll be seeing you soon.’
Nessa emerges from the wardrobe, crosses the room carrying a navy print two-piece, humming a tune. ‘Cheek to Cheek’. Good choice, Nessa.
A little smile on the corner of her mouth, she drapes the clothes over the back of a chair, turns and says: ‘And which shoes would you like, Mrs Wattestone? The navy courts?’
Beatrice gapes, chokes on her words.
Nessa approaches the bed. ‘Are you all right there, Mrs Wattestone?’
‘Gah,’ says Beatrice, jabs a finger in my direction, ‘gak – g-gaah.’
Nessa shakes her head, comes closer. ‘Are you having a bit of trouble with your breathing, there, Mrs Wattestone? Want another pillow?’
Beatrice finds her voice. ‘Can’t you – can’t you see it?’
Nessa looks up, stares directly into my eyes. ‘See what, Mrs Wattestone? What is it? Is there a spider?’
‘It’s – it’s right there …’
Nessa pantomimes peering into the gloom behind me. ‘Nope. Sorry. What is it I’m looking for?’
I fold my arms, gaze down at Beatrice sorrowfully. ‘She can’t see me, Beatrice. Why would she be able to see me? She doesn’t know I’m …’ I take a step forward. A slightly risky move, but I reckon she’ll recoil, which she does.
I bend slightly at the waist, the better to show her the black around my eyes. ‘… dead,’ I snap.
The word has the effect I’ve been expecting. Beatrice lets out a tiny shriek, drops back against the pillow. Nessa makes a show of fussing around her, raising her up and tucking an extra pad in behind her back as she gawps wordlessly at me.
‘Oh, yeah, Beatrice,’ I assure her, ‘I’m dead all right. And you know what else?’ I step back into the safety of the shadows and fix her with a long, steady, triumphant gaze.
‘You’re going to hell, Beatrice,’ I say. ‘There’s no going to church or dominating the county’s going to save you from this one. You’re going to hell for the rest of eternity, and you know what else?’ I’m not entirely sure if I haven’t gone too far. Beatrice’s face looks like landslip.
‘We’re going to be right there with you,’ I say. ‘What do you think about that?’
‘Mrs Wattestone? Are you OK?’ asks Nessa.
‘Don’t you see it?’ stutters Beatrice. ‘Don’t you see it?’
‘She can’t see me, Beatrice,’ I say. ‘Why would she be able to? It’s not like she knows what you did, is it?’
‘It’s … it’s …’ stammers Beatrice.
The struggle is delightful. What can she say? How can she tell Nessa she’s seen me? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to knowing I was dead?
‘… ghost,’ she chokes.
Nessa stands back, lets out a braying, unsympathetic laugh. ‘Oh, Mrs Wattestone, you do crack me up, you really do! What would you be seeing a ghost for?’
‘Gah,’ says Beatrice, ‘gaaah.’
‘It’s not like you’ve got anything to have a guilty conscience about, is it?’ asks Nessa.
Silently as I came, I slip back behind the curtain.
Chapter Eighty
In the Dark
And lying in the dark on my nest of mink coats, under a blanket of beaver lamb brought through from the wardrobe, waiting like a princess in a fairy-tale for my prince to rescue me, I see a ghost of my own.
I suppose I should have expected it, really. Even though I know I’m only dreaming, that the unease with which I lie is as bound to give me nightmares as if I had eaten a truckle of stilton. But it seems to me that I wake up to find the room filled with an eerie green light, and Lucy Wattestone, in cocktail dress and three-inch heels, perched on the end of the bed fiddling with a diamond ear clip. Not Lucy as I have known her, but the Lucy I have seen in a silver photo frame in her daughter’s drawing room. Thirtysomething, slim. False eyelashes and half a dozen rings like knuckledusters on long, slender fingers.
I struggle to sit upright. Am relieved to find that I am not, at least, subject to the paralysis that assailed me when Andy visited. But my voice sounds blurred to me, as though I have a mouthful of cotton wadding.
‘Lucy,’ I say.
She gives me a bright cocktail smile that matches her clothes, and says, ‘Have we met?’
‘No, no.’ I try smacking my lips in an attempt to clear the fuzziness. ‘But we’ve already slept together,’ I try a joke.
Lucy frowns, high, pale forehead wrinkling, then dismisses the comment. ‘I don’t suppose,’ she asks, ‘you’d happen to have a cigarette, would you?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve had to give up. Sorry. Bad for the baby.’
‘How funny. Is that the latest fad?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ I tell her.
‘How long have I been dead?’ she asks bluntly.
‘A while. A bit over thirty years, as it goes.’
‘God.’ She looks appalled. ‘I wasn’t alive for much longer than that.’
She looks over her shoulder at the depression in the bed where her body has lain for all that time. ‘I could so do with a cigarette.’
I give her a Gallic-style shrug. Desolé, madame. Il n’y en a plus.
‘Don’t tell me you’re still getting cravings after thirty years.’
‘You have no idea. How powerful nicotine is. Nobody does, until they have to give it up. Mind you, I miss most things. Sunrise. Deodorant. Bacon sandwiches.’
We take a little time to think about all the things.
‘How’s Edmund?’ she asks.
‘He’s—’ what do I tell her? That he’s a broken man?
Don’t be stupid. She’s a figment of your imagination.
‘He never really recovered from you,’ I say.
‘Oh dear,’ she says. Then: ‘Well, sort of – I suppose at least he didn’t just forget me.’
‘No, he never did that.’
‘I don’t know whether I’m glad or not. Life has to go on.’
I think: I’d better level with her. ‘He had a son.’
She looks like I’ve just slapped her. ‘Oh.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Can’t be helped. Might have expected it really. That bloody Beatrice wouldn’t have got rid of me without following the whole thing through. Are you sure you don’t have even one little cig?’
<
br /> I shake my head.
‘And he had it – sorry, him – with that poisonous little shit Mary Fulford-Ffawkes, I suppose?’
I nod.
‘Oh. I’d sort of hoped he – oh, well. I don’t know. I just wish I’d realised, you know, beforehand. I just thought she was a horrible little suck-up, waiting for Edmund to divorce me. I thought she’d give up eventually. Always hanging about here with that creepy little poof Hilary Crawshaw.’
I quell the urge to correct her vocab. It’s not an inaccurate description, in the circs.
‘And Mathilda?’ she asks suddenly.
Mathilda. Mathilda. Oh, right …
‘She’s great. Oh, Lucy, she’s great. You’d be so proud of her. She’s had a hard time of it, but she’s grown up so – such a wonderful person. And she’s had a daughter!’
‘A daughter! So she got married? I’m a grandmother?’
I sort of gloss it over. ‘Yes. Well, yes. And she called her after you!’
‘Oh …’
And her face is long and tragic. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish – I wish I could have seen that. I wish I could have … it was the last thing I thought about. Before … you know. I tried to send her my wishes. Beam her my … I couldn’t be there to protect her. I wish … I loved her, you know … so much I thought it would burn me up.’
‘She loved you,’ I assure her. ‘So, so much. There’s not a day goes by she doesn’t think about you. But, look. She’s got Rufus. Rufus protects her. He always will. And she’s got me now.’
‘And Rufus is …?’ She realises, says: ‘Oh.’ Then she says: ‘And you’re the inconvenient wife?’
I nod. Feel myself blush.
‘So history repeats itself.’
And I say: ‘No. Not this time. And, Lucy, we’re going to get you justice too. That’s why I’m here now. That’s why I came back. I’m here for you as much as I am for myself. We’re going to save Rufus, and we’re going to save Edmund as well. By the time this is finished, they will have nothing left.’
And then she shocks me. Because instead of thanking me, instead of congratulating me on my courage, my sense of fair play, she looks grave. Leans forward and says, in a voice filled with accusation: ‘You fucking hypocrite.’
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