by Amanda Mason
‘Where?’
Sarah hesitates. ‘There.’ She points to the far wall, shaded by a beech tree and some low, scrubby bushes. ‘She was there, looking up at the house.’
‘Right,’ says Lucy. ‘Do you want to tell me?’
Sarah looks into the mug, gently swirling the contents around. ‘It was morning and Mrs Leeman, she has the room next to your mum, she was down at breakfast and I’d been doing her bed, because she … Well. I did her bed and tidied round a bit and I was tying back her curtains, and I looked out of the window and …’ She clears her throat. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about it, only I don’t want you to think Mrs Corvino’s, well, making it up, or anything. Because she’s not. And it’s not – you know – it’s not her illness.’ Sarah is pale, she has dark shadows under her eyes; she must work long hours, caring for those who have no one else to tend them. She wears a ring on her left hand, a bright blue stone surrounded by tiny diamond chips that spark and catch the light. Lucy is surprised – she’s far too young to be thinking of marriage, surely.
‘I saw a girl,’ Sarah says. ‘A girl that shouldn’t have been there. I thought it was a reflection at first. Because we were all busy inside, with breakfast and that, and she wasn’t wearing a coat or anything. But then I moved and she didn’t, and the angles were all wrong anyway, and then I could see she was wearing a long dress. She was tall and pale with long blonde hair, she was standing perfectly still and she was looking up at me. Like she could see me. Like she could see into me.’ Sarah shivers, looking across the garden. ‘She must have been cold, because she was barefoot, just like everyone says.’
‘They’ve let their imaginations run away with them, that’s all.’ Jean’s office is warm, and the lamps on the desk and over the fireplace cast a comforting amber glow. The room smells of beeswax polish and freesias. There are snapshots and family portraits scattered about, and the effect is comforting, intimate. It’s hardly the place for a confrontation.
‘They call her the barefoot girl,’ says Lucy.
‘They’ve given it a name?’ For the first time, Jean’s confident expression seems to fade, and something in her sags, gives in a little.
‘It?’
‘It’s not real, surely you can see that. It’s just …’
‘They’ve all seen her,’ says Lucy, relentless now the obvious explanation has presented itself. She’s relieved too, now that her mother’s ghost is no more than a rumour, a story circulated by bored and impressionable young women. The emails from Nina Marshall, well, they can’t have helped much, but that’s something else, something private, she can deal with that later.
‘Some of the staff claim they’ve seen … someone,’ says Jean. ‘But you’re not suggesting anything—’
Supernatural.
‘Of course not,’ says Lucy.
‘And we do have quite a few young women working here, you know. Any one of them could be outside, be seen through a window, and be back at work a few minutes later.’
It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.
‘Well, that’s not the problem, is it?’ says Lucy. ‘I don’t care what any of the staff here think they might have seen. I care that these ridiculous rumours are getting back to my mother.’
‘They’re not …’ Jean leans back in her chair and her tone softens. ‘The thing is, when you work with older people, the frail, the ill. Well, you build up a little collection of experiences, the odd things that happen that you hear or sense when you’re on your own on a night shift – you know the sort of thing I mean.’
‘Ghost stories.’
One of them has to say it.
‘I suppose so. And you tell those stories, don’t you? You pass them on to the people you work with, you share it, that odd feeling you had late one night, the prickle on the back of your neck. It helps you cope sometimes, with fear and loss. And – they’re so young, some of them – they enjoy scaring themselves.’
Sarah hadn’t looked like she was enjoying it.
‘And the barefoot girl?’ Lucy asks.
‘I first heard about her a month or so ago. Which means they were talking about her for a little while before that, I suppose.’
‘She’s just a figure in the garden?’
‘Yes. A pale figure dressed in black, with long fair hair, looking up at the house, only if you go outside to find her, she’s vanished.’ Jean pauses, looking embarrassed, and more than a little guilty. ‘It’s nonsense, of course. There’s no reason for her to be there, no story about a girl connected to the house. It’s just kids being silly, scaring each other.’
Lucy remembers the girl she’d seen in the window in her mother’s room, the relief she’d felt when she realised it was her own reflection.
‘Someone must have mentioned it to Cathy,’ says Jean. ‘Planted the idea somehow. I’ve spoken to them all about it and I’ll speak to them again. I’m so sorry, Lucy, truly I am.’ She lifts her chin. ‘I’ll quite understand if you feel you need to make other arrangements for your mother,’ she says, ‘but I hope you won’t. I’ve spoken with the staff concerned, and there’ll be no repetition of the oversight with the alarms.’
The possibility of taking Cathy away hadn’t even occurred to Lucy and her irritation is replaced by a sudden rush of guilt. ‘Yes. I know. I don’t think – Mum’s perfectly happy here. We don’t need to upset her over this,’ she says. ‘Moving her would be – well, we’d have to discuss it as a family.’ She can just imagine the emails and phone calls that would provoke. ‘We’d have to think about that.’
‘I see,’ says Jean. ‘Well, maybe you should do that. Have a chat with Cathy. Let me know how you all feel. We’d be very sorry to see her go.’
Lucy goes up to her attic room and sits on the bed. All this turmoil, all this fuss because of a few emails and a foolish rumour. It makes her head ache.
She weighs her phone in the palm of her hand. Maybe she should call Dan first, let him know she’s solved the mystery. That there has been nothing to worry about after all. Someone has told Cathy the tale of the barefoot girl, and the rest is just—
Tell her I made a mistake.
She finds the screenshot and reads the message again.
so looking forward to sharing with you
She can’t imagine why Cathy’s become involved with these people, these strangers. Look where it’s got them. She can’t have her upset like this, she won’t.
There’s a phone number at the top of the email and Lucy comes to a decision: enough is enough.
8
Now
They’d arranged to meet that evening in a bar just down the road and Lucy shoves her hands in her pockets as she walks briskly along the cliff top, welcoming the stinging cold and the chance to get away from the house, her mother, for a while.
She won’t be able to put them off their investigations, she’s fairly sure of that, and there’ll be nothing she can do if the girl wants to write an article or another book about the farm, but that doesn’t matter. She can write as much as she pleases. Cathy and her children have all survived far worse. But she’ll have to do it without their help, she’ll make that perfectly clear and if she can put them off their meeting with Cathy, maybe that will minimise the damage. With no new interviews, no new material from the Corvino family, the best Nina Marshall will be able to manage is a rerun of the original story and Lucy can’t imagine anyone will really be interested in that.
It’s not perfect, and her mother won’t be pleased, but she can’t think of anything else.
The bar is on the ground floor of a large hotel which stands on the cliff top overlooking the bay. In the summer the views must be spectacular, but tonight the building feels remote, almost forbidding, built on a scale a little too large for comfort. It’s not busy – there are maybe half a dozen customers, mainly couples, and the long room is all discreet polished wood and gleaming mirrors, nautical brass instruments and sepia prints, someone’s idea of a luxury yacht, perhaps.
/> The three of them are easy enough to spot: young, slightly dishevelled, a little out of place. They’ve taken a table by the window. The two men look up as she walks in, and one, the fair one in glasses, says something to a young woman with her back to the door.
Lucy undoes her coat and unwinds her scarf as she walks towards them, trying to catch her breath; she’s still running through it all in her head, what she needs to say, how best to make a start. The young woman turns to look, as the man next to her carries on speaking, whispering in her ear.
And everything falls apart.
‘Hello. I’m Nina,’ the girl says, standing. ‘Nina Marshall. It’s so good of you to agree to meet us. We were just going to get another drink.’ They shake hands and the girl keeps on talking, bright, friendly, confident. ‘What would you like?’
Lucy can see herself reflected in the windows and the polished brass table top; the girl is there too – she shimmers. It occurs to Lucy that she should have picked somewhere else, somewhere busy, one of the big cheap pubs along the sea front, somewhere less … exposed. She feels dizzy.
‘Beer?’ Nina is asking. ‘Or wine?’
‘White wine. Something dry, please,’ Lucy says, and she takes off her coat as Nina goes to the bar. Her hands are actually trembling; she can’t believe they haven’t noticed. Maybe they’re all too polite to comment.
‘Lewis Wellburn,’ says the blond boy, offering his hand, ‘and this is Hal Fletcher.’ The other one, darker, older perhaps, slumps back in his seat. He nods but doesn’t speak.
‘Lucy Frankland.’
‘Yes.’ Lewis is smiling, beaming. ‘We know.’
Lucy takes a seat and again turns her attention to the girl standing at the bar. The resemblance is quite clear, unmistakable. She’s tall and slender and her long hair is streaked with blonde highlights.
‘Thank you for calling,’ says Lewis. ‘We really appreciate it.’
‘Well,’ Lucy says, ‘I thought we needed to talk.’ She takes a deep breath, trying to compose herself.
‘Oh, it’s brilliant,’ says Lewis. ‘I can’t tell you – this is just fantastic.’
Lucy doesn’t know what to say. She hadn’t expected such enthusiasm. She pulls her phone from her coat pocket and pretends to check it. She puts it on the table, face down.
Nina places their drinks on the table, wine for Lucy, beer for the rest of them. She sits and Lucy is certain: she has the same eyes, the same nose, the same smile. He’s there, right in front of her.
Simon.
‘This is so great, really,’ Nina says. ‘I have so many questions, we all do.’
‘Questions?’
‘Well,’ says Lewis, ‘we were hoping to get a bit of background from you, some sort of context for the events at the farm, now you’re able to – well, now you have some … perspective.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Lucy tries to focus. ‘I think you’ve misunderstood. I rang because I wanted to talk to you about my mother. Not because … I’m not interested in your project and I can’t help. I thought I’d made that clear.’
‘Well, I suppose we hoped you might change your mind,’ says Nina, looking at the others, drawing them in. ‘We have some amazing material, if you’d just take a look.’
‘We can show you here?’ says Lewis.
‘No. I don’t want to see.’ Lucy’s voice is just loud enough to merit a more than casual glance from the barman; she picks up her glass, tries to regain some sort of control, to still the tremor in her hands. ‘I don’t need to see what you’ve been doing. My mother – Cathy – has explained to me what’s going on, and really,’ she puts the glass down, hides her hands under the table, ‘you need to understand that we, that my family has no interest in your project and we can offer you no help.’
There. Formal, clear, final.
‘That’s not the impression I have from Cathy,’ says Nina.
‘Yes. Well, I’m afraid my mother is … unwell. She has vascular dementia and she …’ Lucy finds that the details of her mother’s condition escape her. ‘I can’t have her upset, or disturbed,’ she says. ‘Surely you can see that?’
‘Oh,’ says Lewis, in the awkward silence that follows. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Thank you.’ Lucy finally allows herself a sip of wine.
‘I’m sure that’s very worrying for you,’ says Nina, ‘but Cathy’s emails all seem – well, quite clear. She’s been very helpful, she obviously remembers life at the farm in great detail, the investigation and everything that came after.’ Her words are mild, but there’s an underlying tone, not a threat exactly, more an insistence that she is not going to back down easily.
‘Well, she has good days and bad days,’ Lucy says. ‘And you talking with her about … that summer, my sister … surely you can see that’s going to be difficult for her, even at the best of times.’
‘Has she said something?’ Lewis asks. ‘We really didn’t mean to upset her.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t. But – she’s old, she’s … ill. She’s had a fall, actually – that’s why I’m here. It was quite serious and to be honest, I’d prefer that you didn’t contact her again. You must see that any questions you have might be distressing.’
Lewis, at least, seems to be listening. He’s starting to look worried.
‘I didn’t know your mother was ill. None of us did,’ Nina says, swiftly. ‘We never meant to … But don’t you think that talking to us might help?’
‘No. I think that’s rather naive, if you want my honest opinion.’
‘But it can’t be healthy, keeping things bottled up.’
‘Nina.’ Hal’s voice is soft.
‘Healthy? I’m sorry, but I don’t think you have the—’ Lucy leans forward. ‘It’s not as if you’re doing this for our benefit, is it? You don’t actually believe this will help my mother, or any of us, for that matter.’
‘I want to complete the investigation at the farm. By any definition that’s closure?’
‘Nina,’ Hal says. ‘Maybe you – we should all just slow down for a minute.’
‘Closure?’ Lucy’s voice rises. ‘Closure for who, exactly? Closure for my mother? Me? Or for you, and your father?’
‘Hal’s right,’ says Lewis. ‘If we could just—’
‘I mean,’ Lucy’s not sure how to go on, ‘I’m not wrong, am I?’
For once Nina seems lost for words.
‘Because the thing is – you are very like him. Simon.’
‘Sorry, what?’ Hal says.
Lewis sits back and picks up his glass.
‘And Cathy would have told me, if she knew. But she doesn’t know, does she? And that’s – that’s inexcusable.’ Hal looks confused, turning first to Lewis, then to Nina for some sort of explanation.
At least the girl has the grace to look embarrassed. ‘I was going to tell her,’ she says.
‘Really? When? Why wait?’
‘Because I thought if she knew, then she might not – she wouldn’t want to see me. I thought it would be better to present the project more – formally.’
‘So you lied. You didn’t even use your real name.’
‘I didn’t lie.’ Nina’s words travel the length of the room and once again, the barman pauses and looks over at them.
She lowers her voice. ‘Mum and Dad never married. My name is Nina Marshall. Leigh is my middle name. I was going to tell her, but once we got in touch, after she answered the first letter, I didn’t know how to – how to bring it up. And then we started emailing a bit and I thought it would be better to do it face to face.’
‘Who do you work for anyway?’ Lucy asks. ‘Don’t you have rules about this sort of thing?’
‘The Society for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena,’ says Lewis.
‘AnSoc,’ says the other one, Hal.
‘It’s a voluntary thing,’ says Nina.
‘A student organisation,’ says Hal, ignoring the sharp look of disapproval that crosses Nina’s face.
&
nbsp; ‘Students?’ Lucy can barely keep the relief out of her voice, and suddenly they’re no longer a team, they’re just a bunch of kids, playing at research. If the worst comes to the worst, she can always contact the university and make a complaint, a thought which is satisfying as well as comforting. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘as I’ve made clear, we can’t possibly get involved, and really, it’s not as if you need us. You can still speak to Simon, can’t you? He probably remembers it better than I do.’
She falls silent, and as Lewis looks at Nina, his expression oddly tender, Lucy realises she knows what’s coming next.
‘The thing is – I’m sorry – he died,’ says Nina. She leans forward across the table. ‘My dad. Simon. He died about six months ago.’
Lucy can’t meet her eyes.
‘It was a heart attack. It was very – sudden.’
Nina opens the bag she’s propped up against the table, her words tumbling out now. ‘After the funeral we had to sort all his stuff out, his files and, well, you know … Everything was pretty well organised, the research for his books, and the TV shows, the documentaries … Here.’ Nina has found what she’s looking for: a manila folder, worn and tattered at the edges. Lucy remembers those folders, in his leather satchel, inside the tent. ‘The only material not filed away, that was on his desk and laptop, was this, well, lots of these, actually. I thought it must be a current investigation at first. The TV programmes had sort of dried up a while ago, but he still took on new cases, wrote articles, lectured at the Society. But it wasn’t a new case; it was an old one, the first one, the one they never finished, and I could see that he’d started making revisions, and I thought – I suppose I thought we could finish it for him.’
‘Your university group?’
‘Not exactly,’ says Nina. ‘But, you know – some of us.’
Lucy can’t help herself. She opens the file and there they are, her and Bee looking up at the camera. She can feel the dusty fabric of the old red sofa, with half its springs gone, she can smell the joss sticks her mother had been so very fond of and she can remember how crowded the room had seemed. There was Michael, serious, slightly formal, and Isobel and her cameras, and Simon sitting cross-legged on the floor, smiling reassuringly at them both, as the tape recorder wheels went round and round; and now, astonishingly, Lucy does cry.