by Guy Sheppard
‘Ever wonder how the men who built this church married devotion with geometry? How did they devise and draw all its fussy Gothic windows to let in the light so beautifully? That way the secular expresses the divine.’
‘Since when were you an expert on the spiritual?’
‘Perhaps we overlook all hope at our peril?’
‘Really, Colin? Everyone at the Yard takes you for a total sceptic. When did you ever believe in any accepted doctrine on any subject? You’re too battle-hardened, not to say heartless.’
‘Didn’t say I came here out of faith.’
‘You look like hell, you’re so thin and pale.’
‘Suppose we go for that coffee, instead?’
I could ignore the aspersions on my body but not on my mind.
Jan shook her head.
‘You can’t fob me off with a latte. I was Lizzie’s best friend, remember. She and I met at college.’
‘I don’t know. What good does it do to make so much fuss over so little?’
‘Really? Now you tell me? Where is this God-forsaken dump that you’re staying, anyway? Does it even have a name?’
That was the trouble with police officers, they didn’t miss a trick. Meanwhile, on the south wall of the church there were to be seen the sad, washed-out remains of a late medieval painting, I realised. There, at the Last Judgement, the Devil watched me fidget as poor, lost souls were tipped into hell.
‘That reporter is sniffing round the scene of your car crash again,’ said Jan, after a while. ‘He’s trying to find a witness to what really happened.’
‘Fuck him. I wasn’t trying to kill myself because of any guilt, I really did swerve to avoid what I saw in the road.’
‘As for that other business, the Commander keeps hinting that he wants to take things to another level, but with a change in the law in the Lords so imminent everyone’s holding off. It’s all down to the CPS to see if they still have a case against you. But then who wants to damn one of their own?’
In the chapel’s east window, I winked at sun not shadow. Only by turning a blind eye could I feel I was capable of outstaring the horror.
‘Did you speak to Maria? Did you have time?’
Jan planted her hand very firmly on my knee and her diamond ring dug into my trousers.
‘You know, as a doctor, she works incredibly long shifts.’
‘You two actually getting married, at last?’
‘Come to the wedding, won’t you?’
‘Just as soon as I’m back in London.’
Jan leaned sideways and her eyes probed mine with surgical precision.
‘Okay, now tell me in church what you can’t in Costa’s?’
*
‘Since arriving in Coberley Hall I’ve come to doubt my own senses,’ I confessed in a whisper. ‘There’s no electricity and I have to grope my way about day and night with a candle. Half the time my phone won’t give me a signal and I daren’t mention the sanitary arrangements.’
‘Serves you right for skipping town so clandestinely.’
‘I can tolerate the longing for basic comforts, but not of nightly disturbance. I can’t seem to get any proper rest.’
‘Maria says that when someone has a night terror they will open their eyes but they’re neither completely awake nor asleep. Nor are they aware of what they are doing.’
‘So, please, Jan, can you tell me why the apparitions should appear by day?’
‘She has a patient who dreams that someone has broken into his bedroom. This intruder persuades him that he must leave his bed, kneel on the floor and beg for mercy, it’s all so convincing.’
‘Really? Me? A daydreamer? But you’re right, I do sometimes ‘wake up’ and feel that I’m due to pay for my crime, that there never will be any salvation or forgiveness, only reckoning and revenge ever afterwards.’
‘Maria believes that you’re trying to cope with an acute traumatic stress disorder triggered by your part in Lizzie’s death. As children we often suffer really bad dreams but only relatively few of us go on to have them when we’re adults. However, the older we are the more dangerous the nightmares become. You still terrified of confined spaces?’
I promptly looked up at the chapel window and, blinking hard, stared at the red and blue biblical figures which were clearly illumined by the bright world beyond.
‘Yeah, well, okay. As a child my stepfather shut me in a cupboard.’
‘When the mind is occupied by one idea it can lead to a morbid state of nerves that Maria calls nyctophobia.’
From the south wall, the Devil laughed at more of the damned who fell into hell.
‘Doesn’t really explain why I’ve started to see things at other times, does it?’
‘Maria advises keeping a journal.’
‘I’m doing that already.’
‘You look exhausted, Colin. Your brain needs to rest. Who knows what tricks it is playing on you, otherwise, all the time?’
For once I agreed. But for a man to sleep well he had to make a clean break with each day. To make a clean break with each day he had to surrender himself to the night that came after. To surrender himself to the night willingly he had to believe he was breaking with the continuity, sequence or course of his very existence. In the north-east corner of the chapel stood a hideous but imposing memorial to a man and wife dressed in early Jacobean ruff collars. Their awful, sculpted figures lay face up on top of their tomb where they rested their preposterous heads on hard red and black pillows. For hundreds of years the loving couple had lain together for all to gawp at and yet I distrusted their smug serenity. I wanted to know that the sleep they slept was forever dreamless.
‘Colin?’
It was Jan, bringing me back from my reverie.
‘Sorry.’
‘So tell me again what you said on the phone. Who is this woman you see who reminds you of Lizzie?’
I felt the charnel-house beneath my feet grow chillier.
‘Yeah, no, I don’t know. Her whole self revolted from me, but it was me she seemed to want. They call her the countess.’
‘What did she ask of you?’
‘Not a thing. Why would she? Yet I did feel like I did when I crashed my car. Can it be that someone else sends her?’
Jan could not believe what I had just said. Had I really meant anything by it? Had she? In the end I believed in one sort of ghost and she another.
By now we were walking together towards the south aisle.
‘Please, Colin, who else would use Lizzie to get at you from another world?’
*
‘Wait,’ I said, halting in mid stride. ‘Did you bring what I wanted? Hand me your bag at once. Is it in it?’
‘Really, Colin, you’re being very abrupt and jumpy.’
‘Until now I’ve thought nothing of it.’
Reacquainted with a gold ring in my hand, never before had I felt it invite so much presentiment of material harm or even evil.
‘Can’t say I ever saw Lizzie wear it,’ said Jan.
‘She didn’t.’
‘Do you know why she wanted such a spooky old thing? I don’t.’
‘As I thought, it must date from the 1640’s or 50’s.’
‘So how in hell’s name did she come to own it?’
‘She didn’t tell me properly. It may be that it started life as a keepsake, souvenir or legacy, but later somebody had it made into a mourning ring to show loyalty to King Charles I, not long after he was beheaded in 1649.’
‘That’s the king’s image, then?’
But of that I could not be certain. Blowing hard on the ring’s shiny concave surface, I rubbed a man’s miniature portrait back to life on my sleeve. Set in a circle of deep blue enamel, his boyish pink cheeks and heavy black eyebrows exuded an elegiac aloofness, suggesting that it was his duty to safeguard the future of a whole kingdom. Here and there the gold had worn away to reveal black metal underneath.
‘Let’s face it, most Cavaliers look ali
ke.’
‘If you literally can’t put a name to him why do you want it?’
‘I still think it might be significant.’
*
Once in a restaurant, but holed up in a corner away from the noisier tables full of unbearable busybodies, I set aside my knife and fork to watch my ravenous companion bone her salmon.
‘Haven’t dined out for ages,’ I admitted anxiously.
‘Already you’re forgetting what life’s all about,’ said Jan. ‘You know we all miss you, Colin, even that bitch in HR whose psychological test got you suspended. You know that if she finds out that you never disclosed your panic attacks, she’ll go mad. It’s a serious breach of police protocol.’
‘Until Lizzie died I thought I’d left them far behind.’
‘You need to get your act together. That means not lying about your health to anyone. Me, included.’
‘Perhaps I really am not well?’
‘So come back to us?’
‘Soon… soon as I can.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re starting to see yourself as lord of the manor? You, who always lambasted the ruling classes? You, who vowed never to send any child of yours to private school?’
‘If the baby had lived we would have called her Lucy.’
‘DCI Hopkins asks how you are.’
‘Tell me, did Lizzie ever mention anything about her upbringing, at all?’
‘You’re not listening to a thing I’m saying, are you, Colin?’
I reached for a glass of water.
‘Fact is, I didn’t know my real father and I took his absence for granted. I thought Lizzie did the same.’
‘She did say that it was one reason why you and she first got together.’
‘Since chatting to people on the Coberley Estate, I’ve begun to doubt her whole story.’
‘There never was anyone more honest than Lizzie.’
‘So why did she lead me to believe that her father was dead when he wasn’t? Why put herself through so much for nothing?’
‘You know she loved you body and soul, so why doubt it?’
‘Since then I’ve discovered that he was hidden away by his brother in a former sanatorium.’
‘Sounds dramatic.’
‘I see the significance now. For years, on Lizzie’s birthday, a small present arrived at our door, no matter where we lived in London.’
‘So what if she didn’t want you to know that she had been fathered by an oddball? It’s her life, Colin, her choice, i’n’t?’
‘That’s just it, I’m not sure Philip was mad, entirely.’
‘What then?’
‘Maddened is more like it. Or cursed.’
Jan pointed to my redundant cutlery.
‘For God’s sake, Colin, please do eat something, you’re making me nervous.’
I shrank from my own verbal clumsiness.
‘When Lizzie lay dying the painkilling drugs caused her to call out all sorts of strange things in her opium-tinged delirium. She cried hell and Coberley Hall in the same breath.’
‘How is one at all like the other?’
‘She said that it was a place I had best not go alone.’
Jan spooned thick toffee pudding into her mouth.
‘So why bequeath you the damned place if she was so dead set against it?’
I skipped straight to the coffee.
‘That’s what I have to discover. That’s why I’ve stayed on to investigate.’
*
‘Perhaps this will help,’ said Jan and deposited a black notebook midway between plates on the table.
‘What is it?’
‘I found it at the bottom of Lizzie’s jewellery box. To be honest, I don’t know what to make of it.’
The notebook’s cover flipped open against my saucer.
‘Seems she sketched things on every page.’
‘One thing, actually,’ said Jan, as her eyebrows almost met in the middle. ‘Every picture is a pencil drawing of a house with three gables.’
‘That’s Coberley Hall.’
‘She has drawn it so many times she ran out of paper. But see here, Colin.’
My eye followed the tip of Jan’s long red fingernail while I studied the heavily drawn lines that represented the house’s roof and walls. Scratching up and down with her pencil, Lizzie had executed what appeared to be a series of childish or unfinished pictures but in everyone there was, to my amazement, the outline of a figure at a window.
‘Is it Lizzie?’ asked Jan. ‘Has she drawn herself?’
In that moment, I felt the same hurtful presentiment that had come with the ring.
‘The thing is, I can’t be sure.’
Whoever gazed straight at us through the leaded panes of glass had been captured with a few amateurish dabs and dashes. Beyond the slight resemblance to an actual person the observer, being black on white, had the appearance of somebody seen against the light so that only their basic outline was distinguishable. As for the face, that was lost in a caul of shadow.
‘To sketch the same house over and over with only very slight variations would suggest it was in some way beyond her control,’ said Jan. ‘She was drawing it like an automaton as it resurfaced from her childhood, I guess.’
‘Or like a medium.’
‘Whoever it is, she must have meant you to see it, Colin, I’m sure.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Jan pointed again at the oriel in one gable. There, the tiny figure could be seen scratching something on its window.
*
Half an hour later Jan and I unloaded my suitcase from her grey Volkswagon Golf in the nearest car park.
‘Are you quite certain you don’t want me to drive you back to Coberley Hall, Colin?’
I shook my head vaguely. Yet undecided as I was, very firmly did I demur.
‘You get off to London. There might be more floods.’
‘What’s a few extra waves?’
‘Tell the landlord that I’ll sort out any rent I owe very soon.’
‘In the meantime, Colin, no more going off grid. That means no ‘ghosting’. I want to text or call you whenever I wish.’
I smiled. She had forgotten what I had said about no signal.
‘I mean it, Colin. That notebook of Lizzie’s is really strange. I literally think she meant something urgent by it.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Why cry for help from the very place she intended to leave you?’
‘For as long as she really is dead how will I know?’
Jan waved me off. She thought I was joking.
*
For someone to define a fear so graphically explained little when the reason for that fear was so indefinable. Rather, Coberley Hall, as sketched, constituted a parallel world with super-symmetrical shapes that were a mirror-image of the house as I knew it. Such a blind, black world did, for all I knew, constitute half the universe, yet it remained dark matter to most telescopes.
*
Ten unbearably stuffy miles later, I banged my buzzer repeatedly in order to persuade the stubborn driver of local bus number 51 to deposit me at the lonely roadside halt near Coberley. The fiery sun rolled low like a ball over the hills. I tugged my tweed cap flat on my head and once more turned up my collar. So dazzling was the white-hot furnace on the horizon, but so neutral, impartial and indifferent that the hairs on the back of my neck rose up and prickled.
Meanwhile, each griffin tightened its talons on its pillar as it watched me pass by, very intensely and closely. If surprise could move stone to smile, then both birds were so gratified as to greet me with broad grins at my return along the lost driveway.
I gave a second shudder. When the whole sky turned a blind eye on someone he could be forgiven for wondering how so many blistering rays appeared to decompose before they reached him.
I had the comfort of sufficient day to light me homeward, but not yet the comfort of being home.
21
&nbs
p; Upon arrival at Coberley Hall I was intensely nervous and watchful. I distinctly felt the ancient house’s dark interior prepare to enwrap and enclose me, yet secretly thrilled to the promise of its strange tranquillity. Greeting me in the candle-lit entrance hall, a censorious James offered to relieve me of my coat and suitcase. To him I tried to pass off my excitement as guilt.
‘So, please, tell me I’m not too late. Am I?’
‘Supper was served ten minutes ago, sir.’
‘H’m, well, yeah. The buses only run every hour.’
‘Pressing business, was it, sir?’
‘Please take my case to my room at once,’ I said, removing my gloves in a hurry.
I thought it highly unlikely that he had not already reported my absence to his lordship. However, when I stared into his slate-grey eyes, I received no response. Which was to say that he was a past master at observing the niceties by affecting disinterest.
As was I.
A moment later, I strode straight into the great hall with a smile and a swagger. There, I was delighted to confirm that a place at the top table had been laid for me. I lifted the lid to a pheasant and cereal broth that steamed in its solid silver porringer, then sat down on the best chair. I positively smacked my lips in keen anticipation. Faint with hunger was I not, but most resolutely did I feign being hungry.
For I was all goose-flesh at the prospect of what I had to do next, the moment I finished dining.
I relished the risk of the thing to be detected, if not the risk of detection.
*
The fretful, one-eyed greyhound overtook me at the dog-gate. Together we proceeded up the unevenly worn oak stairs past the hideous catarhine monkeys whose long impudent tongues slavered at me from atop their newel posts. Meanwhile from her empyrean abode in the white alabaster ceiling, Venus welcomed me ecstatically with her milky blind pupils. A look as empty as hers forever posed a puzzle: could any man be a true arbiter of love? Could I? Never before had I asked who or what that might mean, only whether these were normal reactions to the unknown.
No sooner did I reach the gallery and approach its row of candle-lit portraits than the greyhound began to yap and whine. The irritating animal ran along the landing and sat down in the open doorway, waiting and hoping.