Strange Tombs

by Syd Moore

  I thought of all the other people we had to talk to and felt a pang of weariness. Maybe there was another way to get through them. And then it occurred to me that possibly, actually, we didn’t need to talk to all of them: according to Cullen they were all together until they went to bed. And despite what our fidgety interviewee thought about an element of premeditation, there was no solid evidence that pointed in that direction. It was all circumstance and coincidence.

  Rain began to patter against the window.

  Sophia sighed loud and long. ‘If only it had rained last night.’ And we all nodded. We knew what she meant – there would have been fewer trick-or-treaters. Maybe Graham would still be alive.

  Out the window something caught my eye. A flash of whiteness skittering along the treeline. At first I wondered if it was a light. But then realised it was too dull. It was in fact a form, slightly rounded or oval and at head height, I reckoned. Maybe a barn owl or the like. I got up from the stool – my buttocks were sore – and took a couple of paces towards the window.

  ‘Is there someone out there?’ My breath steamed the pane over.

  Sophia joined me. ‘No, I think everyone’s here?’ But I think she might have glimpsed something too – there was a question in her statement.

  I rubbed the glass and peered through it.

  Sam had come over now and was leaning against the frame. ‘One of the trick-or-treaters come back to visit the scene of the crime?’ he mused.

  Neither of us answered. The form flickered then became indistinct so that it looked like there was only blackness out there. And trees.

  ‘Yes,’ I said and turned to Sophia. ‘Do we know who they are? These trick-or-treaters? The ones who allegedly scared Graham?’

  Sophia shook her head. ‘Not as far as I’m aware. No one’s told us anything. I’m not even sure they’re looking.’ Then she shivered as if she was in a draught and wrapped her arms around her.

  ‘But the finger,’ Sam muttered, then stopped.

  I bent round to him. ‘We should speak to the police tomorrow. See if they’re doing anything about it. And maybe go into the village to find out if anyone knows about the trick-or-treaters? People usually have an idea about mischief-makers.’

  He nodded. ‘Good plan.’

  I turned back to Sophia. ‘Well, we’ll be off.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, continuing to hug herself tightly. She wasn’t looking at me, her gaze was still fastened onto the copse in the distance. ‘You know those woods over there?’ she said at length. ‘They’re called Witch Wood. You don’t think that’s got anything to do with it do you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, not getting the reference.

  ‘Witches,’ she said and swallowed. ‘There’s a rumour that they work in the woods and celebrate their sabbats out there.’ Then she shuddered again. Visibly.

  I darted a glance at Sam and waited for him to kickstart one of his ‘Witches were scapegoated and bullied and probably identified as Christians’ speeches. But he didn’t. He took a long hard look at Sophia and returned his gaze to the woods.

  Then he sighed. ‘We’ll talk about that tomorrow.’

  It signalled the end of the conversation.

  We said our goodbyes and left Ratchette Hall.

  It was lit up against the night sky. On the ground floor every window was glowing. A couple of lights shone in bedrooms on the first floor, but none at the top. We heard the clatter of something hard and metallic crash against a tiled floor at the rear of the building where I guessed the kitchen must be.

  Someone laughed. A woman.

  The air had cooled significantly.

  My eyes hadn’t adjusted to night vision yet and I couldn’t see anything other than the silhouette of trees in the distance beyond the car. This close to the house, the sky appeared tea-brown, slivers of the Milky Way sliding in to lighten the tinge.

  In the distance an owl hooted.

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t tackle that Sophia on her witch-prejudice,’ I said to Sam.

  He waited for me to unlock the car and said, ‘I’m not as predictable as you think I am.’

  I tried to make out his face in the darkness but could only see his jawline. Chiselled and as handsome as a statue. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘There are occasions when you’re not predictable at all.’

  Something rustled in the darkness of the trees. As the doors clicked open I turned to them.

  We both froze as the unmistakable howl of a wolf echoed out across the grounds.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Well, perhaps not ‘unmistakable’.

  ‘Wolves haven’t been around in the British Isles for two hundred and fifty years,’ said Sam once we were back and safely tucked into the domestic sanctuary of Septimus’s living room, above the Witch Museum, happily munching on a lamb casserole that had been in the slow cooker all day.

  ‘Okay, so that rules that out,’ I said fishing a rib bone out of my mouth. ‘Something howled. It was really bestial. An animal? Or maybe someone.’

  ‘And why would they do that?’ said Sam and rearranged the tray on his lap.

  ‘Maybe they were in pain?’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe they were happy. Maybe they were kind of announcing themselves?’ I was surprising myself with my suggestions, although truth to be told, they were all good ones. ‘Or maybe,’ I concluded. ‘They just wanted to scare us?’

  ‘Like Graham Peacock,’ he said. ‘And why would they want to do that?’

  I thought about this for a minute as I rolled a black olive stone around my mouth. ‘Because they want us to go away.’

  ‘Possibly,’ he said, and laid his fork on his tray.

  ‘Maybe just for fun? Because they can.’

  He considered this. ‘Depends on who is doing the scaring, doesn’t it? The reason?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, watching him licking his fingers. It was a boyish appreciative gesture which made me smile with fond delight.

  ‘Well,’ he said oblivious to my burning gaze. ‘If it’s kids, it’s usually mischief-making.’

  I shook my head, partly to rid myself of a curling arousal and partly because I disagreed with that he was saying. ‘Possibly that was what was going on tonight, with the thing in the bushes – if it was a person. But last night, with Graham, no. That was different. Cullen said he went up at half past ten. Graham was helping the oldies to bed. That means it was getting on for eleven when the trick-or-treaters came by. At that time it would be unusual to have children out and about. It was a school day. So if it was trick-ortreaters that gave Mr Peacock the fatal scare of his life, then they’d be much older.’

  Sam steepled his fingers and pointed them under his chin. ‘Do older kids trick-or-treat?’

  I shrugged. ‘Dunno. But we should find out tomorrow.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The village. The pub or at the church maybe, like we said earlier. I think we should go and look at these tombs don’t you?’

  ‘They do seem to be rather central to the matter,’ Sam said. ‘As does the story they studied by that writer.’

  ‘Edith Nesbit. Yes, we should ask Laura if the requirement to read Man-Sized in Marble was advertised beforehand? So we know how many people were privy to the ending.’

  ‘The stone finger in the hand is a direct echo of the story’s climax,’ Sam said slowly. ‘Graham could have broken it off someone …’

  I blinked with incredulity. ‘You’re not suggesting the stone knights got off their tombs and marched to Ratchette Hall with the implicit purpose of scaring the caretaker to death?’

  He leaned back into armchair. ‘I’m ruling nothing out. However, the laws of probability would suggest the marble digit was more likely to have been put there by a human hand.’

  ‘Yes. The mystery writers.’ I sighed. ‘I didn’t think Laura seemed very cooperative tonight.’

  ‘Well, it will be easy to find out if they were asked to read up on certain texts before they arrived at the Hall,’ sa
id Sam. ‘And Sophia gave me a list of everyone’s details including phone numbers. So we can work through that.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you text Laura now and find out?’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Sam. ‘If she’s obstructive then we can ask Margot and Cullen if they were asked to read the story beforehand. I think it would also be useful if we both read it. Something might jump out at us.’

  ‘Hopefully not of the stone variety,’ I said and smirked.

  Sam ignored me as usual. ‘I’ll find a PDF online and print it.’

  ‘Great,’ I said again. ‘I’ll, I’ll …’ I petered out. I didn’t actually know what I should do. I worked my spoon round my plate and gulped down the last of the casserole.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘You should think about tackling that.’

  I turned and looked at him enquiringly and saw he was gesturing to a box of my grandmother’s and Celeste’s ornaments, sketchbooks, jewellery that I had brought down from the attic about a month ago. I had laid it down in front of the fireplace and subsequently failed to do anything else.

  ‘Every time we sit here together you stare at it,’ he went on. ‘But you never touch your mother’s things.’ His tone wasn’t accusatory. It was soft and gentle. ‘Or are they Ethel-Rose’s?’

  ‘Both,’ I told him.

  ‘So why have you brought them down?’ he said. ‘Can’t be just to look at.’

  I sighed. ‘I’m planning to go through them. Sort them out. Decide whether I want to keep the ornaments and jewellery. I don’t think there’s much of value.’

  ‘And so?’ he said. ‘What’s stopping you?’

  I looked back at the box. A porcelain pillbox poked out of a wrap of lavender tissue paper. Beside it a question mark of pearls spread out over a silk Hermes scarf. It all looked very unthreatening: girly, lacy, fragile. ‘I don’t know what I might find.’

  Sam didn’t say anything. But he nodded. ‘Would it help if I went through them first?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. And I really didn’t.

  Since I’d inherited the witch museum I’d experienced enough shocks to keep me going for a lifetime. If I didn’t go through their stuff, I might body-swerve any more nasty surprises. At the same time, there were still a trillion unanswered questions involved in the story of my true past. And these worried me.

  Solving the mystery of my grandmother, Ethel-Rose, and her sudden disappearance, however, had resulted in the unearthing of not only her mortal remains, but also the long-hidden secret of my true parentage. The discovery had provided closure of one sort, whilst opening up raw wounds and doors onto new mysteries. Who knew what other wells of misery and painful disclosure might lie within the contents of the box? If indeed there was anything there that was of interest at all.

  Sam was being kind with his offer, but the whole issue was so loaded I just couldn’t answer him. It had only been four months since everything had happened. And although I was fine at a rather shallow level and completely able to function efficiently on a day-to-day basis, I was also intelligent enough to know beneath the surface things were still in turmoil.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Sam, after my long pause. ‘You decide what you want to happen and let me know. I’m here to help. I want to. Now, have you finished your casserole? I’ll sort the bowls out then go up to the study. That okay?’

  I nodded and handed him the tray. Fair exchange. This is how we worked things out – whoever cooked got let off clearing up. Unfortunately, we still hadn’t managed to divvy up chores in the rest of the museum. Although, since the business with the Blackly Be boulder in May, we’d had so much publicity, takings at the museum were up. This meant we’d managed to sort out extra staff. Namely Vanessa, who came and did the till and Trace, her mum, who cleaned and did the books, which took that burden off of Sam. Thus we were freed up to go through the museum, systematically, working out what to do with dated exhibits and taking stock of some of the thousands of other artefacts we had in various storage rooms dotted around the place. Well, that was the theory.

  Sam however, seemed to be constantly booked for talks with the various schools who now turned up on a regular basis. Lots of them wanted to know all about the Blackly Be and the ‘dead head’ that had ended up on it. However, as the whole affair had crossed over into my own personal domain and now involved an impending court case, we weren’t really allowed to talk about it. Interest in the scandal continued to pull in punters, so to capitalise on that we were planning to update the Blackly Be exhibit, and maybe commission a film on the whole thing, which visitors could watch in a new theatre section. We had identified a bit of dead space in the Cadence Wing which we thought could be walled off and sound-proofed and thus turned into a small cinema space. We reckoned we might be able to fit in about thirty bums on seats and maybe even use it to screen films for the locals at weekends. I was up for doing midnight horror films too. Reckoned people would flock in from miles around. See, the times they were a-changing and museums, like libraries and bookshops couldn’t just be single-use any more. I had plans for a café at some point too and really wanted to get an alcohol license. So, yeah, like, we were well busy.

  And Sam also had at least one day off a week to devote to his PhD – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Witchery in Essex but Were too Afraid to Ask. Or something.

  At times this resulted in him locking himself in the study or taking off to Cambridge for a night or two. Which was fine, as it meant he didn’t drive me mad all the time and allowed me to go through certain areas of the attic and other storage areas where I had come across some of the Strange family’s personal belongings. Like I said, I’d managed to bring this one box downstairs but that was as far as I’d got.

  To be fair to myself, I hadn’t just been sitting there staring at everything like a gormless wonder. There had been a lot of other things to attend to as well: autumn is not a resting time for gardeners. There was all this decluttering, raking, cutting back, mulching, aerating, trimming of the land around the museum. Some of the creepers needed structural support too. Bronson was getting on a bit. He couldn’t do it all on his own.

  Carmen had got started on chiselling some of the names of those who lost their lives to the witch hunts into these big blocks of soapstone. I thought we might have to get a stone mason to do it but she was insistent she would at least try. It would cost us less. Plus I had to sort out layers of admin regarding the burial of Bartholomew Elkes and Anne Hewghes. Not to mention that of my own grandmother, which had in turn meant that I’d really had to support my dad and my mum a bit too. Despite the fact that they weren’t biologically my mum and dad. But they were in the ‘upbringing’ sense. In fact they were all I knew. And I loved them. And they loved me. That much was most definitely true.

  Which I think was another reason why I shied away from looking at Celeste’s things. I felt guilty. Guilty that I hadn’t known she was my mother. Guilty that I loved my own, Maureen. Guilty that I hadn’t spent much time with Celeste. Guilty that I couldn’t remember the time that we had shared. Guilty that I hadn’t known her. Guilty that I hadn’t tried to look through her things earlier. That I had been so dismissive when people said I looked like her. That I hadn’t thought about that more. Guilty.

  Of course, there was nothing I could do about any of that and none of it was my fault. But that makes no difference to ‘guilt’. It just sits there, like a vulture, on your shoulder pecking at you every so often when you don’t expect it. Or sometimes when you do. I needed to get myself in order and shoo it away.

  I shook myself out physically and got up from the sofa. Such sluggish, indulgent thoughts were no use to anyone. And pointless too. Sam was right of course: I should do something with the stuff. So, seizing this present moment of sudden motivation, I went and gathered up the box and carried it into Septimus’s bedroom. There I put it on the console table near the window and had another long stare.

  I removed the pillbox from the tissue paper which
was dusty and a bit manky. The pillbox was edged with gold and had a looping daisy pattern pressed into it. Really it seemed quite Rococo. On the lid was a painting of a nineteenth-century woman, with finely piled dark hair. She was at leisure, with a book, sitting beneath a tree near a rambling brook. It was a pretty pastoral scene. I flipped the catch on the side and opened it. Inside, wrapped in a fine gauze, was a lock of baby hair. It was quite a shock. I hadn’t expected it, and for a moment I paused to consider who the lock might have once belonged to – Dad? Celeste? Me?

  I didn’t want to touch it in case it made me sad and start to think weird things, so wrapped it up quickly and was about to put it back in the box, when I noticed the corner of a mustard-coloured moleskin notebook poking out. I began to pull it out and saw an intricate landscape had been doodled on the cover: rolling hills, some coloured in a dull or faded green. In the foreground a white Tipp-Ex cloud with a grey underbelly rained down large teardrops of blue ink. One in the background had lightning coming out of it and striking the ground. It made me shiver. For it reminded me of the tale my father had told me of how he became my dad.

  ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ he had said, his eyes baggy and low. ‘I didn’t want to go out. The rain was lashing at the windows. The wind was up.’

  ‘It was howling, Rosie,’ added my mum. ‘I had a bad feeling about that night. There was something out there in the dark. You could feel it. In a way I wasn’t surprised when …’ she broke off and looked at my dad, who shook his head at her in a restrained pulled-back way that he hoped I hadn’t seen.

  He ran a hand over his jaw. There was a slight sheen of grey stubble and sweat under his nose. ‘Then I got the call from Dad. Septimus,’ he clarified. ‘Your grandfather. I knew there was something wrong at once. You could hear it in his voice.’

  My mum had leant forward and nodded. ‘Normally he was so …’ she bunched her lips together and frowned ‘… composed, I think is the word. He didn’t get flustered by much. When Ted told me he wanted us there at once, like I said, I knew something was up. We got in the car straight away.’