Squeak, squeak.
‘Phew,’ I whispered to Matt. ‘Sounds like he’s still in the same spot.’
‘Must be waiting for you to carry on with your story,’ he whispered back, a note of sarcasm in his voice. ‘Right. Look, the floorboards are just nailed down. It won’t be a problem at all to get this one up. But can you just keep talking to him while I do it? I’ll be as quiet as I can, but I don’t want him to get spooked and run away.’ He hesitated, giving me a little grin now. ‘If you want to carry on with your life story, I promise not to listen.’
‘Nah. It’s a bit boring,’ I said. ‘I’ll sing to him instead.’
‘Got any earplugs?’ he joked as I started singing. I nudged him and pulled a face and he chuckled as he got up to get his tools. It felt good to be back on friendly terms with him. It was a few minutes, though, before I realised what I was singing. It was Shane’s first number one hit – needless to say, my favourite song once upon a time. Not any more. I stopped singing abruptly and started reciting the Lord’s Prayer instead.
‘Are you religious?’ he asked me, as he carefully pulled out the first nail.
‘Not really. But I went to a Church of England school so we learnt it off by heart. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done …’ I continued.
‘Let’s hope we don’t need prayers to help us find this hamster,’ Matt muttered as the next nail came out of the floorboard.
I frowned to myself. I couldn’t believe I’d inadvertently started talking about my childhood. Before I knew it, I’d be telling him all about what happened at school and how I went off the rails as a teenager. Then it’d only be a short step to telling him about meeting Shane, and then it’d be too late. I really, really needed to guard my tongue around him if we were going to be friends again.
‘There,’ he was saying. ‘That’s the nails out. Now, I’ll just prise the board out from this end. Can you still hear him squeaking? Hold his cage ready to catch him when I lift him out.’
But it seemed the prayers might be needed after all. As the floorboard was lifted clear, we just caught sight of JoJo’s tail as he scampered off.
‘He’s only just out of reach,’ Matt said, lying flat on the floor next to me and shining his phone’s torch under the floorboards. ‘He’s sitting there staring at me. Can you sweet-talk him back again? Try a different prayer. Perhaps he’s a Methodist.’
By midnight, we’d had to take up five floorboards. There was a gaping hole in the floor of my clients’ home. But JoJo the runaway hamster, after leading us a merry dance moving from one spot to another as each board came up, was finally back safely in his cage, rewarded with all the bits of fruit and vegetables I’d been trying to tempt him with earlier. I put the broken hamster ball in the kitchen out of the way.
‘Phew.’ Matt wiped his brow. ‘Put the kettle on, can you, Emma? I think we both deserve a cuppa before I nail these boards back down. I’ll just retrieve my phone. I left it down there …’
He lay down and reached under the floorboards again. I went out to the kitchen to make the tea, and a couple of minutes later he joined me, carrying what looked like an old tin box.
‘What have you got there?’ I asked.
He set it down on the kitchen worktop. ‘I’ve no idea. I was reaching for my phone when I found it. It looks pretty old and rusty, though.’ He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Shall we have a look inside?’
He opened the lid. And we both gasped with surprise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘So what was in the box?’
Lauren was sitting opposite me at the kitchen table the next morning. It was a Saturday and I’d slept in late, after being at JoJo the hamster’s house with Matt until the early hours. I didn’t even stir until Holly peered round my bedroom door and called me a lazybones, and I was still in my pyjamas now at ten o’clock, eating a late breakfast while I told Lauren all about the drama.
‘About five hundred quid in cash, for a start!’ I said. ‘And some jewellery …’
Lauren’s eyes widened. ‘What kind of jewellery? Gold, silver, pearls?’
‘Yes. All of those. Plus what looked like a diamond and sapphire ring, and a brooch with … I think … rubies set in it.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea how valuable any of it is, of course.’
‘But do you think the couple who live there know about this – that they hid it there?’
‘Well, it’s a good hiding place, but it seems very strange, particularly as they’ve got a safe! It’s hidden behind a picture on the wall. Billie showed it to me, in case I needed the keys to the garage for any reason. She apparently always puts them – and absolutely everything else – in there when they go away. She seems a really nervy, jumpy kind of person. I can’t imagine she’d feel happy living with a cache like that under the floorboards when she even locks her car keys and chequebook away in a safe.’
‘No. How very odd.’
‘It is. But that’s not all …’ I wiped the toast crumbs from my mouth and leant closer to her across the table. ‘There were some old papers in the box too.’
We’d nearly missed the papers. They were folded at the bottom, under all the cash and jewellery. Matt pulled them out, handling them carefully – they were dog-eared and yellow with age. But when he opened them up and spread them out to read, he fell silent.
‘What is it?’ I asked him.
‘Listen.’ He lifted a sheet of faded and smudged close-typed text, which looked like a carbon copy of something written on an old-fashioned typewriter, and started to read it to me.
‘The haunting of Castle Hill House is well documented. Many cases have been reported over the years, including sightings of specific supernatural embodiments. I have documentation referring to several appearances of a young man dressed in military uniform, with one arm severed at the elbow and a gaping hole in his neck, who floats across what would once have been the back parlour, moaning and calling out for “Florrie”. Another apparition mentioned more than once is that of a small blonde child wearing a Victorian style of nightgown and carrying a candle, crying “Mama! Mama!” in a distressingly pitiful voice. Other reports detail voices calling through keyholes and a bloodcurdling scream coming from the fireplace in the sitting room.’
I glanced towards the fireplace. It was very late at this point – nearly two o’clock in the morning – and it was all too easy to imagine something spooky and unpleasant going on within these old walls, however much modernisation had taken place over the years.
‘And it carries on in much the same vein,’ Matt said, turning the page over and glancing at the next one. ‘Ghosties, ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night … sorry, are you getting spooked?’
‘No,’ I laughed, ‘although the lady who lives here probably would be,’ I added thoughtfully. But Matt was thumbing through the rest of the papers, his eyebrows raised in surprise.
‘Look at this!’ He held up the large and very tattered page he’d just unfolded. It was the front page of a newspaper. ‘It’s the Crickleford and District Gazette – I’ve heard it was the Chronicle’s rival paper here, till it went out of business, oh, probably about thirty years ago. And look at this headline: CRICKLEFORD HOUSE VISITED BY GHOSTS.’
‘Oh my God. It was actually in the paper?’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes.’ He was scanning the article quickly, beginning to look excited. ‘Evidence has recently been uncovered of frequent supernatural activities taking place in Castle Hill House, Castle Hill Road, Crickleford. Residents both past and present have reported seeing …’ He looked up at me, his eyes shining now. ‘It repeats much of what’s in the typewritten document. Emma, whoever wrote this, had it published on the front page of the local newspaper!’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘Well, it was quite a story, I suppose.’
‘And it still is,’ he said, very pointedly. He got to his feet, carefully folding the papers again. ‘And enough years have passed since this was published – it’s time for it to be resurrect
ed!’
I dropped the gold bracelet I’d been holding, back into the box, and shook my head at him.
‘No, Matt. You can’t.’
‘Why the hell not?’ he shot back. ‘Who’s it going to hurt?’
‘The people who live here, for a start! If they don’t know about it, and I can’t believe they do, it’s going to be enough of a shock, when they come back from their holiday, to find out that all this has been under their floorboards, without it being shouted at them from the Chronicle! It’s their home, Matt. You can’t write about it without their permission.’
‘I’ll get their permission, then. I’ll wait till they come home, fair enough, but they’re bound to find it really interesting themselves—’
‘I’m not so sure about that. Billie seems like a very anxious person. She’ll probably be terrified. And they have two young children. It might upset her so much, she’ll want to move house. I’m not convinced we should even be telling her about it.’
‘What? We have to tell them, Emma! It was under their floorboards!’
‘Obviously they need to know about the money, and the jewellery, but all this ghost stuff …’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Tell the husband, then, if you think the wife’s going to have an attack of the vapours!’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I’m really starting to think you don’t want me to write any big story for the paper, even if it’s not about you.’
I didn’t respond. We agreed to put the papers back in the box, and put the box in the safe until the family came home, and he went back to nailing down the floorboards.
‘I’m going to talk to Billie’s husband about it first,’ I told Lauren now, as I spread marmalade on my second slice of toast. ‘In case he wants to keep it quiet from Billie and the kids.’
‘Yes, that makes sense. Wow. The things that go on in your own town that you don’t even know about!’ she said. ‘But I’m glad the little hamster was safe.’
‘Yes. That’s the main thing.’ I smiled. ‘He’s had the adventure of his life, though. I don’t think it bothered him one bit – he really didn’t want to be recaptured, the cheeky little thing. Matt thought it was hilarious.’
I hadn’t thanked Matt properly, yet, for helping me. I felt bad now about the way we’d parted. We’d both been tired, and I knew he was cross and frustrated with me, but I wasn’t in the mood for an argument. Now, though, I was worried that we’d go back to not speaking to each other again, such a short time after things had felt better between us. I decided I’d get dressed and walk into town in the hope that Matt might be working a Saturday again in the Chronicle office.
The weather had suddenly turned hot: high summer had come to Crickleford and, with it, an influx of tourists. Grockles, I found myself thinking, and chuckled. I was starting to think like a local! There were groups of hikers in the Town Square, rucksacks on their backs, hiking poles clutched in their hands, taking a rest on the benches in the Square while they spread out maps and consulted their handheld sat-navs. Family groups strolled in the sunshine, looking in the shop windows and exclaiming about cute artefacts that were, of course, displayed precisely to attract them, their prices bearing no relation to their value except to the holidaymaker who wanted a ‘Souvenir of Dartmoor’. I headed straight for the Chronicle office, but to my disappointment the only person there, a girl who was slumped at her desk, reading a magazine and looking bored, told me Matt wasn’t working that day, and that they only had a skeleton staff on Saturdays. I presumed she was the skeleton that week.
At a loss now, I decided to go home and see if Lauren and Jon would like me to take Holly to the park. I had nothing to do until it was time for JoJo the hamster to wake up that evening. But as I passed Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, I glanced in the window and Annie waved to me, so I popped in for a quick coffee and chat. The place was heaving, and Annie was red in the face, yelling out orders to a guy who was helping her, and then yelling across the room to customers when their drinks and snacks were ready.
‘You’re a bit busy today!’ I shouted above the noise of the customers’ chatter, and she gave me a look, her eyebrows raised.
‘Fair makes the gravy run,’ she muttered.
‘Sweat,’ her helper translated for me with a grin. ‘She’s working up a sweat is what she means. My mum can’t speak normal English, can you, Ma?’
Annie laughed and pretended to swipe him across the top of the head with a menu, telling him not to be so forthy.
‘Cheeky,’ he explained with another grin at me. ‘I’m Kieran, by the way. I don’t think we’ve met before. I help Mum out, in here, when I’m home from uni.’
‘Emma,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ I smiled at him, thinking he looked a bit older than the usual university student – but already he was explaining:
‘I worked in here full time when I first left school. Then I realised my mistake.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Well, I had no ambition back then. You know how it is, when you’re a teenager, you just want to leave school, and earn enough money to have some fun with your mates. Then you grow up! I realised if I was going to make anything of my life I needed to go to uni and get a degree. I’m a mature student at Bristol. Doing engineering.’
I nodded, suddenly feeling sad. If I hadn’t gone to the States with Shane, would I eventually have ‘grown up’ and done something sensible about my own life? Got an education, instead of being a dimwit? Probably not. I didn’t have it in me.
‘You OK?’ Kieran asked, looking concerned.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I’m holding up the queue. I’d like a cappuccino, please.’
‘She’ll die of thirst afore you serve her, poor maid,’ Annie scolded him. ‘Chattering on about your bliddy university. She don’t want to hear ’bout all that.’
‘No, it’s fine. I was interested, actually,’ I said. ‘But I’ll let you get on.’
I smiled my thanks at Kieran and took a seat in the corner, where I listened with half an ear to the gossip going on at the next table about somebody’s husband and someone else’s girlfriend. After I’d drained the last of my cappuccino, I was getting up to leave when Kieran suddenly appeared at my table, ostensibly collecting crockery.
‘Did you mean that, about being interested, or were you just being polite?’ he asked quietly. ‘Only you looked kind of upset when I started talking about being a student.’
‘Oh, no, it’s nothing,’ I said, feeling embarrassed. Then I sighed. ‘I suppose I just envy people like you – people who are clever enough to go to college and get a proper career.’
‘Well, it’s never too late, Emma,’ he said, looking at me with his head on one side. ‘I know it’s a big financial burden these days, but it pays off in the end. There’s nothing stopping you doing what I’ve done—’
‘Yes, there is,’ I said, shaking my head and taking a step towards the door. I looked back at him. He seemed a nice guy, with an open, friendly face and intelligent grey-green eyes. A mature student, studying for an engineering degree. How could he possibly understand how it felt to be too stupid to pass even the most basic school exams? ‘I didn’t even get any GCSEs,’ I said quickly, looking away from him.
As I pushed my way through the group of hikers now coming down ye olde steppes into the teashop, I thought I heard him call after me ‘Nor did I!’ – but, of course, I must have heard wrong. Or he was trying to be kind. Or patronising me. Whatever, I decided to steer clear of him in future. I didn’t need comparisons with university students to make me feel any worse about myself. I had my own business now, I reminded myself crossly as I walked home, the sun burning the back of my neck. I was an entrepreneur. But still, the meeting had unsettled me and I wanted to just get home and take little Holly to the park. Spending time with her always cheered me up.
‘Oh, Emma, I’m glad you’re home,’ Lauren said as soon as I’d closed the front door behind me. ‘A letter came for yo
u in the post this morning.’
‘For me?’ It was no wonder she’d sounded surprised. I’d had no mail whatsoever since I’d come to live here, and hadn’t expected to get any.
‘Yes, here it is!’ She came out of the kitchen, waving an envelope at me.
I took it from her cautiously, as if I expected it to blow up in my face. I recognised the writing on the envelope straight away – it was Mum’s. But when I ripped it open, there just was another envelope inside, a blue airmail one this time with an American stamp on it. My heart began to race and my hands were clammy as I carried it upstairs to open in private. There was one sheet of flimsy paper inside this second envelope, covered with the same handwriting that was on the airmail envelope. It was written in a tiny, cramped script that blurred before my eyes. The signature was completely illegible. But I wasn’t even going to try to read it yet – because the important thing was what had been folded inside the letter. It was a photo of Albert, my beloved cat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I stared at the photo of Albert until my eyes ached. I even stroked him, in the picture, ran my finger over his head and his back, and tickled his tummy just the way he used to like. It was a while before I could think about anything other than the fact that he was here in front of me, even if only in a photograph. But eventually I started to look at the picture more closely. I didn’t recognise anything about the background. He was lying on a stripy cushion, on a gold-coloured sofa. Behind him was a wall decorated in a floral wallpaper, with a glimpse of some stripy curtains that clashed with the wallpaper, and in front of the sofa was a brown floral carpet. There weren’t any other clues as to whose home it was, but in a funny way I was pleased about the cushion. Whoever was looking after him was obviously happy for him to make himself comfy on the sofa. From what I could see, he seemed to be in good health. He looked calm and contented. That was very reassuring. I picked up the letter again and stared at the spidery writing, screwing up my eyes, trying to make out what it said.
Trust Your Heart Page 4