Village of Ghosts

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “Please be seated.” Ravyn’s voice was soft. “I regret we must do this now. Are you well enough to speak, at least briefly?”

  The woman was pale, face devoid of makeup. Her once-smart clothes were wrinkled. She looked at the police constable.

  “If you don’t feel up to talking right now, luv, you just let Mr Ravyn know,” WPC Webber said. “But it’s important to find out as much as we can about this terrible thing. Sooner is better.”

  “I…I understand.” WPC Webber helped her sit. “Thank you.”

  Ravyn gestured at the other chair. The constable sat beside her charge. Stark came around the desk and leaned close to Ravyn.

  “Her cousin’s come up from London for her,” he whispered. “I don’t see any problem with that.”

  Ravyn nodded in agreement. He started the recorder. Time of interview and names of those present were taken down.

  “Why did you come to Little Wyvern, Miss Wallace?”

  “I…I wanted…” Her voice faltered.

  “Was it simply to take the Ghost Tour?” Ravyn asked.

  “I…” She shook her head and tears brimmed.

  WPC Webber touched her shoulder. “Steady on, luv.”

  “Was it so you could meet Simon Jones?” Stark asked.

  She nodded. “When I first saw an advertisement for the Ghost Tour of Little Wyvern in Paranormal Monthly, I didn’t think much of it. After all, there’s always someone trying to commercialise the paranormal, isn’t there? Philistines, most of them.”

  “But then you found out Simon Jones would be leading it?”

  She nodded.

  “How did you find out, Miss Wallace?” Ravyn asked.

  “On the internet.” Her tone betrayed slight annoyance. “Isn’t that how everyone finds out anything of importance these days? I was in a ghost forum…” Seeing their blank expressions, she added: “People interested in spectral phenomena…people from all over England…we talk about it online. Someone mentioned the Little Wyvern Ghost Tour, about FOG, and someone else said how the tour would be led by Simon Jones.”

  “What was the name of the forum?” Ravyn asked.

  “Oh.” Madeline frowned as she concentrated. “I’m on so many of them. I think it was either Otherworldly or one called Crossing the Bridge, one of the two.” She paused, fidgeting in embarrassment. “On both I go by GhostLady137.”

  “And when was that?” Ravyn asked, pleased to see Stark jot down the information in his notebook. “Do you recall?”

  “Yes, precisely,” she said. “The night before the tour. I rushed to pack an overnight kit after the Barclaycard charge went through, made rail reservations, all of that.” She uttered a small melancholy laugh. “I nearly forgot to leave word I’d be on a week’s holiday.”

  “Where do you work, Miss Wallace?” Ravyn asked.

  “At Tetcher and Sons…in the City.” She laughed again, almost a sob. “They think me quite mad already. I don’t care, not now.” She drew in a breath; it escaped as a ragged sigh. “I put so much hope in this. It’s all ashes now, isn’t it?”

  “You were a fan of Mr Jones?” Ravyn asked.

  She looked at Ravyn, eyes wide. “Not just a fan, Mr Ravyn, but his soul mate. I came to Little Wyvern so I could join Simon in his quest for the truth.”

  “Had you met Mr Jones previously?” Ravyn asked.

  “No.”

  “Corresponded with him?”

  “No,” she replied. “I was going to send a letter to him in care of his publisher, but I could not find an address.”

  “Interacted with him online?” Ravyn asked. “An e-mail?”

  She shook her head. “I found places on the internet where he was chatting with others, answering questions about his books, but I was too embarrassed to join in. I didn’t want my questions or his answers to be out where everyone could see them.” She paused and glanced away. “Where everyone could judge them.”

  “So, you came up just on the off chance you could corner Jones and propose a sort of ghost hunting agency?” Stark asked.

  Madeline stiffened at his words, then relaxed. A wan smile curved her lips. “When you put it like that, it does sound kind of silly, but, yes, I suppose that’s what I was hoping. Do you think I was foolish in my hopes?”

  “We were told that Mr Jones seemed to take an interest in you,” Ravyn asked. “Is that accurate?”

  She nodded. “I wondered how I would introduce myself, how to stand out from the crowd I knew would be around him, hanging on his every word. Most of my journey to Hammershire was spent thinking of gambits by which I could manoeuvre close to him.” She reddened. “I even considered trying to seduce him, though I knew he had evolved far beyond gross sensuality.”

  Stark leaned forward, scribbling in his book to hide a reflexive smirk. He had no desire to harm the poor little mare. She would have nightmares the rest of her life. Let her cling to her illusions. At the same time, he felt a hot streak of anger towards Simon Jones. Madeline Wallace may not have known what Jones had in mind, but Stark did, and it had everything to do with ‘gross sensuality.’

  “He glanced at me several times at the pub,” she continued. “I thought it might be because I was the only unaccompanied woman, or because I was dressed a bit smarter than the other women—they were all too casual, I thought, the way people are these days. When he spilled orange juice on me, I knew it was an accident, but I also knew it was a way for the cosmos to bring us together.”

  “What were you drinking, Miss Wallace?” Stark asked. “For the record, you understand.”

  “Oh, yes, I know details are very important in any line of work, Sergeant,” she said. “I spend my days totting columns of numbers. One mistake, and economic calamity might ensue.”

  Pencil poised, Stark lifted his gaze.

  “Orange juice, same as Simon,” she said. “Spiritual beings such as Simon and I have no need for stimulants. Alcohol interferes with the ability to sense entities dwelling on the higher planes.”

  Stark jotted down the answer in strained silence.

  “During the Ghost Tour,” Ravyn said, “were you with Mr Jones the whole time?”

  “Oh yes,” she sighed. “It was wonderful! I felt the village’s ghosts all around me, felt the friendly spirits.” She paused, frowning. “Well, not all were benevolent. Some were troubled or sad. A few violent, such as the ghost of the warlock hanged from Hopkins’ Oak in 1645. He glared at all of us, but especially Simon and me.”

  “You saw this ghost?” Ravyn asked.

  “I sensed his spirit,” Madeline explained. “A shadow only. He watched us, vast and dark, from the depths of the oak. I felt his rage, but I was without fear, as long as I was with Simon.”

  “What happened at the church,” Ravyn said.

  She made a face. “That foolish, evil man!”

  “The Reverend Dickerson Allen?”

  She nodded. “We were having a grand time, all of us, but me most of all. Simon had already told us we would be unable to enter the church due to some deviltry by the vicar with the Council. Pure mean-spiritedness. He was being bloody minded, as usual. We were disappointed, but there was still the graveyard to see.”

  “None of you tried to go inside the church?” Ravyn asked.

  “No, though some asked, just in case,” she said. “It would have been fascinating. There are a dozen ghosts in St Barnabas from Christian times, and more from the pre-Christian era.” She leaned forward slightly. “Its foundation was laid atop a pagan temple. The crypt contains its stones. They always did that, the early Church, incorporate old with new, but this time they inherited some ghosts.”

  Madeline’s recollections dovetailed with accounts taken from the others. She embraced the good memories, but her eyes clouded as she approached the end.

  “Simon told us to find a grave, to try to speak to its spirit,” she said. “I wanted to get Simon alone, to confess my love for him, to ask him to let me join him. I was desperate because I thought
it might be my only chance. In the confusion of everyone moving around I lost track of him. After a few minutes, I saw him away in the darkness, off by himself. I tried to talk to him, but…it…it was too late. The ghost had…had…”

  Her control crumbled. She lapsed into sobs. She almost fell from the chair but the constable grabbed her, held her.

  “There, there, luv,” WPC Webber consoled. “It’s all in the past. You’ll be all right.”

  “No!” Madeline gasped. “Never all right! Simon’s dead! Killed by the Warlock’s ghost…striding among the headstones…black and dreadful…rope burns on his neck…I saw him!”

  Ravyn instructed WPC Webber to take Madeline to her cousin. He sighed, then switched off the recorder.

  “Sad case, that,” Stark said. “Pathetic. Sorry for her, but…” He shrugged. “All nutters, only separated by degrees.”

  “”Degrees of perception,” Ravyn said. “Sights and sounds are filtered through insight. We all see and hear the same things, but each perceives them differently. To know what was really seen and heard, we must understand those filtering beliefs. Comprehension will reveal the truth.”

  “Sir, can we at least agree the murderer was no ghost?”

  Ravyn smiled. “Yes, we can at least agree on that. Probably.”

  Stark pocketed his notebook while Ravyn picked up the digital recorder. He was already composing case notes in his mind. Ravyn demanded fast and accurate reports, and Stark hated retyping.

  “There is, however, one aspect we’ve not considered.”

  “Yes, sir,” Stark said. “The heart. Not by or around the body, not turned up at all by forensics. Where could it be?”

  “Perhaps taken by the Warlock’s ghost,” Ravyn suggested.

  Stark did not smile.

  Chapter 5

  Not From Around Here, Is He?

  Detective Sergeant Leo Stark sat at his desk, elbows planted on the top, fists pressed against his temples, eyes directed towards the report prepared from his notes. He appeared to be proofing the document, readying it for final submission.

  The other members of the Hammershire CID left him alone, for it was well known a single error was cause for rejection by Chief Inspector Ravyn, not to mention anything less than a word-by-word account of an interview. While Stark was still ‘the new bloke what got sacked by the Met,’ he had outlasted the pool started when assigned to Ravyn by Superintendent Heln. There was grumbling when he did not request a transfer, but the widows and orphans fund benefited nicely from Stark’s endurance.

  Stark, however, was not proofing the report he had typed up during a brief respite at home. The papers were reflected in his eyes, but he did not see the pages. His mind was elsewhere.

  After Constable Leo Stark was fast-tracked to a slot in Scotland Yard’s CID, he attended a dizzying array of classes at Hendon Police College, recalled fuzzily at best. One examined punishments of the past. Lecturer forgotten, text lost to memory, but he vividly remembered a PowerPoint presentation. In amongst the beheadings, eye-gougings, burnings and floggings, there was an engraving of a poor damned soul caught between two opposing forces.

  The man’s bound wrists were attached by a long rope to a horse headed north. His ankles, likewise constrained, were attached to a south-bound horse, also by a rope. The horses had been slapped into motion, and the artist had captured the exact moment when the two halves of his body began to separate.

  What the man had done to deserve such a punishment Stark did not recall, but he remembered well the terror and pain reflected in the victim’s face. Even more vivid in his memory was the glee expressed in the features of the horses.

  Gripped by suffocating memory, he named the horses Aeronwy Stark and Superintendent Giles Heln. And the man caught between the irresistible forces? Well, that’s good old Leo bloody Stark, isn’t it? he thought.

  The moment he arrived home, just before dawn, a concession to Stark by Ravyn, Aeronwy had started in. It was as if her prior text had never been sent. Why did they always have to send him out to some godforsaken village at an ungodly hour? Did the Hammershire nick have no other detectives on call? It was fine for the unmarried chief inspector—who would want him anyway?—but a man with a wife and a baby on the way had responsibilities. Or was he even out on a case? Was that why he did not want her calling or texting his guv’nor anymore? Was that why Chief Inspector Ravyn changed his mobile number, so the two of them could carouse around the county doing who-knew-what while she sat at home, forgotten and alone, pregnant with his child? Perhaps she should address her concerns to Superintendent Heln, a most understanding man.

  While she spoke, one hand or the other somehow found its way to the bump that had yet to actually show. Finally, he snapped back, some growled response he no longer recalled, though it might have been something about gin or always getting so bloody emotional about every little thing. Whatever it was he said, it resulted in a hard slap to his face, the quick clicks of her sandals as she ran off and the slamming of the bedroom door.

  He had planned on an hour or two of desperately needed sleep, a scalding hot shower and a good breakfast. Instead, he went to his study and began typing up his notes while the incidents were still fresh in his mind.

  Though Stark was a fast and accurate typist, his fingers refused to cooperate. Her comment about Heln vexed him. Had there been actual contact between her and Heln? Hopefully, it was nothing more than her battering him with an emotional truncheon, thrashing him with an authority she herself did not possess.

  “Are you almost finished with that?”

  The words swirled before his eyes.

  “Stark?”

  He looked up. “Sorry, sir. Didn’t realise you were there.”

  “Are you finished with your report?” Ravyn asked.

  Stark flipped over the final page, one he had stared at for more than a quarter-hour. He collated the pages, clipped them, then gave them to Ravyn.

  “You don’t seem as refreshed as you should be.” Ravyn turned the pages quickly, spending no more than a second or two on each, but he lingered almost thirty seconds on the last one, an eternity to him. “Did you get some sleep after you got home?”

  “Not as much as I had planned, sir,” he said. “Aeronwy was asleep when I got home. I did not want to wake her, so I slipped into my study. I typed the report, then caught a few winks on the divan.”

  Ravyn held the report up. “Well done. Your recall and attention to detail continues to improve.” He paused. “Have you been in the station for long?”

  “No, sir, not very long,” Stark replied. “I probably stayed in the canteen longer than I should have, but…well, it was a bit of a pull in Little Wyvern…I guess I was a little more appreciative of my morning coffee than normally.” He paused, then added a nugget of truth: “I didn’t have a chance to breakfast at home…Aeronwy was still sleeping.”

  “Quite considerate of you.” In his mind’s eye, Ravyn replayed his walk through the station canteen to get his cup of tea, and did not see Stark sitting at any of the tables. “She’s not very far along, but pregnancy affects each woman differently, and each husband as well, from what I’ve read.”

  “It’s our first,” Stark said, then wanted to slap himself for such an inane statement. “I’m rather at sea. We both are.”

  Ravyn nodded. “I’m going to go over the other statements.”

  “The recordings have been transcribed already?”

  Ravyn raised his eyebrows.

  “No, of course you mean the statements taken by the constables from the Ghost Tour members.” Again, Stark berated himself. If Ravyn needed anything from the recorder, he would simply replay the copy in his own memory. “You mean, see how statements link up with each other and with the interviews.”

  “If you need more rest, I can spare you a half-day,” Ravyn said. “As you say, it was a long pull this morning in Little Wyvern.”

  Stark thought of Aeronwy sitting at home. “No, sir, I’ll be fine. A cu
ppa will set things right.”

  “Form and background on everyone,” Ravyn said.

  “Yes, sir,” Stark said. “I’ll go as deep as necessary.”

  Ravyn turned and headed toward his office, Stark’s report in hand. He would pull up the file from their shared drive, correct the three spelling errors and one mistake in subject-verb agreement, then run a copy on his own printer.

  Stark closed his eyes and waited for the computer to cycle. He had to get his head screwed on. His statement about the canteen had been a stupid one. It was only blind luck that Ravyn had not himself been in the canteen. Or in the hallway outside Heln’s office.

  Stark realised now that Superintendent Giles Heln must have been looking out his window, watching for him to drive into the car park. Stark had only one leg out of the car before a nervous, fresh-faced constable appeared, informing him of the summons.

  Heln was seated behind his desk concentrating on a spreadsheet. Stark hoped Heln would not stand. It would make the man’s lack of height less distracting. Not for the first time Stark wondered how many regulations had been waived, how many favours had been called in, how many palms had been greased, not just to get Heln accepted by the police, but to fast-track him into administration, bypassing anything resembling real police work.

  The man looked up, as if surprised by the early morning visitor. “Ah, Detective Sergeant Stark.”

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Are you finally settled in?” Heln asked. “Getting the hang of how things are done in Hammershire?”

  “I think so,” Stark replied. “DCI Ravyn is a fine teacher.”

  Heln frowned. “I understand there was something of a kerfuffle over in Little Wyvern last night.”

  “Yes, sir, a suspicious death, a writer named Simon Jones,” Stark said, though he knew that neither he nor Ravyn would have been roused from their beds had Heln not had a hand in changing the duty assignment. “Early days yet, sir, but I feel a great deal of progress has been made already.”

  Heln tapped the end of his biro against the spreadsheet. “I hope so. The man-hours quotient is trending up again. Do you think the chief inspector is using more resources than the case requires?”