Seeking the Dead

by Kate Ellis

  ‘You OK, Emily?’ Joe asked as they led Elizabeth out to the waiting car.

  ‘I will be when they find the girl alive,’ she replied with a worried smile. ‘Thanks for asking,’ she added as the prisoner slid into the back seat.

  Cemeteries are quiet places, the territory of the sleeping dead. But today the blanket of deep peace was slashed by insistent sirens and running feet. The Gosson Mausoleum, in the oldest part of the burial ground, now disused and overgrown, was the focus of all the activity. The ambulance stood there, lurking like a nervous onlooker, behind the patrol cars. Waiting for its cargo … dead or alive.

  Sunny Porter placed the key in the lock in the centre of the great iron door and hesitated. It was the sort of place that spooked him. There would be rotting coffins inside containing the dead. He didn’t want to go in there. But he knew he had no choice. This was the place where he kept them. The killing chamber.

  His hand was trembling as he turned the key, expecting his efforts to meet the resistance of years of rust and disuse. But the key turned smoothly. The mechanism had been oiled, as had the hinges of the heavy door which swung open in response to his tentative pull.

  Sunny turned to the pair of uniformed constables who were hovering just behind him. ‘OK. In you go.’ There was no way he was setting foot over that particular threshold if he could help it.

  But a few seconds later, in response to shouts of ‘In here, Sarge,’ Sunny ventured reluctantly into the darkness, trying not to look at the rows of stacked coffins containing long-dead Gossons, intent only on the focus of attention. The long, roughly hewn oak box with the chains wrapped around it.

  ‘Don’t just stand there. Get it open,’ he barked at the constables, who forced the padlock with sheer brute strength and let the chains slide noisily on to the flagstoned floor before lifting the lid.

  ‘Get the paramedics … quick,’ someone said to Sunny, who was standing there frozen, staring in disbelief. He rushed outside and from that moment things seemed to happen at double speed. Before Sunny knew it, the girl’s nakedness was covered deftly with a blanket and she was bundled on to a trolley and into the ambulance, which sped off, all sirens blazing.

  The silence that followed seemed almost unreal as the Forensic team moved in to seal off the crime scene.

  Carmel opened her eyes and saw only white light. Her first thought was that perhaps she was dead. Perhaps this was it. The end. But then, as her eyes adjusted, she could make out a bright rectangle, possibly a window, and a fair-haired woman in pale blue with a stethoscope slung around her neck bending over her. An angel, perhaps.

  ‘Hello, Carmel,’ said the angel. ‘My name’s Dr Hughes. You’re in Eborby General. You’re quite safe now.’

  Carmel tried to smile but wasn’t quite sure whether she’d managed it. She moved her legs. Soft sheets. That was good. Somehow she’d always imagined that heaven would have soft sheets.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ the angel asked.

  ‘OK.’ Her own voice sounded faint and distant, as if somebody else had spoken and she had mouthed the word like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  The angel leaned over her, her pretty face full of concern. ‘The police would like to talk to you but if you’re not feeling up to it …’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll talk to them,’ she heard herself saying.

  ‘And there’s someone else who wants to see you. Are you up to receiving visitors?’

  Carmel mouthed the word yes. She wanted someone to tell her what had happened, to return her to the land of the living.

  ‘OK. I’ll tell Sister.’ The angel smiled. ‘You’re doing well. You’ll be out of here in no time but in the meantime, take it easy, eh.’

  Ten minutes later Tavy McNair rushed into the room and took Carmel in his arms, his eyes full of tears.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dr Keith Webster sat alone in his office, thinking of Janna Pyke. She had been trouble, he had known that instinctively from the moment he first met her. But something about her had entranced, almost hypnotised him. He had engineered meetings, extra sessions to go over her work. And then the final triumph of getting her into the flat, a favour that had left her in his debt. But now, when he thought about it, he felt such a fool.

  He began to read the first page of her diary again, trying to make sense of it. ‘She has a little, thin face,’ Janna wrote. ‘Very pale. The eyes are sunken and dark like the coal eyes of a melting snowman and she has long hair, unbrushed and so matted with dirt that it looks almost grey. Her lips are as white as the rest of her flesh. There’s no blood in them. In fact she looks dead. But then that’s probably because she is.’ He’d read through the diary several times and the references to this ghostly girl puzzled him.

  Then there were the entries about the Black Hen. And her flight from the Vicars Green flat and her fear that a woman called Elizabeth who’d seen her in Boargate would tell her ex-landlady, Mrs Thewlis, where she was. But that was Janna. Running, afraid. Always trying to escape from something or other – usually a disaster of her own making.

  Then there were the bits about Tavy McNair, but Keith had known all about him. And she wrote about a man called Jeff Timmons. She’d followed him home one day and had rung directory enquiries to get his number – Keith wondered what their exact relationship was but he supposed he’d never get to find out.

  There were times when he’d contemplated giving the diary to the police. But someone had already been arrested for Janna’s murder – a psychiatric patient and an unidentified woman, the papers said. And besides, there were the sections about himself. About his lacklustre performance in bed and Janna’s threats to tell his wife what a dirty old man he was. She had written some humiliating things. Hurtful. And the prospect of his personal embarrassment being pawed over in a police station – maybe even used in evidence in some court – was more than Keith could cope with.

  After discarding Janna’s diary in the bin, covering it with waste paper so that he wouldn’t have to look at it and be reminded, he turned his attention to the file containing her work … her research. As her supervisor, he had been aware of the subject matter – the Seekers of the Dead. But he knew now that she had kept things from him.

  He re-read her work avidly, with an interest that was both professional and personal. This research had been important to Janna. It had almost been part of her.

  Her notes were written in a conversational tone – almost like a second diary – but she wrote as though the subject matter was real to her, almost as though she knew the protagonist personally.

  The truth came as a complete surprise, she began. I presume the Seekers of the Dead were accustomed to death in all its forms but what they found in the house on Vicars Green must have shocked them. You can tell that by the language used in their report. They were women, ordinary women of the time doing an extraordinary job.

  The account of one Eleanor Buckby, who was the first to enter the house doesn’t make for easy reading. She describes the bodies, their position and their state of decomposition. The father and mother were found in the downstairs room, their faces hideously contorted but their bodies bearing no sign of the buboes that were the normal symptoms of the bubonic plague. A twelve-year-old boy, in a similar state to his parents, was also found downstairs and two servants in the attic room. When Eleanor Buckby ventured upstairs she found the girl who had raised the alarm that her family had succumbed to the plague. The authorities had decided not to allow her out of the house and her pleas to be released were in vain as she was considered a risk to others. It seemed that for weeks she would call from the window, saying that as she had no symptoms she should be freed, her cries becoming more and more desperate as the bodies of her family rotted around her. But still they would not let her out and when she was found by Eleanor, it seemed that she had starved to death as nobody would venture close enough to that house of pestilence to provide her with food.

  It seemed that the girl could write and s
he recorded her thoughts and her suffering. It was this brief account that I discovered in the archives with Eleanor Buckby’s report … and it altered everything, all my assumptions. How wrong I was. If I had known the truth, I would never have contemplated setting foot in that flat.

  Keith sighed and put the papers to one side carefully, fighting a strong temptation to take her research and claim it for his own. After all, nobody else was aware of her findings and if he put the material together in a coherent form, it would do his academic reputation no harm whatsoever. Perhaps when a decent amount of time had passed and he had added some original research of his own to Janna’s … She was dead so she could hardly accuse him of plagiarism.

  Keith’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on his office door. He called out a curt ‘Come in’, shoving Janna’s notes to one side. Somehow he hadn’t expected a visit from the police. With Janna’s murderers arrested, he’d thought that his tentative involvement was over. So when the door opened to reveal Joe Plantagenet standing on the threshold, he was surprised … and a little alarmed. He found himself instinctively covering up Janna’s notes with a file – hiding his guilty secret – as the detective sat down and made himself comfortable.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard that we’ve arrested Janna’s killer,’ Joe said. ‘I thought that as you were close to her …’

  Keith felt himself blush at the implications of the words. Had he been close to Janna? Had anybody ever been close to Janna, who lived on that edge between darkness and light?

  ‘I read about the arrests in the paper,’ Keith said. ‘So what was the motive, do you know?’

  Joe hesitated. What he was about to tell Keith Webster wasn’t pleasant and it would probably shatter any illusions he still harboured about his former lover. He took a deep breath and recited the bare facts.

  Keith already knew most of it from Janna’s diary, which now lay beneath a screwed-up draft report at the bottom of the waste bin. But he wasn’t going to let Joe know this so he feigned surprise. ‘I’d no idea she was mixed up in anything like that,’ he said, trying to sound convincing. But he wasn’t sure he’d fooled Joe Plantagenet.

  The two men sat quite still for a few moments before Keith broke the awkward silence. ‘Janna was a bright girl, you know. Her thesis was very promising. She was researching the history of her old flat in Vicars Green – a girl who supposedly starved to death there after her family died of the plague.’ He looked up at Joe and saw that he was listening intently. ‘Only they hadn’t died of the plague. They were murdered.’

  Joe leaned forward. ‘That’s interesting.’

  Keith hesitated. This policeman wasn’t involved in the world of academic research and learned papers so it would do no harm to share the story Janna had uncovered. Besides, he was so excited about the discovery that he longed to tell someone.

  ‘A woman called Eleanor Buckby – one of the so called Seekers of the Dead – reported on the deaths to the authorities. She concluded that the victims had all been poisoned, apart from the girl who had starved to death, and she found poison underneath the girl’s bed. The girl had reported that her family had died of the plague – not that they were ill, but that they were already dead. What she can’t have known about was the practice of locking any family members who hadn’t succumbed to the plague in with the dead to prevent infection spreading. By lying she had signed her own death warrant.’

  ‘But why would she kill her family?’

  ‘Her father was a wealthy merchant and, with her parents and brother dead, she should have inherited the lot. And according to neighbours there had been family conflict about an unsuitable boy – one of her father’s apprentices. Janna was working on the theory that he put her up to it.’

  ‘Looking at it from a policeman’s point of view, that sounds likely,’ said Joe. ‘Did Janna discover the girl’s name?’

  Webster nodded. ‘Elizabeth. Elizabeth Melchet.’ He hesitated. ‘Plantagenet. Any relation to …?’

  Joe shrugged his shoulders before standing up to leave.

  On the day Carmel Hennessy returned to her flat it rained. Number five Vicars Green looked innocent enough as she stood at the front door with Tavy McNair by her side, his hand hovering by her elbow as if he was afraid she would collapse.

  Carmel’s mother, Sandra, and her stepfather, Steve, had rushed up to Eborby from Milton Keynes as soon as Joe told them what had happened and they’d stayed in Joe’s flat until they were sure she’d made a full recovery. But Carmel was relieved when they returned home. She couldn’t stand people fussing over her: it made her feel like breaking down in tears.

  When Joe met Sandra he embraced her, saying over and over again how sorry he was that he hadn’t kept Carmel safe from danger. But that, thought Carmel, was Joe all over – all that guilt. Perhaps Maddy Owen would be good for him … if she could ever get them together properly. The relationship was still tentative – like the start of some elaborate courtship ritual on a wildlife programme – and Carmel wished they’d just get on with it.

  Tavy interrupted her thoughts. ‘You ready?’ he whispered in her ear.

  She tried her best to give him a brave smile. ‘As I’ll ever be,’ she said, her voice emerging stronger than she’d expected.

  As she put the key in the lock the cathedral clock began to chime the hour, the sound distracting her for a moment, giving her courage. It was twelve o’clock, midday, and by the tenth chime Carmel was at the top of the stairs, staring at the door to her flat.

  When Tavy took the key off her and opened the door she gave him a shy smile. Since he’d started rehearsals for the new play, he’d seemed more confident, more positive. He’d told her that he’d never really enjoyed the ghost tours. And Oscar Wilde was a useful antidote to death.

  Maddy Owen had been in to tidy up and she’d made a good job of it. The flat was neat and clean and there were fresh flowers on the coffee table. But Carmel still couldn’t help shuddering when she looked at the bedroom door.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Tavy as though he’d read her thoughts. ‘Maddy’s cleared up in there. Changed the bed … everything.’

  Carmel managed a weak smile. ‘You will stay tonight, won’t you?’

  Tavy put his arms around her and held her close. ‘If you want. But I’ll have to let mum know that I won’t be home. She worries.’

  Carmel gave him a swift kiss on the nose and began to wander around the flat, looking in cupboards, examining the bathroom, trying to come to terms with the fact that it all seemed so very normal. She could hear the sound of voices drifting in through the open window from the pavement below. Another guided tour of the city was passing by, taking in the notable sights. Carmel wondered whether they would mention the Resurrection Man killings and point out number five as the place where the only victim to survive was attacked. But she doubted it. Such things would hardly be good for Eborby’s tourist image.

  When the doorbell rang Carmel jumped. Her nerves were still bad. Her heart still raced at the sight of a white van or the thought of confined spaces. She could no longer travel in a lift and she hated the very thought of an aeroplane. Life would never be quite the same again. Some scars never quite heal.

  Tavy left her alone to answer the door and she wandered into the bedroom, testing her courage. She’d always sensed the girl in there, even in the middle of the day. There had always been a feeling of not being alone, of having an unseen companion. And somehow she needed one now.

  But standing in the middle of the room, she felt nothing. There was nobody there, nobody watching her, half seen in the darkest corner. All she was aware of was sunlight streaming in through the small window and the sound of bustling, living humanity below on the green. The girl had gone.

  When she heard voices she returned to the living room. Maddy Owen was standing there with Joe Plantagenet, holding out her arms, and Carmel hurried over to her to submit to her comforting hug.

  Joe leaned towards Maddy and whispered in her ear.
‘Shall we tell her?’

  Maddy nodded and Carmel sensed a rapport between them that hadn’t existed before her attack.

  ‘I’ve found out who your ghost girl is,’ Joe began. ‘I know the whole story.’

  Carmel turned and saw that Tavy was watching her anxiously. ‘Well?’ she said. She could feel her hands shaking and at that moment she wondered if she really wanted to know the truth. Sometimes it’s better to remain in ignorance.

  Joe told her to sit down and Maddy rushed to put the kettle on. Whatever it was, this was serious.

  She listened as Joe recounted the story of the girl, of her terrible secret and her horrible death. No wonder, Carmel thought, her spirit couldn’t rest. It explained everything.

  Carmel looked Joe in the eye. ‘When I went into the bedroom before, I sensed she wasn’t there any more. Maybe I’m wrong but …’

  ‘While you were in hospital I asked someone to come over – someone who knows about supernatural phenomena. He …’ Joe didn’t know quite how to say that Canon George Merryweather had prayed in the flat and ordered the girl to leave, to be at peace. In the everyday atmosphere of modern Eborby it seemed a little strange. But it had happened. Joe had seen it with his own eyes. He’d felt the oppressive presence vanish.

  ‘He exorcised the place?’

  ‘She’s gone now. She won’t bother you again.’

  Carmel said nothing. She wasn’t sure how she felt. After all, the girl had tried to warn her of the danger she was in. Maybe she had been trying to do a good deed to make up in some way for the sins she had committed in life. Who knows? Carmel certainly didn’t and she felt a small twinge of resentment that Joe had interfered.

  ‘Will you be OK staying here?’ Maddy asked anxiously. ‘You don’t think you’d be better moving or …’

  Carmel shook her head. ‘Someone should keep an eye on Conrad downstairs. After all, he won’t have Elizabeth now, will he?’