Birthday Cake and Bodies

by Agatha Frost

  “Come on!” Nancy cried over her shoulder, grinning from ear to ear. “We don’t want to be the last there.”

  Liz nodded, the icy breeze licking at her face. She glanced back at the coastal town of Scarlet Cove, which was nothing more than a mass of twinkling lights in the distance. Turning back to the looming castle on the hill, she marched forward with renewed energy, partly spurred on by her curiosity of the night ahead, and partly because her Beagle, Paddy, was yanking on her arm.

  “You do this every year on the night before Halloween?” Liz called into the wind as she caught up to Nancy. “The whole town?”

  “The whole town,” Nancy affirmed, her short, quirky fringe bouncing against her forehead right above the thick-rimmed glasses, which framed her round face. “For as long as anyone can remember.”

  Liz had only been living in Scarlet Cove for a little over two months since retiring from her city detective job, but she had come to accept that ‘for as long as anyone can remember’ was as good an explanation as any. In those two months, she had grown fond of Nancy, who despite only being thirty-four to Liz’s forty-two, had a childlike quality that she had always found grating in other people, but found endearing in Nancy.

  “And you all believe you’re going to see ghosts?” Liz asked sceptically, scratching at her bushy red hair, which was tied lazily in a messy bun. “Right here, in Scarlet Cove? Real ghosts?”

  “Of course!” Nancy exclaimed, slapping Liz on the shoulder in the way Liz had grown accustomed to. “Because of the legend.”

  “The legend,” Liz echoed with a knowing nod. “It’s all I’ve been hearing about in my shop all week.”

  Liz had moved to Scarlet Cove in the height of summer when the skies had been cloudless and blue long into the evening; it was what had attracted her to the tiny fishing town in the first place. Now that summer had passed and autumn had taken hold, she had fallen in love with the early evening sunsets and the orangey red leaves on the trees. Being a painter who ran her own arts and crafts shop in the heart of the town, she loved being able to dip into the warmer toned paints when she took her easel out on lazy Sunday afternoons. Over the past week, however, the chatter in her shop had not revolved around art, but the legend of Scarlet Cove Castle. She had heard the tale so many times she could now recite it by heart, not that she believed it much.

  “A wealthy nobleman bought the castle hundreds of years ago,” Nancy started, casting her hand to the giant stone structure as they got ever closer. “He lived there with his wife, and they were as happy as a couple could be. Like me and Jack, although I hope we don’t end up like those two did. According to the legend, they were trying to start a family, but the wife was struggling to conceive. She was convinced it was her husband’s fault, and she grew to resent him for it, so she started having it off with one of the cooks, hoping she would fall pregnant. The nobleman’s only love was his wife, but the wife’s only love was for the baby she couldn’t have, and yet longed for.”

  “And then the nobleman found out his wife was messing around with the cook and he chopped her head off, the cook’s head off, and everyone in the castle’s heads until the walls and hill were soaked in blood,” Liz said quickly, waving her free hand dismissively. “I know the rest. It’s a good story, I’ll give you that.”

  “It’s true!” Nancy cried, a little giggle behind her defiance. “It’s where the name Scarlet Cove comes from, and it’s been called that for as long as anyone can remember. It had a different name before that day, apparently. There was so much blood from all of the beheadings, the water in the cove was stained scarlet for weeks.”

  Liz pursed her lips, not wanting to burst her friend’s bubble. She did not want to inform her that it would probably take the blood of tens of thousands to run down the hill, not soak into the soil, cross the rocks and sand, and then stain the water.

  “It’s a good story,” Liz repeated. “Very imaginative.”

  The steep slope levelled out, allowing Liz to catch her breath. She had passed the castle many times on her evening walks with Paddy, but she had never seen it like this before. Someone had gone to the trouble of up-lighting the entire decaying medieval structure with blood-red floodlights. After fifteen years in the Greater Manchester Police, little scared Liz, but just looking up at the castle on the night before Halloween made her gulp a little.

  She paused to scratch behind Paddy’s ears as Nancy ran towards her boyfriend, Jack, who was on the edge of a group of what Liz could only guess was two hundred, if not more, people. Fires burned in old barrels, vendors sold food from trucks, men handed cartoonish severed head balloons to children. A small part of Liz was surprised at the effort the town had put into celebrating an ancient tale, but a big part of her had come to expect nothing less from Scarlet Cove.

  “What do you think, boy?” Liz muttered to Paddy. “Do you believe the legend?”

  “Of course he does, babe!” a familiar squeaky Essex accent announced from behind her. “You need to book yourself in for another trim. It’s split end city up in that ginger nest of yours.”

  Liz turned to Polly Spragg, who was bundled up in a bright pink overcoat, her peroxide blonde beehive jutting out from her make-up heavy face and unnatural orange tan. She was the owner of the Crazy Waves hair salon, and had been cutting Liz’s hair since her arrival in town.

  “I think you might be right, Polly,” Liz said with a small chuckle as she stood up fully, her eyes drifting to the man on Polly’s arm. “You must be Polly’s boyfriend. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “You have?” the man asked with an air of disinterest, one eye on Liz and one eye on the castle. “Dare I ask?”

  “I talk about you all the time at the salon, babe!” Polly giggled, slapping the man playfully on the chest, barely able to raise a smile from his stiff and sour expression. “Nathan, this is Liz. She’s the one who owns the new arts and crafts shop, remember? Well, it’s not so new anymore, but you must have heard of her.”

  Nathan forced a half-smile and jerked his head into what might have been a nod, not fully giving away if he had heard of Liz or not. She narrowed her eyes on the disinterested man, sure she had seen him somewhere in the town, but unable to place her finger on where exactly.

  After promising to book an appointment some time in the coming week, Liz let the couple overtake so she could watch them walk towards the ritual. Her mental image of Nathan had been completely shattered from the one in Polly’s stories. The hair stylist was such a fun and upbeat girl, Liz had expected her boyfriend to be cut from the same cloth, but he looked like he could have sucked the fun out of his own birthday party. She could not remember the last time she had seen two people more unsuited to each other. Wondering if she had caught him on a bad day, she tightened her hand around the lead and tagged along behind.

  Chatter and laughter swallowed her up as she walked into the vast stone courtyard, the red walls of the castle looming around the townsfolk. Distant music drifted in from concealed crackly speakers, and the scent of barbecued sausages and burgers pricked hers and Paddy’s noses.

  She pushed through the well wrapped up crowd until she found Nancy, who was draped across her handsome boyfriend, Jack. They were sitting on what appeared to be a fallen stone column, with Jack’s best friend and local farmer, Simon, on his other side. Simon smiled meekly at Liz, and she smiled back, her stomach performing a somersault, making her wonder if she was really forty-two and not fourteen.

  “Get a grip of yourself, woman,” she whispered under her hot breath, pushing forward a wider smile. “Good to see you both.”

  “You too,” Jack said, slurping from the mouth of a beer can as he reached out to scratch Paddy’s head. “Didn’t think you’d be the ghost hunting type, Liz.”

  “Oh, you know me,” Liz said with a shrug as she looked around the crowd, sure the gathering was more an excuse to eat and be merry than actual ghost hunting. “I’ll try anything once.”

  Liz perched on the cold stone
next to Simon. They smiled clumsily at each other, like teenagers would in the school corridors. She cleared her throat and looked out at the crowd, focussing her attention on a group of young children who appeared to be re-enacting the night of the beheadings with a large stick and tomato ketchup stolen from one of the food trucks.

  “I’m glad the weather has held up,” Simon said, his cheeks blushing as he glanced up at the clear inky sky. “Rained non-stop last year.”

  Liz parted her lips, unsure of how to respond. It had been two months since her shop’s grand opening, and two months since her almost-kiss with Simon. In that moment behind her shop, after sampling one of Simon’s delicious cheese nibbles created in her honour, she had wanted nothing more than for him to kiss her. Nancy had interrupted them before their lips had a chance to meet. They had not spoken about it since, even if it was written across their faces every time they were brought together.

  “Beer?” Jack asked, reaching across to offer Liz one of an ice-cold dripping four-pack. “It’s Scarlet Cove Brew.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Liz doesn’t like beer all that much,” Simon said, reaching behind him into a zip-up cooler filled with ice. “Which is why I brought this.”

  He handed her a soggy box of wine, the melting ice having dampened the cardboard.

  “Wine,” she noted unsurely. “In a box. I can’t remember the last time I drank boxed wine.”

  Simon blushed and glanced down at his feet, looking like a scorned child. Liz sighed, rolling her eyes at her own stiffness. She was not a snob when it came to wine; she usually bought whatever was cheapest with the strongest alcohol content. They were both adults, but neither of them seemed to know how to act like it.

  “Here.” Jack reached out and grabbed the box from Liz. “It’s really just a bag in a box.”

  He tore off the soggy cardboard with ease before passing it back to her. She looked down at the chilled bag of white wine, feeling like a drink was just what she needed.

  “In for a penny,” she said, passing Paddy’s lead to Simon so she could tease the valve over her mouth. Cool white wine dribbled against her tongue, some spilling over the edge and running down her chin into her scratchy scarf. “It’s not half bad, actually.”

  She winked at Simon, prompting him to grin, which flashed his trademark dimples. Seeing those soft dips in his flushed cheeks had an effect on her she had spent the best part of the last two months trying to explain to herself. Despite years of police work under her belt, it was a case too complex even for her to solve.

  Without noticing that they had vanished, Liz looked across to see that Nancy and Jack were no longer there, something that happened almost every time the four of them got together. Whether they were having lunch in the Fish and Anchor, or walking along the seafront, Nancy and Jack had a habit of disappearing in the blink of an eye, leaving Simon and Liz completely alone to face each other.

  “So,” Simon said, drumming his fingers on his knees. “How’s the shop?”

  “It’s good,” she said with a nod. “Business is slow, but it’s getting there. I’m having some supplier trouble at the moment. They’re trying to squeeze my profit margins, but I’m standing my ground. How’s the cheese?”

  “Good,” he replied. “Mum and Dad think they’ve found a shop down the coast who want to stock it, which would be great. More work, but it’d be worth it.”

  Liz looped Paddy’s lead around her foot so she could drink more of the wine. When she had left Manchester in search of her new life on the South Coast, she had not expected to fall for a blond farmer with dimples who had a passion for making homemade cheese and ice cream, but that was exactly what had happened. And yet, she could not bring herself to talk to him in anything other than stilted, fragmented sentences.

  A drunken man staggered towards them, sloshing his beer can over his shoulder, narrowly missing Paddy. Liz watched as the man swayed on the spot before clinging onto another man by his side, who looked less than happy about the situation. Liz was about to jump in to defuse things before anything serious happened, but she stopped herself when she recognised the drunken man as Daniel Bishop, the owner of The Sea Platter, Scarlet Cove’s seafood restaurant. Since moving to town, it had become a regular spot for her and Nancy to have dinner and catch-up on the local gossip, and while there, Daniel had been nothing but polite and professional. She could barely bring herself to look into his eyes, not wanting him to know that she had seen him like this.

  To her relief, Daniel apologised to the man, who begrudgingly accepted, perhaps because he also recognised Daniel from the popular restaurant. Liz was glad when he staggered away and out of sight.

  “I’ve always thought people used this night as an excuse for getting drunk,” Simon whispered, his shoulder leaning against Liz’s, sending a hot spark through her cold arm. “You might want to make sure you’re back home before midnight. That’s when it starts to get rowdy.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Liz whispered back, her lips twisting into a smile. “So, when does the ghost hunting start?”

  “You actually believe the legend?”

  “Not in the slightest. Do you?”

  Simon considered his answer for a moment as he slurped his beer, the amber liquid wetting his pink lips in a way that made Liz instinctively lick her own.

  “I’m not sure,” Simon said, cocking his head to her, his rugged good looks softened in the crackling glow of one of the distant barrel fires. “Mum is convinced that it’s true, but Dad isn’t so sure. There are records that a man lived here with his wife, but their deaths aren’t accounted for.”

  “There’s nothing like an unexplained ending to get people’s tongues wagging.”

  Simon chuckled as he drank his beer. Liz cast her eye over to the barbecue line. Nancy and Jack were queuing with empty hotdog buns in their hands. Nancy shot up two jolly thumbs over her bun; Liz pretended not to have seen.

  “I think you’re the first person I’ve spoken to all week who isn’t definite that the legend is true,” Liz said after another glug from her bag of wine. “I was starting to wonder if I was being too cynical.”

  “You must have seen a lot of nasty stuff in the police.”

  Liz did not know why, but her mind instantly transported back to the night her late-husband, Lewis, had been shot. She felt the rain on her skin, as though she was back there, and not two years in the future. The blood leaked from the gunshot wound and into the water, her hoarse cries drowned out by the pounding raindrops on the road around them.

  She blinked hard. It had only been two years, but it felt like it had happened to another woman in another lifetime. His dying words had been ‘be happy, Lizzy, please’, just as the ambulance had screeched to a halt next to them. Scarlet Cove was her life now, and she knew Lewis would have loved it here.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Liz said, suddenly jumping up as her mind snapped back to the present. “Paddy is getting restless.”

  “Sure,” Simon said, finishing the last of his beer without questioning her. “Maybe we’ll see some ghosts.”

  Liz laughed awkwardly, not wanting to admit that she had just seen a ghost from her own, not too distant, past.

  With Paddy separating them, they broke away from the crowd and headed down one of the old stone corridors lining the courtyard. She looked into the crowd as the people of Scarlet Cove ate and drank, no doubt sharing their theories on what really happened here on that night hundreds of years ago.

  They turned left, walls appearing on both sides of them. The inside of the castle had also been swathed in red light, unsettling her in a way she did not expect. She put it down to her flashback and not the ghost stories. Even still, she ran her fingers along the rough cold stone of the crumbling castle, sure she could hear the screams of the nobleman’s wife as he brought the axe down on her neck.

  “People say they’ve seen the wife up here,” Simon said, a glimmer in his eyes. “Headless and all.”

  “
How indecent of her.”

  “Nancy swears she saw her.”

  “I’ve heard that story too. I think Nancy might have had one too many glasses of wine that night.”

  “Probably.” Simon laughed deeply, his gruff voice echoing off the walls, which seemed to be narrowing the deeper into the castle they walked.

  A patch of the old ceiling vanished above them, forcing Liz to glance up. Milky clouds drifted lazily in front of the bright moon, her icy breath drifting up to join them. A shiver ran down her spine, prompting her to tuck her chin deeper into her tatty old scarf.

  “I couldn’t imagine living somewhere this big,” Liz said, casting an eye back at the corridor as the darkness swallowed them up. “I’m more suited to my flat.”

  “Where did you live before?” Simon asked, the question rolling off his tongue so quickly that Liz was sure he had been waiting to ask it for weeks. “Before you came to Scarlet Cove?”

  “Manchester.”

  “I know that much, but where? Did you have a flat up there?”

  “Oh,” Liz said, her old glossy apartment nothing more than a foggy memory. “I had an apartment in one of those city blocks. All stainless steel and glass. No character. You know what it’s like.”

  “I don’t, actually,” Simon said with an apologetic shrug. “I’ve lived -”

  “In Scarlet Cove your whole life,” Liz finished. “Didn’t you leave to go to university? See some of the country before you settled here?”

  “You don’t need a degree to be a farmer.”

  “That’s very true,” she agreed. “Nor do you need to leave to know you’ve got a good home here.”

  “I have passion,” he said with a soft smile. “That kept me here when everyone else ran off to explore.”

  Liz was sure she sensed a shred of resentment in his voice, long since supressed and buried. She thought about her own time at university in Manchester when she had been a girl studying for her art degree. Those years had shaped her into the woman she was now, even if she had spent fifteen years being someone else entirely in the intermission.