Will laughed quietly.
“Our subsequent communication was through our lawyers,” said Martha. “And Ruby’s name is Armstrong – not Smith – isn’t that right, petal?” She leaned across the table to stroke Ruby’s chubby cheek and Ruby jiggled in Will’s arms, contentedly playing with the wooden beads around his wrist.
“He was a very stupid man to let you go,” said Will. “I wouldn’t.”
There was silence. Martha looked at Will, expecting him to explain the remark, to observe that it hadn’t come out right. He didn’t.
Martha blushed. “We just wanted different things, I suppose. When I was ‘The Bird Behind Hitchcock’ he thought I was great – ambitious, all fired up by work like he was, but he had me all wrong. We had loads of money and a lovely house but I just wanted to fill it with more babies and write my books. I lost the fire for the sort of work he wanted me to do. We were going in completely different directions – the whole thing should have ended years ago. I was too young and probably too needy to spot that.”
“Should have stuck with your Goths,” offered Will.
Martha laughed. “Anyway – he’s with Paula now – Queen Bitch as they call her in the agency. She’s his chief rival on the sales team and has all the drive and career ambition and ruthlessness that he could ever want, so he’s happy. And do you know what? Good luck to him. I’ve got Ruby and because of her I wouldn’t change a thing. Onwards and upwards, eh, Rubes?”
They fell silent for a while, Martha sipping her wine, Will rubbing Ruby’s hand. Ruby gave a long yawn and Will laughed at the effort that she put into it.
There was a sudden bang from upstairs as Martha’s bedroom door slammed shut in a gust of wind. She knew what the sound was, knew why it had happened – because of the open windows upstairs. They both jumped nevertheless.
Don’t get sleepy, Ruby, thought Martha, knowing that her bedtime was coming very soon and with that, darkness. “What about Will Peterson in a nutshell?” she asked. She was genuinely interested to know more about this relative stranger. She also wanted to keep the conversation going, to stave off bedtime, to avoid ever having to stand up from the table and face what was next.
“Oh blimey,” said Will. “Let’s see. Dad was in the army so we moved house a lot when I was small – just me and my twin sister Lucy. Have you any siblings by the way?”
Martha shook her head.
“So, yeah, me and Lucy and my mum who is a lovely little housewife. She and my dad have settled in the countryside, in Cornwall. She’s in the WI – all flower-arranging and baking considerably bigger buns and all that. Lucy’s still at university – we’re not big on proper jobs in our family! She’s studying archaeology so she’s been at it for years, more power to her. Goes off on digs all over the place . . .”
Martha coughed. “Will Peterson in a nutshell, please!”
He grinned and nodded apologetically. “Played rugby in school, never a Goth, liked 80’s electro pop – Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan . . .”
Martha looked at him in shock. “You are kidding!”
Will looked indignant. “I’ll have you know that OMD, for example, have provided us with some of the most symphonic pop music this side of Bach and Abba!”
Martha threw her head back and laughed.
Will carried on, looking at her in mock disdain. “I won’t apologise for it either! My taste as a twelve-year-old was impeccable. Anyway, it developed into a love of dance music – trance, house, all that kind of thing. I lived on Ibiza for a year which was fairly nuts. Came home via Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dublin – just dossed round for a while, I guess.”
“Quite the traveller,” said Martha.
“Well, sort of. Dublin’s great but it’s hardly a kibbutz in Israel, is it? Actually, I’ve been to China – that was pretty adventurous. I didn’t like it though. There’s a lot of spitting.” He shuddered at the thought.
“What were you working at that you could travel so much?”
Will looked almost embarrassed. “I, eh, dabbled in property in the late 90’s.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Will shrugged. “I dunno. With the economy the way it is I just don’t go on about it much.”
“Everyone who could, did it. There’s nothing to feel sleazy about unless you screwed people over, I guess.”
“No, nothing like that.” Will shook his head. “My gran left me a house – that was when I was travelling first, doing bar work and stuff, so I went home with the intention of living in it. It was in London, actually. Islington. I stayed there for a while but I hated the city so I gave the house a lick of paint and stuck some clean carpet in it and dammit if it didn’t sell for a small fortune. It hadn’t really occurred to me to make a living out of it but Lucy’s got this mad business head for a bone-digger and she gave me a talking to and I tried it. Bought two houses in the same area for what I’d made on Gran’s and it just grew from there.”
“So how on earth did you end up doing what you’re doing?” asked a baffled Martha, draining her wineglass.
“Well, I was studying psychology at night-time – at this stage I’d moved to Edinburgh and I was living in this old flat near the Royal Mile. It was a spooky old place and I kept seeing this old man on the stairs.”
A chill ran down Martha’s spine.
“I got chatting to him one day.”
“So he was alive?” said Martha in amazement.
Will spluttered with laughter. “Oh lord, yes! But he used to tell me all these things his wife used to tell him. I never saw her, assumed she was an invalid maybe. Turns out she’d been dead for a couple of years! He got me interested in the psychology of his situation – why couldn’t he let her go, what comfort did he get from thinking she spoke to him and so on. So I used to visit him – bring him cakes and stuff. He was a dear old thing. Used to chat to her while I was there so it was like there were three of us.”
Martha’s eyes grew wide. “Like how exactly?”
“Oh, just small stuff. I’d be doing the whole ‘bit nippy today, Bernard, shouldn’t you have a warmer jumper on?’ sort of stuff and he’d laugh and say ‘Norah asked the very same thing earlier! What’s that, darling? Forecast’s for rain? Oh dear, better get to the shops early’ and so on. I thought it was just his way of communicating with me, some little habit he’d retreated into after she’d gone, but one day he said the oddest thing to me. ‘Will’, he said, ‘Norah tells me you’ve got a lot of property round the city.’”
“What was odd about that? You did, didn’t you?”
“I did. But I’d never told Bernard. I didn’t want him to think that I was some sort of sleazy shark, making friends with him because I wanted to buy him out or anything. I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with how I made my money so I’d told him I was a student.”
“Surely someone you knew in common could have told him?”
Will shook his head again. “Genuinely, we didn’t know a single person in common. The only person he communicated with was his dead wife and I’d only lived there a month or so and knew two people – one was Canadian and one was Chinese and neither knew him.”
“Could he have been in your flat maybe, had a look around?”
“Not to my knowledge. And not likely. He was crippled with arthritis in his legs and hands. He only used to come out as far as the landing for a cigarette because Norah hated him smoking in their flat. I lived three flights up from him and there was no lift.”
“Maybe you let it slip to him some day and then forgot you had?”
“Possibly. Well, it was just a little thing, really, but I couldn’t figure out how on earth he knew. It turns out he wanted to – sorry, Norah wanted him to sell his flat and go into a retirement home where he could be properly looked after, but the poor old thing didn’t have a clue how to go about it. They’d lived there for sixty years, can you believe? Apparently Norah thought I was a lovely young man and just the
sort of person who’d give Bernard good advice.”
“And did you?”
Will nodded. “I got him a great price and sold the one I was in as well. Bernard was thrilled – he moved into a lovely place near their daughter and grandchildren. I went to China then and when I got back I heard he’d passed on. He went and left me money as well, the silly old thing.”
“Aw bless,” said Martha.
“They wouldn’t give me his daughter’s details to give it back so I donated it to cancer research in the long run. That’s how he lost Norah.”
“Oh, Will, that was a lovely thing to do,” said Martha, impressed.
Ruby was beginning to grizzle in Will’s arms. Martha glanced at her watch. Seven thirty already; bedtime. She felt panicky at the thought of having to go upstairs to change her. Ruby threw her head back and squirmed. Suddenly, Martha spotted her changing bag. Clean nappies, she thought, and her babygro from the previous night were in there as well. Reprieve. She wouldn’t have to go upstairs just yet after all.
“Bottle time for someone, I think,” she said, standing and taking Ruby from Will.
“Let me,” he said and busied himself heating up the bedtime bottle while Martha set about changing Ruby for bed on the playmat, kicking the kitchen door shut behind her before she knelt down.
“What happened then?” she asked, eager to hear the rest of his story.
“I just couldn’t get the thought of this man out of my head,” he continued. “Norah’s presence had begun to seem natural and convincing to me.” He crossed back from the worktop to the table and poured Martha a second glass of wine.
She didn’t really want it, but if it meant putting off whatever they were going to have to do later then she’d take it.
“I went to China with Bai, my girlfriend at the time, and while I was there she was chatting in Chinese with her family a lot so I had plenty of time to think about Bernard and Norah. Being with a Chinese person also meant that I saw a lot of local culture and customs. Honouring the dead was a huge thing for Bai’s family, and ghosts and spirits are really important to the Chinese. You just don’t make light of what we call the paranormal over there. It just dawned on me one day – what if Norah really was talking to Bernard? If she could see stuff and know stuff that he couldn’t and she was busy filling him in about it? It was like a light bulb going off in my brain – the simplest solution. Cancer had taken her before she was ready to go but her passing was merely an end to her physical body. We’re not just made up of our bodies – what if her consciousness, free now from all the drugs and the pain and the disease, was able to rise up and just carry on living with the man she loved?”
“You old romantic!” said Martha, fastening Ruby’s bib around her neck. She rose and sat back down at the table. Taking the bottle Will handed to her, she popped it in Ruby’s mouth.
“I just stopped thinking ‘Why?’,” said Will, “and opened myself up to ‘Why not?’ Then I met Gabriel at my dad’s retirement party of all places. He was on a date with one of his old army buddies – well, it was complicated – but he spent the whole evening talking to me which was the end of his date and the start of a few worries for my mum for a while! Anyway, he intrigued me. Did he tell you about Laurence?”
Martha nodded. “How awful to lose your brother in an accident when you didn’t even know you had one.”
Will’s brow furrowed momentarily. “Laurence didn’t die by accident,” he said.
“But Gabriel told me he drowned!”
“He was drowned alright,” said Will gravely. “But by someone else. Laurence was murdered by a guy called Martin Pine who it later emerged was a known paedophile. That’s why his parents never told Gabriel he had an older brother – they just didn’t know how.”
Martha was stunned. Gabriel had shown no signs that something this horrific had happened to his brother. Her heart went out to him – he was probably so used to hiding the truth that it came like second nature to him. “So Laurence is actually the real reason he doesn’t do ‘bairns’ then?”
“It has to be a large part of it,” agreed Will.
They fell silent for a while and watched Ruby drain her bottle, her eyes closed tight. Martha eased the empty bottle from her lips and replaced it with a soother from her pocket to allow the baby to drift off to sleep, to avoid having to take her upstairs. Martha’s earlier positivity was almost gone.
“I take it that’s why you decided to study parapsychology then?” said Martha, eager to keep the conversation going.
“Gabriel told me about it. He almost challenged me to come and do it and to get back to him when I was done – defying me not to believe – you know what he’s like!”
“Now listen here, William . . .” said Martha in a deep voice, with a bad Scottish accent.
Will guffawed at the terrible impersonation and Ruby jumped in her sleep. “Oh shit, sorry!” He chuckled again. “I only started the course last year so I’m a bit of a rank amateur really. Parallel to the course is the study I’m doing on Gabriel himself. He fascinates me. I just follow him round as he does his thing sometimes. I go to his spiritualist church occasionally as well – my fellow parapsychology students would frown on me for having a shred of belief but I think a little differently about the . . . supernatural, as it were, than them.”
“How’s that?”
Will thought carefully for a moment. “Anything supernatural or paranormal is supposed not to be scientific. But if it’s real – and I think it is – then it’s a law of science, just one we haven’t discovered or pinned down yet. If it exists, then it’s all science. The question is proving it exists and that’s where I am coming from. I don’t want to prove it doesn’t exist and deep down I think a lot of people like me want that too. To prove it exists, I try to get as much experience of so-called paranormal activity as I can, so I just hang about with Gabriel. He likes to help people – he doesn’t advertise, but word gets round. He visits people in their homes who are having problems of a paranormal nature and he tries to help. I help him out sometimes – check for things like high EMF, add a scientific perspective to things. We’re quite the team!”
“And that’s how Gabriel earns his living then?”
“Oh no,” replied Will. “He refuses to take payment for helping people out. He won’t do private readings either. He wants folk to believe his skill is real and not something he’s using to make a fast buck.”
“So how does he live?”
Will grinned. “He’ll kill you if he finds out I told you this but he’s a tour guide on the Edinburgh Bus Tours!”
Martha’s face creased and her shoulders shook with silent laughter.
Will joined in. “He’s only here with us because his bus is broken down and they don’t need him for a few days!”
That made Martha laugh harder. “I’m not laughing at what he does,” she said eventually, wiping away tears of laughter from her eyes. “It’s just that it’s Gabriel doing it! I thought he owned an art gallery, or a restaurant or something!”
“I know. He’s such a grand old dame and the tourists love him! He makes a fortune on tips! Brilliant at his job, he is!”
“He’s just one surprise after another, isn’t he?” said Martha, shaking her head.
“A gift that keeps on giving,” giggled Will.
They sat in silence again for a while.
“I think someone should go to bed,” said Will eventually, nodding at Ruby.
Martha had to agree. The baby was beginning to sweat in her mother’s arms and had an expression of discomfort on her tiny features. It was time, thought Martha, and glanced for the first time at the cameras dotted around the room, the cable taped to the floor. While they chatted she had completely forgotten that they existed. A feeling of dread filled her stomach.
“What do I have to do, Will?”
Will sat forward and placed his hands, palms down, on the table in front of her. “Nothing,” he said. �
�Just put Ruby down and then do whatever you’d have done before all of this started – watch TV, work, knit, read a book – whatever.”
Martha gave a weak smile.
“I’ll be outside keeping an eye on everything,” he assured her. “In the meantime, keep an ear and an eye out in here and tell me about anything unusual that you notice – anything that you see or hear or feel – chances are there won’t be a single thing. In the vast majority of cases that I’ve investigated, nothing physical happens.”
Martha nodded, noting carefully what he was saying.
“Just think back to whatever Gabriel said to you earlier,” continued Will. “You seemed to feel a lot better after you spoke to him.”
“I did,” said Martha, almost reassuring herself as she stood up and walked slowly toward the kitchen door.
“We’ll put Ruby down together, will we?” suggested Will quietly, as though encouraging a child.
Martha smiled, then nodded and faced down the hallway as Will held the kitchen door open for her.
The hallway felt different, cooler. Martha knew this had to be because of the open bedroom windows and the contrasting warmth of the kitchen where they had been for a long time. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched Will go ahead of her.
When they reached Ruby’s room, they set about making the room ready for her. Will closed the window and blackout blind, pulling together the cream curtains with their lemon trim. Martha carefully placed her daughter in her cot and arranged the cover over her, and Hugo alongside her head to snuggle into. She switched on the nightlight and turned to survey the room. Everything was as it should be.
The Dead Summer Page 25