The Dark Water

by Helen Moorhouse

  “Fair enough,” said Gabriel. “I was hoping you’d say that – I’m all for it. There’s also the pressing issue of Dubhglas – did Martha tell you that I’ve been summonsed back to one of my childhood haunts? Except it sounds like it’s not me who’s doing any of the haunting these days.”

  Will shook his head. “No, she didn’t . . . that is to say, I didn’t . . .” He glanced across at Martha, a sheepish expression on his face.

  She smiled and nodded her head, as much as to say all was forgiven.

  Will cleared his throat. “Tell me again,” he said to Gabriel and watched with interest as the medium slipped his hand into the top pocket of his shirt and withdrew the envelope that he had shown Martha in his apartment. He handed it to Will who unfolded it and read with interest, raising his eyebrows as he got to the end. “That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?” he said as he placed the paper flat on the table.

  Gabriel nodded. “I’ve told you about Gifford before. He’s not a man given to hysterics. I just thought that this might be of interest to you. Plus, it adds another layer to things, I think.” He took a swig from his glass. “I’m even more confused now because this might be connected with Laurence’s disappearance. You both know that Dubhglas Castle is where Laurence died.”

  Martha and Will exchanged a look. This wasn’t a subject with which Gabriel was comfortable.

  “I can’t help but wonder if whatever’s going on there – enough to get Gifford, a man stonier than something you’d find on Easter Island, to write to me looking for help – is connected with Laurence’s spirit going missing? I feel that I need to go there for some reason, but I don’t know what that reason is. I need help. My schoolboy logic dictates that if I can somehow sort out what’s happened with Laurence – see if he’ll come back to me, or if I can find him somehow – then perhaps I can communicate with this man who’s been following me.” He fell silent for a moment and looked from Will to Martha and back again. “Whaddya think?” Then he added in a giddy, childish voice, “Will you come to the party, Will?”

  Will and Martha didn’t smile.

  Will sat forward, reaching into his jeans pocket to pull out a small notebook with a tiny pencil stuck in the spiral binding. “First thing’s first, we need to sort out investigating your flat, try to see if we can find out anything about your stalker. And then you need to tell me everything that you can about Dubhglas. And about how Laurence died.”

  It was after one when Martha slipped away from the table and headed for bed, leaving Will and Gabriel in deep discussion about the proposed investigation. Truth be told, she had tuned out of much of the conversation, focusing unavoidably on her own thoughts, thinking about Dan’s face opposite her in the hotel and how she was going to deal him. She just had to talk to Will, she reasoned, but tonight hadn’t been the night.

  She fell asleep feeling hopeful for the first time in months, lulled by the hum of voices from the kitchen below and the wine and good food. It’ll be all right, she thought to herself. Everything was going to be fine.

  CHAPTER 16

  1963

  There was no denying that having young Laurence McKenzie around Dubhglas Castle changed the place for the better. There was something in him – some infectious joy, some lightness of heart – that made it brighter. He had arrived with his parents on a Friday night, devoured three helpings of roast pork and apple crumble, and had barely batted an eyelid when his parents left again the following morning. Claire had seen them climb into their car – the father, the Captain, folding his bulk into the driver’s seat without a second glance – the mother, a tall woman with blonde hair in a neat perm, staring back at the facade of the castle sadly, longing to see her son peer back at her through one of the many windows . . . but he was already gone, tearing down to the kitchens to find Martin Pine and take him in search of a fishing rod.

  Mrs Turnbull was right too. Having Laurence around turned Martin into a child himself. He’d arrive into the kitchen, breathless and scratched from pushing his way through thorny bushes near the lake or with the knees of his trousers torn from climbing rocks. He and Laurence would beg lemonade from Claire and then pelt off again in search of another tree to climb. There was always noise when Laurence was around. A favourite loud game involved whooping around the kitchen table wearing headdresses fashioned from Mr Turnbull’s ties and chicken feathers, until Mrs Turnbull would usher them outside, her patience sorely tried.

  And then there was the added work. The boy loved to swim and Claire seemed to be caught in an endless cycle of washing clothes that he had worn to jump into the lake, towels with which he had dried himself, or hanging out bed-sheets that he had lain on while damp. And there was a constant trail of wet footprints leading across the halls and the kitchen floor where he would enter, having run dripping all the way up from the lake for something or other. “I’ll build you a swimming pool!” she had heard Mr Calvert laughingly promise him and more than once sincerely wished that he’d get on with it. It was bad enough dealing with the workmen’s mess, but dealing repeatedly with the damp signs of Laurence’s presence tended to get on her nerves a little.

  When Mr Ball was around, there was always noise too, but nothing like the happy noise that accompanied Laurence as he skipped through each day with his childish innocence. With Mr Ball there was shouting – shouting at Martin, shouting at Mr Turnbull, shouting at the maids – even shouting at Mr Calvert, although the staff tried to turn a deaf ear to anything that they heard upstairs. Everywhere, there was Mr Ball’s huge braying voice, with an accent even more difficult for Claire to understand than Martin’s. When she heard that voice she was never so thankful that her place was in the kitchen because, as terrifying as he was to hear, he was twice as terrifying to the eye.

  Claire didn’t think she had ever seen a man so wide. There was something about the way that Mr Ball – ‘Uncle Jack’ he insisted on being called by everyone, staff included – carried his great bulk, that made him seem to fill spaces with his very being. He owned the castle, she knew. And Mr Calvert, then, was the child of Uncle Jack’s widowed sister. “That’s all you need to know,” Mrs Turnbull had told Claire firmly. “Except that if Mr Ball says ‘jump’ you say ‘how high?’, do you understand? Or there are consequences . . .”

  The housekeeper hadn’t elaborated on what those consequences might be but Claire didn’t care to risk finding out. His appearance alone terrified her. On the few occasions that she had actually seen him she had tried to cower in corners to avoid him, his great broad shoulders, thick neck and forearms and long legs taking up room everywhere he turned. He walked with his hands casually slung into his pockets, his neck buttons left open. It was his attempt at looking relaxed, Claire understood. Except he looked anything but. He looked like trouble to her.

  And, of course, there was the scar. The red and purple disfigurement that ran up the left side of his face from his mouth almost to his ear. “’Is Glasgow ’alf-smile,” Martin had called it, himself smiling ruefully as he did. Claire had no idea what he meant. Nor did she understand what Martin meant when he observed that “the fella wot did it never got the chance to even it off on account of how Uncle Jack ’ad ’im in a ’alf-Nelson quick as you can say Jack Robinson and snapped ’is neck for ’im.” Martin seemed to know a lot about Uncle Jack. And Claire wasn’t sure that she liked that side of him. But he rarely spoke or passed comment. Just made himself available to do Uncle Jack’s bidding at any time, as they were instructed.

  Claire understood from Mrs Turnbull that Uncle Jack was in some way responsible for Martin being at Dubhglas, and she was perceptive enough to understand that Martin seemed to owe him something. But other than that, there was nothing else to be learned about the great, hulking presence of the man who had come up from London, quite simply because no one would talk about him.

  When Uncle Jack was around there was also, quite often, the sounds of things being broken – cups and glasses thrown around. Furniture being shifted in the library
– Mr Ball’s throne room, as Mrs Turnbull called it. And the relentless jingle of the bell around that cat’s neck, the vicious feline that everyone tried to avoid – but it always seemed difficult to steer clear of Tiger. Before long Claire noted that Mrs Turnbull had tended wordlessly to almost everyone on the staff, including Martin, who needed help for bites and scratches administered by the sleek grey beast. The only time, she knew, that they were safe from attack, was when Uncle Jack indulged in his unusual habit of taking Tiger out for a ‘constitutional’ at any time of the day or night on a red leash which he wound proudly around his thick fist before parading the beast like a show-cat around the grounds.

  As the summer stretched on, Claire gathered from snatches of overheard conversations that the staff found it unusual that he should stay at the castle so long. Hidden in the drills of the kitchen garden while she gathered potatoes for dinner, she overheard two of the maids discussing him. “He’s disgusting,” she’d heard Dots whisper vehemently. “I have to pick his clothes up off the ground – he just leaves them lying there, scattered all round the room. And more often as not he’s broken something else up there. Yesterday it was his ashtray of all things and I had to clean up all his filthy cigar butts and scrub the carpet where it made a stain. And then I nearly knocked his blessed camera over. He’d kill me stone dead if I damaged that. Or the cat.”

  “Sssssh!” hissed Esther. “If he hears you, you’re done for! What I want to know is why he is here so long this time.”

  Claire saw her glance back toward the house, terrified lest they be heard.

  “He only ever comes for a week in the summer and then takes that filthy beast back with him to the pit where he came from.”

  With her lips sealed and her eyes and ears wide – her lifelong pattern – Claire gleaned that according to the staff, Uncle Jack had far outstayed his welcome.

  His presence stirred an unease in the castle that she hadn’t noticed before he’d arrived. A feeling of anxiety, a shade of darkness that Claire hadn’t felt before. A darkness that she recognised from her past life, that she could never quite shake off, no matter how hard she tried.

  CHAPTER 17

  November 20th

  “Missed a bit,” remarked Gabriel, pointing a finger at something Martha couldn’t quite see on his now pristine kitchen floor which she had just finished mopping.

  Martha sighed and rolled her eyes as she tipped the bucket of grimy water down the sink and sluiced it out with fresh water from the cold tap.

  “Not funny,” she said drily – it was the fifth time Gabriel had cracked the joke since they had started the first clean-up his flat had seen in quite some time. There were certain areas which had to remain untouched, of course – the areas with evidence of spirit presence – but Gabriel’s ghost visitor clearly didn’t frequent the kitchen and Martha had been detailed to make it fit for purpose.

  The medium giggled and wandered back toward the living room, completely idle, humming one of his favourite Smiths’ tracks, occasionally bursting into a line from the song. Martha grinned as she finished cleaning the Belfast sink. It was nice to hear Gabriel back to his usual sarcastic and perky form, nice to be helping him out even if that meant doing everything for him, nice to be focusing on menial tasks to take her mind off everything that was happening.

  It was an unseasonably mild day in November and where she should have been shivering with the windows open wide to air the rooms throughout the apartment, Martha was glad of the breeze to cool her down after the energetic mopping she had just given the stone tiles in the kitchen – the one room where Gabriel had steered clear away from a Georgian feel with modern shaker cupboards, a Gaggia coffee maker and a wide American-style fridge. Dan’s words, “must be some money in ghost hunting”, sprang to her mind as she took long steps over the wet tiles to return the bucket to the small utility cupboard off the kitchen.

  The thought of Dan made the tightness in her chest return, the sick pain behind her ribs that she’d forgotten while she mopped and scrubbed. She still hadn’t spoken to Will about everything that was going on – Dan’s request for increased custody, the unpaid maintenance – even the fact that she’d met with him remained a secret, and Martha was becoming increasingly panicky as she realised that the longer it went on, the more deceitful it looked. And the angrier Will would most likely get about the whole thing. Not to mention the fact that she could only assume Dan was still hanging about Edinburgh, waiting for a response. He’d given her no indication of when he might be leaving – surely he’d have to go back to work at some point, she thought, and then realised that she was merely thinking that in the hope he’d go back to work and forget about the whole thing. Which just wasn’t going to happen.

  Then there was the investigation tonight, adding to the general niggling stress. Gabriel had begged her to come and she’d reluctantly agreed. She didn’t want to rock the boat – she hadn’t seen Will as excited about an investigation in months. This time, he seemed to have lost the panicky air that he sometimes had about him in recent months, giving a sense that it was imperative that he gain some conclusive evidence on each occasion, and if he didn’t then something terrible was going to happen.

  “La la la la la laaaaaa!” crooned Gabriel, re-entering the kitchen and coming close to Martha’s face and waving his arms about in what he thought was an accurate impersonation of Morrissey. Martha couldn’t help but giggle as he stepped away, humming tunelessly and doing his shimmying dance all around the wet floor.

  “I’ve just cleaned there!” she pointed out, as he left a large footprint on a tile.

  Gabriel didn’t miss a beat and simply continued to dance, changing the words of the tune to “You missed a bit, you missed a bit, you missed a biiiiit!”

  Martha chuckled and turned to flick the kettle switch. “You’re very perky all of a sudden,” she observed.

  Gabriel broke into laughter and drew the dance to a halt, leaning into a cupboard above her head for two Cath Kidston mugs and a tin of teabags. “Nothing wrong with a bit of perk every now and again,” he replied.

  “Even with tonight coming up?” asked Martha, leaning back against the worktop.

  Gabriel opened a drawer for a teaspoon and bumped it shut with his hip. He shrugged his shoulders. “The sun is shining, my dear, and tonight maybe a piece of the puzzle will fall into place. I’m just pleased that I’m finally doing something to find out what’s going on with the visitor and in a few hours’ time I might have regained some of my sanity.”

  Martha found herself shuddering at Gabriel’s use of the word ‘visitor’ and felt again the creeping dread of what was to come.

  As if he read her mind, Gabriel, turned slightly toward her, keeping an eye on his task as he shovelled two large sugars into the floral-patterned mug. “Thanks for agreeing to come along by the way,” he said.

  Martha’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “A thank-you from Gabriel McKenzie? Do I detect . . . sincerity in your tone?”

  “Just don’t tell anyone,” he warned. “I’ve been showing way too much emotion lately. You’re holding me in a vulnerable position. And no running to the tabloids either doing sympathy-and-tell stories – ‘TV Psychic is Actually Human’ and the like.”

  The kettle started to whistle and Gabriel reached into the fridge for a small jug of milk.

  “Depends on the fee they offer me,” shrugged Martha and smiled. “I could really do with the cash.”

  Gabriel turned to look at her and frowned. “Now hang on a minute here – you’ve just released a small puff of sincerity yourself, haven’t you?”

  He continued to study her face and Martha didn’t know where to look.

  “Are you having money troubles?” he asked.

  Martha blushed and looked at her feet.

  “You bloody are,” said Gabriel, continuing to stare, having stopped all tea-making activities.

  Martha shuffled slightly and then turned her back, opening and closing cupboard doors and peerin
g inside. “Have you any biscuits?” she asked, in an attempt to change the subject.

  “Of course,” replied Gabriel, not moving. “There’s a packet of turn-round-and-tell-me creams right over here!”

  Martha stopped her over-earnest search and turned to face Gabriel. “Fine,” she sighed. “It’s not money troubles as such – I mean, people out there have real money troubles – people who can’t feed their families, or are out of work long term and on benefits and –”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it, the peasants,” replied Gabriel impatiently.

  “Gabriel!” said Martha, shocked. “That’s appalling – you can’t speak about people like that.”

  “We’re not talking about ‘people’, my little pauper,” he replied, turning back to pour water into the two mugs as the kettle clicked off. “We’re talking about you.”

  Martha rolled her eyes to heaven. “I’m far from a pauper,” she said. “I just have some . . . some concerns, that’s all.”

  “I thought you two were bloody loaded individually, never mind with your vast wealth combined?” said Gabriel. “And what about Desperate Dan? Doesn’t he pay his way for Ruby?”

  Martha sighed again. “Not at the moment, no,” she said, feeling again the niggling ache in the pit of her stomach at the mention of her ex-husband’s name. She suddenly couldn’t hold it in any longer. In for a penny, she thought, as she blurted it out. “That’s another thing I’m concerned about. He’s here. In Edinburgh. I’ve met him.”

  Gabriel’s eyes grew wide and he slopped some of the tea he was handing to Martha on the floor. “What?” he spluttered. “He’s here? Old Brideshead himself? Is he still all blonde and dishy like you told me? Like your wedding snaps? All Ice Queen?”