Strange Sight

by Syd Moore

  His daughter’s fuzzy unfocused eyes ranged over him, then turned round and regarded me and Sam with indifference. I wondered if she was all there.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, and tried to smile my absolutely bestest warm smile. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Mary’s eyes focused but she didn’t speak. There was either such a lot of stuff going on behind them that she couldn’t work out where to start, or not much at all.

  I waited. She gulped down a large breath, looked down at the floor and opened her mouth. Her shoulders were hunched and she was sitting right on the edge of the sofa looking like she might at any minute either fall flat on her face or take off and run shrieking out the door.

  ‘She’s shocked, isn’t she?’ Boundersby said after a couple of long minutes of silence.

  ‘I can see that,’ Sam piped up from the other end of the sofa. His voice loosened. ‘Hello, Mary,’ he said, ‘do you think you might be able to tell us what happened?’

  She reacted to her name: the eyebrows twitched. Her face lifted and rotated to Sam. He gave her a tender smile, all crow’s feet and cheekbones, and edged along the sofa minutely, not wanting to startle the girl nor crowd her out. ‘I’m sure you’ve been through this with the police already but we have certain specialisms that may help with this kind of thing.’

  When he spoke like this, I was reminded of his other side, the darker one that took on ex-Serbian mafia types in hand-to-hand combat, the man that was on first-name terms with government agents in the Civil Service X-Files or whatever they were. One day I really needed to sit down with him and have a good long chat about all of that. I wanted to know how much he and my grandfather were involved. What they had done and why they had done it. Over the past couple of weeks there had been no time to discuss much of anything. Other things always seemed to be more pressing. Plus ça change.

  I watched Mary consider his words. ‘Well, it’s so difficult and upsetting,’ she said, and then paused. Her voice was deep, a bit like her dad’s, though she enunciated her consonants. Definitely a different accent going on there. I reckon she’d been sent to some posh boarding school once the family had relocated to Essex and gone legit.

  Now her eyes were back on the floor but they were dancing around. She twisted the blanket between her fingers.

  I looked at Sam, who shrugged so lightly I knew no one else could see it and mouthed, Patience.

  I got the message and sat back into the sofa. If Mary was going to continue in zombie mode, I’d take the opportunity to find out what the room might tell me instead.

  Not much, it appeared. The sofa was white, modern, comfy. Not expensive. Not cheap. On the wall facing it was a huge plasma television. Expensive. Not cheap. A wicker chest which doubled as a coffee table, dining table and chairs all looked pristine like they had been purchased recently. Not expensive. Not cheap.

  On the dining table was a bottle of brandy, three unwashed glasses, a couple of dirty white mugs with brown drips down the sides and a bowl of slatted wooden fruit. I always wondered why people bought that stuff. Why not real fruit? It was so much more colourful and attractive. Did they not like colour or taste? Mary worked in the restaurant so I knew she probably did like food. And she obviously ate a fair bit of it. Maybe she didn’t like interior design and accessorising.

  There were a couple of photos of Mary with Ray and a tall elegant blonde woman, who I presumed was her mother. My aunt had told me she was a ‘lady’, whatever that meant, and always had ‘beautifully ironed clothes’. It was beyond me how you measured such a niche skill but Mrs Boundersby evidently was an expert and, as such, the envy of women of a certain age in our shrinking home county. I sighted a couple of photos of Mary with some friends on top of a mountain in ski season, but none of her and Tom. Which probably meant the relationship was fairly new. I was betting if I checked, there would be just one lonely toothbrush in Mary’s bathroom.

  The place wasn’t cluttered. In fact, things looked a bit semi-permanent. One level up from student accommodation. She hadn’t lived here long, I thought. Possibly it was her first flat. Late-twenties used to be late for first-time buyers, but not any more. Inner-city house prices and astronomical rents priced most young people out of London. Into the suburbs if they were lucky. Into the Home Counties if they weren’t. Or if they really wanted to stay within the glare of the bright lights then into houses of multiple occupancy. Unless they were in banking or something corporate, inherited a chunk of wealth, lived on estates or had concerned parents with disposable incomes. I reckoned Mary’s dad had helped her.

  The only piece of decorative art that I could find was a framed Escher print, Relativity, with its confounding staircases and bulb-headed occupants calmly defying gravity.

  ‘It was the ghost,’ Mary suddenly piped up. Her voice was low and scratchy, like she’d strained it. At least she was looking up now, engaging, making eye contact with Sam. ‘She’s been plaguing me for months. It was her. She killed Seth.’ Then she hiccupped out a sob.

  I realised I had been wrong: there was a hell of a lot going on inside her. Warring emotions, fracturing recall, impossibilities boiling with discomforting conclusions. Mary had been having a hard time articulating her experience. Sometimes words weren’t enough. Plus, she’d probably been up all night and been questioned down the nick all day yesterday. I suspected she was quite weak.

  Ray breathed out a long breath. I think he was relieved his daughter had broken her silence.

  Sam nodded and clasped his hands together roughly. ‘To build a picture of what happened, we need you to tell us as much as you can. Will you start right back at the beginning?’

  Mary squinted. ‘Back in December?’

  That muddled me – I thought the chef had been killed Saturday night. But Sam was right on it.

  ‘Is that when you first saw it?’ he said, not missing a beat. ‘This ghost?’

  Mary nodded slowly. She was watching his face. Probably, I suspected, for hints of exasperation, anger or incredulity. As alibis went, those of a phantom nature weren’t well received by police.

  ‘See,’ Ray butted in, glowering at me. ‘This is what I wanted you to sort out.’ He stabbed a finger in my direction. His jaw was clenched solid when he wasn’t speaking. It made me feel a little panicky. ‘When I contacted your auntie Barbara I was hoping for an immediate response. I didn’t want it to get this far.’

  I looked at Sam. So did Ray. ‘You should have come up to see me …’ There was more than a portion of blame in his voice but Sam chose to ignore it and turned his body away from the father so that he was fully facing Mary, one knee up now and lounging over the sofa. He was opening himself to her, taking any suggestion of confrontation out of his body language. ‘Tell us about it now, Mary. We won’t laugh, I promise.’

  Speak for yourself, I thought but didn’t say. Then cancelled that entirely. We were talking about murder after all.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mary at last.

  ‘December you said,’ Sam led her on.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right. The first time, it was the night before New Year’s Eve.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mary’s voice was faltering. She was strung out but, all things considered, she did a good job of communicating the facts.

  ‘We weren’t going to open for New Year’s Eve,’ she explained. ‘So the next restaurant day was going to be the third. I was doing a final double-check on everything. Making sure that fridges were closed. Securing the site.’

  Ray stood up. With one flick of his wrist, he spun the chair round and settled on it legs crossed. ‘No one up town, then. Everyone’s at home, in the commuter belt, with their feet up, patting their turkey bellies, or if they’re out, they’re keeping it local. That in-between week’s always dry as a nun’s—’

  ‘Dry as a bone, he means.’ Mary hurried on. ‘We’d closed earlier than usual. It’d been that quiet. I let half the staff go about nine. The rest cleared off a bit later. I’d locked the front do
ors. Always do when I’m finishing up on my own. Then I made sure the gate on the yard was secure.’ She looked at Sam and sniffed. ‘We’d had some kids yanking it about, vandalising stuff. So I was to lock up the kitchen when I heard something in the cellar.’

  Ray added, ‘It’s not unusual to hear things in that place. That’s why she didn’t call anyone, see.’

  Ah, I thought. The police must have asked about that earlier. I presumed the fact she didn’t call anyone meant there was no one there to corroborate her account.

  Ray carried on. ‘The cellars, floorboards, walls, beams. They’re old. The City is ancient. The foundations of La Fleur go way back. Things creak, things groan. Sometimes they squeak. And yes,’ he curled his lip, ‘we’ve had rats as you’re probably aware.’ His massive shoulders shrugged up and down. ‘But you know what they say – you’re never more than six feet away from one in London. It’s a fact of life.’

  Gawd, he was a gasbag! How much did I want to tell him to shut up? About as much as I liked my kneecaps. I sucked in a breath to calm myself. Ray clocked my expression but interpreted it as squeamishness and let out a short grunty laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Rosie. There’s no bubonic plague any more. Rats can’t be helped. Not when food’s about.’

  ‘Ray.’ Sam put a hand out to him. ‘Let’s just hear it from Mary. We need to listen to her version really carefully.’

  Inwardly I gasped and huddled protectively over my knees, but Boundersby apologised and put a finger on his lips, play-acting like he was a little boy chastised. And he didn’t interrupt again.

  ‘Notebook, Rosie,’ Sam said to me and rotated an index finger in the air. It so irritated me when he started getting bossy like that. I was his guv’nor, after all. And I had a strong streak of healthy defiance that resurrected whenever men started telling women what to do.

  Having said all of that, however, I was used to it: whenever we did ‘living together’ checks at work, there would always be one lead, one note-taker. It was a useful methodology and I understood what Sam was doing right then, so shut up, ground my teeth and fetched my notebook out. See, Mary was responding to him. Sometimes it happened like that. Sometimes they responded to a woman, sometimes a guy. Depended on the personality. Mary responded to men. Or, at least, she was responding to Sam. So he was right – I should be note-taker and jot down anything he deemed of interest. When it came to ghosts – that seemed to be everything.

  ‘Go on, Mary,’ Sam urged. ‘You heard a noise in the cellar. Can you describe what it was like?’

  Mary screwed her face up and looked over Sam’s shoulder into the past. ‘I knew straight away that it wasn’t a rat. It was too slow.’

  I wrote down, 30th of December. Not a rat. Too slow.

  ‘Why?’ said Sam. ‘How was the noise slow?’

  She thought hard for a minute then said, ‘It scraped on the floor. Like metal being dragged across the cellar. But not something really heavy. Not machinery. It clinked, that time. And rattled.’

  Sam’s eyebrows rose. His mouth tightened. I’d seen that look before. Irritation. I wasn’t sure why. ‘Like what?’

  ‘I thought it might be a bag of bottle tops falling open, at first.’ She turned to me. ‘I try to recycle them, you see. I’d put a bag down there earlier. It was only plastic, lightweight, so I thought that might be it – that the bag might have ripped or fallen over and the tops were spilling over the floor. But anyway, it went quiet again and I was tired so I thought I’d sort it out when I was back in. It was just as I was leaving through the double doors that I heard it again. It wasn’t as light as bottle tops, the noise. It was heavier. Like a chain.’

  Oh, that sounded a bit murky. ‘Was there a chain in the cellar?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Mary said. ‘Why would there be?’

  I didn’t know what people kept in their cellars and I kind of wanted it to stay that way. ‘Did you go down?’

  She nodded wordlessly. We all waited.

  ‘The light switch,’ said Mary, ‘is near the lower rungs on the steps down, so it was very dim. But I couldn’t hear anything. I listened to see if there was the sound of breathing, if someone was down there. But there was nothing. Only this strange smell – fumy. Like flaming coals. Gases. Though I couldn’t see anything there – no burning. I was about to flip the switch. Then I heard her whisper.’

  Sam sat up straight. ‘Actual words,’ he murmured to himself.

  ‘They were indistinct,’ she said. ‘Like she couldn’t talk properly. Like there was something wrong with her mouth or tongue. Like groans …’

  Of course they were, I thought but didn’t say. No self-respecting ghost talks clearly or properly, do they? Have to have a bit of blathering and moaning going on. Can’t have a straight-up, clear conversation with the dearly departed, can we?

  ‘It,’ said Mary, becoming more animate, ‘sounded female. Or maybe like a child.’

  She cleared her throat then in a creaky low voice stated, ‘She said, “Vover vere.”’

  I waited for someone to respond.

  No one did.

  ‘That’s what I heard,’ Mary explained. ‘I just stood there, frozen. Then after, I don’t know how long, I plucked up the courage to turn on the light. And it was so odd.’ She cocked her head to one side and squinted. ‘It was like all the darkness in the room was suddenly sucked into the middle.’

  Ray shouldered forwards. ‘It wasn’t a fire?’

  ‘Not a fire, no,’ said Mary. ‘It was hard to describe. It happened so quickly, I only caught a glimpse of it.’

  I was aware of Tom inching out of the shadows of the kitchen, head down listening.

  ‘And what did you see?’ Ray went on. He and Sam were both leaning in towards Mary as if straining to hear her. I wished again silently that he’d shut up. I wanted his daughter to speak for herself.

  ‘It was like a funnel of darkness. But I had the sense it was shrinking, that it had been bigger before and was now contracting and disappearing.’ She paused and rubbed her left eye. It was sore and red-rimmed. I thought I saw a tear spill out of it, but she smoothed it away. ‘Crazy, crazy, I know,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘I can hear myself telling you this, and I’m listening to myself and thinking, You sound as mad as a hatter, Mary Boundersby.’ She smiled, then let out a high-pitched peal of laughter. When she finished, she went on, her mouth set in a serious line as if she hadn’t just chuckled at all. ‘And, you know, I did think at the time that I was totally losing it but that’s what it was like. I’m telling you straight.’

  ‘See,’ Ray butted in. Again. ‘She didn’t tell anyone because she thought she sounded loop the loop, radio rental. I mean you would, wouldn’t you? You can see that, why she’d do that, can’t you?’

  ‘It’s very common,’ Sam concurred. ‘The first thing that people do when presented with challenging or irregular experiences is doubt themselves, the validity of their experience. That they’ve seen what they have.’ He smiled gently at Mary. ‘You should know that it suggests that you aren’t mad, actually, because you realise it’s abnormal.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Mary said, and laughed. But this time it wasn’t overly manic.

  ‘Anything else? Anything at all? It might seem trivial to you,’ Sam asked, and made a scribbling gesture at me.

  I thought about what she’d described and duly noted down funnel and crazy.

  Mary’s fingers entwined. Her hazy eyes began wandering again. ‘I didn’t see this but I had the mental impression of dark matted hair.’ She gulped. ‘And thinness. And blood.’

  She winced, then collected herself. ‘I can’t remember any more. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, like I said.’

  ‘And there was nothing else there?’ I asked just to be clear. ‘Nobody? No rats. No chain?’

  ‘I checked. Nothing. No one.’

  ‘And then you went home?’ Sam asked.

  Mary nodded.

  ‘So, earlier, you said “that time”.
When was the next event?’

  ‘About a week later, at work. I was just staring out the office window into the yard, I can’t remember why. You know, you do that sometimes, don’t you? When you’re busy. You forget what you’re meant to be doing. And I was just dawdling for a moment, in the office, and I saw this woman come across the yard. Just like that. She walked across it. So I knew I wasn’t imagining it – I mean it wasn’t a mere glimpse this time. I saw her go all the way across the yard.’

  ‘You sure it wasn’t a real woman?’ I asked. ‘You must have people constantly walking about your yard. And you can’t be the only female member of staff? Presumably there are also trade suppliers and deliveries.’

  Mary shook her head. ‘Somehow I knew that she wasn’t living. But it was different to the other time because I could see her clothes really clearly. I saw them Saturday night too. With Seth …’ She flinched at the memory.

  I waited to see if she’d tell us what they were like. I was genuinely interested in what was currently on trend in Spooksville.

  Mary squinted again and this time I did see a tear pop out of one eye. Quickly, she wiped it away. ‘Made me think I was mental. But I could see this very wide-brimmed hat. I’ve seen her wear it twice now.’

  I started writing it down but snuck a sideways glance to see what Sam was making of it all.

  ‘And she had a shawl over a laced bodice and full skirt. You know the kind of thing. Georgian. The dress was detailed, I remember. Pale blue.’

  ‘Was there sound?’ asked Sam. He was leaning right in to her, all ears, as it were.

  Mary thought about the question. ‘No,’ she said after a long pause. ‘I don’t think so. Not then. I can’t recall any. I just remember suddenly feeling very bad – there was this huge feeling of dread that came over everything. Then she crossed the yard and just disappeared,’ she finished.

  There was silence in the room again. The wind rustled the curtains. The grey voile billowed towards us. Somewhere outside in the road a bus honked its horn. A woman shouted. Traffic hummed and screeched. A solitary bird somewhere up above chirped happily. Life was continuing as usual.