Strange Sight

by Syd Moore

  There were things that people did when they lied. Often they didn’t have a clue they were doing it. Erratic vocal undulations were one. Fidgeting was another. Turning their face away, pausing so they could make up an answer and avoiding pronouns in their speech. These were all telltale signs. Mary was doing none of them. Maybe fidgeting a little. Right now, she was rubbing the back of her neck. She had done that before and kept hunching her shoulders. It was either a habit, an injury or bad posture taking its toll. That kind of thing rose to the surface when you were stressed.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked, realising as it came out that it was a really stupid question. I glanced at Ray to see if he was going to tell me just that but he didn’t. He was biting his lip. Probably his tongue too.

  Mary dipped her elbow and stopped massaging. ‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘Whiplash injury. I had a car accident a few months ago. Nothing serious.’

  That would explain it. That and the huge anxiety she was undergoing through the retelling of her traumatic discovery.

  Unable to sit still any longer Ray got up from his chair, shook out his hands and went and leant against the wall, next to the telly. He smoothed down his trousers and said, ‘She told people this time though. Didn’t you, Mary? You told the staff.’

  ‘Yes, the kitchen staff were in. There are windows around the door so you can see into the yard. I asked them if they’d seen her too.’

  ‘Had they?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not then. But a few days later MT said she’d seen something.’

  ‘That’s right, she did,’ Ray added. His hands were behind his back now and he was leaning on them, perhaps to stop himself twiddling his fingers and giving away his anxiety levels. ‘I was there that night. She came rushing out of the ladies and said she’d seen a ghost in there. Just staring at her.’

  I wrote down staring.

  ‘Marta Thompson,’ Ray explained, ‘is our hostess, or butler. Maître d’hotel.’

  Mary nodded. ‘She heard someone in the toilets.’

  ‘And it wasn’t a customer?’ I asked.

  ‘They were groaning apparently,’ Tom said.

  ‘Food poisoning?’ I asked.

  Sam tutted.

  Ray shot me a very nasty look. ‘That came later,’ he said, and managed to make the statement sound like a threat.

  Mary looked over to her father. ‘I think it was some kind of warning because the next day was Friday the fifth of February and then everyone heard it.’

  I noted the date.

  Ray sighed. ‘Yes, the night we had the rat incident. Two or three of the buggers actually ran across the dining floor in clear view of everyone. Very bold. One ran right upto a journalist too. You bet your life there was a lot of moaning that night. All across social media. Not ideal.’

  ‘Yes, but everyone heard her,’ Mary repeated, and I understood what she was getting at. There were lots of witnesses this time: not just this MT person, but the diners and all the restaurant staff. It wasn’t singular insanity.

  Tom appeared behind the sofa with a tray of mugs. ‘They did.’ He put it down on the wicker chest for us. ‘Every single diner in La Fleur heard it.’

  I noticed as he leant over to hand me the drink there were huge dark green sweat patches under his arms. Greasy fingerprints remained on the mug. ‘I was there that night,’ he said. ‘Up at the bar, waiting for Mary. It was real loud. Just before the rats.’

  ‘Were there words?’ Sam asked.

  Tom shook his head. ‘Not that I could make out.’

  ‘What did they do?’ Sam looked at him. ‘The staff?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Tom. ‘There wasn’t really time to talk about it because suddenly the rats happened and then everyone sort of forgot about the moaning.’

  I nodded. ‘Priorities, I suppose.’

  In a restaurant, yes,’ Ray agreed. ‘They demanded immediate action, I’m sure you can see that.’

  I nodded. ‘A lot of people were witness to both incidents then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mary. ‘But people, the staff, knew it was her – the ghost.’

  ‘Knew she’d brought the rats?’ I asked.

  Mary shook her head, ‘No, I didn’t mean that. But probably. What I meant was we all knew it was the ghost wailing.’

  ‘How?’ Sam came in quickly. ‘He had been paying close attention.’

  ‘It was obvious. To me anyway. I told them.’

  But Sam clearly didn’t think so. ‘How did you know the noise had come from the apparition you’d seen?’

  All of us looked at Mary, who frowned. ‘I just did. What else could it be?’

  There were a lot of explanations for a sound like a wail: metal screeching on metal, dodgy pipes, bad plumbing, wind in the eaves. But I didn’t say anything. I just sat still and waited for her to continue. When none of us moved, Mary grimaced and said, ‘It was high-pitched again and female. You can tell, can’t you?’

  Tom bobbed his curly bonce up and down quickly, animating the thickened curls.

  ‘The same female?’ Sam continued.

  Everyone looked at Mary again.

  ‘Oh.’ She fiddled with the blanket. ‘I don’t know now.’ Her forehead was full of lines. It made her look knackered and much, much older. One hand let go of the blanket and crawled up over her face. She wiped her eyes, then felt round the back of her neck again. ‘I can’t remember. But it had to be, didn’t it? Had to. Because after that everything seemed to unravel. Everyone was talking about her. Femi, the sous chef, was muttering that Fleur de Lis Court was cursed. He didn’t want to say before, but it came out that all businesses on the street had had a run of bad luck.’

  Sam was making notes now too. ‘Because of the curse? Was it anything specific?’

  ‘What?’ Mary’s pale face turned to him.

  ‘The curse?’ Sam spoke up. ‘Were there any specific aspects to it or was it general bad luck?’

  Or bad investing and the financial crisis, I thought. Or maybe simply bullshit? People loved stirring things up, having a bit of a gossip, creating some drama. They didn’t realise what it could lead to.

  Mary shook her head. There were dots of sweat across it. ‘At that point I didn’t think it was the restaurant that was cursed.’

  ‘Really?’ That surprised me.

  ‘No,’ Mary sighed. ‘I thought it was me.’

  ‘You?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I saw her again.’

  ‘In the cellar?’ It was a good a guess as any.

  ‘No.’ Mary rubbed her neck. ‘Here.’

  ‘Here?’ I wondered for a moment if she was referring to her back. ‘Where here?’

  ‘She walked across that window.’ She thumbed the wall behind her. We all looked through the voile curtains to the narrow street and buildings across the road. The casement was wide and propped open with an aluminium rod.

  ‘Is there a balcony out there?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Mary said, and hid her face. ‘Only at the front. There’s a sheer drop behind the window. That’s when I knew she was haunting me. And that it was a real ghost.’

  ‘Do you keep it open all the time?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m on the third floor.’ She cast a guilty glance at her father. ‘It’s not a security risk.’ They’d had this argument before.

  ‘But you say someone walked past it,’ said Ray, sounding exhausted. And I realised he was on the same page as me. He loved his daughter but he wasn’t buying the ghost theory.

  ‘It was a ghost, a spectre, an apparition,’ Mary repeated with emphasis. ‘Obviously they don’t observe the same rules.’

  Ray shook his head. ‘Something strange is afoot for sure,’ and he turned away from his daughter and glared at us.

  ‘I saw her, Dad.’ A plaintive note had crept into Mary’s voice. ‘Like the one in the yard. ’Cept she had her bonnet on again then. It was a ghost.’

  But Ray put his head in his hands and groaned. Then he brushed those short,
stubby and very strong fingers through his well-oiled hair.

  ‘She tells the truth, Mary does. You know that, Ray.’ It was Tom. This was the most forceful and emotive thing I’d heard him say since we arrived. He stepped over to the couch and sat down next to Mary, reaching for her hand.

  She took it and held it tightly, then gave him a weak smile.

  They looked like a sweet couple.

  I heard a splutter from the chair. Ray was wiping his nose. His eyes were bright and vivid. He had the look of a powerful man who had faced fear before but was fighting down his worst terror. ‘You’ve got to get to the bottom of all this. She’s all I got, Mary is. She took it bad after her mum died but she’s just getting back on her feet and – and I bought that place for her – to set her up with a business. A trade, you know. So she could be purposeful. It always pays to have a purpose. A meaning. A reason to get up. And now, oh god, I can’t believe what’s happening. You’ve got to find out.’

  I didn’t know whether to go over and pat Boundersby’s back or pretend I hadn’t seen anything. I looked down at my knees and decided to address Tom. ‘So were you here? When Mary saw the thing? The apparition?’

  He shook his head roughly. ‘I came over and looked around obviously. But nothing. I thought maybe Mary was working too hard.’ He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. ‘She does that.’

  The whole of his girlfriend’s face brightened briefly.

  ‘At least someone does,’ Ray muttered, eyes fixed back on the floor. He hadn’t thought anyone had heard it. Interesting. I made a note to ask Tom what he did or didn’t do for a living. There was obviously tension there.

  Ray’s face was tense. ‘And at La Fleur things got worse and worse: a customer found a cockroach in his food. Subsequent to that a swarm of them showed up round the bar, hogged the limelight then scarpered, but not before every fucker had tweeted pictures.’

  ‘The toilets backed up,’ Tom added, blinking. His eyes were the same colour as forget-me-nots. Quite attractive, though his front teeth were a little overlong. ‘Then there was that awful writing on the wall.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘We heard about that. Sounds well nasty.’

  ‘Who from?’ snapped Ray, his face pinched and red.

  ‘Bumped into one of your staff,’ I said. ‘Yesterday. Joel Rogers. Nice boy.’

  I didn’t mean it.

  Ray looked relieved. ‘Oh, Joel, yes. Well good. We tried very hard to shut that one down. Everyone who was in that night got a free meal on the house. Cost a bloody fortune. I had to pull in a lot of favours to keep it out of the press, but we managed to neutralise the damage, thank Christ.’

  Sam clicked his tongue. ‘And I understand it read,’ he flicked back a few pages of this notebook. ‘Till the blood gushed from her eyes. Why did it say that? Anyone know?’

  ‘No, no one.’ Ray shrugged. ‘Not a Scooby.’

  I chipped in my own penny’s worth. ‘It’s fairly specific. Were there any incidents it could have referred to? Accidents in the kitchen, perhaps?’

  ‘People cut and burn themselves all the time in kitchens,’ said Ray. ‘But nothing’s happened with eyes. That I’m aware.’

  Mary joined her father with a shrug. Tom shook his head.

  ‘And then Seth was murdered?’ Sam went on.

  ‘No,’ said Mary. ‘I saw her again. In the yard. No bonnet. Thin and red and wretched.’

  Sam nodded her on. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was kind of weird. The motion sensor lights were off but I saw the moonlight on her arms. They were thin, like bones. There was that burning smell again. Charcoal. And she was pointing across the yard. But it was only for a moment. I went to the door to see if she needed help but when I opened it she was gone again. That time I felt so bad. Really bad. Worried. Like something terrible was about to happen. Like she was trying to warn me. That was last week.’

  ‘Then we had the food poisoning,’ said Ray. ‘Friday.’

  ‘I thought that was what she might have been warning us about,’ Mary said. ‘But it wasn’t, was it?’ She looked down at the floor.

  Tom put his arm across her shoulders and said, ‘Shh.’

  We were coming to the climax.

  ‘I’m sorry to mention it but we do need to know what happened the night you found the body,’ Sam said as gently as he could.

  Mary balked at the prospect of recounting it again, but managed to rally her courage and tutted. ‘I don’t know why she did it. Gutted him like a fish. I didn’t think she had the strength.’

  That was an interesting comment to make.

  ‘Why not?’ Sam asked. I guessed he was thinking the same as me.

  ‘Because of the blood and the lacerations all over her. She looked so weak.’

  ‘The lacerations?’

  ‘She doesn’t have them all the time. Sometimes she is dressed well. With the bonnet. Other times she looks very different. Terrible. Abused.’

  Sam scrawled in his notebook. ‘So what happened? In your own time.’

  And Mary detailed the whole event. How she had forgotten Tom’s present and returned to work with an absence of maybe twenty-five minutes. She told us she had located the package and was about to leave when she heard sounds. Then how she witnessed the spirit pass over the floor, bloodied and ethereal. She described descending into the hell of the cellar, the scene – the body of Seth hung up high on a hook, gashes and wounds to his body, throat slit and guts spilling.

  It was a hideous tale. At the end of her story, I felt sick and appalled. That someone could do that to another human being was beyond me.

  Ray turned his face away from us. Tom paled so dramatically I thought he might faint. Only Mary kept herself together through it all. Trying hard to remember whatever she could, desperate to please, to help us.

  Eventually, afterwards, when we had collected ourselves, Sam spoke. ‘I need some extra detail, if you don’t mind trying?’ I thought Ray was going to intervene and stop the interview – Mary was clearly distressed – but he didn’t. He nodded to his daughter and said, ‘Go on, love. Try.’

  Sam sent her a pleasant smile. ‘So how did she get out? Of the restaurant?’

  Her eyebrows lowered. ‘I don’t know. She must have walked through the door. She can walk across windows three floors up, can’t she?’ And then she pulled her arms in and crossed them over her. I had a sense she was shutting down.

  Again the room lapsed into a fraught silence until Ray shook his head and spoke up. ‘You know Mary cut him down? She’s got his DNA all over her and vice versa.’

  Oh dear, I thought but didn’t say.

  Sam was obviously pressing Mary for something. ‘And no one else came in or out afterwards?’

  ‘No, not until the police showed up.’

  Her voice began to tremble. ‘Which means it had to be the ghost. Because if it’s not the ghost, then it was me, wasn’t it? I did it and I’ve gone mad.’ She pulled up the blanket around her shoulders and started rocking. ‘I don’t want to be insane. I don’t want to have killed Seth. Why would I do that? Just because his hygiene wasn’t good. It wasn’t a massive deal, was it, Dad? Not in the bigger scheme of things.’ Her breathing had started to accelerate. ‘Oh god. I don’t want to go to prison. Or a nuthouse. I don’t want to. How can this be happening?’ She let go of the blanket. It slid off her shoulders. Then she hit her chest. Hard. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Shh,’ said Tom and put his arm round her and pulled up the blanket again. ‘It’s going to be okay. I won’t let anything else happen to you.’

  ‘You are not going down,’ said Ray, his voice firm and measured. ‘These people,’ he gestured between Sam and I, ‘they’re going to find the ghost.’ He was speaking at a pinched, measured pace. ‘Aren’t you?’ Then he smiled.

  But it wasn’t a nice smile. More like the kind that would spread across Dracula’s face if he happened upon an unsupervised play-school.

  Before either of us could re
spond, he turned back to Mary. ‘And if they don’t, I’ll shoot them.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Once my pulse had slowed down enough for me to detect any sound other than my banging heart, I was relieved to hear Sam laughing, though it was extremely high-pitched and squeaky. Once he stopped, he told Ray that we’d absolutely need to look around the place. At length.

  ‘Not today.’ Ray’s voice returned to his regular ‘convivially menacing’ mode. ‘The whole place is out of bounds. Crime scene, innit.’

  I looked at Sam, who shrugged. He appeared to be taking the whole ‘threat to life’ thing quite well.

  Snapping his notebook shut, he asked, ‘Well, we’ll get on with interviewing the rest of the staff. Do you have their addresses to hand?’

  Ray shook his head. ‘Not on me.’

  ‘I can get into our system remotely,’ said Mary. ‘But my laptop’s with the police.’ She paused and looked hurt.

  ‘Use mine,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll nip home and get it.’ Then he put his hand on her knee and gave it a rub. She didn’t smile but leant her head on his shoulder.

  ‘You know MT’s anyway, don’t you, Tom?’ Ray scowled. ‘Give it to Rosie and Sam. They can start with her.’ He pulled his jacket together and smoothed down the front, then walked over to us. ‘I’ll let her know you’re on your way over. Mary will email you the staff list. As soon as I hear about La Fleur, I’ll contact you about access.’

  Then he dismissed us with a nod of his head and went to his daughter. Picking up Mary’s hand he pulled her to her feet. ‘But right now, I want you, young lady, to eat something.’ Then he sat her down at the dining table.

  Left alone on the sofa Tom sighed, then he got up and ushered us out. In the hallway, with the volume of his voice just above a whisper, he relayed MT’s address.

  ‘Why do you have it? Are you friends?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Yes,’ Tom nodded. ‘We were at uni together. It’s through MT that I met Mary.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You’re obviously very fond of each other. When did you meet?’