The Forgotten Cottage (26 page)

‘Have you heard anything about our William?’

Annie shook her head. She had never called him William once and it sounded strange; she much preferred Will.

‘Nothing, but I have it on good authority that Will is going to be set free anyway and, if not, then by tomorrow Tom will have the money ready by lunchtime to do the drop.’

John nodded. ‘I see and then they will let him go, is that right?’

‘I hope so; that’s what they said.’

‘Is there anything I can do? Maybe I could take the money? They won’t feel threatened by a priest; that way, you’re not putting yourself or Mr and Mrs Ashworth at risk.’

‘That’s very kind of you, John, but I couldn’t ask you to do that. I want to take the money. I want to be there.’

Jake looked at her. ‘And we all know why that is, but you can’t beat her up, Annie. As much as you want to batter her, you’ll lose your job and she might have a knife or a gun; we don’t know how dangerous she is.’

‘I don’t care about my job, Jake. I care about getting Will back safe and sound and then hunting her down and bringing her to justice, one way or another.’

Jake shook his head. ‘You’re a pain in the arse.’

‘I know.’

John laughed. ‘Annie, Annie, Annie, you don’t change one little bit and that’s why we love you.’

She led them into the kitchen and they all sat down at the table.

‘John, I have a big favour to ask you which doesn’t concern Will… Well, not at this moment in time, but if we don’t sort it out very soon it could well do.’

‘Ask away; I told you I’d do anything to help you.’

‘Anything?’

‘Yes, anything.’

‘I think my new house is haunted. No, I don’t think, I know that it’s haunted. By a woman called Betsy Baker who lived there back in 1782, before she died.’

She gave him a chance to digest the information, which didn’t take very long.

‘How do you know that it’s haunted? A lot of old houses have draughts and creak in the night.’

‘This is more than that; I’ve been having nightmares and visions. I keep seeing a woman dressed in a white gown running through the woods near the cottage being chased by a group of men with dogs, only I kept waking before they caught up with her. Last week I was driving home from the cottage and I caught a glimpse of a flash of white running through the trees; as I rounded the bend she was standing in the middle of the road and I had to swerve to avoid hitting her. I went off the road, crashing my car into a tree and ended up in a coma in hospital for a few days. Whilst I was unconscious, the dream carried on, only this time it went to the end. She’d poisoned an entire family and the men caught up with her. They dragged her back to the cottage and hanged her from the beams of the front porch. Only I felt as if it was me they were hanging; I could feel them dragging me, their hands were rough and then they looped the rope around my neck. I could feel myself being lifted from the ground and choked. That was when I came out of my coma. The builders are refusing to work in the cottage; they keep finding their tools missing, one of them was strangled by something invisible and someone keeps breathing icy-cold air down their necks. There is a terrible sound of nails being scraped along glass whenever one of them is in there on their own; I’ve heard it myself when I’ve been there.’

Jake gulped. ‘I heard it too, the last time I was there with you and Alex, only I didn’t want to say anything in case you thought I was losing it.’

‘See, I knew you had seen something; you were acting so strange even Alex thought you’d flipped. Why didn’t you just say?’

‘Because I didn’t want to put you off living in your dream house, Annie, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. I thought with you being psychic you’d pick up on it and get it sorted out yourself.’

‘Ah, then we have a bit of a problem. I’ve never heard of Betsy Baker… Who did she kill?’

‘I think she poisoned her mother, her boyfriend’s children and his parents, with arsenic by the sound of it. There is no official record of her being hanged, from what I can find, but I trust my instincts enough to know that what I saw was an action replay and it wasn’t very nice. What can we do, John?’

‘I think we need to see if we can find a grave in your garden and see if Betsy Baker is buried in it and then we need to report it to the police and let them take over.’

‘That would take months—years, knowing what our police are like. Technically, me and Jake are the police; if we find her grave and it’s a really old skeleton can we not transfer her to a quiet patch in the church grounds and give her a proper send-off? I want to move into my house after the wedding and I won’t be able to if we notify the authorities; they’ll want to dig everything up.’

John shrugged. ‘Your call, Officer Graham, but if we find any evidence that she hasn’t been in the ground for at least two hundred years then we report it. I’m too old to argue with you and I want to help.’

Jake looked at them both. ‘I don’t know about this; if there’s a body in there we should do the right thing, Annie.’

‘Jake, it’s not going to be a body as such, is it? If I’m right, she’s been buried there since 1782 and nobody missed her then. If we don’t give her a proper burial she’ll be grounded in my house forever and I’ll never get rid of her and, besides, it’s not as if she was an upstanding pillar of the community. She killed at least five people, possibly more. She tried to kill me. She wasn’t a very nice person.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose so. Trust you, Annie, only you could buy a house that has to be haunted by Cumbria’s first female serial killer. You couldn’t get one that was haunted by a tabby cat or a friendly dog?’

‘No, Jake, you know that’s not my style.’

‘I know it isn’t but I wish to Christ it was. Sorry, Father.’

John smiled. ‘You’re forgiven, my son. When shall we do this? If I’m to dig a grave in the churchyard without any of my nosy parishioners catching me I’ll have to do it when it’s getting dark. How about if I get it prepared tonight and we move her tomorrow? She will need to go straight from one grave to the next and you’ll have to transport her in a specially blessed container of some kind. You can’t just shove her into a cardboard box and hope for the best. If she’s haunting you, Annie, she must have quite some spiritual power.’

‘I’ve got a plastic under-bed storage container. Can you bless that if I bring it to the church with me in the morning? We could put a cross inside and sprinkle it with holy water.’

‘What about some garlic and a wooden stake to drive through her heart?’

‘Shut up Jake, I’m being serious.’

Annie’s mobile began to ring and she saw Kav’s number flash up on the screen. She put it to her ear. ‘Tell me you have some news, please?’

‘We have an address and the cell site analysis of Will’s phone has come back to within a three-kilometre radius of that address so a couple of plain clothes task force officers are on their way as we speak to scour the area and do a sweep and no, I can’t tell you where it is because you’ll go rushing there and probably end up getting yourself in a whole world of trouble that I won’t be able to bail you out of. I just wanted you to know that we’re on it and doing our best.’

‘What if I promise to sit in the back of the car with you and Jake so I can’t get out and get into any trouble? I promise I’ll be good—please, Kav, I need to be there when they bring him out. I’ll go mad sitting here biting my nails.’

‘Arghh, I knew I shouldn’t have said anything and just turned up at the house with Will following behind. Wait until they’ve checked it out and given the go-ahead; if we go storming in, you and I know that it might not end too well for Will. If they think they’re going to get caught they might decide to cut their losses and run.’

‘Thank you, Kav. I promise I won’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to jeopardise Will’s life. Let me know as soon as you’re going there. I want to be there.’

‘I know you do, kid, just hang on and let the big boys do their stuff first.’

The line went dead and Annie repeated what Kav had just told her. Jake’s radio began to ring and he excused himself and stepped outside. Annie didn’t need to be psychic to know it would be Kav telling Jake to keep a close eye on her but she wouldn’t do anything to put Will at risk, at least not until he was safe and then it would be a different matter. If that Amelia thought she was getting away with this she had another think coming.

John took hold of her hand. ‘I’m going to go now and prepare somewhere to put Ms Baker’s bones. I have a storage box like you described so I’ll bless it and fill it with anything and everything I can think of to keep her contained. But I need you to come and collect it tomorrow morning; is that okay with you? I have a busy day tomorrow but we’ll get it sorted and have her buried before tomorrow night. Let’s just hope that the Bishop doesn’t get wind of this or I’ll be finishing the rest of my life marrying couples in a chapel in Vegas.’

He winked at her and she squeezed his hand back.

‘I’m sorry to drag you into this but I don’t know anyone else I can trust.’

‘Don’t be sorry, Annie; I’m a great believer that things happen for a reason. There was a reason you were sent to my door last year and was I glad that you were because I dread to think what would have happened to me or Sophie if you hadn’t. I’m the one who is forever in your debt so don’t be worrying about any of this. What’s the worst that could happen?’

His nervous laugh made her smile. She felt bad for involving him but she knew that he wouldn’t have it any other way and that she couldn’t do this without his help.

Chapter Twenty-One

Megan came rushing into the caravan, making Henry jump up from where he was sprawled on the sofa.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve found us a place we can take our victims. It’s perfect and nobody uses it. I asked the farmer and he said that the man who owned the field died last year and his son lives abroad. We’ll be able to turn it into our little torture chamber.’

‘Stop right there; you asked a farmer what, exactly?’

‘I was looking at the horses in one of the fields and he was cutting the grass in the field next door. I shut the field gate for him and he stopped to thank me, we just got chatting so I sort of slipped it into the conversation. He was old so he won’t remember what we were talking about.’

‘And what are we talking about?’

‘There’s an overgrown field with an old building on it in the middle; there’s no one around it. We could take our victims there, tie them up and gag them. If we make it secure so they can’t escape it will be perfect.’

‘Won’t the farmer see us coming and going? It’s far too risky. I like your thinking but we need a house somewhere with a cellar that is on its own so if they scream no one will hear them.’

Megan looked as if she was about to burst into tears and Henry felt bad.

‘Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good idea but how on earth would we get a girl, screaming and fighting, across an overgrown field and into a ramshackle barn without anyone seeing us? And just what if whoever owns it turns up to see that we’ve been using his shed for more than keeping chickens?’

‘Sorry, Henry, I got so carried away. I’m desperate to do it; I want to kill someone.’

‘I know you do but you have to be patient; we can’t risk everything that you’ve spent the last few months planning by taking chances and hoping for the best. That’s how people get caught, and I don’t want to get caught, Megan. I’ve never been so happy in my life and it would make me really angry to see it all thrown away because of being impatient.’

Henry knew he was asking a lot. Expecting her to keep her burning desires in check was something he knew was going to be difficult for both of them because the more he thought about murder the harder it became for him as well. All he wanted was to get Miss Graham and have some fun with her and he was finding it all very frustrating. He also wanted to leave this caravan as he was getting stir-crazy but he knew that it would be a massive risk. He enjoyed his evening stroll around the site and down to the shore line once it was dusk but he couldn’t be seen going in and out through the day. The scars were too hard to cover; that bloody woman had so much to answer for. She’d stopped him, almost killed him and then burnt his secret room down to the ground; his trophy room was nothing more than a pile of charred wood and ash, thanks to her. It didn’t enter Henry’s head that if he hadn’t splashed petrol all over then the old mansion wouldn’t have gone up in flames because it was easier to blame her, to blame Annie Graham for everything that had gone wrong the last two years.

Megan threw herself onto the bench opposite him. Her legs looked as if they went on forever in her very short denim cut-offs and he admired how smooth and tanned they were. The weather had been glorious since they’d arrived and she’d spent all day in and out of the caravan, pottering around in a pair of shorts and a strappy vest top. Being by the sea had agreed with her and she looked a picture of health. She no longer wore lots of make-up and thick black eyeliner or painted her nails in luminous colours; she was very au naturel and it suited her. He’d expected her to sink into a deep depression once she realised that she’d thrown her life away but he’d been very wrong. She had embraced this life ‘on the run’ wholeheartedly and was thriving on it. Henry wanted to make her happy; he wanted her to experience everything that he had.

‘Henry?’

‘Yes, Megan.’

‘Are you staring at me again?’

‘Yes, Megan.’

‘I can tell, you know. I don’t mind you having a perv over my body if it makes you feel better, but what would be even better was if you just actually came out and said exactly what it is you want.’

‘And what do I want?’

‘Me, of course. I don’t blame you one bit. I know it’s probably been a long time and you know I would like nothing more than for you to ravish my body. I like a good fuck now and again; you could stop being a gentleman for once and drag me into the bedroom.’

Henry grinned. ‘That isn’t very ladylike, Megan, and of course I would love nothing more than to drag you into the bedroom but I can’t and you know that; I don’t want to ruin our friendship with a quick fuck.’