The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (28 page)

“Well, you’d be wrong about that.” He spooned more sugar into his coffee. His movements were automatic, absent-minded. I knew he’d forgotten having done the same thing only minutes before. “For the final year of our marriage it was all she would talk about. Allison did a lot of research into our house’s history. She did that with all our houses. It’s something that gives her pleasure, the way I get a kick out of maths problems and you enjoy stories. Anyway, she discovered there’d once been a murder there. It wasn’t some common or garden domestic incident either, it was something horrible. I didn’t see that it mattered much. Everyone involved in the case was dead and that included the murderer. But Allison was quite upset by it. She started saying we should never have moved there, that we’d been
lured
. She’d never come out with anything like that before and I didn’t believe a word of it. To be honest, I thought it was hormonal. She was pregnant with Sophie by then, and the murder victim had been a little girl. I thought Ally would get over it but she didn’t. She was convinced the dead child was still in the house and trying to make contact with her. After Sophie was born things got worse. Allison started saying that the other girl – the murdered girl – was jealous of the new baby.

“I hate to say this but I was worried for my daughter. It wasn’t that Allison didn’t care for her – anyone could see she was besotted with the baby. But there was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I felt I didn’t know her any more.”

“You’re talking about the Loomis case, aren’t you? The name of the murdered child was Nancy Creel?”

“You know all that already, then?”

“Actually I hardly know anything. There’s no information anywhere. All I’ve been able to discover is their names.”

“Allison was always good with information. She had problems at first as well, but then she managed to turn up this grotty little true-crime book from somewhere that described the whole case from A to Z, even down to the court transcripts. It had Ally hooked from day one.”

“Did Lorna Loomis kill Nancy Creel?”

“In a manner of speaking she did. She kidnapped her and tied her up, then locked her in an upstairs bedroom. Then she took off to Chester to visit her cousin. Nancy Creel starved to death in her absence. It was a month before they found her body.”

“That’s appalling,” I said. I knew without having to ask that it was the box room Nancy Creel had died in, the room I had commandeered as my study. “Why on earth did she do it?”

“It was all on account of a man, if you can believe that. Lorna Loomis had been having an affair with Nancy Creel’s father. Tony Creel wanted to break it off, but Lorna Loomis was having none of it. She threatened to tell his wife, but Creel got there before her and confessed everything. Apparently the wife forgave him. He’d had affairs before and they never came to anything. Loomis was furious. She started telephoning the house at all hours of the day and night, making threats and shouting insults. If she hoped to drive a wedge between the Creels it didn’t work. Then suddenly the phone calls stopped. Six months later Nancy Creel went missing. Loomis knew Creel doted on Nancy. The child was probably the main reason he decided to break off the affair.”

“She killed the daughter to get back at the father?”

Rand nodded. “Her defence was that she never intended for Nancy to die, that she always meant to return to the house and release her. She just wanted to scare Tony Creel a bit first. But she fell and broke her leg while she was in Chester and her cousin insisted on keeping her there until the plaster came off. Loomis couldn’t think of any reasonable excuse not to stay, and the more time passed the more terrified she became of having to admit to what she’d done. Finally she convinced herself that Nancy’s kidnapping had all been a dream. That’s what she claimed anyway. You can imagine what the jury thought of that. She got life without chance of parole. If it had happened a decade earlier she’d have hanged for it.”

“Is Loomis still alive? She’d be old now.”

“She died eight years into her sentence. Allegedly of natural causes, although there was a story about one of the other inmates managing to sneak some arsenic into her food.”

I realized that I liked Steven Rand. I admired the way he had managed to hang on to himself in spite of his tragedy. Also I liked the way he told stories. Sitting in the café listening to him tell me about Lorna Loomis made me realize that the events as they had happened made a more compelling narrative than anything I could invent, and in spite of the horror of the thing I was tense with excitement.

Later, once I was home, a strange thing happened. I was in the bedroom, changing the sheets, when suddenly and out of nowhere I was overcome with desire for him. I wanted to know what it felt like, to be with him here in this room, to perform the sexual act in a place that still resonated with the terrible things that had happened there. I imagined Rand’s sinewy arms, the long lean rake of his body. He had told me there had been no one else in his life since Allison and I wondered with a tremor inside if that would bring an extra urgency to his lovemaking.

I shuddered and sat down on the bed. I was disgusted by my thoughts, yet still aroused by them. The house was still and silent as it always was, and yet I sensed something hovering on the outer edge of my perception: the haunted, broken laughter of Lorna Loomis.

Allison Rand had told me the house was not safe for children. Could it be that it was not safe for lovers, either? Roy and I had been so happy when we bought the place. I had blamed our problems since on his war experiences, but what if the house itself was the cause of our breakdown? The house working on us and through us, the same as it had with the Rands.

I dismissed the idea as so much rubbish and tried to put it from my mind but I went to bed still thinking about it and that night I had a horrible dream. I was in the study drawing the curtains, but each time I looked away they would open again. It was dark outside, and I was afraid to look out of the window. I became increasingly agitated, because I knew Roy was waiting for me downstairs, only I was scared it would not be him I found when I went down there. I went to the wardrobe to fetch my evening dress, and found the girl from the allotments curled up inside. She lay quite still, her bony knees drawn up to her chest. She was staring right at me, but I knew she was not really seeing me, and when I shook her by the shoulder I discovered she was not the real girl at all but some kind of copy, papery and weightless and balloon-like, reminding me of the pleated orange fruits of the
Physalis francheti
that grew in my parents’ front garden, years and years ago when we lived in Birmingham. Chinese lanterns, they were called. I hadn’t thought of them in ages.

I closed the wardrobe door and then woke up. I was breathing heavily, and I had the feeling I might have called out in my sleep although there was nothing to prove this either way. I turned on the bedside lamp and got out of bed. It was still dark, still early. I tiptoed out on to the landing. There were shadows bunched in every corner but no human presence, at least none that was visible to me.

I used the toilet then returned to the bedroom. The girl was lying on the bed, looking right at me as she had in my dream, only this time she was seeing me, I was sure of it. She had on the same grey school skirt and green cardigan she’d been wearing on the day she disappeared.

In the yellow light from the lamp her eyes gleamed like glass marbles.

I began to shiver, my teeth chattering in my head as if it were November and freezing. Yet it was warm in the room, warm enough to sleep naked, although this was something I rarely did when Roy was away.

“You shouldn’t be here, Nancy,” I said. “It’s time you went home.”

If you’re thinking it was brave of me to say that, you don’t know how scared I was. I spoke mostly to see if I still could speak. I said the first thing that came into my head.

“I don’t want to,” said the child. “I like it here. You’ve got lots of books. The soldier said I could read them, if I wanted.”

She rolled on her side, drawing her knees up to her chest the same way she had when she was in the cupboard. I felt my back muscles stiffen.

“What do you mean, the soldier?” I said. “There are no soldiers here.”

“He was crying,” Nancy said. “He thinks it’s all his fault that the other man died.” She smiled a secretive little smile that reminded me unpleasantly of Allison Rand. “The other man was going to die, though, anyway. So it wasn’t the soldier’s fault at all, really. The soldier was just trying to help.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“I have to go now.” She unfurled her legs and slipped down from the bed. When her feet hit the floor they made no noise. “We can look at the books soon though, can’t we? I like the books with trains in. And animals.”

“If you like,” I said. There was a ringing in my ears, and I felt overcome with a feeling of faintness, the same feeling I experienced if I happened to cut my finger while chopping vegetables. It’s the sight of blood that does it. Roy always thought that so funny, a crime writer who can’t stand the sight of the red stuff.

She flowed past me and out through the door. The moment she was out of sight I felt certain she had never been there, that the whole thing had been in my head, an after-effect of my nightmare. I got back into the bed and pulled up the duvet. You will think I kept the light on, but I didn’t. I wanted darkness around me, the deep kind of darkness that makes it impossible to see anything.

The call came the following morning. For a moment I thought the man on the other end of the line was Steven Rand, and felt a sharp, sweet lurch of the heart, that he wanted to phone me. Then I realized it wasn’t Rand at all. The man asked me if I was alone in the house and if I had any friends or neighbours that I could call. I remember thinking:
what the hell business is it of yours
? Then he told me that Roy was dead.

I thought he was going to say it was one of Roy’s bombs that had done it.
He was a brave man, but his number finally came up
. What he actually said was that Roy had shot himself.

“We’re not sure yet what led to this tragedy,” he said. “But you can rest assured there’ll be a full enquiry.”

I could tell he was embarrassed, that making a phone call like this was a job he dreaded. Absurdly, I told him not to worry.

Three months later one of the men from Roy’s unit drove over to see me. He brought some things of Roy’s: the folder of photographs he was always looking at, the wallet made of dark green leather I had given him for his birthday the year before. The wallet’s silk lining was torn. There was a photo inside, a picture of the two of us on holiday in the Lake District. We’d stopped a passer-by and asked her to take it. Both of us were grinning like fools.

I asked Roy’s comrade if he would like a cup of tea. He said no at first but then changed his mind. “I’d love one,” he said. “But only if you’re sure it’s no trouble.”

He told me Roy had shot a man, a young soldier who had been caught in an ambush and injured so badly that all they could do was move him to the side of the road and wait for him to die.

“His face was mostly gone,” he said. “He was screaming like a man on fire. Roy had real guts to do what he did. It was like none of the rest of us could move, and only he was able to do what needed doing.”

I was starting to show by then, and the man kept darting worried glances at my belly. I leaned back against the kitchen cabinets, gripping the edge of the worktop in both hands. My limbs sometimes felt heavy and throbbing during those later months of my pregnancy. My blood pressure was up slightly, but my doctor said that so long as it didn’t get any worse it was nothing to worry about.

I could tell that Roy’s comrade was wondering whose child it was.

“Don’t you think you should sit down?” he said. He jumped up from his own chair and shoved it towards me, almost knocking over his mug of tea.

“I will in just a moment,” I said. “It’s good for me to keep moving, though. It stops my ankles swelling.”

I wanted to reassure him that the baby was Roy’s, that she had been conceived the night we made love during Roy’s last leave. To tell him that in a sense Roy was still alive in me and always would be. In the end though it was not his business, and I knew he would be embarrassed if I tried to explain.

Thank God I had stopped taking the pill. I don’t think I believe in God actually, but you know what I mean.

I glanced at Nancy. She was sitting quietly at the kitchen table, cutting pictures out of a magazine to stick in her scrapbook. Her tongue poked from the corner of her mouth as it often did when she was concentrating on something. I could smell the glue she was using, Gloy gum from a plastic tube.

“Will you stay for supper?” I asked the officer. “You’ve had a long drive.”

“It’s good of you to offer, but I won’t,” he said. “I promised the lads I’d be back before ten. We’ve got this card thing going.”

He flushed scarlet then, as if the mention of a card game might make him guilty of some particularly heinous brand of callousness. He seemed nice enough, but I was glad he was leaving. Nancy wasn’t keen on people who couldn’t see her. They made her nervous.

Aside from that I wanted to keep the evening free to work on the book. With any luck I could still deliver the manuscript before the baby was born.