‘I nearly died last night.’ Grant spoke with his head bowed. Brigit, his wife, sitting at the breakfast table a few feet away, looked across at him. Had he made a statement requiring a response, had he simply made a statement, or had he made an announcement? She held her look, observing him closely.
‘What?’ she eventually felt compelled to ask. And so he revealed his dream. He told her he thought he was back in Zennor. He didn’t know what time of night it started. It began, he said, with the same tapping on the door he had heard that night staying at the bed-and-breakfast by the Cornish coast. Next it changed to loud knocking, and the noise from the corridor outside increased substantially. Before long his door was being thumped and splintered open, wood crashing in a heap on the floor. He was petrified, unable to utter a word, even though he was trying to shout. His room was suddenly filled with shadowy figures, one of whom said, ‘We’re police officers, and we’re arresting you, Grant Morrison, for the poisoning of Tom Youlen in 1972, leading to his death in 1977, and for the murder by drowning of Hector Wallace in 1972.’
Brigit arched an eyebrow; a look he knew betrayed anxiety on her part.
He continued. ‘When I woke up I couldn’t breathe. I could see, I could move, but I thought I was in limbo between life and death. I genuinely thought for a few moments I had actually died, that I was on the other side and that this was the beginning of the afterlife; this was my fate.’
‘Then what?’ Brigit tried to play it cool.
‘It took a few seconds before my respiratory system started working again – before I could breathe normally. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. After several minutes I’d calmed myself enough to realize it had been a horrific dream, but it was the waking from it that scared the living daylights out of me – quite literally.’
She restrained a giggle. Grant could take himself very seriously and wouldn’t see the oddness of his last remark. Only he could be more scared waking from a nightmare than having one.
‘You see,’ he continued, ‘for several minutes I just lay there taking short intakes of breath and exhaling from the pit of my stomach. Gradually my breathing returned to normal and I could feel the blood flow in my head.’ He stopped and stared ahead once more.
She was unsure of whether to cuddle and reassure him or just to let him be for a while. She was unsettled by his story, and she didn’t really want to touch him right then; he seemed different, distant. She wondered about the recent trip to Cornwall he had undertaken alone. He had said, ‘I’ve got to find out the truth, Brig. I’ve got to know what happened.’ And now he had returned home apparently scared out of his wits by the two nights of extraordinary, sinister events he had experienced during his stay in the village of Zennor.
At length Grant went on. ‘When I was in Zennor, one night at some unearthly hour, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard it.’
‘What?’
‘A soft voice that I thought at first was a woman’s. Singing “Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle …” I heard the first line in a dreamy haze, the second wide awake. “That’s the way the money goes …” I jumped out of bed, reaching for the door. Then I stopped myself, fearing I might be walking into a trap.’
‘Who was it?’
‘I don’t know. I have no idea, Brig. But there was something else that freaked me out. It seemed to be a child’s voice. And there was an echo – as if the words were being sung by a child in a cathedral choir.’
His wife observed him. She had heard bits and pieces of his experiences as a teenager in Cornwall over the past few months, but during the previous twenty-five years she had known him he had never mentioned it at all. ‘D’you mean this is connected to what you have been banging on about for months now? And that this relates to the stuff that occurred forty years back?’
Grant didn’t appear to hear her, but he told her more about his disturbed nights in Zennor. How music from the bar below his bedroom had woken him at four in the morning, with ‘Good Morning, Starshine’ from the 1960s’ musical Hair playing at high volume. At that time of night it had given him quite a start.
‘There were other things, Brig. There was the message.’
‘What message?’
‘I was in Porthcurno and came across Trevor Mullings, the fisherman who got drunk with Hector Wallace the night Hector drowned.’
‘So there was a real Hector Wallace – not just in your dream.’
‘Yes, there was. He used to stay with us at the hotel, and he left a message for his aunt, who was his companion and benefactor. “Dear Aunt Agatha, I will love you always …” They said it was written in blood and that he had added in ink, “Tonight I am not alone.” When he returned from the sea, cold and dead to the world, no one knew he had left a message. I recently discovered it in a bottle.’
Brigit was becoming disoriented. ‘Are you sure you want to pursue this? I mean, why does it matter forty years on, for goodness’ sake?’
‘Oh, it does matter. It matters very much indeed.’