Chapter One

Wednesday

The last gaggle of ghoulies and ghosties shrieked off with parents and minders into the night. In the cloakroom of the Victorian school, now the local community centre, Maggie Ballater whistled out a sigh of relief. Alone at last. Tired and fractious after the long dress rehearsal for Creektown’s first Halloween pageant, the pre-tweens had worn her out with their wriggling while she took off their ghostly robes and cleaned the face paint from their contorted features.

The longed-for silence settled over her like a shroud. Too fanciful, girl. The creepy Halloween atmosphere was infectious. Muffled footsteps and subdued chatter of night class students in the corridor behind recalled her to the job in hand. With a tsk of annoyance, she swooped to the far side of the room to pluck a crumpled bed sheet from the floor. Easy to guess who’d dropped his ghost costume instead of hanging it up. She latched it onto an iron hook on the wooden partition dividing the space into improvised dressing rooms.

“Jimmy Tolliver,” she said aloud, half-amused, half annoyed. Small and sparky, he was the archetypal scruff kid, endearing on a good day. This had not been it.

According to Kyle, dress rehearsals were always grim. Even with her limited experience Maggie knew this had been worse than most.

No one had said at her interview that the events organizer would stage-manage an open air pageant on a dark night in freezing October gales. The ghost walk, planned on a summer day, now felt unbelievably long in the bitter autumn chill.

And for the vicar, of all people, to be the one to wreck the rehearsal with his erratic behaviour…

Poised with her hand on the light switch, she took one last look round. Something wasn’t right. But what? Just as she snapped off the lights, the Gothic door to the street creaked open and amber light spilled down the corridor.

A cold draught curled round the back of her neck, and she shuddered. The ghostly robes on the cloakroom pegs fluttered into life, then subsided again into limp sheets with black holes for eyes.

The oak door crashed shut, and her boss, Kyle Lachlan, creator, producer, and director of ShriekWeek, strode down the corridor toward her. “No dithering, Maybe.” He did not wait for an answer, never did. “We’re late.”

“You’re late.” But she did not say it. And she hated being called Maybe, but she did not say that either. The nickname created by her initials M.A.B. had followed her since primary school, and wherever she travelled there was always some smartass who thought he’d invented it for the first time.

His Cuban heels clacked like a tap dancer’s over the stone flags. His black cloak swirled around him, and the night lights flickered in the pumpkin lanterns on the tables lining the walls.

Spooky. She shivered. Someone walking over her grave, her granny would have said. But it was just exhaustion, and the chill of a Victorian building after hours.

Irritation swept away her nagging uneasiness. She turned the old-fashioned key until the lock thudded into place and scurried after her boss toward the lights ahead.

A wisp of music curled out from the classroom on her left, followed by a cacophony of heavy chords. The night class for guitar beginners. She’d seen it advertised. A quick glance told her the tutor was new. He looked up, winter-sky eyes and ruffled blond hair enhanced by the all-black polo and jeans which silhouetted his lean line. A little hoop of excitement ricocheted round her ribs. She shot it down fast. “Not for you, my girl,” she muttered and passed into the far-too-bright modern hall.

The adult cast for ShriekWeek sat chatting round the trestle tables, waiting for Kyle. He stood on the dais at the front, rustling a sheaf of papers and making them too sound irritable.

“Notes, then.” He rapped the desk in front of him with a pen. “Find somewhere to sit, Maybe. Quickly, and we’ll start.”

There was a time when Maggie would have collapsed flustered on the nearest seat. But after four months of meetings and rehearsals, she knew most faces in the tight-knit Island community. Emma Dalrymple waved and shuffled along a bench at one of the furthest tables. Maggie squashed down into the space by her side.

Kyle scowled and cleared his throat, but his voice still sounded cigarette-croaky. “I’ll take the scenes in order, okay? As we walk them.” He flicked back through his papers.

“Starting at The Fish and Anchor. Maurice and Marsha—”

“Not here.”

His tongue clicked in annoyance, and he fumbled left-handed in his jacket pocket for a phone.

“No use phoning. They’re working—unlike some.” Police Sergeant Pamela Carter grinned and waited for the raspberries from the hall before suggesting, “I can call in if you like—it’s on my beat.”

Pam was everything Maggie used to wish to be—wildly attractive with her long red-gold hair and slim figure. Maggie put up with a frizzy brown bob and a body best described as sturdy. And the woman was so confident in herself and her abilities. She took every opportunity to wind Kyle up, and as always he fell for it.

“I can call in at The Fish myself, thank you.” He drew a spiral notebook from a pocket and flipped through it fast. “It’s too bad one of them couldn’t have come. We’re doing this for everyone’s benefit, after all. More publicity, more tourists, more money in the coffers.” More money for Kyle and his B&B at least, Maggie thought.

He looked round the tables for approval, but as far as she could see, there was more resentment than reaction. Kyle was an overner like herself, a mainland man, not Isle of Wight born and bred.

“Monastery ruins next, then. That’s you, Vicar. And where the heck were you? You were supposed to be at the altar. If the kids hadn’t run up and down hooting and hollering, there would have been no haunting there at all. What happened?”

As always, his mind flitted off on a tangent. “And as for Maybe and the makeup”—all heads swivelled in her direction—“effective, but taking too long. Start earlier or be done faster. Up to you. Look at the vic, for instance.” Everyone focused back on the vicar. In his sacking robes and still wearing stage makeup, he looked ghastly. “He doesn’t need to be so luminously green. Less face paint the better.”

And indeed the vicar’s face was glowing brighter. Sweat accentuated the sheen, creating mossy rivulets of his wrinkles. A small squeak escaped his mouth or body. Afterward no one was certain which. Slowly he slid from sight.

“Quite an achievement,” said Emma Dalrymple trying to stop a nervous cackle with a cough and a splutter. “Never thought to see the day I’d drink the vicar under the table.” But then she took in what was happening and stopped her mouth with her hand.

“Get an ambulance.” Pam swept her out of the way and took charge. “Clear off, all of you. Give the man air. Looks like some sort of allergic reaction, probably from the face paint.”

She knelt down beside the old man and slipped a hand behind his ear. “Still breathing. Anyone got one of these allergy pen thingies?”

“Epi-Pen? I have one for school.” Why hadn’t she thought of that first? Maggie bent down toward the policewoman, rummaged in her bag. “Full dose in the outer thigh.”

“Thanks.” Pam was always so competent, assessing situations on the run, and glamorous as a runway model even in her police uniform. Guiltily Maggie brought her thoughts back to the vicar. He did look ill. That accounted for his dreadful performance at the dress rehearsal: fluffing his lines, forgetting his moves, not remembering to use his props.

He groaned and fluttered his fingers, which caught on Maggie’s coat sleeve. He was pulling the strangest faces, trying to speak. She bent closer, and his wheezing breath fanned her cheek.

There was no sound, although his lips moved, but she had trained herself to lip read. “Carer,” she guessed aloud, and he nodded. He must want Emma. She was his housekeeper and the nearest thing in his life to a carer. Maggie tried to look round for her friend, but the scaly yellow fingers with their long nails scrabbled again, catching in the wool of her brown coat. They reminded her incongruously of hens’ feet scratching for grain, and she quelled an impulse to recoil. “Nighty night hood.” Was that what he’d just said? Reverting to some childhood security phrase? She repeated it aloud, and he nodded. And finally, on a sigh, “Wolf.”

“Ambulance on the way,” said Emma.

“Off with the rest of you till we get the vic to hospital.” Sergeant Carter’s knees clicked as she stood, and someone tittered.

“I have your names, know who you are.” The titter stopped abruptly. “If we need statements later, I know where to find you.”

“Meeting adjourned to the pub.” Kyle prodded Maggie in the back and waited for her to stand. “Emergency, if the vicar’s out of action.”

She should have said no. She still had the next day’s work to organize. The Spanish club she’d agreed to run for the primary school was fun but time consuming. She hesitated a moment too long and was left to follow as he stormed off into the night.

Instead, she opened the cloakroom door again and looked round, using the light filtering in from the corridor. This time she knew what had been bothering her.

****

Her search of the cloakroom left her last to leave the building, and she locked up carefully. The click of the security lighting triggered by her presence sent her skittering across the small car park, and she looked round, embarrassed. But everyone was gone. The wind bit into her bones, and her fingers, stiff with cold, fumbled to reset the padlock code on the front gates.

Across the road, the small seventeenth-century fishermen’s cottages huddled together along the alley to the square protected her from the sea wind. The lighting was fitful, the current erratic.

Her heels clicked briskly on the cobbles, echoed by a soft slipper-slap of leather keeping pace a footfall behind. No use telling herself she imagined it. Her chest constricted. She panted to breathe. Her feet of their own accord increased their pace, and the echo did too. She fought back panic. This was Creektown, for goodness’ sake, an unspoiled Island village, not some troubled sink estate on the mainland. The pub and safety were only yards ahead.

But the following feet padded faster now, nearer. A gloved hand caught her by the shoulder, and her heart stuttered to an agonized stop.

“Glad I caught up. Hope I didn’t frighten you.” The hand relaxed its grip, dropped away.

Her heart, still distrustful, kick-started with an irregular beat. She swivelled round to face her fear and saw the other hand of her assailant held a guitar case. Unless it belonged to some member of an unknown Creektown mafia, it must belong to the night class guitarist. His dark clothes blended into the night, but his face loomed pale, and in the lamplight his eyes glittered a silver grey.

“Surely you left before me,” she said when she recovered her breath. She’d seen the evening class leave while she waited for the ambulance.

“I live beside the school—popped back home for spare strings. You teach Spanish, don’t you? Saw you at the induction for Adult Learning tutors. Coming to the Pumpkin?” he said. She recognized the local name for The Coach and Horses. Made her feel more belonging.

“Kyle’s diverted the pageant post-mortem there,” she said. “And I’ve missed the last bus home, thanks to…” The sentence tailed off as she realized how insensitive it sounded. She wondered how the vicar was.

“Mmm. Heard the commotion. Hope he’s okay. A stroke perhaps, or a heart attack? He’s old, been retired for ages.”

He held open the pub door, and noise, loud and cheerful, surrounded them.

“Busy. Live music by moi, and it’s darts night. The team’s playing at home, so no one will hear a note I play.”

“That’s a shame,” she said. She’d enjoyed the ripples of music floating through the school.

They’d started teaching, he said, at the same time.

“I’m hardly teaching, just a couple of sessions to keep my hand in. I came to the Island as part of the ShriekWeek team.”

His body stilled. She felt rather than saw it. Then he was moving through the crowd ahead, greeting everyone he passed.

She felt she’d gate-crashed a large happy family that had no intention of adopting her but were too polite to say so. He seemed to belong from the moment he arrived.

“What are you drinking?” he called over his shoulder as he ploughed his way through to the bar.

“White wine and soda.”

“A spritzer then, Suze,” he said, “and the usual for me.”

The usual turned out to be a black coffee. “Can’t play well if you drink,” he said in answer to her thought. “And I might have to drive later. That’s if you don’t have a lift home and if you wait for my set to finish.”

“No.” Her tone was too loud and shrill. Wine slopped out of her glass as she banged it down unsteadily on the counter. In the sudden silence she was aware of attention from both sides of the bar.

“So that’s the way of it, is it?” He crunched out the words. “Fine. Nice knowing you.”

“No, thank you,” she tried softly, but it was too little, too late. She looked up, wondering how to explain, but he had gone.

“Sorry,” she said to no one in particular.

“No worries.” The barmaid leaned over to wipe the bar and take the unused coffee cup. “I can take you back—you’re up in the new bit, aren’t you? Renting Charm’s house?”

She nodded, no longer surprised everyone knew her business.

“I’m taking out the minibus later to drive the darts team home. A few live round your way. No probs.” Suzie bustled off again, filling orders, clearing glasses as she went.

Maggie sipped at the dregs of her wine. She hated upsetting people. But Suzie had given her a great excuse. When she next got the chance, she could say she hadn’t wanted to take him out of his way. But had her voice sounded too shocked to make that explanation credible?