The security camera’s lens had been poked out, and it had been twisted off its perch above the till, leaving it hanging limply, a useless appendage. But it was a while before Meredith noticed it, her horrified gaze being first drawn to the shelf of Minstead House-branded pottery, now at a forty-five-degree angle, its contents in a smashed pile on the shop floor. Plates, mugs, tea sets, each with its own delicate line-drawn silhouette of Minstead House, now all in a jumble of shards. Who would do this?
She scanned the rest of the shelves, taking a hasty mental inventory of the shop’s stock, but nothing actually seemed to be missing, not even the more expensive jewellery in the glass display case. No money had been taken. They always cashed up and put it in the safe when they closed the shop at night; the safe, hidden behind a painting, was still locked and untampered-with. So strange that there was no sign of a break-in. Someone must have had access to the keys.
Footsteps coming up the stairs. The door handle slowly turning. A heavy black boot through the locked bedroom door. Warm urine tickling my thigh as the panel splinters and shatters and I wait, paralysed.
Stop. Focus. Call security.
‘George, it’s me, Meredith. The shop’s been broken into, but nothing seems to have been taken, just some stuff smashed and the security camera broken.’
‘Hey, love, don’t sound so upset … I’ll call the police and check the exterior CCTV. Leonard didn’t mention anything, useless old bugger. Get the kettle on and I’ll be over in two minutes.’
Leonard was night security at the house, and was older than some of the antique furniture. He and George had a decade-long simmering feud as to which of them was the more efficient – or as everyone else had long ago decided, the least useless. Nobody could understand why the Earl kept them on. He must have promised them both jobs for life, preferring for his own reasons to update the security technology rather than the technicians themselves. Ralph, as estates manager, was always grumbling about both of them.
Meredith sat down behind the counter, still feeling shaken and a bit nauseous. She gulped in air, then picked up the internal phone again.
‘Hi, Ralph. Some shit’s broken into the shop and smashed it up a bit, but nothing seems to be missing. George is calling the police.’
‘What? Good grief. I’ll be right down,’ he said immediately, and she felt a tiny bit better. There were people who cared, about her and the shop. People she could ring and who would come, even though they didn’t know what had happened to her before.
There’d been nobody I could ring that night and nobody to come.
Ralph arrived before George, panting slightly from sprinting down the stairs in the main house and across the wide cobbled courtyard. Through the plate-glass window, Meredith saw him just about avoid crashing into the iron racks of pot plants for sale outside the shop door, such was his haste. He came in and walked straight over to the counter, almost knocking down a hat stand draped with hand-dyed silk scarves, and gave Meredith a huge avuncular hug, wrapping his arms around her and pressing her face into his barrel chest so she could barely breathe.
‘Well, this is all a bit shit, isn’t it? Who the hell would do this and not even bother to nick anything? Are you sure nothing’s gone?’
He sounded jovial, but Meredith, once she’d extricated herself from his embrace, could see from his eyes that he was worried. Despite the combined age of its security guards, Minstead House had never been burgled before.
‘I’ll have to have a word with the Earl,’ he said, his voice now sombre, and she knew he meant about Leonard.
‘Maybe Horace is back,’ she said, turning her back to him as she went to make tea. Horace was the house’s once-active poltergeist. She wasn’t joking – she did hope it was him. The thought of a ghost was a lot less unnerving than a human intruder.
Horace had been a regular spectral visitor in the chapel a few years before. Leonard would lock up at night with the only key then come in the following morning to find the furniture rearranged and candles laid out in serried rows on the flagstone floor. The Earl had eventually had an exorcism conducted, which had got rid of the entity. They’d christened it Horace, after the spurned lover of the house’s original owner, Lady Wilmington – the most likely candidate to want to hang around, causing trouble.
‘No sign of a break-in, stuff randomly smashed,’ Meredith said. ‘Sounds like Horace’s MO, doesn’t it?’
‘Mmm,’ said Ralph, who had always been convinced that there was no Horace, that Leonard had done it himself for the attention. Meredith disagreed though. Leonard could be a bit of an old drama queen, but he wasn’t a fantasist, as far as she could tell. And she’d heard enough stories about ghosts from reliable sources to believe in them, even without first-hand experience. ‘Well, the CCTV should show who came in out of hours, so I don’t think we’re going to need Sherlock Holmes’s expertise to figure out who the culprit is.’
George arrived next, knocking a pile of hairy blankets crooked with his hip as he bustled in. Meredith had to sit on her hands to stop herself immediately going over to the shelf to straighten them. She couldn’t even look at the broken china.
‘Police are on their way,’ he said, self-importantly.
‘Nothing’s been taken,’ she told him. ‘Maybe we should tell them not to even bother. What if the shelf just collapsed?’
‘Oh no,’ George said, looking shocked. ‘It can’t have done. That bracket’s clearly been tampered with. And the camera! That’s not an accident. I mean, look.’
She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to talk to the police. Police made her itchy with panic. Police brought back memories she didn’t want to think about. She’d had enough of police to last a lifetime.
But in the end, though, it was OK. A slope-shouldered PC who couldn’t pronounce his R’s turned up and took some photos and notes. Scratched his head about how the intruder got in, and why they’d bother. Asked her if anything else ‘unusual’ had happened.
Meredith looked at Ralph and raised her eyebrows. He was the only one who knew about the flowers. She hadn’t told him; he’d seen them. He nodded, briefly.
‘Well … I didn’t think anything of it, but there have been a few things. Last week, for example…’
‘Yes?’ The PC poised his pencil over his pad.
In fact, there had been more than a few things, on and off, in the year since Iain’s call, but they were so small, Meredith hadn’t bothered to mention them. If she did, she’d need to admit why they worried her. And anyway, it was all just tiny stuff: far easier to dismiss as nothing – as her own paranoia: the unopened can of green paint left in her front garden – a visitor could have dumped it there. The bathtub full of cold water she came home from work to find one day – she must have run it herself that morning and forgotten. Things moved around in her living room – must have been her. The fact that she woke up every night screaming and covered in sweat was nothing to do with it, she insisted to herself.
Nothing to worry about. Nobody else apart from Pete had keys to her house. Everything else, apart from her anxiety levels, had remained the same, at least for the next few months. She had kept her head down, carried on working in the shop.
The eighties revival tour happened, without Cohen. Nobody came for her. To her knowledge there had been nothing in the papers, and no reporters had come to the shop.
‘I live on the estate, in a cottage just past the greenhouses. It’s about five minutes’ walk from here. Last week, when I arrived home I saw that … it’s probably nothing … but someone had cut the heads off all my dahlias. I’ve got my own little fenced-off garden in front of the house, but anybody could walk in – to the garden, obviously, not the house. Visitors pass it all the time when they’re walking round the grounds. I just thought it was weird. They were definitely beheaded intentionally; clean cuts, with scissors or secateurs, and the heads were just left lying in the flowerbed, about twenty of them. Every single flower had been cut.’
She felt sick, as if it was only real now that she had admitted it.
‘I see. That is a bit weird,’ agreed the PC, scribbling furiously.
George bristled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You should have reported it!’
‘Because, like I said, I just assumed it was a visitor with anger issues, or one of the gardeners having a bad day. Or even a kid, messing around.’
‘That’s vandalism, that is!’
‘Well, in the grand scheme of things I didn’t think it was a major crime.’
Not a major crime, no … but another of those little things that were probably just coincidence. They had to be.
It had been well over twenty years since she’d left the band, and during that time – until Iain’s phone call the year before – Meredith’s paranoia had subsided to a dull roar; most days, anyway. Sometimes, though, she was almost puzzled why nobody ever recognised her, but simultaneously relieved. As Pete always said, though, it was about the context. When she’d been in the band, she’d had black backcombed hair and jumped around stages in black PVC, shrieking into microphones. Now she had short blondish hair, wore Boden dresses and sold beribboned packs of honeycomb brittle and overpriced Minstead House merchandise to Japanese tourists, most of whom were far too young to remember her.
The day of the break-in dragged by without further incident, but Meredith couldn’t settle to anything. It was a big relief when the time came to flip the sign on the door to ‘closed’, and set off through the grounds towards her cottage.
On the far side of the ha-ha, she felt calmed by the sight of the Surrey Hills rising up in the distance, stolid layers of hazy shadow thickening as the sun slid down behind them. It was a balmy June evening and the rolling lawns, a vibrant green after a week of rain, smelled fresh and new as she headed past Lady Wilmington’s grave, planted in solitary state in the middle of a separate grassed area, flanked at the back by box hedges with marble statues in front of them. Lady W had planned it all herself before her death, leaving sketches showing exactly where in the shadow of the house she wanted to be buried, and which statues would be her marble guardians for eternity.
Coming through the archway from the vegetable garden, the sight of her little Victorian cottage’s bottle-green shutters, turreted gables, Gothic-arched front door and barley-sugar-twist chimney pots reassured her even more.
It had just been an accident. No sign of a break-in, nothing stolen. One of the cleaners had probably done it and been too embarrassed to admit it.
She opened the wooden gate and walked up the path. Coming home always felt like she was meeting a friend, she loved her cottage so much. Built in 1879, at the same time as the house, gatehouse and other outbuildings (including the stables, which now housed the shop), historically it had been the residence of generations of gardeners – she was the first non-gardener resident. The Earl had let her rent it since the current head gardener started having children, and his wife wanted to live somewhere less isolated.
Pete always questioned the logic behind living in such a secluded place. ‘You’re lonely,’ he’d say, bluntly, and she always denied it – because, when she was with him, she never did feel lonely. And the rest of the time, it wasn’t loneliness as such; it was paranoia. She only really felt safe once she was sequestered away in her cottage.
As she put the key in the door, she glanced at the bare dahlia plants, their severed heads now brown and rotting into the earth underneath. She had a momentary wobble, then dismissed it again.
Beheaded dahlias and some smashed china didn’t have anything to do with what had gone on before. She was sure of it.