I left work early to shower and change before going up onto the moors. That tiny little heat of crush wouldn’t let me appear in my creased work clothes, smelling of office biscuits and hot electrics, if Max was going to be there, so I put on a nice shirt and a swishy skirt. A little gesture to not having given up totally, even though he wouldn’t notice or even care – it wasn’t for Max, it was for me, for my self-respect. After all, he might not even be there; it might be Jenna and me playing at detectives. Like… I groped for a suitable pairing. Starsky and Hutch? No, more like Mulder and Scully.
Before six, I was in the narrow two-car pull-in off the moorland road. The soil was dry and sandy, whipped into little dust devils by the scudding gusts of sudden breeze that came out of nowhere, and I could see the track I’d followed the last time I’d been here, winding its beaten-heather way up and over the curve of the hill. I stayed sitting, hands on the steering wheel and the radio on low, playing some thumping beat that echoed the pounding in my head, and I could have sworn the lyrics contained the words ‘stupid Alice’.
There was a roar on the road behind me and the sound of a powerful engine going down through the gears to get up the slope. I wondered if this was Max, and I had the horrible feeling that he would be wearing bike leathers that made him look like a film star. I beat at my libido with the wet newspaper of all my past rejections and worked on my ‘neutral’ expression. I didn’t have to look aggressively antipathetic, but I didn’t want so much as the twitch of an eyelid to give away how attractive I found him.
The bike pulled up alongside the car and stopped, and I had to look up. To my astonishment, Max was clambering down off the pillion seat, looking slightly uncomfortable. He was wearing a leather jacket, but it was too big for him and made him look as though he’d got his dad’s clothes on, and his helmet squashed all his features together so he was looking at me through his cheeks. ‘Come on,’ he said through the car window. ‘Jenna will take you down to the site and come back for me.’
Jenna gave me a gloved wave.
‘I’ve never ridden on a motorbike before,’ I said, cautiously, getting out and locking the car.
‘You have to hang on and balance.’ Max handed me the helmet and, after a moment’s hesitation, the jacket. ‘Jen knows what she’s doing. I hate the bloody thing, but it’s honestly the quickest way to get there, otherwise I’d rather go by wheelbarrow than have to ride this.’
Cursing the swishy skirt, which I had to fold under me like a nappy, I clambered inelegantly onto the back of the bike. The jacket was enormous on me, my hands flapped halfway up the sleeves and I had to shuffle a good deal of leather up under my armpits to get a grip on Jenna’s waist before we were off, scattering gravel and making me feel as though I was about to launch into orbit.
Fortunately, the ride wasn’t too long. Jenna swung the bike off the road and down a rutted trackway and then off again across a featureless field of overlong grass studded with tall white daisy-like flowers, but passing through it at speed was like watching the scattering of white when you empty a pocket that’s been washed with a tissue in – a blur of bits. After that, I kept my head down and closed my eyes, with my hands clutched so tightly into Jenna’s jacket that she must have feared for her circulation, until we eventually bounced an arrival and the bike slowed to a grumbling stop.
I opened my eyes. We were at the head of the dale, close by the blackened circle of earth where the house had stood. I peeled myself off the seat and my skirt fell into damp folds around my legs as Jenna took the helmet and jacket from me, secured them to the bike and took off again with a waved hand, leaving me alone with the exploded aftermath.
It was very, very quiet once the bike had left. I could still hear the echo of it somewhere in the distance, but only in the same way as I could hear the distant trill of a small bird, fluttering high above me like a full stop in search of a sentence. I tried, again, to imagine Grant out here and could only conjure up a vague tone, complaining about the lack of phone coverage.
Cautiously, I approached what was left of the house. Smashed roof tiles crunched under my feet, no walls stood higher than half a metre and the rest lay in a blackened ruin in a small depression which must have been the basement that everything had fallen into to burn. Bits of glass peppered the short grass and glimmered at me as they reflected the evening sun. The site looked untouched, but accident investigators and fire people had been turning it all over since the day it had been discovered. Presumably entropy was winning out – a tendril of sticky bindweed was already inching its way over some of the scattered brickwork.
I closed my eyes and tried to feel… something. Anything. A trace of a presence, whether Grant’s or some previous occupant. But all I could feel was the sun on my face, a pernicious little slice of wind coming into the gulley and the slight tickle in my nose from the smell of burned wood and hot brick, plus the heaviness of the moist cotton of my skirt. No ghosts of any kind. I opened my eyes again and lifted a loose brick from the remains of a tumbled wall. It sat in my hand, heavy and real, with absolutely nothing ghostly about it at all, while I squinted around the dale to try to catch sight of anything supernatural. There was nothing more paranormal than the shadows of the trees further up the hill, dusting the grass with darkness and then surrendering to the sunshine and vanishing.
The roar of the bike climbed back up into the register of hearing again and I turned around to watch it pulling to a stop and Max getting off with the same amount of distaste that he’d shown back on the road. Jenna pushed the bike up onto its stand and took her helmet off and the pair of them stood, looking at me. The wind flipped my skirt and I moved to tuck it between my knees. I wouldn’t put it past nature to try to complete my appearance of desperation by giving a gigantic gust and revealing my knickers. Also, for the record, gigantic.
I smiled, slightly weakly, at both of them.
‘This is it, pretty much the same as it was last week. What do you think?’ Max dropped his helmet on the grass.
‘Why here?’ was all I could say.
Max ran a hand through his hair. He looked tired, I thought. A little less-than-perfect today, although maybe I’d stopped seeing him as unattainably gorgeous and started seeing him as a person since I’d seen him getting off the back of his sister’s bike.
‘Okay, potted history,’ he said, pointing at the house. ‘The Fortune House was built in 1920, by Mr and Mrs Fortune, who farmed this little patch of dale with a few sheep and grew some oats, sometimes had a cow or two. In 1925, they had a daughter, Alethia, who left the dale when she was fifteen to go into service and then on to work as a Land Girl. In 1945, they had a son, John, who left home sometime in the sixties and never came back.
‘Alethia Fortune inherited the place from her parents back in the eighties and she was living here alone. I’d finished my PhD and started lecturing at York when I first heard the stories about the Fortune House, and I needed a location to form a basis for student projects and work into the psychology of the paranormal. I came up a few times, doing some peripheral work, research, photography, and one day – well, one day something happened that made me knock on her door and ask if I could use the house as a project. She said no.’
Max gave me a slightly rueful grin, which made me think there might have been a few more words than ‘no’ uttered, then he went on. ‘We got friendly, eventually. I think she found it a bit lonely and isolated out here to be honest, although she was a spry old thing who used to cycle down to Pickering for her groceries once a week, until her arthritis got too bad. I’d do a few bits of shopping for her and call in to chat about the house and about growing up out here in the dale. Anyway, she died just over a year ago, and since then, I’ve been bringing groups out here, studying the environment and, it must be said, the people who were willing to come. It’s been a valuable resource for field trips.’
Max stopped talking and stared at the ruin. I watched the way his black eyes flickered over the smoke-stained brickwork and the hole, and I wished I could see what he was seeing. A house with a few sheep grazing up against the walls? An old lady dismounting from her bike with relief and wheeling it into a shed? Dark rooms where the temperature dropped without warning and shadows moved with nothing to cause them?
The breeze had another attempt at revealing my pants to the sky and I clamped my skirt tighter between my thighs so it couldn’t billow upwards. Jenna was watching me. I wondered if she’d told Max why she’d asked me to come up here, and what she expected us to find.
‘Then Grant started asking if he could come with me out here. Said he wanted to get involved in the ghost-hunting trips. I’d started writing a book about the site, and I’d asked people to send in their ghost stories, so there was quite a bit of admin work to do – he’d begun to help me with that too.’
Jenna made a snuffly little noise of acknowledgement.
‘So I started bringing him up with me when the group came – he’d handle some of the equipment and make recordings for me, jobs like that. He really seemed to like it out here. Like I said, he spent a lot of time during vigils wandering around the house.’
‘Did he ever see a ghost?’ I couldn’t avoid the tone of slightly amused sarcasm that crept into my voice. I could sense Jenna straightening up as she put Max’s helmet onto the bike seat, on alert. This was why we were here, after all, whatever she might have told Max. ‘Or anything that might have brought him back up here that night?’
Max sighed again. ‘I’m not sure he would have admitted it if he had,’ he said. ‘And Grant was showing an interest in what I’d been researching at the house – the part of psychology that is my speciality, researching the people who see ghosts. What they see is all linked in to why they see things, you see. Grant started asking lots of questions about the place – what it used to be, why nobody had laid on mains services, that sort of thing. The things that make this place so unique for my purposes.’
‘I’m not sure I—’
He cut me off. ‘It was the core of my doctorate. I’m not so interested in whether ghosts exist or not, that’s a side issue, I’m trying to get to the bottom of why people see things, why they want to see things; what kind of people get interested in the supernatural and what they are hoping to get from it.’ He frowned. ‘I thought that maybe Grant was starting to believe, and it would have made him valuable, from a research point of view – watching someone actually move from non-believer to fully engaged in the subject. It’s surprisingly complicated and a specialised field of psychological study.’ Another pause. ‘The university is funding it. They’re very excited about my work.’
Max didn’t sound particularly excited about it himself, more as though he was beginning to wonder now what the hell he’d let himself in for, with the explosions and the deserted wife. Complications that he couldn’t even have contemplated when he’d started work on the Fortune House.
He stopped talking and, for a moment, the only sound was the wind shuffling through the heather, as though embarrassed. ‘You actually seem interested,’ he said finally. ‘Most people wander off halfway through that last bit.’
‘I am. It’s not something I’ve ever thought about before, ghosts and why people see them,’ I said honestly. ‘But I’m really going to give it some serious thought now. Probably at about three o’clock in the morning, thanks very much.’
Max grinned. ‘Sorry about that.’
I couldn’t help but smile back. He sounded so unabashed after scaring me to death, it was amusing.
‘But why would Grant come out here in the middle of the night?’ Jenna’s voice from behind us had a top note of wail in it. ‘He didn’t say anything, he told me he had something to do, got up and…’ She tailed off into snuffles again.
Max turned round to look at her. ‘Maybe he had seen something. People on their way home, coming past the house, have reported things – it’s a shortcut down the dale,’ he explained to me. ‘The Fortunes were a bit territorial, didn’t like people on their land, apparently. Old Mr Fortune used to chase them off with a shotgun if he saw them, but you know what people are like. That didn’t stop locals on their way back from the pub cutting through the bottom of the yard there.’ He turned and pointed. I looked, although I didn’t know why, there was no yard left to see, just the grassy expanse where we’d had our picnic. ‘And it’s quite close to a footpath.’
‘It can’t have been much fun for them, out here, though.’ I looked around at the way the rocks broke the thin soil and the absence of anything else. ‘Scraping a living and both their children having grown up and gone. Why didn’t they move into town?’
‘Stubbornness, I suspect.’ Max went closer to the wrecked house. ‘And it was their home.’
‘Did they ever complain about it being haunted?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Nothing I’ve found suggests that. No, actually, there was one report from a neighbour, someone who used to call in now and again.’
‘A neighbour?’ I looked around pointedly at the lack of anything approaching another house. ‘Living in what, a tent?’
‘There were other houses out here then.’ He gave me another smile. ‘Lime kiln workers, other farmers. This was quite a busy place up until the early seventies, you know.’
I let the silence, the air heavy with nothing but bees and the wind, do the sarcasm for me, and he went on. ‘The neighbour said that the Fortunes were always a bit jittery in the house, once John had left. Didn’t like letting people come in. And the place felt dark and oppressive, there was an “atmosphere”, apparently.’
‘Well, that’s gone,’ I said. ‘Along with everything else. Can you have atmosphere, when there’s nothing to be atmospheric in?’
Max actually laughed at that. ‘Don’t you feel that this whole dale has a kind of ambience? A weird sort of mood?’
I let the air flow around me and tried to feel something. ‘Not really. If anything, it’s a bit too try-hard, with all the rocks and the trees and shadows and stuff. It’s a bit like those lads in town who wear big trainers and talk like roadmen and pretend to be in street gangs. You just know that they’re all called Simon and their dad drives a BMW.’
‘Right…’ Max looked around him. ‘I’m not sure I can ever do any more research here now.’
I made a face. ‘Sorry about that,’ I said, echoing his earlier words. ‘But you’re right, it does feel lonely here. Isolated. No wonder Alethia left at fifteen.’
‘And her brother left when he got to a similar age.’
‘Ah, the blissful rural life,’ I said, and my tone was so weighted that Max raised his eyebrows.
‘You sound a bit cynical.’
‘Thirty-four years living in Pickering, listening to the tourists talking about getting a little holiday place up here, and thinking that I bet living through a few Yorkshire Februaries would change their minds.’
‘Ah. Yes, the attractions of horizontal sleet and daylight that only lasts five minutes.’ Max was smiling again. He seemed to have forgiven me for not being able to feel ‘atmosphere’, whatever that was.
Jenna made ‘throat clearing’ noises. She must have heard the story of the Fortune House so many times by now that there was no charm to it any more.
‘Do you want me to get the camera off the bike? There’s only about another hour before the sun starts to drop behind the hill and you won’t get the light. And I promised to show Alice around the site, properly.’
‘It’s fine, Jen. I need the long shadows anyway.’ Another look flicked at me. ‘I’m bringing some groups up this week. Before they come, one group gets shown pictures taken in the half-dark, all brooding and gaunt, and the other group has the daylight sunny pictures.’
‘So you’re trying to influence what they see before they even get here?’
The look Max was giving me changed. Up until now it had been almost amused, almost light-hearted. Now he tilted his head as though to change his angle of regard. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You get that?’
I was interested. I hated to admit it, because I didn’t want to be interested in Max Allbright, with his shiny hair and his long legs and his work out here. But this was intriguing. ‘What else do you do?’
Behind us, Jenna made a sort of ‘humph’ noise and started rummaging in the bags on the back of the bike. Max sat down on the cropped grass and looked up at me. ‘Well, I have to have a control group who know nothing about the place – they’re told we’re coming up on a photography session. I do photography, you see, alongside the whole…’ He waved a hand, meant to indicate, presumably, a haunted house investigation site rather than implying that he routinely blew things up. ‘There are questionnaires for them to fill in before and after. That was one of Grant’s jobs, handing them out. It was good having him do it because it kept me at one remove, if you see what I mean.’
‘So nobody suspected your underlying motives? I can see how that might influence a control group.’
Over Max’s shoulder, Jenna was jerking her head at me and I remembered why I’d really agreed to come and that basking in the glory that was Max Allbright’s attention was merely a side effect. ‘Anyway. Jenna’s going to show me around a bit, if that’s all right.’
He looked taken aback again. ‘Well, yes, of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’
I couldn’t think of a single reply to that apart from ‘I might scare all the ghosts away’, but he’d said that ghosts weren’t the point anyway, so I ignored him and went over to where Jenna was rotating with anticipation at the thought of actually investigating something.
‘He’s all right really, Max,’ she said. ‘He’s just a bit pompous. And overprotective. And a wuss about bikes.’
‘That’s quite a long list of drawbacks for someone who’s “all right really”,’ I said without thinking as we walked closer to the demolished remains of the house. ‘And at least he has a sense of humour.’
‘I suppose he does.’ Jenna stopped and turned around. ‘But he’s my brother. I’m contractually obliged to find him an insufferable dick at times.’ She flashed me a smile and it was a proper relaxed, uncomplicated smile, which made her look a lot like Max. ‘But thank you for coming, despite him, Alice. I’m really very grateful. It’s nice to have someone else who understands how I’m feeling. Why I want to be here.’
I cleared my throat. ‘So. What are we looking for?’ I spared the blackened remains of brickwork a quick glance. ‘There’s not much left to investigate.’
Instantly the purpose seemed to flow out of Jenna and her shoulders resumed their slump. ‘I don’t know.’ She sounded defeated again. ‘Anything. Anything. Just some clue as to why Grant came up here that night.’
‘How did he get here?’ I asked idly.
‘He borrowed the bike. The police found it up here and brought it back. That was how I found out about… what happened.’
I had a sudden image of the police on my doorstep. Jenna, as a girlfriend, wouldn’t have been accorded that dignity. ‘I’m sorry.’ A loose brick under my hand broke in two and then crumbled. I sifted the dust, unthinking. ‘I didn’t know Grant could ride a motorbike?’
‘Neither did I. Oooh, do you think that’s a clue? I mean, it must have been something urgent to make him take my bike! It’s not really been the same since, either.’
‘Where’s his car?’
‘He sold it. Didn’t need it, he said.’
I looked sideways at Jenna. She was scrambling over some outlying rock, past a tattered section of police tape, and didn’t seem to be worried. ‘So how was he getting to jobs?’
‘He was doing all his work virtually.’ Jenna panted into place atop a pointy boulder. ‘Didn’t need to be there in person, he said, remote working was better. Anyway. This bit here was the outhouse. You’re standing in the middle of the kitchen. Can you see anything that looks – odd?’
I scanned the whole gulley. At the bottom of the site, I could see Max, camera in hand, resting his back against a whippy little birch tree. I tore my eyes away and looked elsewhere. Over the snaggly collection of loose bricks, shattered glass and into the dip where the cellar had been, where smashed concrete, like icebergs in a sea of rubble, jutted angular and grey. It looked timeworn and established, as though there had never been anything more than a pile of debris here. I could not imagine what the house would have looked like, occupying the middle of this little valley, a lone dwelling in the belly of the hills. A few sparse bushes paddled against the wind for a second and then were still, and a collection of ornithology fluttered skyward to become dark dots against the bright sky.
‘There’s nothing to see.’ I tried to sound gentle. ‘And what if what Grant came up for was in the house? It’s all gone, Jenna. He’s gone.’
She sighed a sigh so deep it sounded as though her lungs were turning inside out. ‘I know.’ A half-turn, so that she was looking out across the valley. ‘Really. I do know. I feel so helpless. I mean, I thought I knew Grant pretty well, I thought we were a proper partnership. But he didn’t tell me what it was that he came up here for and I want to know why he would keep a secret like that.’
Graceful and balletic, she jumped down off the boulder and came over to me. I instantly felt as though my legs retracted and my bottom expanded so I stood like a boiled egg beside Kendall Jenner.
‘Could he have been meeting someone?’
‘Another woman?’ Jenna sounded as though she’d already thought of this one. ‘But why would he have to come all the way out here to do it? It wasn’t as though I followed him around all day, he could have met someone in town during the day.’
‘But you said he got rid of his car? How would he have got there?’ I couldn’t somehow conjure the image of Grant jumping on the 128 bus to go on illicit excursions.
‘Oh, there are cars he could have used,’ Jenna said vaguely. ‘And besides… Grant… I can’t see it being someone else. Not like that, anyway.’ She flicked me a look, as though she hoped I hadn’t understood, and I fought hard to keep my expression neutral. Grant had never been the most sexual of men and it looked as though it hadn’t been entirely my fault. A little weight of guilt that had hung from my heart like a pendulum, swinging from ‘he didn’t really fancy me’ to ‘he probably had low testosterone’, snapped off and fell.
‘But I doubt he was admiring the view.’ I scanned the little site once more, trying not to look over to where Max had set a tripod low down against the grass and was crouching to take pictures.
Jenna picked up a burned brick and turned it over. ‘You admit it’s a mystery?’ She scraped at the blackened surface with a nail. ‘You can see why I think it’s not as straightforward as everyone seems to believe?’
I looked out again. Wind-bent grasses hissed the passage of a breeze that also hushed its way through the branches of the weedy birches. Nature hummed into the otherwise silent air. Imagining Grant out here was like trying to imagine a killer whale at a Pilates class. ‘It does seem out of character,’ I said. ‘But I hadn’t seen him for years. Nobody is going to take any notice of anything I say. Have you mentioned your doubts to the police?’
‘I’m the bereaved girlfriend. Plus I – well, when my previous relationship broke up, and then when we… when I miscarried…’ She stopped and then looked at me as though trying to work out whether I was trustworthy enough to tell her secrets to. ‘I had a few mental health issues,’ she said to the ground. ‘I mean, I’m fine now, I’m better, but it’s the kind of history that follows you, if you see what I mean.’
Max had packed away the tripod now. He was sitting, looking dark and moody, by a pile of stone that might be the remains of a wall or a small cairn. ‘So the police are just dismissing your concerns.’
‘Yes! But you feel it too, don’t you? How wrong it all was for Grant to be here in the middle of the night?’
Shadows gathered and flitted. The sun was dipping behind the rising shoulder of hill behind us, throwing long shades from small objects. The heather became pillowy outlines, and the trees took on long, sinister shapes against the sky.
‘It is odd, yes.’ It was all I could say. ‘Look, Max is packing up. Maybe we’d better go back.’
Jenna dropped the brick she’d been picking at and looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she felt encouraged by my agreement or as though I were dismissing her concerns, which was my aim. I hadn’t wanted to slap down her theories, but, on the other hand, I didn’t want drive her any further into TV Mystery Land. After all, it was odd, that was no lie. But there were also plenty of believable reasons he could have been out here, if you ignored Grant’s general hatred of the outdoors. After all, they’d both suffered the shock of the loss of their baby. It had caused Jenna’s mental health to lapse, maybe it had driven Grant to seek out the peace and solitude of the moors at night? Stranger things had happened. But I didn’t want to drag all that up, remind her of a time so painful that it had sent her back to an eating disorder. Maybe my mother had been right with her ‘least said, soonest mended’ mindset.
‘I’ll drop you back at your car.’ Jenna disconsolately turned her back on the ruined Fortune House and led the way back across the little valley.
‘You can take Max first if he wants.’
She gave me a look I couldn’t fathom. ‘He’ll be fine here on his own. He likes sitting here while it gets dark. It’s probably all part of being a psychology professor. I’ve met some of his colleagues. They’re all rather prone to wearing too much black and trying to look mysterious.’
Max didn’t even look up as we returned and climbed onto the bike. His eyes were full of the dale, staring out across the fold in the hills and the tossed-about brickwork. He’d lain the camera down beside him and didn’t seem to register us leaving by so much as a twitch of the hand.
But then, I thought, as I peeled myself off the bike seat, flapped a farewell to Jenna and got back into my car, did I really expect any different?
Personal communication, first person, Bertram Salter, experiencer of event. Transcribed from recorded conversation.
It were round 1970 or such. Me and the boys were getting in a hay crop from the daleside, over near to the Fortune place, and I’d warned the lads not to get over onto their land. Old Jack Fortune, he were a devil if he thought his land were being trespassed; he’d come out with his gun, waving it about and firing. He were never really right since his lad went off to that London, he’d been a right mardy bugger before that too, but once his kids left, he just got worse and worse.
So we’re turning the hay and putting it up onto the trailer. I were out on the far hedgerow. I were a lad of about fifteen, and there were a couple of lasses out with us that day, so we were all having a bit of a flirt and not paying too much mind to what we were doing, but then I realised that I needed to piss. And obviously I doesn’t want to do it right there in front of the lasses, so I puts my rake down and I went off t’other side of hedge, into the little thicket of birches and firs over there, between us and the Fortune place.
I gets in there and has my piss. Now, we’ve been working since dawn and it were a hot old day up there and we’d taken some cider, so I reckon that the dark and the cool of the wood made me come over a bit strange, because I suddenly comes over a bit mazed and I had to sit down. I don’t know how to tell it, really, it sounds a bit strange, but it were like the whole wood went black just then. Like it were the middle of the night. I’m sitting with my back against this tree, waiting for the feeling to pass, and it’s so dark that I can’t even see the far edge of the wood and it’s not a big forest or nothing, about half an acre of copse that Jack planted up during the last war. I should have been able to see right clear through to the field where we were haymaking.
All of a sudden, this man runs past me. Quick as you like, I hardly had time to notice him. But he’s running, running through the trees like he’s running for his life. And then I realises that, for all he’s running, he’s making no sound. He should have been crashing along, going through branches and breaking twigs and such, but there’s nothing. And then he’s gone. Not gone out of the wood, just – gone, like he fell into a big hole in the ground, disappeared.
I don’t mind telling you, it put fair put the wind up me. That weren’t no flesh-and-blood person, not running so quiet like and gone like someone put a candle out. I came over all cold and I shut my eyes and I sat there and then all the sound came back and I could hear the birds singing again and the lads shouting in the field, and when I opened my eyes again, the daylight were back, and the wood were just the little copse I’ve known near enough all my life. Well, I ran out of there like the hounds of hell were after me and everyone come over cos I were white and shaking and kind of trying to get my words out to tell them what I seen. Mr Sleightholme, he were in charge of the haying, he sent me home after that. Said I’d probably got a touch too much of the sun and I should wear a hat and knock off drinking the cider while I were working. But you asked for anyone who’d seen anything up round the Fortune place, and that were what happened to me.