Work was quiet that week. People tend not to think about their windows when the weather is sunny and warm, so new orders were thin on the ground and my main responsibility was making sure our team of fitters were in the right place, replacing the windows of the cottage at number nine, rather than stripping out the unwilling windows at number eight amid the shouted admonishments of the residents – it had been known to happen.
But I found I was bored, as though my exposure to the Allbrights had flipped some kind of switch in me, and made the familiarity of spreadsheets and emails no longer enough. Chatting idly with Malcolm or Sheila, who ran the boss’s office in a rather old-fashioned way, no longer had any charm, nor did the daily cake run to the baker’s in the Market Place. My mind kept coming back to Grant, to Jenna, to that house on the moors. And, yes, all right, to a little bit of pleasant daydreaming about Max Allbright too, but that got pushed into the background of general musing.
What the hell had Grant been doing up on the moors that night? Had he seen something he couldn’t explain? If so, why had he not taken it to Max? Was it something he didn’t want Max to know about? But what the hell could that have been, given that he’d been helping Max out at the site?
All I could come up with was that Grant had been there for a reason he didn’t want Max, and presumably Jenna either, to know about. Something he felt he’d had to hide from them both. What on earth could have been so mysterious that he couldn’t even mention it to his girlfriend? None of it made any sense.
I browsed around on the internet but didn’t really learn any more than Max had already told me about the history of the Fortune House, although I did find some of Max’s published articles, which I read with a touch of wonder. I actually knew someone who’d got stuff published! Whose work appeared, peppered with words like ‘peer review pending’ and ‘possible patholigisation of psycho-traumatic incidents’, some of which I had to look up.
The articles were interesting. They seemed to boil down to ‘people see what they expect to see’, influenced by not just what they’d been told about a site but also by their past experiences and upbringing. Total disbelievers generally saw shadows and sought a logical explanation for anything odd that happened, whereas those primed to see ghosts saw ‘mystery and the inexplicable’ at the same place and time. I began to follow up references and found myself forgetting about the mystery of what Grant had been up to, in favour of reading the journals of the Institute for Parapsychological Research and the writings of James Randi. It was fascinating.
Unfortunately, all the tales of mysterious shapes and voices and figures that appeared and disappeared wouldn’t leave my brain and I found myself wide awake in the middle of Friday night, listening to every creak on the landing in a fever of dark expectation, much as I’d told Max I would. My little terraced house was well over two hundred years old – what if ghosts really did exist? What if they hung around places they had known in life, and were, even now, massing at the top of my stairs?
I turned resolutely away from the wall by the door and faced the wall that lay between me and Next Door Right, through which I could hear the faint wail of the baby crying for its three o’clock feed. Or was it? Was it a real baby? Or the spectre of a long-mourned child, dead in some outbreak of typhoid or cholera but doomed forever to cry out for its parents in the deep watches of the night?
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Alice! This was no time for a dormant, and previously unsuspected, imagination to come roaring to the fore. I sat up and put on the light.
It was that peculiar hour that is either very, very late or much too early, and outside all was quiet, apart from the slight buzz of the street lighting and the distant sound of cats fighting. No traffic ruffled the air, even the early workers hadn’t got going yet, and the air hung heavy and oppressive under the night. I was never going to get back to sleep. I dared the possibly phantom-strewn landing and went downstairs to make myself a cup of tea and turn all the lights on to try to drive the dreams away.
Whilst I was waiting for the kettle to boil and tidying the kitchen in a desultory way, I had a sudden thought. I could drive up and look at the site of the Fortune House in the dark. Then I’d have a chance to see if there was anything that could have drawn Grant’s attention that only lingered in the crepuscular shadows or under the depths of midnight. And if I found nothing, then that would help to reassure Jenna. I could check it out and report back that there were no ghosts, no weirdly moving lights or haunting wails; no half-formed creatures creeping through the low grasses…
… actually, no. The idea was far too scary. It would be dark and dangerous, and I might twist my ankle and lie there until someone found me, a rotted corpse, flyblown and – for goodness’ sake! Stop it! There was nothing there. Nothing existed out there on the moor that I couldn’t personally poke in the eye. Fear lay all in the mind, wasn’t that the central tenet of Max’s research?
Before I could talk myself out of it, I put a jacket on over my pyjamas, locked up the house and took a firm grip on my phone, in case I did twist my ankle. It was bad enough Max seeing me all pink and sweaty, but the possibility of his falling over my hefty corpse didn’t bear thinking about. Then I got into the car and drove up onto the moor.
I didn’t park in the pull-in. Instead, I drove carefully along until I found the beginning of the rutted track down which Jenna had taken me on the bike, and parked there. It still meant a good mile of stumbling progress over tiny snares of bush, but knowing that nobody could see me through the thick dark made it easier to accept the constant falling over. By the time I arrived at the lip of ground where the moor dropped into the gulley, my pyjama trousers were studded with fragments of undergrowth and my hair had come down from its night-time bun in wisps and straggles. I was puffing, too.
The sky stretched, star-strewn and perfect, above me. I’d got my night vision now too, so I could make out the line of the old house amid the shattered remains. Somehow it was easier to see what would have been, in the dark. That line along there, that would have been the outside wall, and Jenna had told me that the little square at the back had been the outhouse. A tattered bunting of wallpaper showed where an internal wall had once stretched across the middle and not been completely obliterated by the blast. I’d thought it was quiet in town, but the quiet up here was something solid. It felt as though my ears had been stuffed with the night. There was a faint whistle from the wind passing through the dale and a shiver of leaves, but that was all.
I sat down with my back to a boulder and my knees under my chin. The thought of Grant up here, searching either for something corporeal or ethereal, still didn’t compute. I couldn’t see anything that might have called him from a warm bed to this silent, shadow-filled scoop in the landscape. Plus, it was cold, even on this summer night. I could almost convince myself that there was something supernatural about the chill, except that the practicality I’d been born with assured me that sitting on the ground in the small hours wearing only a thin coat and pyjamas this high up was never going to be balmy. The shadows that seemed to move, masses of blackness that flowed and writhed around the stumps of wall still standing, weren’t paranormal visitors either. They were the result of what little light there was from the stars and the falling moon being blocked by brickwork and flickering in the breeze.
No. There was nothing here.
I stood up and ricocheted off something behind me. With a mind full of ghosts and skin already pricked to goose pimples with cold, I had a brief moment of total terror. My mouth felt as though it were being sucked towards my stomach, my heart squeezed its way up into the veins of my neck and all my limbs flailed a panicked retreat, tumbling me over backwards into the heather.
And then the very unparanormal swearing started.
‘What the fuck…? Who the bloody hell are you? And what the fuck are you doing up here?’
It was Max. I’d only gone and cannoned off the person I least wanted to walk into whilst in my current state of sartorial inelegance and with middle-of-the-night hair. Hell, I’d even have preferred some kind of supernatural visitation than this very corporeal incident. ‘It’s me. Alice,’ I said, trying to stem the torrent of abuse he was currently unleashing in my direction. ‘I came up here to… well, Jenna said Grant…’ I tailed off. There wasn’t really a good, sensible reason for my being here, I now realised. I’d let the generalised megrims of a three o’clock in the morning waking get the better of me. ‘I just am,’ I finished. ‘There’s no law against it, is there?’
The previously apparently unperturbable Max was staggering around clutching at his chest as though he was having some kind of cardiac incident, but at least he’d stopped swearing now. ‘You – Alice?’
‘Yes. Alice Donaldson, Grant’s ex-wife.’
‘Yes, I know who you are.’ Another moment of fist to the sternum and he flopped to the heather, a shadowy outline in front of me. ‘It’s more where you are. Up here? In the middle of the night?’
‘It’s four o’clock, actually,’ I said, trying to force myself to be factual and yet helpful at the same time.
‘Still with the where, rather than the when.’ He sounded rather breathless. I wondered if I’d driven the wind out of him with the body-impact. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘But you’ve only ever seen me here.’ I couldn’t shut my mouth up. It was trying to follow the ‘reasonable’ right to its conclusion, when I really wanted it to stop talking and let me breathe through it for a moment. ‘So, for all you know, I live down the dale.’
Max’s face was a pale circle. He was wearing black and with his dark hair it was giving him the look of a levitating head. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You live in Pickering, Jenna told me she’d been to your house. And that you were very kind to her. Thank you.’ He clambered to his feet. It was, I was glad to see, a very inelegant manoeuvre.
‘That’s all right. She was very unhappy, and with what you told me about her mental health, I didn’t like to just dismiss her, even if I think she’s talking rubbish about Grant.’
‘It was still kind. Given that you and she have a somewhat complicated reason for knowing one another.’ A pause. ‘You do seem a very kind person, Alice.’ His voice was softer now.
I was flustered and it made me babble. ‘No more so than the average person, I don’t think. And I do have frequent daydreams of doing Malcolm a mischief when he “helpfully” tidies up my paperwork, which definitely do not contain any kindness. More a degree of stuffing him in his own filing cabinet, really.’
‘Well, regardless of that. You still seem kind.’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘But, of course, I don’t know Malcolm. He may be utterly innocent and undeserving of whatever mental punishment you’ve devised.’ A hand came out towards me. ‘Why are you lying down?’
I took it and hauled myself to my feet, not worrying for once about my weight and how much effort it might have cost him. ‘I fell over. It’s really dark out here and I didn’t see you.’
‘Right. And who’s Malcolm?’
‘Malcolm?’
‘You were just talking about him. Is he here with you?’ Max’s shadowed outline seemed to survey the surroundings as though in search of a lost accountant.
Now I was upright I could see that he was wearing a dark trench coat, black boots and a black beanie style hat. He looked like a manga version of a paranormal investigator. ‘No! And why are you here?’
‘Um, it’s my job?’ There was a tone of almost sarcastic amusement that instantly made me feel every inch of my sloth-printed pyjama-clad body.
‘But your job is writing about the psychology of ghost hunters, isn’t it? How much of that can you do at four in the morning on a deserted moor?’ My reply was snippy in consequence. ‘There isn’t anyone to analyse.’
‘There’s you,’ came the equally snippy reply. ‘And, possibly, the mysterious Malcolm. Who either is or isn’t here, I’ve not quite got to the bottom of that one.’
‘Malcolm is our accounts person. He is most definitely not here.’ I was beginning to feel a bit baffled. ‘I only mentioned him because – actually I’m not really sure how he came into the conversation now.’
‘So what did you expect to see out here?’ The sarcasm was gone now, his tone was pure amusement, almost as though he was enjoying himself.
As the adrenaline of our physical encounter drained out of me, so did my attitude and my energy. After all, I’d hardly slept, it was the small hours of the morning and here I was, in my PJs, facing off with a man I had only just reasoned myself out of having a crush on. It was painful. ‘Nothing,’ I said, heavily. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘Then I’d guess that’s exactly what you did see. I’ve got a PhD in this, you know.’
Jenna was right, I thought. He was pompous. So certain of himself and his rightness, sure that his assumptions were correct. Just because he was writing a book, that didn’t make him any better than me, really, did it?
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, wanting to puncture his certainty. ‘I thought I saw something moving, over there, for a second.’
‘A shape? A figure?’
Again that tiredness, that rearing up of the part of my personality that made me wonder what the hell I was doing, trying to talk to people more intelligent than me. ‘Shadows,’ I said. ‘Just the dark.’
‘Nothing that might have brought Grant out here?’ Max was looking at me. Although his face was little more than a circle, slightly paler than the sky, I could feel his close attention.
‘I don’t know the place well enough to know,’ I said, matter-of-factly. ‘It doesn’t look like the kind of place that drug-dealers would use – too far out from civilisation. And anyone hiding anything out here would run the risk of ramblers falling over it, which rather rules out the chance of it being used to stash stolen goods. And besides, we’re talking about Grant here, not Hercule Poirot.’ I waved a hand at the night. ‘It’s all just shadows.’
More silence. I couldn’t see where he was looking, if his eyes had gone in the direction I’d indicated or whether he was staring out over the moor in general. Then he spoke again, and his voice was different now, it had lost the gently humorous, almost teasing, edge. ‘Jenna’s really unhappy,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do. She got a little better after she brought you up here, but I’m worried about her again. She’s so caught up in what she thinks Grant was doing up here – she told me that you both came up to “investigate”.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to encourage her.’ I felt better talking to him when his tone was more normal. ‘But she does have something of a point. What was Grant doing up here?’
‘It’s the explosion that bothers me.’ Max shrugged himself down into his big coat. I was starting to really feel the cold now. Cotton pyjamas aren’t really moorland wear, and I was praying to any deities which might be hanging around out here that he hadn’t noticed the cute sloths. ‘Some of those propane cylinders had been up here for years. I left them because we sometimes had overnighters up in the house and it was useful to be able to cook breakfast in the mornings and put a bit of heat through the place now and again. In a somewhat more controlled fashion than eventually happened,’ he added, turning to look over the remnants of house.
‘So the cylinders were full?’
‘I got them replaced when they ran out.’ He turned around now, I saw the flick of his coat and hair. ‘Alethia left this place to me, you see.’ Hands in pockets, he was just an outline against the lightening sky. ‘If there’d been any insurance, I’m fairly sure the police would still have me in an interview room, but as it stands, there’s no profit in the destruction.’ A sigh. ‘It’s a shame. I could have lived here.’
‘Was there electricity?’
He shook his head, and I saw the hair flick again. ‘Nope. Only the gas, powering everything. No mains water or sewerage either.’
I had a momentary image of this dark man wandering around a large, unlit house. Holding a candle. ‘How Victorian.’
‘Well, yeah, I would have had to run mains power out here, of course.’ The dismissive way he said this told me that he came from money. From privilege. From the sort of background where dropping a few thousand pounds on electrifying an isolated property miles from the nearest supply was more a matter of inconvenience than a financial impossibility.
‘So it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Grant came up here, went into the house, lit a match or a candle and…’ I raised both hands in an ‘explosive’ gesture. ‘Which is what the police think happened.’
‘And that’s exactly what happened.’ Max sounded fierce now. ‘It has to be. But Jenna won’t have it. I think, deep down, she knows it’s as simple as that. But she wants there to be more to it, she wants it to be a mystery, and that’s what’s so worrying.’
‘Where’s your car?’ I asked suddenly. ‘I didn’t see one up at the track. How did you get here?’
A faint tinge of brightness was highlighting the hills now, I could see. The merest dusting of illumination, as though someone was very slowly turning up a dimmer switch on the world. I could see Max more clearly, see the detail of his eyes and his chin. He was looking at me, but thankfully I didn’t blush, although I did shuffle the sloths about a bit to try to conceal the worst of the cuteness.
‘I’m parked a bit further down,’ he said at last. ‘I like walking over the moors at night.’
‘How very Heathcliff of you,’ I said without thinking.
‘I like to think I’m nicer to my women.’
Now the blush came roaring in, heating my chin, my cheeks and my forehead, as though I’d been standing under a sun lamp. Even though he hadn’t meant anything by it, I still blushed. God, I felt pathetic.
‘Well,’ I said, awkward as usual. ‘I ought to go.’ Hopefully the oncoming dawn still wasn’t bright enough to reveal my pinkness. Maybe, I thought optimistically, it was adding some interesting shading to my face. Giving me cheekbones. ‘Now I’m positive there’s nothing mysterious going on up here at night.’
‘Apart from you and the invisible Malcolm roaming the moors.’ There it was, that slight tone of teasing again. Weirdly, it stopped me feeling so overwhelmed by Max, made him more human.
‘Obviously.’ I tugged my inadequate jacket further towards my knees. ‘Come along, Invisible Malcolm, let’s go.’
Max laughed, a proper deep laugh, as though I’d been really funny, rather than responding to his ridiculousness. Then he said, ‘Come over,’ really quickly, as though he’d only just thought the words and they were bursting out of his mouth without any consideration. ‘Tomorrow. Oh, well, today really, I suppose. Come and talk to Jenna,’ he added, as though I might have thought he was inviting me to see him. ‘You’ve got that mix of pragmatism and empathy that might help her to get to grips with losing Grant and understanding that he wasn’t up to anything out here.’
Had I? Pragmatism and empathy? ‘Well, I…’ I hastily tried to think of a previous engagement but couldn’t come up with anything. I had been going to wash the sofa covers, but as I wasn’t taking them to the local river and banging them on a rock, that was hardly an all-day excuse. Plus he really did sound worried about his sister. ‘All right.’
‘Here.’ A tiny square of card thrust out from one of his pockets under my nose. ‘This is us. See you at about three?’
Jenna had said she was living with her brother, hadn’t she? I took the card without looking at it and pushed it into my pocket, then shivered. There was a chill down my spine – whether to do with the sharp coolness of the early hour, a particularly localised breeze or the stern words I was having with myself about noticing Max’s fingers brush mine as he handed me the card, I didn’t know.
‘You’re not really dressed for it up here, are you?’ He took a couple of steps back and raised his eyebrows. ‘In fact, aren’t those your pyja…?’
‘Thank you, tell Jenna I will see her this afternoon,’ I said, as haughtily as I could manage. The light level was increasing fast, and my nightwear was becoming far more apparent. Any minute now, the sun would come up and I would be highlighted in all my jungle-animal glory. Some of the sloths were wearing nightcaps and I didn’t think I could stand the humiliation. I turned around to begin the stomp back across the meadow and up the track to my car, feeling the cold beginning to spread between my shoulder blades now. Maybe I could run, to warm myself up? But the thought that Max could be right behind me, watching me, and my bra-less state that would mean discomfort and the sound of slapping flesh, kept me to a decorous walk.
I’d got about a hundred metres when there was a flash of black beside me. ‘Here.’ A sudden draping warmth descended over my shoulders. ‘You look frozen. Bring it back later.’ And then Max was gone, as though he’d evaporated into the scenery, leaving me with his coat wrapped around me and the birds beginning their early-morning vocal routines from the gorse bushes and the heather. I stood for a moment, as though I suspected a joke, then carefully, without turning around, continued on my way over the stunted grass. I was almost sure I heard a voice carried on a snatch of wind say, ‘Nicer than Heathcliff!’ but I couldn’t be sure whether it had been Max or my inner monologue.
I arrived back at the road, in a state of wonder that Max had invited me over. It had hardly been ‘assignation of the century’, I was going there for Jenna, but even so, it was the closest I’d come to being asked out for some time. I wanted to hold that feeling for a little bit longer. A gorgeous man had given me his number and his coat, had teased me lightly, and in my world, that was up there with ‘being swept off my feet’, fanning the embers of my imagination into the tiniest spark of potential.
Then I sighed as the weight of reality and practicality settled itself around me again and forced that little spark back into the darkest regions of night-time fancy. The sun was coming up now and I was profoundly glad of the coverage of the large coat. I hadn’t really considered dawn when I’d set out, and my nightwear was clearly visible to any and all cars coming down the moorland road as I headed back to my parking space. I would have looked like an escaped hospital patient hiking along in my quickly slipped on shoes and inadequate jacket, but the flapping length of the big black coat covered the worst. I probably still looked like I was heading for the nearest soup kitchen for a good meal, but at least I was decently covered.
The sun breasted the distant rise of hills and inched its way vertically, clearing the last of the night from the sky and making the tarmac steam. I stood and watched morning arrive over the undulating acres of moorland. Birds began to flutter and scoop above me, the occasional car dashed past, ripping noisy holes in the fabric of the quiet dawn and the wind carried fragments of torn sentences from early walkers. The dark, loaded atmosphere of the night had gone. Even the site of the Fortune House was invisible from here, beyond a hump of hill and dropped into its little gulley. No wonder nobody had noticed the destruction for days.
I gathered Max’s coat more closely around me and got into the driver’s seat. The coat smelled of strangeness, of different cupboards and houses. A hint of orange peel, a smoky smell like incense – I realised that I’d dropped my chin under the collar when the stiff fabric scratched against my cheek and pulled myself upright again with a quick look to see if anyone had noticed. There was no one to notice. Just a sheep that had wandered out to sit in the middle of the road, placidly chewing its breakfast.
I made a face at myself in the mirror, and drove home.