The address on the card said ‘Hatherleigh Hall’. It sounded grand but I’d never heard of it, and my satnav took me down lanes of decreasing size until I ended up in a village on the outskirts of York. I say ‘village’, but the whole place had the uniform look of an estate, built by a lord of the manor to house his cap-doffing underlings in slightly less squalor than might otherwise have been the case, and I became increasingly uneasy as the coordinates brought me closer and closer to an enormous grey stone building. It had a square and uncompromising frontage, with the occasional pillar breaking the lines, as though it had been designed by someone handy with a ruler and uncertain about curves. Max and Jenna lived here?
Maybe the place had been divided into those posh flats that historic buildings all seemed to be turned into these days. High ceilings, moulded cornices and an impossibility of dusting; all carefully furnished and decorated ‘in keeping’, and horribly expensive. I reassured myself with the prosaic thought of Max standing on a chair to remove cobwebs from a ceiling rose and then berated myself for thinking of him at all, but somehow my imagination wouldn’t put Jenna and dusting together. She seemed too ethereal for housework. Born to languish, was Jenna, drooping pale and solitary on a chaise, with a small handkerchief and a slight cough. But then I remembered her confident in leathers, riding that powerful motorbike, and wondered which version of Jenna Grant had seen and fallen for.
There was an absence of marked parking bays on the expanse of gravel outside the columned and porticoed front of Hatherleigh Hall, so I left my car lowering the tone beside a Range Rover and went to the front door. There was no row of buzzers and intercoms either. It made me uneasy. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to knock and wait for a butler or fling the door open and yell, ‘Flat number nine, I’m here!’ There was something about the formality of the building that caused me to hesitate, but the informality of the scattered parking let me know there were people about, they just weren’t here. In the end, I spotted a huge bell-pull behind a pillar, and gave it a couple of diffident tugs.
Nothing happened for long enough for me to think I should get back in the car, when Jenna appeared around the side of the house, wearing an apron which was covered in flour. ‘Oh, hi, Alice! Sorry, I was baking, we don’t really use the front door much these days, come around the side.’
She was holding her hands out in front of her, scattering grains and gobbets of dough as she came, and I wondered if this had been the Jenna that Grant had found so intriguing. He’d loved food but hated cooking and I’d always wondered whether it had been my winning ways with a chocolate muffin that had swung him round to marrying me. I followed the trail of flour and finally caught up with her heading in through a small door in the side of the enormous building. ‘You live here? The whole house?’
We pattered on down a long corridor lined with paintings and tapestries and eventually ended up in a large kitchen, where the bronze and copper pans gleamed like an outback sky from hangers on the ceiling and everything was super-scale, as though we were Lilliputians trying to make a go of it in the regular world. Jenna filled me in as we went. ‘Well, no, we have a flat upstairs. But we open the house on Sundays in summer, and we start next week, so I’m trying to make a job lot of scones to freeze, for the teashop.’ Jenna knocked a stray wisp of hair away from her face with the back of a wrist. ‘Sit down over there, I’ll get these in the oven and then I’ll take you up. Max is around somewhere, he said he’d asked you over, and I really should repay you for your hospitality the other week when I dropped in unannounced.’
I sat and enjoyed the smell of fresh cooking and industrial cleaner. Jenna was following a recipe on an iPad, trying to scroll down the page without touching the screen with floury fingers, and it gave me a sudden idea. ‘Jenna, did you check Grant’s computer?’
‘Mmmm?’ She added some milk to a bowl. ‘What for?’
‘Well, he may have had something on there that gave him a reason for going up to the site on the moors.’
Now she was focused on me. ‘You’ve been doing more investigating? Alice, that’s wonderful! Did you find anything out?’ In her eagerness, she picked up the iPad, smeared its surface with sticky offshoots of baking, and put it down again to wipe her hands on her apron.
‘Not really.’ Just that it’s really cold on the moors before sunrise, I didn’t add. And your brother isn’t Heathcliff, I didn’t even dare think.
She subsided again and sat on one of the many high wooden stools that dotted the echoey space. The whole room was tiled, and huge scrubbed oak tables took up much of the floorspace, like a cross between a Victorian dairy and a mortuary. ‘The police had a quick look at his computer, but they said there was nothing there.’
‘But did they look thoroughly enough?’
Jenna was picking strings of yeasty flour off her arm. ‘I don’t know. They weren’t here very long, they just switched on his computer, had a quick look at Grant’s things – they were looking for a suicide note, I think, from what I overheard. They didn’t say as much to me, of course.’
‘Could I have a look?’ The police thought it was either an accident or that Grant had blown himself up on purpose, that much was clear. I wondered if they’d gone through his passwords. ‘I mean, I used to know all his logins. He never told me, but I spent so long watching him on the bloody thing…’ I tailed off.
Jenna seemed energised now. ‘Of course! That’s a brilliant idea!’ Her words echoed off the walls, powered by enthusiasm. ‘Let’s go up now!’
‘But you need to get your scones in.’
‘I’ll do them later. They’re scones, not soufflés, they’ll keep.’ And she was off again, me tailing her through obvious servants’ quarters; endless winding corridors and panelled spaces where ancient bells hung rusted and unrung and the floors were stone flagged and uneven. We climbed stairs, jigged around corners formed from walls several feet thick, and eventually burst through a door onto a hallway with actual carpet and where the walls were painted in chalky colours rather than looking as though they suffered from a particularly disfiguring disease.
‘This is our flat.’ Jenna hurtled her way along until we came to an open living space. If I’d expected something boxy and scattered with old newspapers, I was wrong. It was entirely in keeping with the rest of the house, long windows letting in sunlight, billowy white curtains, floor-to-ceiling bookcases and, I was amused to see, plenty of mouldings. Jenna went to a corner, pulled a lever, and what had seemed to be an ordinary piece of walnut furniture folded in on itself to form a desk. There was a laptop in the middle, slightly dusty, and a huge monitor and illuminated keyboard on the top. I presumed the actual computer was in the bottom bit, hidden by Louis XV doors and gilt handles.
‘This is where Grant used to work.’ Jenna stroked the laptop casing gently. ‘We don’t often use this room, so he had it all to himself most of the time.’
This life must be nice, I thought, as I opened the laptop gingerly. I had one or two saucepans I didn’t often use, and the back door didn’t get as much exercise as I’d like, but to have whole rooms you didn’t use? And where was the dust, the smell of shut-in woodwork and damp? This place smelled as though someone had gone berserk with a tin of beeswax recently. Then I realised that Jenna and Max must have a team of cleaners to keep a place this size from becoming ninety per cent cobweb, and felt slightly better.
Praying that Grant had still been set in his ways after six years, I switched on the laptop. When it asked me for a passcode, I typed in his date of birth and everything opened.
‘That’s what the police did.’ Jenna was watching over my shoulder. ‘Grant told me his code, in case it was ever needed.’
All normal. Emails, all standard, basic admin. Some internet orders, work. Nothing suspicious. Nothing on any of the other sites either. I flipped through to check. ‘Did they check his other account?’
Jenna stared at me. ‘What other account?’
I felt my heart drop. Jenna didn’t know. How much did I tell her? Would it make her feel differently about Grant? Oh, what the hell, he was gone anyway… ‘His account under his gaming name? You knew he gamed?’
‘Oh, yes!’ Her laugh had relief in it, as though she’d been as worried as I momentarily had. ‘Every Friday night, online, with his cohort. I thought it was rather sweet.’
At least you got him down to every Friday night, I thought. I’d had to suffer the gaming practically every evening. ‘That Lord of the Rings rip-off game, where they all played characters surviving in the woods and trying to take over the Evil Kingdom?’
Jenna shrugged. ‘It was something like that. I never really got involved, it was Grant’s thing.’
‘Well.’ I typed a few more words, another screen opened up. ‘He had another account under his character name.’
Jenna leaned in closer. ‘LionLord? Gosh, that doesn’t sound much like Grant.’
‘It was the character he played in Wilderness Assault. He had mastery over beasts. Something like that, anyway.’ And, yes, it had been as far removed from real-life Grant as it could be – a bare-thewed, kilted avatar, who could call on the power of the wild to further his aims in the game. Like Jenna, it hadn’t really been my thing, and I’d let him get on with it. I never really understood the allure, but it had, apparently, been really important for Grant never to leave his computer during weekend hours, in case a rival warlord infiltrated their… something or other. I’d glazed over by the time he’d got to this bit of the explanation, and wandered off to stare out of the window at other couples walking hand in hand down the street.
There was a tension in the air between Jenna and me now. A sharpness, as though Jenna was waiting to hate me, waiting for me to show her something that made Grant a little less hers. I wished she wasn’t standing there behind my left shoulder. I wanted to be able to rummage about among his files and filter out anything that could hurt her before she saw it. I was slowly coming to realise that I liked Jenna, with her odd dichotomy between the fragile and easily upset and the bike-riding badass. If there was anything on this computer that might upset her or make her think differently about Grant, I wanted to see it first.
There was nothing. A few messages, emails, all about gaming. I cranked up the big computer and found the same. Absolutely nothing – to, I thought, a suspicious degree.
Jenna breathed out a big sigh. ‘Well. That’s all right, then. You had me worried there, with all that talk of a secret account. Oh, here’s Max.’
Max had evidently been standing in the doorway watching us. Jenna briefly explained what we’d been doing. ‘But there’s nothing there,’ she said, sadly. ‘And now I must go back to my scones for a minute. Max, will you make Alice some tea? I’ll be back as soon as they’re out of the oven.’
I sat awkwardly in front of the keyboard as she left. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to sit in the wrong place or touch the wrong thing and, whilst I’d felt quite at ease up here with Jenna, with Max it suddenly all felt different. Formal. I was worried about knocking antiques with my elbow or ripping the cover of a first edition, as though I’d turned into the Incredible Hulk in the last thirty seconds.
While I pulled myself together, Jenna had gone. I could hear the echoes of her leaving down several floors, scuffing feet on stone, until a final door slam and silence.
The whole house was silent. Apart from the computer and laptop buzzing and beeping in front of me, there was nothing. Even Max, standing beside me, was quiet. Finally, I had to say something.
‘Why do you go up onto the moors to look at haunted houses when you live in something out of an Austen novel? Couldn’t you research ghost hunting round here?’
He pulled up a chair that looked as though it had started its life in a Sheraton catalogue and made its way here via Blenheim and Laura Ashley. ‘Because I have to walk these hallways at three in the morning, when someone’s left a window open or the cat’s got stuck in a sideboard,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘The last thing I want is to have had a bunch of students telling me they’ve seen a dark shape walk through a wall in the dining room when I’ve got to go in there in the dark.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts?’ I turned round rather sharply and cracked his knee with the leg of my chair. He was sitting closer than I’d realised.
‘Ow. No, I don’t. But all bets are off at 3 a.m. when there’s a gale blowing and mysterious noises in the library. It’s amazing what you can believe in in the dark.’
‘Sorry.’ I wasn’t sure if I meant to apologise for hitting his knee or challenging his beliefs.
He smiled. He seemed more relaxed here, less dark and moody. It could have been because he was on familiar territory, of course, but the change of clothing helped. He was wearing a shirt so lairy that it looked as though it would offer to sell me six genuine Chippendales for a fiver, a pair of shorts smeared with creosote, and hefty work boots. ‘It’s fine.’
There was a lapse in conversation. Max was looking at the computer screen. ‘Did you find anything?’ he said at last.
I twitched, checking the doorway to make sure Jenna hadn’t tiptoed her way up four storeys. ‘No,’ I said slowly.
‘And? You sound as though that’s giving you pause for thought.’ Max leaned back. Hairy legs jutted into my field of vision, but it was fine. I didn’t feel as though I was about to blush or cover myself in confusion today, as though seeing him in his natural habitat made him more normal. Or it could have been because the shirt was so awful that it threw his appeal into the shade of dreadful clothing choices.
‘It’s… strange,’ I said, hesitantly. ‘I’d have expected lots of gamer chat, searches for kit – Grant always likes… liked to look the part. He was constantly trading for in-game stuff – I don’t really know the terminology, but his search history should be full of stuff. And it’s not.’ I glanced at Max. ‘Almost as though he’s deleted a lot of it.’
Max leaned forward now, so he could see my face. ‘He’s deleted parts of his search history? Anything else?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, this is a new machine since he left me, I don’t know what he might have done. Maybe he’s archived his searches or put them in an inaccessible file. But yes. There are things I would expect to see that aren’t here. And Grant knew how to go dark, he knew how to search without leaving a trace, which means he must have deleted anything he thought would be suspicious. Or, at least, put it somewhere it wouldn’t be found by anyone doing a cursory search. But because he’s got rid of stuff I would have expected to see, it probably means he deleted it in a hurry.’
‘But what would he be deleting? What the hell could he have been looking for that made him go up onto those moors?’
Max and I exchanged a look. I felt a moment of quiet triumph, not only that I was managing to look at him as a human being, not the single most desirable man I’d ever met, but also that I’d managed to impress him.
‘Don’t say anything to Jenna.’ I switched both machines off. ‘She might start on with the Famous Five stuff again, and I really don’t think there’s anything to “detect”. Grant’s gone. Whatever he was doing, it’s over.’
Max nodded. There was paint in his hair, I noticed. ‘Yes. You’re quite right. But at least we can be pretty sure he was hiding something from her. From me, too. There was something up there, something about the Fortune House that he knew and didn’t want anyone else to find.’
‘And it killed him,’ I said shortly.
‘Something did, certainly.’ Max leaned forward, arms on his thighs. ‘Grant never struck me as particularly…’ He trailed off, looking at me sideways.
‘Are you waiting for me to fill in a word there? I’ve got lots.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘I bet you have. And yet, here you are, helping Jen, being kind. You didn’t have to do any of this, you know, Alice.’
‘Well, it’s too late to say that now. Before, when the police told me, I was just “accidents happen”. Since I’ve met you and Jenna, I’ve practically got Grant down as a criminal mastermind,’ I said. ‘Well, criminal, anyway.’
‘So it’s my fault?’ He was teasing me again, I realised, with a slight shock.
‘I haven’t ruled you out.’
‘Good.’ There was a bit of a pause, and then Max seemed to mentally shake himself. ‘The police team are up there now.’ He shuffled his chair back. There was the careless noise of expensive furniture squealing along carefully polished floorboarding. ‘If there’s anything suspicious, they’ll find it, but there’s been nothing so far.’
Our eyes met. ‘What was he doing?’ we both asked at the same time, as though interrogating one another. I stopped, embarrassment had finally caught up with me, but Max continued, ‘Jenna must never know. She’s having a lot of wobbles, just when I think she’s doing better she goes back downhill again. I can’t wait for the site to be cleared and nothing found. It might help her.’
I didn’t know what to say. All I could do was reassure him. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to say anything, and she will get better. As the memories fade and everything gets less sharp, she’ll stop dwelling on Grant so much.’
Max jumped up. ‘I was going to show you this,’ he said, stomping heavy-booted to a side table. It was scattered with photographs in frames, all carefully arranged to give maximum exposure to the pictures, and I wondered who did the arranging as I followed him over. He picked up one photograph, but I was scanning the others. Most of them seemed to feature a couple, a man like Max but older, with shorter hair and less watchful eyes, and a woman very like Jenna, with flowers in her hair. ‘Our parents,’ Max said shortly. ‘But this is what I got out to show you. This was the Fortune House. This is the picture that got me started.’
It was a black and white shot of a four-square house built of brick and roofed with Yorkshire stone. An ordinary, unremarkable house, with a small stable-type outhouse to one side, it looked grey and dour and about as North Yorkshire as it was possible for a house to be. If it had been a person, it would have been wearing a flat cap above a worn, wrinkled face. And probably smoking a pipe.
‘I took this picture when I was out on the moors one day. Only Alethia lived in the house then, her parents had been dead for a good number of years; she let me into the kitchen for a glass of water, and that was the first time we met.’ Max tilted the frame so that the picture winked out of existence, merging with the light from the window. ‘I wanted to show you what it looked like in its heyday.’
I didn’t know what to say. It looked like – a house. Windows to the left and right of the front door, one above it, all blank and black, with only a hint of reflected sky. The front door was enclosed in a deep porch, making the front look unwelcoming. Bare, unleafed trees jutted from either side and I wondered why I’d not noticed them on my visits and then realised that they must have been blasted from the ground by the force of the explosion. There was a tatter of curtain remnant at the window above the porch, but the others were bare.
‘Why is it in a frame?’ I asked suddenly and Max, who had been looking down at the picture with me, turned his head slowly to look at me. It was a very deliberate movement. ‘You must have loads of pictures of the house. Why is this one different enough to keep?’
‘You…’ He started to speak, stopped, cleared his throat. ‘Do you know, no one has ever asked that?’
There was nothing I could say to that.
‘This picture is special. Yes, you’re right, I’ve got lots, but this one…’ He came in closer. I could smell the wood preservative from his shorts, the smell of something sweetish from his hair which I presumed was shampoo. His shoulder bumped mine. ‘What do you see?’
I looked again. ‘Why is that the only room with curtains?’ I pointed to the little window above the porch, where the flash of something lighter on one side of the window was the only feature.
I had Max’s full attention now. Those dark, dark eyes were staring into mine. ‘There are no curtains at the window,’ he almost breathed the words. ‘There was absolutely nothing in that room. I got Alethia to let me have a look around.’
‘So what’s that, then?’ I flicked at the white smear. Max’s only reply was silence. ‘It’s obviously something inside the room, you can see where the window frame cuts it off.’ I looked at his face. ‘Oh, come on, you’re not going to tell me it’s a ghost, are you?’
He said nothing for a bit longer, then breathed out a sigh. ‘You know I told you that I saw… something one day up there? This was it. Something at that window. There when I took the picture and then, the next minute – not there. I didn’t know what I was looking at, and I thought it must have some obvious explanation, so I went to the house, got talking to Alethia and asked her to show me around. I think she thought I wanted to buy the place. When I went back later and asked her about using the house for some ghost research, she – well, she got quite angry. Threw a saucepan at my head, actually.’
I imagined Max running from the house, pursued by a little old lady flinging cookware, his carefully cool image in tatters. It made me grin.
Now he was smiling back at me. ‘It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Well, it was, when I finally got the courage to go back, anyway. She told me that when she inherited the house, that was the only room that was empty. All the rest were furnished; it was almost as though her parents didn’t want to acknowledge that space.’
‘What about when she was growing up?’ I looked at the image of the house again. Blank, black windows, giving nothing away. Rather like Max’s eyes, I thought, and then had to cough to force the blush back down.
He inclined his head as though acknowledging that I’d said something clever. ‘Just another room. Her parents used to use it as a storeroom, she said. Old furniture, things her father was going to mend, stuff like that. But when she took the place over, after her mother died, the room had been stripped. Just an empty room, not so much as an old painting on the wall or—’ he flicked a finger at the picture, two-dimensional yet threatening, ‘curtains.’
‘Maybe she was up there dusting when you took this? Or looking out the window at you?’
Max gave me a level look. ‘She had crippling arthritis. She couldn’t even get up the stairs. She slept on a pull-out bed in the room next to the kitchen,’ he said.
‘Well, maybe there was a cat.’
‘Are you sure you’ve not done this ghost-hunting thing before?’ Max leaned back now and put the picture carefully down on a little bureau. ‘You’re asking all the right questions. No, no cat. The door was closed when I went up there and there were no animals. Nothing there at all, except Alethia, living on a pension. She thought that maybe it had been her brother’s room, and they wanted to remove all traces of him for some reason, when he moved away. What do you do for a living, Alice?’
He’d gone to stand by one of the long windows now and was gazing out over the fields with his hands behind his back. The effect of the shirt was blunted by the sunlight, but the shorts still looked anachronistic and slightly grubby. It was like being interrogated by a Mr Darcy who’d got dressed in the dark.
I swallowed. ‘Admin,’ I said shortly. I definitely did not want to feel any more out of place by explaining what kind. I already felt two degrees and an alphabet of qualifications short of his standard. ‘Plus, I have to torment Invisible Malcolm.’
‘Any chance you’d feel like giving it up and becoming my researcher?’ He was still talking to the agricultural view. ‘You seem to see things that other people don’t, and that could be really useful.’
I almost flopped down onto the nearest sofa with surprise. Only the worry that it might be a genuine antique, and unable to support my considerable bulk hitting it at speed, stopped me. Change my job? But I’d been there since I left school! That was nearly eighteen years! It was a job I could do competently without needing to think! I settled for gripping the back of the nearest chair to keep me upright.
‘Er,’ I said. ‘No, thank you.’ I mean, how could I? I knew that office inside out. I knew where Sheila kept the secret supply of paperbacks that she read in the boss’s office when no one was about. I knew about Malcolm’s habit of slightly massaging the figures, and the fact that our workforce of fitters quite regularly used their lunch breaks to head to the nearest betting office, having spent the whole morning discussing form and handicap, when they weren’t supposed to leave the site.
I knew that job in the same way I knew how to breathe. I’d gone there on work experience week aged fifteen and they’d told me to get in touch when I finished school and they would have a role for me. ‘A bird in the hand, love,’ Mum had said. ‘It’s a guaranteed job, good money. You could train for years and not get anything as reliable.’ So I’d gone straight into Welsh’s Windows and run the photocopying until I’d worked my way up to being allowed my own computer.
‘No, thank you,’ I said again, a little more firmly now. ‘I’m fine where I am.’
Max turned around and made a face. ‘Okay, if you say so.’
Silence descended again. There was nothing but the sound the curtains made, brushing softly against the back of expensive upholstery and far, far off, a faint sound of hooves on a tarmac road. I began to feel like a maid who’s not come up to scratch in the fire irons cleaning department and is about to be chastised by the master of the house. Sometimes I sneaked a read of some of those books Sheila thought were hidden, and the stories had obviously rubbed off on my psyche.
‘Tea,’ Max said suddenly.
‘I’m sorry?’ Thinking about those books had made me go back to thinking about my job. About the familiarity of it; the way my office chair had moulded itself to me so that I was the only one who could sit on it with any degree of comfort, the fact that I was the only person who could work the blinds in the front office. The predictability of the Monday morning chat, the smell of old soup and sandwiches in the tiny kitchenette.
‘I told Jenna I’d make you a cup of tea.’ He was moving now, crossing the carpet, which occupied the middle of the floor with highly polished boards all around its edge, as though the carpet was afraid of the walls. ‘Come on, we’ll go and sit in the kitchen, it’s a bit more homely than this room.’
I followed him out and down the corridor to a room that could only be described as ‘homely’ by someone who lived in a house with floorspace that was measured in acres, with pale oak cupboards, a range cooker and an island which accommodated a butler’s sink and a wine rack. ‘It’s like falling into an edition of Ideal Home magazine,’ I said, without thinking.
Max blinked at me. ‘It’s just a kitchen,’ he said, filling the kettle.
‘It’s a kitchen, certainly.’ I looked around. ‘I don’t think there’s any “just” about it.’
He was half smiling to himself as he filled the kettle, as though he was enjoying himself. ‘It’s got all the normal kitchen things in it, though,’ he said. ‘I can’t start calling it anything else, not after thirty-odd years. My head might explode.’
‘No more exploding,’ I said firmly. ‘One person a lifetime is quite enough.’
Max swung away to a beautiful oak-surfaced worktop. ‘I shall bear that in mind.’
I remembered Jenna staring at my walls when she’d visited my house. She’d probably been wondering where the rest of the room was. But thinking of Jenna reminded me of Grant. ‘Did Grant live here?’
‘Well, yes. He moved in with Jenna after they’d been together about six months. They were going to move out to a little place up near the carriage house, but…’
‘I’m going to have to stop you there.’ I held up my hand. ‘I was getting on all right with the “it’s just a kitchen”, but mentioning that you have a carriage house is gratuitous, I’m afraid.’
Max grinned and I felt proud of myself. As though turning down his offer of a job had somehow swung the pendulum of power in my direction, I no longer felt in awe of him. I mean, yes, I was still madly jealous of the big house and the qualifications and the fact that he was writing a book and could look sexy and appealing in horrible clothes, but – I didn’t want to work with him. I could say no. I could tease him and pull him up on his privilege. I wondered if this was what that empowerment I’d heard so much about felt like, and resolved to try it more often.
‘Yeah, sorry.’ He plugged the kettle in. ‘But to properly answer your question, yes, Grant lived here. Jenna used to live – well, she lived with her utter shit of a boyfriend and when that broke down and she was so…’ He tailed off, as though searching for the right word.
‘Fragile?’ I supplied.
‘Jenna’s not fragile, she’s as tough as steel,’ he replied. But he had his back to me, shuffling through mugs in a cupboard, and I wasn’t entirely sure that he meant what he said. ‘Don’t let the waifish eyes and the tears fool you.’
He’s trying to make himself believe that, I thought. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that she’s not strong at all. The insight surprised me.
‘She was upset, that was mostly it. And it kind of triggered an eating disorder, so I brought her back here to live with me so I could keep an eye on her, and she’s, sort of, stayed. Like I said, they were going to move to the cottage when the baby arrived but…’ He stopped talking again and plonked two mugs down on the surface, harder than was really necessary.
I did a slow rotation, taking in the walk-in larder, the huge fridge, the dresser with the collection of what was probably very expensive china displayed on its shelves. ‘It’s a lot of kitchen for only two people. Well, three, I suppose, if Grant was living here too. Unless you’re also accommodating a herd of buffalo, because there’s room, you know.’
‘Nope, no buffalo, although we do get silverfish, according to Mrs P.’ I didn’t ask who ‘Mrs P’ was. Max dropped her name in so casually that I thought I was already meant to know. ‘Jenna likes to cook, she just doesn’t always like to eat.’ He closed his eyes slowly and there was a slump to his shoulders that made me worry he was about to drop to the floor. ‘I don’t know what to do, Alice. Everything is so fucked up. I need help, here.’
The change of tone, from lightly amused teasing to this, was abrupt, as though Max couldn’t keep the façade of cheerfulness going any longer. He sounded so desolate and looked so dejected that I felt a burst of sympathy. He had all this – the house, a carriage house, for God’s sake – and yet he could still feel out of control and miserable in his life. But then I didn’t know really know what to say to a man who didn’t think his kitchen was anything out of the ordinary, when you could have played competition netball in there. Angst whilst rich is a whole different thing to angst whilst just getting by, I’d had personal experience of that.
‘How nearly done is your book?’ The kettle was boiling, but he was ignoring it, so I started making the tea.
‘It’s… okay. I mean, I’ve written up most of the stories. I’ve had to stop taking groups up to the Fortune House while the police are investigating, but we can resume once they’re done and the site’s cleared. There’s a clear demarcation between those people who’ve had what they consider paranormal experiences up there and a past belief in the subject, I’ve just got to write up my conclusions, really.’ He sighed. ‘I never thought it would take this long to write a bloody book. Or, to be fair, that it would include explosions and a dead potential brother-in-law.’
I pushed a tea mug closer to his hand, found milk in a jug in the fridge and fetched it out. The fridge was the size of my entire kitchen and had samphire in. I hadn’t realised it was a foodstuff until now, I thought it was a paint shade. ‘Right. So that’s progressing as well as can be expected, then. So what else is, as you so delightfully put it, “fucked up”?’
He lifted his mug and looked at me through the rising ghosts of steam. ‘You really like to put things into proportion, don’t you?’
‘You have to. Otherwise it’s too easy to dwell on what might happen, and then it’s easy to get overwhelmed,’ I said carefully, keeping my tone even. Trying not to flash back to years of lying awake when things had been really bad, fears of what would happen to me, if Mum didn’t make it through the night.
‘Yes, but am I not allowed to feel a bit overwhelmed? I’ve got a sister who may slip back into not eating, I’ve got Hatherleigh Hall to run, thanks to Dad thinking that the place should stay in the family rather than doing the decent thing and leaving it to the National Trust. I’ve got a book to finish, despite the subject of said book having been obliterated, and a study of the psychology of ghost hunting to write up, plus about a hundred students’ papers to read through and comment on before term ends next week.’
Max took a sip of his tea, made a face, and then poured the contents of half of the milk jug into the mug. ‘Don’t let all this fool you.’ He jerked his head at the kitchen ceiling. ‘Big house just means it’s more expensive when the roof leaks.’
‘You could hire people? It sounds as though it’s all down to organisation, and there are companies that specialise.’
‘That’s why I was hoping to persuade you. You’re practical and you think laterally, which is what I need.’
I gave him a look over the rim of my mug. ‘You’ve just told me all the bad points. Don’t go into the recruiting business, will you? You make it sound as though only someone who untangles Slinkies for a living could organise your working life.’
Max lowered his mug and grinned. ‘And you have an interesting perspective on things. Seriously, I like the way your mind works, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who sees things the way you do.’
I bit the inside of my cheek and concentrated on the awful shirt for a moment to stop me from taking such an enormous gulp of tea that I would probably drown.
‘Ah, well.’ Max shrugged and a little bit of milky tea slopped onto the work surface, where it blended with the wood. ‘I’ll work something out. I usually do, I’ve had a fair bit of practice.’
I moved away a little, so as not to do something wildly disorganised, like putting my elbow in his spilled tea, and ruining his opinion of me. These confessions were making me feel uneasy. None of it was my business. I was only here because of Jenna and, now I came to think about it, that was a weird reason. She was my ex-husband’s girlfriend, we were hardly united in grief about his death. I’d got sucked in to her beliefs that he’d been up to something out at the house. I suddenly had no real idea what I was doing here.
‘Look, I’d better go,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing any good, I’m just reminding Jenna of what she’s lost. It’s been nice meeting you both, but – well.’ I put my half-drunk tea down on the scrubbed oak of the table. ‘Anyway.’
Max was scratching at incipient stubble with his paint and wood-stained fingers. ‘And you’re sure you won’t come and work for me? I really, really need someone who’s organised and sensible to help get this book to be an actual book and not a collection of experiential evidence with pictures.’
I stared at him. ‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘I need – I want – somebody.’ He sounded frustrated, although he hadn’t so much as raised his voice. ‘And I like you, Alice.’
Like. Oh, I was used to that. Like was as good as it got for people like me, apparently. But I was still riding that crest of being able to be assertive, not giving way beneath someone else’s aspirations. ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I think I’ll leave you and Jenna to it from now on.’
It wasn’t exactly a hard ‘no’. It wasn’t me taking charge and putting him firmly in his place, but I’d only just discovered that I could say no at all and be listened to, so it would have to do. I left Max sitting with his tea steaming its way to coolness while he put his head in his hands and stared at the immaculate worktop in front of him. It took me several goes to find my way out of the house, and when I did, it was out of a door so obscure that it took me another few minutes to find the parking area. But when I did, I started my car with unnecessary savagery and spun my wheels, flinging gravel at the house in a passive-aggressive leave-taking that nobody would even have noticed.
I was halfway home before I realised I still had Max’s coat on the back seat.
Personal communication from Miss Deborah Wilson, experiencer of event, received via email.
I don’t know if this is the sort of thing you mean, but I saw your letter in the Yorkshire Post asking if anyone had had any kind of paranormal experiences up on that part of the moors, and this is mine.
To this day it remains the oddest thing that has ever happened to me. I am sixty-three, in good health and not given to flights of fancy or hallucinations, and I am at a loss to explain what I saw that day.
This was the long, hot summer of 1976. A friend had come to stay and we’d decided to take a drive and a short walk up out onto the moors. I’d known this friend for years, we’d been at college together and now, at nineteen, we were about to separate. She was off to teacher training college down south and I had a job in a typing pool. I had recently passed my driving test, so we were taking this last chance of a day out together.
We’d parked the car on the roadside and walked a little way out along the dale. We could see the house that I now know to be the Fortune House, but we walked past that and out onto the moor proper, to try to get a bit of a breeze as we were so hot.
After we’d walked about another mile, we sat down to have a drink and our picnic. I was talking and taking my sandwiches out of my rucksack, when I turned to look at my friend, who’d gone a bit quiet. She was sitting with her back to me, looking, I thought, out at the view across the moor. I said her name and she turned. And her face was not that of my friend. Instead, it looked to be a much older person, and she wore a smile that I can only describe as ‘evil’; a kind of fixed rictus grin, above which her eyes were staring in the most horrible way.
I jumped up and screamed, my friend turned away again, smoothly, and untroubled by my evident distress. She did not speak. When, after a few seconds, she turned back to me again, her face was restored to that of my friend, and she was puzzled at my obvious terror. She told me that she had been looking at the view, that she hadn’t heard me say her name nor turned around. She had simply heard me scream, presumed I was fighting off one of the many wasps that were continually buzzing around our picnic, and only looked away from the view when I had, apparently, called her name loudly after I had jumped to my feet.