The week went surprisingly quickly. Work were obviously having a whip round for me, and Sheila would have organised a card, because they all went very quiet whenever I walked in on more than two people. Malcolm had become rather sullen and Sheila was full of questions, but apart from that, we worked on normally. The onset of an early autumn had concentrated people’s minds on their blown double glazing or that draught from upstairs, and enquiries were coming in thick and fast. I fielded calls, organised appointments, sent out brochures both in PDF and paper form, and felt a daily poke in the ribs of regret that this job I could do so easily would no longer be mine.
The shiver of anticipation about moving on to something new and different had mutated to a grim fear that I’d be no good at it. That Max would get bored with me after a fortnight, that the organising that he seemed to think he needed would turn out to be two phone calls and an alphabetical ordering of his filing system, and I’d be out on my ear, back at Mr Welsh’s door, pleading to come back. Sheila had mentioned something about them getting in a series of temps from the agency to fill my role ‘for the time being’, so everyone clearly expected the same result, me back in my chair before the year was out.
But Max seemed decent. Kind. He’d accepted Grant back, even after the furore he’d caused, when he could have refused to let him set foot on the Hatherleigh Estate. He’d repeatedly reassured me that, should things fall apart between us, there would be other jobs for me. The estate seemed to need workers, I’d still have my home, although renting it out was going to be a bit of a problem as who would want to live in the middle of Pickering amid my furniture and rattling windows? I’d made approaches to a rental agent, who’d made, ‘Weeeeelllll, possibly, if you price it low enough…’ noises, which hadn’t filled me with hope, and I was starting to resign myself to leaving it empty and dashing back every weekend to check that Mr Next Door Left hadn’t knocked through to give the dog a room to itself. But that wouldn’t work, there would still be bills to pay and I was relying on the house to pay for itself and perhaps give me a little bit for savings, not actually cost me money.
So, all in all, I didn’t know whether to regret my decision or celebrate it.
Then it was Friday evening and I was heading back to the Hall, the much smaller pile of papers, now reduced only to those I thought would be of interest, tightly bound with string on the back seat.
Darkness was drawing in early these days, with the frost-crisping of the leaves, and the distant lights at the top of the Hall beckoned me down the drive, with the gravel cracking and spitting under my wheels. The black-railed fencing that Max was evidently still painting outlined the rutted shadows of ploughed fields and I kept my eyes strictly to the front so as not to catch sight of a ghostly horse and rider plunging to their deaths over the distant hedge-line. I was still a little hazy over exactly how Max’s mother had died, but I didn’t want to see a spectral replay when I had a full bladder and the need to stay in her home for the rest of the weekend.
My worries about my now-uncertain future had crystallised into a grim determination to get to the bottom of the Fortune House papers. Once they had been sorted and sifted down to only those of importance to Max’s book, then we would see. Either more organisation would be necessary, or I would be out of a job, but the faster I got to that point, the faster it would all become apparent. If I found something amid all the scraps and torn-out pages that could give Max his definitive ending, then so much the better. If not, well, if it all fell apart, then I’d move back to Pickering and spend my remaining years knitting hot water bottle covers and running jumble sales.
As I pulled up at the front door, I could see Jenna’s motorbike slewed at an angle beyond the steps. This reminded me that Grant was in line for a tongue-lashing, and I readied myself for his crouched contrition, his promises that he’d never do it again, all to be instantly forgotten when expedient. I knew Grant only too well.
Max was there. Lovely, lovely Max, outlined in shadow by my headlights, coming down the steps like a game show host to greet me. The second he opened my door and threw his arms around me to envelop me in that orangey scent and the drift of his hair, I knew I was doing the right thing, and revelled in that feeling because I knew it would vanish like the frost in the sun come Monday morning.
‘Oh, I have missed you,’ he breathed against me.
‘We video-called this morning,’ I pointed out. ‘And last night.’
‘Well, yes, but it’s not the same, is it? For a start, your Wi-Fi is dreadful and you kept dropping out and freezing. I’m not sure we managed more than half a sentence without having to stop and apologise.’ He stood back so he could see my face. ‘I really have missed you,’ he repeated.
‘Then lead me to your centre of disorganisation and I will make a start.’ I hefted the pile of newly sorted papers from the back of my car by their string tie.
Max widened his eyes at me. ‘Hold on, it’s Friday night, let’s wind down a bit first. There’s plenty of time for all that.’
This jolted me a bit. He was right, there was plenty of time. Why was I going about this as though it were some kind of temporary job, to be got through as fast as possible? Because I wanted to see what would happen after it was over? That seemed a bit counterproductive.
‘All right.’ I put the papers back in the car. ‘But I do have to kill Grant first, for letting himself and Jenna into my house last weekend. And use the loo.’
‘They’re inside.’ Max waved an arm at the open door, which was letting a tempting slice of bright yellow light out to illuminate the gravel. ‘If you can get a word in edgewise past Jenna’s favour samples and chair dressings.’
We went into the main hall, where it struck me again how odd it was that this whole huge house could be so empty, yet so full of shadows, but it no longer felt sinister. Now it was just the Hall, and I knew what all the rooms were and could find my way along most of the corridors with only the occasional wrong turning. The Visitors’ Toilet, which had the grace to be signposted in quite large lettering, was just off the hallway, and while I availed myself of its facilities, I primed my anger towards Grant for making free with my house, particularly when he hadn’t given me chance to hang clean towels or – I sniffed at the luxury brand handwash that filled the dispensers by the sinks – put out my best soap.
Grant was sitting in the old kitchen, on one of the stools, whilst Jenna talked over several piles of coloured material. He looked rapt, I thought, as I went in and caught them not knowing they were observed. As though he were genuinely interested in purple velvet versus fuchsia satin. I’d never seen him look as engaged in anything I’d tried to tell him, and I felt another one of those pangs, below the heart but above the lungs, that told me again how wrong I’d got it by marrying Grant.
‘Hey, Al.’ He looked up and saw me standing in the doorway.
‘My key.’ I held out my hand. ‘Right. Now.’
‘Oh yes, we went to the house last week,’ Jenna said, without a trace of shame. ‘I love your house, Alice.’
‘If you could love it in future only when I’m actually, you know, there inside it, I’d appreciate it,’ I said, watching Grant search his pockets.
‘But we want to rent it from you.’ Jenna was collecting up her samples, so she didn’t see the utter gape of disbelief that came onto my face. Grant dropped the key into my hand and it slithered straight off my palm and onto the floor.
‘You… want…?’ I looked around the high ceilings, the solid wood units, the vast acres of historic storage and the sheer Big Housedness of the kitchen. There was not one single point of reference that aligned with the kitchen in my house, other than that they both had some form of cooking apparatus in them. Here there was a range big enough to cook a ten-year-old on. In my house, you could barely get a small chicken in the oven, and that had to go sideways.
‘Yeah, Max said you want to let the house out rather than sell. It’s in the perfect place, because I want to move the bike business somewhere nearer town, and Grant can work from anywhere,’ Jenna went on, obviously not seeing my sheer disbelief. ‘There’s more passing trade near a main road, down here people have to make a special journey, which is a pain if your bike’s broken down. I’ve been looking at premises on the little trading estate on the Scarborough road, and it looks brilliant.’
Right next to Welsh’s Windows, I thought. It was as though Jenna and I were swapping lives. But it would solve a lot of problems; the house rental would be straightforward, and Grant already knew about the peculiarities of the hot water system and the strange floor arrangements.
‘Oh. Well.’ I was winded for a second. ‘That sounds… are you sure?’
‘I mean, obviously we’ll buy a place soon, but it would be great to start out, make sure the move works and everything,’ she went on with the blithe lack of concern for actual financials that would be involved for anyone without an upbringing that contained a carriage house. ‘We only popped by the other day so Grant could have a wee – you know how he is with public toilets,’ she rattled on, still not the least abashed. ‘And your little house feels so… so…’ She groped for the word.
I could have supplied her with half a dozen, but they were all prejudicial, and she did seem enthusiastic, so I picked up the key from the polished oak floor, marvelling again at the contrast between how Jenna lived now and how she seemed to want to live.
‘And what do you think of these?’ Well, I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned, I thought, as she thrust a pile of photographs under my nose when I stood up again. ‘Samples from photographers. I like the guy who does the black and white arty shots, but Grant says it looks like we’d be getting married in 1956.’
The photographs were all watermarked with the name of the photographer, presumably so you couldn’t forget who had taken which photo. The arty shots had the watermark over the face of the bride, which I thought was a bit tasteless, but I agreed with Jenna that they looked pretty, and then wandered off to find Max. My intention to berate Grant had dissipated under Jenna’s sheer excitement and anticipation, and as his desire for a private toilet stop had been instrumental in their decision to rent the house, I could hardly yell at him about it now. Actually, no, I could yell at him, but it had never done any good before. I couldn’t see him suddenly having an epiphany about his behaviour towards me, which, I was increasingly realising, was very sibling-like.
Max was standing by the front door. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’
‘A walk?’ The question came out as though this was the most outrageous suggestion I had ever heard.
‘Yes, walk. Transfer weight from one leg to the other whilst swinging your body forward – it’s the new craze, you’ll love it.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘I know it’s dark. I know it’s probably going to be frosty. But there’s something I want to show you. And I want to be with you, on our own, without Bonnie and Clyde rustling around and producing sample invitations like a magic trick.’
I fell into step alongside him and he led the way out of the main door, across the gravel and onto the lawn. ‘You’re taking me to the icehouse?’
‘Well spotted.’
There were fairy lights up now, around the entrance, which gave it the inviting look of a grotto, until we got through the gate, where it still had the look of a brick-lined bucket and a smell of damp stonework. With half my brain, I could see it as it could be. A wooden floor to level off the worst of the ‘bucketness’, a rail around the platform which circled the sides, so that a congregation could watch the ceremony. Bride and groom and officiant in the middle, lights and acoustics and music – it could be beautiful and quirky.
The other half of my brain saw moss and mould. I tried to ignore the, probably expensive, ‘plink’ of water dripping somewhere.
‘You don’t seem to believe that I could possibly find you attractive,’ Max said, out of the blue, as we stood under the arch of fairy lights. They had obviously been stolen from a Christmas tree somewhere, because one or two of the lights were elf-shaped.
I looked at him. ‘I’m trying to,’ I said honestly. ‘I really am. I mean, I’ve seen the Boobie Room. But that was your however-many-times-great grandfather, it’s not as though you had it done to demonstrate your tastes. It’s just that a part of me won’t let me think you could…’ I breathed deeply and forced out the word, ‘…that you could… love me.’
‘And you don’t think that’s more down to you and your self-esteem than me and my preferences?’ Max asked gently.
‘Probably. But why I think it doesn’t matter so much as the fact that I do.’ I stared up at the curve of the lights. ‘Why are we having this conversation, Max?’
‘Because I wanted you to see these. They may help.’ He pulled a small case out of his pocket. ‘They took a bit of hunting down, and Grant had to help me with the recovery of some of the more prejudicially deleted items.’
They were photographs. Some of Max with a girl, some of a girl on her own, laughing at the camera or performing various activities; punting down a river, sitting in front of a picnic basket. The ones with Max had him with his arms wrapped around her, or with the two of them standing facing one another. Some looked posed and very Country Life, others more spontaneous. The girls were all different. Two were shorter than Max, one topped him by half a head; two were black, one wore glasses and not one of them was the skinny model-type I’d always imagined him with. They were all very attractive in their own unique ways, but there wasn’t a size ten or even twelve amongst them.
‘This,’ Max flipped the photos, ‘is my dating history. Well, most of it, there’s a couple of one-nighters when I was at uni and Sophia, who hated having her photo taken, but, yeah, that’s pretty much my past, right there.’ He looked at my face and added quickly, ‘Not all of it, obviously, there was studying and essay writing and an appalling amount of drinking too. But this is the part I thought you’d find most interesting.’
I shuffled through the pictures. Curvy, wonderful women. Beautiful women. I felt a little part of myself shift. I was Max’s type. He wasn’t slumming it or doing me a favour or lowering his standards. One of those women, in fact, looked a little bit like me. I held up her picture.
Max took a deep breath. ‘That,’ he said, and his voice was slightly hoarse, ‘was Rebecca. She was the one who didn’t want children.’ He looked down at the picture, sparking and twinkling in the little lights. ‘I loved her,’ he said, simply. ‘But – well. What we wanted was just too different. She’s working for NATO now, apparently.’
I frowned. ‘I hope I’m not a do-over.’
He tore his gaze away from the picture and looked at my face. ‘Good Lord, no!’ He sounded horrified. ‘That was years ago, I’m over it now. Well, mostly.’ A cheeky grin. ‘Apart from the nights I wake in a sweat screaming, “Rebecca, Rebecca, please don’t leave me.”’
I gave him a stern look and then laughed. There was a bubbling of something in my chest, an uplifting of spirit that was almost joy. ‘You are an awful boyfriend,’ I said.
‘I know, but I try really hard.’ He came in close and kissed me. ‘You’ve got to give me points for that.’
What happened next was probably inevitable. After all, we hadn’t seen one another for a week, but it was enough to give me fond feelings towards the icehouse for quite a while afterwards. We tested those acoustics to destruction. I felt more able to be abandoned now I’d seen those pictures, more secure that Max really did want me, the way I was. I wasn’t some stand-in for a thin girl called Arabella, he wasn’t making love to me because I was the only woman around to whom he wasn’t related. Me. Max wanted me. And, I have to say, he had me, quite definitively, in that icehouse.
Sweaty, despite the chilly air, red-faced and with our clothing dishevelled, we walked back towards the house hand in hand. The sky mimicked the fairy lights we’d just left, an arch overhead of bright pinpricks twinkling and winking at us, and the grass had the slight crispness of an incipient frost. The air was very still.
We’d reached the gravel of the drive when a thought struck me. Jenna. Those watermarked photographs. Postcards. The strangeness of them. I dodged into my car and retrieved the bundle of papers I’d deemed ‘interesting’.
‘Thank goodness.’ Max watched me emerge with the package. ‘I thought you were going for a reprise on the back seat of your car. I might need a moment longer, I’m not twenty any more.’
‘Look.’ I pulled loose the two postcards from the top. ‘Postcards, from John.’
‘Yes.’ Max turned them over to catch the light coming from the two long windows beside the front door. Hatherleigh Hall looked like a music box, some windows illuminated and a faint glow from others, as though it were waiting for a giant key to turn so it could play ‘Für Elise’.
‘But look at the postmark. I noticed it before but I’ve only just remembered, thanks to Jenna and her bride with the written-on face.’ I moved the cards to show him. ‘Look.’
He held the squares of card up, and then went closer to the house to throw more light on them. ‘The postmarks are fuzzy? Is that what you mean?’
‘Neither one is readable. They both look as though they’ve been obscured, maybe deliberately. You can’t tell if these were posted in London or Luton. Or,’ I said, meaningfully, ‘York.’
‘You think,’ Max said slowly as though he were piecing things together in his head, ‘that Mrs Fortune wrote these and posted them to herself to make everyone think John was still alive?’
‘Or Mr Fortune.’ I took the postcards back from him. ‘Or even Alethia. It makes sense. If John was killed in the house and they buried him under the basement floor, then put about the story that he’d “gone to London” with occasional bits of proof…’
‘It wouldn’t be Alethia.’ Max was still speaking slowly. ‘She would know and she’d have thrown these away. Well, I say that, given the amount of trash she held on to, she may not have done.’
‘My money is still on the father.’ I lifted the rest of the bundle from the floor and Max, in a very gentlemanly way, took it from me as we walked towards the house. ‘Handy with his fists, didn’t you say he’d been? Keen to keep people away, and armed with a shotgun? So he could have killed his son, and the mother is covering up for him. Alethia knew nothing and was told her brother left home, never to be seen again.’
‘Yes, and her mother, old Mrs Fortune, told Alethia what she wanted to hear, maybe to let her keep her memories of her father as good ones.’ Max looked down at the pile of papers. ‘Is there any more corroborating evidence?’
‘I’m not sure. This is the stuff that looked most interesting, once I’d whittled out the worst of the junk and the dead spiders. The rest is still taking over my living room back in Pickering.’
Max draped his arm around me. Not in the half-hearted, siblingesque way that Grant had used to, though, this was a drape that pulled me in close against him as we walked. It was a cosy, accepting sort of drape. ‘I know I keep saying this,’ he gave me a little squeeze, ‘but you really are the most amazing person I have ever met.’
Stifling the feelings that kept rising of being far more on the Clouseau end of the spectrum than the Poirot, I went with him into Hatherleigh Hall.
Interview with a retired nurse, who asked not to be named (information available upon contact with the author). Transcribed via recording.
I was a nurse for many years, and, as such, saw a fair few things that I couldn’t explain, but your letter in the Yorkshire Post asked for anything in or around the old Fortune House up on the moors, so I thought I’d send you my ‘strange tale’.
Old Mrs Fortune was very ill and presumed dying. Her daughter had been sent for and was making her way from somewhere in the Home Counties, so I had been employed to stay with Mrs Fortune and help keep her comfortable until her daughter could arrive and take over the duties. So it was that I came to be spending nights in the house.
This particular night, Mrs Fortune had had an unsettled day and looked to be in a good deal of pain. I’d given her her medication and was waiting for her to fall asleep, when we both heard a noise downstairs (Mrs Fortune’s bedroom being the old marital bed in a room on the first floor). I said, ‘Sounds like rats.’ Mrs Fortune replied that it wasn’t rats, they didn’t have rats.
Bearing in mind she’d been confined to her bed for nearly a month, I still suspected vermin of some kind. It was that sort of noise, that shifty shuffling, if you know what I mean. So I said I’d go down and look, but Mrs Fortune became very distressed by the suggestion, and so I stayed up with her until her medication took effect and she fell asleep.
At this point, the noise became more insistent. I took up the lantern (there’s no electricity up to the house, so we were using oil lamps) and went downstairs. The noise sounded as though it was coming from the old basement, so I went down to try to determine the source of the sound, as I was concerned that an infestation of rats might mean that my patient needed immediate removal to a more sanitary environment. As I approached the basement stairs, which ran from inside a cupboard in the kitchen, the noise was a definite scuffling, as though something was being dragged along the floor down there, but the second I set foot on the staircase, it all went silent.
I believed that the vermin must have seen the light, and frozen to avoid detection, so I went down a few steps and held the light up, so that the flame illuminated as much of the basement area as possible. The floor area, of approximately twelve feet by twelve, was devoid of any items, and the entire room was empty. There was no sign of any rats or mice, nor of anything which could have caused the dragging, shuffling sound. I went right to the bottom of the stairs at that point and began an investigation of the four corners of the room, to try to ascertain whether or not rodents had either gained entry or formed a nest. As I reached the far side of the room away from the staircase, and bent to hold the lamp close to the wall, the noise started again, behind me. It had the distinct hallmarks of footsteps now, but the footsteps of someone afflicted or dragging some heavy weight; they lingered between each step.
I turned and once more held the lamp up, but there was nothing in that cellar besides me and dust. My flesh had begun to creep now, there was something very purposeful about the sound of those invisible steps, and I made my way at haste back up the staircase to the main house, where I remained the rest of the night in the room with Mrs Fortune.
Her daughter arrived the next day to take over the nursing of her mother. I never mentioned the strange sounds to her, as I believed that I could have been mistaken and the sounds could have been due to floorboards creaking above my head in the farmhouse parlour. That is the only explanation for the noises, but, in my heart, I believe that there was someone walking with me in that basement, someone that I couldn’t see.