There was a powdery residue of snow up in the bowl on the moors. It had largely melted away from the grassier stretches, but lingered at the roots of the feathery whin bushes and the dormant heather clumps, and filled holes and dips to smooth whiteness. The Fortune House was nothing but a crater, fenced off with incongruous orange plastic wattles and the remains of police tape. Snow had pillowed inside the depression, looking as though someone had dropped a pristine white duvet to soften the edges.
We stared into the hole. A thin skin of frosted ice stared back from the bottom.
‘Maybe there was an argument,’ Jenna said thoughtfully. She’d got a scarf wound round her head and she and Grant had evidently come in the car because she wasn’t wearing leathers. Instead, she’d got on a baggy pair of dungarees that made her look as though she were playing dress-up in her dad’s clothes, and a pair of Dr Marten boots. She still looked slender, but her face had filled out of the sunken misery and there were no bags under her eyes. Grant was good for her. ‘And it ended up with John being killed.’
‘Or he could have died out on the farm,’ Max said, snuggling himself against me. ‘And for some reason, they didn’t want to tell anyone. Maybe some kind of accident and Mr and Mrs Fortune were worried that they could be prosecuted?’
I bumped gently against him. ‘No. He died in the house. Whatever happened, it happened in the house,’ I said.
Max looked down at me. Chilly fingers of wind were making his hair twist into curls against his cheek. ‘You sound very certain,’ he said. ‘Want to explain?’
‘The tooth.’ I jiggled a bit. That breeze that was making him look picturesque and more than a little Heathcliff against the barren landscape and the background snow was getting down the back of my neck and chilling my spine. ‘The police found the tooth in the house when they thought it was Grant.’ I spoke slowly, policing my words so that no hint of ‘pretending to be dead’ leaked out. ‘So whatever happened that knocked that tooth out was violent and happened in the house itself. The body was in the basement, after all, buried under concrete.’
I’d found a receipt, in among the papers. Not completely damning, of course, there were a million reasons why a farming family would need a ton of cement, from building a wall to patching up a cow byre. But in 1965, they had taken delivery of twenty-five sacks of cement mix and a lorry load of sand. Circumstantial, not absolute proof, but putting it all together made it look obvious.
Max nodded a sideways nod of acknowledgement, then dug into the pocket of his big black coat. I smiled to myself. I had a fond attachment to that coat. When he’d finished fishing about, he came up with the photograph he’d taken of the Fortune House, before Alethia and the pursuit with the saucepans. He held it up, aligning it to fill the space where the house no longer was.
‘There was something in that room,’ he said. ‘I know I saw something. An empty room, possibly John’s old bedroom, with something at the window. And then there are all those stories.’
Jenna and Grant had moved off and were laying out a picnic under the spindly shelter afforded by the trees. Mrs P had, as promised, packed us up supplies and Jenna smelled of fresh baking. I had high hopes of the provender. I hoped that the wind would let us eat it.
‘It’s like all ghost stories ever.’ I took the picture from him and scrutinised it. ‘A mysteriously empty room, something half seen.’
‘Well, it got me started on the book, which kind of brought us together in a roundabout way.’ Max smiled at me. The wind had another go at his hair. ‘And I’ve come to terms with the not knowing now.’
‘To be fair, it was your obsession with the house that got Grant up here to blow himself up, which was what really brought us together.’ I was still looking at the picture. ‘And that shape at the window could be a reflection, you know.’
I thought of Max, lonely and dark, stalking across the moors, obsessed with the idea of ghosts, and then I looked at the Max in front of me. Still dark, hopefully less lonely and with the whole ghost fascination now mutated into a more pragmatic view of ‘most of it is explicable, but there will always be things we don’t understand’.
‘I know.’ He took the photograph back from me. ‘I just wanted it to be a ghost. At least, I thought I did, but now it doesn’t matter. Like you said, I know Mum loved me. I didn’t need her to come back and tell me so.’
We both looked over to where Jenna was carefully fetching plates from a wicker hamper and directing Grant’s attempts to spread a rug over the tree roots. The breeze was flipping the blanket back to hinder him, and they were both laughing.
‘Life is strange enough,’ I said. ‘Who would ever have thought of those two being together? Or us, come to that, a window fitters’ admin girl and a posh git. And if life can be that weird, we don’t really need ghosts to make it any weirder, do we?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Max put his arms around me. ‘I actually like a bit of weird, here and there.’
My new life was surprisingly busy, and I found that I didn’t miss window fitting at all. As summer came in, carried on warm breezes that smelled of heather, we had to face all the new challenges of reopening Hatherleigh Hall to the public, and I had to cope with learning to make a variety of scones for the tea shop. Not quite the same as booking sets of double-glazed windows and making sure they arrived at the right address, but involving nearly as much administration. I also had to make sure that Max finished his book, which wasn’t easy. With the coming of the nice weather, he showed a disturbing preference for painting fences and repairing walls which was, he said, a lot easier than making words work.
But he wrote, and rewrote, and I organised and baked. And in the short, hot, summer nights I truly came to believe that he loved me utterly.
Eventually, we reached the day when Max’s book was due to be published and we were holding the launch party up at the site of the Fortune House. Minibuses had been laid on for attendees, so the place was swarming with Max’s students, both current and past, and friends and family. Ghost-hunting groups had come out in force – ‘Free booze,’ Max had said – and the Fortean Times had got up a party. Max had written a long and learned article for them about the history of the site and they’d all come to look.
Everyone was chatting happily, some were staring moodily out over the heather, scarified by the effects of the sunlight. It was almost impossible to imagine this place as haunted. Even the birch trees had gained leaves and now looked properly arboreal instead of resembling dark dead arms reaching for the sky. The atmosphere was completely different to that of the oppressive isolation that had hung over it before. The filling in of the big hole had helped too, of course; the place was one smooth ribbon of sward now, surrounded by perky tufts of flowering heather and sheltering hedges of gorse. Everything was flowering like crazy in tasteful shades of purple and yellow and even the birdsong was limiting itself to some high lark song from above.
It could not have looked less ghostly if it had had a McDonald’s in the middle of it.
Max had refused to hold the launch party at Hatherleigh Hall. ‘I want to keep the book separate to where we live,’ he said, when we’d been drawing up lists of potential venues. ‘I’m not having a bunch of despondent critics wandering around my home. If they want to do that, they can come at a weekend and pay admission fees like everyone else.’ He’d also turned down famous ‘haunted’ sites around York on the grounds that this book was less about ghosts and more about his own personal experience, and, as that was limited to seeing ‘something’ in an empty window, it had seemed somewhat egregious to hold a party in a location mostly known for its ghosts.
‘This is the “taster” book for the follow up,’ Max was explaining over glasses of free wine to the book reviewer from the local paper. ‘The Haunting of Fortune House is about the “what” of ghosts, where I explore the history of the house and its ghost sightings. My next book will be more about the “why” of ghosts; why we think we see what we do.’
‘Plus this book is full of scary local ghost stories,’ Jenna added, hovering by Max’s elbow and looking incredibly pretty in a floaty white frock. She was carrying a copy of The Haunting of Fortune House and looked like a girl in a TV ad. ‘So it’s got that too.’
I was staying under the trees. Max had introduced me as his partner and assistant on the book when he’d made his introductory speech, which made me feel a bit of a fraud. All I’d really done was try to beat Alethia’s papers into order to give him the proof he’d needed to round the book off with the supposition of John’s death and a reason for the haunting. There was nothing of the Fortune family remaining to be harmed by this rationalisation of the stories or the atmosphere that had been said to hang over the house. I’d dug into records and double checked, because we hadn’t wanted a second cousin to burst out of the woodwork declaring that we had besmirched the Fortune name and demanding a cut of the profit in recompense. Although, at the thought of the word ‘profit’, Max had laughed for a very long time and in rather a sardonic way.
Now, with the shadows of the trees lengthening towards dusk, the tone of the place began to edge towards ‘slightly spooky’. The cluster of guests gathered closer together in an atavistic, safety in numbers way, apart from little knots of students who were using the opportunity to improve their ‘lone windswept poetic’ look. From the amount of coupling-up that was going on, it was proving quite successful too.
Max came over to me, holding out a glass of something fizzy. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been a bit quiet the last couple of days.’
I gave him a stern look. ‘Max, I’ve been organising this party, sorting out the architect’s drawings for the cottage, helping Jen with her wedding invitation list and trying to track down seemingly the only person in the entire known universe who can sign off on the permissions for the icehouse. Believe me, I’ve not been quiet, it’s just that, by the time you’ve got back from lecturing and we’ve managed a moment together, I’ve run out of words.’
‘Sorry. Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to sound as though I were overlooking how busy you’ve been. You’ve been working absolute wonders.’ He came in close and kissed my neck. ‘You’re a wonder in all forms, my Alice.’
We drank our champagne in a companionable silence. Over at the far side of the site, Grant was chatting happily to a couple of Jenna’s biker friends, invited to bump up the numbers just in case. Jen was hostessing admirably, tidying the display of books which we’d cunningly arranged next to the booze. ‘The danger of spillage is outweighed by the fact that it takes a really miserly person to take free wine and not buy a book,’ she pointed out.
‘You’re happy with the book?’ I asked Max eventually, when the bubbles had carried sufficient alcohol into my system. ‘Even the end?’
The dusk tangled in his hair and made his eyes look deep and mysterious. I still couldn’t really believe that this gorgeous man was planning to marry me, and it was times like this, when alcohol came into the picture, that I nearly chickened out and ran back to a life of knitting patterns and cats.
He sighed and casually looped his arm around me. ‘Pretty happy,’ he said. ‘I mean, no author is ever completely happy with their book. There’s always something that you want to change, but only once the entire thing is in print, with a cover, and on sale somewhere.’ He took another mouthful. ‘Funny, that. You think it’s perfect until the day it comes out and then you realise all the mistakes you made.’
‘I think that’s called being human.’ I stared out at where Grant and Jenna had drifted together. She was explaining something to him, probably wedding-orientated. There were only two months to go before their nuptials, and most of her conversations were centred around whether the icehouse floor would be in on time. It hadn’t done my stress levels any good. ‘But everyone seems to think the ending is good.’
‘The supposition that it’s John Fortune haunting the house and his body that was hidden under the floor? Yes, they do.’ Max looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, no reason.’ I leaned into him. ‘Whoever died here, I shall forever be grateful to them for bringing us together.’
‘And that’s an epitaph that anyone could be proud of.’ He gave me a quick squeeze. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Positive,’ I said firmly.
‘Then I’m going to go over and try to persuade a few more sales out of the ghost-hunting bunch. Might as well make use of the fact that they’re all getting legless.’ With a cheerful grin, Max headed off over the springy turf towards the drinks table.
I gave a sigh of relief. He was happy with the book and had no qualms about having to end it with a whole raft of assumptions and hypotheses. The absence of anyone to cross-match DNA with meant that the bones from the cellar had been sampled by the police and then buried. We’d laid on a small funeral in the Hatherleigh Hall estate chapel, and interred the skeleton in the family burial plot, with a small stone denoting where it had been found and the belief that it was John Fortune. ‘It’s all we can do,’ Max had said. It had given him a good rounding off and summing up for his final chapter, making sure that the book finished with the hint of doubt that would keep the reader hooked, yet enough of a conclusion to be satisfying. He had redrafted and rewritten that ending so often that I’d been able to recite most of the last five thousand words of the book by heart, having had it read to me most evenings. If he’d had to rewrite it once more, I feared that I might have been tempted to beat Max over the head with the manuscript until he stopped.
Which was why I hadn’t said anything when, just as the final, absolutely totally finished, no-more-editing-allowed copy had gone to the printers, I’d found a letter.
It had been folded and refolded, scrunched up into the corner of the pile of papers. A tiny hump under a selection of Yorkshire Show catalogues had drawn me to actually flip through, when I’d been going to carry the entire armful down to the paper recycling bin, and I’d found it and smoothed it out.
It was dated October 1966, and written in a scrawled and childish hand.
Mam
I wants to let you know, I is safe and happy now. I is living in London where I can be who I wants to with other people like me. Don’t tell Da, he will only be angry and take it out on you and Alley. Don’t tell Alley neither that you has heard from me because I won’t be writing again. I has changed my name so it’s no good looking for me. I don’t want no more to do with the family. After what Da said when he found me and Bernard was still meeting, I knows he wont change. I loves you, Mam, and Alley, but I has got to live my own life the way I wants.
Bernard said he’d come to me when he could, but hes not come yet. If you sees him tell him Im still waiting for him in London and I miss him.
I is sorry if I upsets you by this, but this is goodbye.
Your loving son
John
I’d tell Max. One day, I’d tell him.