Harlequin E Shivers Box Set Volume 3

Ceri had eaten and was reading in the kitchen when Gethin and I sat down to dinner. I didn’t think my reputation would stand any more of her artless disclosures. The long dining table was meticulously set, with a pristine white cloth and gleaming silverware. The whole room shone with the effects of polish and elbow grease. I had discovered some embroidered damask in a store cupboard and commenced making new covers for the chairs. I was a slow, steady seamstress, but I had plenty of time to myself when Ceri was in bed.

“I must congratulate you on what you have managed to do with the place in so short a space of time, Miss Divine,” Gethin said later as he took a sip from his wine glass. The words were pleasant enough, but his expression was chilly.

It was the moment of truth. “Ah, well, as to that…” I pleated the tablecloth nervously. Before I could say any more, Anika appeared carrying a soup tureen. Vidor followed her with a platter of homemade bread. Both of these items were accompanied by the delicious scent of home cooking. Gethin made no comment about the appearance of these two oddly dressed strangers in his dining room.

“You were saying?” he prompted, after they had deposited the food on the table and departed. “I confess, I am eager to hear all about it. After all, when I left you here—less than one month ago, if my memory serves me correctly—the place had a housekeeper. Not a particularly effective one, I’ll admit. But might I be permitted to enquire exactly what you have done with Mrs Price? And perhaps, at the same time, you could enlighten me as to how the north field appears to have become a refuge for Romanies?”

So, with much hand waving and verbal sidestepping, I poured out the whole story. His face was, as always, hard to read, but he heard me out in silence. At the end of my convoluted discourse, he said, “And perhaps you could also explain my niece’s question about how much she money could expect to earn for taking her clothes off?” I groaned and put my head in my hands. “I suspect,” he continued blandly, “that she has begun to view bath time in a new and decidedly lucrative light.”

I bit my lip, watching his face anxiously. Two weeks ago I could not have imagined wanting to stay in this great tumbledown mausoleum with its unique, mercurial personality. But with a fierceness that took me by surprise, I knew that I would fight him if he tried to get rid of me now. I loved Taran House. I had no idea why, but I wanted to stay. And I was not—absolutely not—prepared to leave Ceri. She needed me, and in that strange, symbiotic way that was exclusive to us, I needed her, too. Gethin said nothing, and we resumed our meal. I took his silence to be a reprieve, and eventually I stopped holding my breath.

After I had seen Ceri—who was distinctly quieter as a result of her uncle’s presence—to bed, my mood was oddly flat. In my room, I couldn’t settle to read a book or sew cushion covers. I stood at the window and gazed out at the valley, nestling under the protective wing of the mountain. I drew the curtains, obscuring the suffocating blackness from sight. As I turned away, my foot caught on an object, and I stumbled slightly. With a frown, I bent to pick up the shoe that was protruding from beneath the bed. These black, high-heeled pumps with their asymmetrical silver trim were a memory of a wild indulgence. I had fallen in love with them on a trip to Petticoat Lane Market and gone without a proper meal for a week in order to pay for them. I could not bear to part with them, even though I was highly unlikely to ever wear them in my new profession. I had placed them at the back of my wardrobe when I arrived at Taran House and had not moved them since. This was the left shoe, and I turned it over in my hand. Its companion was nowhere to be seen. When I opened the wardrobe, the right shoe was exactly where I had placed it on that first night. Someone had been into my room and into my wardrobe.

There might be a number of explanations; my mind slipped instantly into reasoning mode. The shoes were gorgeous. Perhaps Gwladys had opened the wardrobe for some reason—what reason?—seen them, and been unable to resist trying them on? Or Ceri could have taken our dressing up game a step further? There was absolutely no reason to succumb to the crawling, fearful apprehension that began to unfurl, like a flag, inside my mind.

It was close to midnight when a knock on my bedroom door, just as I was about to tumble into bed, made me jump nervously. I was in my nightgown, and I threw an old shawl about my shoulders before tiptoeing to the door. Gethin was leaning against the jamb, a brooding look in his brown eyes. He had removed his jacket and tie and his white shirt was half unbuttoned to reveal a tantalising glimpse of dark chest hair. I chewed my lip apprehensively. Was he about to proposition me? I wasn’t sure how I would respond if he did.

“Miss Divine,” he said formally, “would you do me the courtesy of coming to my room?”

I gazed up at him, feeling an insistent little flicker of desire starting to thrum deep down within me. I’ve always been one for acting first and thinking later, so, with my bare feet padding on the floorboards, I followed him along the landing.

He held the door to his own room wide and stepped aside so that I could see in. “Since today has been a veritable festival of explanations, I wonder if you would be so kind as to enlighten me about this?” Shucky was sprawled diagonally across the bed. He looked up as I entered, rolled his eyes at me and gave a delighted bark of welcome. Muttering a furious apology, I attempted to haul him off the bed. Since Shucky decided it was a great game and strenuously resisted me, my efforts quickly degenerated into the realms of slapstick. In the end, Gethin came to my aid and between us we evicted the interloper. By the time we had finished, the bed resembled a war zone.

I stammered an apology and made a fumbled attempt to rectify the damage. All the while I was painfully aware of my shawl slipping off my shoulders, the flimsy material of my nightdress and those eyes that seemed to bore into my soul.

I sat in the large rocking chair that we had hauled down from the attic and placed beside the range. It was so capacious that Ceri was able to curl up next to me. Her head was tucked into my shoulder, and we had pulled a knitted patchwork quilt over our knees to keep out the chilly evening vapours that seeped under the door. Shucky rested his head on my feet, and I rocked the chair lightly as I read out loud. It was Heidi, a book that Ceri had chosen because of its setting. I decided that the chapter we had just begun was particularly apt.

For some days past Fraulein Rottenmeier had gone about rather silently and as if lost in thought. As twilight fell, and she passed from room to room, or along the long corridors, she was seen to look cautiously behind her, and into the dark corners, as if she thought someone was coming silently behind her and might unexpectedly give her dress a pull …

I glanced up as Gethin came into the kitchen and paused in the doorway, watching us. I smiled an involuntary welcome and was pleased to see the echoing expression that just touched his eyes. He motioned for me to continue and, instead of going away as I had expected, pulled out a chair and sat at the table.

“Do the voices, Lilly,” Ceri ordered, her voice muffled because her face was pressed into my neck.

Obligingly, I carried on in the gruff accents of the doctor. “So there is a sick person in the house, and one that has first to be caught?” Ceri chuckled and I changed my voice so that it had a high, falsetto pitch. “Much worse than that, doctor! A ghost in the house! My house is haunted!.”

“Lilly is good at doing voices,” Ceri informed Gethin, who continued to watch my face, a slight smile playing about his lips.

There was one thing Lilly wasn’t very good at, I concluded, as I placed a bookmark in the page and closed the book. I was incapable of preventing even the slightest glimmer of a smile in Gethin Taran’s sable eyes from melting my insides.

“I received a letter from Ceri’s old school,” he informed me, his businesslike tone contrasting oddly with my chaotic thoughts. He patted his pockets. “Damn, I’ve left it in the study….”

I opened my mouth to protest at this blatant bedtime-delaying tactic, but Gethin had already said, “It’s on the mantelpiece,” and Ceri had skipped away before I could say anything.

Gethin remarked, “You seem to be getting on very—” He was interrupted by an almighty crash. We both ran to the study. My hand fluttered to cover my mouth. The huge mirror that had, until seconds ago, hung over the fire, had fallen onto the floor. A million dagger shards were flung in a brilliant display across the room.

“Ceri?” I gasped and, with a tiny whimper, she appeared from behind the door. “Oh, thank God!” I swung her up into my arms and she clung to me for dear life. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “I just pulled the letter down and the mirror fell.” She looked over at Gethin fearfully. “I didn’t do anything. I jumped back as it came down, but I didn’t do it….”

Gethin went over to the remains of the mirror. “The string must have rotted,” he said, standing over the now-empty frame.

“No, it hasn’t.” I pointed at the empty space above the fire. “The nails that held it in place have come out of the wall. Every single one of them.”

Shucky had developed a new and annoying habit of lying on the landing outside Gethin’s room throughout the night. He refused point-blank to move when I tried to tempt him away.

“Whose virtue are you protecting?” I whispered, stroking his ears. “Mine from him, or his from me?” He thumped his heavy tail in reply but stubbornly stayed where he was. His bulky body was stretched partway across Gethin’s door, with his nose just touching the locked door to the clock tower. I left him to it and went down to the kitchen.

Anika marched determinedly in through the door, carrying two slim books under her arm. Once we had made breakfast, she gestured for me to sit at the table with her. Her berry-black eyes were troubled. She turned to a page she had marked by folding down the corner and tapped her fingertip on it for me to read. It was a short article all about a legendary phantom dog. A huge hound, black as the portal of hell itself, with eyes that blazed gold fire, that was said to stalk the night. Only the pad-pad sound of his giant paws alerted the unwary to his ghostly presence. The creature was variously described as sinister or benign, depending on the individual experience of the eyewitnesses who recounted the tale of his appearance. Anika’s insistent finger drew my attention to the last sentence: “From the Anglo-Saxon word scuca (pronounced ‘shucka’), meaning demon, the black dog is one of Britain’s oldest spectres.”

As I looked up and met Anika’s solemn dark eyes, Ceri and Shucky burst in through the door carrying a length of rope between them in their favourite, uneven game of tug of war. I surmised that, since Shucky had deserted his sentry post, Gethin must have left his room.

Anika tapped her finger on a crudely drawn sketch of a snarling dog. “He does,” she pointed out as Shucky chose that exact moment to gnash his teeth in mock ferocity. Ceri squealed with laughter, and the playful pair tumbled back out again to continue their game on the lawn.

Anika opened the second book and again went straight to a marked passage. Bossily, she pointed to the page and, obediently, I read. “In the wake of the passing storm of wild huntsmen, a phantom black dog will be found wandering the earth. To remove it will need rites similar to those for removing changelings. If it is not removed by these means, it must be well cared for and allowed to live upon the family hearth.”

“Is not for joke,” she reproached me with her quiet dignity, and I hurriedly begged her pardon.

The garden around the house was a hayfield. Vidor had organised two young Romany lads who were tackling it with scythes, while he tried to start a bonfire and muttered dire Magyar retribution when it refused to catch light. Anika and I were energetically tackling the overgrown flowerbeds. Even Ceri, usually less than enthusiastic about manual labour, occupied herself by removing chunks of rock from the lawn and piling them up at the side of the house. Anika nudged me and, with a jerk of her head toward her husband, whispered, “The name Vidor means ‘happy’ in my language.” We both giggled uncontrollably.

It was into this scene of bustle and merriment that Gethin wandered in the late morning sun. I was wearing a pair of black satin shorts, these scandalous items having been bestowed upon me by Fanny when I left the Felicia. She said—grudgingly—that I should have them because I had better legs than her. I had tied my cotton shirt up under my breasts and rolled up its long sleeves. I was aware, as soon as I saw Gethin watching me, not only of my unconventional attire, but also my red, shiny face and bare feet.

To my surprise, he came over and joined me, pulling up a few of the more stubborn weeds that had resisted my efforts. In answer to my look of enquiry, he gave me a boyish grin, which was so irresistible that I couldn’t help but return it. It was an expression I had never seen on his face before. I decided he should definitely do it more often. We worked together side by side in companionable silence.

“You really are the most redoubtable girl. Did you know that, Lilly Divine?” I liked the way he said my name that way, as though it was an endearment. He swept an arm about him to indicate the house and grounds. “You’ve done more for this place in a month than anyone has done in decades.”

I turned to look at him. Our faces were mere inches apart. He reached out a hand to remove a blade of grass from my hair, and, unable to help myself, I leaned closer. His upper arm brushed against my breast and my nipple hardened painfully. I knew he felt it, too. The look we exchanged could have started Vidor’s bonfire for him.

“I don’t understand why your brother, even given his lengthy absences, kept Mrs Price in her post. Or at least why he didn’t do something about her inability to look after the house,” I said, when my breathing had returned to normal. “Her only talent seems to have been for not doing anything! Ceri told me that she rarely left the kitchen and, consequently, had not set foot in many of the other rooms for years.” I looked at the house that slumbered contentedly in golden sunlight. “It still needs a lot of work, but much of the problem has been caused by sheer neglect. I just don’t understand how a housekeeper who turns a blind eye to everything could ever be considered a blessing!” I decided I had said quite enough and stopped abruptly.

An arrested look crossed his features, and he stared at me briefly before looking up at the house. I had the feeling that my words had jarred something deep inside him. “Unless,” he murmured, talking more to himself than to me, “turning a blind eye was exactly the trait that was needed.” He turned back to the flowerbed and strenuously pulled up some thick strands of ivy that had strayed away from the house. The camaraderie of mere minutes ago was at an end. He was wrapped in his own world again, and I moved away to join Anika, who was enthusiastically, but not very expertly, pruning an overgrown rose bush.

“Oh, and, Lilly?” Gethin’s voice halted me in my tracks. I glanced back over my shoulder. “Your friends were wrong.” I frowned in confusion and he grinned again, melting my heart a little in the process. “When they said nobody wants a sexy governess,” he explained, his eyes dropping to take in my long, bare legs and exposed midriff. “They couldn’t have been more wrong.”

My face was so red as a result of my exertions that the fierce blush his words provoked had no effect. Like a candle lit at noon. Or so I hoped.

Ceri, rounding a corner of the house with a pile of twigs, had paused to observe this exchange. “Lilly’s a show-stopper,” she agreed, nodding approvingly at me. Laughing, Gethin continued with his task while I attempted to regain a modicum of my lost composure.

Afternoon was in its death throes when we returned to the house, tired but with a shared feeling of accomplishment. Like the house, the garden had given us back more than the sum of our efforts, Herculean though they were. Vidor and his helpers had scalped the hayfield and hacked back the choking brambles, nettles and weeds. In the process, they had unearthed a surprising find. Completely hidden by the wild climbing mayhem, a stunning white marble fountain of Italian design sat in the centre of the lawn. It made me think of Spanish carnivals and nights under jewelled Mediterranean skies. Gethin stared at it in silence before saying softly, “I didn’t know it was still here.”

Anika and I had trimmed back the ivy that had taken the beds and borders by force. At last the brightly coloured flowers, free from oppression, were able to peep through. Some of these might well be considered weeds by the purist, but I liked the sprays of glowing goldenrod and white lacy frills of wild carrot. Wisteria formed a vivacious, sweet-scented tunnel in shades of violet and blue, and dainty clematis clambered over the trellis that led to the kitchen garden. The lilac-perfumed breeze was redolent with memories of early summer.

Mounting the stairs, I had a feeling of satisfaction that the old house was starting—just starting, mind—to look like a home. The woodwork gleamed and the jewelled colours of the freshly scrubbed rugs lent warmer tints to the hall. Light, diffused by the stained-glass skylight, wandered in changing ribbons of colour across the floor. The scent of newly cut flowers, beeswax and freshly baked bread made my nostrils twitch appreciatively.

Ceri ran up ahead of me toward the nursery, but she paused, with a gasp of horror, on the threshold. It looked like a tornado had blown through the suite of rooms while we had been outside. Her bed had been overturned, the bedding flung to the four corners of the room. Every drawer in the tall chest that contained her clothing gaped open, and the contents were strewn wildly across the floor. Her wardrobe had been ransacked. In the nursery, jigsaws were tipped from their boxes into a jumble in the middle of the rug, books had been hauled from their neat shelves and upended carelessly on the floor and wooden toys had been taken apart and then abandoned. Ceri’s dolls and stuffed toys had fared the worst. A sad pile of limbs and heads bore witness to a plaything massacre and kapok stuffing spilled sadly from the brutalised remains of Ceri’s beloved teddies. Rita lay on her back, her forever sightless glass eyes raised heavenward. Ceri’s cry was pitiful. Her favourite toy had been slit open along her full length, and her innards lay in a heap next to her. I fell to my knees, scooping Ceri up into my arms, holding her close and whispering words of comfort. When I stood up, I frowned and brushed some familiar-looking green sparkles from my knees.

My room had received similar treatment. Drawers were flung open, the wardrobe doors hung wide, my clothes and bedding had been strewn across the floor. Gethin appeared in the doorway, his mouth a grim line as he took in the devastating scene. He drew me to him in a comforting embrace, and I felt slightly reassured by his strong arms around me. I felt a few other things as well, but none of them were in keeping with the situation.

“Why?” I asked simply, after a few minutes. Gethin’s chin was resting on my head, so I was forced to speak into the warm, musky hollow of his neck. It wasn’t a hardship.

I laughed without humour. “Pretty dim opportunists, then. Why would you look for valuables in the nursery and the governess’s room? I take it nowhere else has been touched?” He confirmed that suspicion, and I drew away from him to start gathering up my clothing. “And why do this in broad daylight?”

“If they have been watching the place, they would know that you are always here at night,” he pointed out. This observation did not make me feel any better.

“I just don’t understand how someone could get into, and then back out of, the house, while we were all in the garden,” I stated.

“Lilly, you are not going to like this suggestion,” Gethin said sombrely, and I paused in the act of folding clothes to look at him. “The gypsies have access to the house, they knew we were occupied in the garden….”

“No.” I shook my head vehemently. I wasn’t proud of it, but of course the thought had already crossed my mind. I had dismissed it instantly. Anika and Vidor were my friends. The whole caravan was grateful for the chance to stay on the field, rest their horses and affect any necessary repairs to their homes before travelling further north for an annual fair that was held in Yorkshire. The elders would, I knew, exact dreadful retribution if any of the younger members of the group stepped out of line. The gypsy code of conduct was strictly enforced. I didn’t ascribe any false romantic notions to my new friends. They would, I was sure, steal if the necessity arose. Just not from me. And there were daily opportunities for petty pilfering of quite valuable objects from this house, if any of their number was that way inclined. But the gypsies were not stupid enough to do anything on this scale. My mind came back to, and circled around, the fact that, if robbery was the motive for this onslaught, the wrong rooms had been chosen.

“You came outside some time after the rest of us,” I said to Gethin. I busied myself with continuing to pick up my clothing from the floor. “I don’t suppose you noticed anything?” He tensed slightly and I regarded him in surprise. He could not, surely, believe I was accusing him of doing this? “What a pity you have no motive,” I said in an attempt to reassure him and lighten the mood. “Since you appear to have had the best opportunity!”

I had made a perplexing discovery. Some of my clothes had been deliberately and systematically slashed. I held a dress up to show the damage to Gethin. It had been slit from neck to hem. “Why did they have to ruin these things?” I demanded in outrage. The only items that had been ravaged were my Felicia clothes. “Why couldn’t they have taken a knife to the sensible ones?”

I interrupted Gethin’s reluctant laugh to inform him of a new discovery. “They came in here first.”

I held up a blouse. It had been a particular favourite of mine. It was a soft green colour, adorned down the front with green sequins. A deep, diagonal cross had been cut into the front and the sequins were spilling onto the floor. “Some of these were in the nursery. They must have stuck to the intruder’s feet or clothing and been carried up there.” I looked around at the mayhem of my bedroom. “Whatever they were looking for, they thought they might find it here, in my room.”

“Ceri?” I had to say her name twice because she was deeply engrossed in kneading dough for Anika. She looked so young and helpless when she finally turned to me with flour on her nose and in her hair that my heart quailed. But, although we were so in tune, her psychic abilities were far in advance of mine. She knew and understood much more than most adults, let alone children of her own age. I pointed at the enormous dog, slumbering in a patch of sunlight. His heavy paws twitched and he grunted as he acted out his canine dreams. “Why do you think Shucky came to us?”

“Do we need to be looked after?” I finished setting careful stitches in Rita’s tummy. I couldn’t say she looked as good as new, but Ceri seemed happy with the result.

She nodded, but her nose wrinkled. “I don’t know why,” she said, pre-empting my next question.

I steeled my nerves to interrogate her further. “Ceri, when did you first see me in your dreams?”

She stopped, her sticky hands poised in midair above the bowl. A tiny frown appeared between her brows. “It was just after…you know…my parents…” Her hands fluttered helplessly and a blob of dough fell onto the table. She stared at it as if in shock.

“When they died?” I asked gently, and she nodded, her eyes bigger than ever. “And when did you first see the Hunter? Was it at the same time?”

Her hair danced wildly as she shook her head. “No,” it was emphatic, “I’ve always seen the Hunter. For as long as I can remember.” She gave the dough a vicious thump.

I took my cup of tea outside and sat on the bench beside the kitchen door, lost in the darkness of my thoughts. Our dreams—Ceri’s and mine—although they overlapped at this point in time, seemed to have taken divergent paths until now. She had dreamed about the Hunter for as long as she could remember, but I had first seen him only about four months ago, exactly the same time at which I had first appeared in Ceri’s dreams. The reminder that Ceri had always featured in my nightmares niggled at me.

The more I puzzled, the more the answers eluded me. Like a ghost hunter searching for phantoms where none existed, I was attempting to make sense of that which had no logic. But one thing was clear: whatever the reason for this strange convergence of our slumbering consciousness, it could be traced firmly back to one specific point in time…the moment when Bryn Taran’s car left an Austrian mountain road and plunged into a mountainside, killing both its occupants.

I was so deep in thought that I did not notice Gethin turn the corner of the kitchen garden. I didn’t know how long he had been standing there watching me before he said quietly, “Penny for your thoughts, Lilly Divine?”

“They are worth considerably more than that,” I informed him lightly, glad of a distraction. I shuffled along the bench and he came to sit next to me. I was, as always, utterly intoxicated by his presence, instantly powerfully, achingly aware of him. His profile, hewn from the same unyielding granite as the crags above us, revealed the silhouette of his perfect features against the dying light.

“It is so beautiful,” I said, dragging my eyes away and gazing out across the dramatic, disquiet valley. The river played its babbling music to the accompaniment of the late evening birdsong. “How sad that your brother did not love it as you do.”

“My brother was not capable of loving anything. Or anyone,” he spoke quietly, almost as one in a trance. “Beauty meant nothing to Bryn. But wherever there was evil, that was a different matter. That is where he would be drawn.”

I paused to consider this new layer in the shadowy picture I was building of Bryn Taran. “But surely he loved his wife? And Ceri?” I asked.

“How terribly sad that they died in such a way.” I shifted position slightly so that I was looking at him again, instead of out across the garden and over the valley. “Was your brother driving the car?”

He was silent for so long that I began to think he would not answer at all. Eventually, he said quietly, “The vehicle was found, completely burned out, at the roadside. The occupants were badly burned, but the authorities were able to ascertain that a man was in the driving seat and a woman was the passenger.”

Impulsively, I put my hand over his where it rested on the bench between us. He glanced down at it, and then turned his palm so that he could return my clasp. “I suppose the gossip mongers have been at work, so you already know that Christina was engaged to marry me before she met Bryn?” he asked. I nodded. “She rang me the day she died,” his voice had a faraway, dreamlike quality. “I hadn’t really spoken to her for years, but that day—of all days—she telephoned my office to say she needed to talk to me urgently and that she was coming to London. She wouldn’t say what it was about, but she sounded distraught.”

“Were they happy?” I asked. I was intensely aware of the warmth of his hand gripping mine. I didn’t know much about the protocols of this sort of situation, but I did wonder if holding hands with the boss was strictly appropriate. As if he read my thoughts, he lifted my hand, twining his fingers more firmly between mine.

He shook his head again. “No, not even in the early days. Christina was Bryn’s trophy. I don’t think he ever actually loved her. She was just one more thing he had won from me. He was intensely competitive and, well, we never really got on, even as children. Oddly, for twins, we may have looked alike, but our personalities were completely different. We never had that empathy that people expected us to show. He took great delight in wooing Christina away from me. And she…well, I suppose he did me a favour by showing me her true colours.” His words may have expressed gratitude to his dead brother, but his voice did not. “Bryn wasn’t capable of being faithful to Christina—or to anyone—he had a string of mistresses before they married, and he continued in the same way after. Morality meant nothing to him. Vice, promiscuity, he would laughingly call them the ‘new virtues.’ I heard rumours that, once Ceri was born, Christina had affairs, as well.”

I wanted to ask Gethin if he was still in love with his brother’s wife, but it was too personal. And I didn’t really want to hear the answer.

“No, I brought the bodies home and they were buried in the churchyard in the village.”

I searched around for a morsel with which to console him. “So they are resting in peace here in the valley.” It felt like I was trying to issue a pardon when the execution had already taken place.

“Perhaps.” There was that word again. Absentmindedly, his thumb traced a slow, circular pattern around my palm. I gave myself up to silence, and the maddening sensations his feather-light touch provoked. Then he stopped, staring at my hand as though he was surprised to see it there. “Lilly, I wish it was, but the past is not dead….” He let my hand go and I felt bereft. Emotion flickered in the dark depths of his eyes, like seaweed moving below the surface of a stormy sea. “I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t tell whether he was saying it to me, to himself or to someone else. Someone who wasn’t there.