The woman looked so solid, and so close, Jason could have reached out and touched her. She was as he had seen her before, with short, dark hair, power-dressed in a black suit, white blouse and court shoes, and staring him, levelly, in the eye. Neither friendly nor hostile.
Jason felt the hairs on his neck rising and the same icy wind as before seemed to be radiating from her.
He glanced at Emily. She looked rooted to the spot, her face white with terror.
For an instant it felt like time had stopped. As if the pause button had been hit on a movie. Jason desperately wanted to say something, but he could not open his mouth. Could not move a limb. He was struggling to breathe. It seemed as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the room.
‘You may go now,’ Orlebar said in his rich, confident voice.
Caroline Harcourt smiled, wryly, in a kind of acknowledgement.
An instant later, as if he was looking at a conjuring trick, Jason saw the woman begin to dissolve in front of his eyes. All the colour bleached out into monochrome. It continued fading, steadily, until there was only a silhouette, formed by a human-shaped cluster of tiny lights.
Then, like grains of sand in an hourglass pouring away, the lights steadily slipped away into the floor.
Within seconds they were gone.
The stomping above them had stopped, Jason realized.
The house felt, suddenly, quite different. Calm. As if some energy that had been there was now dispersed.
He looked at Emily and could see she felt the same thing. The tiniest twitch of a nervous smile on her lips.
Liberated.
They all sat down. Skeet and Orlebar looked shattered.
‘You saw her?’ Skeet asked.
Both of them nodded.
‘She needed to cross over,’ Orlebar said. ‘I think she was trying to attract attention – that’s what all the problems you’ve been experiencing were about. I don’t think you’ll have any more disturbances now.’
‘That was . . .’ Emily began, then shook her head. ‘I – did I – what did I see?’
‘You will be fine now,’ Skeet said.
The two clergymen began packing up.
Jason stood up. ‘We’re very grateful to you.’
‘Let’s hope that’s the end of it for you both,’ Orlebar smiled. ‘And now you can enjoy your new home and have a wonderful Christmas.’
She and Jason stood on the doorstep, watching them return to their funny little car that looked like a panel van and drive off.
‘I should have taken a photograph of them,’ he said. ‘They’d make a great painting!’
‘Beavis and Butthead?’
He grinned. As they went back inside and shut and bolted the front door he looked, warily, up at the ceiling.
‘So?’ Emily said. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think I need a large drink.’
‘Me too – a very large one.’
Walking back into the kitchen, Jason said, ‘That was weird. Weird! Freaky deaky weird.’
Emily opened the fridge and took out a bottle of white wine. ‘What was it that Orlebar, said – about historical activity, unrested souls. Negative energy? What were those footsteps about?’
‘The power of suggestion?’ he ventured.
‘Those footsteps weren’t power of suggestion. They were real. We both heard them.’
‘Or imagined we heard them?’
‘We heard them,’ she said, plainly. ‘You know we did.’
He twisted the screw-top cap off the bottle. ‘I don’t know what the cops thought last night.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘They thought we were a couple of loons.’
‘Shit!’ he said, suddenly. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’
‘What?’ she looked at him, concerned.
‘My fucking brain is all scrambled. I’ve got the paintings in my car – I was going to deliver them to my clients on the way home. I got so distracted by the Bishop I forgot.’
‘It’s Thursday tomorrow; still five days to Christmas. Your clients can wait until tomorrow, can’t they? Don’t take them tonight. Have a drink and relax.’
He nodded.
‘Maybe don’t leave them in the car overnight, though.’
‘I’ll go and get them; I don’t want to risk the car being broken into or stolen during the night.’
‘By our ghosts?’
He put the bottle down, grabbed his car keys and went outside into the darkness. All the Christmas lights, and it seemed more than before, were blazing again outside the Penze-Weedells’ house. He didn’t look long enough to see if there were any faces in the windows; he was too concerned about his paintings.
He popped the boot lid of his BMW, raised it and peered inside.
And felt a sudden, terrible, sick feeling of panic.
The boot was empty.