Ghostwalk (18 page)

“Richard Herring—the boy—was the fourth in the series? How did he die? Did he drown? Was he a Trinity fellow too?”

“No, he wasn’t. He was the son of an alderman called John Herring, a draper, who was very important on the city council and had been mayor of the city until the year before his son’s death. His son, Richard, got tied up with things alchemical, Elizabeth thought. He drowned at dawn in the river in 1668. Yes, at dawn. It’s all in the file. He was the fourth in the series but not the last. But then it’s not really possible to talk about beginnings and endings as far as the dead are concerned.”

“So Elizabeth came here and you ‘called up’ Greswold and Valentine? Then Cowley and Herring turned up on the letterboard. What did they tell you?”

“Nothing coherent. That was the trouble. It was all a jumble. We kept a record of everything the spirits told us through the glass on the letterboard. There were references to the Bible, to what we assumed were alchemical texts, initials, and what we assumed were code words, as well as the words
Herring
and
Cowley.
It was all just fragments. We failed to make any sense of it. Elizabeth eventually gave up and went back to the archives to see if the names were significant. She found Cowley pretty quickly.”

“How did she find Richard Herring?” I asked. Dilys passed me a sheet of photocopied paper. “It was under her nose. She looked up Herring in Alderman Newton’s diary and found this,” she said. The photocopy was headed, in Elizabeth’s hand, “Richard Herring—fourth in the series” and showed an extract from the diary. Alderman Newton had described the events of the night of Richard Herring’s death—the game of dice in the Red Hart, the riverbank walk—events that I had just glimpsed or dreamed in that strange trance:

11th November, 1668.
Wednesday:
Richard Herring the sonne of Alderman Herring draper, did drowne himself as it is thought, betweene 6 and 7 in the morning before it was light between Garrett Hostle Bridge and Trinity Coll Tenniscourt, he had bin at play at dice the night before being Tewsday night at John Dods at the Red Hart in Petticury and lost (as was thought) there with a London gamester, and cheater above 100 which as was thought was the onely reason he offered violence to himselfe, the money was said to be tax money received by him for Captain Story. He was buryed in the South Churchyard of Great St Maryes the same night.

“But,” I said, suddenly chilled.

“I’ve never read this.”

“Precisely.”

“So how…?”

“Oh, it all depends on what you believe. Sceptics would say you have an active imagination or that you have yielded to my powers of suggestion—though I am not quite sure how I might have suggested those particular details.
We
would say that earlier this afternoon you received a spirit who passed through you. You were not hypnotised. Richard Herring is very insistent on using other people to speak for him and to remember for him. He has been very insistent since Elizabeth first came here.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “He is, frankly, a nuisance.”

“How so?”

“He gets in the way of the other spirits. My work is terribly important to the people who come here. I have to speak with those who have passed through to the other side: fathers, sisters, dead children. People rely on me. There are messages to be conveyed backwards and forwards. People get upset very easily and there’s so much room for misunderstanding, so one needs the lines to be very clear and one needs to be very tactful. It is all rather delicate. I’m afraid that since Elizabeth first received him, Richard Herring has been more than a nuisance.”

“What does he want?”

“He won’t say. But he’s got much worse since Elizabeth died.”

“Don’t most ghosts come back for resolution or justice? If they are still around, isn’t that because they have unfinished business?”

“That’s all a little clichéd, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said Dilys, mild disappointment in her voice. “And all rather
Catholic.
People who think of spirits as the unquiet dead, well, that’s all based on very old-fashioned notions of a place called limbo. We don’t like to call them ghosts. Smacks too much of white sheets and chains. Marley’s ghost. Spirits is a better way of thinking about them. Spirits make contact for all sorts of reasons.”

“But revenge might be one of them?”

“Oh yes. Revenge is an important motive for many of them. I wish it weren’t so. But there you have it. You have to work with what you’ve got.”

I scanned the report of Herring’s death again. The details were all so vivid: the Red Hart in Petticury, the dice, the tax money, the boy drowned at dawn. “Might Herring have been drugged and then drowned?” I asked. “Is it possible that the card game was a smoke screen, an attempt to make it look like suicide? If Herring was murdered for whatever reason, wouldn’t he have a motive for revenge? Wouldn’t that be reason enough for him to come back?”

“Yes, but if we are being detectives, then surely we’re looking at either Newton or his friend as possible suspects, if only because they are the people Herring saw at the Red Hart just before his death.”

“But, Mrs. Kite, we can’t be detectives with evidence like this, based on communion with the dead. Nor can ghosts be suspects. Not in twenty-first-century law in any case…You talked about repetitions. What repetitions?”

“Elizabeth rang me on the sixth of January to tell me that the dates of the deaths of Greswold, Valentine, Cowley, and Herring had begun to coincide with another series. She was very agitated. Felt responsible, she said.”

“Coincided with what?”

“Elizabeth had noticed two deaths last year very close to each other in Chesterton: on the ninth and eleventh of November. Two street drinkers found dead, one at the bottom of a car-park staircase, the other drowned in the Cam, a suspected suicide. She’d noticed the coincidence of the dates but hadn’t thought any more about it. Then on the fifth of January this year there was another death by falling in Cambridge—a young man who fell down a staircase in a local hostel.”

“Christ. The dates coincide. OK. And what did she make of it?”

“She said she thought it was a warning of some kind—a warning to her to stop investigating. I think someone violent was trying to contact her from the other side, drawing attention to the dates. But she kept on going just the same, all through the spring and into the early summer. We tried calling them up again, and Elizabeth kept on taking down all the combinations of words and fragments of things that came up on the board. Then she told me one day in the library that she’d been in contact with a Mr. F. She wouldn’t name him—said it was too dangerous, but she said he knew things about the Trinity deaths. Then on the twenty-eighth of July there was another death—another young man from the same hostel found dead in one of the stretches of grass near Trinity; a heroin overdose, they said. The police started an investigation, and in a few weeks they’d shut the hostel down.”

“The twenty-eighth of July—the date of Cowley’s death?”

“Exactly. Elizabeth was frantic. She was convinced there was a connection between her research and the deaths, that it was her fault in some way. The police weren’t investigating—they didn’t see anything suspicious. There was a big fuss in the papers about drug cultures and street drinkers, and people were campaigning to have the hostels shut down. When Elizabeth rang me after the July death, she said she’d decided to burn all her papers. I told her to wait. I wish I hadn’t. She wouldn’t say anything else. She said she didn’t want to put me in danger. I was worried, so I went to see her. She wasn’t in. Then I went away in August to a convention in Scotland. At the beginning of September she left a message on my answer phone saying she’d finished the book. But by the time I got back, it was too late. She died on the seventh of September. Cameron found her three dys later.”

Something over to my left. A shadow in a doorway. The outline of a man, his face illuminated from the left. The light touches only the white of his shoulder-length hair, the sheen of his forehead, the side of his lip, which curls faintly with a tincture of malevolence; dark shadows fall across all the rest. He passes in red through the open space between the two sides of the door frame and then is gone.

“Well, my dear. You are up to your neck in this now. Nothing you can do about it. One thing at a time. There will be a suspicious death in Cambridge in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the ninth of November, the date of Valentine’s death, then again two days later, on the eleventh of November, the date of Herring’s death. I will stake my reputation upon it. Unless we can do something before then. There’s been a death on each of the dates since Elizabeth started investigating.”

“How do we stop it?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“And the fifth man? The fifth in the series.”

“He’s gone missing from the files.”

“Who was he?”

“We never knew. Elizabeth found him somewhere in some archive or other. She only told me that he was a fellow at Trinity, sent down in 1666, one of the two plague years. But she never told me his name.”

“Sent down?”

“Insanity, Elizabeth said. She’d found a reference in some Trinity archive or other, but it’s disappeared. I’ve been through everything. It happens. Elizabeth considered him to be the fifth in the series, but I’m not sure why. There’s no way of finding out now—not without a name anyway.”

Bring something that belongs to him,
Dilys Kite had said. The prism. Newton’s prism. Why would Elizabeth, conservative, law-abiding, reclusive Elizabeth, have stolen a glass prism, least of all from a museum, unless something very important depended upon it? She and Dilys had already spoken to Newton, then, drawing him in with his own prism, despite the fact that Dilys said it was too dangerous.

Seventeen

O
ne night snow began to fall. Will and I were sitting in the window seat in The Studio watching the snow powder the trees and rosebushes in the garden when she began to tell me a story about being stuck with her grandfather on a broken-down train in a snowstorm between Norwich and Littleport when she was fifteen. Her grandfather, she said, who ran a butcher’s shop in Norwich, was taking her home to her parents. She didn’t want to go. Sometime in that void of whitened and blizzarded time he told her a story about blood and snow. Back in the forties, he said, after the war, he’d given up his job at the Smithfield meat market for a job at a small abattoir in Norfolk, right out in the middle of the fields, near Littleport. He wanted to find a place to settle down and start a family, now that he’d met Elsie, Will’s grandmother.

They built abattoirs in the fields then, he said, so that the local farmers could plough the blood straight back into the soil. Will winced when she described what she imagined as a glistening mixture of black soil and red-brown blood, but, she said, her grandfather insisted that the blood was good for the crops. Potent. And what else were they supposed to do with it? he said. You couldn’t just flush it into the drains.

Eventually, once he’d found his feet in the new job, Elsie took the train from London to see him, turning up at the Littleport Station in a snowstorm with her dog, a white terrier. Frank took her for eel and chips in the village pub and then they set out across the fields to walk in the snow. It was, he said, one of those perfect winter days—imagine, he said, white fields under a lowering and white sky, broken only by the spires of a few churches on the horizon and the cross-hatching of hedgerows, dusted white. He took Elsie diagonally across the field towards the setting sun. He had a question to ask her.

Elsie kissed him in the middle of the field. It was when he opened his eyes after that kiss, he told the fifteen-year-old Will, that he saw the blood on Elsie’s boots, but it was too late to stop his question or her expectation of it. It had to be asked. In front of them the landscape was so beautiful that it hurt to look at it, he said. Behind them, like a chain connecting them to the gate through which they had passed and where she had kissed him, two sets of red footprints in the snow punctured the whiteness. The farmer had sprayed blood onto already frozen fields the day before and, unable to plough the blood into the frozen soil, had taken himself home. Then the snow had fallen in the night to cover the blood. Their small steps that afternoon had been enough to melt the thin snow and bring the blood to the surface.

“I’ve never been able to get that picture out of my head,” Will said. “The fields were bleeding. Can you imagine that? My grandmother and grandfather were standing out there alone in all that blood and he was about to ask her to marry him. And then my grandmother laughed,” Will said. “She just laughed at the line of blood in the snow, laughed at her dog now stained red and barking, at his boots and her boots, thick with coagulated blood. And then she said, ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’ He hadn’t even asked her, he said. My grandmother was like that—she always seemed to know what you were thinking before you’d even thought it yourself.

“Think of the number of animal lives,” she said, “that it must have taken to produce enough blood to cover a field, not just once but again and again, enough for radishes and spinach and beets to grow fat on. There’s slaughter everywhere,” Will said, “deep in the soil, infecting the whole food chain. My grandmother and grandfather could live with that—they had to. He went straight from all the slaughter of Smithfield to the war and back to Smithfield and then to the abattoir near Littleport. She was a nurse. You just washed it away, Elsie said, when Will asked her about the blood. You used bleach and chemicals and strong soaps and the best twin tubs and you just washed all that blood out of his white and striped cotton aprons and her blue uniforms. Blood comes out. You just don’t think about it.

“I never went there,” Will said. “To the abattoir. Though I dreamed about it a lot when I was a kid. Still do. Maybe it would have been better to see it for myself. They’ve knocked it down now. Does it ever go away, though, do you think? All that blood? My grandfather came back from the war and spent the rest of his life killing animals and selling meat. How many animals did my grandfather slaughter in his lifetime, would you guess? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Could you ever wash all that blood away?

“That’s what it’s like up there on the Black Fen,” Will went on. “Since the Romans and the Dutchmen came, people have spent all that time draining that land so that they can use it, plough their fields and lay their railways, but the water is only ever a few inches or feet below the surface, like the blood welling up around the abattoir. My grandfather has a picture of the floods at Littleport in 1939 just as the war was about to break. There’s a train brought to a standstill and a man standing on the track surrounded by water. To me it looks like blood,” she said. “An ocean of blood. A tide.” She pulled her feet into the window seat, rested her head on the window frame, and closed her eyes.

And that same marsh lies down there, I thought, watching Will’s face in repose, down there under the weight of Cambridge stone and quadrangle and manicured lawns. Waiting. Inscrutable. Like Conrad’s jungle. Biding its time before it rises to take its revenge upon its oppressor. Lying close. The city of reason may have declared all that lies beyond rational knowledge to be obsolete, but it hasn’t gone away; it’s just slipped into the unconscious, down there into the water table. Lying low. The gardeners have to keep the marsh at bay by perpetually trimming the hedges and peeling back the ivy from the stone. T. S. Eliot knew about the malevolence of water too:

…the brown god is almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable,

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

Will had fallen asleep in the window seat; from the armchair I saw her closely cropped head fall forward slightly and her lips part as her breathing deepened. The story had unsettled me, but so had the way she told it. I was beginning to understand something.

As I sat watching Will sleep, wondering about her, I knew I was being watched. I turned to look through the window and saw a man with white hair standing near the apple tree closest to the window, looking in, lit only by the light that fell from behind me. He appeared so much closer than before that as I met his gaze, his nearness made me catch my breath and turn cold. There was a terrible intimacy in his appearing there in The Studio garden; it was an alarmingly forward stride for him, I felt. He was the same—the white hair, the curl of the lip—and seen only, this time, as I had seen him before, from the waist up, the window blocking the rest of the view. And, also as last time, it was as if he had rubbed through from somewhere else because, though the snow fell heavy and slow in the garden and across everything, it did not fall across his thin figure or the space in which he stood. And behind him people seemed to be moving in sepia inside a kind of oval frame with smudged edges, crossing and recrossing. I couldn’t see whole figures, just the edge of a gown or part of a face—smoke too, grey smoke softening the edges of the moving figures. Among the trees, in the slanting snow.

He stood there looking in at me only for a few seconds—long enough to convince me that he also saw and recognised me. It was the strangest sensation, as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always. Though he fixed me with his gaze, I watched as his eyes wandered, picking out various objects in the room behind me: the manuscript on the table, the shelves and boxes of papers. I was suddenly quite sure that it was not for me he had come. He was looking at Elizabeth’s manuscript.

I gasped, suddenly angry and territorial, rising from my chair towards him, kneeling on the window seat, pressing my face and hand to the pane of glass which clouded up instantly; I wished I could pull a curtain across the glass to shut him out. Will woke, startled by the noise and movement I had made and, seeing me staring out into the garden, turned slowly to look at whatever it was behind her that had frightened me. All we could now see of the orchard was empty with a great emptiness. Will turned back to look at me. My face and expression had shocked her.

“Fuck. You look awful. What’s happened?” Her hand tightened on mine as she followed the line of my gaze. “What is it?”

“I thought I saw something in the garden,” I said. “Spooked myself. It’s just the snow—plays tricks with your eyes.”

“Jesus, you frightened me,” she said, looking at her watch. “It’s so late. How could I have fallen asleep like that?” She paused, dragging her fingers across her face to wake herself up. “You OK now?”

I nodded.

“Look,” she said. “I’m going to have to go away for a while. I came to say good-bye.”

“You’ll be back?”

“Oh yes, I hope so. Depends on what happens over the next few weeks.”

“How long?”

“Could be a week or a month. Probably not any longer. And I’ve arranged for someone to keep an eye out for you.”

“An eye on
me
? Why?”

“Because you’re caught up in something complicated and it might be dangerous. I can’t explain because I’m not allowed to and because I can’t just give you bits—I’d have to explain it all.”

“To do with Elizabeth’s manuscript?”

“No, absolutely nothing to do with all of that. Something very un–seventeenth century. Now go to bed and don’t think about it. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Don’t think about it? How was I supposed to do that? I had only just begun to think…as if for the first time.