Property of a Lady (13 page)

‘Yes, you probably would. Thanks very much,’ said Nell gratefully.

As they pulled up outside the shop front, Michael said, ‘I’m sure you’re exhausted and you just want to go home and go to bed. But in case you haven’t eaten, the Black Boar do a reasonable bar meal.’

He said this diffidently, as if he was not at all sure it was the right thing to say, and certainly as if he was not sure of her reply.

Nell started to say she would go straight in, then realized two things. One was that she still did not know what had sent him out to the old churchyard and it was important to find out as much about that as possible. She could let Inspector Brent and the hospital know where she would be for the next hour or so, and in any case, she would have her phone to hand.

The other thing was that, as Brad would have said, she was suddenly extraordinarily hungry. So she smiled and said, ‘D’you know, that’s a very welcome suggestion.’

The Black Boar’s dining room was small and had the air of being an extension of the bar with a few knives and forks dropped casually on a couple of the tables. Even so, it felt odd to be facing a man across a dining table after so long.

Michael ordered the food, then took from his pocket a folded A4 sheet. ‘This is what sent me to that church,’ he said, handing it to her. ‘It’s a printout from an article in one of the local newspapers.’

Nell looked at the headline. ‘“Missing girl found in churchyard”. She glanced at the date then read the article through, frowning slightly. ‘How on earth did you know about this?’ she said, looking up at him.

‘You mentioned it to me on the phone.’

‘Did I? Oh yes, so I did.’

‘And you told the inspector as well,’ said Michael.

‘I do remember that,’ said Nell. ‘He managed to get the case notes, but he said they were very brief. That there was nothing to link it to Beth’s disappearance.’

‘There wasn’t. I saw the file. But I had something else to go on,’ said Michael. ‘Two things, in fact.’

‘What?’ For the first time she felt a faint suspicion.

‘The first is that when I was at Charect House a few weeks ago I saw – or thought I saw – a man who fits Beth’s nightmare.’

‘A real prowler after all?’ Nell felt a bump of fear. ‘Not just a nightmare or amnesia?’ But I don’t want him to be real, she thought. I don’t want Beth to have been threatened by someone who might still be around, still watching her. The man with holes where his eyes should be, the man who sings that macabre rhyme . . .

‘I’m not sure if he was a prowler at all,’ said Michael. ‘I’m not really sure what he was.’ He paused as their food was brought and set down. ‘I told you there were two things,’ he said, after the waitress had gone. ‘And it’s the other thing that’s worrying me.’ He frowned, as if searching for the right words, then said, ‘My god-daughter, Ellie, has been having nightmares that sound identical to Beth’s.’

‘The man with holes where his eyes should be.’ It felt even worse to say the words aloud than it had to have them inside her mind. Nell wanted to gather Beth up and move as far away as possible from Marston Lacy and forget all this had ever happened. But if another child was having the same terrors as Beth . . . ‘That’s really disturbing,’ she said, after a moment.

‘Yes, but what if it’s just a fairly common manifestation of a child’s secret fears?’ said Michael. ‘I have no way of knowing that. It would need a psychiatrist specializing in the problems of children.’ He made an impatient gesture with one hand. ‘But I don’t know very much about children.’

‘I’m beginning to wonder if I do. Children can have quite severe nightmares, though. Tell me about Ellie’s. There might be all kinds of differences.’

‘There is one difference,’ said Michael. ‘Ellie has another character in the nightmare. She says the man is trying to find someone.’

Nell stopped with a forkful of lasagne halfway to her mouth. ‘Elvira,’ she said. ‘Is it Elvira he’s trying to find?’

‘Yes. How on earth did you know that?’

‘Because earlier this evening, Beth said she hadn’t been as frightened of the man as she might have been, because she wasn’t the one he wanted. He wanted Elvira.’ The lasagne, which was beautifully cooked and served with crisp warm Italian bread, and which Nell had been enjoying, suddenly tasted of nothing.

At last Michael said, ‘Does Beth know anyone called Elvira?’

‘No. Nor do I. I’ll bet you’d have to go a long way to find anyone called Elvira these days. Michael, what is all this?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I think we need to find out who – or what Elvira is. The first thing to do, is for me to ask Jack a bit more about Ellie’s dreams.’

‘Don’t alarm them unnecessarily,’ said Nell. She liked the sound of Liz Harper and her family, and it would be terrible to put needless fears in their minds.

‘I won’t,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll email them as soon as I get back to Oxford.’ Then, as the waitress hovered, ‘Would you like anything else to eat? No? A cup of coffee?’

Nell shook her head. When the waitress had gone, she said, ‘I was thinking you could email from the flat if you like. You’re welcome to use my computer – I’ve got Liz Harper’s email address on it.’

‘It’s a bit late to do that now,’ he said slowly.

‘It needn’t take long. And if you send something tonight there might be a reply as soon as tomorrow.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But I’ll use my own laptop – I brought it with me thinking I might do some work and thinking the Black Boar would have Internet connection, but it doesn’t, at least not for customers. There might be an email from Jack to pick up, as well. Wait here, will you, and I’ll get it from my room.’

If it had felt odd to dine with a man again, it felt even odder to be unlocking her own door and going up to the sitting room with him. There was a moment when Nell wondered if she was being stupid, inviting this near-stranger into her home late at night. But it was not so very late – barely ten o’clock – and in a way this was a semi-business arrangement. The trouble was that she was out of practice at dealing with a situation involving herself and a single man. On the heels of this thought came another one: that Michael Flint was actually quite attractive – the dark hair and eyes, and the diffidence mingled with undoubted intelligence. And the vague impression that in certain situations he might be very far from diffident . . .

She was instantly horrified and sickeningly aware of disloyalty to Brad. It would be gratitude to Michael she was feeling, nothing more. Relief that Beth was safe. There was some German phrase about immense emotion being churned up towards people with whom one shared a danger or a difficult situation – this would be an example of that.

She pointed out the Internet connection so he could plug in the laptop and, as he sat down at the desk, headed for the kitchen to make coffee. As the percolator hissed and bubbled, Nell’s thoughts strayed again and she found herself wondering if he was linked up with anyone. He had said he was not married, but he would be sure to have some incredibly learned female don eagerly waiting for him at Oxford. Someone who was fluent in five or six languages, or wrote papers on ancient Sanskrit or obscure corners of medicine, and who lectured to immensely scholarly societies. One of those women who wore infuriatingly-flattering glasses and scooped their hair into loose chignons with apparent carelessness, but looked fantastic. Thinking man’s crumpet. Was it Joan Bakewell who had originally inspired that phrase? The coffee blew a series of loud raspberries, and Nell reached hastily for the jug and poured the steaming brew into mugs.

Michael had tangled up the laptop’s power lead with the Internet cable and was half lying under the desk, frowningly trying to sort them out.

He looked up as she came in. ‘I don’t think this is right, do you? I’m not actually terribly good at mechanical things or electronic things.’ He looked so perplexed that Nell laughed properly for the first time in twenty-four hours and said, ‘It looks as if you’ve been trying to plug the phone cable into the mains. Come out of the way and let me do it. If the battery’s sufficiently charged, you don’t really need to connect to the mains, not for the few minutes it’ll take to type an email.’

‘I can generally get somebody else to do this kind of thing,’ he said apologetically as Nell crawled under the desk and connected the laptop’s USB cable to the phone line. ‘Thanks, Nell. I’m fine from here on.’

As soon as the laptop came on and the email programme opened, Nell saw the email with the name Jack Harper on the ‘From’ line at once. Her heart leapt, even though she told herself it would contain an ordinary message, something to do with Charect House’s renovations. She sat in the deep armchair, her hands curled round her mug of coffee, trying not to watch as Michael read the email. But when he said, ‘Oh God,’ a voice within her said: something
is
wrong.

‘Come and see this,’ he said, getting up from the desk.

Nell, her heart racing, sat down and began to read.

Michael—

We’re thinking we might have to get Ellie away from Maryland for a time to see if it will cure these nightmares. Last night was by far the worst ever, and in the end we took her to ER. They checked just about everything that could be checked – all absolutely fine. All they could do in the end was hold her down and sedate her. If you’ve ever seen a seven-year-old girl restrained by two nurses and given chlorpromazine – well, I shouldn’t think you have, but it’s killing to see it. Liz was devastated, and so was I, although I didn’t show it as much as she did. Maybe I absorbed some British reserve at Oxford.

They’re waving the prospect of psychs at us, of course. It’s this business of ‘Elvira’ they’re worried about, and we understand that because we’re agonizingly worried about Elvira as well. I don’t know very much about schizophrenia or whatever it’s correctly called nowadays, but what I do know is that last night Ellie screamed Elvira’s name over and over again. Most of what she said was unintelligible – hysterical sobbing – but at one stage she said, very clearly, “He’s going to get her very soon. Only he mustn’t, he really
really
mustn’t . . .” She clung to me, shouting, “Daddy, don’t let him get her – promise you won’t let him . . . She’s so frightened of him . . .”

I promised I wouldn’t let anyone get Elvira – wouldn’t you have done the same? I said she was safe and Elvira was safe – Michael, I’d have promised her the moon and the universe to reassure her. But then I said, “In any case, hon, that man can’t ever get at anyone – he’s safely locked out.”

Ellie started sobbing again then. She said, between anger and panic, “But that’s just it, Daddy. You’re so stupid, you don’t understand. He can get in anywhere, he
can
. Because he can do the dead man’s knock on the door. When he does that, the doors open for him. All locks open to the dead man’s knock.”

Truly, Michael, I’ve never heard anything so all-out chilling in my life. Ellie believes all this – she believes this man is trying to find ‘Elvira’ – that he can get inside houses by means of a dead man’s knock, and I
know
that sounds like a macabre party game, but it’s what she said and I’ve no idea where she got hold of such a grisly idea.

What I do know is that Ellie believes when this man finds Elvira he’ll harm her in some appalling way she can’t explain.

The medics think Ellie’s had some sort of traumatic experience at the hands of an adult – something we don’t know about – and that she’s transferring the bad experience on to an alter ego. And it’s true the names are similar – Ellie and Elvira. But Liz and I would know if Ellie had been hurt or frightened or – oh God – abused. I can’t believe I wrote that last word. I’m sure we’d know, though. Ellie’s in school all day, and Liz takes and collects her along with a bunch of other kids. She and three neighbors take turns. So we know where she is all the time. We know her friends and their families. And listen, I
know
that’s what all parents of abused kids say, but I’m absolutely convinced nothing’s happened to her. And it
can’t
be right to put a seven-year-old into analysis.

Sorry for the long and (I’m afraid) emotional rant – but it feels like talking to you to write it all down. Like all those nights we used to thrash out the world’s problems and our own into the small hours and I used to drink too much, because most of the problems were generally mine. You hardly ever got drunk, did you, and on the rare occasions when you did go over the top, all that happened was that you had a look of soulful decadence next morning – like a romantically-inclined monk who went on the loose and found it so good that he was wondering if he should do it again.

Anyhow, here’s the thing. If Charect House is anywhere near habitable, we think we really will come over for Christmas. It would do Ellie – and Liz – so much good. Different places, different people.

Talking of people, we’re looking forward to meeting the cool-sounding Nell West. Also your mystery lady who looked out of Charect’s window that day. Or are they one and the same?

Till soon,

Jack

As Nell finished reading and sat back in the chair, Michael said, a bit awkwardly, ‘That last bit – Jack thought there was someone in one of the photos I sent him of Charect. It looked as if someone was peering out of an upstairs window, and he thought . . . There wasn’t anyone, of course, it was a trick of the light.’