Property of a Lady

‘An’ he stood in the corner an’ that’s when I woke up,’ said Beth. ‘He was looking for me.’ She was making a valiant effort not to cry, and Nell’s heart contracted. ‘Could I come downstairs after all, Mum?’


‘Of course you can.’ Nell reached for the dressing gown and wrapped it round the small, shivering figure. She would crush a junior paracetamol in the hot milk. That would calm Beth down and help her to go back to sleep.

‘The bad thing,’ said Beth as they went down the stairs. ‘The really bad thing—’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s frightening to say it.’ Her lower lip trembled. ‘It makes it real if you say it.’

‘No, it doesn’t. Saying a thing shoos the fright away. Sit by the fire and tell me.’

‘He had no eyes,’ said Beth, thrusting a clenched fist into her mouth. ‘That man who got into my room. He was trying to find me, but he couldn’t because he had no eyes.’


No eyes. How had Beth known something so macabre and so deeply distressing? Because when Brad was killed, skidding on that patch of ice so that the tanker smashed into his car, the impact had driven one of the tanker’s splintered wheel arches straight through the car’s side. His eyes had been shattered – Brad’s dear lovely eyes that smiled with such love and life. . . . His brain had bled out through the eye sockets while the ambulances tried to get to him through the motorway pile-up.

Beth had never known about the injuries, of course. Somehow Nell had managed to make Brad’s death sound smooth and clean to her. They had discussed what might happen when somebody died; Nell, who had never really sorted out her own beliefs in that direction, had tried to give Beth a child’s outlook on reincarnation, which seemed to her one of the happier theories, and which, for Beth, could be likened to plants that died in the autumn, but came up again the following spring, bright and new.

But the only people who had known what the tanker’s huge metal struts had done to Brad were Nell herself, their GP in London, and the coroner’s office.

And no one in the world knew about Nell’s own nightmares, in which Brad, his face shredded, his eyes torn away, tried to fumble his blind way back to find her.

The photograph of Charect House showing the woman at the attic window had bothered Michael in a low-key way for several days, but he managed to push it to the back of his mind. He also managed to ignore the nagging memory of the shadowy figure he had glimpsed on the stairs.

Michaelmas term went amiably along its well-worn tracks, enlivened here and there by various college activities. Michael gave a paper to the Tolkien Society, which seemed to be well received, and was guest speaker at a Students’ Union debate – the topic was the relevance of romanticism in the modern world, which made for some lively discussion. Afterwards, some of his students bore him off to the Turf Tavern, where inordinate quantities of beer were drunk and huge platters of seafood risotto circulated. Michael finally managed to extricate himself on the grounds that he had a faculty meeting at nine next morning and should get an early night. This was received with derisive hoots, and somebody started a limerick on the subject of faculties. Michael grinned, waited until the second verse was boozily completed, joined in the applause, then dropped an extra twenty-pound note into the drinks kitty before making good his exit. He reached his rooms shortly before midnight to find that Wilberforce had left a dead mouse on the step, which had to be disposed of in the incinerator in the basement. By the time he had dealt with this it was a quarter to one when he finally got to bed. Still, it had been a good evening, and it was nice that the students were so friendly.

It was during the first week of November when Jack Harper emailed again about the Shropshire house.