Property of a Lady

She stood very still, listening intently. The sounds came and went, like a bad radio or TV signal. She was about to call out or make a dash for the lychgate when something moved on the edge of her vision, something that was not quite substantial enough to be a figure but that was more than the curtain of rain. A figure moving between the trees, was it? For pity’s sake, this was turning into every classic ghost scenario ever written! But there had been something, she was sure of it.

The sounds were forming a definite pattern – forming words, a faint rhythm.

‘At the midnight hour, beneath the gallows tree . . .

Hand in hand the Murderers stand . . .

By one, by two, by three . . .

Open lock to the dead man’s knock . . .’

Horror closed around Nell’s throat. It was the rhyme – the rhyme Alice had heard that night, the rhyme Beth talked about and Ellie had known. She waited, but the eerie chanting had stopped and she could only hear the rain pattering on the leaves and against the walls of the church. And then footsteps, blessedly ordinary footsteps, came towards her, and there was the bright colour of an umbrella and Michael’s voice calling that he was sorry to have been so long, but he had dropped the car keys and they had rolled into the ditch and nearly been washed down a roadside grid, and he was covered in mud from retrieving the wretched things. This small, ordinary thing was somehow so reassuring that Nell smiled. Because, of course, those sounds had been simply the rain and the dripping trees mixed up with her own nervous tension. Anyone would be jumpy and a bit over-imaginative in a deserted old graveyard, for goodness’ sake.

But some perversity made her say to Michael, ‘Did you see anyone on your way back?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I thought Inspector Brent said something about sending his forensic people in to see if Beth had been taken inside the church.’

‘I shouldn’t think they’d come here in all this rain,’ said Michael. ‘Are you alright to look at the grave? I mean, it isn’t going to upset you?’

‘I’m tougher than that. Let’s do it before one of us gets pneumonia.’

‘Well, stay under the umbrella.’


They went as quickly as possible towards the old gravestones. The umbrella was a large golfing one, but it was still necessary to huddle quite close together. It brought back the rainy afternoons when Nell and Brad used to take long walks on the heath, their arms round one another under an umbrella, and how they would come back to the tall, old house where Brad would wrap her in a huge bath towel and make love to her in front of the fire while her hair was still wet . . .

The headstone Michael indicated was very weathered. Moss and lichen covered parts of it, but most of the lettering was legible. Michael read it out: ‘“Elizabeth Lee, wife of William Lee. Tragically taken from the world in October 1888.”’

‘William Lee,’ said Nell, staring down at it. ‘Charect House again. That’s a curious coincidence.’

‘Yes.’ Michael knelt down, heedless of the sodden bracken piled around the grave, and began to scrape the moss from the lower part of the stone. ‘Look,’ he said, and something in his voice sent Nell’s nerve-endings shivering again. Brushing off the moss had uncovered the rest of the lettering. Beneath the wording about Elizabeth Lee, wife of William, was another line.

Dearly loved mother of Elvira.

Elvira.

Michael sat back on his heels, staring at the carved words. ‘Elvira,’ he said softly, and the name seemed to hiss through the trees.

Elvira . . .

Nell found she was gripping the umbrella handle so tightly that it was scoring marks into her palms. Elvira, the name that had haunted Ellie Harper’s nightmares. Elvira, for whom Beth believed the eyeless man searched.

Michael stood up, brushing the wet bracken from his cords. Half to himself, he said, ‘So she existed. And she must have lived at Charect House – grown up there. That’s extraordinary. D’you know, I didn’t believe in her until now.’

Nell had not believed in Elvira either. She had thought Elvira was a nightmare figure, a phantom of a child’s imagination. But she was real, she had been the daughter of William Lee, the man who, according to Alice Wilson’s journal, was said to be still seen in Marston Lacy, seventy years after his death.