They looked at one another. ‘No,’ said Antonia at last. ‘It doesn’t have to be. There are several very good hospitals around here.’
‘Good.’ He refilled the wine glasses. ‘You do know you could have this cottage for as long as you want?’
‘Could I? Along with the ghosts?’ Antonia had no idea why she had said this.
‘Everyone has ghosts, Antonia. But after a while they can be lived with.’
‘I know that. And there aren’t precisely ghosts in this cottage,’ said Antonia. ‘But—’
‘But there are pockets of something a bit odd, aren’t there?’ he said. ‘Especially the part where the kitchen goes through into the old outhouses.’
‘Yes.’ Antonia looked up at him. ‘You know about it?’
‘Of course I know. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘I didn’t think anyone else would understand.’
Oliver seemed about to reach for her hand, and then thought better of it. But he said, ‘I understand all about ghosts. And there’s the same feeling of–of oddness in parts of Quire House. Unhappiness–something stronger than unhappiness, even. But I don’t know any more than that.’ He looked at her very intently. ‘Do the ghosts matter? Or can they be lived with?’
The ghosts. Richard and Don. Oliver’s wife who had died at Twygrist. Daniel Glass, and Bryony who had written that letter to him from her raggle-taggle Irish idyll. The body of the man in the kiln room. And poor sad Maud inside Latchkill…
Antonia said, very carefully, ‘Yes. Yes, I believe the ghosts can be lived with,’ and saw with delight he was reaching for her hand, and this time he was not going to think better of it…
They said there was always one thing you forgot when you killed someone. Always one mistake you made.
Donna had not thought she had made any mistakes–she had had five years to make sure that mistakes would not happen, but…The Clock-Winder. The one thing she had not thought about–had hardly even known about. But if it had not been for that young man–another young man for Weston to get her claws into!–Antonia would have died in Twygrist. She ought to have died: Donna had wanted her to die alone and in the dark.
Instead the bitch was free, the police had discovered Donna’s existence, and she was being questioned. They had turned up at her flat, hammering on the door, giving her no chance to escape, or even to think.
Now she was locked up in this appalling interview room, with everything she said being recorded on a machine, and with serious-faced men and women asking her questions. Why and when and how? Then breaking off to give her a rest, not because they wanted to, but because it was the law, and then beginning it all over again.
And then, quite suddenly, Donna saw something she had not seen before. If she told these people the truth–everything–she would clear Don’s name. Everyone thought Don had killed Richard Weston that night, and only Donna had known he had not. But she could put that right. She could exonerate her beloved boy. A huge wave of delight surged up inside her. She would do it. She would make this sacrifice for Don’s memory.
Most likely it would mean prison, but she would bear it. Once she had vowed to wait as long as it took in order to be revenged on Antonia Weston: she would wait twenty years if she had to, she had said. That still held good. Because even if she did have to wait twenty years, one day she would be free, and on that day…
On that day she would begin a whole new plan for Antonia Weston’s punishment.