The Ghost Writer

PART TWO

Hatherley. Descendant anxious to trace family history. Would anyone with any information about the early life and antecedents of Phyllis May Hatherley, granddaughter of Viola Hatherley, born Marylebone, London, 13 April 1929, married Graham John Freeman (1917-1982) in Mawson, South Australia, on 4 May 1963, died 29 May 1999, please contact her son, Gerard Freeman… *** c/o Lansdown and Grierstone

Commissioners for Oaths

14A Bedford Row

London WC1N 5AB

12 June 1999 Dear Mr Freeman, I am writing in reply to your advertisement in this mornings Times. I am afraid I am not equipped to reply by fax or email as you suggest, and hope that you will be able to decipher my arthritic handwriting! I hope, too, that you will accept a strangers condolences on the recent death of your mother. To come straight to the point: in 1944 I was moved, due to the upheavals of the war, to St Margaret's School in Devon to complete my education. My new form mistress (who believed in order above all things) did not allow personal preference to determine the seating arrangements in her classroom. Desks were assigned alphabetically by surname, and so I was placed next to a girl called Anne Hatherley, who soon became my closest friend. Anne Hatherley and her younger sister Phyllis (whom I never met, though we once spoke on the telephone) were brought up in London by their grandmother, Viola Hatherley, and their aunt Iris, Violas unmarried daughter. I felt certain, therefore, as soon as I saw your advertisement, that your late mother and my dear friend's sister must be one and the same person. To make doubly sure, I re-read some of Anne's letters this morning, and established that Phyllis's birthday was the 13th of April. Anne was born on the 6th of March, 1928, and since Phyllis was just a year younger than her sister, the dates match perfectly. Viola Hatherley died just after VE Day, and Anne was of course obliged to leave school immediately and return to London. I remained at home in Plymouth, but Anne and I wrote constantly for the next four years, and saw each other whenever we could. Her Aunt Iris died in the autumn of 1949, and soon after that Anne's letters abruptly ceased. I never heard from her again. I shall, of course, be only too pleased to help you in any way I can. Do please write to me by sealed enclosure, c/o my solicitor, Mr Giles Grierstone, who handles all of my affairs, including my correspondence. I wonder-and I do hope you won't be offended by this-whether you would mind providing him with formal proof of your own, and your late mother's identity, including, if possible, photographs. Anything you send him will be treated in the strictest confidence. Though you do not mention Anne in your advertisement, I do hope you will be able to tell me what became of her; I have never ceased to wonder. Yours sincerely

(Miss) Abigail Hamish c/o Lansdown and Grierstone

Commissioners for Oaths

14A Bedford Row

London WC1N 5AB

27 June 1999 Dear Mr Freeman, Thank you very much for your kind and most informative letter. I do appreciate all the trouble you have gone to in providing Mr Grierstone with so much documentation, and so promptly. The photograph of your mother in the full bloom of youth, nursing your infant self, is most touching-I can certainly see a resemblance to Anne as I remember her. An aversion to being photographed must have run in the family, for Anne steadfastly refused to give me even a single snapshot of herself. It was indeed a shock to learn that your mother always spoke of herself as an only child. Yet I was not wholly surprised, for reasons I could not divulge until we had established beyond doubt that your mother was Anne's younger sister. I fear that what follows will prove distressing, but you have urged me to be frank, and I shall do my best. There is very little I can tell you about your mother's childhood. Like your mother (perhaps it will be easier if I call her Phyllis), Anne almost never spoke of the loss of her parents; she herself was only two years old when the accident happened. They were brought up by their grandmother and their aunt Iris, in very comfortable surroundings; they had a nurse, and a cook, and a maid, and later a governess, and had never known any other life. By the time I met her, Anne had come to believe that her childhood would not have been nearly as happy had her parents lived. Whether Phyllis felt the same, I simply don't know. The war of course brought great upheaval: the girls, like so many children, were sent away from London when the bombing began in earnest. Iris and two of her spiritualist friends-she was a devout believer in'seances and ouija boards and so on, despite Viola's scorn for such activities (odd that Viola, who wrote ghost stories, should have been the sceptic)-but I see I am getting into one of those parenthetical muddles that Miss Tremayne (the form mistress who believed in order above all things) was always warning me against. Iris, I was going to say, took a cottage at Okehampton so as to be near the girls, but Viola refused to leave London, even at the height of the Blitz. The Germans, she declared, were not going to drive her out of her house. Though I never met Viola, Anne took me to tea with Iris on two or three occasions. Auntie's very sweet,' I remember her saying, 'but she will talk about her spirits as if they're real people you ought to be able to see. I've never minded, but it gets on Filly's nerves.' All I can recall of Iris is that she was tall and slightly stooped; my memory for faces is usually very good, but hers won't come to me as anything more than a vague impression of kindness. I have a feeling she may have been very short-sighted. Anne told me later that Iris lost her fiance in the Great War and never got over it-but I am wandering from the point again. The reason I never met Phyllis was that she left St Margaret's a few months before I arrived, to study typing and shorthand, I'm afraid I don't know where. I do know that she was working for a firm of solicitors in Clerkenwell soon after the war. Viola, you see, believed that girls should be able to earn their living, regardless of expectations. Anne had hoped to go on to Oxford, but Viola's death changed everything. Iris went quite to pieces, and because she and Phyllis did not really get on, much of the burden necessarily fell upon Anne. Of course they had no idea, when Viola died, that Iris had only a few years left to live. As I think I mentioned in my previous letter, I was obliged to remain with my family in Plymouth. My own father was ill-he had served as an engineer with the Eighth Army, and his lungs were badly affected by diesel fumes-and I was needed to help look after him. Perhaps that was part of the bond with Anne. Our circumstances then were surprisingly similar. Viola's estate had been much reduced by the war, and if she had lived much longer, they would have had to sell the house to pay the punitive death duties that came in with Mr Attlee. And of course we were all coping with the exigencies of rationing, the constant shortages and so forth. We went on writing, and Anne came down to Plymouth several times to stay with us. My father was very strict, and would not allow me to go up to London on my own, much as I would have loved to. I still remember those visits as the happiest days of my life. Anne was (or so I have always thought) an exceptionally beautiful young woman, quite without vanity-she had a lightness about her, a natural freedom from self-consciousness, or perhaps I mean self-absorption-but I must get on. In the spring of 1949, Anne met a young man called Hugh Montfort. She was uncharacteristically reticent about him-perhaps fearing that I would be hurt by this new attachment-but as the weeks went by his name began to appear more and more frequently in her letters. It was plain that he was spending a great deal of time at the house. On the 30th of July she wrote to tell me he had asked her to marry him. She wanted to bring him down to Plymouth to meet me as soon as he could get away for a few days. But she never did. By the 20th of September it was all off. 'I promise I'll tell you everything, Abbie,' she wrote, 'but not just yet.' Then on the 1st of October I got a hurried scrawl. 'The most awful thing has happened,' she wrote. 'Auntie and Phyllis have had the most dreadful set-to, I can't say what about, but Filly has run away. She packed two suitcases and left in a taxi, we don't know where she's gone, and Auntie has sent for Pitt the Elder' (Mr Pitt, their solicitor, it was a family joke) 'and I'm afraid she means to change her will. We're all at sixes and sevens-I'll write as soon as ever I can, love always, Anne.' On the 8th of October she wrote a brief note to tell me that her aunt had died suddenly, of heart failure. Iris was only sixty-two. Of course I pleaded with my father to let me go up to town, but he would not allow it. I telephoned the house several times (from a call box-we did not have the telephone at home) but there was no answer, and no reply to my letters. At last I resolved to defy my father. I took the money from my post office savings, caught the train to Paddington, and made my way, with much trepidation, to Ferrier's Close in Hampstead. The house, I should have said, was built by a bachelor uncle of Viola's. She was his favourite, and he left it to her outright. It was right on the edge of the Heath, in the gloomiest corner of the Vale of Health-or so it seemed to me. Anne had described the house so often and so vividly I felt I had been there, but in her descriptions it was always sunlit. On that bleak, cheerless November day, it looked more like a prison. The brick wall at the front was topped with broken glass, and so high that I could only see the upstairs windows. The blinds were down, the curtains drawn. No smoke rose from the chimneys. The only entry was through a wooden door in the front wall. Anne had told me that this door was always kept unlocked during the daytime, if there was anyone home, but it would not open. I stood shivering in the lane for nearly an hour, until all I could think to do was leave a note in the letter-box and begin the long journey home. My parents, when they had got over their anger, took the view that it was none of our business. Of course Anne couldn't have stayed there alone, they said; she must have gone to relatives or friends. It was sheer selfishness on my part to expect her to write at a time of such grief. I could see the sense of this, but I was not convinced. Eventually I summoned the courage to look up Mr Pitt's address-I could think of no one else to approach-and write to him. He replied by return, to say that he had heard nothing from Anne for three months-it was now February-and would I please call at his office in Holborn as soon as convenient? Mr Pitt's letter was alarming enough, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock that followed. On the 26th of October (a fortnight before my own fruitless visit to the Vale of Health), Anne had come to see him in his office. Aunt Iris had indeed changed her will a week before she died, cutting out Phyllis altogether and leaving everything she possessed to Anne. Now Anne insisted on making a will of her own-naming Mr Pitt as her executor, and leaving the entire estate to 'my dearest and most trusted friend Abigail Valerie Hamish'. Of course (as he later admitted to me) Mr Pitt suspected undue influence, a designing young woman preying upon her grief-stricken friend, but when he saw how shaken I was by the news of the bequest-the recollection of it still makes me feel dizzy and short of breath-his manner softened perceptibly. Surely, he had asked Anne several times, she did not mean to perpetuate her aunt's injustice toward Phyllis? To this Anne would only reply, very despondently, that she knew, for reasons she would not discuss, that her sister would never accept a penny from her. He told her that she was in no state to make decisions (she was looking very unwell, he thought, and her face had come out in a rash) but she would not listen. He brought out every argument he could summon, but in the end she declared, exactly as her aunt had done a few weeks earlier, that if he would not do as she asked, she would go to another solicitor. 'I can't stay in London,' he remembered her saying, 'I have to get away, and I want you to look after things for me.' Very reluctantly, he agreed. She signed the will, and promised to keep in touch with him. By the time I came to see him, Mr Pitt was already anxious about her safety. Even more alarming than her silence was the fact that no money had been withdrawn from her account. He alerted the police, and advertised repeatedly, asking anyone who knew the whereabouts of Anne or Phyllis to contact him, all without result. Of course we did not know that your mother had emigrated to Australia, which explains her silence. So much grief, as I have often reflected, sprang from that one quarrel between your mother and her aunt. Such a pity-but I must get on. As the years passed with no news of Anne, I remained closely in touch with Mr Pitt. He was in his sixties when I first met him, and when ill health forced him to retire, he prevailed upon me to assume the role of executor. (There was no Pitt the Younger, you see, that was part of the joke.) After he died, I took my business to a Mr Urquhart, who proved unsatisfactory, and thence to Lansdown and Grierstone, with whom, as you can see, I have remained ever since. I was advised by Mr Urquhart that, as nothing had been heard of Anne for more than seven years, I ought to commence proceedings to have her declared legally dead, and take possession of the estate. This, of course, I refused ever to contemplate. I should have mentioned that when the police came to search the house, they found nothing amiss, and concluded that Anne had simply packed her things, locked up the house and left. Mr Pitt, I know, was much troubled by the fear that she might have made away with herself; I have never allowed myself to believe that she would do such a thing, just as I have never ceased to hope that she is still alive. But I confess that not knowing has caused me much torment. I seem to have spent the greater part of my life waiting for news of Anne. And now, quite suddenly it seems, I am an old woman, and must think about my own will as well as fulfilling my duty to the estate. I am very tired-so much emotion revisited-and must make an end of this long letter. Writing it has stirred, once again, my passionate yearning to know, for certain, what became of my best and dearest friend, what really happened during those last troubled months before her disappearance: why she broke her engagement to Hugh Montfort, and what (if you will forgive my curiosity) precipitated the disastrous falling-out between your mother and Iris. My intuition has always hinted that the answers are to be found somewhere in the house by the Heath. In earlier years-after I had accepted the post of executor and could legitimately enter the house-I came up to town several times with the intention of making a thorough search. But the house is very large, not to say labyrinthine, and daunting, even by day, to a single woman who hears an intruder in every creaking board! It is many years-decades, indeed, since I last set foot in it. And of course I never liked to employ an outsider. I wonder, therefore-since you will be in London very shortly-whether, before you come down to see me, as I very much hope you will, you would be kind enough to look over the house for me, just to see if anything turns up in the way of letters, notebooks, diaries and so forth. As a professional librarian, you will I am sure be interested in the Ferrier family library, which contains several thousand books. I am afraid the electricity was disconnected many years ago, and the garden is dreadfully overgrown, but it will be high summer when you arrive. Mr Grierstone will have the keys waiting for you at Bedford Row. And please feel free to follow your instinct wherever it may lead. Perhaps it is merely an old woman's fancy, but I feel there is a destiny at work here, and that if anyone is ever to uncover the answers, it will be you. I am very much looking forward to meeting you. Yours most sincerely,

Abigail Hamish Lansdown and Grierstone

Commissioners for Oaths

14A Bedford Row

London WC1N 5AB

12 July 1999 Dear Mr Freeman, We have received your letter addressed to our client Miss Abigail Hamish. I regret to inform you that Miss Hamish has suffered a slight stroke and is undergoing treatment in a private nursing home. It may be some weeks before she is well enough to reply to your letter, or to receive visitors. In the meantime, however, we are instructed to make available to you the keys to the house at Ferrier's Close 34, Heath Villas, Hampstead. These may be collected at the above address at your convenience, on presentation of appropriate identification, such as your passport. Yours faithfully,

Giles Grierstone From: Parvati. Naidu@hotmail. com

To: ghfreeman@hotmail. com

Subject: Alice is fine and sends you all her love

Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 20:12:46 +0100 (BST) Dear Gerard, Alice asked me to email you as soon as I could (I'm the ward sister) to tell you that the operation was a complete success. Mr MacBride says she'll have to lie completely still for the next forty-eight hours to let the sutures settle down. She says she'll write to you as soon as she's allowed to sit up. I hope you don't mind me saying, but I think it's so romantic, the two of you having waited so long. Alice is so beautiful, we all love her. I'm sure you'll be blissfully happy together. Must dash, Parvati

From the laneway outside, all Icould see of Ferrier's Close was a mass of rampant foliage, towering above a weathered brick wall. The wall itself was at least ten feet high, shrouded at the top by overspilling branches, holly and buddleia and rampant blackberries. A solid wooden door, reinforced with iron straps, was the only entrance, just as Miss Hamish had said. Further along to my right, the lane was cut off by the stone wall of another house, with a third wall, painted white, running back behind me. Though most of the houses in the Vale opened directly on to the narrow streets, the occupants of this corner (somewhere on the western side; I had lost my bearings among the twists and turns and narrow passageways that had brought me, circuitously, to this cul-de-sac) clearly cherished their privacy. Luxury cars, stained with sap and bird droppings and humped up on the pavement, were the only evidence of occupation.

Just on two o'clock. The walk up from Hampstead Heath station had been uncomfortably hot, but here beneath the overarching canopy, the air was cool and damp. I had been in London just three days, and already I felt more at home than I ever had in Mawson. The transformation was extraordinary. On Saturday afternoon, after settling into my new, clean, high-rise hotel near St Pancras, I had wandered for hours through leafy streets and squares, breathing deep lungfuls of warm, diesel-laden air as if I had just arrived at a mountain health resort. People no longer avoided eye contact with strangers. The mountains of garbage had shrunk to a few isolated middens. Even the dogs seemed to have cleaned up their act.

I strolled up to the end of the lane and back, weigh ing the heavy bunch of keys in my hand. No one would know there was a house hidden behind the massive trees, some of them sixty or seventy feet high. I wondered how high they had been when Abigail Hamish had stood shivering here, just a few months short of fifty years ago, at the end of autumn. Most of the branches would have been bare.

Miss Hamish, as I had learned from Mr Grierstone's secretary a few hours ago, was now resting comfortably and would be in touch with me as soon as she felt well enough. She wasn't up to visitors, but I could certainly send her some flowers; they would be happy to arrange that on my behalf.

And for the first time in my life, I knew exactly where Alice was. In the National Hospital for Neurology and Microsurgery in East Finchley, less than an hour's walk across the Heath from Ferrier's Close. I had promised not to visit, or ring the hospital: Alice thought it would bring bad luck. She wanted to come to me, with no warning-'it'll be too awkward and formal otherwise'. Like a bride and groom keeping apart on their wedding day, not seeing each other until the ceremony. 'I want to save everything from now until we meet,' she'd said in her last message. She was spending long hours in physiotherapy, gaining strength every day. 'My feet haven't forgotten how to walk. I'm aching all over, and it feels wonderful. Nothing can go wrong now. Enjoy your house'-Alice was convinced that Miss Hamish meant to leave the whole estate to me-'and its mysteries, and soon-maybe sooner than you think-you'll hear a tap on the door.'

Secretly I agreed with her about the estate, but I didn't want to tempt fate by saying so: Miss Hamish might have another stroke and die before she'd met me. In which case the estate would presumably go to charity, or some distant Hamish relative; she sounded quite alone in the world. Tempting fate or not, I couldn't help imagining us arriving at Miss Hamish's place in the country-which had grown, in my fantasy, into a tall, rambling house with sweeping lawns and ancestral oaks-into Staplefield, in fact.

Though miss Hamish hadn't replied to any of my questions about Staplefield, that might well have been out of delicacy-for the same reason she hadn't yet given me her address. The destruction of Staplefield would have been a huge and traumatic event; Anne would have talked about it. Whereas if the house had survived, it was quite possible that Miss Hamish, once she'd been appointed executor, had decided to rent Staplefield from the estate. Or simply to live there: as the sole beneficiary of Anne's will, her only legal duty had been to herself. She just didn't want to tell me, until the time came for us to meet, that my mother had lied about the fire.

Back in Mawson, reading and re-reading Miss Hamish's letter in the chilly hallway, a ghastly suspicion had leapt off the page. It had obviously never occurred to Miss Hamish-she could never have written so openly if it had-that Phyllis Hatherley might have murdered her sister. Everything fitted perfectly: Phyllis and her aunt quarrel violently; Phyllis is disinherited and leaves home in a rage; her aunt dies suddenly (and very conveniently) within weeks, leaving everything to sweet-natured Anne, who immediately makes a will leaving everything to her best friend Abigail. Why would a girl of twenty-one make such a will, unless she was afraid of her sister? But Anne doesn't know where Phyllis is, so she can't tell her about the will. Until, perhaps, it's too late. Phyllis discovers she's killed her sister for nothing, and that's the last we see of her until she turns up in Mawson a decade later.

It had seemed horribly plausible, until I realised that the same thing must have occurred to the police and the lawyer. It would have been their first line of inquiry. And they would have questioned Abigail Hamish about Phyllis: they would have wanted to see Anne's letters. So the police, and the lawyer-and therefore Miss Hamish- must have been satisfied that Phyllis was innocent. Otherwise Miss Hamish would never have trusted me with the keys to Ferrier's Close.

Or so I had persuaded myself. There were at least a dozen keys on the ring: three pitted gunmetal Banhams; two for spring locks, and several household keys, very worn and tarnished, for barrel-locks of various sizes. The door itself was curved at the top and recessed into the brickwork. It had weathered to a pale greenish grey, mottled with lichen; lines of moss sprouted between the vertical planks. A discoloured nameplate, a brass mailslot, locked or corroded shut, a latch and a keyhole. No bellpush or speaker grille; no way of making your presence known except to pound with your bare knuckles on the swollen timbers of the door.

The second of the Banham keys fitted the lower keyhole: the snap as it turned over was startlingly loud. I lifted the latch and pushed, against resistance. To my surprise the door opened silently.

I was standing at the entrance to a tunnel about eight feet high, formed by hooped metal frames over which branches of some kind had been trained. Dim twilight filtered through an arched roof of dense greenery; a few spots of sunlight glowed on the flagged stone floor. At the far end, some thirty feet away, I could just make out two steps leading up to another door. Vines and creepers and climbing roses had grown up amongst the gnarled branches; the metal hoops were heavily corroded. But the inside of the tunnel had been recently pruned. The clipped ends of vines and shoots were still sharply defined, the dark, lichen-stained flagstones bare except for a scattering of leaves.

I withdrew the key and let go of the street door. It closed behind me with a faint hiss. The spring lock clicked shut; suddenly fearful, I snatched at the knob to make sure I wouldn't be trapped.

It had been quiet in the lane outside, but you could still hear the faint hum of traffic from East Heath Road, the occasional howl of an accelerating motorbike, the distant whine of a jumbo from the endless queue descending towards Heathrow. With the closing of the gate, all of those sounds had ceased. The tick-ticking of my pulse was suddenly louder. I set off along the path, accompanied by faint rustlings and stirrings. Birds, I hoped, though I couldn't see any. The surrounding vegetation was impenetrably dense.

At the far end, the sides thinned out enough to allow glimpses of red brick and stonework, and the light was a little better. Though the tunnel-what was the word?-espanniered?-no, pleached-extended all the way to the porch, you could see where the original structure had ended and another section had been added, also many years ago, by the look of the gnarled vines overhead. I went up the two steps into a porch, only a few feet deep, with solid brick walls on both sides. It looked as if there had once been vertical windows on either side of the door, but the apertures had been bricked up. No glass in the door, either. Its dark green paint was cracked and peeling.

Three locks this time. After the snap of the second Banham, I had to wait until my heartbeat had slowed enough to distinguish it from approaching footsteps. I glanced back along the green, twilit alley and turned the key in the spring lock.

The door opened quietly, on to a dimly lit entrance hall. Dark panelled walls, an elaborate hall-stand immediately to my left, then a recessed wooden bench. Carpeted stairs at the far end ran up to a half-landing. Light filtered through a doorway to the left of the staircase. I stepped across the threshold, keeping hold of the front door, which like the street door appeared to be self-closing. I took another step forward, letting the door close behind me with the same faint, unnerving hiss.

The hall-stand was draped with hats and coats and scarves; there were several umbrellas and at least three pairs of Wellingtons. The sense of trespass was suddenly overwhelming.

'Is anyone here?' A muffled echo-I couldn't tell from where-sounded disturbingly like a reply. Then I noticed that the hats and coats-all of them women's-looked very old-fashioned indeed. Tentatively, I drew out one of the umbrellas. A small cloud of dust followed, and I saw that there were holes in the fabric.

I tried to move noiselessly, but the floorboards creaked at every step. At the far end of the hall, I found a closed wooden door to the right of the staircase. An opening to my left led into a passage running towards the rear of the house. Multi-coloured light shimmered through a doorway opposite.

At first I thought I had stumbled into a chapel. Two tall, narrow stained-glass windows shone in the upper half of the wall to my left, an elaborate design of leaves and vines and flowers climbing over a plain, lead-lighted background. The moving shadows of actual leaves and branches outside made it look as if the pattern had come alive, greens and golds and brilliant crimsons rippling upwards into darkness.

Tall wooden shutters, latched on the inside, concealed the windows in the lower section. Humped shapes of furniture stood around a massive fireplace opposite the door. To my right, the lower half of the rear wall opened on to what looked like a dining-room. A gallery was built out above the opening, running the full width of the room.

Crossing to the shutters, I got the first one open and came face to face with a chaotic mass of nettles, buddleia and leaf litter, shot through with ivy and rising above head height. Sunlight filtered through the foliage overhead. The windows were protected by vertical metal bars almost eaten through with rust.

Apart from some archaic electric light fittings mounted on wall brackets, I could have stepped back into the 1850s. The brocaded chairs and sofas, mostly faded lemons and pale greens, the chests and screens and occasional tables, were all marked and worn by use. The polish on the woodwork had faded long ago; you could see the outlines of ancient stains on the huge, threadbare Persian carpet. And yet someone must be coming in from time to time to dust and air the place, and turn on some sort of heating in the winters, or everything would be rotten with damp and mould.

I moved on towards the dining-room, whose dark panelled ceiling, though still ten or twelve feet high, was only half the height of the drawing-room's. The opening between the two, I saw, could be closed off by a set of sliding panels which stood folded, concertina-fashion, against the right-hand wall. The gallery loomed overhead: it had a gilt rail at about waist height, with vertical rods below the railing, and doors at both ends.

Troubled by a vague sense of something missing or wrong, I moved on through the dining-room, between a long oak table with chairs for a dozen people, and a massive sideboard laden with tarnished serving dishes and candlesticks. With the drawing room closed off, it would be pitch dark in here. But when I got the shutters in the end wall open, daylight filled the room. I found myself looking down on to a flagged courtyard, surrounded once again by an impenetrable tangle of greenery.

The land on which the house was set evidently sloped downwards, for the window was at least ten feet above the ground, but the view beyond the courtyard was obscured on every side by rampant, towering foliage. Weeds sprouted between the flagstone^. Below and to my right, a long, narrow conservatory had been built out along the rear wall of the house. From the far side of the courtyard, a path continued a few yards further, towards what looked like the remains of an ancient gazebo or summerhouse, half buried beneath a canopy of nettles.

I pressed my face against the glass, but could see nothing more. There were no bars on these windows, and no visible locks or bolts, but neither side would budge. I went on through a door to the right of the windows, on to a landing from which a wide staircase descended. A narrower flight ran steeply up to another half-landing on its way to the floor above. There were several other doors to choose from, but I went on down, hoping to find a way out on to the courtyard so that I could see the house from the outside.

I found a small parlour or breakfast room, immediately below the dining room, with shuttered French windows opening-or rather refusing to open-on to the courtyard. Behind the parlour was a small kitchen-1920s or 30s, I thought-three-burner gas cooker, chipped porcelain sink, wooden cupboards and benches. Mixed crockery, also chipped and cracked, that looked like the remnants of expensive services. A few tins rusting in the food cupboard, labels long gone.

The main house door next to the parlour was painted a drab black. It appeared to be locked and bolted. To the right of that was another set of French windows, also locked, into the conservatory. Peering through the glass, I saw a long trestle table crammed with pots and seed trays from which a few desiccated sticks protruded. Garden tools leaned against walls and benches. An old wooden barrow stood blocking one of the aisles.

No other doors. The stairs continued on down, back in under the house. Daylight slanted down the stairwell on to a patch of stone floor. From where I stood in the entrance, the original kitchen extended out to my left. An ancient black range with a corroded flue; brick walls; a scarred worktable; canisters rusting along a wall shelf in descending order of size. The air down here was colder, and distinctly damp; the ceiling was only a foot above my head. I took a few uneasy steps into the gloom. There was a doorway in the opposite wall, opening onto darkness.

I retreated up the stairs to the landing, took the first door on my left, opposite the dining-room, and was greeted by the warm, faintly sweet smell of printed paper and cloth boards, dust and leather and old bindings.

The shutters-polished wood here, rather than painted-opened into a library as imposing as the drawing-room. Tall bookcases rose like pillars between four high, narrow windows in the rear wall of the house. Around the other three sides of the room, a mezzanine gallery had been built about seven or eight feet above the floor, giving access to a second tier of shelves, with cases built out like piers from the recessed shelves below, so that the books in the lower section were housed in a series of alcoves. There was an open spiral staircase at the far end of the room, leading up to the gallery; a chesterfield and two cracked brown leather armchairs stood below the windows. The centre of the floor was taken up by a massive table covered in worn green baize, with four high-backed library chairs ranged around it. Several large blank sheets of what looked like butcher's paper had been left at one end of it, with a folded chessboard and some sort of child's toy on top of the pile.

I wandered along the cases, pulling out volumes at random. Blue books, parliamentary papers, regimental histories, accounts of military campaigns and naval battles, gazetteers, clerical lists, law lists, county histories and so forth, occupied an entire wall. A nineteenth-century gentleman's library. Belonging to one J.G. Ferrier

… and a G.C. Ferrier… then a C.R. Ferrier, in thick, greyish ink on the flyleaf of A Narrative of the Operations of a Small British Force Employed in the Reduction of Monte Video on the River Plate, A.D. 1807. By a Field Officer on the Staff.

I moved on to the next wall. Literature: Greek and Latin, all J.G. Ferrier; the standard English poets, mostly in nineteenth-century editions inscribed by J.G. and G. C… until I took down one of several disintegrating Byrons and found 'V. Ferrier/ Jan. 1883' on the flyleaf in a clear, spiky hand. And in the next alcove, in a well-worn copy of Balzac's Illusions perdues, 'V. Hatherley/ Oct. 1901'.

Half an hour later, though I hadn't even started on the mezzanine gallery, I knew that Viola Ferrier had become Viola Hatherley some time between 1887 and 1889; that she often marked passages in her books, but did not annotate beyond an occasional cryptic reference such as v. P. de C, ix '; that she, or someone with whom she shared her books, had been a heavy smoker-traces of ash and fine shreds of tobacco appeared between numerous pages in all her books-and that she read widely and eclectically in French as well as English. A system of shelving books by author and subject had been gradually subverted, so that a book by one Georges Lakhovsky, he Secret de la vie: les ondes cosmiques et la radiation vitale, marked simply 'VH/ Aug 1930', appeared between Richard Le Gallienne and Alice Meynell on a shelf devoted to the poets and essayists of the 1890s. Percy Brown's American Martyrs to Science through the Roentgen Rays, which looked as if it had been dropped in the bath or left out in the rain, lay sideways across the top of Lakhovsky.

Suddenly overtaken by a lurching wave of fatigue, I sat down at the central table. Filaments of dust drifted in the light from the four great windows on my right. Soon, maybe sooner than you think… Perhaps Alice would simply appear in her white dress, leaning over the gallery rail, smiling down at me… 171 come to your house.

From my perspective, the gallery formed an elevated U, with the spiral staircase immediately to the right of the windows. At the corresponding point on the opposite side, just before the end wall, one of the bookcases seemed to have been set back into the side wall at a considerable angle. No; a dummy bookcase, disguising a low, narrow door, like the ones on the galleries in the old Round Reading Room. Odd that I hadn't noticed it before.

Idly, I reached over to the stack of paper and picked up the toy. It resembled a miniature tricycle, four or five inches long, with two polished wheels at the back of a boat-shaped platform of the same dark wood. But instead of a front wheel, the stub of a pencil had been pushed through a hole at the front, point downward, and secured with a rubber band.

I put down the toy and opened the chessboard. Only it was not a chessboard. Instead of squares it had YES in the top left corner, next to an image of the sun, and NO opposite, next to the moon, above the letters of the alphabet set out in two shallow horseshoe arcs, then the numbers 1 to 10, and below that, GOODBYE. The William Flud Talking Board Set. John Waddington Ltd, Leeds amp; London, permitted user of the trade marks Ouija, William Flud and Mystifying Oracle.

Now I knew what the tricycle was. I leafed through the sheets of paper, but they were all blank. After a little practice with the-plechette?-no, planchette-I could produce legible words. On a clean sheet of paper I wrote WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNE? in large, spidery letters, and set the planchette below the W, with my fingers resting lightly on the wooden platform.

I didn't-did I?-seriously expect it to answer. You needed at least two people, anyway. But I did have to find the answer myself if I possibly could. Because clearly Miss Hamish had given me the keys as a sort of test. To prove myself a worthy heir to Ferrier's Close and Staplefield. She had all but said so on the last page of her letter. There is a destiny at work here… my passionate yearning to know, for certain, what became of my best and dearest friend… if anyone is ever to uncover the answers, it will be you.

But suppose-just supposing-I were to discover that my mother really had murdered her sister? I would have to live with the knowledge for ever; it would poison my reunion (as I often found myself thinking, perhaps because of our shared dream) with Alice; and Miss Hamish certainly wouldn't leave me the estate.

Of course I didn't know that Anne Hatherley was dead. She might have… packed her things, suffered an attack of total amnesia, and started a new life under a different name? Joined a silent order of nuns and forgotten to tell anyone? Been abducted by aliens? All we knew for certain was that her body had never been found. Or at least identified.

The police found nothing amiss. But how thoroughly had they searched the house? Had they dug up the garden? What if the person who left with Anne's suitcases hadn't been Anne at all?

The old sick feeling of dread came flooding back. I released the planchette and tried to focus on breathing deeply and slowly. Unclench your hands. Concentrate on breathing. Repeat after me: if the police and the lawyer hadn't been certain that Phyllis was innocent, Miss Hamish would have known, because she was their principal witness.

And in the very worst case, if I were to uncover anything along those lines, telling Miss Hamish would be sheer, pointless cruelty. Whereas if I could come up with something benign-amnesia was, after all, a possibility, especially after so many traumatic events, coming so close together-or even a religious conversion, one of those blinding light experiences… really, I owed it to Miss Hamish to keep an open mind and not leap to conclusions that could only distress her. I hadn't even seen the upstairs rooms yet.

Ihad assumed that by the end of this first exploration, I would have gained a clear picture of the house and its surroundings. But the higher I climbed, the more disoriented I became. The air grew hotter and stuffier. I tried various windows on the upper floors, but none of them would budge: many above the ground floor were so thickly coated with grime that when blurred patches of the Heath began to appear amongst the treetops, I wasn't always sure which direction I was looking in. And yet there was something oddly familiar about the place.

The blurred views compounded the sensation of slipping backwards and forwards in time, for if it was still 1850 in the drawing-room below, the first-floor sitting-room had got as far as the 1940s: a large, light, comfortable room furnished with a sagging floral sofa, stuffed chairs, a massive cabinet radio to the right of the fireplace, and a bookcase full of novels: Galsworthy, Bennett, Huxley, early Graham Greene… Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett… detective stories even I had never heard of, such as The Public School Murder, by R.C. Woodthorpe, inscribed 'V.H. Xmas 1932'. The window looked down upon the overgrown courtyard. A door to the right of the window led to the rear stairs-there seemed to be at least two different ways of getting from any one room to another-and to an L-shaped passage with doors leading to the mezzanine floor of the library at one end, and to the gallery above the drawing-room at the other.

Apart from the sitting-room at the rear of the house, there were only two other rooms on this level: another, much smaller sitting-room, and a bedroom, both opening off the front landing. The upper levels of the drawing-room and library and their respective galleries took up the rest of the space. The two front rooms, I decided, had probably been Iris's: the sitting-room bookcase held long runs of two spiritualist journals from the 1920s and 30s: Light, and The Medium, along with numerous volumes on theosophy, the tarot, Buddhism, astrology, astral travelling, divination, reincarnation, and more. I noticed a copy of An Adventure -which I had once skimmed-about the two women who claimed to have got lost in the gardens of Versailles and found themselves back in the eighteenth century. The closet was still full of clothes that looked as if they might have belonged to a tall, elderly woman; a rusting lipstick and several faded cardboard containers were neatly arranged on the dressing-table beneath a thick layer of dust.

I went on up the stairs to the second-floor landing. Ahead of me, a dim corridor led towards the rear of the house. Threadbare Persian runners over dark stained boards; William Morris paper, frayed and peeling at the joins.

I started down the corridor and tried the first door on my left. Daylight showed faintly below the curtains at the far end of the room, which shared a common wall with the landing. A musty old-dog smell rose from the carpet as I approached the window; for a moment I was a child again, trespassing in my mothers bedroom. I dragged the curtains open. Looking down at a blurred glimpse of laneway through thick foliage, I realised that this room must be directly above the drawing-room. Dust and fragments of the curtains-a dingy maroon-drifted down around me. To the right of the window stood a dressing-table with a swing mirror and a brocaded stool; on the left, an oak tallboy, and then a small bookcase. The bed, a single, draped in a bedspread the same colour as the curtains, stood with its head against the panelling opposite the window. The other three walls were papered: more fraying William Morris.

A closet had been let into the panelling beside the bed; the door was slightly ajar. Moving closer, I drew back the bedspread and saw that the bed was fully made up. A moth fluttered out from behind the pillow, trailing its own tiny cloud of dust as it whirred past my face. Inside the closet hung a single white dress or tunic; a yellowy, greyish white now. And on the floor below the dress, a tennis racquet, with ANNE HATHERLEY burnt in pokerworked capitals into the wooden handle.

The bedroom next door was almost a mirror image of Anne's, except that the window was in the side wall of the house. It too had a single bed, with its head against the common partition, and a closet built into the corresponding space to the left of the bed. The curtains and bedspread were dark green, made of the same heavy material. Nothing in the closet this time except dust and a few wire hangers. Just four books in a small case on the other side of the bed. A High Wind in Jamaica, Rebecca, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and The Death of the Heart. The Agatha Christie was unmarked. The other three had 'P.M. Hatherley' written in neat, slightly rounded script on the flyleaf.

For someone who had left home for ever with just a couple of suitcases, Phyllis Hatherley had done a remarkably thorough job of clearing out her room. Apart from the four novels, and a musty blanket in the bottom drawer of a chest by the window, the room was completely bare. Of course she might have come back later, when the house was empty… best not to think too far along that track. In fact it would make my task a lot easier if I were to think of Phyllis Hatherley and my mother as two quite separate people.

Which really, when you thought about it, they had been. And whatever Phyllis Hatherley might have done, Phyllis Freeman had paid for it with life in Mawson, no remission for good behaviour. I couldn't imagine my mother living in this house.

As I went to shut the door of the closet, it struck me that there must be quite a lot of unused space in the partition between the two rooms. I tried a panel above the bed and felt it give; pressed more firmly and it swung open. A cupboard, about eighteen inches square, the same depth as the closet. Empty again. Except that something heavy had evidently been kept in here: there were deep parallel scratches gouged into the wooden floor. A child could easily climb right inside; I imagined the girls tapping out messages at night, frightening each other with ghostly noises.

A loud clatter-or was it someone knocking?-sounded through the partition. I was out the door and half-way across the landing in a blind, panic-stricken rush for the stairs before I registered what I had glimpsed through the open door of Anne's room: curtains the colour of dried blood, heaped beneath the fallen curtain-rod.

I found I was holding my breath, straining to identify a faint rustling sound. A branch against the wall? Mice in the ceiling? Best keep moving.

Returning to the corridor, I saw a thin line of daylight, evidently coming from beneath a door at the far end. The room opposite Anne's was empty, unfurnished, and thick with dust; the next looked like Viola's. I opened a small jewelbox on the bedside table and found a gold wristwatch, engraved 'V. from M./ with love/ 7.2.1913'. 'V.H.' was inscribed in several of the books in the bookcase beneath the window, including, I noticed, a battered hardback copy of The Sacred Fount. Her clothes, or some of them, were still hanging in the closet, protected by the ghosts of old mothballs: everything from long tweed skirts to furs and several plain but very expensive-looking evening gowns, including one made of a material that shimmered like finely beaten gold, with shoes to match. But again no letters, no papers, no photographs.

The floor creaked more loudly at every tread, until boards were sounding up and down the hall as if invisible feet were moving all around me. I tugged at the end door, which opened inwards. Light from two high windows streamed into the corridor. There was one other door beyond Phyllis's: a boxroom, with only a small square window high in the wall. Trunks, cases, hampers, hat boxes, a golf-cart; more tennis racquets, croquet mallets, chairs with broken backs, a doll's house.

Two doors opened off the landing, on my right: a bathroom nearest the corridor. Bare board floor, porcelain washstand; an imposing claw-footed bathtub, darkly stained, with a greyish bath towel carelessly draped over the side. In the wall cabinet above the basin, a clutter of dried-up lipsticks, tubes, bottles, hairpins. Everything metal was heavily corroded, the labels unreadable.

I tried the other door. Not a closet, but yet more stairs, angling up to the left. I checked the door to make sure I couldn't be trapped, and clambered up. Two drab attic bedrooms, each with a single metal-framed bedstead; flock mattresses and pillows, tinder-brown with age, but no bedding. Plain wooden furniture, washstands with white china jugs and basins, bare boards. The windows were set like skylights into the sloping ceilings. Nothing in any of the cupboards.

Back on the landing, the sense of familiarity tugged at me again. Through the tall slit window in the stairwell I caught a blurred glimpse of the ruined summerhouse far below. The stairs came up on my right, with a railed balcony above the stairwell, extending about twelve feet to a dead end below the left-hand window. There was only one other door, immediately to my left, in the panelled wall that formed the other side of the balcony. Though there was nothing on the wall, I could see several slightly paler rectangles where pictures had once hung. The nearest of these was also the largest, at least five feet high and perhaps half as wide, just to the right of the door.

Pictures. The absence of pictures, or more precisely, portraits. That was what had troubled me in the downstairs rooms. The balcony was not the only place from which pictures had been removed. On several of the walls downstairs I had seen, without paying much attention, the outlines, and sometimes the empty hooks, where pictures had once hung, some of them very large indeed. A few small prints, mostly still lifes or rural scenes, remained. But so far no portraits, no photographs; not a single image of a human face.

I tried the handle of the door. Locked.

Like the door to the studio in The Revenant. With the portrait of Imogen de Vere beside it. The resemblance that had been tugging at me all the way along this floor. How could I have missed it? If the garden hadn't been so overgrown, I might have seen the resemblance from the lane outside.

Phyllis, Beatrice. Almost the same sound.

But that couldn't be right, because the typescript was dated December 1925, two years before Anne was born. Viola couldn't have known, then, that she would have two granddaughters. Or that her son and his wife would be killed in an accident. Miss Hamish had forgotten to mention when, or even what sort of accident; she must have assumed I knew.

The date could be wrong. But the story was set in 1925, seven years after the end of the Great War. And if she had been writing after the accident, Viola wouldn't, surely, have exploited her granddaughters' situation so closely. I already knew enough about her to feel certain of that.

And she absolutely couldn't have known that, four years after her death, her eldest granddaughter would become engaged to a man called Hugh Montfort.

Only I didn't know how the story ended. Or how many pages were missing. I had searched the house in Mawson all over again, even taken up the carpet in my mothers room, without finding anything more.

One came true.

What if this door opened on to Henry St Clair's pictures, 'The Drowned Man' on its lectern, the polished wooden cube with the carved rosette? What would I do then?

My concentration was broken by a faint rhythmic sound which seemed, as I became aware of it, to have been going on for some time. As I turned, a board creaked, and the noise ceased instantly. Birds or mice, no doubt-the walls must be full of them-but it had sounded unpleasantly like a nib scratching across stiff paper. Somewhere close by.

Suddenly I was stumbling down the rear stairs, glancing over my shoulder and trying not to run, all the way down to the massive black-painted door to the courtyard. None of the keys looked remotely large enough. Then I saw that the tongue, or whatever that part of the lock was called, was plainly retracted. Which was odd because I had-or thought I had-a clear memory of standing here a couple of hours ago and noticing that the door was locked. Jet lag, presumably. I dragged back the equally massive bolts and hauled the door open, letting in the scents of flowering creeper and warm stone.

The courtyard was about fifteen feet deep, and perhaps twice as wide; it was hard to tell because the surrounding wilderness encroached on every side. I crunched over dead twigs and leaf litter, past a rotting bench and several stone ornaments, cracked and flaking and pitted with lichen, to the path I had seen from above, hoping to find a way through to the boundary wall, wherever that might be.

The path, gravel with a stone border, had once been fairly wide, but the nettles had advanced so far that I had to clear the way with a fallen branch to avoid being stung. As I descended towards the wreck of the gazebo, I felt an odd prickle of recognition. It was a common enough structure: a wooden octagon, six or seven feet across, like a miniature bandstand, with a waist-high railing and entrances on opposite sides. Most of the roof had collapsed, leaving only a few corroded sheets of metal attached to the remnants of the frame. Traces of dark green paint still clung to the fallen sections.

Prompted by that elusive sense of recognition, I went on slashing and trampling the nettles until, at the cost of a filthy, sweat-soaked shirt and several painful weals, I had cleared a narrow circle around the gazebo. The slope here was quite steep, so that the entrance nearest the house was level with the path, whereas the one on the far side was at least two feet above the ground, with steps leading up to it. Wooden seats, enclosed like window-boxes, had been built around the sides.

As I was clearing away the debris of the fallen roof, I discovered that the middle sections of the seats on both sides of the gazebo were hinged. The lid on the right would not budge; the other one came up with a shriek of frozen hinges. Pale, bloated spiders scuttled away from the light. In the cavity below was a crumbling picnic hamper, black with dirt and mould and swathed in cobwebs. I used a stick to prise open the lid; apart from more dirt and spiders, all it contained was another, smaller box: an old-fashioned metal cashbox, I thought, about eight inches by ten, not very deep, with a handle in the centre of the lid. The rivets were so corroded that the latch came away in my hand.

Inside was a thick buff envelope, containing not jewels or banknotes, or the tide deeds to Staplefield, but a mouldy paperbound volume. The Chameleon. Volume I, Number 1, March 1898. Essays by Clement Shorter and Frederic Myers; poems by Ernest Radford and Alice Meynell; and 'The Pavilion, by V.H. As I turned to the beginning of Violas story, a small printed slip fluttered from the pages. With the author's compliments. And in faded black ink, in Viola's clear, spiky hand: for Filly if she can find it.