The Ghost Writer

PART THREE

I SAT IN THE WRECK OF THE PAVILION WITH EVEN STAPLEfield was a lie and Alice will be so disappointed looping through my head. But my mother hadn't lied, not exactly: Ferrier's Close was Staplefield. And Ashbourn House; and others, perhaps, I didn't yet know about. So why had she brought me up on the story-book version-in the most literal sense-of her childhood?

Because she couldn't bear to let go of Viola altogether, said the Alice-voice in my head.

Then what did she do here that was so terrible?

The voice did not reply. From here, the house was invisible; the path curved away into the encircling nettles. When I first saw it, the ruined pavilion had had a certain romantic charm. Now it looked utterly despoiled. Rusting, twisted sections of the cupola roof littered the trampled clearing. The desolation was suddenly unbearable.

You're just angry, I told myself as I walked back to the house; angry she lied to you. She chose the story-book version because she'd been disinherited, not because she murdered Anne.

The anger carried me on up the stairs to the second floor and another search of the bedrooms. This time I made as much of a racket as I could, banging doors, slamming drawers, stomping across like a poltergeist. My noisy progress reminded me of something a colleague at the library had told me years ago, about a troubled boarding school, iron bedsteads flung across an empty dormitory. I looked again at the deep gouges in the floor of the cupboard above Phyllis's bed; they looked unpleasantly like the marks of paired claws. But I found nothing new.

I returned to the library, intending to begin a systematic search for papers, but instead was overcome by another wave of black fatigue, lay down on the chesterfield, and fell instantly asleep.

I WOKE-AS IT SEEMED-AT DUSK. THE SKY THROUGH THE upper windows was still relatively bright. High above, the ceiling floated in a vault of gloom. My gaze drifted down rows of shelves towards the false bookcase at the end of the mezzanine gallery.

Only I couldn't see the false bookcase, because someone was standing motionless in front of it. A woman-for a horrible moment a headless woman, until I saw that she was veiled in black. And wearing an elaborate gown in some heavy material; I could see the flare of her skirt through the vertical bars below the railing. A dark green gown, gathered at the shoulders.

I thought, 'Viola', and then, 'Imogen de Vere', and then, 'This is one of those dreams where you dream you can see through your eyelids.' Usually I wake the instant I realise I'm asleep, a little disappointed to find that I can't see with my eyes closed, any more than I can fly. But the figure didn't vanish. Instead it appeared to shrink, receding into the shadow of the end wall. I closed my eyes resolutely, counted to three. The false bookcase had reappeared. There was no one on the gallery.

I SLEPT BADLY THAT NIGHT FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE MY arrival, spinning through interminable dreams of Ferrier's Close, stepping up to the front door over and over again, struggling half awake, then repeatedly demolishing sections of the pavilion, appalled at the damage I was doing but compelled to continue, round and round in a series of endless loops, up and down the empty passages and staircases until I was wide awake at dawn, watching the grey light slowly brighten across the miles of rooftops.

Of course the veiled woman had been a dream. I made myself a cup of tea and returned to the window. 4.37 a.m. I knew I wouldn't sleep again, and I didn't feel like reading. Breakfast wasn't until seven. I looked at the heavy bunch of keys beside my laptop. No one had said anything about keeping office hours-or any hours-at Ferrier's Close. I could sit here brooding for the next two and a half hours.

Or take a taxi up to the house and try to open the locked door on the second-floor landing.

The sky was brightening as I paid the driver at the entrance to the Vale of Health, but beneath the overhanging trees the lane was in deep shadow, and when the gate closed behind me it was so dark that I could not see the front door. I had a book of paper matches from the café I'd eaten in the evening before, but I didn't dare light one here; the whole thing might go up like a bonfire if the head of a match flew off. Remember, remember, Miss Hamish is your friend. The words came floating into my head and I started chanting them under my breath in a staccato rhythm that got my feet moving along the flagstones and helped mask the stirrings and rustlings and tickings that accompanied me all the way to the porch, where I used more than half the matches getting the front door open.

Floorboards popped and cracked as I passed through the drawing and dining rooms in near-darkness, and out into the comparative brightness of the landing above the back door. The whole staircase creaked when I set foot on it, as if the house were stirring in its sleep. Houses creak more at dawn and dusk, I told myself, climbing towards the second floor where the first rays of sunlight were angling in through the high windows, on to the ghost-shapes of vanished pictures and the locked door beyond the banister.

The smallest of the four household keys on the ring was the only possibility. It turned easily enough. I eased the door open, and a familiar blend of odours wafted out of the gloom. The same dusty-sweet smell as the library downstairs. A perfectly ordinary study. With a desk below the window: a walnut writing-desk, I saw as I drew back the heavy bronze-coloured curtains. Before the trees had grown up, there would have been a clear view eastwards to the wooded skyline on the higher ground beyond the Vale.

A covered portable typewriter sat on the writing-desk: an ancient Remington, with circular keys and a black, skeletal frame, worn to bare metal in places. There was a small fireplace in the centre of the wall opposite the window, with bookcases on either side of it. A low armchair, upholstered in faded green leather, in the corner behind the door. And to the left of the desk, a cedar cabinet like a half-size map chest.

The top of the cabinet was bare except for a single photograph. A head-and-shoulders portrait of a young woman in a dark velvet dress, with shoulders gathered like the wings of angels. The same as the one I had brought with me from Mawson.

This proves it, I thought: she can only be Viola. Put here as a memento, after she died. But then I remembered the inscription on the back of my copy. 'Greensleeves', and a date in 1949… the 10th of March. I picked up the frame and removed the cardboard, but the back of this one was blank.

I looked through the trays in the cabinet: all empty. So were the drawers in the writing-desk, but when I closed the lowest one I heard a faint crackle of paper. I knelt down to look; the dusty, doggy smell of the carpet brought back a flash of Mawson on a hot January afternoon. I took the drawer right out of the desk and saw that several sheets of paper had been crushed into the space behind. A handwritten note to Viola from 'Edie', evidently returning some letters after the death of a friend. A few pages, presumably from those letters, in a small, spiky hand with a hint of italic, signed V. A length of rusty black ribbon. And a single page of typescript, evidently from the missing part of 'The Revenant'.

'The Briars'

Church Lane,

Cranleigh,

Surrey

Friday 26 Nov.

Dearest Viola,

I found these in the drawer of Mamas bedside table. I know you said to burn everything of yours but I couldn't bring myself to do it-hope you don't mind. I can't write any more now but I do so look forward to seeing you, soon I hope.

With all my love,

Edie

with Eva and Hubert to see The Cherry Orchard at the Lyric last Wed. It seems obligatory to admire Tchekov these days but I found it tedious and said so, which rather shocked H. I think. Then Wagner at Covent Gdn-the Valkyrie in German-I prefer opera when I don't understand exactly what they're singing, but I liked him more when I was younger. Before the war, I suppose I mean. I found myself thinking of Zeppelins, and that of course reminded me of George. Poor boy-charming as ever, though we see very little of him these days. I live in hope that he will settle to something.

Next week we go to the Fletchers (the Holland Park lot) at Hythe-C. becomes more tedious every year but I am very fond of Lettie-If the weather holds we shall get in some good walks.

Am reading The Sacred Fount again-don't quite know why-a perverse fascination. Sometimes I think HJ is simply Marie Corelli in fancy dress (you know what I mean), but then I remember the tales-The Way it Came, The Jolly Corner, The Altar of the Dead-no one else could have written those, let alone The Turn of the Screw-

yrs ever

V.

Ferrier's Close

25th July 1934

Dear Madeleine,

Relieved to hear you won't need another extraction. Teeth are the root of all evil (forgive the pun)-or so I feel whenever I have to face the dentist. I don't know why they call it laughing gas; I have never felt the slightest impulse to chortle whilst having my jawbone scraped. Enough of this.

The girls are doing well. Anne has got the whole of 'La Belle Dame' by heart (Iris thinks it unsuitable for a child of six, but I really don't see why). Miss Drayton is very good with them-they both adore her and I only hope she'll stay on. Yesterday we took them all the way to Parliament Hill-a long walk for Phyllis but she didn't complain. We met Captain Anstruther on the way home & he made a great fuss of them as usual.

Anne has been asking a good deal about the accident lately, but I don't see any sign that either of them feels orphaned or deprived or anything of that sort. If only people (mostly adults who ought to know better) wouldn't treat them as if they ought to be unhappy-the sad truth is that they have a better life with us than they would have had if George and Muriel had lived. I doubt the marriage would have lasted. Poor George… shell shock is such a ghastly thing. Though as he once pointed out to me, if he'd been a corporal instead of a lieutenant he'd have been shot for cowardice rather than invalided home. That actually happened to a man in his regiment and it preyed dreadfully on his mind. He said the humiliation of losing his nerve (that was how he saw it, no matter what the doctors said) was worse than the worst nightmares.

I don't think I shall be going to Scotland in August after all, so if you

for certain, but next week, if this wonderful weather keeps up, I shall go down to Devon to stay with Hilda.

You asked me what became of Alfred's 'infernal machine'-I kept it as a memento mori. I shall never forget, that day at the Crystal Palace: I think of it whenever I read 'The Relic'. It destroyed the illusion of immortality, the feeling of infinite time that one enjoys when young. Alfred was obsessed-he had to have one. But it seemed to me pure, evil, a thing of darkness. I think that was when I knew, irrevocably, that I'd married a stranger. (Though I suppose the obvious riposte is: who doesn't?)

Foolish youth-illusions perdues, indeed. But yes, I suppose it does fascinate me in a perverse sort of way. A few years after the War-I don't think I've ever told you this-I used it in a novella. All those years I didn't write-I seemed to have lost the impulse-and then the idea came to me, and went on nagging until I wrote it all down. Then a year or two later-it can't have been much more-George got married out of the blue. Though as everyone must have realised, he can't have had much choice: Anne was far too big to be a seven months' child. And then that dreadful smash. Sheer coincidence of course-literature is full of orphaned girls brought up by relatives-but there was something unheimlich about it. I felt that some sort of prognostic gift had been thrust upon me, and I didn't like it. So I put the manuscript away; I could never quite bring myself to destroy it.

Odd how one can write what one wouldn't say. I do hope Edie is quite recovered.

Yrs ever

V.

Harry flung up one arm as if to ward off an assailant. Beatrice cried out in fear, which turned to fury as she recognised her sister.

"What are you doing, hiding there?" she cried, advancing on Cordelia.

"I was on my way to meet Harry-"

"No you weren't, you were spying on me. You're so jealous, I cant even walk with him from the station, why do you think I never speak to him when you're around? Because you cant bear it, I only have to look at him to have you sneaking off to Uncle…"

"-I say, steady on," said Harry nervously.

"-I am not jealous," said Cordelia, backing away from her sister's tirade.

"Then why were you spying?"

"I wasn't-"

"Yes you were, or you would have waved as soon as you saw us."

Beatrice would not concede an inch of her ground, and soon Cordelia found herself apologising while Harry stood feebly by, leaving her no choice but to retreat. She did not stop at the house, but kept on until she reached the riverbank, hot, humiliated, and confused. Being in love, she thought, has not made me a better person as it is said to do in novels. Beatrice is right; I am jealous, and distrustful, and clutching, and thoroughly miserable, and I hate myself… and if he does not follow I will break our engagement. The light was fading rapidly. A few moments later the still surface of the rock pool was broken by a large raindrop, then another, and then the heavens opened with a flash and a deafening thunderclap.

I read and re-read these pages sitting in Viola's armchair, distracted once or twice by the sensation, rather than the actual sound, of the faint rhythmic scraping or rustling I had heard the day before. The novella she mentioned could only have been 'The Revenant': the typed page in my hand was numbered '82', and the typescript back in my hotel room broke off at 81. So… I stared at the photograph, trying to imagine what must have happened: Phyllis running in here, perhaps, as she was packing to leave after the quarrel with Iris, wrenching the desk drawer open and snatching the typescript… which must, presumably, have been kept with the bundle of letters for these pages to be caught up together. But not the photograph… she must have had her own copy… well, obviously. Perhaps it really was Viola and the inscription had nothing to do with the picture at all.

And Phyllis must already have found and read the story. About two sisters growing up in this house. But where were the remaining pages? Where, for that matter, were the rest of Viola's manuscripts?

One came true.

I went on gazing at the photograph until I was no longer certain that the two pictures were identical. Different setting, different light, I told myself; and easily settled: I would bring my own copy up to the house on my next visit.

For the next two hours I searched the study. I leafed through every book on the shelves, took every drawer off its runners, moved the furniture, looked under the carpet. Nothing but dust and shreds of dried tobacco and an assortment of bookmarks, bus tickets, slips of paper with fragmentary jottings on them. But in several of the books, I found indentations where folded papers or envelopes had been crushed between the pages.

Someone had been through the house, not in a mad rush but carefully, thoroughly, removing letters, manuscripts, pictures, photographs… And it couldn't have been Miss Hamish because she had asked me to look for just these things.

It could have been Anne, in her last weeks alone here after Iris died. If she'd taken everything away, and died in an accident (yet another accident?) and somehow not been identified… but how could she possibly not be identified if she had all the family papers with her?

She could have made a bonfire of the lot-amnesia or breakdown again-and walked away from the entire estate to start a new life. Leaving behind just the one photograph on the cedar cabinet; which just happened to be the double of the photograph I had found in Mawson.

Again I became conscious of that faint rustling and scratching somewhere nearby, and again I found myself stumbling down the stairs, back through the dining- and drawing-rooms, fumbling with the front door locks in the semi-darkness of the porch, and out into the lane where I leaned gasping against the wall until I noticed an elderly woman with a dog, both of them watching me suspiciously. I attended ostentatiously to the Banhams, and walked away as casually as I could.

BREAKFAST, I TOLD MYSELF FIRMLY. A SOLID ENGLISH breakfast, and then some solid factual work in the Family Records Centre. I didn't run because I was afraid. I was afraid because I ran. I could always buy a large battery radio; but that would seem like sacrilege. Or a mobile phone, but who could I call?

Alice. The only person in the world I wanted to talk to. The only person I wasn't allowed to-had promised not to-ring. I started up the slope towards East Heath Road with a strange sensation of vertigo. How could I have accepted Alice's terms for so long? Or felt so sure, so much of the time, that we would fall into each other's arms one day and live happily ever after? Madness. Obscured until now, one day at a time, by the cosy routines of the library, the daily dose of worry about my mother. Tonight I would ring the hospital and ask for Alice and say, you're not the only one capable of surprises.

THE NEW FAMILY RECORDS CENTRE IN CLERKENWELL WAS clean (except for the older registers, which stank even more than I remembered), spacious and, at opening time, relatively tranquil. The crowds built up as the morning wore on, but by then I had found most of the entries I wanted; and learned nothing, in essence, that I didn't already know from Miss Hamish's or Viola's letters.

Viola's shell-shocked son George-George Rupert Hatherley-had married Muriel Celia Hatherley, née Wilson in the district of Marylebone in the third quarter of 1927. Anne Victoria Hatherley had been born in the first quarter of 1928, and Phyllis May (just to make certain, though I didn't know why I was bothering, unless I suspected my mother of forging her own birth certificate), in the second quarter of 1929. And then George and Muriel had died in the third quarter of 1930, in the district of Brighton. George had been thirty-eight years old, and Muriel just twenty-seven when the accident happened.

They had died the same way as Alice's parents, it struck me as I sat in the basement tea room amidst the roar of genealogical debate. Since our very first letters, Alice had insisted on writing as if she'd been born, rather than nearly dying, on the day of the crash. She rejected as too painful, or simply ignored, all my attempts to get her to talk about her family, until I gave up asking. Just as I had with my mother, which made Alice's attitude seem-if not normal then at least perfectly understandable. I didn't even know her exact birthdate, only that she had been born in March. We didn't do birthdays or Christmas, or send presents of any kind: all that had been left on hold, waiting for our life together to begin. Mad, mad, mad. But now I could find out.

I fought my way through the swelling mob in Births, from 1958 to 1970, without finding a single Alice Jessell.

Deaths weren't as popular as Births. It took less than twenty minutes to establish that no one called Jessell had died anywhere in England or Wales between 1964 (the year Alice ought to have been born) and the first quarter of 1978, when she first wrote to me.

Of course she could have been born-and the accident could have happened-in Scotland, which kept its own records.

At the counter they told me I could log on to the 'Scots Origins' website and run as many specific searches as my credit card would bear. I ordered my certificates and walked down Ex-mouth Market in brilliant sunshine until I found an internet café. But the Scottish system didn't allow searches later than 1924. I logged in my credit card number anyway and entered 'Jessell 1560-1924'. We have no records for this name.

I opened an email window to Alice but couldn't decide what to write. One of my favourite books, when I was about eight or nine, had been an old Puffin Tales of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green. It had sinister illustrations in the style of woodcuts, which still occasionally came to life in my dreams. One of the stories was about a knight who married a beautiful princess under some sort of enchantment which meant that after seven years she would turn into something hideous… and there was another version in which they would live happily, so long as he never questioned her about her past. Of course the questions preyed upon his mind until at last he commanded her to answer, and then… I couldn't remember exactly what happened. Something dark and irrevocable.

I logged off without sending anything, finished my coffee and moved over to the payphone by the door. I had the number of the National Hospital for Neurology and Microsurgery in East Finchley in my notebook. It couldn't do any harm-could it?-to ring the desk and ask to speak to Alice Jessell. And ring off before she answered. But on the other hand… best leave it until this evening. Collect the photograph from the hotel, take a cab back to the house, start searching the library. Concentrate on the Hatherleys and try not to think about Jessells.

THE WINDOW OF THE CAB WOULDN'T OPEN. EVERY STRETCH of grass we passed on the way up was crammed with half-naked people soaking up the sunshine. I was dripping with sweat when I paid the driver at the entrance to the lane. Half-past one.

I had brought sandwiches, bottled water, a torch and spare batteries, three boxes of matches. But when the gate had closed behind me, there was plenty of light now that the sun was overhead. I tried again to swallow the sensation of something cold and metallic lodged in the centre of my chest, about where, I realised, my mental image of Alice habitually floated-an indistinct figure in dazzling white, glimpses of a face from several different angles, never quite in focus. As much a part of me as breathing. As close to you as your heartbeat.

I took my photograph up to the study and set it beside the framed picture on Viola's cabinet. They were indeed the same, but I was no closer to knowing who she was. 'Greensleeves', 10 March 1949. Just four days after Anne's twenty-first birthday.

Alas my love you do me wrong

To cast me out discourteously…

Greensleeves was all my joy…

I couldn't see a connection with anything I knew about her. It couldn't be to do with the breaking of her engagement to Hugh Montfort, because that hadn't happened until the summer of 1949. Could someone have written a play based on the song? A play for which she had auditioned?

Once more I read through the pages from Violas letters, which I had left on the writing-desk. Something in the dusty-sweet smell of the paper reminded me again of that hot afternoon in my mother's room, where this had all started. Or so it felt. Were the missing papers crammed into some hiding-place I hadn't found, back in the house in Mawson? Of course I'd hardly begun to search this one; I hadn't even looked in the basement yet.

Hiding-places… the false floor in the top cupboard. Could my mother have got the idea from something in her bedroom here?

The house was completely still. I left the two pictures side by side on the cabinet and went on down the corridor.

EVEN WITH THE CURTAINS OPEN, THE LIGHT IN MY MOTHER'S room was unnervingly dim. I had already looked through the dressing-table and chest, but I searched them again by the light of the torch. I lifted the bookcase away from the wall, dragged the counterpane and bedding and then the mattress off the bed, stirring up a cloud of dust and several more heavy, slow-flying moths, deliberately postponing my last and best chance: the wall of built-in cupboards that divided this room from Anne's.

As I had noticed the day before, the beds in both rooms were centred against the common partition, with the space equally divided between the two, so that on either side of the partition there was fixed panelling to the right of the bed, a cupboard above the left-hand half of each bed-head, and then hanging space with a shelf above the rail. I shone the torch beam into the cupboard above Phyllis's bed. The gouges in the floor-long, wavering scars, about a foot apart-looked unnervingly fresh.

The shelf in the closet was indeed made up of two separate sheets of wood-I could feel them flexing-but both were solidly fixed. Silly idea in the first place. If it had been a hiding-place, Phyllis would hardly have forgotten to take whatever she'd hidden there. She'd remembered the typescript in the study, after all.

Just so I could tell myself-and Miss Hamish-I had left nothing undone, I moved on to Anne's room and repeated the search, with no better result until I took the yellowing tennis dress off the rail to see if there was anything in the pocket. It didn't even have a pocket. As I hung it up again, the shelf above the rail rattled slightly. I climbed on to the bed to get a better view. In the torchlight, I saw a faint dark line around the nearest panel.

In the cavity beneath lay a dusty quarto notebook. Lined pages, handwritten. A diary.

25 MARCH 1949

Still freezing. I meant to start this on my birthday but it's nearly three weeks. Such a let-down, turning 21. The old suffocating feeling again, worse than usual. Something's missing and I don't know what it is. Like craving for a food you've never had but you'd know at once if you could only taste it, and then you'd never eat anything else. Or finding you can't breathe ordinary air any more.

I know what Grandmama would have said. Stop moping, girl, smarten yourself up, get a job. Iris just smiles sweetly and says you must do whatever you think best dear and goes back to the seventh astral plane. Perhaps I'd be happier if I had a boring job like Filly, but then I wouldn't have any time to myself. I waste so much time and then I resent it when I don't have time to waste. I don't want to type and I don't want to nurse and I don't want to teach. But I know I could write if only I had something interesting to write about.

29 MARCH

Went to a Labour Party meeting with Owen last night. In a horrible hall in Camden that stank. Of course it's awful, slums and all that, and I know I ought to care but I don't. The secretary, Ted somebody or other, tried to make me join. I said I'd think about it but I could see him thinking, rich girl slumming. Owen must have said something. And here I am queueing for neck of lamb and counting our pennies. I'm sick of Owen; he lectures me all the time and never notices what I'm wearing.

5 APRIL

Had tea with Owen in the High Street yesterday and gave him the push. He went all doggy and pleading and I walked off despising him and feeling I'd been hard and cruel.

14 APRIL

Iris got a summons irbm Pitt the Elder and insisted I go instead. You're twenty-one now dear, and I'm sure you've got a much better head for these things than I have. She's convinced herself she's going to die quite soon: one of her premonitions. Of course there's her heart, but she's only sixty for God's sake.

Felt very nervous about having to explain to Mr Pitt that I was there instead of Iris. But he was very charming and made a great fuss of me. Miss Neame brought us tea and a proper teacake and sandwiches, and I thought he just wanted to chat about how we were managing and all that, until I realised he was leading up to something.

I did wonder if Iris had been keeping something from us but it still came as a shock. He says our capital's run down and we're going to have to sell either the house or some of the pictures, furniture or silver or something like that. Apparently he's warned Iris several times but she hasn't done anything about it.

I asked him what he thought we should do and he said that depended on how much we want to keep the house. Now is a bad time to sell, apparently, because of death duties and supertax and all that, and with the housing shortage he said it would most likely go for flats and whoever bought it wouldn't want to pay much. But on the other hand if we know we want to leave, then perhaps the sooner the better.

Until now I'd never really thought about it. Somehow I'd assumed that Filly and I would get married and Iris would find herself a companion and everything would go on just the same. Even though we freeze every winter and the garden's going to pot I can't imagine not being able to come back here.

15 APRIL

Iris more or less admitted she'd kept quiet because Horus or whoever came through on the ouija board had told her something was sure to turn up. I nearly said yes, the bailiffs, but I bit my tongue. Of course she doesn't want to move. And Filly doesn't seem to care either way; she says she just wants to get a flat of her own as soon as she can afford it. So we've agreed to ask Mr Pitt about selling some of the pictures or the good chairs.

18 APRIL

Rang up Mr Pitt this morning. He asked if we had a copy of the inventory that Grandmama had made when she did her last will; if not he'll get Miss Neame to type out another one for us. Iris didn't know so I went up to the study to look.

Even with the morning sun streaming in the study always feels slightly haunted. Perhaps it's the leftover smell of her tobacco. And there was something rustling about in the ceiling. I don't think I'm afraid of mice but I shouldn't like it to be anything larger.

It wasn't in any of the drawers, so I started looking through the little cabinet, but then I got distracted and started reading some of Grandmama's stories again. And that made me remember her reading us 'The Pavilion' in the summerhouse before the war, at least I thought then she was reading but she made it into quite a different story, with nothing about Rosalind getting married or Mr Margrave being a vampire, or of course the angel; it was all about the way the pavilion changed whenever you went to sleep in it.

I didn't find the inventory, but at the back of the cabinet underneath a stack of typing paper I found an old leather music-case. Inside was another of her stories, a longer one I'd never seen before, called 'The Revenant'.

The creepy feeling started when I looked at the date. Three years before I was born, before our parents had even met. I wondered at first if she'd put 1925 for 1935, say, but I don't think she would have written it after the accident. Of course there must be lots of stories about orphaned sisters being brought up by aunts and uncles or grandparents. And it's not as if I've ever felt like an orphan. Just that so many things seem to fit.

It's this house for a start, though only this floor, really, and the lane and the garden. But why is it different from her turning the summerhouse into the pavilion? Because F. and I are the same age as Beatrice and Cordelia? Our rooms are side by side, and the studio is where Grandmama's study is. Beatrice goes out to work and Cordelia stays home, like me. And Iris has a weak heart. But so do lots of people, and she's not fat like Aunt Una.

And their not having any money, and having to do their own cooking.

And me just turning 21.

Still freezing.

19 APRIL

Read the story again last night. It reminds me of the feeling when we used to play with Iris's ouija board: the way the glass seemed to come alive and tug. I'd never thought of Filly and me as estranged, just not terribly close. But now I wonder. Just as it didn't seem odd, before, that she and I haven't talked about our parents for years and years, and now it does.

28 APRIL

Filly does remind me of a cat. And there is something guarded and distrustful about her. I notice it more and more.

But is the story making me see things that aren't there? Like walking on the heath at dusk, when you think there's a man watching you from the shadows and he turns out to be a treetrunk?

5 MAY

Mr Pitt says Christies will send someone to look at the pictures. All I have to do is ring up and arrange a time.

This is silly. Lots of people have their pictures valued.

11 MAY

Mr Montfort-Hugh Montfort came this afternoon to look at the pictures. It was Iris's day with Mrs Roper's circle so I was here by myself. All morning I kept thinking, what if he looks exactly like Harry Beauchamp?

Of course he was nothing like, except for being young and quite good-looking. He's tall, and slender, with black hair swept back from the temples, pale skin, no moustache. And no corduroy trousers-he had on a charcoal grey suit, beautifully pressed. Very dark brown eyes, the corners crinkle when he smiles.

And he didn't make me feel embarrassed about our having to sell things. I wasn't going to mention it but he was so nice I ended up telling him all about us while I was showing him the pictures-although really he was showing me: he knew about almost every one we looked at. He thinks the Blake etching might fetch quite a bit.

He actually listens: such a change from Owen. His parents live apart and he has a married sister in Canada. He's sharing rooms in Piccadilly with a friend-they were in the army together but he didn't want to talk about the war. I don't think there's anyone special.

15 MAY

Hugh rang to say he'd like to have another look at the Blake. I asked him to tea on Thursday and he said yes!

19 MAY

Such a wonderful day: we took our tea out to the summerhouse and talked and talked. Afterwards I said I'd walk down to the station with him and we went on a huge detour, all the way to Highgate Ponds.

I asked how he got interested in pictures and he said he'd wanted to be a painter but realised after a while he'd never be very good. Apparently having a good eye for pictures doesn't mean you can do it yourself.

I said I liked Constable which was a mistake but he was very nice about it. And it's OK to like Turner though only the blurry ones, Hugh said they were done when his eyes were going and that's how the world actually looked to him. There was a painter called Fuseli who was colour-blind, he said, and had to choose his colours by remembering where they were on his palette. He told me about a collector he knows, very rich and eccentric, who buys every picture he can find by a man called Rees, because he hates his work so much he doesn't want anyone else to see it. Because he's a collector he can't bring himself to destroy the pictures, so he keeps them locked in a damp cellar where they're slowly rotting away.

That was the only slightly creepy moment, because it reminded me of Ruthven de Vere buying up all Henry St Clair's pictures. I won't think about it any more.

On Tuesday we're going to the Tate!

24 MAY

Went to Tate to look at the Turners but I couldn't really concentrate, I was so happy. Then walked for miles along the Embankment with the sun shining on the river. I want to live by water.

6 JUNE

Cinema with Hugh. The Heiress-so exciting. Supper afterwards. He kissed me properly at last. And told me I'm beautiful. And I didn't mention Filly so it wasn't in the least like the story. I might as well admit I'm in love with him.

Somehow we got on to Iris. H. asked me whether she really believes, and so I told him about Geoffrey being killed in the last war, and how she never really got over it, and that led to our parents. He was very tactful and tentative, but I don't think he quite believed me when I said I'd never really missed them. Did Filly feel the same way, he asked, and I had to admit I didn't know, and that made me think of the story again. I wish I'd never found it.

9 JUNE

Tea with Hugh in Mayfair: a celebration. The Blake has sold for 500 guineas!

I know we've only been out a few times but he's the man I want to marry. I've never felt this way about anyone. And I'm nearly sure he feels the same.

14 JUNE

Hugh to tea here to meet F. and Iris. I couldn't put it off any longer. I didn't want to but he's been asking when am I going to meet them.

Iris was on her best behaviour-H. must have thought I'd exaggerated terribly-but when I introduced him to Beatrice -o my God Filly-I couldn't help noticing, she turned quite pale. Tea was awful. And when I said we'd go for a walk on the Heath F. asked if she could come too, and I couldn't very well say no. F. talked-I suppose he was only drawing her out, but why did he have to sound so interested in her boring job?-and I seethed, all the way up to Parliament Hill and back. And then when he kissed me goodbye at the tube he said how much he'd enjoyed it. I shan't bring him here again on a Saturday if I can help it.

F. behaved exactly like Beatrice in the story and I could see H. looking at her. But I was so tense and miserable, I can't help wondering if I brought it on myself.

17 JUNE

Today I did a very stupid thing. I started searching the house for "The Drowned Man'. To prove it doesn't exist. But not finding it only made me more afraid that it's hidden somewhere, lying in wait for H. Even Iris noticed. I didn't dare ask-one thing the spirits are quite good at is suggesting places to look. The last thing I want. I feel creepy enough as it is.

19 JUNE

H. very busy-big sale coming up-won't be able to see me this week.

No one is going to die. I just mustn't think about it any more.

28 JUNE

H. to tea again with Filly. He came to pick me up and Iris invited him before I could stop her. We had it on the terrace. H. talked about some Russian who only painted coloured squares. F. very quiet but hanging on every word.

12 JULY

H. started talking about money. Says he hasn't a bean-spends his salary before he gets it. I'm sure he was leading up to proposing. Tried everything I knew to encourage him without seeming to let on. I'm sure he will.

16 JULY

But he hasn't.

19 JULY

A perfect afternoon. Long walk with H. and then we lay down in the grass-really passionate at last. We were kissing and he was lying almost on top of me and I could feel the sun shining through his body into mine. It really is like going to heaven. He undid my dress and I thought we were going to make love properly. I didn't care about anyone seeing. I wanted him to. But then somebody's wretched dog came bounding up and H. got all embarrassed and started apologising for being carried away. I wish he hadn't.

25 JULY

H. asked me to marry him this afternoon. I'm so deliriously happy. I know I am. I wish we could keep our engagement a secret.

Later: I've locked the story in the study. I will never read it or think of it again.

28 JULY

Told Iris this afternoon. I hadn't meant to, so soon, but it just came out. So when Filly got home I had to tell her too. She said all the right things but I felt she didn't mean them.

8 AUGUST

H. here again for tea with F. We had it in the summerhouse and then he wanted us all to play tennis. I said I couldn't remember where the net was, but Filly went and dragged it out of the conservatory. If I say anything he'll think I'm jealous.

I should tell him about the story and how it haunts me. But then he'll want to read it, and he might

I must not think about it any more.

12 AUGUST

Alone with H. at last. He asked me if something was wrong and I said no, just a bit of a headache, which was exactly the wrong thing to say, because he insisted on taking me home.

I keep thinking he's not as passionate as he was a month ago, but I'm so tense and miserable I don't know if it's him or me. I'm sure he loves me. I will not read the story again.

20 AUGUST

Filly is acting very strangely. I keep watching her-about Hugh I mean-I can't help myself. Sometimes I think I must be going mad.

25 AUGUST

Hardly slept at all. H. very busy again at the saleroom. Tried again to tell him about the story and couldn't.

10 SEPTEMBER

Very close and airless. H. stayed late again playing Scrabble. Kept willing Filly to go to bed but she wouldn't, even though I could hardly keep my eyes open-just played on and on until H. realised he'd missed the last tube. He said not to worry about making up the spare bed, he'd sleep on the couch in the library. I wanted to go downstairs with him but he said good-night on the landing in front of Filly.

By then I was too angry to sleep. I tossed and turned for hours until I gave up and went and stood at the window and looked at the moon. And I thought, I'll go down to the library and have it out with him.

Filly's door was locked and it was deathly quiet. Until I got to the landing outside the study and heard the noise. A squeaking, creaking sort of noise. Coming through the ceiling.

I tiptoed up the attic stairs and there they were, on Lettie's old bed, stark naked in the moonlight. He was sprawled along the mattress with his head hanging over the foot of the bed. She was riding him like a horse, straddling him with her hands on his shoulders, lashing his face with her hair. I couldn't move and I couldn't look away. Then her whole body arched and shuddered and she threw back her head and looked straight at me.

(The rest of this page, and all the remaining pages in the diary, had been torn out.)

I read through the diary by torchlight, sitting on Anne's bed with the faded white tennis dress floating at the edge of my vision. I could not associate the mother I had known with the woman in the attic, and yet the final scene left me with a nightmarish sense of having witnessed my own conception. It was also disturbingly like one of the fantasies Alice and I had shared. I remained staring at the torn page until a very faint rustling somewhere overhead set the hair on the back of my neck bristling.

Downstairs in the comparative safety of the library, in an armchair beneath the four great windows, I read through it again. I had known, really, since I first read Miss Hamish's letter. Why else would Aunt Iris have turned so violently against Phyllis? (I would not think of her as 'my mother' any more.)

Phyllis had found the diary; had probably been reading it all along. 'Filly is acting very strangely: I saw what must have happened, set out as clearly as an endgame at chess, with Phyllis always one-no two moves ahead… Owe came true, indeed. Anne's record of the closing trap had gone with the torn-out pages. But why had Phyllis put the rest of the diary back in its hiding-place after-whatever she had done to-had done with Anne? It made no sense: after all, she had taken 'The Revenant'.

And there was something else… something that didn't fit. I took out Miss Hamish's letter to check the dates. Somewhere around the middle of September, Anne had written to say the engagement was 'all off'. But the 'dreadful set-to' between Phyllis and Iris hadn't happened for another fortnight or so. Anne clearly didn't tell her friend why she'd broken off with Hugh Montfort. Then Iris had changed her will and died within days of learning the truth. And Anne had last been seen alive in Mr Pitt's office on 26 October.

Miss Hamish. The diary did not once mention Miss Hamish.

How could this be? Unless she hadn't been nearly as close to Anne as she imagined… but no, Anne had left her the estate. For a few wild moments I toyed with the notion of Miss Hamish and Phyllis conspiring to murder Anne, but that was idiotic. Every detail in her letter fitted exactly with my own discoveries, and with Anne's diary, including Mr Pitt the solicitor. And the police would have investigated Abigail Hamish, as the sole beneficiary, very carefully indeed.

No: the only obvious answer was that Anne simply hadn't included the friendship-and presumably whole other dimensions of her life-in the diary. Odd, all the same. I leaned back in the armchair, staring up at the gallery where the veiled woman had appeared in my dream.

A woman in a dark green gown. Greensleeves.

The back of my neck prickled. Of course it had been a dream. I didn't-did I?-seriously believe in ghosts. Any more than I believed in spirit messages from beyond. I looked over at the stack of butcher's paper on the table. Something about the planchette had changed.

The squeak and scrape of the chair rose into a high, drawn-out note as I stood up. There was my question:

WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNE?

but the planchette had moved on. In faint, spidery letters, an answer had appeared:

Filly murdered me

From: ghfreeman@hotmait.com

To: Alice.Jessell@hotmail.com

Subject: None

Date: Wed, 11 August 1999 19:48:21 +0100 (BST)

…later I rang Mr Grierstone's clerk and asked her if the cleaners, or a security patrol had been in the house last night, and she said no, certainly not, no one else has keys, Miss Hamish was most insistent about that. She said the only way anyone could have got in was if I hadn't locked up properly last night, and I know I did.

I felt angry when I first saw the message. A defensive reaction, I suppose. Someone's playing games with me, I thought, but I'll show them. I wrote down another question, something no one else could answer, thinking, that'll prove you're not a ghost. It seemed perfectly logical at the time. But I knew really, even before I went out to phone, that it couldn't have been a cleaner or anyone like that. Who could possibly know that my mother was Filly to the family?

Maybe Mr Grierstone lives a double life, creeping out at night to frighten his clients. I wish I could believe that.

The only other possibility-the only one I want to think about-is that I wrote it myself, when I was sitting at the table yesterday afternoon, doodling with the planchette. But I KNOW I didn't do that. I can see myself sitting there yesterday, trying to convince myself that Mother couldn't have killed Anne, and the planchette doesn't move.

So either I'm turning into one of those 'missing time' people with alternate personalities, or Anne's ghost is telling me what I already know from her diary. I don't know which is more frightening. If I did write that message, what am I going to do next? What if it's inherited?-the condition, whatever it is? Am I going to turn into a murderer too?

I know what you'll say: I'm letting my worst fears run away with me. If only. It would actually be a relief, now, to believe what I've just written. Because I don't. I keep getting flashes-like the shadow of something truly monstrous creeping up behind you. Your mind keeps saying no, no, but your skin and your spine and your hair and the pit of your stomach know what's coming. In that house, anything is possible.

Alice I know we agreed to wait but I really need to talk to you right now. I've never felt more alone in my life. This morning in Family Records I looked you up, or tried to, I just couldn't help myself. You weren't born in England, so why have you always let me believe that you were? And that the accident happened here? After the shock of losing Staplefield, and finding out my whole childhood was a lie (I mean my mother's, but it feels like mine) and now this, you must understand why I need to hear your voice now, not 'very soon' but now.

I'll wait for an hour to see if you've read this before I ring the hospital…

From: Alice.Jessell@hotmail.com

To: ghfreeman@hotmail.com

Subject: None

Date: Wed, 11 August 1999 20:29:53 +0100 (BST)

I didn't tell you because I wanted it to be a surprise, but I've already left the hospital. I'm having a last lot of physiotherapy, in a clinic in St John's Wood, and I'll be with you in three more days, maybe sooner. There's nothing I want more in the world than to pick up the phone and pour out everything I feel. But we might regret it later. We mustn't have a conventional beginning, hi how are you, nice to speak to you at last. I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal.

And it is a terrible ordeal, but you mustn't lose hope yet, about your mother. I think you did go into some sort of trance and write that message, but it doesn't have to be either/or, either you wrote it or Anne did. I think Anne was trying to speak through you, only the fear that was preying on your mind took over the pencil. Houses, especially old houses, hold the impressions of people very strongly, and you're so attuned to her.

We'll be together very soon

Your invisible lover

Alice

As soon as I had read Alice's message, I took the lift down to the foyer and joined the crowds heading west along Euston Road towards the last of the sunset. The roar and stench of traffic was comforting; it stopped me from thinking. Just beyond Tottenham Court Road I found an entire street full of restaurants. I chose the noisiest, ate something vaguely Middle Eastern and drank a bottle of bad but expensive red, a thick metallic wine heavy with sediment. On the way back to the hotel I stopped at an off-licence and bought a bottle of whisky.

I woke at ten the following morning with a slow, thudding headache, which accompanied me down Kingsway to Somerset House on the Strand, where I intended to look up Iris's will, only to be told that wills were no longer kept there. I was sent back up to First Avenue House, a featureless modern building with airport-level security, in High Holborn. There were only two other people in the registry, and it took me all of three minutes to establish, from the probate registers, that Viola's estate had been valued at £12,989; Iris's-she had died on 6 October 1949-at £9,135.1 applied for copies of the wills, was told there would be an hour's wait, and went back to the registers.

George Rupert Hatherley, my grandfather, had died intestate in Prince Alfred Hospital in Brighton on 13 August 1929, leaving effects to the value of £724.13.9. Violas husband, Alfred George Hatherley, had died not at Ferrier's Close but at 44 Ennismore Gardens Knightsbridge, on 7 December 1921, leaving just under six thousand pounds. So Viola had presumably inherited money, as well as Ferrier's Close, from her own family. Then I thought I might as well search forwards from 1949, just to make sure that Anne Hatherley hadn't died without Miss Hamish's knowing about it; I had got as far as 1990 before I remembered that as Anne's executor, Miss Hamish couldn't not have known. A coffee break was clearly overdue.

My copies arrived just as I was leaving. Viola had made her last will on 10 August 1938, leaving everything to Iris with the proviso that if Iris should die before the will was proven, the estate should be divided equally between 'my granddaughters Anne Victoria and Phyllis May Hatherley, both of Ferrier's Close Hampstead in the County of London'. Her executor was 'Edward Nichol Pitt of 18 Whetstone Park Solicitor'. Iris's last will, signed on 4 October 1949, two days before she died, was even simpler. It left everything to 'my dear niece Anne Victoria Hatherley'. Pitt the Elder was again the executor; Phyllis wasn't even mentioned.

Surrounded by people shouting into mobiles through the clatter of cups and the hiss and roar of the coffee machine, while the traffic outside negotiated High Holborn in a series of kamikaze rushes, I felt almost certain I didn't believe in spirit messages. Of course I had written those words myself. If only I could remember writing them, I wouldn't have to worry any more about alternate personalities, or missing time. Or ghosts. I picked up my pen and sat with the tip resting lightly on a blank page of my notebook, trying to will myself into recalling the moment. But the memory would not come, and instead I found myself thinking about Alice.

Some time later I realised I had been doodling. Above a heavily inscribed 'A' I had drawn a small pig with wings, an imbecilic smile, and a halo.

At least it showed I could have written that message.

AT SEVEN THAT EVENING, I WAS SITTING IN A VAST BEER garden at the foot of Downshire Hill. Evening sunshine slanted across the grass. Still plenty of daylight left.

From Holborn I had walked slowly back up Southampton Row, intending to call in at the new British Library and try another search for more of Violas stories. Instead I had gone straight back to the hotel and slept until half-past five. The headache had gone when I woke, but the knot in the pit of my stomach was still there. Hunger, I told myself. A good meal will settle it.

Yet in spite of the roast lamb, and the beer, and the roar of several hundred conversations, the knot had refused to unravel.

I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal. In a couple of days' time I could be sitting here with Alice. Trust me. I tried to imagine her, in her white dress embroidered with small purple flowers, her thick copper-coloured hair loosely tied back, smiling at me from the empty chair opposite. She would be wearing that dress, she'd told me, when we met; it still fitted her. Alice is so beautiful, we all love her. Parvati Naidu, the ward sister at Finchley Road, had said so. I'd forgotten about Parvati during this last attack of doubt. I should learn to be more trusting.

And what would we be talking about, sitting here on the terrace, watching the sun go down? Whether Phyllis had murdered her sister as well as sleeping with her fiancé? I loved Alice for defending my mother to the bitter end, but I couldn't agree with her. On the evidence of Anne's diary alone, Phyllis May Hatherley was guilty unless proven innocent. And to prove it either way, I would have to find out what had happened to Anne.

I found that I was on my feet and heading for East Heath Road. The shadows had lengthened noticeably; the sun was only just above the treetops on Rosslyn Hill. All I needed to do this evening was check the library and confirm what I already knew: that the planchette would be sitting exactly where I'd left it, beneath the question I'd scrawled on my way out, in a moment of nervous defiance-if you're so smart, answer this. To make certain nobody was creeping into the house at night, I had fetched a reel of black thread from a sewing basket upstairs, tied a length of it across the hall a few paces from the front door, and another half-way along the path to the gate. I hadn't told Alice.

I took the path that ran past Hampstead Ponds, now crowded with swimmers, and across the Heath towards the eastern end of the Vale; the path I had taken on that wintry day thirteen years ago. Half of Hampstead seemed to be out walking or cycling. My mother and Anne, and Iris and Viola had walked these paths hundreds of times-all those coats and scarves and boots and galoshes by the front door-they would have been a familiar sight. Anne must have had friends; she'd lived here all her life. The life excluded from the diary. Apart from Miss Hamish, I didn't have a single name to pursue.

Except Hugh Montfort. I'd been so preoccupied with my mother and Anne, I'd hardly given him a thought. Had he and Phyllis run off together? Wouldn't the police have wanted to question him as well? He might still be alive, in fact-he'd only be in his seventies. It would certainly be worth trying to trace him: if not through public records-and I hadn't even checked the London residential phone book yet-I could try another advertisement in The Times.

As I approached the pond that lies between the Vale and the open Heath, I kept trying to identify Ferrier's Close. There were several possible candidates lurking behind dense stands of trees on a rise away to my left, but the geography of the Vale was so deceptive, I wasn't even sure I was looking in the right direction. Back in Mawson, I had skimmed through a massive history of Hampstead and the Heath: in the 1870s, the Vale of Health had been a rowdy pleasure-garden with its own gin palace; before that, it had been mainly cottages and a handful of larger houses, of which Ferrier's Close must have been one. I wondered how the bachelor uncle had felt about the gin palace.

Now gentrification had triumphed: the only remnant of commerce was the fairground on the eastern fringe of the Vale, an incongruous stretch of wasteland crowded with run-down mobile homes, derelict cars, mounds of salvaged timber and broken stone, rusting pieces of machinery.

A puff of wind sent dust eddying across the yard. Last time I saw this, it had been a sea of mud. Dank and dripping; as Miss Hamish had said, the gloomiest corner of the Heath.

Something in that swirl of dust, or perhaps a rowan tree on the far side of the fairground, dripping with scarlet berries, reminded me of Mawson, sitting with my mother in the back garden, the morning of my return. She had been so joyful, so relieved, to have me safely home. Consumed with misery and self-pity, I hadn't taken much notice. And then I'd mentioned the Vale, and she'd broken out in a cold sweat. Anything could have happened to you. You might have been murdered. No one could fake a reaction like that. Murders must have been committed on the Heath from time to time; perhaps she'd been warned, as a child, never to wander off alone. I had to keep you safe.

Meanwhile the sun was dipping below the trees on the skyline, and I had better get a move on.

IN THE GLOOM OF THE PLEACHED WALK, I HAD TO USE MY torch to locate the first line of black thread. It was unbroken, exactly where I had left it, at knee height. Along with the torch and matches I had brought the bottle of whisky, and in another attempt to loosen the knot in my stomach I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls in the porch before tackling the Banhams.

The thread in the hall was intact too. But it wouldn't hurt to check the back door before I went into the library. Torch in hand, though there was still plenty of light from the stairwell, I turned left into the drawing-room. Overhead, the stained glass shone crimson and gold, casting a faint sheen over the humped sofas and chairs and the faded rectangles on the walls where pictures had once hung. Once again I caught myself trying to move noiselessly. A board squeaked. Whisky sloshed in the bottle. I swallowed another mouthful of Braveheart, left the bottle with my bag of provisions on the dining table and went on through to the rear landing and courtyard door. Which was again exactly as I had left it, firmly bolted.

Cold air brushed my neck. I turned and shone my torch down the stairs to the flagged floor of the kitchen below. This was one of the reasons I had bought the torch. It would be dark down there at any time of day. Or night. I think of you as my questing knight.

The drop in temperature was much more noticeable this time. I went down the stone stairs with the sensation of entering a pool filled with chill, invisible water. The beam of my torch wavered across the black range and around the shelves to the doorway opposite. A tunnel, or passageway, about ten feet long, leading to a low wooden door. Rough stone walls, a flagged floor. Two massive joists running crosswise overhead; floorboards above the joists. A little unsteadily, I crossed the floor and shone my torch into an opening on the left, just inside the entrance. Two massive tubs, a copper, mops, buckets, fireplace in the wall opposite. A hint of stale soap, starch and cold metal, mildew.

I turned the torch beam to the door at the end of the tunnel. My hair brushed against a joist: I guessed I might be somewhere beneath the dining-room. Grit slithered underfoot; mortar flaked and crumbled when I steadied myself against the wall.

The door was very like the one in the front wall: heavy vertical planks, massive hinges. The black metal straps spanned more than half the width of the door. Timber architrave, flush with the stonework. Latched by a solid metal bar, which evidently slid up and over a metal tooth projecting from the architrave, and dropped into the slot behind, where it was now secured by an archaic padlock. A heavy pull-ring, black metal like the other fittings, was bolted to the centre of the door.

I reached into my pocket for the keys, then hesitated, glancing over my shoulder. The last of the daylight was fading from the basement steps.

Tomorrow morning, if the weather held, the sun would be shining directly down those steps. The door could wait until then. But I would sleep better tonight if I checked the planchette first. I hastened back up to the dining-room for another-well, two more healthy slugs of Braveheart and strode purposefully across the landing to the library, taking the bottle with me.

The stack of butcher's paper on the table was exactly where I had left it. There was my question:

WHO IS MY PENFRIEND?

But the planchette was no longer beneath the 'W', and even without the torch, the faint, looping reply was clear enough:

Miss Jessel

I was still in the tunnel, trying to find the basement stairs, but I couldn't see where I was going because someone was shining a light in my face. The light grew brighter until it hurt my head, which was propped at an uncomfortable angle. And someone was calling-no, whispering-my name.

I was lying on the chesterfield below the library windows, with a full moon shining down into my eyes. And a blurred recollection of having drunk too much whisky much too quickly.

'Gerard.'

A slow, insinuating whisper, making two long syllables of my name. It seemed to hang in the air above my head. The moon was painfully bright: everything else was in darkness.

'Ger-ard.'

I lifted my head slightly, trying to locate the sound. Pain shot through my forehead; the moon wavered and lurched.

'Close your eyes, Gerard. You're dreaming.'

I had had dreams before in which I dreamed I woke up, but never as real as this. My throat was parched; my tongue felt sore and swollen.

'I wouldn't try to run if I were you. You're dreaming; you don't know what you might meet.'

The voice was coming from the direction of the gallery.

'Who are you?' It came out as a hoarse croak; I hadn't meant to speak.

'You know who I am'-intimate, caressing-'but you can call me Alice if you like.'

I must wake up. I must wake up. I heard a cry that might have been 'Alice?' and realised it was me.

'I know everything about you, Gerard. You're dreaming, remember; I'm inside your head. Closer than your heartbeat, you might say.'

Another incoherent sound.

'Why don't you ask me something? I'm dead, you know. The dead know everything.'

This is a terrible hallucination. I must wake up.

'Wouldn't you like to ask me about Anne?' the whispering voice insinuated. 'She left you a message last night. She's dead, of course, but you know all about that. You've seen the scratches in the cupboard.'

'Who are you?'

'That would be telling, wouldn't it? I might be you.'

'Me?'

'That's very good, Gerard. I might be you. Or Hugh. I might be Hugh Montfort.'

The whispering lingered on the last two syllables. There was no sound of breathing, only soft, insinuating words floating in darkness.

We're all dead, you see. Filly killed us all, one by one. Hugh too. She killed Hugh too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet. And soon, very soon, we'll be together for ever and ever.

'You can go back to sleep now Gerard. Sweet dreams.'

The moon still shone through my eyelids. A barred shadow touched my face. I shot bolt upright with a shriek that rang and reverberated around the library and died to a slow drip, drip, drip somewhere beneath the couch. I had lost control of my bladder.

The barred shadow had been thrown by the casement half-way up the window. Slowly, the library beyond the small moonlit area around me began to materialise. I stumbled the few steps from the couch to the table and snatched up the torch.

There was no one on the gallery.

FOLLOWING THE QUIVERING PATCH OF LIGHT THROUGH THE darkness to the front door, with a hundred malignant eyes playing up and down my spine, was almost as terrifying as listening to the voice in the dark. I walked all the way down through Camden to the hotel and arrived at three in the morning, smelling like an incontinent drunk but cold, shivering sober. Even the headache had gone. I showered and made tea and stood at the window, staring down at the yellow vapour lights ranged along the bleak expanse of Euston Road.

I had been awake when I heard the voice. No point pretending otherwise. And no one could have got into the house; not even, to be totally paranoid for a moment, Alice. She didn't have keys, and I hadn't told her about the black thread.

Either my mind was coming apart, or I'd been listening to a real ghost. Though when you thought about it, there wasn't much difference. The voice was part of me; it had said so; it knew everything about me. It knew about Alice; it knew about Filly. It was the embodiment-the disembodiment-of all my worst fears, an escaped nightmare, loose in the house.

You don't know what you might meet. The veiled woman on the gallery. I'd been awake then too.

When we first began writing, Alice had often said that her parents were watching over her, that they appeared to her in dreams, not just as memories but as actual beings. Every emotion, she thought, left some trace in the material world. Ghosts appeared wherever those traces were concentrated, but only certain people could perceive them, and only when they were alone and quiet.

Ghosts or hallucinations-did it make any difference what you called them? The whispering had certainly started in my head. It had been lurking there most of my life; ever since that hot January afternoon in Mawson when I first saw the photograph and Mother stopped talking about Staplefield. And now it had got out of my head and on to the gallery, and I had nearly died of terror, and there was absolutely no limit to what might happen, or what I might meet, if I went back to Ferrier's Close alone.

A police car went tearing west, no siren, red and blue lights flashing wildly.

So far the-manifestations-had been confined to the house, but if something truly monstrous appeared, how did I know it wouldn't cross the threshold? Or walk into this hotel room and send me running head-first through the window rather than meet it face to face?

And supposing Alice came with me to the house, would she hear what I heard, see what I saw? I might believe I was trying to save her from some nightmare creature when I was actually strangling her. All of my doubts and suspicions about Alice might be symptoms of incipient madness.

I remembered the story of the iron bedstead sailing across the empty dormitory, the appalling crash when it hit the wall. The image was still as vivid as if I'd been there myself. If a roomful of troubled adolescents could generate that much psychic energy, why couldn't one very troubled thirty-five-year-old man cause a planchette to move by itself: when he was somewhere else in the house, perhaps, upstairs in another room? I liked that even less than the idea of whispering voices escaping from my head.

How could I be sure Alice would ever be safe with me?

Filly killed us all, one by one. Hugh too. Filly killed Hugh too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet. Or had it said 'you too'?

The dead know everything. No: these were my own worst fears running wild, not the words of an omniscient ghost, and to prove it, maybe even to save my sanity, I would have to prove the voice wrong. Search the deaths in Family Records this morning for Hugh Montfort-as well as the searches I'd already planned for him. Renew my reader's ticket and search The Times on microfilm in the new British Library for any mention of Anne Hatherley or Hugh Montfort. Find out where lists of missing persons were kept. No more speculation.

Another police car hurtled past, heading towards King's Cross.

The police had searched the house; Miss Hamish had said so. I knew her letter almost by heart, but I got it out anyway, to check her exact wording. 'They found nothing amiss, and concluded that Anne had simply packed her things, locked up the house and left.'

I wondered if they had opened the padlocked door in the basement.

I stayed up until well after dawn writing to Alice, telling her as dispassionately as I could manage everything that had happened since my last message, and what I feared might be happening to my mind. Meeting at the house, I said at the end, would be a very bad idea; I would go anywhere she chose, but not Ferrier's Close. I lay down on the bed, not expecting to sleep until the alarm dragged me out of a black, dreamless void.

PASSING CORAM'S FIELDS PLAYGROUND, BREATHING DIESEL and cut grass and the dusty farmyard smell of the miniature zoo, I found myself wondering whether Alice would want to have children now that she was healed. Neither of us had ever raised the question. I felt certain I didn't, and probably shouldn't, but supposing she did… what would we tell them? 'Your grandmother? Oh, she murdered her sister; the police never caught her.' No: I would lie to them, as my mother had lied to me.

In fact the best thing I could do for everyone involved-for the living, at least-would be to walk down Doughty Street, which I was now approaching, to Gray's Inn and along to Bedford Row, and return the keys to Mr Grierstone's secretary. Because I still didn't know, for certain, that my mother had murdered Anne. And so long as I didn't discover anything more, I need never know. Already I could almost believe that the whispering had been a drunken nightmare. 'Miss Jessel' would fade from the sheet of butcher's paper on the library table. Tell Miss Hamish I had searched the house thoroughly and found nothing at all.

Only I would have to go back once more because Anne's diary was still on the library table. Along with the planchette and the messages and half a bottle of Braveheart. And a bit of a mess on the chesterfield.

I could whisk the butcher's paper off the table and crumple it without looking. Clean up, lock up, restore Anne's diary to its hiding-place, and take the keys straight back to the office. The shutters were open; the ghost would not walk in daylight. I hailed a cab, changed my mind as it pulled up, and told the driver to take me to the Family Records Centre instead. First set my mind at rest about Hugh Montfort. I realised, as we hurtled along Calthorpe Street, that I didn't know his middle name, and that it would have been better to start by searching The Times in the British Library for an engagement notice, but then if I didn't find one I'd have to come back here anyway. Besides, it wasn't a common name; and anyway why was I doing this search at all? At four in the morning it had seemed overwhelmingly urgent to prove the whispering voice wrong. Now it just seemed mad.

The doors were opening as I came up the front steps. A small eager crowd surged in ahead of me and dispersed among the registers, leaving me alone with Deaths 1945 to 1955. All I wanted was not to find anything.

Nothing for the second half of 1949. Or the first, second or third quarters of 1950. But in the register of deaths for Oct.-Dec. 1950, I found my own name.

Montfort, Gerard Hugh Infant District of Westminster

Filly killed us all, one by one. You too. She killed you too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet.

I filled out the form for Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, with the sensation of ordering my own death certificate. By express, £24 for a guaranteed twenty-four-hour turn-around; they might have it by late afternoon. Then I went over to Births, where I found him in the second quarter of 1950, also District of Westminster.

There was no entry in Marriages for either Phyllis May Hatherley or a Hugh Montfort. No Hugh Montfort in Deaths either; I searched both registers all the way through to the end of 1963, the year my mother married Graham John Freeman in Mawson.

Under her maiden name, it struck me as I was leaving the registry, prompting a sudden crystal-clear memory of my mothers drawn, anxious smile, already middle-aged in the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece in Mawson. And then of the picture I had found in the study, my amazingly youthful mother with an infant on her knee. Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant. Deceased.

From an internet café I wrote to Alice, telling her what I had just discovered, in the spirit of a castaway consigning a message to a bottle.

I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY IN HUMANITIES READING Room Two in the British Library searching The Times on microfilm, first for an engagement notice for Anne Hatherley and Hugh Montfort, which I didn't find, and then from 1 October 1950 for any mention of Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, Deceased. After twenty minutes of that, I realised I was wasting time: the death certificate would give me an exact date. I went back to 6 October 1949, the day of Iris Hatherley's death, and began working through the home news pages, looking for any small item-it would have to be small, as neither Hatherley nor Montfort appeared in Palmer's Index. When my shoulder began to ache, I went out onto the gallery and leaned over the sheer precipitous drop to the marble concourse far below, thinking how little it would matter if I slipped over the edge.

At 3.30 I rang the FRC; the certificates hadn't arrived and wouldn't until Monday morning. I decided to carry on for another hour-the mechanical concentration at least kept me from thinking about Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant-then have something to eat and go up to the house for the last time. There would still be plenty of daylight left.

Back at the microfilm reader, I remembered something from Miss Hamish's letter: Pitt the Elder-Edward Nichol Pitt of 18 Whetstone Park, Solicitor-had advertised repeatedly for news of Anne. Whom he had last seen on 26 October 1949. I might as well know exactly how his advertisement had read. Starting at the end of November, I began scrolling through the personal columns, day by day. And in the column for 16 December 1949 I found

Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Hugh Ross Montfort, late of 44 Endsleigh Gardens WC1, please communicate with Pitt & Co. Solicitors of 18 Whetstone Park Holborn.

The same advertisement appeared twice more, at fortnightly intervals. I went on through February and March, expecting any moment to see a parallel advertisement for Anne. I had worked up a steady rhythm by now, picking up the columns in fast forward, five days a minute, six minutes to the month. At the end of June I stopped to check Miss Hamish's letter. Mr Pitt had been anxious when she went to see him in February 1950. 'He alerted the police, and advertised repeatedly. Surely he wouldn't have waited another four months. I was working fast but carefully, checking each date to be sure I didn't miss any; I knew I wouldn't have missed even one advertisement. I went all the way through to December, but I didn't find one.

LIGHT FROM THE STAINED GLASS FLOWERS FELL LIKE splashes of blood across the drawing-room, spilling from chairs and sofas into the darker red of the carpet, around the fireplace, in great elongated streaks along the wall towards the dining-room. Ten to seven on yet another improbably perfect evening. I carried my bag of cleaning materials on through to the library and set to work.

Scrubbing at the stains beneath the chesterfield reminded me of childhood humiliations in Mawson, things that happened while you were asleep, but were still your fault. I felt very strange indeed: something akin to the disembodied sensation of severe jet lag, as if my physical and emotional selves had parted company altogether, but my mind seemed perfectly clear. At the moment-when not brooding on the disappearances of Anne and Hugh-it was simply refusing to accept that the whispering voice could have been anything other than a nightmare.

So far I had kept well clear of the planchette: from where I knelt I could just see the vertical stub of pencil, above the edge of the table. The sight induced a mental logjam: I know I didn't write those messages; it couldn't have moved by itself; the messages did appear; no one else could have written them., round and round, jumbled together with thoughts of Alice, and missing persons, and Staplefield, and Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, deceased in the borough of Westminster. My half-brother, you could say, except that I had only been born because he had died. I was his ghost; or he was mine, I couldn't quite decide.

I packed away the cleaning things and stood up, looking around the alcoves at the thousands of volumes I had scarcely begun to examine. When Miss 'Hamish died, Ferrier's Close would presumably go to some distant Hamish relative. The library would be sold and dispersed, the house bought by some commodities broker, or converted into luxury flats. Judging from the agents' windows along Hampstead High Street, it would fetch several million pounds as it stood.

THIS COULD HAVE BEEN MY INHERITANCE, SAID A SMALL REBELlious voice. I recalled my fantasy of taking tea with Miss Hamish on the terrace at Staplefield, its sweeping lawns and formal gardens ranged before us. Which had once been the view from here, I thought, staring at the undergrowth encroaching on the dry, desolate courtyard, the wreck of the pavilion beyond. I feel, young man, that you are the rightful heir to all this… She had actually said something like that, in her letter. Yes: 'I am an old woman, and must think about my own will as well as fulfilling my duty to the estate.'

I sat down at the table-as far as possible from the planchette-and re-read, yet again, her account of her visit to Pitt the Elder in February 1950. By then he had already placed three advertisements seeking news of Hugh. Anne had last been seen in Mr Pitt's office on 26 October 1949. How could Miss Hamish possibly not have known that Hugh Montfort had also disappeared, at almost exactly the same time? The disappearances must have been linked; the police would have been working on that assumption.

'Phyllis would never accept a penny from me,' Anne had said. Not in anger but very despondently'. As if she'd tried to persuade Phyllis, and failed. Extraordinarily generous, especially if she already knew that Phyllis was pregnant by Hugh. Which could well have been the reason for Hugh's disappearance: fleeing his responsibilities. Just as it could have been Phyllis who got Mr Pitt to place those advertisements; he was the family lawyer, after all. But again Miss Hamish would surely have known about it.

And if Anne thought Phyllis should have her share in spite of everything, why not will it to her anyway and let time decide? Leaving an entire estate to an outsider, even 'my dearest and most trusted friend Abigail Valerie Hamish' was a huge decision for a girl of twenty-one. Maybe Anne just couldn't bear to admit-even to herself-that she hadn't forgiven Phyllis.

Nothing about Miss Hamish's letter suggested confusion, or failing memory.

Except that she wasn't once mentioned in Anne's diary. And on Miss Hamish's own account, Anne had written just three short notes to her dearest and most trusted friend during those last crucial weeks of her life. Why hadn't she, at the very least, written to say, Dear Abby, I'm going to leave everything to you? The lawyer would certainly have asked. 'How do you know this young woman will accept your bequest? What is to happen if she doesn't? Who is to inherit if Abigail Hamish dies before you do?'

'My dearest and most trusted friend Abigail Valerie Hamish'. They had shared the same initials. Abigail Valerie Hamish. Anne Victoria Hatherley. That was how they'd met, of course. The alphabetically minded schoolmistress who believed in order in all things.

I was reading with a pencil in my hand, as I often did when concentrating. Now I saw that I had been doodling variations on the two names at the foot of Miss Hamish's page: AVH ANNE VICTORIA HATHERLEY ABIGAIL VALERIE HAMISH MISS A V HATHERLEY MISS A V HAMISH

The last set of letters rearranged themselves into

MISS HAVISHAM

I almost laughed. Great expectations, indeed. A two-million pound bequest, courtesy of Miss Hamish-Havisham? This message comes to you direct from your subconscious.

Like 'Miss Jessel'? And the whispering from the gallery?

That was a dream.

But how had it-the whispering voice in the dream-known about Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant? That had come as a complete, paralysing shock.

Coincidence. The register entry interpreted the dream, not the other way round.

You've seen the scratches in the cupboard. You know all about that, the voice had whispered. But I didn't. I glanced up at the gallery. Though it was still almost full daylight outside, shadows were gathering in the alcoves.

There was one other possibility. Apart from a choice between ghosts and hallucinations. Miss Havisham. Hamish. Ridiculous, of course. But at least rationally ridiculous, unlike escaped subconscious minds writing messages on butcher's paper.

Purely for argument's sake: she could have lied about the stroke. She had access to keys. She knew the house. She might have seen the black thread. And as the sole beneficiary of Anne Hatherley's will, she even had a motive for murder.

Ridiculous, nonetheless. Aside from everything else, she could have had Anne declared legally dead after seven years, taken possession of the estate, and either moved into Ferrier's Close or sold it.

Unless she was afraid the process might spark a fresh investigation into Anne's disappearance. Such as a more thorough search of the house and grounds.

Which Miss Hamish had kept unoccupied and overgrown for fifty years.

Ridiculous all the same, because if Miss Hamish had murdered Anne, she Would never have answered my advertisement. Let alone given me the keys to the house. Besides, Miss Hamish couldn't have answered my second question, or whispered those words from the gallery, because I hadn't told her about Alice. So not only ridiculous, but impossible.

Unless Miss Jessel and Miss Havisham had joined forces.

Alice is so beautiful, we all love her.

Terminal paranoia beckoning. Time to leave. I picked up Anne's diary, again with my eyes averted from the planchette at the other end of the table, and headed for the front stairs.

THOUGH SUNLIGHT WAS FILTERING IN THROUGH THE TREES above the stairwell windows, I could not help glancing over my shoulder every time a board creaked. I realised as I approached the second-floor landing that I couldn't even recall what I was doing here. But if I turned back now, I might lose my nerve altogether; and I still had to get the downstairs shutters closed and make my way out of the house by torchlight. Forcing myself not to tiptoe-or run-I moved swiftly across the landing and into Anne's room.

A patch of light fell across the floor. The closet was still open. I replaced the diary, slid the panel into place and closed the door firmly. As I did so, the cupboard above the bed swung open.

You've seen the scratches in the cupboard. But the floor of the empty cupboard was unmarked, and for a disorienting instant I thought I had simply imagined them. Then I remembered that the scratches were on my mother's side.

I had a sudden horrible vision of some monstrous creature concealed, scrabbling loose in the dark, dropping on to Anne's bed. But the side panel separating the two cupboards was entirely solid; so was the section of wall which formed the back of the cupboard in Phyllis's room. And the cupboard floor was firmly screwed to the frame below; I tried one of the screws with a small coin to make sure. The cavity below, directly between the two beds, didn't seem to be accessible from either side of the partition. There was no loose panelling, and certainly no door. Only a tarnished electrical socket, still connected to a lamp on the bedside table. The lamp, I noticed, had no switch of its own: to turn it on, you had to reach down to the power point.

I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal. What would Alice think of me if I didn't see this through? The question, which I had managed to suppress until now, propelled me along the corridor to my mother's room, which was much darker, because the overgrown window faced north.

Again I shone the torch on the deep gouges in the cupboard floor. Too straight for claw marks, surely: more as if something very heavy had been forced into the cupboard. I noticed, too, that the heads of the screws that secured the floor were burred.

It's only the wiring, I told myself, some long-ago electrician, making repairs. The bedside lamp and socket were identical to the ones next door, but there seemed to be a lot more cord. Crouching beside the bed, I drew out a dusty tangle. The cord from the socket ran to an ancient double adapter: from there, one lead went to the bedside lamp. The top of the light bulb was blackened; broken ends of filament glinted in the torch beam.

The other lead vanished through a hole in the panelling just below the frame of the headboard.

She's dead, of course, but you know all about that. I tried the coin on one of the screws in the cupboard floor and felt it give. Too fearful even to look over my shoulder, I removed a second screw, and then a third, tugged at the edge of the panel and the rest flew out as it came loose. Darkness and floating dust, and then, in the torch beam, an extraordinary piece of apparatus. A bulbous glass tube about a foot long, draped in cobwebs, appeared at first to be floating in a black void. Then I saw that it was suspended above a wooden base-plate by an arrangement of slender rods and clamps. The tube had nipple-like protrusions at both ends, and another emerging from one side, all three with fine silver rods running through them and soldered to what looked like electrodes, small concave sections of silvered metal. Insulated wires connected the tube to an imposing black metal cylinder mounted on the wooden base.

I had seen a picture of something very like this-and recently. Here, in the library downstairs, in the book about martyrs to radiation that looked as if it had been dropped in the bath. Just a glimpse as I'd flipped through the pages: the glass tube clamped vertically on a stand, the black cylinder on a bench nearby, presided over by two bearded Victorian gentlemen.

'Alfred's infernal machine.'

'I used it in a novella'…that was it, 'The Revenant': the glass tube Cordelia broke in the studio when it slid out of the green dress. The dress Imogen de Vere had worn in Henry St Clair's portrait.

I understood at last how my mother had murdered her sister without attracting the slightest suspicion. Viola, all unwittingly, had drawn up the plan for the perfect murder, and Phyllis had executed it ruthlessly. Anne had died without ever knowing who-or what-had killed her.

Three minutes later I was back in the library with Viola's letter in my hand, staring at a picture of the first X-ray photograph ever taken: the skeleton of a hand shrouded in ghostly flesh, the black band of a wedding ring stark against the fingerbone. The hand of Anna Rontgen, wife of Wilhelm Conrad von Rontgen, discoverer of Rontgen rays, as they were then called, taken in December 1895. The machine upstairs was called a fluoroscope; the vacuum tube that generated the rays had been named after its inventor, Sir William Crookes. Like several other distinguished Victorian scientists, Crookes had divided his energies between science and'séances, especially the'séances conducted by an attractive young medium named Florence Cook.

In the spring of 1896, thousands of people had queued at exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe to place their hands, even their heads, in primitive X-ray machines and see the skull beneath the skin. Thousands of fluoroscopes had been sold in that first year: to physicians, engineers, prospectors, amateur scientists and cranks of all persuasions. One of them must have been Alfred Hatherley.

I shall never forget that day at the Crystal Palace: I think of it whenever I read 'The Relic'. It destroyed the illusion of immortality, the feeling of infinite time that one enjoys when young. Alfred was obsessed-he had to have one. But it seemed to me pure evil, a thing of darkness.

Viola had been right: the machines were appallingly dangerous. A Viennese doctor subjected his first patient, a five-year-old girl, to 32 hours of radiation in an effort to remove a mole from her back. All her hair fell out; her back burned and blistered horribly. Thomas Edison's assistant Clarence Dally was the first to die, in hideous agony, at the age of thirty-nine, with both arms amputated in a vain attempt to stop the cancer from spreading. An early radiologist described the pain of X-ray burns as 'worse than the torments of hell'.

And this was what my mother had knowingly inflicted on Anne. There was no question of concealment any more. I would have to tell-I wanted to tell-not Miss Hamish, the truth was too appalling-but the police. Fifty years too late, but they could close the file.

As I moved around the table to replace the book on the shelf, the planchette caught my eye. I had meant to scoop up the sheet of butcher's paper and crumple it without looking: that way I would never be certain that I hadn't dreamed the messages. But the idea now seemed childish; I knew perfectly well that 'Miss Jessel' would still be there.

As indeed it was, but the planchette had moved on again. From the tail of the final T, a faint pencil line meandered back towards the left-hand edge of the sheet, then downward in a sudden decisive swoop into thin, spiderish script: