Date: 2015-12-10 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Mystery; Ghosts; Ghost Stories
Publisher: Bloomsbury Reader
Rights: All rights reserved

An Absence of Natural Light

F.G. Cottam

Contents

One

Two

Three

A Note on the Author

One

She saw him straight away. He was seated in the far corner of the coffee shop wearing a charcoal suit and a grey flannel shirt open at the collar. She assumed from the size of the cup that he was drinking a flat white. His attention was focused on a small titanium-clad laptop next to it.

People at adjacent tables were self-consciously ignoring him, except for a couple of kids too young for tact who were just staring at him open-mouthed. He was more usually pictured in daylight, in his club colours or in the strip of the national team. It was slightly odd too to see him in repose because, in life, Tom Harper had always seemed to her to be in vibrant motion. But the dark hair that splayed to his shoulders and the photogenic cheekbones were familiar from the ads for a pricey brand of cologne and the recent poster campaign for Jaguar’s sportiest range of cars. He was unmistakably him.

He sensed her approach and stood to greet her, a courtesy that came as a slight surprise. He smiled and held out his hand.

‘Rebecca Green,’ she said, ‘Carter, Procter and Green.’

He said his name as they shook hands and she was surprised for the second time in not much more than a second. Celebrated footballers weren’t famed for making eye-contact. The three or four she’d encountered professionally had seemed almost desperate to avoid it. Harper’s eyes, by contrast, held hers with a look that seemed friendly and even curious. Maybe it was a northern thing.

‘It’s Tom,’ he said.

‘Then it’s Rebecca.’

‘I’d bet no one calls you Becky.’

‘Then you wouldn’t lose your money.’

‘Would you like something to drink?’

‘An Americano, please.’ She shrugged her bag off her shoulder and pulled out the chair facing his, aware that people were openly staring now, the grown-ups as well as the kids. He slid past her and went to order her drink and the heads of his uninvited audience shifted, slack-mouthed. He seemed unaware of them. He moved in the spaces between tables on his way to the counter with a liquid grace. Rebecca was only aware of this, she conceded to herself, because like everyone else, she had turned to watch him too.

‘I thought you were Merseyside based,’ she said, when he’d delivered her coffee and sat back down.

‘My career was Merseyside based.’

‘Transfer?’ She frowned. She didn’t pay particular attention to sports stories but given his profile, thought she’d have heard something.

He sipped coffee and shook his head. ‘Knee, medical advice. I’d jeopardize my health permanently if I ever played again. So it’s over.’

‘God, just like that? I’m so sorry.’

‘I’m philosophical. Every pro lives with the risk. In any moment of any game you could push off awkwardly and your cruciate or Achilles could go.’

It was slightly contradictory, meeting someone this famous for the first time. His voice and his face were so familiar and yet he was a total stranger to her. She recognized characteristics in the man opposite her without knowing him at all. She smiled. She said, ‘I’m no authority on the game, but you’re not exactly noted for doing things awkwardly.’

He shrugged. ‘Or you could fail to ride a bad tackle. You only need do it once.’

‘Is that what happened to you?’

‘Mine’s more mundane, just years of wear and tear. Like I said, I’m philosophical. I’m twenty-eight, Rebecca. It’s been a good career.’

‘It’s been a stellar career.’

He grinned at that. ‘Flattery’s not necessary. I’m pretty much sold on the property unless the interior’s a complete disaster.’

‘It was fully renovated two years ago and the spec’s pretty high.’ She gulped down the last of her drink. ‘But never take an estate agent’s word for anything, Tom. Come and have a look for yourself.’

She’d read up on him in the two hours between his cold call to their office at noon and the appointment they’d agreed for 2pm. She knew that he’d been married young to a girl he’d met at school. Her maiden name had been Melody James. Rebecca had thought Melody was the perfect name for a footballer’s wife. It had that pretty, vacuous quality she thought its owner would more than likely possess. But her impression now, driving through the Fulham rain to the property Harper wanted to view, was that the man in her passenger seat didn’t quite fit the stereotype she’d expected.

The Harpers had no children, which was unusual in the footballing world. They almost all had them, and they had them young. That slightly made sense of Tom thinking about buying a fashionable address in a central location rather than a spacious house somewhere more secluded. Maybe the Harpers hankered after the bright lights of the big city. Maybe he’d just found a way to occupy an empty afternoon and was wasting her time. She didn’t think he was, though. He’d already said he was sold on the property and, from what she’d read earlier, he could certainly afford it.

‘Tell me about the place,’ he said.

She knew the history because she was a Green employed by Carter, Proctor and Green and her father, Michael Green, who had worked his way into his partnership role before retirement, had schooled her in the essentials of selling high-end properties. Provenance is important, he’d told her very early on in her own career; buyers on the point of parting with substantial sums of cash care about a building’s pedigree.

Absalom Court wasn’t particularly high-end by the firm or by the market’s current standards but she knew about the block’s history because she had respected her dad and because it mattered to Rebecca to be good at her job.

Built to a pretty lavish standard and with the period’s signature Deco flourishes in the early 1930s, she told Tom. Home in that decade to a celebrated actress and a front-bench MP and a popular big band leader, among other well-heeled residents. Bomb damaged in the latter stages of the Blitz, which seemed to set off a long period of decline until, by the late 1950s, it had become an address of necessity as much as choice for some of the area’s more down-at-heel artistic types; people with bohemian pretensions, but not a lot in the way of rent money.

In this period the whole block had come to be owned by one of the Rackman-type landlords the Government legislated against in the early 1960s. He sold the freehold and it became student accommodation. Then in the early Eighties it was bought by a developer who tried to find the capital to refurbish and restore the property to something approaching its original character. But it remained student accommodation until the housing boom of the late 1990s, when it was bought by a venture capital fund as part of a west London-based development portfolio. Finally refurbished two years ago when the last of the tenancies they’d inherited had lapsed and they had vacant possession.

‘There are ten flats in all,’ she said, fishing for the keys in her bag as they walked back along the side of the building. ‘Each flat has two bedrooms and is built on three floors, two above ground and a substantial basement area.’ She saw the For Sale sign shudder in the rain as they reached the corner and then the building’s facade, its post bracketed against the block’s low exterior wall. ‘How did you find this place?’

‘On the internet,’ Tom said. Despite the rain, despite the fact that he was wearing no coat, he had stopped walking. He was holding his little laptop in his right hand. Its metal casing glimmered dully, streaked now with rain. ‘Something happened here. What happened?’

‘Happened in what way?’

‘Affluent residents might have fled the bombs in the war, Rebecca, but they would have come back after it ended. Why did they leave permanently, the actress and the band-leader and the rest? Why did they sell up? Was there a murder or something?’

Rebecca sucked her teeth. There was no point concealing the building’s past. Her potential buyer had every right to know. She said, ‘In 1944, one of the residents of Absalom Court was exposed as a German spy and arrested and interned for the duration. In 1947, he was tried and hanged. I think it attached a bit of a stigma until people forgot.’

‘Did he live at number 7?’

‘That’s the number you wore on your shirt,’ she said. ‘Are you superstitious?’

‘Not by the medieval standards of most of my former team-mates, I’m not. With me it’s just ladders and magpies. And the number thirteen, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Did he?’

‘No. He lived at number 2. And he died in prison, at Wormwood Scrubs.’

Tom nodded.

‘You don’t sound like a typical footballer.’ They’d reached the front entrance, a pillared and bronzed portico immaculately restored, the high double door studded with green lozenges of ornamental glass.

‘You want me to use all that “end of the day” phraseology?’

‘I’d just sort of expected it.’

He grinned. ‘Well I won’t disappoint you.’ He paused. Then, ‘At the end of the day,’ he said, ‘it’s 11.59.’

Rebecca laughed; it sounded louder than she’d expected it to in the gloom and the rain. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you inside.’

There was nothing to see, really. The ceilings were high, the windows large enough to allow a generous daub of the day’s exterior grayness to enter rooms flawlessly plastered and floored with oiled teak except for the bathrooms and kitchen, where they trod on black, white-veined marble. It was quiet thanks to double-glazing and the block being back off the road and the fact that Laburnum Crescent was exactly that, a gentle and genteel semi-circle that wasn’t really a route to anywhere.

‘I’ll take it,’ he said.

‘Just like that?’

‘Yes, unless you tell me Lars Ulrich lives next door.’

‘No heavy metal neighbours to speak of,’ she said. ‘Everyone here’s very quiet and the walls are extremely thick.’

‘Then I’ll take it.’

‘Won’t Mrs Harper want a say?’

‘Mrs Harper has just had a decisive say in ending our marriage. I was served the papers a fortnight ago. I opened them lying in a private bed at a clinic in Colorado that specializes in sports injuries. I’d been told an hour earlier that I’d never play football seriously again.’

‘Quite the double-whammy,’ Rebecca said.

‘Not really,’ Tom said. ‘Neither piece of news was a complete shock.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you what went wrong?’

‘I told you, wear and tear.’

‘I meant with you and Melody.’

He was looking directly at her. His eyes weren’t completely gray. There was a faint green lustre to them that film didn’t pick up, so subtle it was only detectable in life. She thought in sunlight his eyes would be quite mesmerizing. Tom Harper didn’t look to her very worn and torn at all.

‘You’re probably thinking pole-dancer,’ he said.

‘I’m thinking nothing of the sort. I’ve already said you don’t come across as typical of the breed.’

‘I was no longer the person she fell in love with, is the truth. I was on the way to becoming someone she’d never have fallen for. Probably I’d already got there. When I got the papers, the penny dropped that only the past had been keeping us together.’

‘And the future was going to be different?’

‘Inevitably, yes, because of the injury.’

Rebecca was silent.

‘And now I’m buying this flat. I’m going to be living here.’

‘I’m sure you’ve bought lots of expensive things.’

He looked around. He glanced down at the laptop he was still holding. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like. You get given a lot of stuff and paid to use more stuff through endorsement deals done by your agent. I’ve never bought a car or a suit or a wristwatch. I’ve never even taxed or insured myself to drive a car. The club employs people who take care of that sort of thing. They want you focused solely on your football, so it makes sense to them. They book your holidays because they want you in safe destinations with no risk of injury or scandal.’

‘No skiing, I‘ve heard.’

He shook his head and smiled. ‘No, Premiership footballers aren’t allowed to ski. But it goes deeper than that. The club found me my first digs. They sorted my bank account and life-insurance and driving lessons. Then they moved Melody and me into a nice little house and then when I started playing regularly for the first team and committed to a five-year contract, they arranged the purchase of the big house I called home until a fortnight ago. There’s loads of grown-up, take-responsibility stuff I’ve just never done.’

‘Grown-up, take-responsibility stuff can be pretty boring,’ Rebecca said.

‘Yeah, but it’s still a novelty to me. Buying this place is just the beginning.’

‘Starting a new life?’

‘More a case of giving the only one I’ve got a bit more depth.’

‘Will you need help arranging a mortgage? There are independent financial advisers we can recommend, totally impartially.’

He grinned at that. ‘I’m what I think they call a cash buyer,’ he said.

He was as good as his word. The sale went through smoothly. She didn’t hear anything from Tom Harper for three weeks after completion and didn’t realistically expect to ever again when, on a Thursday afternoon, he called her on her mobile. She’d forgotten that she’d given him her card as she’d dropped him off that rainy afternoon near Esher, where he’d been staying as a guest of one of his old international team-mates while he house-hunted in London.

She’d insisted on driving him there rather than have him endure a journey by taxi or train. She’d never made an easier sale and was in a buoyant mood and there was the surprising fact too that she’d found herself enjoying his company.

‘Why don’t you have a car?’

‘Melody wants the Jag and the Mercedes. I’ve no interest in contesting.’

Rebecca nodded, thinking about the poster campaign he’d featured in. ‘Will Jaguar give you another one?’

‘Now I’m on the scrap-heap?’

‘I think you’re being a bit harsh on yourself.’

‘I’m just being realistic. At best I’m damaged goods.’

‘I hope it works out for you Tom, I really do.’

‘Thanks. I’ll give you a call in a few weeks, once domestic bliss has had a chance to set in, let you know how it’s all going.’

She’d laughed at that and not really imagined that he would, until he did.

‘I’d like to ask you out for a drink, maybe for a meal if you could tolerate my company for longer than it takes to down a glass of wine.’

‘How do you know I’m single?’

‘I know you’re not married, Rebecca. If you were you’d wear the ring to prevent the hassle someone who looks like you is bound to get from clients like me.’

She said, ‘I’ve never met another client quite like you.’

‘Is that a good or a bad thing?’

‘Stop fishing.’

‘I’ve only spoken face-to-face to about five people since I moved here and four of them were crewing a furniture van.’

‘I’ll put you on hold,’ she said, ‘while I get my violin.’

‘I really, really like the flat. I feel like I’m due a celebration and for obvious reasons, I’d like to celebrate with you.’

‘If I say no?’

There was a pause. Then he said, ‘I’ve still got the number of the bloke who switched on the gas supply, I suppose. He’s bound to look more fetching outside of his overalls. Plus, he follows the club I played for.’

‘You’re very funny.’

‘Except I didn’t call just to amuse you.’

‘I’m not a one-night stand, Tom.’

He was silent on the end of the line. She thought he might have broken the connection and endured an unexpected surge of disappointment. Then he said, ‘Melody was the first woman I shared a bed with and I never entertained a single unfaithful thought throughout our marriage.’

‘I believe that, Tom. But now you’re thinking as a single man.’

He was silent again. Then he said, ‘Yes, Rebecca, I am.’

‘I’m free on Saturday,’ she said.

‘A drink?’

‘We’ll start with a drink. I’m actually pretty confident I like you enough for dinner.’

‘Three whole courses?’

‘That might be pushing your luck.’

They went to a pizza restaurant she knew at Gabriel’s Wharf on the South Bank. It wasn’t far from her own flat on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge. She chose it because it wasn’t The Ivy or the Chiltern Firehouse where he would have spent eight or ten times more. Other diners wouldn’t have approached him for selfies at either of those places because they were either way too cool or because they were as famous in their own way as Tom Harper was. But he was only approached a couple of times in the pizzeria and he was gracious about it. He was a gracious man, unless he just wanted his dinner guest to think he was.

That was an uncharitable thought. Rebecca hadn’t always been so wary. She was wary now because of her past mistakes in thinking the best of men who hadn’t in the end turned out to be very good, or nice, or honourable. She felt justified in being cautious with someone as good-looking and successful as the man who’d invited her out. He was absurdly eligible. She thought him almost dangerously attractive. But she needed to be careful not to try to make him pay for her past misjudgments when he’d done nothing at all to hurt her. It was tricky. She thought she’d almost blown it over the phone.

They had been served their puddings, were on the cheese and biscuits and coffee, technically their fourth course, when he mentioned the music.

‘You know that joke I made about Lars Ulrich?’

‘He isn’t in London, Tom. Honestly he’s not. He went from Denmark on a sports scholarship to America as a student. He was a tennis prodigy and basically he formed a band and just stayed. That was in Southern California. He lives in New York now.’

Tom was staring at her. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what a mine of unexpected information you are.’

‘It’s my guilty secret,’ she said. ‘I like Metallica.’ She pointed at her iPhone on the table between them. ‘Lars is drumming on about half the tunes on my playlist.’

Tom looked at the phone. He said, ‘Anyway, you’re right, it isn’t him.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘The music I’ve been hearing at night. It’s very faint and it’s not every night and it sounds like it’s coming from downstairs.’

‘Well it no doubt would be if you’re hearing it in bed.’

‘No. I hear it sort of drifting up, usually when I’m in the sitting room. Like I said, it’s very faint, almost like an echo more than an actual tune. It’s jazz, sort of mournful, a trumpet as the lead. It must be coming from a neighbour’s basement.’

Rebecca frowned. ‘I wasn’t lying to you when I said those walls are very thick.’

‘I’m sure you weren’t. In fact I know you weren’t, from when I had the survey done. The surveyor kept commenting on the building spec. And it’s faint like I said, barely audible. I kind of wish I could place it, but I’m no authority on jazz.’ He took a sip of his beer and blinked and looked at her brightly and said, ‘That’s me all over, just an ex-pro player beating on the doors of the knacker’s yard, ignorant as they come, knowing bugger-all about anything except kicking a ball, which I can no longer do.’

‘What is it you’d like to know more about?’

He was still looking at her. He looked out of the window to his right, to the glittering night vista of the river, with its black water and reflected, floating shimmers of Embankment light. He turned back to her. ‘Everything, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘All of it.’

He walked her home along the river. Thirty seconds into their progress she hooked her arm through his and leant into him. It was late by now and dark but there was enough light from the orbs atop the ornamental lampposts for them to see and be seen. People approached them going the other way, some of them double-taking as they recognized the man she was with. Of course they did; he’d led his country as well as his club and had played all over the world. Millions had seen him from the tiered seats of stadiums. Hundreds of millions had watched him on their TV screens.

The run of elaborate lights to their left were known as the dolphin lampposts. This was a misnomer because the fish coiled around their cast iron bases were apparently modeled on sturgeon. They didn’t look like sturgeon to Rebecca. They looked mythic, she thought, wondering whether any of this was known to Tom and deciding probably none of it was. Did it matter? It did, only, though, because knowledge mattered so much to him.

‘Do you know what an autodidact is?’

‘No. I don’t. I’m guessing it might be something to do with sleepwalking.’

‘That’s a somnambulist.’

‘Show-off.’

‘An autodidact is someone who educates themselves by reading the contents of a library alphabetically. They learn everything, just by ploughing indiscriminately through the whole bloody lot.’

‘Good word.’

‘It’s what I imagine you doing, at night, in that sitting room of yours, as the phantom jazz creeps up the stairs.’

He stopped, obviously offended. She wondered if the wine had loosened her tongue further than it would have gone completely sober. He shrugged himself free of her and she blinked and was about to mouth an apology when he turned to face her fully and lifted his hands and cupped her head in the cradle of his fingers, his thumbs light against her cheeks. And pulled her to him and kissed her, properly.

‘There,’ he said when the kiss eventually broke.

‘Why did you do that? Was it to shut me up?’

‘Because I wanted to, because I’ve wanted to since you walked into Costa that afternoon three weeks ago with your hair all damp from the rain and I saw you for the first time.’

He kissed her again. And they kissed a third time at her front door before she closed it and he turned for his virtuous journey home, still able to taste her, wishing the sensation would last longer than he knew it would.

Tom heard the music again that night. He got to the flat only after midnight. He’d walked back along the Embankment and over Lambeth Bridge and hailed a cab on Horseferry Road. Jaguar had said they would give him another car, which had been good for his ego but had done nothing much to affect his daily routine. After three weeks in London, he’d concluded you drove in the centre of the city only if there was absolutely no alternative.

He got in tired. He felt excited – no, elated – about what had happened with Rebecca. He could still smell her perfume on his fingertips. In Colorado he’d been about as convinced that there was life after football as he thought a committed atheist might be about life after death. He’d wanted something new and different. He’d just doubted he was really equipped for it. It had seemed daunting, unimaginable, really. Then this had gone and happened.

The music droned, almost imperceptibly, on the edge of his hearing, but he thought it had got fractionally louder and more solid than the first time he’d become aware of it. Then it might almost have been imagined; now it was undeniably there. He thought he recognized it, probably from a car or coffee commercial using the soundtrack to give what it was selling an aura of sophistication. It was naggingly familiar. Maybe he had heard it in a posh boutique with Melody on one of those endless weekday afternoons as she’d tried on a series of expensive outfits in what he was thinking of increasingly as his old life.

He just didn’t know. Jazz was unexplored territory. He’d been hurt by Rebecca’s earlier autodidact line because he had actually done a bit of that recently. The problem was that there weren’t just gaps to fill in his knowledge and experience of the wider world. There were chasms to try to bridge securely and then attempt to cross.

It was definitely louder. His beatnik neighbour must have cranked up the volume on his stereo. It had to be one of those proper, old-fashioned stereo systems too. The wattage on the speakers you plugged an iPhone into was too feeble to fire the sound through walls like these. Except that it sounded, actually, as though it was coming not from next door on either side of him, but from his own basement. The tune was leaking through the doorframe at the top of the basement staircase. He looked across to where that hung. The sound was brassy and mournful and insistent. With a surprised swallow of trepidation, Tom knew that he was going to have a look.

The stairs on the other side of the door were stone and led straight down. The door had to be pulled rather than pushed open, he supposed as a safety precaution. You were forced to take a step back to make room for it so the stairs on the other side couldn’t come as a nasty surprise. He naturally expected the music to become louder and gain in clarity when he opened the door and shifted the obstruction, but it didn’t. It actually seemed to fade, in a way that seemed calculated and therefore slightly menacing.

It’s late, he thought, I’m tired. And the tune had become barely audible again. He switched on the stairway lights, industrial in character, ovals of frosted glass bracketed with loops of blue painted metal. They looked the business, those lights, when he switched them on; fit for a power station or a submarine, except that they didn’t actually do their principal job of providing much light.

He hadn’t known what an autodidact was. He hadn’t known what somnambulism was either. But there was another word on the tip of his tongue he thought would describe the music he could no longer hear but had heard recently enough to have a clear memory of. He began to descend the steps. The word was syncopation. It described the way jazz instruments blended to improvise a tune. The music he had heard had been syncopated. He thought it was probably an old recording, something taped from a live session done in a studio, dingy with cigarette smoke, a lifetime ago.

He had no sense there was anyone at all in the basement. It was dark beyond the stairs but he couldn’t hear a sound down there now. He’d had the upper rooms furnished, but had done nothing yet with this substantial, stone-flagged space. The darkness was still and quiet and the sense of menace he’d felt on the other side of the basement door had receded. He reached for the switch at the bottom of the steps and the lights came on, brightly: pearly glass orbs he’d been told had been designed to provide light without casting shadows.

Rebecca had told him that. Rebecca, whose perfume clung to his fingers now, had told him that when he’d first toured the flat a little more than three weeks ago.

Something caught his eye, on the floor by the far wall, eighty feet away from where he stood. It was a single sheet of paper. It hadn’t fluttered, because there was no breeze. The air was confined by four high walls and their heavy ceiling and was completely still. He’d seen it, because in common with most world-class ball players, Tom Harper’s eyesight was almost preternaturally good. He’d seen it also because it didn’t belong there. He hadn’t been down there since Rebecca had shown him the basement. If the sheet of paper had been there then, he’d have noticed it. They both would.

He walked across the room, wincing from a twinge in his right knee inflicted by all the walking he’d done, in the leather-soled shoes with no give, that he’d worn on the date. He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to one in the morning. And it was completely silent now except for the quiet clack of his shoe leather and the steady sound of his breathing. His heart and lungs still had him down as an athlete. His breathing was calm and deep but the pace of his pulse, usually funereally slow, was fast enough for him to feel it jump.

He squatted down, feeling his knee again, picked up the piece of paper and stood and studied it. It was white and plain, as if torn from an A4 notebook, and a sleeping cat had been smudgily sketched on it in what Tom assumed to be charcoal. He’d been quite good at art at school. But he hadn’t been as good as whoever had sketched the cat, catching its slumber and character in a few deft, confident strokes. Whoever had done the drawing hadn’t signed it. So it remained anonymous.

He took the sketch upstairs with him and put it on the large desk he’d bought from John Lewis, on which perched his little laptop and at which he’d started to sit recently to do his autodidact thing. He yawned. He was slightly baffled but not scared, which he now knew for certain he had been earlier. His pulse was slowing. The night had provided him with a range of unexpected emotions. He’d go to bed, but before he did so, he went to find the key, helpfully labeled on a hook in the kitchen’s utility cupboard, and made sure to lock the basement door.

‘There are no keys other than the set and spare set you were given, Tom. The building has no concierge. We certainly didn’t retain a set. The drawing must have been there all along and we must simply have missed it.’

‘How many people did you show the flat to before me?’

‘I showed around three prospective buyers. It’s a prestigious address and in retrospect it was quite competitively priced. It wasn’t on the market for very long.’

‘You’d have seen the drawing.’

‘Except I didn’t, just like I never heard any music. What did you do when you left me last night?’

‘Walked, then listened to a cabbie put me to rights all the way from Horseferry Road to Laburnum Crescent on why we didn’t win the title last season. Then I paid him, got inside, heard the music, found the picture and went to bed.’

‘And now the picture’s gone?’

‘Yes, it’s gone.’

Rebecca was silent for a moment. She said, ‘Did you go for another drink, after seeing me home?’

‘No. And there’s something else. I’ve remembered where I’d heard the music, why it sounded familiar. It was the soundtrack to a car ad on the telly a couple of years ago. That one filmed in Paris at night? All moody café exteriors and gleaming cobblestones?’

‘Miles Davis,’ she said, ‘“So What,” from the album Kind of Blue.’

‘Boody hell, Rebecca. Is there nothing you don’t know?’

‘Not much, Tom. Blame a history degree and the curse of a good memory.’

‘Why would an estate agent do a history degree?’

‘It was the other way around, and you’re not qualified to offer careers advice.’

‘When was Kind of Blue recorded? When did it come out?’

‘I’m stronger on Metallica than Miles, to be honest. I think maybe the early 1960s. It was a long time ago, that’s for sure.’

Tom was quiet.

‘Are you still there?’

‘Just wondering who was living here then, listening to Miles Davis, sketching their sleeping cat.’

‘That’s a creepy thought.’

He looked around. He was barefoot on the deep pile of one of the rugs he’d had strewn over the polished wood. His skin was still glowing from the needling heat of the power shower in the wet room upstairs. His hair was damp against the nape of his neck. He could smell the complex fragrance of the cologne he was paid to wear, freshly dabbed on; top-notes of bergamot, whatever the fuck bergamot was. Sunlight bathed most of the room, but the locked door to the basement, when he looked across, was cast in deep shadow. In a way it was easy to imagine it as the entrance to another world entirely. He wondered for a moment whose world it had been, whose world in some curious, dimly remembered way it still remained.

‘Do you want to see me again?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Short notice, but how about Sunday lunch?’

‘I’m tied up today, Tom. I could meet you tomorrow evening?’

‘Perfect,’ he said. He broke the connection. Perfect it wasn’t, because he wanted to see her today. He was used to getting his own way: the legacy of what he’d accomplished and who, until very recently, he’d been. Maybe this new life would mean more compromises. In fact, he was certain it would. He’d need to develop the maturity to accept his future disappointments graciously. If he didn’t, no woman of Rebecca’s quality would be likely to stick around.

The following evening Rebecca came to Absalom Court for dinner. One of the few non-footballing accomplishments of which Tom Harper was confident was his ability to cook. Melody had insisted on Sabatier knives, Cuisinart cookware, granite worktops, a walk-in fridge and substantial physical all-round dimensions. That was about entitlement, though. To her, good food was what restaurants were for. But training every day gave Tom a ravenous appetite and proper nutrition prolonged footballing careers. So he learned how to cook just out of his teens and discovered he really enjoyed it.

The food was a delightful surprise, the décor, Rebecca thought, a relief. She’d once heard the interior of a top footballer’s house described as looking as though the owner had been given a million pounds to spend at Woolworths. Woolworths was history, but she’d seen some of the customized cars Premiership stars drove in pictures on gossip pages and they made it glaringly obvious that, in most cases, their bad taste knew no bounds.

They ate in the kitchen, at the dining table in the area opposite the business end of the room with its range and rotisserie and hung row of gleaming copper pans. He’d turned the lighting down and it was dark beyond the kitchen window and there was no hint of traffic noise to suggest where they were. Being in his company – alone in his company – was still slightly surreal, but she was getting used to it. He was in jeans and a polo shirt and she was glad she’d come casually attired. They were listening to a duets compilation by a singer Rebecca hadn’t heard of named Kate Rusby. Kate was singing the song playing just then with Paul Weller. Tom had told her he liked folk music, plugging the player in.

‘You’re at home in a kitchen,’ Rebecca said, after he’d served up and opened the bottle of wine she’d bought and they’d sat down to eat.

‘I’m more at home in this one than in the one we had in Cheshire,’ he said. ‘That’s the size of a tennis court. This is practical. What’s that word for when things you need to manipulate are built on a human scale?’

‘Ergonomic.’

He smiled and sipped from his glass. She’d bought a bottle of Blanc de Blanc. Melody, she thought; Harmony, Chardonnay. It wasn’t quite free-association, they were the sort of names Rebecca associated with footballers’ wives.

‘There you go again’ he said, ‘knowing everything.’

And she felt for a moment vindictive, snobbish. He’d taken her coat in the sitting room and gone to hang it up and she’d noticed the books in the bookcase and on his impressively large desk, all of them spanking new, the volumes on the desk open, their leather Waterstones bookmarks brightly signalling where he’d got to in the flare of brightness from a studious-looking Anglepoise lamp.

‘This is absolutely delicious,’ she said, which was true as well as a change of subject. He’d concocted a Chinese dish unappetizingly described as chicken rice. The result looked mundane served up but the preparation was complex and the flavour nothing short of wonderful. He’d done a huge dish of it, which was just as well because she knew she’d be asking for seconds when she’d devoured what was on her plate.

‘Heard any more jam sessions from those dead jazz musicians in your basement?’

He shook his head. ‘They’re not all dead,’ he said. ‘I did a bit of research. Kind of Blue was recorded in New York in 1959. The drummer from the sessions is still alive, though Miles himself is long gone. That’s the first track, “So What,” the one I heard. I’m embarrassed to say it’s incredibly famous.’

‘Only if you’re into jazz,’ she said. ‘It’s a specialist subject.’ She nodded at the sound bar on the work-surface parallel to their table. ‘I’m sure you know more than most people do about folk music.’

‘I probably do. But Kind of Blue was an immediate hit with both the public and the critics. Modal jazz, apparently, a departure from bebop for Miles and the band he put together for the sessions. All improvised, which is astonishing when you think it’s possibly the best-loved jazz album ever made.’

Rebecca just ate, listening. She’d known all this, but didn’t say that. After all she hadn’t known Kate Rusby from Ruby Tuesday before sitting down tonight.

‘So why did you do this research?’

‘I wanted to know when that album was likely to have been played down there, in the basement of what’s now this flat.’

‘You’ve just said it’s possibly the best-loved jazz album ever made. That makes it timeless.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s of its time. That’s the point, I think. The vinyl would have had to be pressed and put in its sleeve and then shipped across the Atlantic and only specialist record shops in London and maybe Liverpool and Bristol, the port cities, would have stocked it. Its period would have been the early 1960s. And it would have been an import and so quite exotic as a choice back then. If there’s a point being made in my hearing it, that’s the point being made.’

Rebecca swallowed what she was chewing. She placed her knife and fork to either side of her plate. She picked up her glass and sipped wine, sips rather than gulps, but she’d almost emptied her glass by the time she put it down again and spoke. She said, ‘Do you honestly think you’re being haunted?’

He held her eyes with his. This was no longer a novelty to her. It was characteristic of his openness and honesty and it made her realize, as the wine swam into her system, just how much she didn’t want him hurt any more than he’d already recently been.

‘The truthful answer is that I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it much more likely that a former team-mate is playing a practical joke on you?’

‘They’re not here, though, they’re back in the North. I can think of a couple of practical jokers in the squad, but no one who’d take this much trouble.’

‘We should go down there when we’ve finished eating, take a look.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

‘I’m staying with you tonight, Tom.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that, too.’

They got up straight away by unspoken common consent because eating was only pleasurable when there wasn’t a hollow of anxiety ballooning in your stomach. That was how Tom felt as he went to fetch the key, and the expression on her face told him that was how Rebecca felt too. They walked from the kitchen to the sitting room in silence. The key made a lot of noise as its teeth bit into the ratchets of the old mortis lock mechanism, the tumbling rasps reverberating off the hard surfaces of the walls.

At the bottom of the stone steps, he switched on the pearly globes to reveal a pristine space in a silence so complete it struck him as profound. There was no ambient noise from the street, no muffled soundtrack of neighbouring lives through the sturdy walls, no thunder of aircraft engines on their commercial flight-paths juddering down from the skies above.

He stole a sideways look at Rebecca, who was searching the floor with her own eyes, but seeing nothing other than stone because there was nothing else to see. She frowned and sniffed.

He asked her, ‘Can you smell something?’

‘My imagination,’ she said, shaking her head.

Tom thought any phantom scent would have to be quite strong to register, competing with the garlic and hot chillies and pungent spices of the meal they’d just eaten. And the beer he’d drunk with it, of course. And the wine she’d drunk. He breathed in slowly through his nostrils nevertheless and savoured the air, but it smelled completely innocent to him.

Rebecca looked at him and he returned the look, and she smiled and he saw the tension leave her shoulders and an anxious vertical line fade to nothing on her forehead. She lifted her arms and placed a hand on each of his shoulders and he noticed, for the first time, that she was only an inch or so shorter than he was. Heels might come into the equation, he thought. But then he forgot about the equation altogether, because she leaned forward and kissed him.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she murmured. ‘Frankly, Tom, we’ve got far better things to do.’

They spent quite some time doing those better things, only making it to his bedroom spent and ready for sleep after midnight. Rebecca climbed naked between ivory cotton sheets remembering that she’d speculated on black satin aboard a king-sized four-poster with a faux imperial crest above the headboard. The thought made her snort a stifled laugh and, drowsing beside her, he heard it.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Liar.’

‘If you knew everything about me you’d get bored very quickly.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ He yawned. ‘Does everyone call you Rebecca?’

After a pause, she said, ‘Everyone but my dad. My dad called me Reeba. You can’t call me that.’

‘Obviously.’

‘So you’ll just have to use my full name.’

‘It seems a bit formal.’

‘Formality, Mr Harper, can be a good thing.’

Rebecca awoke once during the night. For a fraction of a second she didn’t know where she was and then she did and mapped a path mentally in the darkness to the en-suite. She’d flushed the loo and washed her hands and was tiptoeing back into bed beside Tom’s recumbent shape when she heard a noise that sounded human. It sounded like a single, short bark of laughter and it sounded as though it was coming from downstairs. It was husky, and as angry-seeming as it seemed amused. It made Rebecca scamper slightly, back between the sheets where she could spoon herself around the sturdy body of the man sleeping next to her.

It could have been anything, she rationalized, as sleep reclaimed her. It could have been a backfiring car or a scavenging fox or a cawing bird on the sill beyond the window. Night sounds weren’t trustworthy. Wind and space distorted and amplified them. She surrendered to unconsciousness soon after thinking this, wearing on her face a smile that an almost perfect evening had put there.

Work meant that she had to be up early the following morning. She made a pot of coffee and drank a mug of it in the sitting room, noticing that the wire bin beside Tom’s desk was crammed with Amazon packaging. He’d shelved the contents, DVDs, stuff too old or staid to be readily available for streaming, she assumed. She browsed the titles. He had Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. There were two Simon Schama series: A History of Britain and Power of Art.

He came down the stairs fifteen minutes after she did. She hadn’t expected at all to see him awake. She’d intended to leave him a note. She’d assumed footballers were late risers. It wasn’t as though he had a schedule to keep. She thought if the DVDs were any indication, he’d likely be planting his shapely rear on the sofa in front of his flatscreen and watching the Discovery Channel until tea time, probably with a pad, making notes.

He kissed her on the cheek and went and poured coffee from the pot and came back and she said, ‘Busy day?’

‘Gym this morning,’ he said. ‘You can’t just stop. I wouldn’t want to lose fitness and it’s dangerous, just stopping, apparently, can give you an enlarged heart.’

‘So it’s a coronary issue, nothing to do with the six-pack, or the buns?’

He smiled at that.

‘What about your knee?’

‘It’s only lateral movement the injury restricts. I can run, ride a stationary bike, skip rope, all that.’

‘But you’ll never ski, not now.’

‘No, Rebecca,’ he said, ‘I’ll never ski.’

He’d come down in his jeans, his hair tousled and his torso bare, completely unselfconscious, she thought, as a man with a body like his had every right to be. It probably wasn’t that, though. He’d spent a lot of his life half-naked in changing rooms. He was comfortable with it. And anyway she had on his dressing gown which was white, made of heavy cotton toweling and warm. It smelled of his cologne.

‘I’ll take a shower,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘You are my guest.’ He looked away from her, out of the window towards the still-dark crescent and said, ‘Any regrets about last night?’

She said, ‘Not unless you’re sorry.’

He looked at her. ‘I couldn’t be happier,’ he said.

She was stepping out of the shower when she remembered that solitary bark of husky laughter from the previous evening. She was pretty sure it had come from inside the flat and she was equally sure it had been a human emanation. That didn’t sit very well with her, because she couldn’t rationalize it now. She’d done that when she’d heard it, because the alternative had been uncomfortable and even scary. Wide-awake and sober though, Rebecca wasn’t really into self-deception.

She wouldn’t mention it to Tom, she decided. Mysteries could be completely harmless. They weren’t necessarily sinister, were they? But her hearing that sound had followed the basement jazz he’d heard and the sketch that had appeared and then apparently vanished. These oddities seemed to be increasing. Tom was going to cuddle up with Simon Schama and his History of Britain. Rebecca thought she might do a bit of digging closer to home, concerning the history of the property itself.

He’d put on a tracksuit by the time she’d readied herself for work. She looked at her watch. It was 7.15 a.m. Her car was in his parking space. She asked where his gym was and he told her, and she offered him a lift there since it was as good as on her way to the office and she thought saying goodbye on his doorstep might be slightly awkward. She really didn’t do one night stands and that’s what this was, until it proved to be otherwise.

‘I still think it’s brutally early for the gym,’ she said, at the wheel of her car, en route.

‘Full day,’ he said.

‘Really?’ She was unconvinced and knew she sounded it.

‘I’ve got a meeting in Bloomsbury this afternoon,’ he said, ‘Great Ormond Street Hospital. I set up a charitable foundation, football-based, most of the Premiership sides contribute financially and there are exhibition games staged and a lot of the lads put in guest appearances on the wards when they can. Players get a bum rap. Most of them are genuine guys, pretty solid, generous with their money and their time.’

It was the most she’d ever heard him say at once. She said, ‘It seems very empathetic, doing all that for sick kids when you’ve never had any of your own.’

‘My brother’s lad was my godson as well as my nephew,’ he said. ‘Leukemia took David when he was six. Before David passed away, I got to know the hospital quite well.’

They were there. She pulled up, he grazed her hair with his knuckles and reached across and kissed her on the cheek. She said, ‘You’re a good man, Tom Harper.’

‘I’m just lucky,’ he said, ‘and my luck seems to be holding.’

She smiled at him. ‘You think so?’

He said, ‘I’ve met you, haven’t I?’

Two

Even after Absalom Court largely declined into a run-down warren of student conversions, there’d been two residents left over from its more affluent period on ninety-nine-year leases that still had some way to go before they expired. They were a Mrs Georgia McConnell and a Mr Arthur Fleetwood. But Mrs McConnell had died in the winter of 2011, and Mr Fleetwood had been offered a care-home by the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham when he’d been judged too elderly and infirm to continue to live safely alone.

Before the restoration, number 7 had been three separate self-contained flats one above the other. The cat sketch encouraged Rebecca to think art student, if she was going to entertain Tom’s only half-serious theory that a ghost was responsible for the unexplained phenomena. Rebecca thought he might be completely serious if he’d been awake to hear that husky bark of sardonic laughter she’d heard the previous night. But she didn’t identify any art students in the records. In the 1960s, in the period when students would have had Kind of Blue rotating under the needle of their Dansette record players, all the conversions were let to students from the London School of Economics.

With her lunch hour of research freelancing almost up, Rebecca called the LSE. She got through eventually to an alumni archivist. She’d thought they might employ such a person because their alumni were so distinguished. They boasted a long list of global movers and shakers. And there was Mick Jagger, who could still shake a bit when the moment called for him to do so. She remembered he’d studied at the LSE.

She explained that she was researching the history of an address at Absalom Court on Laburnum Crescent for someone who’d just bought a property there and was interested to discover what he could about its past. She was told that there was no problem with her trying to identify who from the school had been resident there, if anyone had. It wasn’t confidential or privileged information. But she’d have to do it herself, physically going through the archive, in person. She could do that by appointment after presenting the credentials to prove who she was. The rider was that there was no absolute guarantee she’d find what she was looking for. Records of that nature were sometimes incomplete. Rebecca made an appointment for the following afternoon.

Tom called her that evening, just, he said, because he enjoyed listening to her voice. Rebecca had become used to guarding against real intimacy by using such obstacles as texting and Facebook and Twitter, the same way everyone did. The spontaneity of conversation over a phone in real time, one comprising pleasure rather than business, had become a novelty to her. She finished the call thinking that her earlier suspicion that she might have had a one-night stand was unfounded.

He called just after 8 p.m. She was about to turn in for a rare early night, when her phone rang and it was him again.

‘I’ve just been down to the basement.’

‘More Miles Davis?’

‘This was more personal than Miles.’ He was speaking quietly, as he hadn’t earlier, the way someone would if they were concerned about being overheard.

‘Jesus, Tom. You’re scaring me.’

‘You’re in the clear there. You’re about seven miles away.’

‘Do you want to come over?’

‘It’s late, Rebecca. And I’m not so freaked out that I’m going to scarper like a frightened child. Nothing’s actually gone bump in the night, so far.’

Except that it has, she thought, but you were fast asleep when it did.

‘What’s happened?’

He was silent. Then he said, ‘I thought I could smell cigarette smoke. It wasn’t a strong smell, more like the memory of smoke than smoke itself, just a vague hint really, but it was coming from the basement. Up close to the basement door it got strong enough to smell like it might be French tobacco. I played for two seasons with a winger from Rheims. Some of the French and Italian lads smoke, just like the English boys drink. It was smoke from a Gauloise. I was sure of it.’

Rebecca nodded to herself. She was familiar with that smell. When she’d smoked, for most of those years, she’d smoked Gauloises.

‘Go on.’

‘I unlocked the door and went down there. The smoke didn’t get any stronger. In fact it weakened a bit or got a bit diluted because it was mingling with something else, another smell altogether.’

‘Which was?’

‘It was perfume.’

‘No sign of anyone?’

‘No.’

‘No more drawings?’

‘No.’

‘Was there music?’

‘No, there was just this empty silence and the mingled smells.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Yeah, two things.’ He was almost whispering now. ‘When I signed the contract to promote that cologne, I was invited to meet a top perfumer, one of the guys with a nose insured for a million Euros who mixes the stuff. They had all the great scents there, in this reception room full of velvet and gold brocade, lined up in jewelled bottles for me to sniff at. I had to be polite, feign interest, only reasonable with what they were paying me. Anyway I smelled it there and recognized it just now in the basement. It’s by Guerlain and it’s called Shalimar. I’d bet my life on it.’

‘I used to wear it,’ Rebecca said and her own voice sounded hollow in her ears. She’d worn Shalimar habitually, back when she’d smoked a pack of Gauloises a day in her wild student days, before she’d ever dreamed she’d sell people the homes they were going to live in, or sleep with a famous footballer.

‘You said two things.’

‘When I got back up here just now, I switched on my laptop. I wanted to read a bit about Shalimar, see how long it’s been around and what it costs to buy and what sort of women would have been likely to have used it.’

‘Whether it’s of a piece with Kind of Blue, you mean.’

He didn’t answer that. He said, ‘My screensaver’s changed. It was a shot of Gordon Banks saving point blank from Pelé in the 1970 World Cup. People still say that’s the greatest save a goalkeeper’s ever made.’

‘I saw that, last night, on your desk.’

‘It’s been replaced, by a charcoal sketch of a cat. It’s identical to the drawing I found in the basement except for one tiny detail. Now it has a set of initials in the bottom right hand corner.’

‘What are they?’

‘You’d find them familiar. They’re yours, Rebecca.’

‘I didn’t sketch the cat. I didn’t tamper with your laptop either.’

‘Happy to put it all down to coincidence?’

‘No, and neither are you. What do you intend to do?’

‘I’m not being threatened here, I don’t think. I don’t think whatever’s happening is a deliberate effort to scare me. I’m bloody sure now it’s not one of the lads or a bunch of the lads playing a practical joke. It’s more like something’s being hinted at, or I’m being teased.’

Rebecca thought about the laugh she’d heard the previous evening: husky, abrupt and more hostile each time she recalled it.

‘I’m going to have a very large whisky,’ Tom said. ‘Then I’m hoping to have a peaceful night’s sleep.’

‘If anything happens, call me,’ Rebecca said. Like I could do anything useful, she thought. But he didn’t call and eventually, she went to sleep herself.

The man in charge of the alumni archive had a hipster beard with waxed points at the ends of his moustache. He wore bespoke jeans and pointy brogued boots and a brown cardigan so coarsely textured it looked like it was woven out of horse hair. Rebecca was fairly certain the glass in his horn-rims was non-prescription. They were a prop, an affectation. He wasn’t so much dressed, as costumed. Observing him and his contrived appearance reminded her with a pang of anxiety just how devastating Tom Harper looked simply in a suit.

The basement of number 7 Absalom Court had been 21a in the period when it had been used as accommodation by the LSE. Rebecca found who she thought she was looking for almost straight away. She’d moved in when she’d enrolled in October of 1963. The name was a clue, because it provided those initials. She was Rachel Gaunt, her degree course was Politics and Philosophy, and when Rebecca saw the photocopied admissions photo paper-clipped to her tenancy agreement, she almost recoiled in shock.

‘She looks like you,’ the hipster archivist said, having stolen up behind her, peering over her shoulder. ‘She could be your sister. Blimey, she could even be your twin.’

That wasn’t true. Rachel Gaunt had been 18 when the picture had been taken and Rebecca was almost a full decade older. The hair was different. Rebecca wore hers carelessly long and loose and Rachel’s was cut in a chic and precise geometric bob. With her heavy lipstick and the kohl around her eyes and in her black crew-neck sweater, she had a Left-Bank Parisian look about her. It was the Paris beatnik style first personified in the model-actress Juliette Gréco, all smoky and existential, except that Rachel didn’t resemble Juliette Gréco, she resembled Rebecca Green. Their features were similar and their dimensions looked it too. People would have said they were out of the same mould. Rebecca couldn’t but acknowledge that.

‘I wonder what happened to her.’

‘There’s nothing on the database,’ the hipster said. ‘I’ve already looked. She hasn’t kept in contact or attended reunions or contributed to any of our fundraisers.’ He stroked the length of his beard with his right hand and tweaked the waxed moustache points between finger and thumb. ‘If you’re really interested, I suppose you could ask Professor Fleetwood.’

Fleetwood was a name recently familiar to Rebecca. Before she made the mental connection, the hipster provided it.

‘When he first became a Professor here, he’d just signed the lease on a flat at Absalom Court. I think he was the one who suggested we buy or rent the vacant properties there and convert them into student accommodation. In those days accommodation blocks had to be supervised at night and he would have got a modest stipend for the supervisory role. As far as I’m aware, he still lives there. He was an extremely clever chap, back in the day. Might still have all his marbles and, since they were neighbours for three years, he might very well remember her.’

‘He doesn’t still live there,’ Rebecca said, still staring at monochrome features, smudged and faded and uncannily similar to her own. ‘He was moved into a home for the elderly when he became too frail to live independently.’ But she thought he might still remember Rachel Gaunt. He might even remember the name of Rachel’s indolent pet cat.

‘That has to be her,’ she said to Tom, seated outside a riverside pub, eating an early dinner three hours after leaving the LSE alumni archive to its picturesque custodian. ‘Professor Fleetwood brokered some kind of deal between the college and the freeholders of the block over the summer of 1963. By the autumn, the conversion work had been completed and the rooms were ready for student occupation by the start of the term in October. Rachel was a fresher and the first tenant. Curiously she was also the last. 21a remained vacant after her departure.’

‘Which was when?’

‘I don’t yet know. She wasn’t awarded a degree, so I’m assuming she didn’t complete her course. The drop-out rate was proportionally higher in the Sixties and Seventies than it is today. But then the course work was much more demanding and the finals much harder than they are now.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘A university education was something you earned academically, not a right contrived by politicians honouring a manifesto pledge. You had to be clever to get in and even cleverer to stay. Few people got a university education back then and all of them earned it.’

He was staring at the picture of Rachel taken by Rebecca using her phone. Some digital alchemy had made it clearer and sharper than the original photocopy. The greater clarity and increased contrast only enhanced the likeness. He hadn’t mentioned this. She was sure he had noticed it, though. It was eerily strong in the shadow she cast over their table, on the screen he studied in the spring sunshine outside the pub.

She looked at Tom, looking at the picture. He looked beautiful in this light, with his iridescent grey-green eyes and his tousled hair and the glow of good health on his skin. He was wearing a pale blue suit and a soft-collared shirt. A cherry tree was in full pink bloom in the pub garden. The ground under their table was tiled and strewn with fallen blossom. A bit of verse came into her head and she spoke it aloud; ‘He was as fresh as is the month of May.’

‘What did you say?’

‘It’s a line from Chaucer, from the Canterbury tales. It describes the knight’s squire, sums him up precisely in a line. You reminded me of it just now. I love this time of the year. May’s my favourite month.’

He sipped beer. Neither of them was driving. The walk back to his flat was less than a mile. He said, ‘I could read forever, and I’d never catch up with you. But I do know what you mean about the spring. It’s a time of birth and growth.’

‘Rebirth,’ she said.

‘An optimistic time,’ he said. ‘The light feels warm after the winter.’ He blushed, listening to himself. His old team-mates would slaughter him for this sort of talk.

‘Were there no books in your house, growing up?’

‘Not one. My dad might have had the Rothman’s Yearbook in the glove compartment of his car. That’s a kind of football almanac. But I never saw it, if he did.’

‘Videos?’

He nodded. ‘Games. Shelves and shelves of old football matches, they covered an entire wall of the living room. And then when DVD players first came out my dad spent a grand on one. It might even have been a prototype. A grand was a lot for a postie to shell out on a piece of kit like that back then. I’d have been about twelve.’

‘He must have been very dedicated to you, to your dreams and ambition to play.’

Tom smiled, but it was more like a wince than an expression of humour. ‘He was dedicated to his pension plan.’

‘That’s not very charitable.’

‘I’ve been very charitable to him in life, Rebecca. My dad lives in a grand house in Southport overlooking the Royal Birkdale golf links. He’s got no mortgage to pay and I threw in a life membership to the club.’

‘Do you still speak to him?’

‘Not much. We’ve nothing in common anymore.’

It was quite a contrast to her own life. Tom had rare talent and the hunger and discipline to exploit it. She’d had none of those things. She wouldn’t volunteer the information, though. She’d tell him the truth about herself, but only if he asked. She knew he wouldn’t, because famous people were always so incurious about the common herd.

And then he did.

She took a deep breath. ‘My dad was totally self-made. Started off labouring on the docks at Tilbury and then took up as a rent collector when that work became too scarce. He trained on the job as an estate agent, surviving on commission because there was no salary through his six-month probationary period. He was good at the work and prospered. Eventually they made him a partner.’

‘They didn’t want him leaving and setting up and competing with them,’ Tom said.

‘I think that’s exactly right. My mum died and he sent me away to boarding school because he wanted me to have a decent start. And it worked; I was the perfect daughter until Brighton and university.’

‘What happened there?’

‘Sex and drugs.’

He sipped beer. She sensed he was avoiding looking at her. He said, ‘And rock and roll? I’m thinking Lars Ulrich here more than Buddy Holly.’

‘Unfortunately it wasn’t funny, Tom.’

‘How bad did it get?’

She couldn’t believe she was telling him this. ‘Rehab and a well-earned reputation as a tramp,’ she said. ‘My dad rescued me, six months before he died. That’s why I’m in this job. By then, of course, I’d broken his heart.’

The screen on her phone had gone dark. He stroked it back into life with a forefinger. She said, ‘What do you think of that?’

He was looking at Rachel Gaunt. He lifted his head and looked at Rebecca. His eyes were clear, paled to translucence with the sun at this early evening angle, shining almost directly into them from behind her head. She could feel it warming her shoulders through her jacket, her scalp through her hair. She couldn’t guess what Tom was thinking at all.

‘Life would be very boring,’ he said, ‘if everyone was the same.’

She said, ‘How far do you want to take this thing?’

‘As far as we can go, Rebecca, if you feel the same way I do.’

She smiled and reached for his hand and squeezed it and said, ‘I meant with Rachel Gaunt.’

‘Ah,’ he smiled back, blushing. He said, ‘I suppose it depends on whether anything else happens. If it does, if things get worse, I think we should try to talk to Professor Fleetwood.’

‘I’m frightened, Tom. She smoked the same cigarettes as me and she wore the same perfume I did and I’d bet money her favourite cocktail was a negroni. What are the odds?’

‘Did you ever own a cat, or a Miles Davis record?’

‘No. And I’m not much good at drawing, but you can’t tell me you haven’t noticed the physical resemblance.’

‘So you don’t want to come back with me tonight?’

‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘But I will come back with you because of what you said about us, just now. I think we both feel the same way about that.’

Tom laughed to himself.

‘What?’

‘Our first-choice ’keeper, Terry Pool, he’s probably the best shot-stopper I’ve ever played with. Off the pitch, he’s also a real glass-half-empty sort of a character. He’s got this saying, this doom and gloom warning. I can hear him now. Terry always says, “Every silver lining has a cloud.”’

‘Then he’s a wise man,’ Rebecca said, before draining the dregs at the bottom of her glass.

They got back to the flat when it was still light, the west-facing windows embellishing the rooms they served with a slight pink flush. There was no sense of impending menace or of being observed that Rebecca was aware of. Tom put on some music and opened a bottle of wine. She kicked off her shoes and sat back in an armchair and inventoried the stuff he’d bought. He’d furnished sparingly and with good, if masculine, taste. She thought that taste instinctive. She couldn’t picture him leafing through design catalogues. He’d just gone to John Lewis and pointed.

‘Did you never want kids?’

‘It wasn’t me that couldn’t have them, it was Melody. I do think they make you vulnerable. What happened to my nephew broke my brother completely.’

‘So you wouldn’t have them?’

He was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘I think I’d make a better father than my own dad was. I also think I’ve got too much not to want to share it. I’m only twenty-eight.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not going to predict the future. I don’t own a crystal ball.’

‘Where are your trophies? There’s nothing on display.’

‘Storage,’ he said. ‘It would be too painful to live with them at the moment. They’d just be a constant reminder that it’s over.’

‘I thought you were philosophical.’

‘I’m not a masochist. I have to live in the present, not the past.’

‘But with a past like yours, that’s hard.’

‘There’s a temptation to dwell on it,’ he said.

‘Have you read The Great Gatsby?’

‘Of course I haven’t.’

‘You’ve got something in common with its hero. I think you’d enjoy it.’

‘What happens to him?’

‘He gets shot and killed at the end.’

‘Cheers.’

She took a cushion from behind where she sat and threw it at him. He caught it and came across and stooped and kissed her, bunching the hair at the back of her head in his fist, half-kneeling, pulling her head towards his.

‘You have a thing for my hair.’

‘For all of you,’ he said, lowering both their bodies down to the rug beneath them.

Eventually, they climbed the stairs to his bed.

Whatever prompted her to seek an interview with Professor Fleetwood must have happened as they slept. They got up together and went down to the kitchen and Tom brewed coffee and made toast and then said he was going to check the weather forecast because if it was going to be fine, he fancied a long run along the Thames riverbank more than he did a visit to the gym.

It had been a cloudless night and, for May, quite chilly. Rebecca was content to stay in the kitchen where it was warm beside the range and snug in Tom’s dressing gown, until she heard him say, ‘You need to come and look at this.’

He had switched on his computer and the screensaver was showing. And the cat they assumed had belonged to Rachel Gaunt had stirred and woken and stalked prey as cats by their nature will. It had a mouse between its paws. It had a cute, playful expression on its face. Innards streaked in a glistening trail from the torn stomach of the little rodent, still alive, at this stage of its final ordeal. The artist’s initials were described, tiny and familiar, in the bottom right corner of the image.

‘She could really draw,’ Rebecca said. She shivered. ‘She was a bit wasted on Politics and Philosophy, if you want my opinion.’ For a reason she couldn’t have put easily into words, she was loath to say Rachel’s name.

‘I think there’s a bit more to your opinion than that. You’re shaking.’

‘I’ve got my brave face on,’ she said, smiling brightly. She nodded at it without actually glancing back towards the desk and the laptop. ‘If I look at it again I’ll scream.’

‘I’m miles out of my depth here,’ Tom said.

‘I’ll go and see Professor Fleetwood today,’ Rebecca said. ‘People in care homes don’t have prior appointments and the elderly wake up early. I’ll go this morning, right away.’

‘We should both go,’ he said.

‘I think I’ll get more out of him if I go on my own. I have a duty of care. Even if I didn’t care about you, which I do, it’s my obligation. Professionally, I mean. I sold you this flat.’

The care home had once been a large Victorian house on what had probably then been a quiet road in Hammersmith. Now it was festooned with bollards and painted with double yellow lines and the humped tarmac of small hills meant to calm traffic erupted every few metres along its length. Cars undulated over them in the ceaseless convoy like rat-runs all over the city.

The professor was polite and courteous, alert and attentive, until Rebecca mentioned the name of Rachel Gaunt. When she did, sitting upright in his wheelchair, he clenched and unclenched his fists.

‘I will not discuss that person,’ he said. ‘I have no wish to recollect that period, or that particular character. I prefer to live in peace and so must insist you leave.’

‘This is important,’ she said.

‘Not to me,’ he said. ‘To me it’s merely prurient. I insist you leave immediately.’

‘Please,’ she said.

He wheeled to face her. Drool glistened on his chin and one of his eyes had a rheumy infection, unless it was a cataract. He was seeing her only out of the other one. ‘You’re harassing an elderly man,’ he said, seated because he was crippled, standing metaphorically on what dignity remained to him. Rebecca felt ashamed, but she persisted because she didn’t have a choice.

‘Absalom Court has been refurbished. Where she lived is now the basement of a luxury flat. I sold that flat to a good man called Tom Harper just over a month ago and she won’t leave him alone and I’m begging you to help me.’

‘The person to whom you refer died in 1965. What you’re saying can’t possibly be true. In her own phrase, she checked out early. Now I’d be grateful if you’d leave me alone.’

Rebecca bit her lip. She was no good at this. A skilled interlocutor might be able take another tack, employ charm and tease out the information. She didn’t know how and was too fuelled by anxiety to find the necessary patience in herself.

‘I’m desperate, Professor Fleetwood,’ she said.

He was frowning. The expression in his good eye had changed. He said, ‘Your resident wouldn’t be Tom Harper the footballer, would he?’

‘Yes, he would.’

‘My God,’ he said. ‘I’ve supported that team for over seventy years.’

‘You speak with the same accent he does. I’ve only just noticed.’

‘Different generations, but I think we were born about three streets apart. I saw his home debut, when he came on as a sixteen-year-old in the second-half of a cup game against Chelsea. I remember he scored. I was a season ticket holder, back then.’

Thank the Lord for football, Rebecca thought. ‘Will you help him?’

‘Bring him here. If you’re telling the truth, I’ll tell you both as much as I can. But do it today. I want to remember Rachel Gaunt for as short a time as possible and to forget her entirely again just as soon as I possibly can.’

She went outside and phoned Tom from the care home drive but got no response. She looked at the sky, which was clear, and assumed he was running along the river. She had no idea how far he’d run, how long it might take him to cover the mileage. He was so formidably fit he could be jogging along for bloody hours.

Her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it anyway.

‘Simon Swarbrick.’

‘Who?’

‘Simon Swarbrick?’

‘Your voice sounds familiar, but you’re going to have to give me a clue.’

‘I’m in charge of the alumni archive at the LSE. We met yesterday.’

‘Of course we did,’ she said, ‘and of course I remember, very clearly. You were most helpful.’

‘Thank you. I’m calling you now because of your interest in Rachel Gaunt. Is that still ongoing?’

‘Very much so,’ Rebecca said.

‘I’ve found some cine film you might be interested in seeing. In viewing, I mean. She features quite prominently. There’s no sound, but the footage is Super 8 and the camera must have been a Braun or something of a similar standard lens-wise because the quality is excellent. You could come and look at it this afternoon.’

Except that she couldn’t, Rebecca thought, looking at her watch. She’d had the previous afternoon and this morning off and the clients were stacking up and it wasn’t like she’d taken a sabbatical or even any holiday time owed. She was supposed to be at work, or at least working while she was out of the office. She was doing neither.

‘I can’t make it,’ she said.

‘That’s a shame.’

‘But I can ask the owner of the property she lived in to come to you. It’s on his behalf I’ve been doing the research.’

‘I was rather hoping you’d come yourself,’ the hipster said. There was now a slight wheedling note to his tone. Rebecca rolled her eyes and then saw she had a call holding. She said, ‘He’s a very wealthy man with a deep appreciation of the importance of higher education and a proven tendency to put his money where he thinks it might be most beneficial, both to society and culturally. Bluntly, he’s someone worth keeping in with.’

‘He will need to bring his credentials,’ Simon said. ‘I’ll expect him at 3 p.m.’

‘Thank you, Mr Swarbrick.’

‘Simon,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Simon.’

‘Anything to oblige you,’ he said, with the stress on the ‘you’.

She terminated the call and picked up the one waiting, which was Tom. She told him about her encounter with Professor Fleetwood. He told her he’d be there in thirty minutes. She spent ten of them finding a coffee shop, ten slowly drinking a coffee and the remainder walking back to the care home to an elderly man with all his mental faculties and a body betrayed cruelly by time.

She hardly had the nerve for the ordeal she thought they might be about to put him through. Her stomach rebelled acidly against the assault of the double espresso she’d just inflicted on it. ‘I’m my own worst enemy,’ she said out loud. But she had an inkling, now, an intuition, that where she particularly was concerned, this old saying no longer rang true.

There were armchairs in the reception room and Tom helped Professor Fleetwood out of the wheelchair and into one, where he looked more comfortable and composed than he had forty minutes earlier. He’d flushed with pleasure like a boy on seeing his celebrated visitor and tried and failed to struggle to his feet to greet him properly. In other circumstances, Rebecca might have felt nervous or uneasy about their encounter. She generally held with the view that you should never meet your heroes; it’s always going to be an occasion at best anticlimactic and at worst disillusioning. Not today, though. Tom was a charismatic man in life, but that wasn’t why she thought it would go okay. She thought it would go okay because he had the grace and generosity to make sure that it would.

The Professor sipped tea from a cup they’d scrounged from the kitchens, the saucer nursed in his lap. They sat in armchairs just like his, facing him. The door to the little room was firmly closed. He looked a good decade younger than he had earlier and he was composed and when he spoke his voice was firm. He’d used the interval to wipe the drool from his chin.

‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said. ‘I need to establish that emphatically with both of you from the start. She used to talk about checking out early. She would follow the remark with a bark of laughter, made husky by her chain-smoking, which wasn’t all that unusual in students back then. Cigarettes were cheap and the harm they did not yet widely understood. Everyone in those days smoked. She smoked the French Gauloises brand.

‘She must have meant what she said about checking out early, because less than two years after I first laid eyes on her she went and did it. Suicide, or the threat of it, was quite fashionable back in those days. It sounds sick to say that now. I think it had something to do with the Cold War and the way the constant threat of obliteration by the bomb had debased life. Life then seemed far more tenuous and contingent and insecure.

‘She used to say that she’d check out early and that one day she’d be back. She said she’d surprise everyone. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more defiant creature in my life. And it’s been a long life. It’s my belief that no one cheats death, however, not even a Rachel Gaunt. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should start really at the beginning.’

He was twenty-eight, had just been awarded his full professorship and his career at the LSE had launched with a property deal very profitable for both him and the school where he was to spend the rest of his academic life. He’d become one of only two tenants at Absalom Court, which by then had otherwise fallen into near-dereliction.

He’d moved in after his successful LSE job interview at the beginning of June and seen the potential of the block as student accommodation straight away. He’d inquired about securing a lease and asked half a dozen building firms to tender for the conversion work required. Then he’d drawn up a business proposal based on typical student rents for rooms in halls of residence, showing that costs would be covered and a profit start to show within a period of five years. He’d presented this to the school’s vice-chancellor and, because wealthy alumni had made the LSE cash-rich, the scheme was approved and the work was begun immediately.

Rachel Gaunt was among the first intake the following autumn. She had a reputation even before she arrived there for beauty, rebelliousness and getting what she wanted. As a precocious sixth-former she’d written to Sartre and Che Guevara and whatever she’d said to them in her letters had earned her written replies. She’d corresponded regularly with Timothy Leary and Martha Gellhorn and Philip K. Dick. She was interested in the occult philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and had got Miles Davis to personally autograph her copy of Kind of Blue, the jazz album Britain’s beatniks were all listening to at their parties and talking about and carrying around with them like some badge of credibility and cool.

She drove a red Triumph Herald convertible and seemed to have plenty of money. Her family background was obscure because she’d been raised an orphan. In the long holiday she did what was described as clerical work for a Brussels-based company called Martens & Degrue. It struck Fleetwood that the paper shuffling she did for them over the summer seemed improbably well paid.

A romance she had with a fellow student at the start of her second year ended abruptly at Christmas, when he’d suffered a nervous breakdown. Professor Fleetwood was charged, discreetly, with the mission of finding out more about the background and character of Rachel Gaunt. Her academic credentials were excellent and her coursework brilliant. But the mental state in which she’d left her suitor suggested some sort of moral corruption or malaise.

He discovered that Martens & Degrue were a subsidiary company wholly owned and maintained by an organization called the Jericho Society. They had run the orphanage which had cared for Rachel from birth. She had grown up there bilingual in English and French. When she was eleven, she’d gained a scholarship to the Surrey boarding school where she’d stayed until passing her A Levels.

Her summer job suggested she kept in close contact with the Jericho Society, which Fleetwood assumed was all she had in the way of kin. But they were an organization discreet to the point of secrecy and he could discover no more about them other than that they were obviously wealthy and completely independent.

‘I suspect that they were probably what today we’d call a cult,’ he told Tom and Rebecca. ‘But Rachel never exhibited any signs of slavishness or manipulation, quite the opposite in fact. She was iconoclastic even by the standards of an age becoming by then quite militant in its defiance of convention.’

‘Beatlemania,’ Tom said.

Fleetwood chuckled. ‘That was just around the corner, Tom.’

‘Ban the Bomb,’ Rebecca said.

‘You look very like her,’ Fleetwood said, turning serious. ‘The resemblance quite startled me when I first saw you earlier. But there was no bomb banning where Rachel Gaunt was concerned. My intuition was that she was completely apolitical. She was drawn to Che Guevara not by the cause, but by the glamour. Marches to Aldermaston wearing a duffle coat under a soggy banner in the rain weren’t madam’s scene at all.’

‘Do you remember the name of the boyfriend who had the breakdown?’

‘I do, Tom. He was an Ethics postgrad from Stafford, Archie Simmonds.’

Tragedy struck in the Easter holiday of Rachel’s second year, he told them. She was among a mixed party of seven LSE students who went on a ski trip to St. Moritz in Switzerland. Wandering off-piste was apparently Peter Hendry’s idea. Peter was studying Economics and Law. He was a boy from the Scottish Highlands who had learned to ski on barrel staves as little more than a toddler. He’d been selected for the British Winter Olympics Downhill Team. There had been heavy snowfalls for a week before their arrival.

‘There were probably avalanche warnings, but communicating them would have been a word-of-mouth task back in those days,’ Fleetwood said. ‘Some pistes might have been closed as a precaution, but they weren’t on groomed slopes in designated areas. They strayed and they paid a fatal price.’

‘What happened?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Six of the group were overwhelmed by the avalanche. It was huge, hundreds of thousands of tons of unstable snow and they were probably killed instantly by the weight and velocity of what hit them. Rachel was the sole survivor, unscathed because she alone managed to ski out of its path. That was her story, anyway.’

Tom said, ‘You think she lied?’

‘I know she didn’t cause the avalanche,’ he said. ‘And it’s become a cliché to say that the young are resilient because it’s so often proven to be true. But she exhibited no signs of grief afterwards at all, not one shred of sorrow for her dead friends and the loss their deaths represented. I think what she witnessed would have traumatized most people. She didn’t seem shocked by it, or even surprised.’

‘She didn’t value life,’ Tom said. ‘She didn’t value her own life. She proved that when she took it.’

‘That’s not right,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’d say she valued her own life very highly. She had sufficient self-regard to think she could defy nature by coming back. Can you tell us about the specifics of her death, Professor?’

‘That’s the last thing I can tell you,’ he said. ‘It’s the only remaining thing about Rachel Gaunt I really think I know.’

She did it with whisky and sleeping pills on the last day of the summer term. She was discovered lying on her back with a serene expression on her fully made-up face wearing the same blue satin dress she’d worn to the summer balls. Side one of Kind of Blue was playing on auto-repeat on her Dansette record player at the time her body was discovered. She’d been one of only five student residents at Absalom Court who owned cars and hers was parked in its usual position to the rear of the block with the keys left in the ignition.

‘Could it have been accidental?’

‘No, Tom,’ Fleetwood said, ‘I don’t think it could.’

‘Whisky and pills can be a confusing combination.’

‘Rachel owned a small black cat,’ Fleetwood said. ‘Strictly speaking, students weren’t allowed pets in their rooms, but Rachel had a disarming gift for getting away with breaking rules. Somehow she made them seem absurd and petty and you by association absurd and petty if you attempted to enforce them.’

‘And you didn’t want her thinking that about you,’ Rebecca said.

‘No, I didn’t. I was twenty-nine years old by then, older than her by a decade, but despite her amorality she was vivacious and beautiful and my male vanity was still intact. Pathetic as it sounds, I wanted her approval.’

‘And the cat?’

‘Cute little creature, never looked like much more than a kitten, though it caught its share of mice. Some of the other students joked it was her familiar. There were rumours, only half in jest, that she might be a dabbler in the occult. I don’t think anyone seriously thought she was capable of witchcraft, though looks-wise she certainly contrived the right, vampy appearance. Anyway, she killed the cat. She laced its food with rat poison. Its last meal, as a consequence. The cat died with its owner.’

Rebecca asked, ‘Did this Jericho Society make waves over their protégée’s death?’

‘No, they didn’t, not a word, which was curious. But the school was in no way culpable and as I’ve said already, suicide among students was far more common then than I believe it is today. They expected less of a world that expected more of them. It was a sometimes unhealthy equation.’

Tom and Rebecca exchanged a look and rose to say their goodbyes. Professor Fleetwood looked at Tom and said, ‘I read about your retirement in the Telegraph. It saddened me beyond words. Is there no hope, no further surgical procedure you could try?’

‘None,’ Tom said.

‘It’s such a pity.’

‘Did you play yourself?’

‘Got my blue playing at Cambridge. I captained the Varsity Team. Had pro trials at Hartlepool and Chesterfield and a couple of other places. I wasn’t good enough.’

‘I’ll bet you grew up playing in a back alley with a bald tennis ball.’

The Professor chuckled. ‘Hour after hour,’ he said. ‘Even the dark didn’t stop us.’

‘No Xboxes or Game Boys or tablets back then, eh? All the kids who could play, completely two-footed from all the constant practice.’

The Professor grinned, showing his dentures. ‘My left peg wasn’t just for standing on, that’s for bloody sure.’

‘You’d have been good enough today, Professor. You’d have made the grade in today’s game, I’d bet on it.’

Professor Fleetwood seemed to grow inside his old suit. Rebecca saw it happen. She watched Tom take something bright with the number seven sewn onto it from the bag she’d wondered why he’d brought.

‘Rebecca mentioned that you were a fan,’ he said. ‘I’ve signed it for you. It’s the shirt I wore for the game that clinched us the title last season.’

‘You scored, twice.’ He held out his hands to take the shirt.

‘I got the rub of the green,’ Tom said.

‘It was football from another planet. They couldn’t get near you,’ the Professor said, staring at his prize.

They said their goodbyes and stood for a moment outside on the street, about to part because Rebecca had to go to work. She sniffed.

‘Why are you crying? Don’t cry, Rebecca.’

He reached for her and held her in his arms and she said, ‘I’m crying because you’re in such an awful situation and you’re such a good man who deserves so much better.’

‘I’m not frightened,’ he said. ‘I’m not frightened of her at all. And you have to stop crying, if only so you can put an end to my misery by telling me what iconoclastic means.’

She wrestled free of him. ‘Do you know what a doppelgänger is, Tom?’

‘I’m not completely ignorant. It’s your double and it’s a sign of bad luck to meet one.’

‘Not just a sign of bad luck,’ Rebecca said. ‘It’s a harbinger of death.’

‘Then maybe you’re the one in the awful situation. Maybe you’d be safer staying away from the flat.’

She’d taken a tissue from her pocket and was dabbing at her eyes with it. She said, ‘No. I am frightened and don’t mind admitting it. But I’m damned if I’m giving Rachel Gaunt a free run at you.’

‘She isn’t coming back for that. If she is coming back, if she’s not back already.’

Rebecca nodded in the direction of the building from which they’d just come. ‘Professor Fleetwood was smitten. I suspect all the men she encountered were, regardless of age, gay as well as straight, and some of the women too.’

‘She was seriously bad news,’ Tom said.

‘She was beautiful and beguiling bad news, Tom.’

‘Yeah, she was,’ he said, ‘pointless to deny it.’

Three

The flat was a fifteen-minute stroll from the care home housing the Professor. It was just after midday and he had his appointment with the LSE archivist at their Bloomsbury building at 3 p.m. Bloomsbury was somewhere he knew from his association with Great Ormond Street Hospital and a part of town he liked. He was curious about the cine film Rebecca had arranged for him to view. It would give him a chance to judge for himself the likeness between the two women the Professor had thought so strong.

He was glad he had taken the shirt along. Unlike the trophies, the shirts – those of his own he’d kept and those he’d swapped with opponents at the end of major games – were in a bin bag where he’d put them, packing in a hurry to exit the tasteless hangar of a house he’d occupied with Melody. He’d been happy about the Professor’s apparent joy at receiving the shirt, but was slightly melancholy now thinking about what Fleetwood had said about him playing football from another planet the last time he’d worn it. It was true. No one had been able to get near him that night. It was a rare and wonderful sensation and he knew he’d experienced it for the last time.

He got into the flat and switched on his laptop and thought about the hundreds of emails and texts from friends and former team-mates and his agent and journalists and the fans he’d accumulated, because he’d ignored them since this business began. He wondered, if he just deleted it all, would his life suffer even slightly as a consequence? He suspected not. What had dominated his thoughts and feelings, since meeting her, was Rebecca. Then the display on his laptop clarified and he saw the mouse-torture screensaver image and frowned. It was intrusive. It was somewhere between discovering you’d been squatted and having an itch you couldn’t scratch.

He wondered how he would react if she knocked softly on the other side of the basement door now and lured him to her in that husky, seductive voice of hers. Would he be indignant? Or would he just be overwhelmed by lust the way it seemed everyone else had been on coming into contact with Rachel. She’d flick her bobbed hair and lick her lips with a wanton look in her eyes and he’d be fumbling at his flies on raw instinct. Would it even seem like betrayal, given that she and Rebecca, physically, were so close to being one and the same?

Except that they weren’t the same. Rebecca had fallen victim to drug addiction and sexual promiscuity for a period. Rachel had never fallen victim to anything except her own wilful desires. Rebecca had been remorseful and ashamed and Rachel had been a brazen stranger to morality.

It was an odd coin if they were the two sides of it. Rebecca was as good as Rachel had been bad. He thought about the doppelgänger, which he remembered was a German thing, like all the best fairytales. For want of books at home, he’d read them greedily in the library at school. Wickedness often prevailed in those stories. He didn’t have much doubt, between Rebecca and Rachel, who would prove the stronger if it came down to a struggle.

He looked at his watch. It wasn’t the model he endorsed. It was a Bremont Boeing and he’d bought it a couple of days earlier because he got a kick out of wearing a watch made by an English company that said London on the face. He’d liked the look of it in the jewellers’ window. It was a very handsome timepiece. Buying himself anything was still a bit of a novelty. It was only just 12.30. He didn’t need more than an hour to get to where he needed to be at three. He didn’t feel spooked in the flat, not in the daytime, at least. He could hear or feel nothing unusual and there were no phantom odours. He decided that he would go down to the basement, just out of curiosity. It was his property after all.

He couldn’t honestly remember whether the hook had always been there or had been put there recently, specifically for the task in which it was currently employed. Hooks weren’t noticeable items unless you were actually looking for one. This one was brass and carelessly brushed with the same white emulsion as the wall and might have been there since the building’s construction. To Tom, there was no way of telling.

The hanger depending from the hook, though, was definitely a recent addition. It was made of curved sloping shoulders of polished wood screwed to a crossbeam lathed smooth and it looked expensive under its coating of dark varnish and carefully buffed beeswax. The blue dress hung on the hanger didn’t look at all as he’d imagined it would when the professor had described Rachel’s death scene. He’d mentioned summer balls and so Tom had pictured something floaty and lace-frilled and possibly embellished by ribbons and mother-of-pearl. He should have known she was too stridently sexual for that sort of confection.

The dress was just a satin sheath with a slashed neck and a split up the thigh. It had been cut to hug the curves of the woman who wore it. He lifted the hanger off the hook by its handle and turned the dress around and the fabric danced before his eyes blackly in its slick satin contours and he saw that it buttoned all the way up the back, closely secured, from the neckline to the hem. He whistled. He knew enough about couture clothing from the ever-changing wardrobe he’d bought Melody to know that the dress he held was a designer item that even in the early 1960s must have cost a fortune. He looked at the label and saw that the house that had created it was Schiaparelli.

He gripped the fabric itself and it slithered through his fist, smooth and slick and cool against his skin. He sniffed its shoulder, just above where the cloth was cut and stitched to shape the swell of her breasts and smelled the recently familiar scent of Shalimar perfume. There was, too, just the faintest, liquorice hint of Gauloises tobacco. He noticed a hair, then, caught in the hook and eye that closed the dress invisibly just beneath the nape of her neck. It was shorter than one of Rebecca’s and while her hair was a darkish brown, this was raven black.

Martens and Degrue, who were actually the Jericho Society, must have thought very highly of their orphan, Tom thought. He couldn’t imagine how they would have reacted to her suicide. For whatever reason, they’d invested a lot in her and it had come to nothing, except, of course, that it seemed to be coming to something now. He put the dress on its hanger back on the hook and looked at his Bremont watch. It told him that the time was just before one.

He was aware of the swell of arousal in his groin. It was heavy and hard with desire. It bulged and throbbed in the confinement of his jeans, slightly hampering his progress climbing the basement steps. He’d take a shower, though he’d had one earlier after his run. He didn’t feel contaminated or even sullied by his contact with the dress. He felt he needed a shower, though, as someone might feel the need to cleanse themselves after some intimacy, spontaneous and therefore unprotected, naked with a stranger.

The strangeness of it all was something he was aware of, he thought as he soaped himself down. But it had receded, really, the way he was used to pain receding after a couple of codeine tablets or a cortisone injection administered to treat a chronic injury. The strangeness wasn’t the priority and he wasn’t the sort of person to speculate pointlessly. He had his growing intuition about what it all meant and would act on that in dealing with it. In confronting it, he thought. It had to be confronted and overcome. He had never been a man comfortable with losing.

The hipster archivist mounted the cine film expertly on a projector reel and pulled down a rolled screen and shut the blinds in a ritual he could have carried out before arrival, Tom thought, and imagined he hadn’t only because he wanted to demonstrate his dexterity at one of the practical aspects of his job.

‘Do you mind if I watch it with you?’

‘Haven’t you seen it already?’

‘Only for verification, to see if it corresponded to what it said it was on the can. It was shot at St. Moritz in the late March of 1963. I saw snow, skis, chalets and big skies. I didn’t really take in the narrative detail.’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ Tom said.

The man was staring at him, though Tom thought the archivist by far the more entertaining of the two of them, with his outlandish wardrobe and ridiculous beard.

‘Are you an actor?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve got a familiar look. I get the feeling you might be someone quite famous.’

Not a football fan, obviously, which on this occasion was a bit of a relief. ‘I’m not remotely famous,’ Tom said.

The archivist sat down beside him and began to roll the film.

Tom Harper had seen more than his share of films. He had his high-res Kate Rusby and Seth Lakeman and Cara Dillon music files and he’d listened to them often on his iPod and more recently on his phone. But he didn’t enjoy computer games like a lot of the lads did and more often than listening to music travelling to and from away fixtures and games staged abroad, he’d watch a movie, which passed the time quicker if it was any good.

He’d watched films at home, too. Old movies were Melody’s passion. He thought that if he’d ever been asked to do a quiz show appearance for charity on the TV, film would have to be his specialist subject. He hadn’t been, but would have been confident of doing himself justice on the Millionaire stool or in the Mastermind chair.

Rachel Gaunt first appeared about two minutes in, after some establishing shots of the Swiss location and a group shot of four grinning male students Tom knew didn’t have long to live. The scene opened on an alpine landscape and some camera wobble and then the camera panned to a figure crouched and fastening ski boots dressed entirely in black, a cigarette couched in the corner of her mouth, winking when the lens found her, standing and shaking back her hair and dusting snow from tight ski pants before finally taking a long pull on her cigarette and plucking it from her mouth and blowing smoke at the vacant sky.

She smiled, the precise bob black and silky framing her features, teeth even and impossibly white in the light reflected off the snow, a youthful crinkle of amusement at the corners of her eyes, her figure pert and slender and pretty much perfect, really.

It was impossible to take your eyes away from her. Other people intruded, walking into shot and mugging for the camera, but their antics didn’t distract at all. She owned every frame she featured in. There wasn’t what the archivist had pompously referred to as a narrative. The film was just a collection of random moments picturing a group of young people enjoying what was still then a pretty exotic pastime in a beautiful location that attracted a privileged crowd.

She did look like Rebecca. But she had something else that Tom had only rarely seen and only ever seen before on celluloid. She had the glamour that film stars such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich had been gifted with. Tom couldn’t think of anyone starring in films with quite that languor and allure in the present day.

‘Alaskan eyes,’ the archivist said.

‘What did you say?’

‘She’s got paler eyes than I’ve ever seen on a human being. I’ve only seen that eye colour among the dogs that pull sleds in places like Alaska. And they’re related to wolves.’

‘I don’t think Rachel Gaunt would be pulling anybody’s sled.’

‘It’s just the eyes. What she’s actually like, is the cat that got the cream.’

‘She had a cat,’ Tom said. ‘It didn’t get the cream.’

‘They all died, didn’t they? I remember reading the cuttings about this event. It was one of the greatest tragedies in the school’s peacetime history.’

‘They didn’t all die,’ Tom said.

The two men watched the film for a while in silence. They watched Rachel Gaunt dance nimbly on her skis through a mogul field.

‘She could ski.’

‘She wasn’t the best in the group,’ Tom said. But she was the one who got away from the avalanche, he thought.

They watched her sip a cocktail with her snow goggles pushed up into her fringe. They watched her reading a book in a chair in the mountain sunshine and she held the cover up for the camera. It was a paperback of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. She was pictured spooning stew or casserole into her mouth outside a café on the slopes and she swallowed a spoonful and then pouted gorgeously, narrowing those pale eyes which slanted upwards slightly towards their outer edge, as Rebecca’s did, giving nothing away despite their transparency.

‘I think she knew,’ the archivist said.

‘She couldn’t have known.’

‘I know it sounds insane to say it, but I think she did. It’s just a hunch, an intuition. I mean, look at her.’

You couldn’t but look at her, Tom thought. Then the film finished. They sat in the darkness for a moment. The archivist said, ‘Fucking hell. I’ve just realized who you are. Can I get an autograph, for my niece? You’re a poster on her bedroom wall.’

‘You’re welcome to an autograph, mate. Or you could nip down the road to Argos and pick up a ball and I’ll sign it. But only after we find out what you’ve got on a student named Archie Simmonds. He was an Ethics postgrad from Stafford and he was here at the same time as Rachel Gaunt. And if you have the information, I also want the location of Rachel’s grave.’

Archie Simmonds must have recovered pretty well from his student breakdown. He’d become Standards and Compliance Officer working in the City for an internationally renowned merchant bank. He’d been generous to his alma mater with a couple of substantial endowments back in the twentieth century. Those were the days when bankers took their bonuses home without making indignant headlines. He had retired to an address in Hampstead Village and there was a landline phone number. As soon as he got outside the main LSE building, Tom rang it.

‘You’re pulling my leg. You have to be winding me up. Come on, who is this really?’

‘It really is Tom Harper, Mr Simmonds. I’ve recently moved into a flat at Absalom Court.’

‘God, mention of that takes me back. You’ve hit hard times?’

‘It’s changed a bit since you were last there. Rachel Gaunt lived in what’s now my basement. I’d like to talk to you about her.’

There was a silence. Then Archie Simmonds said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call for fifty years, I suppose. I knew it would come, one day. I just didn’t expect it to come from Tom bloody Harper.’

‘Since we’ve never actually met, I’ve done nothing to upset you, Mr Simmonds.’

‘That’s not true. I’m a life-long Arsenal supporter.’

‘Aah.’

‘The misery you’ve inflicted on me over the years has been nothing short of extraordinary.’

‘Can you meet me?’

‘Not in public, no. I can’t risk being seen with you by someone who knows me. I’d never hear the end of it, frankly. You’ll have to come here. Come tomorrow morning.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t expect much in the way of hospitality.’

Tom looked at his watch, which he thought was earning its keep. It told him that the time was a quarter to five and he hailed a cab and took out the little map the archivist had helpfully drawn for him once Tom had signed the replica shirt and ball he’d nipped out and bought and posed smiling with a friendly arm around the bloke for the inevitable selfie.

His phone rang and it was Rebecca.

‘Just wanted to hear the sound of your voice,’ she said.

‘You got that from me.’

‘You’ve got me brushing up on an obsolete skill. I used to be quite good at real-time communication with people I care about.’

Tom smiled to himself, flattered. He could still barely believe his good fortune, where she was concerned. ‘It’s a lost art,’ he said. Then, ‘Did you know that a cemetery is also known as a necropolis, which means city of the dead?’

‘You’re in a cab,’ she said, ‘I can tell by the acoustics. Our hipster friend told you where she’s buried. You’re on your way to see Rachel Gaunt’s grave.’

‘It’s in this massive cemetery in Stoke Newington. It’s a huge burial ground, mostly Victorian, quite a sight, apparently.’

‘A necropolis,’ she said. ‘How was the film?’

‘Your hipster thought she knew that it was going to happen. The avalanche, I mean. Said she looked like the cat that got the cream.’

‘God, that’s dark.’

‘We don’t need to go there,’ Tom said. ‘There’s no point, really, nothing conclusive to find one way or the other after fifty years.’

‘Will I see you tonight?’

He thought about the appearance of the dress in the basement, poised and slithery to the touch on its hanger, waiting to clothe its elegant wearer. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m talking to Archie Simmonds in the morning. The bloke she drove nuts?’

‘I remember.’

‘Let’s get together tomorrow evening.’

‘You think by then you’ll have all the pieces of the puzzle?’

‘I’ll have enough. I don’t think I’ll ever have all the pieces of the puzzle. I wouldn’t want the full picture. There are some things best left undiscovered.’

They said their goodbyes. It was a fair way through the early evening spring traffic to Stoke Newington. The remainder of the journey was spent learning from the cabbie precisely where he’d gone wrong in games that to the best of his recollection, his team had actually won.

The sun was pallid in the sky by the time he got to Stoke Newington Church Street and his destination. The cemetery was vast. So were some of the graves; pillared extravagances canted at crazy angles by time and subsidence, gigantic granite angels and marble-clad tombs secured like old bank vaults by the spiked iron railings surrounding them. Death was celebrated here, given a heroic status; brave and futile and redolent of an age when it was all too common and too few people saw out their three score years and ten.

It took him about half an hour to find Rachel’s grave. It was in an area set apart from the mad spree of commemorative masonry surrounding it. The headstones here were modest. There were no crosses. There was no religious symbolism at all, nothing whatsoever to signify individual faith or creed. The graves were uniform, almost like war graves in a military cemetery, though the plot was much smaller than those tended to be and not quite so immaculately cared for.

Rachel’s headstone bore only her name, the years of her birth and death and a splotch of lichen, pale green on the edge of the dark grey granite on its right side as he stood in front of it. He felt no urge to pray for the spirit of the dead girl or to cross himself or anything else. His own faith had lapsed to nothing beyond a vague belief, bolstered by his own good fortune in life, that a God was likelier on balance than not. And he had no sense whatsoever that Rachel was any longer here. The grave had a vacant look, an absence about it, the headstone the bogus character of a movie prop.

Someone was watching him. Tom sensed the scrutiny and turned. There was a tallish figure on one of the path intersections in the middle distance. The man was unseasonably attired in a raincoat, buttoned and belted. He was entirely motionless. He was a few hundred yards away but to Tom’s sharp eyes he seemed too well dressed to be a casualty of what was ironically called care in the community. Five weeks of London life had taught Tom that the place had more than its share of people who shouldn’t have been on its streets unchaperoned. This bloke wasn’t one of them. He watched. And then he moved abruptly, wheeling away, striding rapidly, shrinking in the distance and disappearing altogether from sight.

He didn’t go down to the basement again when he got home. It had been a long and eventful day giving him much to think about. He didn’t have the resilience to endure another of her tricks. They weren’t tricks really, he knew that, they were accelerations in something set in motion beyond his understanding, but he didn’t have the stamina or the nerve, after the discovery of the dress, to see at just what speed the events were continuing to occur.

He slept peacefully enough until something awoke him in the small hours. His dream memory told him it had been a rude sound, a sudden, throaty bark of contemptuous laughter. Since it couldn’t have been, since he lived there alone, he hugged the pillow and closed his eyes. He resisted the hypocritical urge to pray. And his body and brain rediscovered rest, eventually, despite a whiff of Shalimar perfume so potently strong on the pillow next to his he knew with a gloomy certainty it could only have come from life.

Archie Simmonds, in his late-seventies by Tom’s calculation, was still a handsome man, in a biblical epic sort of way. He had a full head of white hair worn longer than it had probably been in his business life. He was tall and broad and strong-featured. Tom knew already that he didn’t sound like he came from Stafford. But Stafford had its share of wealthy people. And Simmonds had the accent of someone who’d been educated at public school. His eyes were the bright blue of the spring sky and his greeting warm, despite what he’d said on the phone.

‘Sorry about Arsenal,’ Tom said.

Simmonds, who still had hold of the hand he was shaking, raised an eyebrow. ‘If we’re going to discuss your career, let’s stick to internationals, like the time you tore Germany apart in that second half at Wembley practically single-handedly. But you’re not here to discuss your career, are you, Mr Harper?’

‘It’s Tom, please.’

‘Then it’s Archie.’

Archie Simmonds slapped him meatily on the back. Then he went and poured them both coffee in the kitchen after showing Tom into his study. He sat on a leather sofa and waited, the silence punctuated by the rhythmic ticking of a grandfather clock in one corner. It was a sedate, orderly room, the domain of a man more cultured and cleverer than Tom knew he would ever become in his lifetime.

Archie came back in with their coffee and they sat in a companionable silence for a beat of time. And then Tom told him about the music and the perfume and the tobacco smoke and the cat sketches and the dress. He told him about the way in which he’d come to own the property and the physical resemblance between Rachel and Rebecca and what they shared, beyond that, and the initials of their names. He looked for surprise on the face of his host and he looked for incredulity, but the expression he got was unreadable. The man had been a City heavyweight in the world of commercial banking. He’d been schooled in masking his feelings and his features gave nothing away.

‘Where did you get your information about Rachel?’

‘Some of it came from the alumni archive at the LSE.’

‘Where they gave you my home phone number, which was rather naughty of them.’

‘Most of it came from Professor Fleetwood.’

‘Arthur Fleetwood. Bloody hell, the old bugger’s still breathing? He must be close to ninety.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Well, they do say it’s the good die young.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Arthur Fleetwood is not a reliable source on the subject of Rachel Gaunt. He hasn’t the necessary objectivity. He carried a torch for her. I’d go further than that and say he was completely infatuated.’

‘What was she like?’

Archie Simmonds ran a contemplative thumb around the rim of his coffee cup. He said, ‘That’s a question it’s almost impossible to answer.’

‘You must have known her better than most.’

‘I thought I knew the side of her she chose to reveal to me, but half a century on, I’m not even sure of that.’

‘I’ve been led to believe she was deliberately enigmatic.’

‘Then you’ve been led up the garden path, Tom. It was more that she was fundamentally unknowable. There was nothing about her she deliberately contrived for effect. I’m sure most of the time she was as much of a surprise to herself as she was to other people. She was a creature of impulse. Oh, she plotted things. She could scheme, alright. But none of what she was, or did, was about impressing other people.’

There was another silence. Tom didn’t quite know where to go next. Then he did. ‘When she talked about checking out early, were you ever there?’

Archie didn’t answer. He was seated in an armchair to the right side of his desk. He put down his now-empty coffee cup. He said, ‘I never saw a woman remotely with Rachel’s glamour or presence again until the mid-Seventies when I went to the cinema here, at the Screen on the Hill, to see an interminable film by Visconti about the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.’

‘The bloke who had all the fairytale castles built on the Danube,’ said Tom, who knew this because he’d visited one of them, in Bavaria, for a game against Augsburg a few seasons earlier.

‘Suddenly Romy Schneider appeared on the screen. She was very famous by then, but new to me. It wasn’t her features particularly. It was the aura, the dynamism and of course, the sensuality. She reminded me of Rachel. Rachel’s death, when I heard about it, seemed like a reversal of nature.’

There was yet another silence between the two men. It wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t a calm, peaceful silence either. To Tom it was as though something impended, some revelation the man sharing the room with him had yet to decide whether or not to disclose.

Then Archie said, ‘I’m going to tell you what I think you need to know, Tom. We’ll start with my breakdown and its real cause. I’m sure you haven’t been told the truth about that.’

He’d been dating Rachel Gaunt since the start of the term, the first of her second year at the LSE, and it was approaching the Christmas break. Winter had arrived prematurely that year and there was snow on the streets and it had stuck, cindered and in places salted but stubbornly there and a treacherous surface on which to try to walk. Darkness of course came early. Though Rachel lived in Fulham, at Absalom Court, Archie didn’t. He rented rooms in Back Hill in Clerkenwell, nearer to the LSE, only a ten minute stroll away but a commercial district of small manufactories and workshops in those days, all but deserted at weekends.

They took him on the Saturday morning. He popped out early for a paper and a pint of milk and never made it to the newsagent’s shop on the corner. Instead a pillowcase was bundled over his head and two strong men manhandled him into the back of a van where a third trussed him up with rope before whipping off the pillowcase and replacing it with a tightly knotted blindfold.

There was one clue to what had happened to him. He thought he’d passed their van on leaving his flat, en route to the shop, and he thought in retrospect it had followed him for a hundred yards or so before his abduction. He’d noticed its livery, done elegantly in cream paint against the brown of the van’s panelling. Martens & Degrue, it had said. The company name was known to him. By the time they had reached their destination, he had remembered it was the company for which Rachel claimed to spend the summer vacation working in some clerical capacity.

Neither the blindfold nor the ropes were removed during an ordeal that lasted until they dumped him on a freezing cold Clerkenwell Green at 5 a.m. on Monday, after forty-eight hours of interrogation without sleep or food and with only the odd sip of water to lubricate his throat sufficiently to answer their questions.

Those questions were about his beliefs. Those beliefs he described honestly, not daring to do otherwise, guessing from the ambient noises and the flat echo of his own voice and the persistent draught and chill that he was in a large garage or agricultural building constructed probably from corrugated steel.

His real beliefs, they said, hitting him on the thighs and upper arms with what he thought later, nursing the livid purple and yellow bruises, had probably been a truncheon made of some dense rubber compound. Liar, they said, trying to force him to reveal his hidden, genuine, sacrilegious beliefs, the ones he was sharing with Rachel Gaunt in his efforts to influence and indoctrinate her.

Archie Simmonds knew that there was no possibility of raised alarm and rescue. Things were very different back then. People could disappear for days and it never occurred to their friends to wonder at their absence. At a time when almost no one had a phone in their home, it was nothing unusual for someone to drop out of sight. You could spend a week in bed nursing flu and though your absence from lectures and seminars might be registered, no one would think to come looking for you. No one would think there was anything wrong.

He thought that they might kill him. The questions were persistent and the answers obviously inadequate and though the violence was controlled, they were not getting what they had taken the time and trouble to kidnap him to learn.

They had seen that he was her boyfriend and they had discovered he was an Ethics student. They had put two and two together and then convinced themselves that it must make four. But he hadn’t turned her against them. Why would he have done that, when he knew less than nothing about them?

About Rachel’s esoteric interests he knew slightly more. She had been intrigued by the occult philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, as a curious adolescent. She had then studied the written works of the English occultist Aleister Crowley. But she’d quickly tired of Crowley, the indignity of his last impoverished years in Brighton bedsits seeming to have disillusioned her. She thought occult rituals should have a pay-off beyond notoriety. It was power she wanted and it was miracles she sought personally to work.

‘Have you heard of Chaos Magic, Tom?’

‘I don’t know anything about magic beyond Derren Brown and Dynamo. I remember Paul Daniels from being a kid, but that’s not what you’re on about.’

‘No, I’m talking not about illusions but about real magic. Chaos Magic is predicated on the belief that you increase your power as a practitioner by breaking all the taboos. There was a persistent rumour at Absalom Court that Rachel had tracked down her birth father and, while concealing her true identity, deliberately seduced him. Quite a fanciful rumour and I don’t know if it was true but I never heard her deny it.’

The irony, as Archie sat being interrogated and tortured, was that his romance with Rachel was coming to an end. After her flirtation with Crowley, she had taken an interest in theosophy and that had persisted and deepened. The stuff she had started to dabble in since he’d met her was too dark for him, well beyond the bounds of conventional morality. It was in the process of destroying their relationship. He had always known she was amoral and while at first that had excited him, now it made him fearful of what she might do. But he thought that if he confided in his kidnappers by letting them know what she was doing they might react by slitting his throat and putting his body in the nearest pig trough.

‘Eventually they let me go,’ he told Tom. ‘A fully trained and field-hardened intelligence operative couldn’t have kept the denials up for as long as I did and after two days and nights of it they must have known I had to be telling the truth.’

‘Except that you didn’t tell them the whole truth.’

‘I had an idea of what she was up to. I didn’t really want to know, by that stage. Anyway I broke down after the abduction and spent some time in a sanitarium and by the time I resumed my studies the following academic year she’d been dead for almost six months.’

‘Who were Martens and Degrue?’

‘It’s not really relevant.’

‘I’d like to know.’

‘They’re just a subsidiary. They’re wholly owned by the Jericho Society, which is an extremely secretive organization which I also believe to be quite dangerous. I did some research into them a few years ago to satisfy my own nagging curiosity, probed as far as I dared. They seem to be a demonic cult, founded in the French Revolutionary Terror and far more influential than they ought to be.’

‘They raised Rachel Gaunt in an orphanage they ran.’

Archie Simmonds nodded. ‘And they lost her and they weren’t very happy about it.’

‘What did they lose her to, in the end?’

‘They lost her to theosophy, Tom, to a more seductive belief system than the one they provided her with.’

Tom had remembered something. He had remembered the man in the raincoat watching him as he stood at Rachel’s graveside the previous afternoon in the Stoke Newington necropolis.

Outside, the weather had changed. The sky had darkened sending murky shadows and etching crevices of gloom in Archie’s study. He looked older in this light and Tom knew that some of these memories were, for the moment, tormenting him. A gust of wind hurled rain in an angry patter against the window panes.

‘What was the attraction for her, in you?’

‘You’re probably thinking she was looking for someone good to corrupt, but it was much more mundane than that. I wasn’t bad-looking, back then. I rowed and boxed and led the backs in the first fifteen at rugger. She had a powerful appetite for sex and I was someone who could keep up. It was never more really than a rather torrid fling.’

It was a fling that had haunted him for half a century. Tom said, ‘Can we get to what is relevant?’

‘You’re not going to like this part.’

‘I didn’t expect to.’

‘Have you heard of the Dweller on the Threshold?’

‘It’s a song by Van Morrison.’

‘If only it was only that.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s a being they talk about in theosophy. It’s a sort of malign spirit that lurks with the ambition of replacing a living person. It lives fully only at the expense of that person, someone it can single out and come to resemble to make the replacement seamless.’

Tom felt colder than it could have been in the room. It had become gloomy in there and wet outside but it was still late May. He shivered. He said to Archie Simmonds, ‘How would you become one of these Dwellers on the Threshold, or return as one, if you’d been human in the first place?’

Quietly, Archie said, ‘It was Rachel’s belief that she could achieve it through sacrifice.’

Tom closed his eyes. He was seeing the boys and girls in the cine film, the clever and good-looking youngsters who’d not lived to see the Sixties swing. It was one of the parts of the puzzle he’d told Rebecca in the cab on the way to the cemetery yesterday he hadn’t wanted to discover.

He said goodbye to Archie at the door, who surprised him with a full embrace at their parting, strong and sincere.

‘Steady, Archie,’ he said, returning it. ‘One of your neighbours might see you.’

‘I don’t give a damn who sees me,’ Archie said. ‘You were a magnificent player, skilled, brave and sporting.’

‘Only in the internationals, mind,’ Tom said, ‘only in an England shirt.’

‘Only in the internationals, of course,’ Archie said. There was a tremor in his voice. ‘Take care, Tom. And take all the care you can of Rebecca Green.’

He caught a cab back into town and Bond Street. He wasn’t particularly eager to get home. He was looking forward to seeing Rebecca, later, but felt things were coming to their conclusion now and there was something he needed to pick up from the shop where he’d recently bought his Bremont watch.

The watch had cost him just over three and a half grand. The item he was after now was priced considerably higher than that, but he could afford it and thought the cost justified. En route, his cabbie told him at some length and in considerable detail about his son’s team, which played on Hackney Marshes, where he insisted that the only thing preventing the players from achieving a Premiership level of performance was the bumpy state of the pitches.

He met Rebecca for dinner at the pizzeria in Gabriel’s Wharf. It was a place with recent, happy associations for both of them. She listened to what he had to say as she ate, without looking at him. When he had finished, she put down her knife and fork and took a sip of her wine and raised her eyes. She said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re not tempted.’

‘I was physically aroused by the scent of her, touching her dress.’

‘She gave you a boner.’

‘Yes, if you have to put it like that.’

‘In some ways she’d be perfect for you. I knew you’d want to sleep with her.’

‘I don’t think I’d get much sleep.’

‘That’s precisely my point. She’s clever and fearless and she doesn’t give a fuck. And you’ve led a monastic sort of life in many respects.’ Rebecca smiled. ‘You’ve got some catching up to do.’

‘We shouldn’t talk about her in the present tense. It’s perverse.’

‘It would be dangerous to do otherwise, Tom. It would be self-deceiving. She’s coming back. We both know it. And if she hasn’t done so already, she’ll seduce you into helping her. You’ll only be a fling, but what a fling. She’s the crash course in the kind of life you’ve only ever masturbated about. I wonder if her Chaos Magic can do anything about your knee.’

‘It’s hurtful listening to you speak like this.’

‘I haven’t said anything you haven’t thought. You’re going to have to make a choice, Tom. If she comes through that door it’s at your invitation and at my expense. I know she’s real. She laughed at me while you were sleeping. You didn’t know that, did you? She’s confident of the outcome here. She must have studied you. I get the feeling she thinks she knows you better than you know yourself. Maybe she does.’

‘She doesn’t,’ he said.

‘Then invite me back tonight. Implore me. Want me. Mean it. You’ll do it, Tom, or I’ll walk out of that restaurant door right now and I swear you’ll never lay eyes on me again.’

‘You don’t think it’s dangerous?’

‘’Course it’s fucking dangerous. But it doesn’t matter where I am, does it? You invite her through that door and it makes me an affront to nature, just an anomaly really, an insult that the world can’t tolerate. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, whoever I’m with doesn’t matter. She comes, I’m gone. Or are you too naive to grasp that?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not too naive to grasp that.’ He paused. Then he said, ‘You know what it is that separates great players from those that are content just with being good?’

‘I hardly think this is the time to be discussing football.’

‘It’s making the right decisions at the crucial moments. It’s not just having the nerve to step up and say you’ll take the penalty kick. It’s waiting that eternity for the whistle to blow and then when it finally does, placing the kick where the keeper can’t reach it, in the top corner, from a dead ball, in front of the billion people you know are watching you.’

‘And you could do that?’

‘I did that every single time, Rebecca.’

‘That’s really comforting to know, Tom.’

‘Sarcasm and contempt won’t put me off you, you know. My feelings for you run too deep.’ He reached across the table and took both of her hands in his. ‘Will you come home with me now?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She even managed a smile. ‘I’ll come home with you, Mr Harper. I thought you’d never bloody ask.’

The party was in full swing when they returned to Absalom Court. There might have been only one arrival and a gate-crasher at that, but she was making her presence unquestionably felt. A haze of Gauloises smoke had seeped through the basement door into the sitting room. Kind of Blue was melodic and insistent and loud from below. Shalimar perfume sweetened air that would have been sour otherwise with burnt tobacco. It was heady and it smelled expensive in a chic, continental sort of way.

There was laughter, which was disconcerting. Rachel Gaunt had a husky, abrupt bark of a laugh. It was explosive and sardonic, the mirth of a capricious nature. It was amused, but cruelly so. Coming from someone long dead it was not something anyone could comfortably listen to. Wordlessly, they approached the basement door. And Rebecca heard the stiletto clack of the thing on the other side of it get louder, ascending the stone steps deliberately as it neared them.

They could have sensed the presence even had it been silent. There was a gravid, static charge this close to its lair. The air felt heated by some out-of-kilter force, as though some transition loomed, grave and unearthly. But it wasn’t silent. There was the subtle insistence on the other side of the door of skin quietly writhing under satin.

Then it spoke.

‘Tom Harper, here in the flesh, as I live and breathe.’ To Rebecca’s ears, Rachel Gaunt’s voice bore the velvet promise of slow and languorous coupling. She glanced at Tom, but his face betrayed nothing of what he was thinking. From its other side, the handle of the door was tested and teased. For now, it remained locked. For now it did, she thought.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ said the voice. ‘You might be the best looking man I’ve seen since Terence Stamp was Billy Budd and that was in ’sixty-two. Have you seen that one, Tom? Ustinov directed. We could watch it together, you and I. You’ve the space for a screening room down here; it’s the perfect spot, with the absence of natural light. I know how much you enjoy your films.’

Tom didn’t respond. He bit his lip. Her voice had breeding and musicality when she spoke in sentences. She sounded clever and civilized.

‘Where are your manners, Tom? You hadn’t struck me as uncouth. It’s disappointing, this failure to observe the common courtesies. Aren’t you going to invite me to join you?’

Again, he didn’t respond to her. And when she spoke next, the tone of her voice was pitched differently; somewhere gleeful and lascivious where Rebecca suspected it truly belonged.

‘Don’t be timid, Tom. Life’s a gamble or it’s nothing. Don’t you want to live all the way up? Don’t you crave that?’ Laughter again, throaty and knowing. ‘All you have to lose is your innocence. You’ve a surplus of that. It’s not before time, sweetheart. And I’m quite a ride.’

Fingernails were drawn down the other side of the door in a slow, reluctant squeal of lust and anticipation. The voice was closer now, lips almost kissing the wood, on the brink, on the very threshold as the dweller’s voice descended to an intimate whisper. ‘You really haven’t lived at all, Tom. You’ll live like you’ve never imagined you would with me. You’ll revel in sensations you’ve never dreamt about. I’ll be your guide and mentor, your lover and companion. I’ll take you in hand. You’ll be emptied and dazed by me. And I don’t make idle boasts.’

On her side of the door, all Rebecca could hear was Tom’s breathing, shallow through arousal or terror or both. He might be as thrilled as he was fearful; she couldn’t tell, all judgment dulled by her own consuming dread.

‘I can make you well again, Tom. Think about that. You’ll be whole with me, complete. You’ll play,’ a chuckle, seductive with promise, ‘then you’ll come home and we’ll play together, just you and me, games we’ll improvise intimately.’

Tom said nothing in reply.

‘Explore me, Tom, discover my deep mysteries.’

Tom closed his eyes.

‘I’m wearing my blue dress. I want you to tear it off me. More than anything, I long for that. I know you do, too. I’m impatient for it. I’m ripe for you.’

Still Tom said nothing. Rebecca wondered was he succumbing to the potent spell of Rachel’s enchantment, to the lubricious allure of what she was offering him? He was only flesh and blood and had already confessed to having felt desire for her and she might yet prove irresistible.

There was a new scent, a fresh secretion to complement the sound of her. It was partly her perfume still but corrupted by something deep and sweetish that made the senses reel with longing and that Rebecca knew was the moist, abundant budding of her sex.

‘Come, Tom,’ Rachel purred.

Rebecca saw Tom open his eyes and look at her, then, and the look was strong and unflinching with resolve. He took something from his pocket and it shone in the light and it was a ring. It was a fat circle of gold studded with precious stones. Bloodshot rubies alternated with the glittering green of emeralds. He held it in front of her eyes and in a voice she thought impossibly clear and calm said, ‘Will you wear my ring, Rebecca?’

‘I will,’ she said. She held out her left hand to accept it.

On the other side of the door, the thing at the top of the basement steps grunted out a feral snarl.

He slipped the ring onto her finger. It was slightly loose, a size too big and then it tightened, white hot, and the flesh beneath it began to burn.

Rachel laughed.

Rebecca could smell the stench of her own searing flesh and her hand clawed up in agony, but she would not remove the ring. She stared through the black swoon of pain trying to claim her and her teeth ground and her knees buckled under her and she thought she might vomit, and then the metal cooled and the pain receded and was gone. It had provoked tears. She blinked through them, smiling now at Tom. He reached for her and she clenched his palm in hers.

There was a moan from the other side of the door, low and abject. The thing that had once been Rachel Gaunt scrabbled and gnarled at the wood. She groaned and beat at it and the door shuddered in its frame and the lock strained but she remained uninvited and the obstacle held and eventually the noises faded and stopped and there was silence. They waited with breath paused above the space she’d occupied. They waited while the silence held and then eventually a sort of stillness descended. She’d been rudely dragged back to whatever darkness she came from. Rebecca was sure she had gone.

‘We need to be certain,’ Tom said.

But when they looked, there was nothing living in the basement now. The shards of a vinyl record lay shattered on the flagstones. A zinc ashtray still smouldered, heaped with lipsticked butts. The remains of a small cat, skeletal, the bones bleached and powdery, reclined in the long, still, slumber of death. That was all. These were her relics.

‘I’m not normally a fan of bling,’ Rachel said, holding out her hand, examining the ring in daylight.

‘It was symbolic. It was a statement of intent and a sign of commitment and it worked, didn’t it?’

‘What gave you the idea?’

‘I was buying a wristwatch in Bond Street and it just sort of came to me.’

‘For someone who’s supposed to be stupid, you’re actually quite bright.’

‘Who said I’m stupid?’

‘It’s axiomatic, dear. You’re a footballer.’

‘I’m an ex-footballer.’

‘I wonder if she really could have mended your injured knee.’

‘Immaterial. The passive smoking would have done for me.’

Tom looked at the headstone. They were at Rachel Gaunt’s graveside. They had placed fresh flowers in a vase on the plot, but that wasn’t the only change. The legend RIP now embellished the granite. It looked more burned than chipped into the stone, but was deep and emphatic. Tom thought he knew whose handiwork it was.

‘She checked out to try to get away from them,’ he said.

‘From that cult, that Jericho Society, you mean?’

‘It was the only sure way she could think of. It must have seemed the best solution. She wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been certain of coming back.’

‘You sound almost sorry for her.’

‘I almost am.’

‘How tempted were you, Tom? How close did you actually come to giving in?’

‘I’m happy with the choice I made.’

‘That isn’t really answering the question.’

‘I don’t think I can answer the question, not without getting into a lot of trouble. But what I’ve just told you is completely true.’

‘It’s about making the right choices at the crucial moments, yes?’

‘You were actually listening, when I said that?’

‘Did you really score with every penalty kick you ever took?’

‘Of course I didn’t. Some of them I buggered up completely, but it wouldn’t have been at all helpful to tell you that just then.’

‘Come on,’ Rebecca said, taking his arm. ‘We need to be going. We’ve got a statement of intent and a sign of commitment to work on and frankly, Mr Harper, there’s no time to lose.’

A Note on the Author

F.G. Cottam was born and brought up in Southport, Lancashire. He read History at the University of Kent before moving to London to pursue a career in journalism. During the 1990s, he was prominent in the revolution of the men’s magazine. He played a key part in the launch of FHM, Total Sport and Men’s Health.

Now a father of two, Cottam lives in Kingston-upon-Thames. His fiction is thought up over daily runs along the towpath between the bridges of Kingston and Hampton Court.

Discover books by F.G. Cottam published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/fgcottam

A Shadow of the Sun
Slapton Sands
The Fire Fighter
The Lazarus Prophecy

This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 2015 F.G. Cottam

The moral right of the author is asserted.

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eISBN: 9781448215782

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