She turned forward, flipping through several pages of detailed information on the Halkin family properties – covering, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, several counties. Then several plates of photographs. As she flipped through them, she stopped with a start, turning back to a scene of London that looked familiar.
Frannie felt her skin tightening around her body. The book shook in her hands as she was confronted by a print of Victorian London. The City. Hansom cabs and horse-drawn carts travelled down the street, and the shops were different. But she knew exactly where it was. She had spent most of her childhood there. The junction of Poultry with Cheapside. The front few buildings of Poulterers’ Alley were clearly visible in the centre of the print.
Her eyes dived down to the caption at the bottom. Her focus blurred and she had to concentrate her vision: ‘Site of original London residence of Halkin family. (Destroyed in Great Fire of 1666.) Now occupied by offices and shops of Poulterers’ Alley.’
Where their sandwich bar had been.
Frannie ran out of the gallery and down the stairs, raced down the corridor to the phone booths, wanting to be more private than back in her office. She spilled a handful of coins on to the surface of the box and dialled Oliver’s office number.
His secretary informed her, in a very formal voice, that Lord Sherfield had left at midday to go to the country, owing to a family bereavement and was not expected back today.
She rang Meston and Mrs Beakbane answered. She had not seen Oliver and gave Frannie Charles’s number. Hesitantly, she tried that, but there was no reply.
She headed back to her office, her heart thumping. Declan O’Hare appeared out of a doorway and walked down towards her, moving in slow motion like a character in a dream.
‘Are you all right, Frannie? With us? You don’t look as if you’ve quite made it to Planet Earth today.’
‘I’m OK,’ she said.
OK OK OK. The word reverberated down the corridor.
‘Well that’s good. Not happy about working on the exhibition?’
‘Very happy.’
‘Good.’
GOOD OOD OOD. The echo followed her boss’s footsteps. The corridor stretched and shrank, then a double door swallowed him and closed with a bang like a muffled shot.
She opened the clasp of her handbag with fingers
that were not working properly, fumblingly removed the lemon cupcake, pressed in one of the tiny candles she had bought, then tried to strike a book match. It fell from her fingers. She tore another out, lit it and carried the cake into her office. ‘Happy birthday!’ she said, trying to sound cheerful.
Spode looked up, startled, from a phone conversation. She put the tiny cake on his desk, pulled the card from her handbag, put that beside the cake and went to her own desk.
Spode terminated his conversation hastily. His eyes went from the card to the cake to Frannie and back. He read the card then set it carefully on his desk.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Frannie. Thank you very much.’ His voice was choked with emotion.
Her phone rang, startling her. It was Oliver.
‘How are you, Frannie?’ he said.
‘I was trying to get hold of you,’ she told him. Her throat felt as if it were full of rocks. ‘I’ve found it!’
‘Found what?’
‘The connection. I’ve found the connection!’ Her voice wasn’t working properly, wouldn’t let her speak at the speed at which she was thinking. ‘You’re not going to believe it. It’s the café. Poulterers’ Alley. Does that address mean anything to you?’
‘Not a thing,’ he said blankly.
‘Your family home in London that got burned down in the Great Fire, in 1666?’
‘What about it? I’m not with you.’
‘It was on the site that is now Poulterers’ Alley. That’s where my parents had their café!’
He was silent for some moments. ‘Godfathers,’ he said. ‘That’s where you had the Ouija session?’
‘Yes. That’s the link, isn’t it? It must be!’
‘You’re certain about the site?’
‘It’s in the library here.’
‘
Non omnis moriar
,’ he said.
Fear crawled across her skin like a living thing. ‘
Non omnis moriar
,’ she repeated. She no longer cared whether Spode was listening or not. ‘I think I’m beginning to understand,’ she said.
‘I haven’t been able to speak to the Bishop yet – he’s away until late tonight. His secretary’s trying to get hold of him to ask him to call me. Charles is in a terrible state, I had to come down and try and get him a bit organized, make some arrangements. Got to sort out the funeral, got to get the body released by the coroner after the post-mortem. There’s more cattle gone sick and I’ve got the vet coming this evening but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to get here until nine.’
‘Can I do anything to help?’
‘No. I just want you to be careful. Best thing is I’ll call you later, as soon as I hear from the Bishop – I hope we can see him some time tomorrow.’
After he had hung up, Frannie stared bleakly at the kinked and twisted cord attached to the receiver. At the grubby dial; at the grain of the wood of her desk, noticing holes, scratches, the dull shine from the light bulb above.
The cursor on her word-processor screen blinked at her. She untwisted the plastic cord with her fingers. Spode’s fountain pen scratched busily across the lined paper of a notebook. She smelled a faint trace of molten wax from the candle he had extinguished on his cupcake, and it reminded her of the candles in Oliver’s bedroom.
She tapped in a fresh file access code on her keyboard, her brain on autopilot, her thoughts on Oliver, on Tristram, on Poulterers’ Alley, on a night three and a half years ago.
She shivered. Tentacles stretched back into the past. She closed her eyes. If she could turn the clock back. Could have told Seb Holland that night to keep on driving, not to stop, could have told him she had changed her mind, that the cellar wasn’t really a good idea after all …
Twenty-five years they had had that café. Her parents had taken it before she was born. All her childhood she had played in there, worked in there. On the site of Oliver’s ancestral London home. The site where the second Marquess had murdered small boys. Where he himself had been murdered; by a red-hot poker.
What the hell had they contacted and picked up down there in that cellar? What had been there all along? All the time she had been scared as a child to go down? The bogeyman? The shadow, the scrape that was like a dragging foot – was that who it was?
The wrong file came up on the screen. She read the words, too scared by her thoughts to be irritated. ‘
Homo habilis
. Skhul. Vindja. Upper Palaeolithic. Java Man. Peking Man.’ Bones. Dead, long dead, whatever had happened mattered no more, unless you lived in some kind of parallel universe or whatever it was Declan O’Hare had gone on about not long ago.
There were no such things as ghosts.
Penrose Spode was looking at her. ‘Are you all right, Frannie?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘You’re crying.’
She put her hands to her cheeks, startled. They were wet. She sniffed, pulled out her handkerchief and dabbed them. ‘Sorry,’ she said, sniffed again and forced a smile.
His lips closed in a silent apology for his intrusion, but he continued to stare at her. She thought he was
never going to return to his work. Then he laid his elbows on his desk, pressed the fingertips of both hands together and inclined his head, shyly. ‘I don’t know – if you have any other plans – but – er – if you don’t – er – would you have dinner with me?’
‘Come to your birthday party?’
‘I’m not having a birthday party,’ he said quietly. ‘I wasn’t doing anything tonight.’
She looked back at him, surprised, and feeling sorry for him. Considered the prospect of going back to her empty flat, waiting for Oliver to ring, sitting alone with her thoughts. Did not want to be alone.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’d love to.’
Penrose Spode was getting drunk. Frannie could see it in his co-ordination, in the way he was articulating with his hands; in the way his expression was becoming soppier and his voice slurring. She was getting drunk too; the booze cheered her, made her feel safe, made everything seem all right, just a bad dream, that was all.
Spode tried to pick a peanut out of the goo of dark sauce with his chopsticks. The points of the sticks clacked together a full inch short of the nut. He persevered, focusing with difficulty, and finally held the nut up triumphantly. As he moved it towards his mouth, it slipped free and tumbled down his chest leaving a sticky brown trail through the grains of rice that already adorned his yellow T-shirt.
‘Ooopsh!’ he said.
Frannie wanted to stay drunk, to get drunker still. She signalled to the waiter for another bottle of Pinot Grigio. Spode registered mock alarm with his eyes and went for a mushroom in another of the array of Thai dishes on the table. He hoisted it up, trapped between
the points of his sticks, then it shot out and skidded across the white tablecloth like an ice-hockey puck.
‘Have you always been interested in archaeology?’ Frannie asked him.
He hovered his chopsticks over the errant mushroom as if he was hoping to catch it unawares. ‘Yes.’
‘What in particular interests you?’
He inclined his head, leaning forwards a fraction, and drawing her in towards him as if he was letting her into a great secret. ‘The past speaks to me.’
‘Speaks?’
‘Yes.’
She plucked out a hot, spicy prawn, and Spode’s eyes followed her chopsticks as if he was watching a conjuring trick. ‘You mean you have conversations with the past? What do you say to each other?’
Spode grinned, then hastily covered his mouth with his hand and resumed his inert expression of seriousness.
‘Psychometry,’ Spode said, keeping his voice low.
‘Huh?’
‘I have this gift.’
‘Psychometry?’
The waitress presented the bottle for inspection, hovered between Frannie and Spode and was rescued by Frannie. Her mouth burned from a hot prawn and she could barely detect any flavour as she tasted it. ‘Fine,’ she said, then looked back at Spode. ‘What’s psychometry?’
‘I can tell things about the past by touching objects.’
‘You mean you’re psychic?’
Spode blushed. ‘Sort of.’
She ate a mouthful of cod in ginger. ‘You’re a dark horse, aren’t you!’
He cradled his freshly filled glass, and drank by
lowering his mouth to it. Wine trickled down his chin. ‘People think you’re a bit –’ he tapped the side of his head. ‘You know – if you talk about these things.’
‘So what sort of things can you tell by touching objects?’
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On the strength of the imprints.’ He eyed a prawn, then stared dubiously at his chopsticks. ‘On the condition of the object. Where it’s been stored.’
‘Why does that affect it?’
‘Objects pick up everything emotional that happens close to them.’
‘How?’
He leaned forwards and she thought for a moment he was going to try to kiss her. ‘They absorb things, the same as walls do, in their subatomic particles, or somewhere. I can read them. Usually works best if it’s a personal object – or something that’s been buried and undisturbed for years.’
‘What sort of personal objects?’
‘Rings. Watches. Bracelets.’
‘Could you read my watch?’
He looked at her scratched and battered Citizen quartz. ‘How long have you had it?’
‘My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday.’
He put down his chopsticks. She unclipped it and gave it to him. He closed his hand around it and stared up at the ceiling with such intensity that his pupils almost disappeared and all she could see were the whites of his eyes. His expression alarmed her, short-circuiting her feelings of pleasant oblivion.
‘I’m getting a young man with a red sports car, and a link with fish. I think you had a boyfriend who was a fishmonger. Not really a boyfriend, a boy you went
out with but did not like. People wanted you to marry him but you were not interested; almost like an arranged marriage, I am sensing. A source of anger between you and your father. Your father was keen for you to marry him, there was plenty of money in the boy’s family. And now I’m getting more anguish between you and your father. Always you and your father, your mother is meek; it’s your father you fight and you feel guilty about it but you never give in because you are a very determined girl.’
She stared at him in amazement. He was talking louder, his voice sounding increasingly excited. ‘Yes, yes, archaeology; a source of contention! Your father was angry that you wanted to do archaeology because there is no money in it. You have fought with him often over this. You have a younger sister who always wears a black hat. You are deeply in love at this moment with a man you met at a railway station.’ He fell silent.
People were turning round and looking at them. Frannie was aware that conversation at other tables in the restaurant had subsided; she was trembling with a strange current that was flowing through her, disturbing the rhythm of her body, and she was blushing hard. It took her some moments before she had collected her thoughts enough to speak.
‘That’s extraordinary, Penrose.’ Her face was in a tight frown, trying to think back, to remember if she had ever told him any of this. They had exchanged pleasantries and talked about work, but never conversed about anything personal before. ‘Can you tell me any more about this man I met at a railway station?’
He closed his eyes. ‘He has a boy. No wife. She is dead.’
‘And the boy? Can you tell me about him?’
She watched him sit in silent concentration. Again the pupils almost completely disappeared; his fist was clenched tightly around the watch, shaking with the tension. He looked as if he was about to say something. Then suddenly, quite unexpectedly, he shot his hand out towards her and uncurled his fingers, presenting the watch to her with an intensely reproachful expression. ‘You’d better take it back.’
She felt herself sobering and her nerves shimmying. ‘What’s the matter?’