all along.
“Why do you think I agreed to see you, to talk to you like this? I did it because I felt I should warn you, that I could do that at least. There’s something in that house, and it killed my daughters.”
“You’re not serious?”
“Believe me or not, it’s up to you. Just don’t bring any more children into that house.”
She put her glasses back on, becoming the sane and matter-of-fact ex-teacher I had met when I first arrived. What she was saying was so out of kilter with the way she looked I found myself wondering if her madness wasn’t contagious.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I said. “Are you talking about ghosts?” I remembered the child from the allotments, calling up at my window and waving her hand. Ghosts were just a game to her.
Rand smiled.
“Ghosts have no physical power over reality. All they can do is manifest themselves, cast an influence. That’s what the experts will tell you anyway. I know you only came here for a story and I suppose you think you’ve got your money’s worth. Don’t think I don’t know how I sound. But I’ve done my best to warn you and that’s all I can do.” She paused. “All life’s disasters sound insane if you try and explain them out loud, have you ever noticed that? I would never have believed a word of this if it hadn’t happened to me.”
Soon afterwards the bell went and I had to leave. I told her I would come and see her again, not knowing if I meant it or not. I passed along the corridor to the exit, where a member of the security staff stood ready to claim my visitor’s pass. The view from the first floor was a swoon of greenness, and when I learned later that the building had won several industry design awards I wasn’t surprised. But when all was said and done it was still a mental hospital. There were security guards at all the entrances, and every outside window was barred.
I drove home slowly, taking the back roads to avoid the rush-hour traffic. As I turned into the narrow lane that led to our house a child dashed across the road in front of the car. I slammed on the brakes, swerving instinctively, but when I stepped out of the car there was no one there. I cooked supper then made coffee and began playing back the tape of my interview with Allison Rand.
The house was quiet, so quiet, and when a knock came at the back door it startled me so much I almost fell off my chair. Roy and I had never mixed much in the town, and I had no idea who my visitor might be. For a moment I found myself wondering what I would do if I opened the door to find Allison Rand standing there, a knife in her hand, her lips stretched in a tight little smile. Such things were not unheard of. You read about them in the papers every day.
It was not Allison Rand though; it was the girl from the allotments. I had not spoken to her since the day she had mentioned murder in my house, although I had seen her up at the allotments a couple of times since, playing with the Jack Russell terrier on the unkempt patch of grass behind the man with the missing fingers’ wooden shed. She was wearing different clothes: a floral summer frock in printed cotton. There was something old-fashioned about it, and once again I had the feeling it had been altered to fit her. She had no coat on, no cardigan, though the evening was not particularly warm.
“I brought you something,” she said. “Look at this.”
She thrust something at me, a piece of paper. It was a newspaper cutting. I expected to see some faded headline about Allison Rand but I was mistaken. The cutting showed newspaper coverage of the trial for murder of a woman named Lorna Loomis. Part of the article was missing.
“You should have some warmer clothes on,” I said. “You’ll get goose bumps.”
She made a face, and I noticed that in spite of the evening chill her skin showed no sign of gooseflesh. It was the colour of chalk, sprinkled with pale brown freckles.
There was no photograph of Lorna Loomis. She had lived in the town though, the article said so. She was what used to be called
I shivered, then realized the back door was still open.
“Come in and I’ll make you a sandwich,” I said to the girl.
She lounged at the kitchen table, all elbows and knees. I noticed the way she looked at my iPod, her eyes wide, as if it were an alien artefact.
“Don’t touch that,” I said. I didn’t want her erasing Allison Rand’s interview by mistake. The girl started back at once, folding her arms beneath the table, and I realized I must have spoken more harshly than I’d intended. I supposed she might be accustomed to getting hit. Her reaction suggested it, though I hated to believe it was so.
“Do you like cheese?” I said. “Marmite?”
“I lo-o-ve Marmite,” she said. She stretched the ‘o’ length-wise, twanging the vowel in midair like a piece of elastic. “All my friends hate it, but that only makes me like it more.”
I laughed at that. The girl was clearly sharp as a flint. It wasn’t late, not yet, but it was getting later. I wondered who knew she was out, if anyone cared.
“Why did you bring me this?” I said. I picked up the cutting from where I had placed it, on the kitchen table. It crackled between my fingers, brittle with age, and I realized that if I didn’t handle it more carefully it would disintegrate.
The girl bit into her sandwich and began to chew. “I thought you wanted to know,” she said. “About the murder, I mean.” She shifted in her seat. “It’s different in here,” she said. “It was darker before. A horrible green colour.” She stuffed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth and gulped it down. “I’d better go now.”
She left as she had arrived, through the back door. I stood at the sink and washed up her plate, feeling vaguely worried about what she might be going home to and wondering when she had been in the house before. The kitchen had not been green when Roy and I bought the house; the young couple we’d bought from, the property developers, had drowned the whole place in magnolia.
Perhaps Allison Rand’s kitchen had been green. I read the clipping again, the words about Lorna Loomis,
The Gilmore was still there, a heavy-set, half-timbered building at the end of the High Street. One of Roy’s favourite haunts. Nancy Creel, I supposed, must have been the murder victim.
Suddenly I remembered the incident in the lane earlier that evening, the child who had rushed across the road in front of my car. At least I thought that was what I had seen, but when I’d climbed out of the car the road had been empty. Empty of traffic and empty of people. I had dismissed the whole thing at the time, probably because I was still preoccupied with Allison Rand, but all at once it seemed sinister and frightening.
I went all round the house, putting the lights on in every room and checking the doors and windows.
I should have found the thought amusing but I didn’t.
Information on Lorna Loomis was hard to find. In view of what I discovered later I still find that odd. It is as if her crime was considered so terrible that everyone who found themselves involved with it, however tangentially, became locked in some silent agreement to keep it secret. In any case, there was nothing on the internet. One afternoon shortly after my interview with Allison Rand I drove into Oxford and spent an afternoon in the newspaper archive attached to the Central Library, but the records were all still on microfiche and without a date for when the crime had occurred it was next to hopeless.
I thought of writing to Allison Rand and asking her if she had heard of the Loomis case. She was a historian after all, or at least she had been. But if the two crimes were connected, it seemed odd that Rand hadn’t mentioned Loomis during the course of my visit.
I decided not to contact her unless I had to. Allison Rand was clearly a disturbed person, and I wasn’t sure how far I could trust her. It wasn’t just that, though. I knew by then that Lorna Loomis would be the inspiration behind my next novel and I didn’t want to spoil things by talking about them. As far as was possible, I wanted to solve the Loomis mystery by myself.
I contacted our building society and asked if I could have a copy of the house deeds. It gave me a shock to see that the Rands had lived at our address for less than four years, that they had moved in just a couple of months before Sophie was born. Before the Rands the house had been the property of a Mr Dennis Michaels; before that the owner’s name had been Tillyer. I paged backwards through the document, jotting down the names in my
