The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

said.

“Mr Rand,” I said. “Steven. My name is Marian Pritchard. I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions.” I told him my address then held my breath and waited. I heard him sigh.

“I’m sick of journalists,” he said. “It’s been three years. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I’m not a journalist,” I said. “I’m a novelist. It’s your house I’m interested in, not you.”

“It’s your house now,” he said. “Bad luck. I’ve got nothing to tell you.” Some of his initial hostility was gone, though. I even thought he sounded intrigued.

“You should speak to my wife,” he said. “She’s the one who believes in ghosts.”

“I’ve already done that. I’d like to hear your own thoughts, if you’ll share them.”

There was silence, and I thought he’d put down the phone. When he eventually spoke again he sounded resigned.

“I don’t suppose it can hurt,” he said. “God knows what Allison’s told you.”

We arranged to meet the following afternoon in a cafe we both knew near the centre of town.

“I like it because the kids hate it,” he said. “They think it’s poncey.”

“I googled you,” he said. “You really do write books, then.”

He was different from what I’d expected. I had imagined Allison Rand being married to someone like herself, buttoned up and a little staid. Steven Rand was confident and expansive. He was even good-looking, in an aquiline, ageing-maths-professor kind of way, and I imagined he was popular with his pupils. I thought he and Allison must have made an interesting couple, that they must once have been happy. I wondered how he felt about her now.

We ordered coffee. I watched Rand spoon brown sugar into his cup and wondered how I ought to begin. He solved that particular problem by himself.

“You might not believe this, but I’m glad you called me,” he said. “It’s the loneliest thing in the world when someone dies. People are all over you at first, but eventually they get bored. They’re tired of hearing the story and they’re sick of your feelings. It’s as if there’s a sell-by date, and once your time is up you’re supposed to be over it. Apart from school stuff and conversations with shop assistants, I’ve hardly spoken to anyone in months.”

“That must be terrible.”

He looked at me sharply, inquisitorially almost, as if he was trying to judge the sincerity of what I had said. “It is terrible actually, if you want to know. It makes you doubt your own existence. I’ve lost my two daughters, just at the point where I was coming to understand what it means to have daughters, the terror and the joy of it. They were alive, and now they’re dead. And here I am, still marking quadratic equations.” He sipped his coffee and made a face. “It’s the algebra that keeps me going, actually. It’s odd how things are, isn’t it? It’s the things that first enthral you when you’re young that turn out to be your survival kit later on.”

“It’s always been that way for me,” I said. “I started writing stories when I was five.”

“Is that all my life is to you then, a story?”

I hesitated. “Only if you think of mine as a quadratic equation.”

“Touche,” he said, then laughed. “My God, you’re as bolshie as Allison. I bet you two got on like a house on fire.”

“If you’re asking me if I liked her, then yes, I did.”

“I’m glad.” He took a sharp, nervous breath, as if he were about to dive underwater. “Allison’s mad, you know. I didn’t know that when I married her. Perhaps I would never have known, if we hadn’t had children. Did she tell you her theory about the house?”

“In a way she did. She said there was something in the house that harmed Alana and Sophie. I got the feeling she didn’t like to talk about it.”

“Well, you’d be wrong about that.” He spooned more sugar into his coffee. His movements were automatic, absent-minded. I knew he’d forgotten having done the same thing only minutes before. “For the final year of our marriage it was all she would talk about. Allison did a lot of research into our house’s history. She did that with all our houses. It’s something that gives her pleasure, the way I get a kick out of maths problems and you enjoy stories. Anyway, she discovered there’d once been a murder there. It wasn’t some common or garden domestic incident either, it was something horrible. I didn’t see that it mattered much. Everyone involved in the case was dead and that included the murderer. But Allison was quite upset by it. She started saying we should never have moved there, that we’d been lured. She’d never come out with anything like that before and I didn’t believe a word of it. To be honest, I thought it was hormonal. She was pregnant with Sophie by then, and the murder victim had been a little girl. I thought Ally would get over it but she didn’t. She was convinced the dead child was still in the house and trying to make contact with her. After Sophie was born things got worse. Allison started saying that the other girl – the murdered girl – was jealous of the new baby.

“I hate to say this but I was worried for my daughter. It wasn’t that Allison didn’t care for her – anyone could see she was besotted with the baby. But there was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I felt I didn’t know her any more.”

“You’re talking about the Loomis case, aren’t you? The name of the murdered child was Nancy Creel?”

“You know all that already, then?”

“Actually I hardly know anything. There’s no information anywhere. All I’ve been able to discover is their names.”

“Allison was always good with information. She had problems at first as well, but then she managed to turn up this grotty little true-crime book from somewhere that described the whole case from A to Z, even down to the court transcripts. It had Ally hooked from day one.”

“Did Lorna Loomis kill Nancy Creel?”

“In a manner of speaking she did. She kidnapped her and tied her up, then locked her in an upstairs bedroom. Then she took off to Chester to visit her cousin. Nancy Creel starved to death in her absence. It was a month before they found her body.”

“That’s appalling,” I said. I knew without having to ask that it was the box room Nancy Creel had died in, the room I had commandeered as my study. “Why on earth did she do it?”

“It was all on account of a man, if you can believe that. Lorna Loomis had been having an affair with Nancy Creel’s father. Tony Creel wanted to break it off, but Lorna Loomis was having none of it. She threatened to tell his wife, but Creel got there before her and confessed everything. Apparently the wife forgave him. He’d had affairs before and they never came to anything. Loomis was furious. She started telephoning the house at all hours of the day and night, making threats and shouting insults. If she hoped to drive a wedge between the Creels it didn’t work. Then suddenly the phone calls stopped. Six months later Nancy Creel went missing. Loomis knew Creel doted on Nancy. The child was probably the main reason he decided to break off the affair.”

“She killed the daughter to get back at the father?”

Rand nodded. “Her defence was that she never intended for Nancy to die, that she always meant to return to the house and release her. She just wanted to scare Tony Creel a bit first. But she fell and broke her leg while she was in Chester and her cousin insisted on keeping her there until the plaster came off. Loomis couldn’t think of any reasonable excuse not to stay, and the more time passed the more terrified she became of having to admit to what she’d done. Finally she convinced herself that Nancy’s kidnapping had all been a dream. That’s what she claimed anyway. You can imagine what the jury thought of that. She got life without chance of parole. If it had happened a decade earlier she’d have hanged for it.”

“Is Loomis still alive? She’d be old now.”

“She died eight years into her sentence. Allegedly of natural causes, although there was a story about one of the other inmates managing to sneak some arsenic into her food.”

I realized that I liked Steven Rand. I admired the way he had managed to hang on to himself in spite of his tragedy. Also I liked the way he told stories. Sitting in the cafe listening to him tell me about Lorna Loomis made me realize that the events as they had happened made a more compelling narrative than anything I could invent, and in spite of the horror of the thing I was tense with excitement.

Later, once I was home, a strange thing happened. I was in the bedroom, changing the sheets, when suddenly and out of nowhere I was overcome with desire for him. I wanted to know what it felt like, to be with him here in this room, to perform the sexual act in a place that still resonated with the terrible things that had happened there. I imagined Rand’s sinewy arms, the long lean rake of his body. He had told me there had been no one else in his life since Allison and I wondered with a tremor inside if that would bring an extra urgency to his