blazing down on whoever passed. We’d seen the glow from the balcony of our cabin. Fairy lights rigged between them, presumably in preparation for the night’s birthday festivities. Security cameras, but pointed away from us because we were the wrong side of them. I assume that was the intention. A shining new aerial dish, twenty foot high, directed northish, as far as I could read it on our way back. Pointed at Miami. Or Houston perhaps. Anyone’s guess.’ He thought about this. ‘Well, not yours, obviously. You people are supposed to know that stuff.’
Is this a challenge or a joke? It’s neither. It’s Perry showing them how brilliant he is at doing their job, in case they haven’t noticed. It’s Perry the climber of north-facing overhangs, telling them he never forgets a route. It’s the Perry who can’t resist a challenge provided the odds are stacked against him.
‘Then downhill again through more forest to a bit of grass meadow with the headland sticking up at the end of it. In reality, the house hasn’t got a back. Or it’s all back, take your choice. It’s a pseudo-Elizabethan hotchpotch of a bungalow built out of clapboard and asbestos, facing three ways. Grey stucco walls. Poky leaded windows. Plywood pretending to be half-timber and a rear porch with a lantern dangling in it. Are you with me, Gail?’
Would I be here if I wasn’t? ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said. Which wasn’t quite what he’d asked.
‘Add-on bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and offices with front doors on them, suggesting that the place had been some sort of commune or settlement at one time. So I mean, overall a shambles. It wasn’t Dima’s fault. We knew that, thanks to Mark. The Dimas had never lived there till now. Never touched it apart from a crash job on the security. The idea didn’t bother us. To the contrary. It had a much-needed touch of reality about it.’
The ever-inquisitive Dr Yvonne is peering up from her medical notes. ‘But were there no chimneys after all that, Perry?’
‘Two attached to the remnants of a sugar mill on the western edge of the peninsula, the third at the edge of the woods. I thought I put that in our document as well.’
Our bloody document? How many times have you said that now? Our document that you wrote and I haven’t been allowed to see, but they have? It’s your bloody document! It’s their bloody document! Her cheeks were scorching, and she hoped he’d noticed.
‘Then as we started down towards the house, about twenty metres from it, I suppose, Dima slowed us down,’ Perry was saying, his voice gathering intensity. ‘With his hands. Slow down.’
‘And would it be here also that he put his finger to his lips in a gesture of complicity?’ Yvonne asked, popping her head up at him while she wrote.
‘Yes it was!’ Gail leaped in. ‘Exactly here. Huge complicity. First slow down, then shut up. We assumed the finger to the lips was all part of surprising the children, so we played along with it. Ambrose had said they’d been packed off to the crab races, so it seemed a bit odd they were still in the house. But we just assumed something had changed and they hadn’t gone after all. Or I did.’
‘Thank you, Gail.’
For what, for Christ’s sake? For upstaging Perry? Don’t mention it, Yvonne, it’s a pleasure. She raced on:
‘Dima had us on tiptoe by now. Literally holding our breath. We didn’t doubt him – I think it’s a point to make. We were obeying him, which isn’t like either of us, but we were. He led us to a door, a house door, but a side one. It wasn’t locked, he just pushed it and went in ahead, then immediately swung round, with one hand up in the air and the other one to his lips like’ – like Daddy playing Boots in a Christmas pantomime, but sober, she was going to say, but didn’t – ‘well, and this really intense stare, urging silence on us. Right, Perry? Your turn.’
‘Then, when he knew he had us, he beckoned us to follow. I went first.’ Perry’s tone by contrast minimal in deliberate counterpoint to hers – his voice for when he’s truly excited and pretending he isn’t. ‘We crept into an empty hall. Well, hall! It was about ten by twelve feet, with a cracked, west-facing window with diamond panes made out of masking tape and the evening sun pouring through them. Dima still had his finger to his lips. I stepped inside and he grabbed hold of my arm, the way he’d grabbed it on the court. Strength in a league of its own. I couldn’t have competed with it.’
‘Did you think you might have to compete with it?’ Luke inquired, with male sympathy.
‘I didn’t know what to think. I was worried about Gail and my concern was to get myself between them. For a few seconds, only.’
‘And long enough for you to realize it wasn’t a children’s game any more,’ Yvonne suggested.
‘Well, it was beginning to dawn,’ Perry confessed, and paused, his voice drowned out by the wail of a passing ambulance in the street above them. ‘You have to understand the amount of unexpected din inside the place,’ he insisted, as if the one sound had set off the other. ‘We were only in this tiny hall, but we could hear the wind bumping the whole rickety house around. And the light was – well, phantasmagoric, to use a word my students love. It was coming at us in layers through the west window. You had this powdery light from the low cloud rolling in from the sea, and then a layer of brilliant sunlight riding in over the top of it. And pitch-black shadows where it didn’t reach.’
‘And cold,’ Gail complained, hugging herself theatrically. ‘Like only empty houses are. And that chilly graveyard smell they have. But all I was thinking was: where are the girls? Why no sight or sound of them? Why no sound of anybody or anything except the wind? And if nobody’s around, who were we doing all this secrecy stuff for? Who were we fooling except ourselves? And Perry, you were thinking the same, weren’t you, you told me so afterwards.’
* * * And behind Dima’s raised forefinger, a different face, Perry is saying. All the fun had gone out of it. Out of his eyes. It was humourless. Rigid. He really needed us to be afraid. To share his fear. And as we stand there bemused – and, yes, afraid – the spectral figure of Tamara materializes before us in a corner of the tiny hall where she’s been standing all along without us noticing, in the darkest recess on the other side of the shafts of sunlight. She’s wearing the same long black dress she wore at the tennis match, and wore again when she and Dima spied on them from the darkness of the people carrier, and she looks like her own ghost.
Gail grabbed back the story:
‘The first thing I saw was her bishop’s cross. Then the rest of her, forming round it. She’d plaited and braided her hair for the birthday party and rouged her cheeks, and daubed lipstick round her mouth – I mean, really round it. She looked as mad as a bedbug. She didn’t have her finger to her lips. She didn’t need to. Her whole body was like a warning sign in black and red. Forget Dima, I thought. This is really something. And of course I was still wondering what her problem was. Because boy, did she have one.’
Perry started to speak, but she talked stubbornly through him:
‘She was holding this sheet of paper in her hand – A4 typing paper, folded in half – and holding it up to us. For what? Was it a religious tract? Prepare to meet thy God? Or was she serving a writ on us?’
‘And Dima, where was he in this?’ Luke asked, turning back to Perry.
‘Finally let go of my arm,’ said Perry with a grimace. ‘But not before he’d made sure I was focusing on Tamara’s sheet of paper. Which she then proceeded to shove at me. With Dima nodding at me: read it. But still with his finger to his lips. And Tamara really possessed. Both of them possessed, actually. And wanting us to share their fear. But of what? So I read it. Not aloud, obviously. Not even immediately. I wasn’t in the sunlight. I had to take it to the window. On tiptoe: which shows you how much we were under the spell. And even after that, I had to turn my back to the window because the sunlight was so fierce. Then Gail had to give me my spare reading glasses from her handbag –’
‘– because as usual he’d left them behind in our cabin –’
‘Then Gail tiptoed up behind me –’
‘You beckoned to me –’
‘For your protection – and read it over my shoulder. And I suppose we read it, well, twice at least.’
