‘No, Matthew.’ He had that parental, cautionary tone again. ‘I’m going to the Hodges’ house. I want to hear their angle on all this.’
‘Hmmm. Good luck with that,’ Matt said. ‘Bob reckons when you cut a seance off mid flow it causes some sort of psychic wrenching. So don’t expect Joyce to be in a chatty mood. I think that’s why he whisked her off. To get her some rest.’
‘I see.’ Larry paused in Holly’s doorway and looked back up at the wooden beam silently. Holly’s beam. He did that for a long moment, enough for Matt to hear the breeze through the window and the tapping of the curtain rail.
‘Larry,’ Matt said. ‘Are you okay?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘You know, Keech told me …’
‘Told you what?’
‘That you were one of the officers who helped get her down. How come you didn’t mention that?’
He shrugged.
‘I can’t imagine what that’s like.’
After a long pause he said, ‘Holly was the first dead child I ever saw. Managed to avoid clocking something like that for years, until I came here that morning, back in the day.’ He pulled his eyes away from the beam and started to slowly scan the room. ‘… All that stuff you said happened in the seance. The alarms going off, the writing …’
‘What about it?’
‘You say Bob’s convinced that was Holly Wasson … breaking through?’ He glanced at the open door, and at the hundreds of Hollys staring out. Faces that seemed a little psychotic before were now sweet and innocuous, disturbing only because of their angling, and the sheer amount. One of them, a shot of her as a toddler pushing a wheeled horse down a path, was peeling off, so Larry pressed his finger against it, setting it carefully back into place. ‘In your … professional opinion, I mean – how do you explain this stuff? Don’t you reckon the Hodges might be onto something?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘If I’d seen someone levitate, or saw Holly herself appear on the doorstep, well, then I might be thinking differently. But all that so-called evidence tonight … a busted bulb, an old woman writing out what popped into her head. That was all circumstantial.’ He said it gently. ‘I’m sorry, but to me this is all just … just chasing after the wind.’
For the first time, Larry took his eyes from scanning Holly’s room and locked them on Matt. ‘You know something? You’re a mate, and no offence, but I don’t think I’d like a mind as black and white as yours.’
‘Just check the churches, Larry. Check all the churches.’
He nodded silently and headed out, and Matt stood on the landing to watch the front door of Barley Street click shut. Larry gone, Matt stood at the top of the stairs with his hand on the banister and had one of those silly, momentary lapses of self-awareness that sometimes follow times of high tension. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe he was finally admitting to himself that the seance, as silly as it was in theory, was actually quite stressful and upsetting in practice.
And as he pondered finishing the cleaning and then grabbing his stuff to head back to Chesham, he had the silly sensation that he didn’t live in Chesham at all. He lived here in Barley Street. That there was actually no such thing as Wren Hunter and his two girls. They had only been some exquisite dream he’d had through the night, but that this was his reality. That he was Rachel Wasson’s dad, and Mary Wasson was his mad, bony wife, and that he lived and paid the mortgage in a house filled with ghosts.
As if to press the point home, he heard a dim muffled scream coming from Rachel’s bedroom.
He tapped on the door and it opened slowly. She was exactly where she’d been for the last thirty minutes, where Larry had questioned her. Legs crossed under her, in the centre of her bed. Hands clasped around her retro pumps, the type basketball players wear. But now she had a pair of headphones clamped to her head.
She was listening back to her recording of the seance, and the sound of wails and squeals meant she’d gotten to the chaotic bit when everybody scrambled out of the room. He could hear his own voice booming out, telling Bob to shut it all down. She must have had it incredibly loud, because Mary’s screeches were bleeding out into the room.
She looked very pale and fiercely focused, pushing the headphones hard against her ears, like she was doing backing vocals on a very grim charity single. But soon she felt his presence, blinked and looked up. She jabbed the recording off quickly.
‘Rachel?’
She dragged the headphones off her head, like a teenager caught with contraband. ‘Yeah?’
‘Can we talk?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
He’d already offered to clean up the glass in Holly’s room yet as Rachel came out of hers and leant her head into next door, she shook her head.
‘Oh, you can’t do all this yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m going to help.’
She stepped inside, then stared at the glass on the floor. Went a little pale again.
He moved forward and reached out his hand. ‘Then, I bagsy the broom.’
His voice broke her trance because she shook her head and made a weak attempt at a smile. ‘What a mess.’
He grabbed the broom and started to sweep the glass into piles, while she was on her haunches with the dustpan and brush. For the most part they did it without speaking, the silence punctuated only by the sharp snap of glass dropping in the bucket. That and the constant scrape and jingle of the metal rings of the window rail. That white curtain still danced and still reached into the room. He could feel the cool breeze against his shoulder.
Finally, as they got the majority of glass cleaned up, she spoke. ‘Where’s my mum?’
‘She’s in the dining room.’
‘Still? What’s she doing?’
‘Just sitting there
