Chapter 11
ALEX
There was no sign of Nick the next morning, although the breakfast things were laid out for her in the kitchen, and the coffee was on the stove. It was Saturday. He’d been making plans, she recalled, so maybe he’d already gone. Alex helped herself.
She’d slept late, her sleep disturbed again by those old dreams. She’d woken in the night convinced there was a party going on in some distant part of the house but was too tired to go and investigate.
Besides, there were only the two of them here and she didn’t believe Nick was sneaking in all his mates to have some kind of blow-out without her noticing.
It must be the wind or something. Sound travelled strangely in old buildings. She knew that better than anyone.
Gabe would have started talking about stone tape theory – the idea that old buildings could somehow record events of great passion or pain and replay them in the right circumstances, memories etched into the very stones.
Eduardo would probably counter with something about infrasound and its effect on the human mind, making people see and hear things, or even just have that uneasy sense of being watched.
None of it explained this place, she thought.
As she left the kitchen there was a flurry of movement on the stairs, she was sure of it. As if someone had seen her coming and rushed away. A soft giggle followed and she froze, standing in the hall.
Such an imagination, her father used to say, and ruffle her hair.
The memory was like a punch to the chest and for a moment she couldn’t move at all.
Stop making up stories, Alexandra, her grandfather would tell her, in a lot less affectionate tone.
This place was going to be the death of her, she thought.
She was going to lose her mind in the quiet, imagining things that couldn’t be true.
When she got to the study, she opened the laptop and put on some music, turning up the volume as high as it would go.
If anything in the house made a noise after that – a pipe or a mouse or ancient floorboards and errant breezes – she didn’t hear it.
She did an hour or two of work and then, reluctant to live on whatever she could scavenge in the kitchen, decided to go out. It wasn’t far to the village, especially not in daylight. There had to be somewhere there she could get lunch on a Saturday, after all.
There was not much to Kilfayne. It was a village surrounded by a farming community, hemmed in by mountains. A river ran through it. There was a parish church, a small school, a shop and a pub. Alex parked the car outside the pub where a board promised hot food. She took her chance and went in.
The low, intimate babble of voices instantly went quiet. There were no more than seven people in there, all of them staring at her. That was the way of rural pubs. She made her way up to the bar, ordered a coffee, and asked for a menu.
Then, armed with a laminated sheet with various offerings printed on it, she found a table by the mullioned window.
The coffee wasn’t a patch on the ones Nick made but she drank it as she decided what to eat. How far wrong could she go with lasagne, she figured. Apart from the obligatory side of coleslaw anyway.
‘You’re from the telly, aren’t you? Home after the ghosts, are you?’
Alex froze as the snicker ran around the room. They knew who she was then.
And they expected her to – what? Flinch? Apologise?
Alex gathered the shield of Dr Alex O’Neill, the great debunker, the sceptic’s sceptic, around herself and drew herself up to her full height.
Not a great height, especially when sitting down, but the effect was the same.
She glared at the young man, wiry, with a terrible haircut and an even worse moustache, lounging against the bar.
He had tight jeans and a grubby-looking band t-shirt on.
She knew the type, far too well. Ted Sanderson would have loved this one.
He would have had him dancing to his tune in no time.
The familiar loathing already seethed beneath his skin.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts. And I won’t be staying long.’
‘Oh aye.’ He let out a nasty laugh. ‘Selling it off, are you?’
It was the sneer in his voice that did it. She couldn’t help herself. Fuck him, and everyone in this dead-end village.
‘Yes,’ she replied coldly.
Shock rippled around the pub, and suddenly it was very quiet indeed. Every eye was on her and every ear turned her way. She’d really done it now.
‘What? The house or the land?’ another, older man asked from one of the other tables. He looked aghast.
‘All of it,’ she said, schooling herself to politeness now. She appeared to have gone too far. ‘There’s a hotel chain interested. It’ll be a great opportunity for the area. Employment, tourism…’
For another long, painful moment no one spoke.
‘No good will come of that,’ the old man muttered, crossing himself and turning his attention back to his pint.
‘Oh, enough of that nonsense,’ said the older woman behind the bar. ‘Leave the poor girl alone. She’s just trying to have a meal. Seán, get off with you. You’re meant to be working. And you lot, mind your own business. You’d put anyone off their lunch.’
That seemed to calm things down, or at least shut them up. And Seán, the smarmy little git, shouldered his way out of the door with a backwards glare at Alex which she found chilling.
The lasagne arrived, with a mound of coleslaw which Alex studiously avoided. And chips. What was the obsession with chips?
The pub crowd dispersed while she ate, leaving only the couple of old men nursing their pints by the time she went up to the bar to pay.
‘Don’t mind them,’ said the landlady. ‘Too much time on their hands most of them.’
‘I don’t,’ Alex told her. ‘Mind them, I mean. But thank you all the same.’
‘Are you really selling up? You granda wouldn’t have liked that.’
He wouldn’t have liked being referred to as a granda either, Alex thought with a smile.
‘Neither would your brother,’ said one of the old men. ‘Loved that land, he did. And Hennesey’s got grazing rights on the lower pasture. How will that work with a hotel?’
Alex, who had no idea and didn’t care, just gave a dismissive shrug as she tapped her card on the machine to pay. This was not a conversation she wanted to be having in the local pub. She shouldn’t have said anything at all.
‘The walker won’t like it either.’
‘Nick?’ she asked. No, Nick didn’t like it at all.
The man made a dismissive noise like ‘psht’.
‘Not him. The walker in the woods. Although you shouldn’t be crossing that fella either.
’ No love lost there, Alex thought, not from that tone.
‘Not after his wife and your brother both. The guards still haven’t answered what happened there, and Nick Walker was their prime suspect, wasn’t he? ’
Alex turned around, staring at them now.
‘He what?’
‘All alone up there in that big house they were, the three of them. And now two of them are dead.’
He had a wife? A dead wife? And did the police think Nick was involved in Theo’s death?
‘That’s enough of that talk,’ the landlady snapped. Alex jumped at the sound. ‘Nick wasn’t even there when young Theo died. He found the body when he got back from the village. Think about what you’re saying.’
‘What happened?’ Alex couldn’t let this drop now.
‘Oh nothing, just malicious gossip. Sally fell down the stairs, a missed step or something. A tragic accident. Poor Nick found her. And your Theo – God rest him – well, you probably know all about that better than anyone here.’ She glared at the drinkers.
‘He’s a good man, is our Nick. Now, do you want a receipt? ’
‘A good man,’ the other elderly drinker snorted out a laugh. ‘All the women around here are mad for him. And look at him. More beast than man.’
‘Do you want me to bar the pair of you?’ the landlady asked, icily.
‘No, Fionnuala,’ they both muttered, like chastened schoolboys.
She huffed in satisfaction and handed Alex a receipt. ‘There you go, love. You watch yourself, mind. It’s an old house. And the woods around it are dangerous. Don’t go straying, will you? Listen to Nick. He knows the place better than anyone.’
Straying? On her own land? Was she getting warned of danger or simply warned off? She wasn’t sure.
‘What is the walker in the woods?’ she asked.
Fionnuala rolled her eyes. ‘Just an old story. Like the good people, you know? Nothing to worry yourself about. A boogey man. They used to say that the forest needed a guardian.’
‘To keep it safe?’
The two old men laughed, a sound cut off by another glare from Fionnuala, who tried to smile and pass it all off again.
‘Pay it no mind, love. Old nonsense, that’s all. The story went that the walker kept the woods in check. Or guarded the boundaries of de Wilde land, keeping the curse contained.’
‘The curse?’ A lot of old families had curses associated with them, didn’t they? And they were all a lot of bull.
‘The de Wilde curse?’ Fionnuala tried that indulgent smile again.
‘Surely your granda told you about that. Comes from when they built the Big House. Crossed the fairies, or so they say, building it there. Just a story like the walker. They give Nick such a hard time about it. Because that’s his job, and his surname and all that.
Superstition and spite. Small communities can be like that.
Nothing else to occupy themselves, some people.
That’s all. Pay it no mind.’ Then she found something terribly important to do at the far end of the bar.
Alex waited until she was in the car before she got out her phone and started googling. She’d never read the news reports regarding Theo’s death. She hadn’t wanted to. But there it was.
Local man detained for questioning… known to gardaí…
And he’d had a wife, who had also died under suspicious circumstances.
She googled Nick as well, but there was precious little apart from the reporting on Theo’s death.
Still, she could ask Arnold. He could find out anything when he set his mind to it.
Quickly, before she changed her mind, she fired off an email.
That would do. She ought to have found out more about Nick Walker from the beginning. So should her lawyers.
Alex let out a long breath and tried to loosen her tense shoulders.
When she tried to start the car, the engine was dead.