Extracting herself, she gave him a tight smile. ‘I’m sure you’ll be far too busy.’ She hastily made her escape, beginning to wish she had just buried that damned rabbit. The whole visit had left her feeling quite unsettled. She was aware of Alex watching her as she made her way down the path. ‘Weird’ she muttered under her breath as she reached the gate. Pausing, she smiled, entertained by the thought of what Brodie would make of the visitor. She doubted that the abrasive girl would have much time for Alex’s charm. Satisfied that he would soon be introduced to the tiny teenaged nemesis, she opened her own door and once inside shut it gratefully on the strange and unpleasant evening.
The draught from the closing of the door disturbed the plastic that enclosed Jean’s urn. It shifted and shed a little of the fine dust that still clung to its interior. An evening breeze picked up the specks and sent them whirling and reeling across the gardens and in through the open window of Miriam’s cottage. Alex had been laughing but was interrupted by an unanticipated sneeze, caused unbeknownst to him, by his sudden introduction to Jean.
Brodie stood in the entrance to the ruined chapel. It looked baleful and forbidding in the low afternoon sun, which cast creeping shadows within its crumbling walls. Inside it was dank and silent, the smell of sweating, musty stone assaulted her senses and she struggled to see clearly into the gloom. She had brought a torch, which she checked for the second time, making sure that the batteries were functioning. Then she checked her pocket for the spares, her hand closing over them in quiet relief. Steeling herself, she made to venture further but was startled by a voice behind her.
‘Hard to believe that this hasn’t been like this for hundreds of years, isn’t it?’
Reeling round, torch gripped in her hand like a baton she came face to face with a plump, ruddy-faced man dressed in black. Unlike her he was wearing a dog collar. ‘Oh, did I startle you? I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘S’all right’ Brodie relaxed her grip on the torch and wondered what the protocol was for talking to vicars.
He placed his hands behind his back and looked up, squinting at the remains of the squat tower. ‘Yes, a hundred years ago this was still a functioning church, maintained by the Gardiner-Hallows. Mostly for family use I should imagine. But neglect takes its toll and now we’re left with just this ruin. Did you know that the land was given to the family by William the Conqueror and that they have owned it ever since? The current house doesn’t date back that far, most of it is Georgian, but the chapel has to be hundreds of years old. Fascinating isn’t it?’ he mused.
Brodie climbed down from the fallen lintel she had been standing on and stood beside him, following his gaze, ‘Why do you think they let it fall down?’
‘Oh, lack of interest and lack of money I should think. These places aren’t cheap to look after. I should know, I’ve been fighting the locals for years to raise money for a new roof on the village church,’ he said, laughing. ‘Besides I don’t think the current incumbents are a terribly faithful lot,’ he added with a conspiratorial wink. ‘Anyway, nice to have met you – do be careful if you’re going to explore won’t you?’ he nodded at the torch.
Brodie watched him wander off, hands still behind his back. Her prior experience of men of the cloth had been the occasional tussle with the hospital chaplain who frequently made it his business to advise her mother of the error of her ways. Shirley had constant battles with God, railing against him for her misfortunes one day and seeking his forgiveness the next. It hadn’t exactly given Brodie an enthusiasm for faith, or those who brokered it. Yet she had felt quite comfortable with this brief meeting, the vicar’s appearance having served to buoy her up for the task ahead. Taking her torch she re-entered the chapel and made her way to what she assumed had once been the front of the church. She was pretty sure it was called the chancel, and the side bits that formed the cross were the transepts. The part where people sat was the nave. Two minutes on Google and she was an expert in ecclesiastical architecture, or enough of one to work out what she was looking for anyway. She had spotted it the day before and had intended to explore it then, if she hadn’t had to deal with Elaine freaking out over a dumb bird.
Picking her way over the rubble she went back to where she had spied an opening the day before. It was overgrown and half hidden, but it was there nonetheless. A rotting, woodlouse-ridden trapdoor lay over it, slimy with lichen. She managed to find a stick and used it to lever up the cover, revealing in its totality what she had glimpsed through the missing lathes in the door. A staircase of roughhewn stone led down into the darkness of what she was sure had to be a crypt. Switching on the torch she shone it down, leaning back lest a flurry of bats should emerge in a furious glut to tangle her hair and scare her witless. Just to be sure, she banged the stick on the stonework hoping to disturb anything that might be lurking. Years of watching horror films had made her cautious (and people said you didn’t learn anything from TV) and even though she knew it would take little effort to break through the rotten wood of the door, she wedged a stone against the hinge just in case. Ready to face whatever was below, she began to descend, one slippery step at a time – the stick held in one hand, the torch in the other.
At the bottom of the steps she played the beam of her torch across the walls, gratified to find that she was indeed in a small crypt. A room of about twenty feet square with a low vaulted ceiling. She was disappointed to find a distinct lack of sarcophagi, and even more dismayed to find that she was not the first to have discovered the hidden chamber.
Several beer cans lay around her feet, and someone had spray painted a crude pentagram on the floor. The room had a distinctive smell of stale urine mingled with mould; an acrid combination, which stung her nose and made her want to sneeze. Pulling her T-shirt up to cover the lower part of her face, so that the smell of washing powder would mask the other stench, she explored further, quickly realising that there were bodies in the walls.
Heart beating with excitement, she moved closer and tried to read the inscriptions. Various dead Gardiner-Hallows had been entombed beneath the chapel, the duration of their often brief lives had been engraved on slabs of marble which were mortared into place.
‘Cool,’ she whispered. The sound set off an eerie echo around the room, as if the dead were mimicking her voice. Her fascination with the deceased gentry was brought to an abrupt end when she heard something above.
Whirling round, torch beam swinging wildly and her heart seeming to leap into her throat, she screamed, just as a torrent of small stones tumbled down the steps. A moment later she got a grip, there was no way she was getting stuck in that place without a fight.
With arms that shook like branches in a high wind, she took a better grip on the stick and raised the torch to illuminate the steps. ‘Who’s there?’ she yelled, ‘you’d better get back because I’m coming up swinging!’ She thwacked the stick against the stonework for good measure. Mustering up her battle cry she flung herself at the steps, howling and yelling like a thing demented. Taking them two at a time, she leaped out at the top like a demonic jack-in-the-box, whirling the stick above her head in a dervish-like frenzy. It met nothing, and her arm sagged as the movement ebbed away along with her adrenaline.
It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the sudden influx of light, so initially the grizzling heap hadn’t appeared to be human. For a split-second she had been half convinced that she was about to be attacked by a huge bear, or more likely a wild boar as she had read somewhere that Britain was full of them. Breathing heavily and braced to use the stick if she had to, she squinted at the now whimpering thing.
It was a man, a giant one, crouching on