Since Ben and Joss Beckett took over The Fair Maid and Falcon, they have had to deal with ghosts, gangsters and well dodgy goings-on. Despite that they have their own family of twin daughters and dogs, and a fabulous ‘found family’ of friends.
I smiled at the idea I was hunting and followed Simeon out of the door into what was now a pale moon-washed night. We formed a sort of loose procession with Simeon in front followed by me, Ben, Neil, Stan and Ollie. The rest fell in behind walking quietly and saying nothing. At the market garden, Jed, Finoula and Clancy joined us, while two hard-handed guys with baseball bats peeled off to guard the gate.
Around the next bend in the lane a scruffy looking Mercedes minibus was parked in the middle of the road. It was facing the other way which prevented them from blinding us with their headlights and Simeon casually opened the driver’s door. The guy who fell out was visibly uncomfortable, but game nonetheless.
“What you wanna go and do that for?”
Simeon gave him a hard stare and he wilted a bit.
“What are you lot doing here?”
“None o’ your business. It’s a public road. We can be here if we want.”
I took two paces forwards.
“It’s not a public road.”
The sliding door at the other side of the van opened and I presumed some person or persons intended to join the argument. However, there was a modest reception committee and the sound of fists meeting flesh was loud in the night air.
“You keep still. Unless you’re up for another smack.”
Finoula stepped into a patch of moonlight. “Bring forward your clairvoyant and let me see if it’s a big a charlatan as it smells like.”
The sound of someone hastily climbing over seats made me think my friend had hit a nerve. In a very short time a youngish man, whose cropped hair was so pale that looked peculiarly greenish in the moonlight, climbed out onto the road surface and glared about him.
“Who dares to name me charlatan?” he demanded.
“Finoula Lovell.”
He obviously knew the name because he flinched visibly. Then he bowed from the waist and stepped closer to Finoula and Jed. Clancy growled, a deep sound in his barrel of a chest, and blondie stepped back a pace.
He said something in Rom to which Finoula replied in a voice that crackled with power. I heard footsteps behind me and Danilo stepped out of the shadows to stand beside me.
“Do you seek to contend with my family, outcast?”
I felt the weight of that and wondered at the necessity, until I heard Grandmother’s voice in my head assuring me that it was both necessary and proportionate.
“How do you judge it right to stand for a gadjo woman against one of your own blood?”
Danilo snapped his fingers. “That for your prejudices lulo bull. She is as a sister to me and to every Lovell that draws breath. Now. I repeat. Do you seek to contend with us?”
“I am not that much a fool.”
Danilo put something in my hand before moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Finoula.
“Do we believe him?”
“No.” Finoula sounded icy cold. “I will have his blood oath before I trust such a one.”
Jed materialised beside me and bent his head to mine.
“Finoula says this one cares for naught but money, and I would say Danilo thinks the same as he just called him a whore.”
“Oh right. And I have to go into the garden with him don’t I?”
“You don’t have to.” That was Ben from my other side. “Also what did Danilo slip you.”
“A pistol. And I do have to. If we want this farce to end I have to take him into the garden and convince him Cherry isn’t there. Which might have been more difficult next week.”
I heard Grandmother laugh inside my head. The ghosts, it seemed, were perfectly willing to take a hand.
Ben put a big hand on my head. “Will I come with you?”
“No love. You and the dogs need to stay out here.”
“If you didn’t have a gun in your pocket, we might have a row about that.”
I leaned into him. “We wouldn’t, because without a pacifier in my pocket I’d not be going in.”
“I take it that thing in your pocket is loaded.”
“Grandmother says it is.”
“Well I guess she’d know.”
He wrapped me in his arms and we stood quietly. I was taking calming breaths and husbanding my mental resources, while Ben was probably worrying but carefully not mentioning his worry.
The three clairvoyants were deep in low-voiced conversation and I had drifted to a place of inner peace when I felt Ben stiffen. As my ears caught the sound of something being driven quietly up the lane, a crunching in the gravel of the lane also alerted me that someone was coming on foot.
“Only us, Joss.” It was Mark’s voice and he stepped into the moonlight with his brothers at his side. “Morgan called me.”
“Fair enough. But who’s driving up the lane?”
“I don’t know. Though I think we need to fade into the background until we find out.”
They blended back into the deep shadow and I smiled at Jed.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said.
He chuckled. “You’m not much like my idea of Alice.”
“She isn’t indeed,” Neil agreed quietly. “More like the Red Queen.”
“Off with his head.” Ben quipped gently.
Mark grinned and for a couple of seconds his teeth showed strong and white in the shadow of the hedge.
“Cheshire Cat?” I looked at Jed.
“It do so appear.”
Whatever was coming up from the village was being driven quite slowly and with only minimal lights.
“I don’t think whoever this is is necessarily on the side of the angels,” I spoke quietly.
“Me neither,” that was Ben.
The vehicle that rounded the bend was another Mercedes van, though it bore as much relationship to the grubby, dented workhorse at the gateway to the memorial garden as I do to Marilyn Monroe. Blondie hissed through his teeth while the guy Simeon held in one negligent hand looked as if he was about to piss himself.
“What have we here, my friends?” I whispered.
The Merc sighed to a halt and the back of the thing opened up silently and smoothly. A chunky figure in a sort of modified nurse uniform jumped out with something in his hand. I took a careful grip of the pistol in my pocket, but it was unnecessary as the ‘nurse’ pointed what I could now see was a remote control and the van extruded a ramp down which came an electric wheelchair.
The cold moonlight revealed the man in the chair to be worn and beyond thin. He was possessed of a face that looked to have been carved from flint so sharply were the angles cut. He turned his chair to face us.
“I would have speech with Mrs Beckett.”
Ben responded . “Who demands to speak to my wife?”
“My name would mean nothing to you.”
“Meaningless or not, we do not speak to those who hide in darkness and anonymity.” I could hear the berserker that lurked just under the surface of Ben’s cool demeanour and I hoped nobody poked a stick in his ear.
It seemed that the man in the wheelchair heard it too because he inclined his head.
“Lantern,” he barked.
His nurse reached into the van, producing a large electric lamp which he placed on the ground beside the wheelchair and switched on. The light was bright, shadowless, and pitiless, revealing our visitor to be a man not far from death if I wasn’t mistaken.
I walked forward into the circle of brightness and said the first thing that came into my head.
“Will you please put your oxygen back on?”
He laughed, though it was a sound without much underlying amusement, and lifted a skinny claw. The nurse charged up the ramp returning with a small cylinder and an arrangement of tubes. Once life-giving oxygen was being gently pumped through his nostrils the man in the wheelchair looked in less immediate danger of death.
“What is so important that you come here in the dead of night?” I kept my voice neutral.
“You know what,” he snapped.
I stood straight and still in the pitiless lantern light. “I do not. I may have a suspicion, but that isn’t knowing. And you are close enough to the veil to know the truth when you hear it.”
His dark fathomless eyes bored into mine before he smiled.
“Cherry had eyes like yours.”
I took a chance. “Who is Cherry?”
“Cherry was my wife. I am given to understand that her bones, and those of our unborn child are buried here. And I would visit her while I can.”
Of course that didn’t come close to explaining a visit in the dark of night, but I thought I’d let that one go.
“If Cherry’s were the bones uncovered in our orchard, then she is not buried here. The police took her away and I have no knowledge of where she is now.”
He sagged in his chair and I felt a stab of pity before he dragged himself back into his habit of command.
“Do you swear this is the truth?”
“I do. And if I knew where her bones were today I’d tell you.”
I felt the spirits of the girls who were buried in the garden as they clustered about him. Esme came into my head. ‘Beware the white-haired one.’ I reassured her that I had my eye on him.
“Perhaps if I could visit the place where her bones were found.”
“You could, but not in the dark and not until the ground dries a bit.”
“Why not? I’m here now.” He waved a hand towards the memorial garden. “It looks like there’s a proper pathway.”
“If the bones were found in the memorial garden there would be no problem. Only they weren’t. When I said uncovered in our orchard that was precisely what I meant. The orchard is down at the bottom of the lane bordering on the pub car park it’s grassy and bumpy and currently boggy.”
He seemed to understand that I spoke the simple truth because he turned his attention to the blond clairvoyant.
“Why have you been telling me that Cherry is here?”
“Because she is. The woman lies.”
“I don’t think so.” The man in the wheelchair carried an aura of real menace. “I think those who told me you were a charlatan were saying nothing more than the truth. Now. What do you think the reward for lying to me might be?”
Finoula’s voice broke into what had become an icy silence.
“He’s not entirely a charlatan, he just magnifies what is truthfully a tiny talent for gain.”
“What should I do with him, then?”
“That’s your decision. I am not permitted to make it for you. But what I can do is call your wife and ask if she has words for you from beyond the veil.”
“Why would you do that for me?”
“I would do it in the name of love, and to ease your passage to the light.”
“Will you then. Please.”
Finoula nodded. “I will.”
She lifted her face and the moonlight sparkled in the pale blue depths of her sightless eyes. Jed went to be as a bulwark at her back, and Danilo walked soft-footed to stand and face her. Finoula’s started to sing a wordless eerie tune.
Danilo joined his voice to hers. “Come forward if you have any words for your grieving husband.”
I felt the other spirits forming a sort of guard of honour and then the scent of orchard fruits filled the air.
The voice that spoke was soft and carried with it a sweetness that even her death and the death of her unborn child hadn’t eroded. But she was angry too, with forty years of anger to get out and she let him have it all. She berated her husband in Irish and he replied humbly in the same language. It felt as if we were eavesdropping, and I was very glad to only understand tone, not words. Everything about this was too naked and too painful so l looked about for something to distract me, which was when I noticed that Blondie was definitely up to something.
Moving very slowly he put one hand inside his leather waistcoat and drew out an object he sought to hide in his left hand. Unfortunately for him I have very good eyesight and the moon glinted on what I determined must be a knife. As Finoula’s song reached its crescendo he slithered towards her. He looked truly reptilian in the moonlight and something hardened inside me. There was no way he was going to hurt my friend while I had it in my power to protect her. I took the pistol out of my pocket and, as he punched an awkwardly curled fist towards her face, I shot him through the wrist.
He made a noise the like of which I had never heard before, and I’d rather not hear it again. But even as he screamed he dropped the knife and Jed put a big foot on it. Simeon grabbed Blondie, with one huge hand around his skinny neck, and stopped the noise by the simple expedient of holding the other huge hand over his mouth. Ben was at my side in two enormous strides, gathering me into the security of his embrace. I leaned against his strength, but I was surprisingly unmoved by having shot a human.
In a matter of seconds it was all over and Finoula closed the door between the worlds.
The man in the wheelchair sat bolt upright.
“He is a naughty little albino isn’t he? Will I take him off your hands?”
“I’m not sure he was ever on my hands,” I was proud of how steady was my voice.
There will be more from Joss, Ben and their friends, courtesy of Jane Jago, next week, or you can catch up with their earlier adventures in Who Put Her In and Who Pulled Her Out.
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