‘And on a stretch of road as open as this, I suppose that’s…’
‘Drivers reckoned they swerved to avoid a ghost,’ Spicer said.
His tone hadn’t altered and his eyes remained limpid. A wood pigeon’s hollow call was funnelled out of the valley.
‘That took a while to come out, didn’t it?’ Merrily said.
‘Come back to the house.’ He turned away. ‘We’ll talk about it there.’
2
Uncle Alfie
After very little sleep, Jane awoke all sweating and confused. On one level she was lit up with excitement, on another fired by the wrongness of things: injustice, greed, sacrilege.
Bastards.
The thinness of the light showed that it was still early, but the Mondrian walls were already aglow: ancient timber-framed squares, once wattle and daub, then plastered and whitewashed and finally overpainted, by Jane herself, in defiant reds and blues and oranges.
It was more than two years since she’d coloured the squares – just a kid, then, disoriented by the move to this antiquated village with a mother who used to be normal and had suddenly turned into a bloody priest.
Just a kid, determined to make her mark: Jane’s here now. Jane takes no shit. This is Jane’s apartment. This is the way Jane does things, OK?
In a seventeenth-century vicarage, it wouldn’t have been at all OK with the Listed-Buildings Police, but it had seemed unlikely that they’d ever come beating on the door with a warrant to investigate the attic. Looking back, Mum had been seriously good about it, letting Jane establish a personal suite up here and splatter the walls with coloured paint they couldn’t really afford… and never once suggesting that it might look just a bit crap.
But that was over two years ago and now Jane was, Christ, seventeen. And this once-important gesture, these once-deeply-symbolic walls, were looking entirely, irredeemably naff. Not even much like a Mondrian – in the middle of an A-level art course, she could say that with some certainty.