Page 37 of The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales

And what of me? I found, after all that, I was happy in Fishbourne, now I was at no one’s beck and call. I stayed in the cottage, painted it top to toe, discovered I liked living on my own. Every spare minute I spent researching, checking every tiny detail, until I was ready to write about the case. A famous unsolved murder in November 1940, the brutal killing of a WAAF girl in Cornmill House. Cleared my brother’s name. Although Harry was never charged, suspicion hung over him – over us all – rightly as it turned out. My mother had gone to her grave never knowing the truth.

Or had she? From time to time, I wonder.

In my own small way, I became quite well known. An interview in the Observer and a few talks to the WI. My book sits on the True Crime shelves in the library where I still work. The church warden at St Mary’s tells me that people often come to leave flowers at the girl’s grave.

And on winter nights, the lights still shine through the windows of the library and out across the marshes. A sanctuary for anyone who needs a place to go.

Author’s Note

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in a small village, Fishbourne, in West Sussex. To the east, the spire of the cathedral dominates the landscape. To the west are the bigger towns of Portsmouth and, further still, Southampton. To the north, the folds of the Sussex Downs – the estates of West Dean and Goodwood, the remains of an Iron Age fort on the Trundle looking down to the estuary. There is a Roman palace in Fishbourne, a small nineteenth-century church (expanded from its medieval origins), the Old Toll House at the site of the Fishbourne turnpike as well as many older cottages and houses dating back hundreds of years. Looking back, I see this is where my earliest interest in history came, simply living in a place where it was so evident in day-to-day life.

More important, though, was what lies to the south – the sea. Not the yellow sands of West Wittering and Bognor Regis, but rather the muddy and tidal estuary of Fishbourne Creek. My sisters and I played at the Mill Pond, hid in the reed mace and high grasses that towered over our heads. When I was older, rather solitary by nature in those days, I’d take a book out to the old flint sea wall and sit reading in the sun. The names of the houses and buildings around the estuary reflected the former industry of this part of the creek – Salt Mill, the Corn Mill, Paper Mill – buildings that are all gone or converted into flats, which still speak of the working landscape. There was, however, no lending library in Fishbourne. That is a ghost of my own imagining.

When I came across the idea of a ‘revenant’ – a visible ghost, or animated corpse, believed to return from the grave to terrorise or take revenge on the living: often their murderer or someone who had done them wrong in life – the story started to take shape. In particular, the idea that derelict or vanished buildings haunt a landscape in the way that a spirit might haunt a person. The word ‘revenant’ comes from the Latin revenans, meaning ‘returning’.

A version of this story first appeared in two instalments in The Big Issue, December 2009.

ON HARTING HILL

South Harting Village, West Sussex

October 1961

On Harting Hill

On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;

from ‘Low Barometer’

ROBERT BRIDGES

Friday, 27th October, 1961. That afternoon, I was late getting away. A burst water main in Tolworth, and down to one lane in Kingston, meant the going was slow and the traffic was heavy. It had been mild, but in the last few days the weather had turned unsettled. There was a light drizzle and the road was slippery and wet. Leaves, fallen, on the pavements.

All the same, I was comfortable enough in my Morris Minor, the heating rattling on full, rime on the inside of the windscreen as I crept forward in a stream of cars leaving London by the old Portsmouth Road. I half listened to the news on the wireless: unrest in the Paris suburbs, the last British troops leaving Kuwait, another stand-off between Soviet and American tanks at Checkpoint Charlie. The traffic inched forward.

A friend from my school days had invited me to stay for the weekend. A few like-minded chaps, Bill said, all of them single or, like me, recently divorced. All very informal, he’d said. Country walks and a pub lunch, a few hands of cards. A round of golf on Sunday morning. I hadn’t seen Bill for years, but the thought of a change of scene was welcome and I’d accepted. Now, what with the traffic, I was in two minds about whether I’d done the right thing.

‘Traffic’s always bad Fridays,’ Bill said. ‘All the weekenders choking up the road.’

‘Adding to their number,’ I’d said, and we’d both laughed in that slightly awkward way of friends who had once known each other well.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Friday it is. I’ll send directions. We’re hard to find the first time.’

‘Can I bring anything?’

‘Just yourself,’ he’d replied. ‘Just yourself.’

I tell you this, and in such detail, so you understand there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was an unexceptional Friday afternoon, nothing to mark it out. I was regretting accepting Bill’s invitation, in the way of those things, but I wasn’t anxious beyond what you’d expect from a man intending to spend the weekend with strangers. I was in good spirits, good health and I’d been sleeping better over the past few weeks.

Once I was out of London, I had a clear run of it and the first hour or so passed uneventfully. Traffic started to thin out. One by one, the commuter husbands hurrying home to their wives. The grey afternoon sky turned pink at dusk, then an inky blue. On road signs, the names of unfamiliar villages, places I’d never heard of and would never visit. As I drove on and on, I thought of all the people I’d never meet, settling down for their supper. A closed up garage on the corner and rows of shops, street after anonymous street of modern new houses on the outskirts of towns.

I made good time. Even so, it already was past nine o’clock by the time I turned off the main road and started to make my way cross country. Bill had promised a scratch meal, since we were all arriving at different times, but I was worried about pitching up after everyone else. I decided I’d stop, if I could, to let him know I was running late.