Page 40 of The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales

‘Again,’ someone muttered, but a glare from his companions silenced him and he hunched back into his beer.

‘Ten yards up to the right,’ said the landlord. ‘End of the path.’

Moments later I was back on the street and walking up a narrow lane to a row of cottages. I knocked on the door, then stood back to wait for someone to answer.

‘Mrs Starr, is it?’ I said, when a woman appeared. ‘Sorry to disturb you so late.’ Thin and with an air of abject defeat, she had the look of someone old before her time. ‘I gave a lift to your . . . to Mary,’ I said.

A flash of alarm in her eyes, then despair.

‘Oh no,’ I thought I heard her say.

From inside the small house, a man’s rough voice, slurred with drink.

‘Who is it?’

‘Go away,’ she whispered, trying to close the door. ‘Leave us alone.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, a little nettled by her rudeness. ‘I haven’t explained myself properly. I picked up Mary on Harting Hill not five minutes ago. I’m sure it’s a mistake, but when she got out of the car, she forgot to give my jacket back.’

‘She’s not here,’ the woman said. ‘How could she be?’

‘I pulled up in the square,’ I said, ‘and she just hopped out. Five minutes ago, ten at most.’

Again, the drunk bellowing from the front room.

‘Who the hell is it?’

‘Go, please go,’ she said, desperate this time. ‘She’s not here.’

I didn’t want to cause trouble between this downtrodden woman and her husband.

‘At least tell me if she’s not here, where else might she be?’

For an instant, the haunted look in her eyes gave way to something else. Grief, perhaps. Resignation, maybe.

‘The church,’ she said softly.

This caught me out. ‘So late?’

‘Where else would she be?’

I heard the sound of a bolt being shot, then a heartrending sob. I raised my hand to knock again, then let it drop. The woman was clearly terrorised by her brute of a husband. Perhaps Mary was too scared to go home?

I walked back to the High Street. The Ship Inn and the White Hart had called last orders and one or two rag-taggle farm workers were calling their goodnights into the damp night air.

One of the black wrought-iron gates into the churchyard was ajar, as if someone had recently slipped through. I pushed it open, thinking Mary might have taken refuge here after all. But the door stayed shut when I rattled the heavy cast-iron handle. I stepped out into the graveyard. Neat headstones closer to the church, rather more overgrown in the corners. Yew and mulberry and evergreen hedges. By an imposing flint wall, a row of older gravestones like broken teeth, a little crooked and sinking back into the earth.

I sensed movement. I narrowed my eyes and tried to adjust my vision to the darkness. Another fox? A sound in the undergrowth, little more than that.

‘Mary?’

I skirted the building and walked towards the sound. The bottom of my trousers grew damp with the dew from the grass and the cold night air slipped beneath my collar, but I paid no attention.

‘Mary, is that you?’

I rounded the corner and found myself in a more secluded section of the graveyard. Stone angels and crosses, the flat tombs of an older age, and a few modern headstones. I could see no one, just shadows, phantasms in the intermittent moonlight.

No one.