Something Wicked This Way Comes Read online

  Well, fuck him. Nobody ever liked living by a school, especially not our type of establishment, and I hoped the idea made him really miserable. Angry neighbours were pretty much par for the course, so it would be no water off my back if he gnawed on his own liver for a while.

  I would need to stop mixing metaphors so egregiously before the start of term, though.

  A couple of bone-rattling moments later, I arrived at a pair of stone-capped gateposts. On either side of the gap, a drystone wall stretched out as far as I could see. A few high trees within the wall masked the buildings beyond, but I could glimpse a low peaked roof and a high wall beyond.

  I drove through the gates into what had once been a cobbled yard but was now mostly moss and grass. Silently apologising to my poor little car, I parked to one side of it and got out. I’d stopped at the services somewhere south of Liverpool, but I’d been stuck behind the wheel for over six hours otherwise, and it was a relief to stretch my legs.

  I turned around to survey the buildings, and my heart sank. It didn’t look good.

  By the gate, running along the wall, was a long, low stone barn. Two wooden doors hung open, and I stepped towards them, wondering if I would have to evict squatters or find evidence of bored local teenagers.

  But the barn was empty as far as I could see—empty and dark. Beyond the patch of light by the doors, I couldn’t see anything, although I heard the skitter of claws rushing away from me. There clearly were squatters, but only of the rodent variety.

  On the least overgrown side of the yard stood a single-storey bungalow, which had probably once been white but now was a mottled grey with streaks of green below the gutters. The windows were grimy, but I could see faded orange curtains hanging behind them.

  And then there was Vainguard itself.

  It was instantly recognisable from the photograph Felix had shown me. It looked more dilapidated now, though, with glass missing from the windows over the great doors and ivy covering both walls and windows. It didn’t look anything like a school.

  I reminded myself that it had functioned as an orphanage for some years. Had those children been taught on-site, or had they gone to a village school? I hadn’t seen one as I drove in, but that didn’t mean much. I hadn’t seen a church or a shop either, and all villages had those.

  Didn’t they?

  As I stood there worrying, my phone rang. It was Kasia, so I picked it up in a hurry, in case something had happened to Felix or Valerie.

  “Where the hell are you?” she demanded.

  “Cumbria.” I said. “Haven’t you spoken to Felix this morning?”

  “You know I can’t do the whole bloody breakfast-at-high-table crap. What the fuck are you doing in Cumbria?”

  “School business.” I told her, then added, because I did feel genuinely bad about leaving before she was awake, “I left a note.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “What possible school business could you have in Cumbria—that’s the Lake District, right? Felix planning to give a talk on how to walk on water?”

  “Further north than that, actually. I had to cross the border to get here. The roads to the south are crazy.”

  “Where has he sent you? You don’t have to do everything he asks of you, Leon.”

  That was an old argument, and one I didn’t want to have in this eerie place. I looked away from Vainguard up at the hills. Everything was green—a cooler, wilder green, I fancied, than the sunlit lanes of Sussex. It felt somehow subtly wrong to me, and staring at it too long brought back that sense of unease which had troubled me yesterday.

  Which was ridiculous because, as far as I knew, I had never been here before. I had no reason to have any reaction to this landscape. I tried to focus on Kasia instead. “Look, I’ll send you and the boys a postcard and buy them some shortbread or something. I think I’m close enough to Scotland for that.”

  “Again, where the hell are you?”

  I tried to forestall her. “Someone left the school a country house. It’s Son of Eilbeck, Kash.”

  She’d been the one to start giving Felix’s grand dreams nicknames, so I thought I might get a laugh. Instead she said, “That doesn’t mean you have to give up your summer for it.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, irritated. “A holiday, sort of. Look, if the place is habitable, you could bring the boys up in a week or two. Make an adventure of it.”

  “In a….” She trailed off in a burst of static beats, and I recognised the sound of her tapping her nails against the phone for patience. “Leon, Leon, Leon, idiot of mine, how long has Felix sent you on this wild goose chase for?”

  “I’ll be back for the start of term,” I said.

  “It’s July. That’s almost two months away!”

  “Come on, you’re overreacting. It’s an all-expenses-paid holiday in a lovely part of the world. Lots of history and scenery and—”

  “Leon, with all the love in the world, get a life. Get a job somewhere else, move out of school, shag someone inappropriate, and marry some bloke who adores you. Or the other way around. Whatever. Just stop all this—”

  “All this what?” I snapped.

  “Stop living in Felix’s dream world,” she said. “Get some dreams of your own.”

  “I owe him. We all do.”

  “Not this much,” she said wearily, then sharply, “Don’t hang up on me.”

  I’d been about to. Instead, I looked up at the hills crouching over me, green and restless under the wind. A bird floated overhead, wings arched on the breeze—some sort of hawk, maybe, scanning the ground below for its prey. On the other end of the phone, Kasia’s breathing gradually steadied.

  We did this for each other, Kasia and Suleikha and I. If one of us asked, we held on to the patience to wait rather than walk away. We’d all had too many people leave our lives without warning.

  At last she said, “I want you to be happy.”

  “I am,” I said, genuinely startled. I had an incredibly satisfying job that came with a home, worked with people I admired, and didn’t want for any material needs. Life was okay.

  “You’re comfortable,” Kasia said. “That’s different. You should let yourself be wildly happy for a while.”

  I shuddered. “No, thanks.” Extremes of emotion, in either direction, did too much damage to both participants and bystanders.

  She sighed again and said, “Think about it, Leon, please. Call me when you get settled into this place.”

  “Tonight,” I promised and hung up.

  There was nothing wrong with my life, thank you, Kasia. Nothing wrong with quiet contentment either, or being single. Some of us put work before relationships. There was no rush.

  Except, as both my foster sisters had pointed out recently with varying degrees of subtlety, I was already thirty-six and not getting any younger. Sisterly interference was well meant but easily ignored, but I was also aware how many of my contemporaries at work had married and started families in the last few years and how many of my old uni friends had drifted away into a world of preschools and parental leave while I was still living two floors above my old school dorm. Even in the family, I was being left behind. Kasia’s boys were both of school age now, and Peter—Felix and Valerie’s birth son—had twin girls who would be taking their GCSEs next year. Even Suleikha, who didn’t want kids, was happily married and running her own business.

  The rumble of an engine making its slow way down the track shook me out of my dismayed reverie, and I turned to watch a Land Rover draw in. The man who got out was about my age and dressed in a peculiar mixture of smart suit and worn walking boots. He left the car to the sound of barking, and I could see a small terrier leaping up and down ecstatically through the back window.

  He hurried forward, almost tripping over a loose cobble, and shook my hand energetically, raising his voice to introduce himself. “Mr Kwarteng? I’m Rob Ademola from Noble and Elliott—Mr Armstrong’s solicitors. Sorry about the dog.” He twisted back to shout, �
�Sit, Dimwit!”

  The terrier dropped back but after a moment began to whine.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ademola said again, looking harried. “Usually I’d have left him under my desk, but my colleague’s away, and he eats legal pads if I leave him unsupervised. Dimwit, that is, not James… my colleague. Uh.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at him. It was good to see another black man, especially after the encounter with Niall Forster had left me on edge, and his babbling was instantly likeable. “It’s fine. He probably thinks he’s here for a walk, right?”

  At the word, Dimwit sat up, his little tail lashing in delight.

  Ademola laughed, relaxing a bit. “Let me get him settled, and I’ll grab the keys and documents. When Sir Philip phoned this morning, he said you’d want to see inside.”

  Of course Felix had. He had always meddled benignly in all our lives, and I was very grateful for it. “Definitely. I’m okay with dogs if you want to let him out for a bit. Seems a shame to leave the poor chap cooped up.”

  Ademola beamed at me. “That’s decent of you.”

  “No problem at all.” It made me feel a little more at home. This might be a long way from the Sussex Weald, but it was still the English countryside—just—and working in the country means dogs. We had six who came to school with various staff members every day, as well as Felix’s two elderly greyhounds, who spent most of their days dozing in his office and farting softly in their sleep, much to the distress of any visiting local authority liaison officers.

  Dimwit leapt at my knees a few times. I ducked down to rub his ears, which he took as an invitation to wash my face. Ademola yelped in dismay and tried to call him off, and I laughed off his apology. By the time Dimwit took off, following some trail towards the barn with his tail wagging happily, we were on first-name terms.

  “I’ve never been inside the place,” Rob said cheerfully, pulling a paper file and a ring of large metal keys out of the case. “It’s a bit of a legend in the office, you know. Armstrong used to phone us once a week.”

  “I never met the man,” I said. “I hadn’t even heard of him until Felix—Sir Philip, that is—explained things yesterday.”

  “It’s a fascinating old place, even if it is a bit neglected.”

  I liked him, his cheerful energy the opposite of glowering Niall Forster’s. He was a good-looking man too, in an understated way, with laugh lines around his dark eyes and a snub nose. He looked like he would be good company without ever demanding too much.

  He asked, “Where shall we begin, then—the barn, the bungalow, or the house?”

  “No preference,” I said. “Isn’t this a bit beneath your pay scale? Not that I mind your company, of course, but I don’t want to take you away from anything more important.”

  He grinned at me. “Honestly, I jumped at it. How often do you get to visit a haunted house on the work clock?”

  “Haunted?” I asked, glancing at Vainguard. I could see how a story like that might get started.

  “Most of the old towers and castles round here have pretty dark histories and the ghosts that go with them.” He looked chagrined. “Not putting you off, am I?”

  “Not in the least. I like a good ghost story as much as anyone, though I’m a complete sceptic.”

  He laughed. “I can barely even fake belief in Father Christmas—my youngest is five, though, and my wife would kill me if I spoilt it, so I manage it every year, just about. But that’s not the point, is it? It’s the fun of it.”

  I suffered a quick twinge of disappointment. I’d taken a liking to him. The chances that the first nice man I met up here would be both single and interested in men were pretty slim, but it would have been nice to have the fantasy a little longer. “Well, let’s get the barn and bungalow out the way first, then, and save the old and creepy bit until last.”

  He nodded and whistled for the dog.

  There was no response. He called, “Dimwit! Here, boy!”

  Still no sign of the dog.

  “He was here a moment ago,” Rob said uneasily and called, “Dimwit!”

  I joined in, striding over to the gates to see if the dog had gone that way. There was no sign of him, but Niall Forster was still standing at the end of the lane. I hesitated, glancing back. “Found him yet?”

  “No.” Rob sounded more worried. “Dimwit!”

  “I’m going to ask the chap in the lodge if he’s seen him. I think that’s the only way out to the road.”

  I started down the drive, calling, “Dimwit!”

  Niall Forster came to meet me at a quick stride. I kept shouting, scanning the fields.

  There was no sign of the terrier, and I swung back towards Vainguard indecisively.

  “Was that addressed to me?”

  I jumped. Niall Forster had arrived faster than I anticipated. His voice was gruff and irritable, and I tensed, snapping, “It’s the name of a dog.”

  “Guessed that.” He strode past me, and I hurried to catch up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Helping you find the dog. Checked the barn yet?”

  “He’d have heard us from there,” I said irritably.

  He let out a short, derisive sound and kept walking, his stride eating up the ground. He was only a few inches taller than me, but he seemed to use his stride differently, effortlessly drawing ahead. I was forced to scurry and disliked him even more for it.

  He nodded briefly to Rob and asked, “Torch? Barn has shit acoustics.”

  “In the car.” He went to get it, and Forster marched to the barn entrance. He rocked back on his heels and remarked, “Damn cat got lost in here all the time.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was intended as conversation, but thankfully Rob returned with his torch and we ventured inside.

  It was quiet in the barn, the sort of muffling silence that comes with ancient stone walls and empty spaces. By the time we’d gone three steps, it was hard to see, even once our eyes adjusted.

  “Dimwit?” Rob called, and the word sank into the quiet, dwindling away to nothing.

  The barn was divided into sections by shoulder-high wooden panels. Rob turned the torch on and swung it up, and I caught sight of a loft at the far end where tarpaulins covered piles of something. The floor was dry, but there was a smell of damp about the place.

  Something skittered in the far corner—a faint sound of claws on cobbles.

  “Dimwit!”

  “Sssh,” Forster said.

  In the quiet, we all heard the soft whine of a frightened dog.

  Rob swung his torch that way.

  Dimwit was frozen, glaring at the corner with his eyes wide and his ears pulled back. His legs were stiff, and his hair was on end.

  But the torch illuminated the corner he was glaring at too.

  There was nothing there.

  Chapter Three

  “COME ON, boy,” Rob called, his shoulders sagging in relief. “Daft dog’s scared of rats.”

  Dimwit didn’t move.

  “Go over and pick him up,” Forster ordered.

  I bristled at his tone, but Rob followed his suggestion.

  “Be careful. He may lash out.”

  Rob nodded and murmured reassurances as he approached the shaking dog. Forster passed me the torch, snapping, “Hold that steady.”

  He went in from the other side, tensing as Rob picked up the dog.

  Dimwit didn’t lash out, staying stiff and frightened. It wasn’t until we made it back to the light that he suddenly stirred, struggling in Rob’s arms. Rob let him go and Dimwit went streaking across the yard with a torrent of barking, swinging round in search of an invisible enemy.

  “I’m so sorry,” Rob said, rubbing his head. “I don’t know what came over him—”

  “Not the first,” Forster said, though the words had been addressed to me. “Animals don’t like the place. Cat clawed me badly the last time I had to fetch her out.” He swung to me, his brows gathering in a scowl. “And you think to bring
children here?”

  The disgust in his tone was unconcealed, and I met his glare, forcing myself to unlock my shoulders and take a deep breath. What was his problem?

  Yeah, right. As if it wasn’t obvious.

  As lightly as I could manage, I said, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry, old chap. We hardly ever lock the orphans up in the outbuildings these days.”

  There was a little moment of silence. A breeze gusted across the yard, making the ivy rattle against the old stones of Vainguard. Dimwit whined.

  And Forster let out a brief crack of laughter. “Fair play. Still a fool to be considering it.”

  “I’ll take that into account,” I said and failed to keep the sarcasm out of my tone. “Is there anything particular I should know, or is it just that you don’t like the sound of children on your doorstep?”

  His face twisted and he said, almost affably, “Well, fuck you, mate.”

  I gaped.

  He turned on his heel and stomped out of the yard. At the gate he hesitated and said, without turning to face us, “Cursed. The damn place is cursed.” Then he continued down the track, fists clenched at his side.

  I turned to Rob, wanting confirmation that had just happened.

  He looked troubled, watching Forster storm away from us. Once he was out of earshot, Rob said softly, “Poor bloody bastard.”

  What?

  He must have seen my expression because he explained, careful to keep his voice low, “The man lost his daughter winter before last.”

  “Oh God,” I said, suddenly horrified over what had come out of my mouth. “I had no idea.”

  “No reason you should have. It was big news locally, but not something the whole country would have known of.”

  “What happened?” I held up my hand. “Sorry. Lawyer-client privilege, of course.”

  “He’s not our client.” Rob chewed his lip, considering. “I only know what I read in the news at the time and what old Armstrong told my boss, but you could find it all out from the internet, and you’ll need to know what the roads are like if you’re really thinking of bringing children up here.”