The Mistletoe Bride(47)

All at once a rush of air, cold and damp like the mist on the marshes, as if someone had opened a door and let the night in. And a dreadful howling, like a deer caught in a steel trap. For a split second, the girl appeared to smile as she gazed upon the face of the man who had murdered her. Then, before my eyes, her face began to change. Her features, pretty printed on the front page of the newspaper all those years ago, started to collapse in upon themselves. Her brown eyes became red, then rolling white, her rouged lips shrivelled to black, her skin turning to a spider’s web of veins and sinew.

Suddenly, without warning, she leapt.

At the hour of his death, she had come to claim him. I screamed, beating the air with useless hands, trying to protect myself or him, I can’t say. But he didn’t resist. Her bloody, broken body seemed to cover him, bones and blood, taking him with her. His legs buckled and he fell forward, arms by his side, making no attempt to break his fall.

Then silence.

I sank to the ground, knees drawn up to my chin, oblivious to the blood seeping across the tiles and soaking into the hem of my skirt. I heard nothing, was aware of nothing, until someone started banging on the front door and I heard them calling my name.

Later, they told me it was the sound of my stepfather screaming that alerted the neighbours. That, and a strange smell of rotting seaweed permeating through the thin cottage walls.

The doctor said it was a heart attack. A blessing, he called it, that he went so fast. One minute here, the next, gone. The blood from where he’d hit his head. Just like that. But I understood now. I knew he had been dying for years. Rotting from the inside out.

Waiting, all that time, for her to return.

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’.