The Unseen(77)

What no goodbye? Most unlike you – you were always so fond of them. Thanks for taking on the little project I found you, I appreciate it. And so does our dead chum here. He’s been rather sidelined since you left – bumped back into the cold store. We’ve had a fresh batch in from the building site of a new housing estate – I tell you, corpses are ten a penny round here. Oh well, keeps the likes of me in pin money. Let me know how you get on. I’m coming over in a couple of weeks for Dad’s sixtieth. Perhaps we can meet up then to discuss what you’ve found? I did enjoy meeting up with you again over here. Really. Even if you did let me pay for dinner, and then didn’t stay for breakfast.

Keep in touch.

Ryan



Leah read it twice, and then flicked the cursor angrily to the delete button, where her finger hovered, shaking ever so slightly. After a hung few seconds she sighed, moved the cursor away. She logged out instead, and ran a search of Cold Ash Holt Fairy Photographs. Various paranormal and new-age sites came up in a list and, halfway down the screen, the village’s community website. She opened this page, and steered away from church announcements and adverts for local workmen by clicking on the History tab. Two paragraphs sketched the life of the village from its meagre Domesday listing to the decline of the canal trade and the Second World War. There were black and white photographs of the church, and of long-dead farm workers leaning on their pitchforks in front of half-built hayricks. Leah stared into their eyes with the fascination she always found in old pictures of anonymous people. Eyes shrouded by shadow and blur – just pinpricks of white, or the steel grey of an iris. People who could not have known, when their likenesses were captured, that eighty years later she would be sitting in a café, getting to know their faces. Their lives, their thoughts, lost for ever. At the bottom of the page was a separate section of text, which read:


Perhaps the most unusual episode in Cold Ash Holt’s history was the publication, in 1911, of a set of photographs, taken by a leading spiritualist of the time, which claimed to show fairies living in the water meadows on the edge of the village. Robin Durrant enjoyed a brief period of fame when the pictures were first published, and were widely accepted as genuine both by his fellow spiritualists and by the general press. They were later discredited, despite the unswerving support of Cold Ash Holt’s vicar at that time, Albert Canning. Are there fairies in our fields? You decide!



Below were two grainy black and white photographs. The first showed a wide, level meadow, carpeted with high summer grasses and thistles, with tall trees out of focus in the background. In the middle of the picture stood a single tree, a weeping willow by the looks of it; its trunk gnarled and twisted with age, leaves pale as silver. A change in ground levels suggested that it was standing on a river bank, although the water was invisible through the grass. To the right of the tree was a small figure, slightly blurred. It was female, and appeared to have been caught in the act of leaping or dancing. Midway through a giant, exuberant stride, arms and head flung back in abandon, hair so pale it seemed white, streaming out behind it, long and wild, almost half the length of the figure’s overall height. Its face was indistinct, the features not quite captured. Just the juts of a delicate nose and chin; pale, pale skin, and its eyes seemingly closed. It was hard to get a true impression of the figure’s size, since the willow tree might have been fifteen feet high or thirty, the grasses a foot tall or three. It was an oddly unsettling picture. The sky was a flat white, the same colour as the figure’s shapeless, diaphanous dress. The fabric clung to a thin body, flat like a child’s, yet there was something adult in the angular arms and legs; the proportional size of the head to the body. The whole picture had an other-worldly, washed-out glow. As though the light had been peculiar that day, or the air unusually hazy. It was an eerie picture, and Leah stared at it until her eyes ached. The figure seemed more ghost than fairy to her.

In the second picture the figure was even harder to make out. The willow tree dominated the shot, much closer this time, and in its shadow the figure was a pallid smudge, body pressed tight against the trunk, arms reaching up towards its branches, head turned to the side and downwards, so again the face was lost, this time in shadow and behind tresses of its own hair, hanging like long cobwebs down past its waist. Wishing she had a printer, Leah studied the pictures for a long time, her nose creeping closer to the screen. If you wanted to believe in them, you could, she decided. They were odd, and ambiguous enough; the figure androgynous and indistinct, and yet still giving the impression of great beauty and delicacy. She knew from Mark Canning that the man who’d taken the pictures, Robin Durrant, had been staying at The Rectory at the time, as a guest of the vicar and his wife, Mark’s great-grandparents. In Mark, without even really trying, she had found a direct descendant of the woman who had written letters to the dead soldier; but having access to her DNA would not help with the identification of the soldier. Those were not letters written to a family member, Leah knew instinctively. Had they been written to this Robin Durrant?