Martin Edwards - The Frozen Shroud

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Miriam asked.

Shenagh Moss stretched in the ancient armchair. Oz Knight had once said her every movement possessed a feline grace. Shenagh had moved on — gracefully, of course — from Oz, but he wasn’t wrong. Where she came from, nobody cared about elegance, but these days, poise came as naturally as breathing. Even with no admiring man around, just an elderly housekeeper with anxious eyes.

‘Ghosts are about the past. Look forward, not back, that’s my philosophy.’

Miriam frowned at a mud-stain disfiguring the carpet she’d cleaned for so many years. Thinking about her long-dead husband? Poor, stuck-in-a-rut Miriam. Sixty was no age, but to look at her you’d think she had one foot in the grave. At least she’d made the effort to dye her hair, but why that dismal shade of mousy brown? Her beige cardigan, shapeless grey skirt and thick stockings were a perfect match for this room, with its faded furnishings, and faint aroma of mothballs.

Yet it was never too late to change your life. Look at Francis, twelve years older than Miriam, and a martyr to osteoarthritis. From the moment they met, Shenagh knew she could put a smile back on his face. Life was short, got to grab your pleasure when you saw the chance.

‘We can’t ignore the past.’ Miriam rested a hand on Shenagh’s shoulder, gripping bone through thin silk. ‘Remember the Faceless Woman.’

‘Our very own ghost?’ Shenagh giggled. Forget the rotten weather, life was good. She wanted to cheer Miriam up. ‘Hey, after haunting Ravenbank all those years, you’d think she’d get bored. Forever prowling up and down the same lane, where’s the fun in that?’

‘You may laugh, pet, but Mrs Palladino once caught sight of the Faceless Woman. Gave her the shock of her life — and she wasn’t given to flights of fancy.’

Shenagh glanced at the framed photograph on the sideboard. With her long nose, pursed lips and pointed chin, the late Esme Palladino looked as though she disapproved of imagination, and anything else smacking of self-indulgence. You’d never guess she’d drunk herself to death.

‘Spooky!’ Shenagh pretended to shiver. ‘Makes you wonder why she carried on living in Ravenbank.’

‘Why ever not? This is the loveliest spot in the Lakes — ghost and all!’ Miriam brightened. ‘You could be so happy, pet, living here permanently. This is your home.’

‘Thanks. You’re very kind.’

Yet Miriam was also wrong. Home for Shenagh should be Katoomba, high above her native Sydney in the Blue Mountains. Or maybe a big house at Double Bay or Vaucluse, with views of the harbour. Not a decaying mausoleum on the edge of Ullswater. She wasn’t nostalgic for Sydney’s outer western suburbs, of course. No one could be sorry to leave behind that weatherboard hovel by the train track in Jannali. But she needed room to breathe. Ravenbank was suffocating her.

‘Well, you’re one of us now.’

There was no higher praise that Miriam could bestow. Shenagh was the daughter she’d never had, according to Francis. And for sure, she’d have been a massive improvement on Shenagh’s actual Mom, a surfie chick who gave birth at fifteen, and was run over by a truck one night when she was out of it on cocaine, looking for business on the streets of Caringbah instead of looking after her daughter.

‘You’re very kind.’

‘You’re not fretting about that dreadful man Meek, are you, pet?’

Miriam cared , that was the difference. She’d never even met Craig Meek, but already she was worried sick about what he might do, now he was out of prison.

‘Hey, it’s fine. Craig isn’t any sort of ghost. Just a selfish, troublemaking bully. Nice as pie as long as everything is going his way, but when it isn’t …’

Miriam peered at her, as if straining to decipher a message written in code. ‘Promise you’ll be careful. Now he’s back in Pooley Bridge … well, it’s too close for comfort, when he has a history of violence.’

‘I’m not running scared,’ Shenagh said. ‘I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. And that is a promise.’

The velvet curtains weren’t thick enough to deaden the lash of rain on the flagstones outside. The clock struck six, but it felt like midnight. This vast sitting room was draughty, despite the crackling fire. Shenagh reckoned the whole house needed a makeover to bring it into the twenty-first century, but she wasn’t going to hang around, waiting for it to happen. Who could blame her for counting the days until she landed back at Kingsford Smith?

Miriam tossed another log from the wicker basket onto the flames, and Shenagh reached out to warm her hands.

‘Why do you ask about ghosts?’

‘Don’t say you’ve forgotten? Today is Hallowe’en.’

‘I wanted to go to a party.’ Shenagh feigned a pout. ‘Francis wouldn’t hear of it. I told him, you don’t have to believe in ghoulies, it’s only an excuse for a piss-up. But he’d rather stay at home, the lazy sod.’

‘One thing he isn’t, pet, is lazy.’ Miriam seldom ventured to contradict Shenagh, but she’d defend Francis to the death. ‘He’s absolutely tireless. That’s why he reached the top of his profession.’

‘Yeah, I hear the nurses worshipped him. No wonder he expects everyone to jump when he says jump. Sometimes he makes me feel like a stupid kid.’

Shenagh smiled. Both of them knew she was anything but stupid. Francis wouldn’t want to spend the rest of his life with an airhead, whatever she looked like.

‘It’s just his way.’

‘He thinks the world of you, and no wonder. During that terrible time, when Esme was ill, he couldn’t have got through it without you.’

A pink tinge appeared on Miriam’s leathery cheeks. This was another of Shenagh’s gifts, her lavishness with praise. It cost nothing to make people feel good, and sometimes they were generous in return.

‘You always say such nice things, pet, but I was only doing my job.’

‘Francis shouldn’t have stayed on in this house,’ Shenagh said. ‘Even though he doesn’t believe in ghosts any more than I do.’

‘Mr Palladino’s a man of science.’ Miriam shook her head. ‘He doesn’t believe in anything he can’t see and touch.’

Shenagh clapped her hands. ‘How’s this for an idea? We can celebrate! Commemorate the occasion. I mean, we can’t just ignore our very own legend. It wouldn’t be fair on poor old Gertrude. Let’s mark the Faceless Woman’s anniversary with champagne!’

‘Oh, pet, I don’t think it’s …’

The sitting room door creaked open, and the words died on Miriam’s tongue. The man who walked in carried a stick, and winced with every step he took. His sparse grey hair was wet, his Barbour coat dripped onto the carpet.

‘Filthy night.’

A voice of authority, unaccustomed to dissent. How he must have relished making the nurses swoon. He claimed he missed the world of medicine, but Shenagh suspected he missed not the patients, but the power. Even she’d been startled by his reminiscences of life and death in hospital, and a God-playing former colleague known as Morphine Morris: ‘No bed-blockers in his wards, I can tell you, not after one quick squirt of his trusty syringe!’

‘Dreadful, isn’t it?’ Miriam said.

No wonder Francis had kept Miriam on after Esme’s liver finally gave up the unequal struggle. Miriam served the same purpose as the adoring nurses. Yes, Mr Palladino, no, Mr Palladino, three bags full, Mr Palladino. And it wasn’t only Francis; her son was someone else she spoilt rotten. No doubt it was the same with her husband, the late lamented Bobby. Big mistake. Let a man get his own way, and he’d walk all over you.