Barbara Erskine - The Ghost Tree

Tom bit his lip. ‘Does the captain know about me being ill, sir?’ he asked.

The lieutenant sighed. ‘He knows about everything that goes on on his ship.’

‘Yes, sir. I see, sir.’ Tom glanced at him. ‘Will he tell my father, sir?’

‘I very much doubt it. Why should he? You’re already on the road to recovery. You’ve been lucky, Tom. You’ve seen the best healer in these islands and, besides, what happened was not your fault.’ He hesitated. ‘Just watch yourself. Farquhar has a malicious streak. I’m keeping an eye on him, but I cannot be there every moment of the day. You need to be on your guard and you need to be able to deal with this situation.’ He looked down at the boy trotting beside him. ‘Be strong, Tom. You have it in you. Don’t be afraid to stand up to him.’

James Reid emailed Ruth a copy of the letter he proposed sending to Timothy. ‘It has come to our attention that the will forwarded to me purporting to come from your solicitor does not carry an authentic signature, neither has it been possible to contact the witnesses. It is a criminal offence to falsify …’ She glanced through the rest of it briefly. James demanded the return of any property Timothy had removed from Number 26 without delay, and threatened to send a copy of the letter to the police if that was not done.

She sat back, staring at her laptop. Perhaps they should send a holding letter first? Give Timothy a little time to return anything he had taken.

‘Ruth?’ It was Harriet on the phone. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m good.’ Ruth smiled. It was good to hear Hattie’s cheery voice. ‘I’m discovering lots of stuff about Thomas.’

‘Any mention of spirit guides?’

‘No, but he does seem to be showing signs of having appeared as a ghost a few times.’

‘Now, that is interesting.’ Harriet’s voice rose with excitement.

‘And one other thing you’ll be interested to hear: I’ve found a copy of Dion Fortune’s book Psychic Self-Defence amongst my mother’s books.’

‘Have you indeed. Listen, Ruthie. I was ringing because I’ve had an idea. I’ve got to come to Edinburgh to interview someone about SOE and check a few things in the library. Liz is lending me her car. I wondered if I could come on to see you the day before and perhaps have supper? Possibly stay the night? Would your friend Fin mind? We can catch up on everything then.’

It seemed like a plan.

Andrew Farquhar had hated Thomas from the first moment he had set eyes on him in that little rat hole of a gunroom on the ship. The boy seemed to have the knack of making friends, of being popular. Young as he was, he addressed the lieutenant and even the captain as an equal. Clearly there must be family connections of some sort. It gave Andrew enormous pleasure to set about planning all the petty revenges that would make Thomas miserable. He hadn’t intended to kill Robbie. That had been unfortunate, a prank aimed at upsetting the sanctimonious Thomas who had befriended the kid. That prank had gone sadly wrong, and thanks to Thomas he was caught and punished and humiliated.

It had been a petty triumph when he had the idea of stealing the infected rags from the squalor of the seamen’s quarters where he now found himself and stashing them in Thomas’s sea chest. He had found it unlocked once or twice over the months and spent time searching it, looking at the neat notebooks and pen boxes and brushes and combs, the pile of letters tied with ribbon that had come from his family, the presents his sisters had sent him via a merchant ship from London. Andrew hadn’t kept the items he filched, that would have been too easy. One pen, engraved with Thomas’s name that he knew had been a gift from his mother, he threw over the side in the dark of the night; the small penknife, a gift from Thomas’s father, he kept for two days then slid through a gap in the boards and heard with great satisfaction the small splash as it fell into the noxious bilge water in the hold.

The plan to infect him had worked, but instead of the death-sentence pox Andrew had hoped for, he had caught some disease which turned out to be curable, and even that small misery had misfired when Thomas had gone ashore and come back with bottles of medicine and a jar of ointment. When Andrew had next found the gunroom empty and crept over to look at Thomas’s sea chest, he had felt the cold waft of evil coming off it before he even touched it and he fled back to his own quarters. He had never gone near it again, but his hatred had grown, if anything, more entrenched.

Timothy threw the letter down on the table and looked up at his sister. For once he did not protest at the fact that she had opened something addressed to him. ‘So that’s it, then. We’ve been found out.’

‘No. He only says there’s a delay. Even if they suspect something, they can’t prove it.’ April glanced at him. ‘And we still have our trump card: the DNA. We can prove you’re the old man’s son.’

‘You really believe that will work?’

‘It will work,’ she said emphatically. ‘And that would at least give us half the house and half the stuff.’

‘Us? It will give me half the house,’ he said mildly. He gave a grim smile. ‘After all, it will prove you are not my sister.’

He looked away when he saw the ice-cold fury in her eyes. ‘Don’t even think you’re going to cut me out of my share,’ she said quietly. ‘It was all my idea and my planning. You haven’t the brains to tie your own shoelaces!’ The scorn in her voice was cutting.

He gave a small shrug of his shoulders. ‘It was me that sat with that old man for months.’

‘And why not? It’s not as if you had any other job.’ She stood up. ‘Now, what do we do with the silver and stuff?’

‘We’re going to deny having it, right?’

‘Of course.’ The tone was withering again. ‘They can prove nothing if they can’t find it.’ She put her hands on the table in front of him and leaned forward, right in his face. ‘What did you do with that box of muck?’

It was the first time she had asked. ‘I put it in the rubbish skip down the road, like you said.’ He didn’t meet her eye.

‘Good. Right. Now, we have to get everything out of here. We can smash up the pictures and burn them; they aren’t worth anything. The rest is easier to stash.’

‘I know where we can hide the stuff.’ His voice was quietly triumphant. ‘Somewhere they will never even think to look.’ Her casual dismissal of the pictures hurt. They were old and so probably valuable.

‘Where?’

‘Macdermott’s place in Cramond.’ He grinned.

She opened her mouth to protest, then sat down opposite him and stared at him hard. ‘Go on.’

‘When I was poking about there in the garden I came across an old shed behind the outbuildings. Looks as though no one has been in there for years. It’s full of spiderwebs and dead leaves. I can put it there.’

She thought for a moment. ‘It could work.’

‘Can you think of anywhere better? Short of chucking it in the Forth?’ His courage was coming back. ‘And you can’t exactly have a bonfire here, can you! Mr Nosy next door would want to know what you were doing and there would be forensic evidence, even if it was ashes.’

‘No, you’re right.’ She made up her mind. ‘Let’s load the car.’

‘I can’t do it in daylight.’

She hesitated. ‘We’ve got to risk it; we can’t risk keeping the stuff here in case the police come. We were stupid to use this address on the will, but we had to give them somewhere to contact us.’ She scowled. ‘Load the car then park it somewhere until it’s dark.’