Barbara Erskine - Hiding From the Light

Mark glanced up at the others from the clipboard. ‘I’m going to want the interviews in different settings. Perhaps some outside by the river, or some of the other places associated with Hopkins. Unless the ghosts appear there’s basically not much to see here. An empty shop. An empty upstairs. But I’d like to get some shots of that staircase if we can light it properly. I’ve got three interviews set up for this afternoon, Joe. Barker first. I’m easy where he goes, wherever he feels most comfortable, then we can fit the others round him.’

‘You don’t think he’ll back out at the last moment?’ Colin hefted the camera up onto the counter.

‘He seemed quite keen.’ Mark flipped over the page and made a quick pencil note on his schedule. ‘I had a moment of inspiration and told him programmes like this lead to dozens of people trying to buy a property after it’s appeared on TV.’

‘Not necessarily after a programme like this one!’ Colin commented dryly.

‘No, well you never know!’ Mark glanced at his watch. ‘Let’s go up and see where it would be best to put him.’

He led the way up the creaking staircase. At the top he stopped, looking into the large upper room. He frowned. Something in there had changed from when he had been in there earlier.

‘Problem?’ Colin was immediately behind him, Joe and Alice at the rear.

‘No.’ Mark walked into the room. The last person up here had been Emma. She had seen something. Felt the atmosphere. He stared round thoughtfully. ‘Feel anything?’

‘Apart from cold?’ The others had trooped in behind him. Colin shivered.

‘Cold is a start. This is August.’

Colin strode over to the window and glanced down into the street. The window sill was level with his knees and he had to stoop to see out of it. ‘We expected bad vibes. What would a haunted house be without them?’ Hunkering down he reached for the window latch and pushed the small casement open. ‘The room just needs a bit of fresh air. This place has horrendous rising damp and probably dry rot and death-watch beetle and every other scourge that old buildings are heir to. Any of that would be enough to put off a buyer, you know.’ He stood up and faced the others. ‘Mark?’

Mark was staring at the brick wall. ‘I saw something move. There. In front of the wall.’ His face had gone white.

They all followed the pointing finger and looked hard at the bricks. The temperature in the room had plummeted. For a moment they stood in total silence, no one daring to move. The traffic noise from the High Street had ceased and the quiet was unnaturally claustrophobic.

‘Can’t see anything. Shall I go down for the camera?’ Colin said quietly. He glanced at Alice. She was gazing at the wall with a slight frown on her face. If she was scared she was hiding it well.

‘No.’ Mark stepped over beside him. ‘No, it’s gone, whatever it was.’

Outside a car hooted.

‘Probably a spider,’ Joe put in firmly. He rearranged his lanky frame, folding his arms nonchalantly.

‘Probably.’ Turning, Mark stared out of the window, taking a deep breath of the air flooding into the room. A strong smell of traffic fumes rose from the street below, where cars paused to pass each other in the narrow thoroughfare. Suddenly the room felt marginally warmer.

The interview took only twenty minutes from beginning to end. They could tell it was going to be a disaster from the moment Stan Barker walked into the shop.

‘I’m not going upstairs.’ He stood, uncomfortable in his best suit, just inside the door.

Colin eyed the florid face, the too-tight collar, the jazzy tie, and glanced at Mark with a raised eyebrow.

Mark gave a barely perceptible shrug. ‘Perhaps you could stand there, at the bottom of the stairs? I just want to ask you a few questions then we’re going to do some shots of the shop itself.’

As interviewer-cum-presenter he was going to remain out of shot. If necessary he could get Colin to insert one or two angles of himself later. They always took a few interviewer shots in case.

‘So, Mr Barker, how long have your family owned number one Church Street?’

Colin, with the camera, had positioned himself beside him; Joe had pinned a mike to Stan’s tie. Stan had the look of a man facing a firing squad.

‘My grandfather bought it just after the war.’ He hesitated. ‘The old house was split into two and turned into shops about the turn of the century, I reckon. The lad as owned this half never come back. His wife wanted shot of the place so it was going for a good price.’

‘And what kind of a shop was it then?’

Mark’s question seemed to floor him. He hesitated, then he shrugged. ‘Butcher. He was a butcher, my granda.’

They were going to have to extricate every word. It was like drawing teeth.

‘And what happened next?’

‘He weren’t well, so he suggested my dad took it over. Well, he didn’t want to be a butcher so he said no. They got a man in to manage it. Old Fred Arrow. He only lasted a year.’

Silence. Stan’s eyes were riveted to the microphone baffle on top of the camcorder.

‘And what happened then?’ Mark prompted quietly. Colin moved smoothly to one side, stepping over the trailing cable, changing the angle.

‘He said he weren’t going to stay another day in the place. Hated it, he did. Said it were haunted. He said he saw Dave Pegram – that’s the lad as was killed in the war – standing on the stairs …’ He broke off and the look he shot over his own shoulder was one of pure terror. Colin smiled. Yes!

‘Well, he went and so did the next chap and then another butcher opened up down the street and Da thought he’d pack it in. So he tried to sell the place. No one was interested. Not as a butcher’s. Then a woman came along in about 1950. She wanted to run it as a bakery. Fancy cakes and things she sold. She lasted a year – maybe a bit longer, but then she saw Dave as well –’

‘When you say she saw Dave,’ Mark interrupted smoothly, ‘would she have recognised him?’

‘No.’ Stan shook his head vigorously. ‘She weren’t local. She’d never met him.’

‘But she described him?’

Stan shrugged. ‘On the stairs, she said. And upstairs. She had a flat up there, above the shop. There were three rooms in them days and then there’s an attic, too. She said he used to walk up and down all night. She’d lie there listening and she could hear him pacing up and down. You might well shiver, young lady!’ He addressed Alice suddenly who, dressed in jeans and a skimpy T-shirt had hugged herself with a shudder as she stood nearby with Mark’s clipboard clasped importantly to her chest. The goose-pimples on her arms were clearly visible.

Mark sighed. It didn’t matter. They could cut that bit.

‘I take it she checked there was no one there?’

‘She wouldn’t go up there. She left. Halfway through the lease, she upped and left. After that there was a whole load of different people. Dress shop. Hardware. Another baker. Bikes. A little tea shop once. None of them stayed.’

‘And I understand you asked for the shop to be exorcised?’

Stan looked uncomfortable. ‘Stupid business. But nobody would take it on after my Da died, so I got the old rector up here. We reckoned if Dave had never had a proper burial wherever he died, poor bastard, perhaps a few prayers and that would sort him out.’

‘And did it?’

The camera moved closer, focusing on Stan’s face.

He shook his head. ‘No. It wasn’t Dave, was it. We’d said the prayers for the wrong bloke. His son turned up in the town one day to see where ’is dad had lived. Turned out he hadn’t died at all – or not till years later! He’d gone to Canada with someone else’s missus!’