Walking with Ghosts

them ourselves. It’s not a job you can give to someone else.’ She shrugged her shoulders and grinned. ‘What I mean,’ she said, ‘J.D. offered me a job as a saint, but I didn’t like the hours.’
    Geordie let her words stand there by themselves for a while. It seemed like they needed space. If they’d been written down he’d have underlined them.
    ‘Tell me about the guy,’ he said. He placed the tray on a low table and turned a chair slightly, so that he could watch the river. The surface reflected a million winking moons. Imperceptibly, inside its ears, the corn grew ever riper.
    ‘It was him,’ she said. ‘He was young, small and dark with the broad forehead. Thin.’ She explained about Charles Hopper, how she had spoken to him on the phone, and then gone round to call on him. ‘I noticed this guy following me when I was halfway home. But he could have been waiting outside Hopper’s house. He looked like the guy Naiomi Leaver described, and it matches the description of the guy at the allotment.’
    ‘Then what happened?’
    ‘I came in the house and he walked on by. But when I looked out the window he was sitting on the grass, by those trees. He was sitting there for about an hour.’
    ‘And then he went, and he hasn’t come back.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see him leave. He could be watching from farther away.’
    ‘What would Sam do?’ Geordie asked.
    ‘Flush him out,’ said Marie. ‘The most important thing is to find out who he is, where he lives. If I go for a walk, you hang back but keep me in sight, then if the guy follows me, you follow him.’
    ‘Better still,’ said Geordie. ‘I’ll leave now, so if he’s watching the house he’ll think you’re alone. But when you go out stick to main roads. Don’t go anywhere quiet, or where there’s no one about. We know the guy’s dangerous, and we don’t want him having a go at you.’
     
    There was a small floating pier and a cluster of rowing boats a hundred and fifty metres downstream. Geordie sat on the pier and let his legs dangle over the edge, listened to the boats rubbing up against each other as he kept half an eye on Marie’s house. She was going to wash-up before she left the house, change her clothes, give Barney something to eat. She’d be out in about twenty minutes. Alone. Barney would remain behind as a guard dog.
    No one was taking an undue interest in the house. Geordie kept an eye on the people who were strolling the path, dog owners, the odd tourist or two, mainly couples. Two lads on bikes, doing wheelies. Something that looked like a student, dressed in a black cloak, head to foot, couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Nothing to worry about there.
    The wind returned with little warning. There was a rushing sound on the river, as if the fish had all come to the surface and were doing the breaststroke. A cloud blew over the face of the moon, and in no time at all the river bank was deserted.
    Geordie zipped up his jacket and toyed with the idea of going back to Marie’s house. There was no point in her coming out in this weather, no one would follow her on a night like this. The wind whipped up white caps on the river and set up a moaning through the trees that was almost human. Like women and children screaming, wailing for something that had once been wonderful but was now lost for ever. The willows lashed the surface of the water and one of the women in the wind, her voice falsetto in the cacophony, was crying herself blind.
    As Geordie decided to give up and go back to the house the wind dropped, the voices died into a distant dirge. Some of the light of the moon returned and a large planet - no, two of them - Venus, with Mars above it, winked down at the earth. The goddess of love and the god of war forever tied together. Over to his right a door slammed and as the elegy in the wind anchored itself to the calm he watched Marie walk from the shadow of her house into the ineffectual fire of the moonlight.
    She was dressed in a lilac suit, the skirt with a stylish cut that emphasized her stride. At the neck of the jacket the moonlight picked out the satin collar of her blouse. He waited until she had passed him, let her get a hundred metres ahead, then he followed, keeping close to the wall, so he was hidden by the shadows. She walked through the Museum Gardens, which was exactly what Geordie had told her not to do. She kept the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey on her left and was hooted at