Walking with Ghosts

just like a ghost.
     

38
     
    The bell rings downstairs and the door opens. You hear Dr Hillerman shout from the foot of the stairs and Diana goes to meet him. He bustles into the room and listens to your heart through his stethoscope. Bushy eyebrows, sprouting every which way. The iron bar has almost gone from your body. You feel light, like one of Mother’s sponge cakes.
    ‘You’ve had some pain?’ he says.
    You look him in the eye and shake your head. He turns to Sam questioningly.
    Sam laughs. He can’t believe you’ve looked the doctor in the eye and told a big lie. He turns back to the doctor. ‘It seems better now,’ he says.
    The doctor holds your wrist. He is not taking your pulse. He is trying to reassure himself by physical contact. ‘We don’t want to take any chances,’ he says. ‘We’d better have you in the hospital.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Have you a phone?’ This to Sam.
    ‘She’s all right here, doctor. There’s no need for the hospital.’
    The doctor makes a face. ‘Impossible.’
    Sam crosses him and stands by the bed, his hand on your arm. ‘She’s all right here,’ he repeats. ‘She doesn’t want to go.’
    Silence.
    The moment of decision.
    ‘We can cope,’ Diana tells him.
    The doctor dithers on the spot, but he knows he has lost. He turns his face to you. ‘You’re a stubborn woman,’ he says, but the tone of his voice has softened. He closes his bag. ‘I’ll be off,’ he says. ‘Some of my patients need me.’ You listen to his footsteps on the stairs, and the front door closing behind him. You catch Sam’s eye, and return his smile. He strokes the side of your face.
    Diana places both hands on the bed and shakes her head. ‘You two,’ she says. ‘You two against the whole bloody world.’
     

39
     
    William stood back in the shadows of the street and watched Dora’s house. He saw the Daimler arrive and the man get out with the doctor’s bag. A few minutes later he watched the man leave the house, get back into the Daimler and drive away. Every room in the house was lit. The ground-floor rooms were unoccupied. Upstairs, the curtains to Dora’s room were drawn, but figures, silhouettes, could be seen moving behind them.
    It would be possible, simple even, to go around the back of the house and gain entry through the kitchen door. Then creep up the stairs, give Dora a big surprise. He had a length of green rope in the pocket of his cloak. A warm knife nestling next to it.
    He smiled to himself, then replaced the smile with a furrowed brow. Because things were going wrong now.
    His attempt on the woman in Fishergate had gone wrong. Badly wrong. He had planned it exactly like the others, and the others had gone according to plan. The man wasn’t supposed to return when he did. William couldn’t understand that. He had thought about it over the last couple of days, and it still didn’t make sense.
    Everything had been going right up to that point. He had stalked the woman. Watched her, he knew how she organized her life. There was a man there, a man who lived with her, but when he went out to his club he stayed out of the house until midnight. Always. As long as William had watched them the man had never returned before midnight. And when he returned he staggered and sometimes sang, as the alcohol boiled inside his brain.
    But when William had the rope around the woman’s neck, when her eyes were bulging with disbelief, the man had returned. It was still not ten o’clock. And the man was not staggering or singing, he was quick and alert. He was strong. William only got away because he heard the door to the flat opening. If he hadn’t heard that the man would have trapped him in there.
    That had been the first thing that had gone wrong. Not counting India Blake. The India Blake thing had gone wrong, but it had come out all right in the end.
    The second thing that had gone wrong was Charles Hopper who was still in the chest in William’s house. William had not wanted to put Charles in the chest in his house. He had not wanted Charles to be involved in any way at all. Charles was work, business. William didn’t want to mix business and pleasure. He wanted to keep them separate, like everyone else did.
    And what had made Charles Hopper get involved was the woman detective who was asking questions. William had thought about that as well. And what he had thought was simple. Get rid of the woman detective and everything would stop. Almost. There would still