Watching the Ghosts

Book 3: DI Joe Plantagenet

by Kate Ellis

Genres: Police Procedurals; Thrillers

Synopsis

Boothgate House is a recently converted apartment building with a sinister past. Once an asylum for the insane, known as Havenby Hall, it was where serial killer Peter Brockmeister was sent on his release from prison.

Detective Inspector Joe Plantagenet is drawn into the house's history when the daughter of a solicitor, who was investigating Havenby Hall's closure, is kidnapped.

Joe wonders whether there may be a connection between the case and the building's disturbing past.

But as secrets come to light, Joe is forced to face an evil that threatens those closest to him.

Release date: February 1, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 80000

Sample

Tick tock. The thing had eyes. And it was watching her.

It stood in the corner, taller than a man, and its deep insistent voice boomed out across the silent room – tick tock. The painted eyes swivelled from side to side as it beat away the time. Tick tock, tick tock.

It had a face, round and pallid, and its smiling lips were half parted to reveal a painted planetary scene which changed with the phases of the moon. But the strangest thing was those moving eyes that watched her and rejoiced in her fear.

Lydia’s limbs were paralysed and she knew there was no escape from the horror to come. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. She could smell him now; a strange hospital smell, clean and threatening. She knew he would take her by the hand and lead her from the room and she knew the hand that held hers would be cold and clammy like a dead man’s. Then she would glide down the stairs like a phantom towards that open door, towards the rectangle of bright light. And the clock with its tall, dark, oak case would follow her. Tick tock, tick tock. He was coming … and he was coming for her.

Now he had vanished but there was no way she could stop herself moving towards the door. She anticipated the horror she would witness when she passed beyond the light and she tried to scream. But no noise emerged. Tick tock, tick tock. The clock was still there watching as she inhaled the whiff of burning flesh and the metallic scent of blood.

Suddenly her eyes opened and she could see the grey dawn light seeping in through the blinds. But for a few moments she lay sweat soaked and shaking, hovering between nightmare and reality.

She forced herself upright and flicked on the bedside light, taking deep, calming breaths. It was only a dream but it had been disturbing her sleep every night since she’d moved into the new flat, leaving her jittery and exhausted.

And she knew that if it didn’t stop soon, she’d have to do something about it.

Daisy loved the small park in the centre of Pickby so it was the least Melanie could do to take her there on the way home from school on the last day of term, the one day she’d managed to leave work early.

She’d told everyone in the office she was taking work home but that had been a half-truth; she hadn’t told them that she’d felt a sudden urge to see Daisy so she’d rung the child minder to say she’d take care of school gate duty that day. The child minder had sounded surprised, which she thought said a lot. But why shouldn’t she spend a little quality time – how she hated that term – with her daughter?

Daisy dumped her school bag at Melanie’s feet and ran towards the swings with a six year old’s enviable energy. Her fair curls bobbed as she ran, splashing in small puddles left over from yesterday’s showers, while Melanie followed her, tottering on office high heels. The other mothers sitting around the fringe of the playground were wearing a summer uniform of jeans and T-shirts and Melanie felt out of place in her dark business suit and crisp white blouse. A couple of the women shot her suspicious glances as they gossiped on the wooden benches, and she felt like an intruder on their territory.

She picked up the bag, walked over to the swing and stood awkwardly as Daisy climbed on to the seat. The other mothers looked so at home there as they sat chatting, unaware of her need for some social contact, however slight. A smile, a comment on the improving weather. Anything would have been welcome.

‘Push me, mummy.’ Daisy was sitting on the swing, jiggling her legs impatiently and Melanie forced out a mummy smile – the kind she had always imagined she’d give her children in the days when motherhood had been a vague future notion.

But as she positioned herself behind the swing her mobile phone rang. ‘Just a minute, darling,’ she said in saccharine tones.

But children have an instinct for when they’re being fobbed off. As Melanie answered the call Daisy slipped off the swing and ran off in the direction of the climbing frame – a large contraption of wood and ropes that, if she hadn’t been so preoccupied, Melanie would have considered too challenging for a slightly built six year old like Daisy. But it was a call from one of her senior partners so Melanie had no choice but to answer and watch helplessly as her daughter ascended the ladder and vanished into the house-like structure six feet off the rubber-matted ground. She held her breath, her mind half on the phone call and half on Daisy. She was out of sight now but the senior partner – a pompous man who loved the sound of his own voice – was droning on about some meeting scheduled for the next day. Melanie attempted to make intelligent and professional-sounding interjections, trying to suppress the mother and bring the solicitor to the fore, but all the time her eyes were searching for Daisy, wishing she wasn’t wearing the dull, navy-blue uniform that made her so hard to spot in the shadows.

She walked round to the other side of the climbing frame, hoping for a glimpse of her daughter, aware that her replies to the senior partner’s questions were becoming more absent-minded.

But it was all right. Daisy was there, smiling and waving from the unglazed window of the play house and Melanie felt as if a weight had been lifted from her heart as she waved back. When the little face disappeared from the window, she turned her back. Daisy was safe and it was time she concentrated on work.

Holding the phone tight to her ear, she stared out across the park. It was filling up now as people on their way home from work mingled with those strolling at a more leisurely pace with children, lovers or dogs in tow. At last the senior partner was saying goodbye and it was with considerable relief that Melanie pressed the key to end the call.

She slipped the phone back in her handbag and when she turned she saw a man walking purposefully towards her, his eyes fixed on hers. She looked round, searching for Daisy. But there was no sign of her.

He was a few yards away now, just outside the playground, his dog straining on the leash as though it was anxious to reach her. It was a big dog – a Boxer possibly, although she didn’t know much about dog breeds – but it looked reasonably friendly.

‘I see you’ve knocked off work early,’ he called across to her, his thick lips curling up in a smile. He was short and wiry but there was a suggestion of strength in his tattooed arms. He wore shorts, revealing a pair of pale and hirsute legs and a sleeveless T-shirt of the kind she had once heard referred to as a ‘wife beater’. She wondered if he had a wife to beat – but then she realized she knew very little about Chris Torridge apart from what he’d told her during their meetings in her office.

‘Have you made any progress?’ he asked and it struck Melanie, not for the first time, that his deep and cultured voice belied his appearance. ‘You do remember, don’t you? Dorothy Watts?’

Melanie walked over to him. This wasn’t the sort of conversation you could hold from a distance. She resented the note of reproach in his voice, as though he was accusing her of neglecting her duties. She remembered, all right. Discovering what had become of Dorothy Watts was one of her more interesting cases – an intriguing change from the usual round of wills and conveyancing – and she had put a good deal of effort into finding witnesses and uncovering the truth. ‘Of course I remember, Mr Torridge. I’ve made some progress since our last meeting. In fact I think I’ve made a breakthrough. If you’d like to make an appointment …’

‘Can’t you tell me now?’

‘The file’s back at the office. Sorry.’ She turned her head to look for Daisy but again, she was nowhere to be seen. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll speak to you soon.’

She saw him hesitate and when the dog began to bark she felt like thanking the creature for coming to her rescue. Without another word Torridge walked away, tugged by the dog, and she stood for a few moments, watching as he vanished into the trees that separated the park from the suburban gardens beyond.

She looked at her watch. It was time she got home. She picked up the school bag which she’d dumped on the ground when she answered the phone and went in search of her daughter.

She hurried to the heart of the playground, calling Daisy’s name softly, one eye on the group of gossiping mothers who seemed to be absorbed in their own affairs. She couldn’t see Daisy on the climbing frame or on the swings and as her search became more frantic panic began to well up inside her, making her heart thud and her legs feel like jelly. After a while, all dignity and reticence abandoned, she rushed up to the group of mothers who looked up at her as if they resented her intrusion into their conversation.

‘Have you seen a little girl? Six years old, fair curly hair, wearing a navy-blue school uniform?’

The mothers all shook their heads but a couple of them, suddenly sympathetic, offered to help her look and they shouted questions across to their own children who answered with bored shrugs. One of the women assured her that they’d seen no lone males inside the playground in the last half hour or so. These days any lone male in the vicinity of a playground without a child in tow triggered all sorts of alarm bells in the maternal head.

The thought that Daisy might have wandered off while she’d been talking on the phone or being questioned by Chris Torridge brought on pangs of guilt. How could she have turned her back like that and left the confines of the playground? How could she have let her precious Daisy out of her sight?

The mothers quickly organized themselves into some sort of search party and, while some stayed to keep a close eye on their own offspring, they fanned out, calling Daisy’s name and accosting passers-by to ask if they’d seen a child matching her description while Melanie stood by the climbing frame, paralysed and feeling strangely detached from the situation. She felt as though she was a spectator watching a scene of immense horror and all she could do was stand there and stare ahead, useless and powerless, scanning the faces of any children in view in the hope that one of them would be Daisy. She couldn’t pray and she couldn’t cry as the numbness took hold. Daisy. All she wanted was to see her running across the grass towards her.

When she spotted a fair-haired child of around Daisy’s height, her hopes were raised for a second. But despair took hold as soon as she realized the resemblance was slight. Daisy was nowhere to be seen.

Warm tears of frustration trickled down her cheeks as one of the park bench mothers, a plump woman with cropped hair, put a comforting arm around her shoulders and led her to the bench. ‘You’re in shock, love. If we don’t find her in the next few minutes we’ll call the police. Try not to worry, eh.’ Her last words didn’t sound convincing. She could hear the anxiety in the woman’s voice.

Melanie nodded and as mucous began to drip from her nose she fumbled in her bag for a tissue. As soon as the bag was open her phone rang, loud and insistent. She stared at it, unable to move.

‘You should answer it,’ her new ally said. ‘It might be news. She might have found her way back home.’

Melanie’s hand was shaking as she pressed the key and held the phone to her ear. She could hardly utter the word ‘hello’ but it didn’t matter because Jack didn’t wait for her to speak.

‘I’ve had a call,’ he said. ‘Someone’s got Daisy.’

‘I only took my eyes off her for a few seconds. I …’

‘Shut up and listen.’ Jack sounded angry. More than angry … furious. ‘They want money or they say we’ll never see her again. They say they’re going to call later.’

Melanie’s hands, suddenly clumsy, refused to obey her panicked brain and she dropped the phone, sending it clattering down to the cold, unforgiving ground.

Perhaps it was a good thing that Eborby’s Tourist Office was always busy. When you’re busy you don’t have time to think and brood and although the nightmare had broken her sleep, Lydia hadn’t felt too bad at work.

She enjoyed working in the elegant eighteenth-century building near the cathedral and she’d managed to fix a smile to her face as she’d handed out the glossy leaflets advertising Eborby’s many tourist attractions and looked up the times of sightseeing buses and river cruises. But when she’d visited the little staff cloakroom and looked in the mirror above the sink, she’d seen dark smudges of blue-black beneath her eyes.

Even in her busiest moments she could never quite banish the memory of that clock with its watchful, swivelling eyes. She’d had that same dream so many times that she’d begun to wonder whether it was some sort of warning. Or perhaps some terrible suppressed memory – she’d read about such things in magazines but had never quite believed them.

At five thirty the working day was over and Lydia headed towards Boothgate, passing the Eborby Playhouse, an old theatre with a recently added glass frontage. The red and black posters outside announced that the latest production was called simply Mary. It had received good reviews and she’d read in the publicity leaflets in the rack at the Tourist Information Centre that the play had been inspired by the building now known as Boothgate House – the building where she lived – so maybe one day she’d make the effort to see it … even though the subject matter didn’t really appeal.

The July evening was too warm for the cardigan she’d stuffed into her bag that morning – just in case – and she felt somehow lighter and more optimistic as she made her way home. She passed the shops and pubs at the city end of the street and soon she reached Boothgate’s rows of elegant Georgian houses, many now converted into offices. She paused to look in an estate agent’s window, purely out of habit, before waiting at the pedestrian crossing for the lights to change and interrupt the stream of cars flowing out of the city down the straight Roman road at the end of the working day.

Then she carried on walking and soon Boothgate House came into view. It was an impressive eighteenth-century building of elegant proportions set well back from the main road behind an expanse of lawn and from the street it had the look of some urban stately home. Perhaps that’s why she’d found it so attractive when she’d come to view the new apartment with its bright modern kitchen, its high ceilings, its long sash windows and its reasonable price tag. But now she knew that the place had a different, grimmer, history.

At one time it had been known as Havenby Hall and there had been a forbidding seven-foot wall around the grounds, now reduced to half that height by the developers. Once its stone had been blackened by Eborby’s myriad smoking chimneys but now the wall and the building had been sandblasted to an unthreatening pale gold. Havenby Hall had begun life as a charitable foundation, an asylum for lunatics and the mentally disordered, renowned in the nineteenth century for its enlightened and experimental treatments in an age when such patients were rarely treated with understanding or kindness.

Later in its history it had been taken over by a private trust as a hospital for the treatment of various mental conditions, chronic and acute. Then in the 1960s one section had been set aside as a secure unit for the more serious cases, the cases judged a danger to the patient – or others – and, as a consequence, in its last days Havenby Hall had acquired a fearful reputation in the town. The hospital had closed in 1981 and had been derelict for years before the developer, Patrick Creeny, had gutted and renovated it beyond recognition. Only one wing round the back lay untouched now. But she had been assured that it was only a matter of time before that too was transformed from ruined utility to twenty-first-century luxury.

Lydia slipped down the side road and through the decorative iron gate that had replaced its secure and solid predecessor before making for the grand front door.

She let herself in and passed the grand central staircase, the sort that might conjure childhood fantasies of being a princess – Cinderella at the ball maybe. But she was just past thirty-two – far too old for such things.

When the door of her flat came into view she readied her key for the lock. It was a handsome mahogany door, one of the originals. The developer had made a great thing of retaining some of the more attractive original features. To date only half the flats had been finished and, of them, only half had been sold. She assumed it was something to do with the recession. But there were times when she wondered whether it was something else. Maybe it was the building’s past history and the accompanying taint of madness that put potential buyers off.

She was about to open the door when the sound of a voice saying hello made her swing round. The woman who stood there was large but solidly built rather than fat. She wore a red T-shirt with faint sweat patches under the arms and a flared floral skirt which emphasized the dimensions of her hips. Her long hair was mousy and pulled back into a pony tail and although her chin merged into her neck, her skin was clear and flawless. It was difficult to guess her age, which could have been anything between thirty-five and fifty.

‘Lovely day.’ The woman smiled, showing a row of perfect teeth.

Lydia responded with a bland remark about the weather. It was good to have a friendly neighbour and Beverley was more than happy to take in parcels and keep a spare key in case of emergencies.

‘How’s your mum?’ she asked. Beverley had moved up to Eborby from the Midlands with her frail, elderly mother a few months ago. Both of them had visited Eborby and liked it so they’d made the decision to sell up and relocate when Beverley gave up her job in her local council offices to care for her mother full time. Lydia considered this a noble sacrifice, and one that she didn’t think she herself would be capable of making.

‘She has her good days and her bad days. You know how it is,’ she said. Her voice was high pitched, almost girlish.

Lydia nodded sympathetically and turned to put her key in the lock.

‘I had a visitor before.’ The way Beverley said the words, as though she was harbouring some delicious secret, made Lydia turn back. She sensed gossip. And, knowing her empty flat was waiting for her on the other side of that door, a bit of gossip was just what she felt like at that moment. Besides, she felt that Beverley must be lonely so she’d also be doing a service to a fellow human being.

‘A man called. He left his card with me. Hang on a moment.’ Beverley disappeared through her flat door which she’d left ajar. Lydia had always been struck by the way she moved so gracefully for someone of her build. She returned after a few seconds and handed Lydia a small white business card.

Lydia studied it. ‘Dr Karl Dremmer. Eborby University, Department of Psychology. Researcher in Parapsychology and Paranormal Phenomena.’

‘He asked me if I’d noticed anything strange about this building,’ said Beverley.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him that, apart from that problem with the drains when we first moved in everything’s been fine.’

Suddenly Lydia was grateful for Beverley’s lack of imagination. But their conversation had given her a small, nagging feeling that something wasn’t right; that her dream had somehow been triggered by something in this place that was impossible to explain.

‘He said one of the builders contacted him. Said things had been happening.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘I don’t know.’ Beverley’s open face suddenly clouded. ‘I’d better get back to Mother.’

As Lydia let herself into her flat and made for the kitchen, she found the news that she wasn’t the only one who’d sensed something amiss in that place strangely comforting.

‘When did he say he’d call back?’

‘He didn’t specify a time. I don’t even know whether it was a he. The voice was put through one of those machines … sounded like a robot.’

The words sent a shudder through Melanie’s heart as she paced the polished wooden floorboards. The prospect of sitting down on the soft leather sofa seemed unbearable. To sit would seem as if she was admitting defeat … as if she was doing nothing. She stopped moving and looked Jack in the face. He appeared to be mildly concerned but not worried like she was. Not frantic, primitive worried. But Daisy wasn’t his own flesh and blood. She was the child of Melanie’s first, ill-advised marriage and Jack had had to accept her as part of the package.

She kept replaying the scene at the park in her head. The way she’d lied to the other mothers when she’d told them that Daisy had found her way home. But if they had scented the truth, they’d have insisted on calling the police immediately. And the last thing she’d wanted was a patrol car turning up, sirens blazing and making whoever had Daisy panic. A frightened criminal is a dangerous criminal and under no circumstances was she going to gamble with Daisy’s safety.

She tried desperately to recall every detail of the scene, cursing that call from the senior partner, cursing Chris Torridge and his presumption that he could take up her private time with what was really a work matter, although she did find the case intriguing. If she hadn’t been distracted, if she’d been watching Daisy as she should have been, this nightmare wouldn’t be happening. The mothers had been quite adamant that no lone man had approached the playground – in the current climate of suspicion they would have noticed – which left the possibility that the abductor was a woman; someone whose presence created no suspicion. Jack had thought that the caller might have been a woman. But kidnapping didn’t seem like a woman’s crime somehow. Unless the woman was the accomplice. Unless Daisy had been taken by two abductors.

Melanie stared at the phone on the sideboard, willing it to ring. She needed to know Daisy was safe. She needed to know what she had to do to get her back.

Suddenly she felt out of her depth. She needed help. She needed someone to tell her what to do … and her instincts. . .