Dead And Buried

She couldn’t see into the bar because of the boarding over the windows. But she didn’t really need to. The interior of a place like this was too predictable. She pictured flagstones, oak settles and low doorways. She imagined an aged local sitting with a pint of Old Moorland Original in front of him on a wobbly table, a bored landlord reading a copy of the Daily Mail at the bar, a deathly silence broken only by a clock ticking away the seconds until closing time.

‘Sergeant, I think we need Gavin Murfin here,’ said Hurst tentatively.

‘Why?’

‘Local knowledge. Gavin has it.’

‘Oh God. See if he’s still outside, then.’

‘Will do.’

The interior of the Light House was a strange dichotomy. Part of it was a major crime scene, brightly illuminated and tightly controlled, busy with SOCOs in scene suits, rich with the familiar smells of a forensic examination. But the rest was exactly as it had been left when it closed for business six months ago.

The main rooms on the ground floor had been securely locked, so were available to Fry with the help of the set of keys handed over by Thomas Pilkington.

Here in the bar, the atmosphere was stale and dusty. Although scenes of crime had found the main switch for the electricity supply and turned on the lights, the boarding over the windows kept the room as gloomy as if it was permanently night.

A few tables stood around, chairs stacked haphazardly, empty shelves and optics behind the long counter. Brass fittings that might once have gleamed with polish were now dull with accumulated grime. The big fireplace where the log fire would have burned during the winter was filled with scraps of old newspaper, fragments of a bird’s nest and the remains of a soot fall.

Fry watched Becky Hurst walk back into the bar. She was pleased that she’d been given Hurst. Of all the members of the CID team in Edendale, this was the officer she might have hopes for. Hurst was smart and tenacious, and Fry had seen how she dealt with Murfin, and even with Luke Irvine, who had about the same length of service.

‘It’s a pity,’ said Hurst. ‘This place would make a good youth hostel or something.’

Gavin Murfin was standing behind her in the doorway.

‘It’d make a better pub,’ he said grumpily. ‘Oh, I forgot — that’s exactly what it was, until the bean counters put the boot in.’

‘Didn’t you used to drink here, Gavin?’ asked Hurst.

‘Drink here? I was practically brought up in this pub. My old man used to leave me outside in the car with a packet of cheese and onion crisps, while he played snooker in the public.’

‘A packet of crisps?’ said Hurst. ‘And a bottle of dandelion and burdock, surely?’

‘Coke. We were quite a trendy family, for plebs.’

‘It’s haunted, I suppose?’

Fry snorted. ‘Aren’t they all? I thought it was an essential feature to get a listing in the tourist guides, like having toilets and satellite TV.’

‘No, this one is genuinely haunted,’ said Murfin. ‘They say it’s the ghost of some servant girl who burned to death in a kitchen accident. Set her clothes alight when she was cooking or something. Now and then she still walks the corridors, giving off a horrible fiery glow.’

‘Yeah, right. They tell those stories because they think it’ll bring gullible American tourists in.’

‘No,’ said Murfin solemnly. ‘I saw her once.’

‘Come off it.’

‘I did. I was about to leave here one night, and had to go to the gents. They’re down a corridor round the back of the bar there, you know. And that was when I saw her, all glowing. Gave me the shock of my life, it did.’

‘Glowing?’

‘Yeah, glowing. Like she was on fire.

‘You were drunk, Gavin.’

‘Believe what you want, I don’t care.’

Fry looked at Murfin closely, sure that he must be joking. She’d known him for a long time, and he wasn’t the kind to believe in ghosts and all that stuff. But his face never slipped. He appeared to be serious.

She looked out across the moor, where the smoke and flames seemed to be getting ever nearer to the pub.

‘If that wind changes direction,’ she said, ‘your flaming kitchen maid could be in danger of burning to death all over again.’

The pub was accessed directly from the car park, and was essentially a one-room open-plan layout, although in visually distinct sections. A games room featured a pool table, darts board and plasma-screen TV. At one end, a dark-panelled snug with pew benches had been left as a reminder of days gone by. It had been heated by a small wood-burning stove.

In this part of the pub, some of the old pictures had been left on the walls. A few portraits, hunting groups, dukes and squires posing with their dogs and horses. In the dim light, there were too many eyes in the room for Fry’s comfort, squinting at her beneath their layers of dust.