Vicious Circle

“I don’t normally do missing persons work,” I said. It sounded lame, I knew, and it sounded cold. I tried again. “You’ve called the police, I’m sure, and they’re already doing all they can. What I could add to that would be—minimal, and pretty haphazard. I think maybe you ought to see what they can turn up before you start putting out feelers of your own. Or at least, you should discuss it with the officer who’s in charge of the case. I know that’s cold comfort, but they do know what they’re doing.”

Into the strained silence that followed, Mel made the lips-parting sound that means someone is about to speak, but then she didn’t.

Steve filled the gap. “There is no police investigation,” he said, looking like he was biting down on something bitter.

I blinked. “There isn’t? Well then, I’d say that’s the first thing you need to—”

“Abbie is already dead.”

Ever the consummate professional, I didn’t actually allow my jaw to unravel all the way to the ground. It took a little effort, though, and there was a strained pause during which the statement just hung in the air, disturbing and palpable. “You’d better run that by me again,” I said at last.

Melanie shook her head, as if her mind were automatically refusing—even while she spoke—to go back over this ground again. “She died on a school trip to Cumbria, last summer,” she said, her voice if anything even deader and harder than before. “An accident. Three girls fell into a river—Abbie, and two of her friends. It was in spate. The current was very strong.”

“They were swept away before anyone could get to them,” Steve took up, sounding angry, but it sounded like an old anger, much rehearsed now and very much sick of itself. “They shouldn’t have been anywhere near the water in the first place. They had no chance. No chance at all.”

They both fell into silence, looking away from me and from each other: I could see that this was still raw, after most of a year. It would probably still be raw after most of a life. “But she came back,” I prompted. I was starting to get the picture now: it was a bleak and sad one, executed mainly in grays, but then I don’t get to see many that are in bright primaries.

Steve nodded. “Yes, she came back. About three months later. We were in her room.”

“Cleaning out her things?” I hazarded, but he shook his head fiercely. “Just sitting. In her room. And I—I suddenly felt that we weren’t alone. That somebody had come in, and was standing quite close to us. I couldn’t see anything, but I just knew.” He smiled a very faint, very tired smile. “I turned to Mel, and said ‘Can you feel it?’ Something like that. She thought I’d gone mad. But then she nodded. Yes. She was getting it, too.

“That was what it was like, at first. You just had to stand in a certain spot, and you could sense her. It was almost as though you could smell her breath. And about a week after that we started seeing her. Always out of the corner of our eye, at first—never when we actually turned to look at her. It was as though she was coming back to us slowly, from a long way away. We kept waiting, and she kept getting closer. Then we could hear her voice, some nights, calling out good night to us from her room when we were getting into bed. We shouted good night back, as though—”

He paused, and Mel came in on cue. I got the impression, just for a moment, that they’d told this story before, and I wondered if they’d tried out many other exorcists before they got to me. “—as though she was still alive. As though nothing had happened.”

“It seemed to be the best way to make her stay,” said Steve. “I’d stand at the sink, in the evening, washing up from dinner, and she’d start up a conversation from behind me. I didn’t look around. I chatted back to her. Told her about what was happening at work, and—and with her friends. Told her jokes.”

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again and stared at me as if he was expecting some kind of a challenge. After a moment, a single tear made its slow, meandering way down his cheek. He looked like a man who’d find it hard to cry, and I felt, just for a moment, the guilty twinge of a reluctant voyeur. “I know how strange this must sound, Mr. Castor,” Steve Torrington said. “But having her back was what stopped us from falling apart after losing her. We went back to being a family again.” He shrugged—a minuscule twitch of his shoulders that spoke volumes. I could see exactly how that would work. And given all the other places that ghosts can end up haunting, the bosom of the family seemed close enough to heaven to make no difference.

Which was maybe the point, a clinical, dispassionate voice pointed out from the back of my mind. For ghosts, happiness is a double-edged proposition.