Free The Haunted Lady by Bill Kitson Page B

order to ward off ill-fortune. Then she looked at me.
    ‘What man?’ she demanded.
    I pointed towards the yew, but the stranger had vanished as abruptly as the magpie. ‘Didn’t you see him, Eve? What about you, Michael? He was standing under that yew tree, just to the right of the lych-gate.’
    ‘I certainly didn’t. I was busy locking up. I only turned round when Eve greeted the magpie.’
    ‘There was nobody there when I looked,’ Eve told me, ‘are you sure you haven’t made it up, Adam? Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or something, a moving shadow possibly.’
    ‘No, he was there, I’m certain of it. What’s more, it isn’t the first time I’ve seen him by any means. He was outside the museum earlier this morning for one thing.’
    I explained the other occasions when I’d seen the stranger and described his clothing, but it failed to register with either of them. It was only when I saw them eyeing me curiously that I realised that they were probably wondering if I, too, was beginning to see ghostly apparitions. I gave up the vain attempt to convince them otherwise and headed for the car.
    When we reached the vicarage, we found that Marjorie Phillips, in addition to brewing a large pot of tea, had also made a huge mound of sandwiches. ‘Blimey, Mum,’ Michael protested, ‘you didn’t have to take the feeding of the five thousand so literally.’
    ‘I suppose I did get carried away.’ She turned to us and explained, ‘After my husband died and Michael went to university I’ve only had to cater for myself. One gets out of practice in providing for others.’
    It was a poignant reminder of how lonely an existence life for someone left on their own could be. I reflected on this sad fact until we were invited to tuck in. Having missed out on the gateau earlier, I was able to oblige. Once we had disposed of all but the foothills of the sandwich mountain, we took our mugs of tea into the lounge, which looked out over the rear of the house, where the well-tended lawns sloped down towards a small brake of weeping willow trees that fringed the stream in the distance. It was a delightful view and, as we sat sipping our tea, I reflected that there must be many worse ways of earning a living than being a parson with a rural parish.
    I listened unashamedly as Michael made his phone call to Elmfield Grange. From the tone of the conversation it was obvious that he was meeting with some resistance to his plan to call on his beloved. ‘I have to see you, Chloe,’ Michael insisted, ‘we can’t leave things as they are.’ There was a pause and then he said, ‘No, Chloe, it can’t wait. It is much too important to me. No, I have to come with them. I lent my car to Mother.’
    His last statement wasn’t actually untrue, it simply wasn’t the whole truth. Michael had indeed lent the car to his mother, but only for her to return to the vicarage. ‘Very well,’ he told her eventually, ‘we’ll be there at four o’clock.’
    He put the phone down and looked across at us a little anxiously. ‘I hope I did the right thing. Is four o’clock all right for you? I had a bit of trouble persuading her. It wasn’t that Chloe was against the idea but her aunt and uncle aren’t too keen on visitors. They only agreed because it was you. According to what Chloe said, they want to talk to you.’
    I wondered what we’d done to be singled out, especially in view of the less than rapturous greeting we had received earlier.
    As we were chatting to the vicar and his mother, Eve seized on the opportunity to tease me further about the apparition that only I had seen. ‘You told us about some of Michael’s parishioners having seen ghosts,’ she told Marjorie, ‘but it seems they aren’t the only ones. Adam has also started seeing people who aren’t there too, and near Dinsdale Church, which makes it even spookier.’ She gestured with her hands and uttered a sort of moaning noise which I suppose must have been her