Free The Ellie Hardwick Mysteries by Barbara Cleverly Page A

remembering. ‘I never could persuade him to get rid of his piratical earing.’ Charles tugged absent-mindedly at his left ear. ‘Can’t say the infringement of the House Style put off the lady clients though—there was always a waiting list for Byam. Pity he . . . but . . . Anyway, he left the country soon after this bit of work. Went to Spain . . . or was it Portugal?’
    I’d been passing on the main road on the way home from a job in Norfolk and had suddenly caught sight of the tower of All Souls silhouetted against a darkening blood-red sky, streaked with saffron. One of those vivid late-summer sunsets we get just after harvesting. I couldn’t resist. ‘I’ll just poke my head inside,’ I told myself, turning into the driveway to the church. ‘Might be in time to witness the twilight flight of the pipistrelles.’ I watched the shadows lengthen under the stand of ancient oaks which gathered protectively, still wearing their dark leaf canopy, around the secluded stones but no bats flew out to greet me.
    And here I was, giving in to temptation and enjoying the guilty frisson of going against all common sense and Charles’ firm rules. I paused to sit on the back row of pews to say a silent prayer for the building as I always did and then went on down the aisle, sorrowful for the poor condition of the fabric, the boarded-up windows, the cracked masonry, the water stains running down the plastered walls.
    And then I heard it. A trickle of sound at first, growing louder and more insistent: the chirping, twittering, agitated noise that bats make when they’re about to take off. I decided to find out where they were roosting. If I was quick enough, I might actually see them emerge from their holes in the rafters or window dressings. I hurried silently back down the nave to the bell tower. The door was swinging open. Checking the state of the staircase with my torch, I was relieved to see that this bit of the fabric at least had been replaced since the middle ages. It was of stout steel. Not pretty, but a tug and a kick convinced me it was firm. I began to climb. I planned to go as far as the first floor but no further than that. Too risky. Up on the platform, the noise of the bats was louder. Would the light of my torch disturb them? I shone it anyway over the floor. Stout oak floorboards, complete, and no holes down which I might stick a foot. There were hundreds of bats tuning up in the woodwork all around me and, I guessed in the very top floor above my head, thousands more. Not too late, then.
    I shone the torch upwards from my feet. No staircase to the top floor. A very old oak ladder reached upwards to the trapdoor giving access to the bell tower. I ran the beam along it to check its condition. There was no chance I would climb that tonight but if it was obviously rickety I would ask Ben to bring a ladder with him tomorrow and impress him with my forethought.
    Looking up, I became aware of a darker shadow amongst the shadows of the raftered roof. As I watched, it moved gently with a sudden gust of wind through a broken pane.
    I leaned against the ladder to steady myself, unable to look away.
    Above my head a huge black shape was suspended, life-sized, vampire-like. A stiff cape flapped in another gust. With a mew of fear audible even over the noise of the bats, I held my torch in both hands, lighting up the horror dangling above my head. Life-sized, yes, because this thing had once been human and alive. Legs and feet hung from the cloak, arms reached upwards, truncated, caught under the heavy trap-door. I forced myself to light the face. This was no pallid, bloodstained Dracula mask of horror films but—no less terrifying to me—I saw leathery features which might have lain, undiscovered for millennia, in an Egyptian sarcophagus or been hauled, as brown as the enveloping earth, from the depths of a peat bog.
    I gulped and, as people do when frightened out of