‘I’ll go down by myself, then,’ said Jenna, misgivings striking her as soon as she spoke the words. Did she really want to do that?
He raised his eyebrows at her but said nothing.
She swallowed. This had become a challenge.
‘Seriously,’ she said, but her voice faltered. ‘Unless . . . you want to come with me?’
He laughed. ‘No, no, sweetheart. This is your baby. I’ll be upstairs finishing off my frescoes.’
‘Right. I’ll, ah, go and get changed then. Into something I can get cobwebs all over without caring.’
She turned and marched up the stairs.
‘Hope there’s nothing worse than cobwebs,’ he called after her. ‘Maybe some tough gloves in case of rat bites.’
She almost vomited on the step but managed to keep her gorge down. It was a good point, though, and she put on her toughest jeans, thickest socks and a pair of leather driving gloves, just in case. She covered her head with a scarf to avoid getting too much dirt in her hair, and put on a dust mask, thankful for the decorating supplies she had in the house.
Jason, happily, had gone by the time she emerged from the room, dressed for combat. He would have laughed at her, she was sure.
But when she came out to the kitchen patio, she felt his absence with a pang. It would have been good to have a companion for this task. Even though the bones were gone, she couldn’t help feeling that there would be a disturbing vibe down there. It could be a murder scene, for all she knew.
Her skin crawled with dread as she crouched to tug at the iron ring in the floor. It was no longer locked, as it had been since she moved into the house. Now its darkest secret had been given up, there didn’t seem much point in keeping it secure. Jenna hadn’t given the remaining contents of the cellar much attention after the bones had made themselves so horribly evident, but she had a vague sense of lots of boxes and shelves, mainly containing paper and old books.
The slab took its time coming up, Jenna making sure she kept her spine straight and knees bent as she tugged. Jason had made it look easy, but then there was deceptive strength in that wiry frame. She thought about how impossible it was to escape from him when he had her pinned against the wall and the pleasurable memory did a little to dispel the scalp-tingling horror.
At last the paving slab eased up and Jenna was able to remove it. Seeing the black maw beneath it, she doubted herself all over again. Could she really go down into that gloom by herself? She activated the torch app on her phone, which reminded her of the time she’d done it last, going up into the attic and finding Jason.
What a moment that had been. She should have been scared then – after all, a living, breathing fugitive in your loft space was surely more frightening and definitely potentially more dangerous than a few dusty old notebooks and some mice. Yet she couldn’t see it that way. Jason in the attic should have been alarming, yet it wasn’t anywhere near as creepy as this subterranean vault.
It must be to do with the unknown, she decided. After all, once she had seen Jason, she knew the worst. It was the not knowing . . . but even that didn’t make sense, because they’d been down there once before, when they found the bones. They’d seen the worst of the cellar too. Or had they?
She thought of the little message they had uncovered beneath the bedroom wallpaper while they were stripping it. ‘Help me’. Something or someone in this house had driven somebody to scrawl those words. And what about the noises Jason said he had heard during the night? Sobbing sounds, coming from somewhere lower down, under the floors.
If an unquiet spirit haunted the house, perhaps the removal of those bones might have satisfied it. Perhaps it would all be all right now.
What are you thinking, Jenna? Ghosts, unquiet spirits. You don’t believe in any of that stuff.
Perhaps this place had turned her head. Life had certainly been overwhelming since she had come back to Bledburn. She was fatally disorientated. And people thought LA was the place that led to disconnection from reality. No way. To her, it was a place of substance, almost mundane compared to this drab little ex-mining community on the borders of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire.
It was Bledburn that was making her go gaga, not LaLa.
She took a deep breath, shone her torch into the inky depths and located the top rung of the iron ladder set into the narrow brick chute leading to the cellar.
She lowered one foot in its hi-top Converse sneaker and waggled it around until it landed on the narrow metal. OK. She had taken the first step. Now she just had to keep on going.
She clipped her phone to her belt so that the torch continued to shine downwards and made slow, painstaking progress down the ladder. It was a matter of no more than about half a dozen rungs and she soon stood on the cellar floor, its flagstones disturbingly uneven and crunchy underfoot. She supposed it might be mouse bones or beetle shells – she didn’t particularly want to check, so she shone the beam upwards, where boxes and trunks stood stacked against the slimy walls.
She tried not to focus on the spot where the bones had been found, but it was still cordoned off with police tape, so it was difficult to ignore. She edged around it, grateful for her dust mask which kept the worst of the thick, musty air from clogging her throat. She lifted one of the boxes from the top of the pile and noticed an index card inside a little gilt frame on the side:
‘Harville Hall: Bills etc. 2006–2008.’
Inside appeared to be a number of photocopies and originals of paperwork, mostly dealing with finances and legal issues. It was dull enough but in good condition despite mouldering down here for so long. There were many such boxes, and Jenna decided to look at each one. Most were, like the first one, full of official correspondence. Jenna shuddered at the thought that somebody had brought the boxes down here
and walked past those bones – in absolute plain sight – in order to stack them. What did these archivists think of their resident skeleton? Had no member of the successive generations thought it might be a nice idea to remove the bones and give them a decent burial?
‘Bloody Harvilles,’ she said out loud. ‘Bad to the bone. Bad to the bones.’ Her little giggle at this silly piece of word play sounded deeply inappropriate and she apologised under her breath to who knew whom. And after all, she only did it to try and keep her dwindling stocks of bravado going. It was so dark down there, and so horrible. She could never be a subterranean dweller.
Box after box of printed matter was examined and discarded, the pile slowly diminishing until she came to very old documents. 1960s . . . 1950s . . . 1940s . . . on and on she went, occasionally taking off a lid to see inside, but never investigating much further than that. What she wanted was material dating to the time when the owner of those poor bones had died. Something must yield a clue – and if she found nothing, then she would laboriously and painstakingly sift through all these other boxes of more recent date, to find a reference, however oblique or obscure, to what must have happened here.