Page 16 of The Peculiar Incident at Thistlewick House

Edward stared at the horrific sight that now lay not two yards from him and felt a sudden rush of nausea.

He turned away from the rapidly spreading pool of blood coming from Silas Garrod’s head which, in the poor light, looked like thick black ink.

The man had hit a large lump of flint, which had caused the wound, but he’d have been dead regardless after a fall from that height.

‘What the hell?’ Maude whispered under her breath as she, too, stared at the broken corpse. She was on her back from where Edward had pushed her to safety, eyes wide and her long, dark hair blowing loose about her face where her hood had slid from her head. Edward reached out his hand.

‘Are you hurt? I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise – you saved me.’ She looked at him properly for the first time and accepted his offer of help. ‘Thank you.’

He pulled her up and she examined her palms, grazed from where they’d broken her fall. The faint smell of juniper berries drifted between them as she started to brush the sand from her clothes.

‘This is all damnably odd,’ he said. ‘Noah was with Silas when I was up on the common just now.’ He tipped his head to the clifftop.

‘Suffered some kind of heart incident and I honestly thought he’d died, but then he sprang to his feet, acting most peculiarly.

Started attacking his brother. It was all so out of character, and I left them to it.

But now this…’ Edward was so confused that he spoke aloud, in an attempt to sort the muddle of events out in his head, but stopped short of making any accusation.

He hadn’t seen Noah push Silas, after all.

‘I must alert the people in the village to what’s happened.

The body needs to be moved. Come back with me.

There’s nothing you can do for him now.’

‘I’ll stay with him,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen death before. I’m not afraid.’

He nodded and ran back to the Thistlewick Rift and up the hill that led to the village.

It was only as he dashed across the common that it occurred to him that Noah would still be wandering around.

He might attack again, either himself or, he realised with horror, Maude – a lone woman on the beach.

What a fool he’d been to leave her there.

He could protect himself with his cane but, even though he knew her to be handy with her fists and aggressive by nature, she was of slight build and undeniably the weaker sex.

He mustn’t linger and should return to her as soon as possible.

He flung open the door to the pub.

‘Silas Garrod has fallen from the clifftop. He’s dead. Come quickly.’

He had no time to give any further details about the incident, nor did he say anything about suspecting Noah of the crime, but the gathered customers in the pub didn’t need telling twice.

Someone shouted that they would fetch Constable Lovett, and there was a scrape of chairs as people got to their feet.

A small group of men returned to the beach with him, as he yet again told himself this whole affair was none of his business.

But there was something strange going on, and he knew it.

By concealing his suspicions, he was both protecting himself from unnecessary involvement and giving himself time to think through the implications of what he’d witnessed.

The tiny seed of doubt, planted by Emma’s bizarre behaviour before her death, had sprouted into something dark and twisting.

Noah’s resurrection had been no illusion – that man had been dead – but he’d heard of people dying on operating tables, only to spring back to life after their heart had stopped beating.

Perhaps he was overthinking what was a simple medical anomaly.

The scene at the bottom of the cliffs a few minutes later was chaotic. Jacob Palmer, one of the tallest men there, held an oil lamp aloft, as Dr Appleby examined the corpse.

‘You don’t need me to tell you that the poor man is dead, but if a couple of you younger lads can get him up to my consulting rooms, I can properly assess the body.’

‘He must have stumbled in the dark,’ Jacob said.

‘Neither he nor Noah had drunk to excess. They only stopped by for one drink, and then Silas bought his brother a bottle of beer to cheer him up because he wasn’t feeling himself – which he took with him.

Why did he wander so close to the edge? He knows the dangers.

’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘We must find his poor brother. He’ll be distraught; he doted on him. ’

‘What exactly happened here?’ the constable asked, a late arrival, pushing through the circle of onlookers.

He’d clearly been woken from his slumbers and was none too pleased to find himself on a wind-buffeted shoreline in the middle of the night.

The doctor was covering Silas’s body with a coat – the sight too much for most men, even in the half-light.

‘Mr Blackmore raised the alarm,’ Dr Appleby said. ‘He’ll know better than us.’

Edward met Maude’s eyes across the gathered group.

How much did she know? What had she overheard or seen?

Her eyes dropped away almost the moment that they met his and she seemed to shrink into the background.

An unpleasant thought crossed his mind. Had she asked to remain with the body so that she could rob it?

‘I’d been in the village posting letters and came down here afterwards. I briefly encountered Mrs Grimmer on the beach but we’d hardly exchanged two words when there was a noise from above.’ He told the constable how he had pushed Maude to safety as he saw the figure fall.

‘An unfortunate accident,’ Constable Lovett concluded.

‘Stupid fool should have known to stay away from the cliffs, especially at night. We’ll need to erect another fence to stop this happening again, but as soon as we put one up, a couple of years later we lose it to the sea.

I’ll speak to the Benevolent Committee about securing the funds. ’

There was a burst of activity as Silas was lifted by some of the men and they carted his body back to the surgery.

Everyone began to return to the village and Edward turned his collar up to shield his face from the bitter wind.

He looked around for Maude to ask her what she’d seen, but she’d disappeared.

He stood by himself, facing the angry sea, his heart racing faster than it ever had, along with his mind. The more he thought about what he’d witnessed, the more an alternative scenario occurred to him – one that was much more other-worldly than a simple medical miracle.

Because if Noah Garrod really had died up on the common that evening, then his recovery had been most peculiar.

For an inarticulate and slightly simple farm labourer, he’d suddenly spoken incredibly coherently.

Initially appearing confused about who and where he was, his ensuing attack on his brother had been completely unprovoked.

He doted on Silas and owed him his life.

And yet, although Edward could not be certain, he suspected Noah was responsible for pushing a man to his death. None of it made sense, unless…

He thought back to Barnabas’s wild claims about Emma being possessed, and they no longer seemed quite so ridiculous.

He’d just witnessed an almost identical personality change in the youngest Garrod brother.

Emma’s behaviour had also altered dramatically, the very night after she was so very dangerously ill that her husband had not expected her to live until the morning.

Perhaps, Edward considered, she had died that night – slipped away when no one was awake, as the fever took hold, allowing someone or something to slide into her body.

And then there was the sickly baby mentioned by Silas Garrod.

The mother thought she’d lost it and yet it had not only lived to fight another day, but had also pulled itself out of its cot…

Had this Esfir, whoever she was, possessed Mrs Shaw? Because the word shouted by Noah had sounded Eastern European and Esfir was definitely a foreign name… These incidents must surely be linked.

Despite the circles he moved in, he’d never seen any evidence of a dead person’s soul communicating with the living.

As someone who had learned all the tricks employed by the mediums, and developed a few of his own, almost every manifestation he’d come across could be easily explained away.

If spirits were truly contactable, then every unavenged murder victim in history would be queuing up to reveal the perpetrator.

And yet, he couldn’t categorically state that they didn’t exist…

It occurred to him, standing alone on that windswept and desolate beach, that the afterlife he’d been so confident was nonsense, fabricated merely to appease the bereaved and reassure the faithful, might actually exist.