Page 8 of The Peculiar Incident at Thistlewick House

Tired from the travel, trying to come to terms with his grief and overwhelmed by his cousin’s startling revelations about the nature of Emma’s death, Edward slept late the following day.

Barnabas had swung from being angry about his cousin’s failure to come to Thistlewick Tye in time to save her, to anxiously tiptoeing about him, in the hope that he might connect with his beloved once more.

Edward’s own anger had dissipated with a good night’s sleep and he felt more kindly towards his host. Losing Emma was punishment enough for the man.

He could help bring Barnabas some closure and relay kind words from beyond the grave.

It would cost him nothing and, rather unexpectedly, result in financial rewards of a magnitude he’d not anticipated.

In order to make the promised séance convincing, he spent the morning talking to staff and reading some of the local history books and pamphlets he found in Barnabas’s book-lined study.

Mrs Drayton was in the drawing room, sitting with the body of her mistress.

He stepped briefly over the threshold, hoping, or perhaps fearing, he would feel something to indicate that there was a trace of Emma left behind.

He closed his eyes and willed her to come to him but felt nothing.

Surely, if there was an afterlife and she was going to make contact with anyone, it would have been him.

Disbelieving she might have been, but she had always been gracious in defeat.

He quizzed the housekeeper for further details of Emma’s passing and found her to be of the same mind as him; the fever had caused the delusions.

‘The doctor had been over the previous evening, happy that she was over the worst of the influenza,’ she said, ‘but trying to calm her odd behaviour and wild claims. When he came downstairs, he mentioned something about missing his morphia but decided he’d left the small red leather box at home.

The mistress must have taken it when he was washing his hands, but we didn’t know it at the time. ’

‘Could someone else have accessed the doctor’s bag during his visit?’ Edward asked.

‘It’s possible.’ She shrugged. ‘It was left in the hallway for a short while when he was updating the master about her condition. But no one in the household wished the mistress ill. She was a kind lady. I took her up some supper, which she ate, and the master looked in on her before retiring to another room to sleep. He didn’t feel right sharing with her whilst she was so confused. ’

Edward could see how emotional the housekeeper was, as she spoke about the woman she’d worked for over the last two decades.

‘Then poor Dr Appleby arrived early the following morning, saying he’d not found his morphia set and was anxious as to its whereabouts. He dashed upstairs to find she’d been dead for some time. Apparently, she did away with herself in the middle of the night.’ Mrs Drayton’s voice finally broke.

Either the woman was a consummate actress or her distress was real, so Edward decided to change the subject. He announced his intention to explore the village and perhaps go down to the beach. Living so far from the coast, he wanted to take advantage of the salty, fresh air whilst he could.

‘Be careful down there, Mr Blackmore,’ she warned.

‘Our cliffs are falling into the sea at an alarming rate. Don’t you be getting too close to them.

A hundred years ago, there was a whole other village northwards and there’s nothing left of it now.

Some say you can still hear the long-submerged church bell occasionally on clear days – a ghostly reminder of its existence.

Thistlewick Tye will eventually meet the same fate, but not in my lifetime. ’

Barnabas was wandering about the house in a grief-induced trance, greeting the inevitable flood of sympathetic callers.

A woman from the village arrived to wash and dress Emma in preparation for the burial, and Mrs Drayton took in a delivery of black-edged mourning stationery, which had been ordered the previous day.

His cousin eventually retreated to the study to send out the necessary notifications and make the funeral arrangements, so Edward took the opportunity to escape before the evening meal was served.

As he was leaving, Wright offered him the loan of a small marine telescope to make the most of the views and perhaps spot some of the coastal wildlife.

Edward graciously took the instrument and slid the small leather case into one of his deep pockets, before sweeping up his coat and cane.

Armed with a letter summoning his own manservant, he retraced his steps back to the village centre and found the small postbox set into a long flint wall that ran along one edge of the common – so much easier to locate now that the country had abandoned green in favour of red.

With luck, it would find its way to Carl by morning.

It was greyer than the previous day, having rained solidly until mid-afternoon, and the nights were drawing in with alacrity.

But he’d always preferred the cosiness of autumn and winter, to the brighter, sunnier seasons.

The smell of wood fires, the crisp air and warming, roasted food were comforts he relished, and he welcomed the soft light of early evening.

Summer, certainly in the city, brought plagues of flies and the unbearable stench of effluent and decay.

Wright had told him that a sloping track to the left of the village water pump led down to the shore, through a gap known locally as the Thistlewick Rift.

It was obvious from the geology that a river had carved out the space many thousands of years ago, but all that remained was a small stream feeding into the ocean.

He followed the burbling water down to the sand, passing a couple of small abandoned wooden fishing boats that had been pulled up from the water.

The tide was high and the great expanse of flat beach he’d seen upon his arrival the day before was now a narrow band of wet, pale brown sand, peppered with lumpy grey and white pebbles – some as large as loaves of bread.

These must be the flints that he’d seen so many of the local houses constructed from.

A bitter wind swept in from the sea, so he turned up his collar to shield himself from the worst of it.

He’d wrongly thought, back in London, that a trip to the Norfolk coast would mean a thriving fishing industry, as the area was famous for its herring and crabs, but it was a stretch of coast strangely barren of fishing vessels.

There was the odd one or two, but then maybe the flatness of the beach made the shore unsuitable for launching boats, as he suspected you could walk out for half a mile and the water would still barely come up to your shoulders.

Had Thistlewick Tye been on a branch line, it would have been perfect for holidaymakers, who could safely paddle in shallow waters and build sandcastles in the long, hot summers, but he got the sense that it was in many ways an isolated village.

He took out the pocket telescope and surveyed the vast charcoal ocean, spotting a tiny vessel on the horizon.

Spinning slowly around, he followed the clifftop from west to east but, with the tide in, he was too close to the land to see far.

He’d have to return on a day when the tide was out to locate the impressive Cromer parish church tower.

The almost ninety-degree angle of cliff face to beach served as a reminder that this dramatic landscape was precarious, as Mrs Drayton had warned, and he could see places further east where the sandy soil had slumped into the sea.

It wouldn’t take much, he realised, for a landslide to smother someone beneath. It would be foolish to stray too close.

He heard the crunch of footsteps from behind and turned to see a cloaked figure emerging from the rift, clutching the neck of a green, glass bottle.

It was the woman he’d spied the previous day and, up close, she was not the old crone that he’d initially supposed, although likely older than him – perhaps in her early forties.

She dropped her head when she noticed him, the deep sides of her hood obscuring her eyes, and stepped out of his path, closer to the land.

‘I’m not sure it’s wise to be so close to the cliffs at high tide,’ he said, as she made to pass by.

He reached for her cloak, not sure whether she’d heard him, but as he tugged at the material, she spun back, her arms like a windmill, slapping his hand away, as a torrent of abusive language came from her lips.

Not wanting to enrage her any further, he backed away, almost getting his shoes wet as a rogue wave surged up the sand.

Stupid woman, he was only trying to help.

She scurried into the distance and he watched her go.

The sun was setting behind her and the edges of her black silhouette were bathed in a warm marigold-coloured light, at complete odds to the bitter temperature.

When she was about a hundred yards away, she bent down to pick something up from the ground and tucked it into the folds of her heavy cloak, before continuing on her path.

He watched her for a few minutes, becoming smaller and smaller, until she eventually disappeared to the left where, he assumed, there was another gap that allowed her access back inland.

He pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat and checked the time.

There was an hour until he needed to return to the house for dinner.

Curious as to what the woman had collected from the sand, he followed the small imprints of her booted feet.

The spiky outline of a small tree at a perilous angle on the clifftop caught his eye.

Its exposed roots dangled in mid-air, like the tangly hair of some medieval princess leaning from her tower, and he could see that the edge of the small woodland on the land above was falling into the sea, one tree at a time.

With winter on its way, Edward suspected that buffeting winds and lashing rain would soon accelerate the erosion, and it would only take one vicious storm for the tree to crash to the ground below.

He walked on a little further and, even in the rapidly diminishing light, he could see incongruous flashes of white in the soil above, a few feet from the surface.

These were no chalky-coated flint pebbles, however, but longer streaks, jumbled and in a concentrated area.

As he lifted the pocket telescope to his eye, he realised with a jolt that they were bones – partially exposed in the dark, umber soil.

He saw the flat triangle of a shoulder blade, the narrow, curved crescents of several ribs and the wide, knobbly end of a femur jutting from the cliff face.

Animal or man, he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps this was evidence of a medieval butcher’s pit, because there were too many to be from just the one creature.

The cloaked woman had clearly picked up one of the bones, and he wondered what she might want with it.

And then he spotted a larger, pale sphere visible a bit further along. The light was poor but as he peered through the eyepiece, he saw two dark circles staring back at him. A shiver of something swept across his body and it wasn’t the cruel north-easterly wind.

Because, without a doubt, he was looking at a human skull.