Joyce shivered.

‘So that means another night in this hole.’ She hugged her knees, looked across at Meredith. ‘Mr Meredith, can I ask you about what happened upstairs?’

‘Yes,’ Hunt added. ‘You seemed to know what was going on.’

Bourne’s eyes swung to Ann.

‘Now we agreed not to discuss anything with Ann present.’

‘I know,’ Meredith resettled his glasses. ‘But we also agreed that Ann would not be used again. So I see no point in not discussing what transpired upstairs. So, Ann, don’t leave. You deserve to warm yourself by the fire. That room was like a vault upstairs.’

‘Very well.’ Bourne acquiesced with ill-grace. Ann smiled.

‘You mean I actually get to know what happened upstairs?’

Meredith nodded.

‘You appeared to slip from a hypnotic state into a trance state in which you were controlled by an entity claiming to be the spirit of Mary Elizabeth Rolfe, a maid in this house in the late nineteenth century.’

‘So it wasn’t the usual – what do you call it? – regression.’

Joyce looked at Ann. ‘It’s true. Mary Rolfe spoke through you to Mr Meredith. She said she had been confused for a long time. She didn’t seem to know she was dead.’

‘There is a famous book,’ said Meredith, ‘called Thirty Years among the Dead by Dr Karl Wickland. Dr Wickland was a psychiatrist. He believed that some of his most disturbed patients were possessed by the surviving entities of deceased persons – persons who had departed this life by suicide, by execution, under the most personality-damaging effects of drink or drugs. These entities were – to use a spiritualist term – earth-bound and occasionally were able to “enter” and in some respects take over certain living people whose minds happened to be in a receptive state.

‘Now Dr Wickland claimed that when he gave shock treatment to such patients the invading entities disliked it so much that they temporarily left their victims.’

‘But this is medieval superstition!’ Bourne exploded. ‘It’s simply the old fantasy of believing mental illness was caused by demons and ill-treating the luckless sufferer to drive away the demon. Barbaric nonsense!’

Meredith nodded. ‘Perhaps. Nevertheless, let me finish. Karl Wickland’s wife had mediumistic powers. It appeared that once the entity had been driven from the patient, it slipped into the entranced body of Mrs Wickland, temporarily controlling her. There it could be questioned and reasoned with by Dr Wickland and the circle of friends who helped him in this rescue work.

‘Let me summarize the common features of the case histories described in Wickland’s book.

‘The entity had not realized it was dead. Its death, as I’ve said, had been caused usually by violence, or was the result of drugs or drink. In its post-death state the entity had experienced a world composed of an irrational mixture of memories, obsessive desires, visions of people dead – and others still alive, a world of utterly confusing impressions.’