He let out a screech of shock and terror, and after a desperate struggle, managed to get away and flee into the darkness, crashing through the bushes.

The ghost laughed softly. ‘I worked in this house during the war. It was a very special place. I’m not letting him raid it.’

She began to vanish, the light flickering softly as she faded, showing a very pretty face.

‘I suppose you saw the ghost,’ Angus said in a resigned tone.

‘Yes, I did. I think it was Melinda Denning. There’s a photo of her in the library.’

He sighed. ‘I wish I could see her.’ He raised his voice and called, ‘Thank you.’

But there was no response and no further sound or flickering light.

Angus checked the rest of the house before locking the door again, then Nell linked her arm in his and they walked home.

Chapter Eleven

For all his IT skills, Adam had difficulty tracing his one-time girlfriend. He found her marriage certificate to someone called Lionel Dobson, surprised at how quickly she’d married after contacting him. Had she lost the baby, or married to give it a name? When he tried to trace her and her husband, he drew a blank, which surprised him.

Were they deliberately keeping off the various local records or had they moved? There were enough Dobsons in the rest of Britain to put him right off contacting them as a method of finding her.

Frustrated, he hired a private detective in the UK and finalised arrangements to go there himself as soon as he’d finished up at university. He felt even more strongly that a gap year and some foreign travel might be a good thing for Gemma. It’d give her more experience of the world before she hit university.

He wouldn’t mind taking a sabbatical, either. He’d been working unremittingly hard in the past couple of years and the money coming from the sale of his ex’s house would make a nice financial comfort cushion as well as what he’d managed to save, and he’d had a few bits of luck with his investments. Not that he’d told Gemma about that yet.

He’d felt for a while that he’d like to revisit the country where he’d been born, travel round it at leisure, not just fly in briefly for a conference, so it all fitted in.

His ex had always refused point-blank to go there for a holiday and hadn’t had a good word to say for the UK. He could understand why now. She hadn’t even come with him to help his father bury his mother, then a couple of years later to help his elderly uncle and cousins to bury his father.

Both his parents had been in their early seventies, which seemed like a short life to him, but there you were. Look at poor Judith, dead at forty-one.

He broached the idea to Gemma. ‘How about we both take a gap year and explore Europe?’

She stared at him, a slight frown creasing her forehead. ‘I don’t have much money.’