After a while, the lure of the internet proved too much. She found the letting agent’s site and clicked on the link for Elder House. The photographs had been taken one evening when the house reflected the setting sun, and someone had applied a filter that gave the building a rich glow it sorely lacked in real life. She scrolled quickly through the potted history onscreen, although she wasn’t quite sure what she might be looking for. The yard, she discovered, had changed its name over the years, Black Elder Yard, Elder Yard, Bishops Yard, and the house had been built in the sixteenth century.

The links the site provided simply repeated the same information over and over again, and after a while, Nell found her attention wandering. She sat back in her chair and gazed aimlessly around the kitchen, and Cheryl’s words came back to her.

Rather you than me.

On impulse, she typed the words ‘ghost walk’ into the search engine, and then after the briefest of hesitations, ‘Bishops Yard’.

It took a little while to sort through the results. In the first company Nell tried, the walks were led by a woman, another had plenty of online reviews, but there was little detail of actual content, just the prices and the booking details. The third, however, The Man in Grey, had posted a video; a surprisingly professional trailer, cutting between various locations in the town, shot at night and filled with looming shadows and artful close-ups of a young man dressed in immaculate period costume.

At one point, he led the way into Bishops Yard.

Nell paused the video, then hit the link to the website. Neither the reviews, nor the business terms had been updated for well over a year, but there was a page dedicated to tour’s highlights, which had included, apparently, The Tragedy of Dr Bishop.

Nell hesitated, she might be better off not knowing, she thought. But then, despite herself, she clicked on the link.

It was another video.

*

‘The thing is,’ Kym said, ‘he was working on a house, it was being done up – because that’s all bloody incomers do, buy up old cottages and knock them apart and – he was an apprentice and there was some sort of accident and it was so unfair, what they said . . .’ She stopped for a moment, trying to pull herself together. ‘No, it’s OK.’ Her voice cracked a little, but she carried on. ‘But the thing is, it happened one evening, after work. When everyone else had left, he went back to the house and – it happened there.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t get—’

Kym’s expression hardened a little, as if Evie were being deliberately stupid. ‘Elder House,’ she said, ‘the house they – the house he was working in was Elder House.’

‘Oh, shit. I mean . . .’ Evie didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’