The two clergymen began packing up.

Jason stood up. ‘We’re very grateful to you.’

‘Let’s hope that’s the end of it for you both,’ Orlebar smiled. ‘And now you can enjoy your new home and have a wonderful Christmas.’

She and Jason stood on the doorstep, watching them return to their funny little car that looked like a panel van and drive off.

‘I should have taken a photograph of them,’ he said. ‘They’d make a great painting!’

‘Beavis and Butthead?’

He grinned. As they went back inside and shut and bolted the front door he looked, warily, up at the ceiling.

‘So?’ Emily said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think I need a large drink.’

‘Me too – a very large one.’

Walking back into the kitchen, Jason said, ‘That was weird. Weird! Freaky deaky weird.’

Emily opened the fridge and took out a bottle of white wine. ‘What was it that Orlebar, said – about historical activity, unrested souls. Negative energy? What were those footsteps about?’

‘The power of suggestion?’ he ventured.

‘Those footsteps weren’t power of suggestion. They were real. We both heard them.’

‘Or imagined we heard them?’

‘We heard them,’ she said, plainly. ‘You know we did.’

He twisted the screw-top cap off the bottle. ‘I don’t know what the cops thought last night.’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘They thought we were a couple of loons.’

‘Shit!’ he said, suddenly. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

‘What?’ she looked at him, concerned.

‘My fucking brain is all scrambled. I’ve got the paintings in my car – I was going to deliver them to my clients on the way home. I got so distracted by the Bishop I forgot.’

‘It’s Thursday tomorrow; still five days to Christmas. Your clients can wait until tomorrow, can’t they? Don’t take them tonight. Have a drink and relax.’

He nodded.

‘Maybe don’t leave them in the car overnight, though.’

‘I’ll go and get them; I don’t want to risk the car being broken into or stolen during the night.’

‘By our ghosts?’

He put the bottle down, grabbed his car keys and went outside into the darkness. All the Christmas lights, and it seemed more than before, were blazing again outside the Penze-Weedells’ house. He didn’t look long enough to see if there were any faces in the windows; he was too concerned about his paintings.

He popped the boot lid of his BMW, raised it and peered inside.

And felt a sudden, terrible, sick feeling of panic.

The boot was empty.

62

Wednesday 19 December

‘No. No, oh God, NO.’

Jason stared in abject horror into the empty space. At the tartan rug lying there.

Was this nightmare ever going to end?

Gone.

The painting and the sketch both gone. Stolen. How was he going to tell his clients?

Then he remembered something, and suddenly his hopes rose.

Idiot!

He lifted a corner of the rug and relief instantly flooded through him. The two pictures lay there, sealed and wrapped in brown paper over layers of bubble wrap, as David had presented them to him this morning.