She had never left Skelthsea because she had been dead before that, and I recalled again her presence and the sound of her voice outside my room and the rage that had leaked from her dead eyes. I understood that fury now – she had not died on the boat. She had been killed here on Skelthsea and someone had attempted to conceal it by hiding her case at Gulls Cry.

Hettie had been murdered.

37

I could not leave the house quickly enough and it was only as I met the path to Iskar that I turned to view Gulls Cry one final time. The wind had picked up and the tide was higher on the sand. I thought of Hettie, not just as the witch she had been, but also as a woman whose life had been stolen. For surely, if she had died by accident, what motive could there have been to conceal it?

It was quiet in my room and I sat heavily in the chair, giving my heart time to cease its rattle. Hettie had been murdered. That was the unpalatable truth that had kept out of reach, and her face remoulded itself for me. In that moment, I knew something else – something that I had not been completely sure of but must now certainly be true: that Ailsa had most likely spoken the truth when she had told me that William had been killed. Before, I had not been able to justify such an abominable act, but a possible reason was finally evident – what if William had witnessed Hettie’s killer? What if he had told? And what about Mary’s muteness? Did she know too? All these weeks, I had wondered what powerful key kept her lips so tightly shut. What logic could be more potent than the knowledge of her brother’s murder to hold her to silence?

My hands shook. All wrong. All wrong. I examined the purse again – the coins that she had saved and would never spend. There was little in her sewing bag – needles and two knitted garments – a baby’s tiny bedjacket and hat. Even with the gravity of horror, I could see the care which had been taken to produce them. I imagined her then sitting by the fire, her cheek caught in the lamplight, her clever fingers on the wool.

I had thought that, by banishing her ghost, I had made Mary safe. That could not be true any more. The logic no longer held, because Hettie had been killed not by a ghost but by human hands, and probably William too. If Hettie returned from the grave later and tried to harm us – it was because Greer wished it. I recalled again that blaze of love on Greer’s face as she looked at Paterson. I felt the fierceness of Greer’s passionate nature – saw her hands taking Hettie’s life and then that of the boy who saw her do it.