All the talk of Bella had left her in my mind. As I drove out of the car park I remembered the bag she’d abandoned in the car. On my way home that day I’d looked for somewhere to dispose of it, but couldn’t bring myself to do so until I discovered what it contained. At my apartment I’d turned out the contents on my desk. There was my aunt’s phone, and a pair of yellowing embroidered gloves as long as half an arm. I found coins several centuries old, and a number of items of jewellery – an oval brooch on which porcelain figures danced in a circle, a necklace dangling gemmed pendants, a ring internally inscribed with symbols that might have related to magic. I’d tried to read a newspaper brown as parchment, where every S rose above the other letters like a weed out of undergrowth, but the pages had crumbled into illegible fragments. I’d consigned their remains to the bin and kept the phone as a reminder of my aunt. The other souvenirs felt like attempts on Bella’s part to cling to memories – to pass for human, perhaps to herself. Although I didn’t want them anywhere near me, I felt reluctant to destroy them, and so I took them to the oldest museum in Liverpool, where I found an opportunity to leave the bag in the gentlemen’s facility while I was unobserved. Days later the local newspaper reported that someone had left several valuable coins and items of antique jewellery in the museum. It was planned to put them on display, but that was the only reference I found.

As I drove home the empty seat beside me felt like a mute rebuke. At least the coins and jewellery were safe, though I’d no idea what had become of the gloves, and I was safe from any lingering influence. I’d thought I would have to return to the derelict hotel and find the jars of haunted earth so as to destroy them – I was afraid that otherwise some trespasser might rouse the presences they invoked – but there had been no need. Before I could nerve myself to venture back, Roy had phoned to tell me the hotel had burned down. I gathered that he felt we were to some extent responsible, given the rumour that people living nearby had started the fire, having concluded that intruders they’d seen in the vicinity were using the place to take drugs or grow them. If the arsonists had failed to realise that cultivation would have required electricity, I was glad of their mistake.