My son seems changed now, a shadow of himself. My son. The very words have a bittersweet ring to me. He has been sorting out Frank’s things, sifting through them all to help me. It’s something I’ve put off for far too long. After all, he was his father. Joseph spent a few years in a psychiatric hospital, and after being discharged, moved from Dorset to Warwickshire. He’s still under the doctor, but medication and therapy seem to have helped him see the error of his ways, and kept him on an even keel. He’s never married and lives alone, only about four miles from Avoncote. I actually pity him. I genuinely believe he regrets how he behaved. Maybe it was all a reaction to his circumstances. I suppose he was just a child. But I can never fully forgive his actions, and the devastation he caused us. And because of what happened, I don’t want him to inherit my home, the home I shared with Frank. Because Frank would never have forgiven me for that. I’ll never understand why Joseph did what he did all those years ago.

But I’m certain you’ll see it from my point of view. You know better than anyone, we never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head, do we?

I put down the letter, shocked. I turned her words over in my mind, piecing together this new revelation with the ‘apparition’ in the garden. And then I remembered the old photograph in the magazine – the young boy staring solemnly down from the window. So, the person who, for all that time, I’d been convinced was Frank Barley’s restless spirit was, in fact, his son, who was very much alive. Judging by the evidence in the photo album, their hatred was mutual. Joseph had obliterated every image of his father, as if he wanted to wipe any evidence of his existence from the face of the earth.

It was obvious now: the noises in the attic, the man’s voice in the old lady’s bedroom. Had he been helping her at all – or just trying to find anything that might incriminate him in some way, in order to dispose of it? The latter seemed more plausible. Maybe he had still been looking for something in his more recent visits to the house. I wondered then if he actually had a key – if she’d even given him one. I shuddered to think that he could have walked in at any moment when I’d been there alone.