The Secrets Of Ghosts - Sarah Painter

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was still lying next to the dead man. She struggled to sit up and the young guy lunged forwards. ‘You shouldn’t do that. You might have hurt your back or neck or something.’

      ‘I didn’t fall,’ Katie managed. Her voice hurt her head, which was already pounding. It made it difficult to think clearly. She could move, though. She stretched out an arm, flexed her fingers.

      ‘Look…’ he was standing up, now ‘…I’ve got to go. I’ll send someone up here.’

      Katie was trying to unscramble her thoughts. She’d come in and seen the man and then she’d passed out. No, she’d knelt down and touched the man and then she’d felt very weak. She looked up, wincing as the pendant light shone too brightly into her eyes.

      The good-looking man was at the door, hesitating. ‘You’re okay, now,’ he said, as if reassuring himself.

      ‘He isn’t,’ Katie said pointing at the man. They had to call an ambulance. He was past that, of course, but still. Suddenly, she realised she was going to be sick. She got to her feet and, the room spinning wildly, made it into the en suite to throw up in the sink.

      When she came out the man had gone, but she heard footsteps in the corridor.

      *

      Later, she sat in the public lounge with a sweet cup of tea and a female police officer. Either an autopilot setting had kicked in, or she was still spaced from fainting, but she was calm and methodical as she told the officer what she’d seen. A second track of her mind was running its own commentary. Katie expected it to be shocked and sad and all the things she imagined to be normal human reactions, but instead it thought: Well, at least my birthday will be memorable for something.

      Katie closed her eyes. She was a bad, bad person.

      Jo came out of the kitchen, still in her chef’s whites, and gave her a hug. Jo nodded to the police officer, then looked into Katie’s face. ‘You okay?’

      Katie nodded. ‘Just a bit of a shock. I’m fine.’

      Jo squeezed her shoulder. ‘You should be at home.’ She glanced at the officer whose name Katie had already managed to forget. ‘Don’t keep her hanging about, will you? It’s not right.’

      The female officer had a monotone voice, as if she were reading from an autocue and wasn’t very good at it. ‘There is a procedure that we have to follow.’

      ‘I’m fine,’ Katie said, before Jo could tell the police what she thought of their procedure. She rustled up a smile for Jo, who gave the officer one last long look before walking away.

      ‘So,’ the officer said, seemingly unaffected by Jo’s display of concern. ‘Do you remember seeing anything out of the ordinary tonight?’

      ‘No, nothing,’ Katie said. ‘I mean, apart from the man. Mr Cole.’

      ‘We’re talking to all the members of the wedding party and the staff, but is there anybody else who may have had contact with Mr or Mrs Cole this evening?’

      The chicken thief. Oh, bugger. If her hunch was correct and he’d crashed the wedding, he wouldn’t be listed as a guest. Did that matter, though? She hadn’t seen him talking to Mr Cole, although he had been upstairs in the hotel, where he’d had no business to be. On the other hand, bringing him into the conversation would delay the interview and she really wanted to go home.

      While she dithered, the police officer continued her list of questions. ‘Any loud disagreements, anybody acting strangely?’

      ‘It was a wedding,’ Katie said, wondering if her face had betrayed her. ‘Define “strange”.’

      Patrick Allen strode into the room and straight up to the senior policeman who was conducting an interview at a nearby sofa. ‘I came as soon as I could. I own The Grange.’

      The detective stood up and they shook hands. Katie had inherited a less-than-positive opinion of Patrick Allen from her aunt Gwen, but at that moment she felt sorry for the man. His hair was sticking up at the back as if he’d got out of bed to come to the hotel and he looked grey with concern. Maybe he wasn’t the heartless suit Gwen had always described him as.

      ‘We’re not a chain,’ Patrick was saying. ‘We can’t take this kind of publicity, and in this financial climate...’ He seemed under the impression that the detective was a journalist. ‘I don’t want a circus.’

      ‘There is no reason for alarm, sir,’ the detective said. He started to say something about it looking ‘very routine’ but they moved away as they were speaking and Katie didn’t catch it properly.

      ‘Miss Harper.’ The police lady opposite was leaning forward, her notebook balanced on one knee. ‘Can I ask you again to think if you saw the deceased argue with anybody this evening?’

      Katie snapped back to the conversation. ‘Wasn’t it a heart attack or something? Why are you asking that?’

      ‘We don’t know the cause of death at this time and we need to get as complete a picture as possible of Mr Cole’s last few hours.’

      Those words — ‘last few hours’ — flipped a switch inside Katie and, at once, she felt incredibly sad. That man, Oliver Cole, ate his salmon starter and drank the over-priced fizzy wine and chatted to people with no idea that he was enjoying the very last few hours of his existence. She reached into her shirt and touched her necklace as another thought hit her: with the Harper family intuition, would she be as clueless? Iris certainly seemed very prepared for her passing: she’d sorted out her journals, left notes for Gwen... But was that better? Preferable? How did it feel when you knew exactly how many more seconds there were to go on the clock? Suddenly, Katie really wanted to get out of the overly warm living room. She wanted to go back to her flat and sleep for a day. Maybe two. She focused on the policewoman, who was looking a bit irritated. ‘That’s everything I can tell you. It’s time to wrap this up.’

      The woman’s eyes slid over Katie’s face as if searching for purchase. Then she said: ‘It’s probably about time to wrap this up. If you think of anything else, anything at all—’ She held out a business card.

      ‘I’ll call you,’ Katie said, getting up. She walked swiftly out of the room before the policewoman regained her senses and went to the staff room to collect her denim jacket and bag. Katie felt shaky. For a horrible moment she’d thought the policewoman had been going to ignore her suggestion. Light distraction or suggestion was one of the basic skills of the Harper women, as natural and easy as telling a white lie or reading cards to help a friend make a decision. It was one of the first hints that she was a Harper, turning up when she was just fourteen, and as much a part of her as the colour of her hair. What if each skill were stripped away until there was nothing left? What if, rather than coming into her true power, she was experiencing the disintegration of the abilities she already had?

      The staff entrance was behind the kitchen so she said goodbye to Jo on her way through.

      ‘You sure you’re all right?’ Jo frowned at her, her pixie-cropped hair sticking up at odd angles where she’d had her hat pinned all evening. ‘Here.’ Jo disappeared inside her walk-in fridge and returned with half a cheesecake on a cling-filmed plate.

      ‘Thank you.’ Katie was touched by Jo’s kindness and it made her want to cry. She got out of the kitchen before Jo could see her eyes filling up, but it was a close-run thing.

      The hot weather was holding and the night air was freakishly warm, even though it was past eleven o’clock. The curtains in the hotel were drawn and blocks of red-tinged light hit the gravel that circled the house, but the driveway was a pitch-black tunnel. She’d told Patrick last year that he needed to put more of the solar ground lights along it but he clearly hadn’t been listening. As soon as she stepped away from the lights of the main building the shape of the low garden walls and clipped hedges took on a grey and menacing appearance, becoming strange and other-worldly in the half-light.

      As a result she didn’t notice the figure sitting

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