The Way Home Read online

  Whether it was because he became aware of her staring at him she wasn’t sure, but after what seemed like forever, he turned slowly and looked up at her window. The impact of his gaze meeting hers was visceral. With a gasp, she drew back trembling.

  It wasn’t fear she felt, even though a stranger invading their garden should have been frightening. That gaze had been incisive, not dangerous. It had caught and pinned her like a butterfly to a board. Those eyes had been shocked to see her at first; shocked that she was watching him. Then they’d turned piercing, as if he could get answers from her just by looking deeply enough into her.

  What must he think seeing a bald woman standing staring at him? She was the first to understand people’s reaction when they saw her this way. Shock was the least negative reaction she received. Repulsion, pity, fear… some people looked at her as if she were ugly or contagious, but none of these emotions were in the officer’s eyes. He just… didn’t understand.

  Hurrying across the bedroom, she headed for the stairs. Marnie would be in the kitchen making dinner. Surely, she would have seen the man from the kitchen window if she’d looked. Maybe she’d know who he was.

  Even walking down the flight of stairs took a lot out of Cassie. By the time she got to the kitchen, she was breathing hard and her legs were wobbly. The look on Marnie’s face when she rushed in was enough to slow her down and get her gathering her resources quickly. Worrying the old lady was the last thing Cassie wanted to do. Having an invalid in her home had been hard enough on Marnie over the last seven months without Cassie adding fuel to her concerns.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ Marnie asked, her very proper Oxford English at odds with her surroundings. It was a voice more suited to a lecture hall than a rustic kitchen.

  ‘I… nothing really. I just saw a man in the garden. Are we having a dinner guest?’

  Marnie glanced out the window and frowned. ‘Where? I can’t see anyone.’

  ‘Leaning against the oak tree. Maybe the angle isn’t right from here.’ Cassie went to the window and looked out. No, the angle wasn’t quite right, but she was sure something of the man should have been visible from where they stood; she could see no sign of him.

  She went to the back door and opened it, letting the fresh air enter the overheated kitchen. Before Marnie had a chance to say anything, she walked out into the garden searching for the man.

  The garden was shadowed but still discernible. Rose bushes ran around the full length of the wall, their last blooms still heavy on their stalks. A small veggie plot, half dug up and ready for the winter planting, sat in the centre with a green lawn in need of mowing around its perimeter. A young ash grew against the wall next to the wrought-iron gate. It reached upward, as if trying to compete with the much older and taller oak closer to the house. All this she could see quite clearly.

  What she couldn’t see was a man.

  She went over to the wrought iron gate and checked the lock. No, it hadn’t been left open and the key wasn’t in it. That usually hung from a rope on the back of the kitchen door. How did the man get in here then if he hadn’t come through the gate or through the house? It was quite a mystery.

  When she wandered back inside shutting the door behind her, she noticed how concerned Marnie looked.

  ‘No one there. Are you sure we didn’t have a visitor? One of the men from the DST?’

  ‘No one has been here, Cassie. Why do you think he was from the DST?’

  ‘He was wearing a uniform. A blue-grey uniform. Old fashioned.’

  Marnie’s face had been flushed red from the heat of the agar only moments before. Now, it was as if the blood had drained right out of her body. Her finely lined skin was suddenly bone white and stark. Even her short, spiked hair appeared more white than grey. Her lips were drawn into a tight line that almost looked like a grimace of pain.

  ‘A young, handsome man in a uniform? Is that what you saw?’ Her voice was hoarse.

  ‘Yes. I suppose you could call him handsome. He looked too hard for my tastes. Like one of those macho men, but without the muscles. Thinner, more dangerous.’

  ‘Yes. He would look like that. But he was younger when I knew him, so there was still a boyish softness to his features then.’

  ‘Knew him?’ Cassie was confused. What was Marnie talking about? Did she know the man Cassie had described? Was he an old friend?

  ‘When I was a little girl – it was 1940, the end of 1940 – he fought in the Battle of Britain as it’s now called, and his squad was sent here to recuperate. I thought he was the most handsome, heroic man I’d ever seen, and believe me, in those days there were plenty of heroic men wandering around the area. Leconfield was buzzing with airmen from all the allied countries. The Americans were particularly flashy, but Hawk was something special.’ Her eyes had become unfocused, her voice soft with nostalgia.

  ‘I don’t understand. You’re talking about a man who’d be older than you are now if he were still alive. That man in the garden was not much older than me – maybe late twenties. No older, I assure you.’

  ‘You don’t need to assure me, dear. I know exactly how old he looks. People have described him to me often over the years, but I haven’t seen him, not since I was eight.’

  At that moment, Marnie’s face became stricken again, as if she’d just realised something awful. Her rummy eyes met Cassie’s for the longest moment, and Cassie was sure it was fear and grief she saw in the old lady’s gaze. What could she possibly be afraid of? Did the man mean her harm?

  ‘He’s a ghost, Cassie. And he’s only ever seen shortly before someone…’ She broke eye contact and sat down heavily on a cushioned kitchen chair.

  ‘A ghost? No, there was nothing ghostly about the man I saw in the garden. He was as solid and real as you or me.’

  ‘Was he? That’s odd. Mostly he’s described as an apparition. His details are clear but he’s not solid. People see through him.’

  ‘I definitely couldn’t see through this man, Marnie. Maybe someone is playing a practical joke. Could someone be trying to scare you? Has anyone been pestering you to sell again?’

  ‘No, dear, not since that developer who bought the rest of the property gave up on me. And no one else knows about Hawk. No one could play such a trick.’

  ‘Hawk? His name was Hawk? How fitting!’

  ‘Actually, his name was some alphabetical soup that no one could pronounce properly. Polish is a very difficult tongue. His nickname in the squadron was Hawk.’

  ‘Polish? How could he be Polish and be in England in 1940? Poland was annexed by Germany in ‘39.’

  ‘Yes, and many of their pilots fled the country so they could go on fighting the Nazis. They were excellent pilots. Daredevils, I think you’d call them; took outrageous risks, but most of them paid off. They had higher kill rates and fewer losses than most of our own squadrons.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that before. How odd. But how did you meet a Polish pilot?’

  ‘He wandered into our farmyard one day. He was on day-leave and just started walking from the base, so Gran told me; ended up here and Gramps asked him in. He loved this house right from the first moment he set foot in it. Told me once that it “called to him”. Nowhere else had ever done that to him before. I suppose that’s why he haunts the place. It’s where he felt at home.’

  Marnie had taken a seat at the table, part of an upmarket country kitchen dining setting she’d bought shortly before Fran’s death. Her face was still pale and a fine sheen of perspiration had sprung up on her forehead.

  ‘And you’ve never seen this… ghost?’ Cassie sat down across from her, glad to be off her feet. She was feeling decidedly lightheaded and woozy.

  ‘No, dear. Only people who are…’ Marnie stopped abruptly and seemed to be desperately searching for some way to finish her sentence. ‘Only certain people see him. Just leave it at that.’

  ‘Psychics? Clairvoyants? But I’m not one of those fruitcakes. Fran enjoyed a tarot reading every so o
ften, but I always saw that stuff as rubbish.’

  ‘No, not psychics. We had ghost hunters in here once but they couldn’t find anything. It’s just ordinary people who see him. You don’t have to be a sensitive or anything. I… I must get back to dinner.’ Marnie climbed to her feet and hurried back to the stove where something was merrily steaming. ‘Are you ready to eat now? You have to start putting some flesh on those bones again. You’re so… thin…’

  This was a familiar refrain and Cassie just nodded and smiled. She would do her best to eat, but since chemo, when she’d gotten sick after eating anything but dry crackers, she’d found food less than appealing. And she looked thin because she no longer had breasts. Her body was now that of a twelve year old.

  They’d wanted her to have reconstruction at the same time as the bilateral mastectomy but she hadn’t wanted that. There was already too much to get used to. A set of plastic, Barbie boobs would have been just one too many. There was no hurry. There’d be time for that later… if she survived.

  ‘Will you tell me if you see him again?’ Marnie asked, as she took what turned out to be pasta off the agar and poured it into a metal colander on the sink. The steam fogged up the windowpane above.

  ‘Him? The ghost? Of course. But I still can’t believe you think that’s what I saw. You’re usually so level-headed.’

  ‘And so are the others who’ve seen him. Dad was the first, we think. When Dad saw him, Hawk was leaning against the oak, smoking, just as you described. Dad had never met him. He and his brother had returned to active service a month or so before Hawk came to Leconfield.

  ‘At first, Gran thought Hawk had come back for a visit and she’d missed him, but when she checked, she found out he’d died over France in 1944. He’d become an ace by then. Fifteen kills. Few pilots matched him. Then she saw him a few years after Dad died. My Gran was down-to-earth Yorkshire without a superstitious bone in her body. If she said she saw a ghost pilot in the garden, then there was a ghost pilot in the garden.’ The steam from the pasta was adding to Marnie’s sheen, and her hands were shaking more than usual as she put the empty saucepan in the sink beside the colander.

  ‘Couldn’t it have been someone else? One of the other pilots who’d survived? How could she remember him so well if he’d only been here a few times?’

  ‘Hawk was memorable. You must realise that now that you’ve seen him. Gran never forgot him, and neither did Gramps or I. Gramps saw him about ten years later but I was living in London then. I rang him one night and he was very rattled. Not much rattled Gramps. He’d seen it all in World War I, but seeing Hawk… well… I came up straight away, but by the time I got here, he was dead. A heart attack in his sleep, the doctor said.’

  ‘Oh, how sad. You didn’t get to say goodbye.’

  ‘Oh yes, we said our goodbyes. By then we’d started to suspect what seeing Hawk meant.’ She looked flustered, as if she’d said too much. Opening the bottom cupboard, she began rummaging around for a smaller saucepan.

  ‘What did it mean?’ Cassie asked, not willing to be sidetracked again. This was the sort of mystery that fascinated her. Not that she believed in ghosts. Something else was happening here and she wanted to understand it more fully.

  ‘Don’t listen to me. I’m just a silly old woman. I’ll be putting the milk in the pantry instead of the fridge next.’

  ‘Marnie, you’re not silly. What did seeing Hawk mean?’

  Marnie turned to her slowly, eyes troubled, as their gazes meshed. ‘Don’t press me, dear. You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I saw him… I saw your ghost pilot. I want to know what it means.’

  Marnie’s face crumpled and she let out a gasping sob. ‘It means death, Cassie dear. It means death to the person who sees him.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hawk took another draw on his cigarette. It soothed his nerves to smoke. He’d come to it later than most. Before North Africa, he’d despised it for its smell and taste, but when nothing else would stop the shakes after a harrowing mission, smoking could. He’d smoked ever since.

  Now he stood looking at the walled garden at Grange End and contemplated life. If the garden seemed to change subtly between each breath of smoke, he didn’t really notice. After all, how could evening turn to morning, morning to night, winter to spring, spring to autumn all in the time it took to smoke one cigarette? He didn’t even question being at Grange End even though he hadn’t been back to the wonderful old farmhouse since 1940, some four years ago.

  He felt the prickles on the back of his neck and fought the urge to stiffen. He knew that warning sign. Someone was watching him. In the air, it meant there was an enemy pilot on his tail that he couldn’t see yet, probably above him. Here and now, it meant something different.

  He brought his body around slowly, scanning his surroundings more stealthily. He saw nothing in the shadowed garden that was blooming with late summer foliage. How could that be? It was barely the end of spring, but from the look of the garden it appeared much later in the year. And the air was warm and heavy, like in North Africa. It was cold the last time he thought about it; so much so, that he’d considered getting his great coat if he planned to stay outside much longer.

  His head swivelled around and then up. The watcher was always up. He’d seen people watching him from the house before. There had been a stocky young farmer who must have been one of Alf’s sons. Then Mildred had caught a glimpse of him and looked downright shocked. Before he had a chance to consider why she would be surprised to see him when he’d been invited here often enough, he’d let the thought go. Her face had faded from memory.

  There had been more faces at the windows above… now that he thought about it. Alf, looking much older than he remembered, a young boy with bright red hair and a cheeky grin, a woman in her thirties who was dressed most peculiarly and then a younger woman… the sister of the one he’d seen before? She was a pretty girl in her early twenties, with brown hair and bright red cheeks. So many people watching him from the house – were they all visitors? He didn’t remember it being a party he was invited to. He’d thought he was the only one here besides the family.

  This time when he looked up at the windows of the top floor, he saw a face that shocked him. It was a young, exquisitely beautiful woman. Only three quarters of her face was visible in the darkness so he wasn’t quite sure what colour her hair was, but he gained the impression that she had it scraped back into a severe bun and that it was very pale. It appeared not much different to the light colouring of her skin.

  However, her eyes were what drew him. They were huge and serious, as if she carried the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders. He’d seen that look before in the eyes of refugees from war-torn Europe. Eyes that had seen too much pain, too much loss.

  As he turned to study her more closely, she moved forward a fraction so that the last of the evening light illuminated her face fully. Not pale hair pulled back from her face. The beautiful woman was bald.

  He expected to be repelled by the sight, but oddly, he wasn’t. French women collaborators had their heads shaved like this, so he’d been told. What would a woman who’d collaborated with the enemy be doing in England?

  Before he could properly consider the possibilities she jerked back out of sight, and the feeling of loss was suddenly more than he could handle. It caught him in the gut and had him gasping for air. The cigarette in his fingers dropped thoughtlessly to the ground as he took several stumbling steps forward, trying to catch a further glimpse of her.

  She was gone.

  For the first time in a very long time, he found he wanted something. He wanted to see that delicate, fragile face again. He needed to see it. But how? She was in that bedroom. Going inside was… not what he did. But that was ridiculous. Of course he could go inside. The door was always open to him, Alf had told him that often enough, so he could go inside.

  But upstairs? He’d only ever been upstairs a few times. Once he’d gone to see
Marnie’s aeroplane collection. She’d hung the models on string from the ceiling in formation. It had surprised him to see how enthralled a young girl could be with planes. Boys were usually the ones who found them fascinating.

  Another time he’d gone upstairs to wash up before dinner. The bathroom was at the end of the hall he remembered. He’d glanced into the other rooms upstairs as he’d passed. Four bedrooms – two facing the front of the house and two facing the back. There was also one window at the top of the stairs, which made up the three windows along the back of the house that he could see from the garden.

  Whose room was that? It was in the middle. Therefore, it was the first bedroom on the right at the top of the stairs. Wasn’t that Marnie’s room? But that woman wasn’t a child, even though she appeared thin enough to be one. Who was in Marnie’s room? He had to know.

  In the next blink of his eye, he found himself in different surroundings. He staggered from the dislocation of it. Quickly he scanned his location. It was apparent that he was no longer in the garden; somehow, he was inside in a bedroom. He spun around in confusion, trying to get his bearings. How had he gotten here? One minute he was in the garden wanting desperately to be in that bedroom, the next he was inside in a bedroom, but it wasn’t Marnie’s. There were no planes hanging from the ceiling. The room was unlike anything he’d seen in the farmhouse before.

  It was the carpet that drew his attention first. It had a thick cream pile and ran right to the walls. But he quickly reassessed it, because if it had been as thick a pile as he’d first thought, his boots would have sunk deeply into it, and they didn’t.

  Then he noticed a wall of doors painted the same cream colour as the walls. Hadn’t the rooms upstairs been wallpapered? The plainness of the furnishings was peculiar, too. He walked over to the window and saw that he was, indeed, upstairs in the farmhouse. The garden he’d been standing in only seconds ago was below him, lit with bright moonlight.