experimentally to confirm it stayed put; she didn’t want it swinging forward and tripping her up. Getting your neck slashed in a dream was one thing; breaking your neck while trying to get down a steep flight of stairs in the dead of night was quite another.
In the event, she managed without any problem, and was soon standing in the cold breeze of the White Horse and Griffin’s side lane, cobbles underfoot. The town was so quiet she could hear her own breathing, and Church Street was closed to traffic in any case, yet still she ventured forward from the alley very, very carefully – a legacy of her accident in Bosnia. Even in a pedestrianised cul-de-sac in a small Yorkshire town at four in the morning, you never knew what might come ripping around the corner.
In the dark, Whitby looked strange to Siân – neither modern nor medieval, which were the only two ways she was accustomed to perceiving it. In the daylight hours, she was either working in the shadow of the abbey ruins, coaxing the remains of stunted Northumbrians out of the antique clay, or she was weaving through crowds of shoppers and tourists, that vulgar throng of pilgrims with mobile phones clutched to their cheeks or pop groups advertised on their chests. Now, in the unpeopled stillness of night, Whitby looked, to Siân, distinctly Victorian. She didn’t know why – the buildings and streets were much older than that, mostly. But it wasn’t a matter of architecture; it was a matter of atmosphere. The glow of the streetlamps could almost be gaslight; the obscure buildings and darkened doorways scowled with menace, like a movie backdrop for yet another version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Any alleyway, it seemed to Siân, could disgorge at any moment the caped figure of the Count, or a somnambulistic young woman of unnatural pallor, her white nightgown stained with blood.
Gothic. That’s what the word ‘Gothic’ meant to most people nowadays. Nothing to do with the original Germanic tribe, or even the pre-Renaissance architectural style. The realities of history had been swept aside by Hollywood vampires and narcissistic rock singers with too much mascara on. And here she was, as big a sucker as anyone: walking down Church Street at four in the morning, imagining the whole town to be crawling with Victorianesque undead. Even the Funtasia joke shop, which during the day sold plastic vampire fangs and whoopee cushions, seemed at this godforsaken hour to be a genuinely creepy establishment, the sort of place inside which rats and madmen might be lurking.
The house in Loggerhead’s Yard was easy to find; when she’d asked about it in the hotel, half a dozen people jostled to give her directions. Magnus’s father had been well known in the town and all the locals took a keen interest whenever a death freed up a hunk of prime real estate. Only when Siân approached the front door did she have her first doubts about what she’d come here to do. An action which, in daylight with people strolling round about, would look like a casual errand, seemed anything but casual now – the eerie stillness and the ill-lit, empty streets made her feel as if she were up to no good. She could be a thief, a cat burglar, a rapist, tiptoeing so as not to wake the virtuously sleeping world, squinting at a slit in a stranger’s door, preparing to slide a foreign object through it. What if the door should open suddenly, to reveal Magnus, still naked and warm from his bed, rubbing his eyes? Or what about the dog? Surely he would go berserk at the sound of her fumblings at the mail slot! Siân steeled her nerves for an explosion of barking as she fed the books and pamphlets, one by one, through the dark vent, but they dropped softly onto the floor within, and that was all. Hadrian was either uninspired by the challenges of being a guard dog, or asleep. Asleep on the bed of his master, perhaps. Two muscular males nestled side by side, different species but both devilishly handsome.
For goodness’ sake, she sighed to herself, turning away. When will you grow up?
Bag empty and weightless on her shoulder, she hurried back to the hotel.
Siân had never been fond of weekends. They were all very well for people with hobbies or a frustrated desire to luxuriate in bed, but she would rather be working. Half the reason she’d switched from paper conservation to archaeology was that it required her to show up, no matter what, at the appointed hour, and dig. It wasn’t easy, especially in raw weather, but it was better than wasting the whole day thinking about the past – her own past, that is.
Saint Benedict had the right idea: a community of monastics keeping to a strict ritual seven days a week, helping each other get out of bed with (as he put it) ‘gentle encouragement, on account of the excuses to which the sleepy are addicted’. Siân knew all about those.
To prevent herself moping, she spent most of her weekends wandering around Whitby, back and forth across the swing bridge, from pier to pier, from cliff to cliff. She’d walk until she tired herself out, and then lie on her bed in the Mary Ann Hepworth room with a book on her lap, watching the roof-tops change colour, until it was time for her to go to sleep and get what was coming to her.
This week, Saturday passed more quickly than usual. Her early-morning excursion to the house in Loggerhead’s Yard had been quite thrilling in its stealthy way, and afterwards she fell into a long, mercifully dreamless doze. She woke quite rested, with only three-quarters of the weekend left to endure.
In the afternoon, while she had a bite of lunch at the Whitby Mission and Seafarer’s Centre, a gusty breeze flapped the yellowing squares of paper pinned to the notice-board near the door. ‘Don’t leave Fido out in the cold,’ said one fluttering page. ‘We have a separate coffee lounge where pets are always welcome.’ Siân left the ruins of her jacket potato consolidating on her plate and walked over to the opposite lounge to have a peek inside. Her nose nudged through a veil of cigarette smoke. Strange dogs with strange owners looked up at the newcomer.
On her way out of the Mission, Siân paused at the book-case offering books for 50p each, and rummaged through the thrillers, romances and anthologies of local writers’ circles. There was a cheap, mass-produced New Testament there, too. What a come-down since the days when a Bible was a unique and priceless object, inscribed on vellum from an entire flock of sheep! Siân closed her eyes, imagined a cloister honeycombed in sunlight, with a long rank of desks and tonsured heads, perfect silence except for the faint scratching of pen-nibs.
‘Now here’s a blast from the past!’ brayed the disc jockey on the radio. ‘Hands up anyone who bopped along to Culture Club when they had this hit – come on,’ fess up!’
Siân fled.
Early on Sunday morning, not long after getting her throat slit, Siân was out and about again, her hastily-washed hair steaming. She couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it, and besides, now was when she ought to be going – at exactly the same time as she’d set off for work on Friday. If Magnus and Hadrian were creatures of habit, this would send them running after her any minute now.
She walked along Church Street, quite slowly, from the hotel façade to the foot of the hundred and ninety-nine steps and back again – twice – but no chance meeting occurred.
Tantalised by the thought of the man and his dog running high up on the East Cliff, in the wild grasses flanking the abbey ramparts, she climbed Caedmon’s Trod until she could see the Donkey Field. No chance meeting occurred here, either, at least not with Magnus and Hadrian. Instead, she met a bored-looking boy and his somewhat frazzled dad, returning from what had clearly been a less than inspirational visit to the abbey.
‘Another really interesting thing that monasteries used to do,’ the father was saying, in a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to get the child excited, ‘was give sanctuary to murderers.’
Siân saw a flicker of interest in the kid’s eyes as she squeezed past him on the narrow monks’ trod.
‘Has Whitby got McDonalds,’ he asked his dad, ‘or only fish and chips?’
It was Monday afternoon before Siân
