Brenda raised her eyebrows. ‘I really don’t know. Frank was delusional, like a lot of those men who were wounded in Afghanistan. Those IEDs, they didn’t only blow off their legs, they damaged them psychologically, too. They can’t stop reliving the moments when those roadside bombs exploded, over and over again, and some of them feel that if only they could go back to those moments, they could escape unhurt, and have their legs back, and their whole life would be happy again. Or happier, anyhow. At least they wouldn’t need prosthetic legs.’

  ‘But you and your nurses saw some strange men here. Maybe they’re the same men that Frank believes are his old Army friends. Maybe there’s some kind of hidden basement here, which we haven’t been able to find, and secret passageways. Maybe there are real squatters living here and they do all that screaming and slam all those doors to scare us away.’

  ‘So how did they make one of your surveyors scream in agony, and paralyse the other one?’

  ‘I have no idea, and I don’t pretend to have any idea. But I don’t believe in ghosts. Unless somebody proves it to me beyond a shadow of a doubt, I still think that we’re being tricked, and by people who don’t care if any of us gets badly hurt. You can give people injections that hurt them, can’t you? And injections that paralyse them?’

  ‘Yes, you can indeed,’ said Brenda. ‘Serotonins and some other substances can cause intense pain. And there are several chemicals can lead to paralysis, such as curare or tetrodotoxin or gelsemium, which is known as “heartbreak grass”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle almost killed himself by taking gelsemium. It didn’t paralyse him but it gave him terrible diarrhoea.’

  ‘Perhaps we should call in some thermal imaging company to give this whole hospital a going-over,’ put in David. ‘There’s one that I used a couple of years ago when I was extending a house in Betchworth, and they found a whole bricked-up room that we hadn’t known existed.’

  ‘I don’t know if Roger would agree to pay for it,’ said Lilian. ‘I can ask him. If we did find that there was a hidden room with people living in it, it would certainly be cheaper than cancelling this whole development.’

  Brenda looked sceptical. ‘Do you really believe there could be people living here in some secret hideaway?’

  ‘I don’t know what to believe, quite frankly,’ said Lilian. ‘I have never felt so confused in my life. And I have never felt so frightened, either. If it is real people, then it’s incredibly scary, because they obviously wish us harm. And if it isn’t – then what on earth are they, and what do they want?’

  15

  Moses arrived at St Helier shortly after midday. He felt tired and frayed, and he had a nagging headache behind his eyes. Yesterday’s experience with Alex had given him nightmares about dogs howling and grinning death masks dancing around his bed, so that he had slept only fitfully. Grace had cooked him his favourite breakfast of noodles and eggs, but he had left most of it untouched.

  ‘Moses – you have me really worried about you, darling,’ she had said, scraping the bowlful of noodles into the kitchen bin.

  Moses had put down his teacup. ‘You are worried about me? You cannot be half as worried about me as I am.’

  He went up to the hospital receptionist and asked her to page Dr Wells for him, so that he would know that Moses had arrived.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Dr Wells is unavailable.’

  ‘Unavailable? He asked me to come and see him today. Cannot you tell him at least that I am here? I can wait, if it is necessary.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s incapacitated. I don’t know when he’ll be well enough to see anybody.’

  ‘He has been taken ill?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you, sir. Is there anybody else you would like to talk to?’

  ‘Dr Morton? Is she free?’

  ‘Hold on. I’ll see if I can find her for you.’

  Moses had to wait in the relatives’ room for nearly twenty minutes, but eventually Dr Morton appeared, carrying a thick folder under one arm and looking harassed. Moses stood up.

  ‘Moses… sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ve had to take over two of Dr Wells’s most serious cases.’

  ‘The receptionist told me he has been taken ill.’

  There was nobody else in the relatives’ room. Dr Morton closed the door and said to Moses, ‘Sit down. You’ve been involved with this from the start, so you need to know what’s happened. Perhaps you can help.’

  ‘So… please tell me. Dr Wells’s condition – is it serious?’

  ‘At the moment, we’ve put him into an induced coma. He was suffering unbearable pain, exactly like Alex Fowler. He was attending Alex Fowler when he was suddenly struck down, and according to the junior doctor who was with him at the time, he started to scream in exactly the same way that Alex Fowler screamed.

  ‘The extraordinary thing is that Alex Fowler had just that minute passed away.’

  ‘Alex Fowler has died?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But that isn’t all. That woman who was also taken ill at St Philomena’s, Charlene Thorndyke, she passed away yesterday, too, and the nurse who was caring for her was struck down with exactly the same paralysis that she was suffering from.

  ‘When both patients died, their symptoms were immediately transferred to whoever was in the room with them.’

  Moses stared at her. ‘How can that be?’

  ‘That’s not the only question, is it? We still don’t know why Alex Fowler was in such appalling pain and Charlene Thorndyke was totally paralysed. We hadn’t finished all the tests on them that we were intending to carry out, but so far neither of them showed even the slightest indications of any physical injury or any neurological disorder.’

  Moses stood up and walked over to the window. Outside, in the car park, a mother was trying to pick up her screaming toddler from the ground.

  ‘I think… the answer to that question can only be found at St Philomena’s,’ he said.

  ‘You could be right,’ said Dr Morton. ‘My colleague Dr Latimer certainly suspects that there’s something strange going on there. But both deceased were sent away last night for post-mortem examinations, so we may know a little more about their condition in a few days’ time.’

  ‘Let us hope the post-mortems show up something that you have not been able to find already. All the same, I am going to go back to St Philomena’s. Yesterday I went to talk to one of the former patients, along with Mrs Chesterfield, who is the lady in charge of its development. This man is quite sure that he can still see his old comrades there, roaming around the corridors. He has promised to come to the hospital with us so we can see them for ourselves.’

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting that St Philomena’s is haunted?’

  ‘I do not know what to believe. Mrs Chesterfield suspects that a group of local protestors are trying to scare her away.’

  ‘That sounds more likely. But let’s you and me exchange email addresses. You can text me if you find out anything of interest at St Philomena’s, and I can send you the post-mortem results as soon as I get them through.’

  Moses watched the woman in the car park dragging her toddler over to her car and buckling him into his baby seat, still screaming.

  ‘To be frank with you, Dr Morton, I am beginning to think that we will never know what caused Alex Fowler and Charlene Thorndyke to suffer the way they did, and to die. I saw some things when I was serving in Afghanistan that I still cannot fully understand. And you know as well as I do that the world of medicine still has many unexplained mysteries. The more we learn about viruses and other pathologies, the more we realise how little we know, and how much more we need to find out.’

  Dr Morton had opened her file and was leafing through it, page by page, licking her thumb as she did so. Without looking up, she said, ‘Yes, Moses, you’re absolutely right. Perhaps we’ll find out one day that there are ghosts, after all.’

  *

  Moses drove into the forecourt of St Philomena’s just as the two forensic investigators were preparing to leave. They were standing in the porch talking to Lilian and David as Moses approached.

  ‘We’ve removed all the bones that we’ve been able to locate,’ the bald investigator was saying. ‘However, we still have a considerable amount of work to do taking soil samples and searching a wider area in case we can manage to find the skull.’

  ‘What is this?’ asked Moses. ‘What bones, if I may ask?’

  Lilian said, ‘I found a skeleton this morning, buried in the woods.’

  ‘A skeleton? My God! Do you know whose skeleton it is?’

  ‘Not yet, sir,’ said the bald-headed investigator. ‘We are taking the remains to our laboratory for further tests and our colleagues will be checking their records for any notification of missing persons in this area. So you never know.’

  He turned back to Lilian. ‘We’ve taped that area off. Please stay well clear of it and make sure that everybody else does the same. Any new contamination will make our job that much harder.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lilian assured him, and the two investigators walked over to their van, climbed in and drove off.

  ‘A skeleton?’ said Moses. ‘There is a saying in Nigeria, “Sau daya, duk kasusuwa sun iya rawa”. It means “Once upon a time, all bones were able to dance”.’

  Lilian shook her head. ‘It’s probably nothing sinister. It could have been the remains of somebody who used to live here, when it was a private house. Except that there was no coffin, and no grave marker, which you would have expected, wouldn’t you?’

  They went into the hallway and through to the drawing room. Brenda Wake was still there, standing by the French windows making a phone call.

  ‘Yes. I’ll be back in about an hour. Don’t worry. I can pick up some fish and chips.’

  When she had finished, Lilian introduced her to Moses.

  ‘When Brenda was working here, some of her nurses thought they saw figures walking around the corridors. But as soon as they tried to confront them, they disappeared.’

  ‘As I said to Lilian earlier, it could have been mass hysteria,’ said Brenda. ‘In those days, the atmosphere here was incredibly fraught. Those young soldiers were coming back from Afghanistan in a terrible state, mentally. The nightmares that some of them were having, I can’t tell you.’

  ‘I would like to talk to you about that in a minute,’ said Moses. ‘First, though, I am afraid that I have some very bad news. I have just come from St Helier. Both Alex Fowler and Charlene Thorndyke have passed away.’

  Lilian stared at him, and pressed her hand against her heart. ‘They’re dead? Both of them?’

  ‘I went there to see what progress they were making, and to talk to Dr Wells. It came as a great shock to me, too. But that is not all. What has happened is even worse than the two of them passing away.’

  He explained how the symptoms that Alex and Charlie had been suffering appeared to have been transferred when they died to Dr Wells and Nurse O’Grady.

  Lilian’s heart began thumping hard and she felt breathless, as if she were going to faint. She reached out behind her for the window sill so that she could sit down. Brenda sat down next to her and took hold of her hand.

  ‘Gracious me, I can’t help thinking that’s almost exactly what happened to Dr Cobb. The fractures in his legs were identical to Derek Walker’s in every way.’

  Brenda turned to Moses and told him how Dr Cobb had fallen from the third floor down to the hallway, shattering all the bones in his thighs and his shins, and how he had subsequently died.

  ‘So what is going on here?’ asked Moses. ‘If it is protestors, how do they make such things happen? If it is not, then who? Or what?’

  ‘I can’t believe it’s protestors,’ said Brenda. ‘As I was just saying to Lilian here, it could be some form of mass hysteria, and somehow it’s stayed in the hospital after all the patients have left.’

  Lilian said, ‘Charlie felt that there was such an atmosphere here in this hospital you could almost cut it with a knife.’

  ‘But how can that make one patient’s symptoms be transferred to another?’ asked Moses.

  ‘Myself, I have no idea,’ said Brenda. ‘But I read about something similar happening once, in a mental institution in Delhi. It was closed down and converted into flats but almost everybody who moved into those flats went mad. They cut their pets’ heads off or set themselves alight or threw themselves off the roof. In the end, so many residents committed suicide that they had to demolish the whole building.’

  ‘Well, who knows?’ said Moses. ‘But whatever is causing it, we need to find out what it is, and as soon as we can. We owe it to those people who have died, and those people who are still suffering. I made a pledge when I joined the Army Medical Corps that I would devote myself to saving life and easing pain. I might be retired now, but I still keep that promise in my heart.’

  ‘Let me call Marion Crosby, and see if she can bring this fellow Frank up here with his night-vision glasses,’ said Lilian. ‘Even if we don’t get to see any of his old friends, at least that will eliminate one explanation.’

  ‘But supposing we do see them? Then what?’

  ‘God knows. Then we go mad and start jumping off the roof.’

  16

  It was dark by the time Marion Crosby brought Frank up to St Philomena’s, and an owl was hooting in the trees as if it were trying to make them feel that they were in a ghost story.

  David helped Marion to lift Frank’s wheelchair out of the back of her estate car, and then to heave Frank himself out of the front passenger seat. Frank was clutching a black helmet in his lap, fitted with his night observation goggles.

  They all went inside, with David bumping Frank’s wheelchair over the front step. Now that it was beginning to grow dark earlier, David had brought the LED lantern that he used for camping with his family. It was stunningly bright, this lantern. It illuminated the hallway like an amateur stage play, with all their shadows stretching up behind them to the ceiling.

  ‘So, where is it that your friends are hiding, Frank?’ Lilian asked him.

  ‘I told you before, love. They’re not hiding. This is where they live!’

  ‘All right, this is where they live. But where are they?’

  ‘Upstairs, most of the time, in the wards, or the private rooms, but of course I can’t get to see them up there because the lifts ain’t working.’

  ‘So how do you get to see them?’

  ‘They come down to see me, once they know I’m here. They all come down to that big room with the chandeliers, the one we used to call the Social Room. Most of them come down, anyhow. Some of them have PTSD so bad they still don’t know where the fuck they are, or even who they are.’

  ‘But those who come down to see you…’ asked Brenda. ‘How do they know you’re here?’

  Frank reached into the breast pocket of his anorak and brought out an Echo harmonica. He blew a squeaky high-pitched chord on it, and then held it up. ‘I play “If Tomorrow Never Comes”, and down they come.’

  ‘And you wear these goggles?’ said Lilian, ‘And that’s how you can see them?’

  ‘That’s right, love. I’ll give them a tootle on my harmonica, and once they’ve all mustered, I’ll pass the nod around and you can have a butcher’s for yourself.’

  Lilian turned to Moses and David and Brenda. ‘Do we think that we’re all ready for this?’

  Moses looked down at Frank. ‘Just tell me this… is there any danger that your friends will harm any of us, in the same way that Alex and Charlene were harmed?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lilian. ‘You warned us about your friends being dangerous.’

  ‘You’re with me, so you don’t have nothing to worry about,’ said Frank. ‘Besides, you’ve done nothing to them, have you? It’s not like you’re Terences or nothing.’

  ‘But Alex and Charlene hadn’t done anything to them either, had they?’ said David.

  ‘I can’t account for what happened to them two, mate. It could have been anything what made them sick, do you know what I mean? Like, this used to be a hospital, right, and who knows what germs could still be lurking around?’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible that some viruses or some bacteria could have survived from that time,’ said Brenda. ‘They found that pithovirus in Russia, didn’t they? They reckoned it was over thirty thousand years old, but it was still infectious.’

  ‘Yes, but that was discovered in the ice in Siberia,’ Moses retorted. ‘This is a hospital building in Surrey.’

  ‘Agreed. But I still think we have to consider that some kind of unfamiliar virus might have been brought here by one of the casualties from Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Middle East. And supposing it was, it might have been able to stay alive much longer in a cooler climate. Viruses are highly adaptable, as you know. Look at all the variants of Covid. I mean, some of them are—’

  David interrupted her. ‘Okay, fair enough. But even if it was a virus that infected Alex and Charlie – or two different viruses – that doesn’t explain the screaming we’ve heard, does it? Or the weird faces that Lilian and me have seen looking out of the windows, or the men that you said you’ve seen, wandering around the corridors?’

  ‘Well, myself, I’m still inclined to believe that we were suffering from delusions.’

  ‘You honestly think so?’

  ‘As I said before, we may have been seeing things because of mass hysteria among the nursing staff. The atmosphere here was constantly fraught. And when I say “fraught”, the whole place felt wound up to the nth degree, day and night. Or maybe our perception was affected by some illness that we’d spread among ourselves without realising it. Malaria can cause psychotic episodes, don’t you know, and so can HIV and AIDs, and you can even start hallucinating when your blood sugar levels are low.’

  ‘Whatever Lilian and I saw wasn’t caused by low blood sugar. We’d both had a Bakewell slice at lunchtime.’

 

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