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The storm passed over us and I calculated they would be getting the worst of it in Acton Carey. Lightning still forked and flickered, but we were becoming blasé after the shock of that one awful blast.
‘I wonder if it was like this in the blitz – the bombing, you know.’
‘Far worse, I should imagine. Bombs killed people. Are we back to your war again, Cassie?’
‘It isn’t my war, but there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
Even as I spoke, I knew I was being all kinds of a fool, so I blamed the storm again.
‘About …?’
‘About what we agreed not to talk about. Shall I make us a cup of tea?’
I was glad to retreat into the kitchen, to get my thoughts into some kind of order, relieved to find the storm had not affected the electric kettle. When I carried the tray into the conservatory, Jeannie was standing at the door, gazing out.
‘You think you’ve seen the ghost again – is that it?’ she said, her back still to me.
‘I’ve seen him. Twice more. Come and sit down.’ I made a great fuss of stirring the tea in the pot, pouring it.
‘Right then!’ She placed her cup on the wicker table at her side, then selected three biscuits, still without looking at me. ‘And I don’t for the life of me know why I’m so silly as to listen to you,’ she flung, tight-lipped. ‘You’re normally such a down-to-earth person!’
‘I know what I saw and heard,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Do you want to hear, or don’t you?’ I took a gulp of my tea. ‘Well – do you?’
‘There’ll be no peace, I suppose, till you’ve told me.’
There came another startling flash of lightning, followed almost at once by a loud peal of thunder. The storm we thought was passing had turned round on itself as if it were searching for a way out of the encircling hills.
‘I’m getting bored with this!’ Jeannie lifted her eyes to the glass roof. The rain was still falling heavily and making a dreadful noise above us. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen.’ She picked up the tray and I followed her, carrying the plate of biscuits. Hector slunk behind me, whining, so I gave him a pat and a custard cream.
‘Now.’ Jeannie settled herself at the table, back to the window. ‘You are serious? After all we agreed, you’ve been poking about again!’
‘I have not! I went to the Rose on Wednesday night, and I’ll admit asking Bill about the people who once lived here. It was natural that since the RAF was the cause of them getting thrown out, we should talk about the Smiths.’
‘And …?’
‘Look, Jeannie – I didn’t tell you, but I saw the pilot at the kissing gate, last Saturday morning! One second he was there; the next he’d gone!’
‘When you’d been to the post office, you mean?’
‘Yes. You said I was acting a bit vague; asked me if I had a headache.’
‘So I did,’ she said softly, ‘yet you said nothing!’
‘I only saw him out of the corner of my eye, but that gate opened of its own accord and I heard it squeak. He was there!’
‘That gate doesn’t squeak, Cassie!’
‘It did during the war, and was rusty and in need of painting!’
‘So when did he appear again?’ She licked the end of her forefinger, picking up biscuit crumbs with it from her plate. She was doing it, I knew, to annoy me.
‘Last Wednesday night.’ I took a deep breath, and she lifted her head and looked at me at last. ‘I’d been to the Rose, talking to Bill. I took the car, so I hadn’t been drinking! I saw him clearly, ahead of me, near the clump of oak trees. It was bright moonlight, Jeannie. I could’ve put my foot down, like it seems people around these parts do if they think it’s him. But I didn’t. I stopped. He seemed anxious to get to Deer’s Leap.’
‘Like last time?’
‘Yes. Just like last time. He wanted to let Susan Smith know he was on standby. And before you ask,’ I rushed on, ‘standby means they might be flying on a bombing mission. I asked him. Then he said he wanted to tell Susan he maybe couldn’t make it that night. Seems he was hoping to meet her parents for the first time.’
‘And it was important?’
‘Seemed so to me. They wanted to get married, you see.’
‘No, I don’t see. He’d never met her folks, yet they were planning to get married? Is that likely?’
‘Bill Jarvis said parents didn’t like their daughters dating aircrew because so many of them got killed. Jack and Susan managed to meet secretly.’
‘And the pilot told you all that – opened up his heart to you about Susan?’
‘Why shouldn’t he? Seems I’m the first person in more than fifty years to take any notice of him. And he called her Suzie, not Susan.’
‘Well, all I can say is that either you’ve got one heck of an imagination, or you really do think you’ve seen him again!’
‘I have! And talked to him. And don’t try to tell me he doesn’t exist. He’s real enough for Beth and Danny to more or less warn me off!’
‘But, Cassie – he might be something someone hereabouts invented.’
‘So who told me then? Bill didn’t say one word about him to me.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t. Nobody round Acton Carey talks about him! Like Beth said, they don’t want the press in on it.’
‘But if Jack Hunter doesn’t exist, why try to cover him up? Why not let the reporters run riot – make fools of themselves?’
‘OK, Cas!’ She threw up her hands in mock surrender. ‘So there have been rumours from time to time about – something …’
‘Too right there have! Beth has seen him. She as good as admitted it.’
‘But doesn’t he scare you?’
‘No. He doesn’t groan or rattle chains. You could take him for a real person, except he seems able to vanish into thin air like he did on Wednesday.’
‘Where did he seem to vanish to?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. I got out of the car to open the big gate and when I got back, he’d gone. All I knew was that I heard the kissing gate creak.’
‘The one that needs painting?’
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ I was getting annoyed. How could she be so stubborn?
‘I – I, oh, I don’t know what to believe. And why does the kissing gate feature so strongly in it, will you tell me?’
‘Because to my way of thinking, Susan Smith used to sneak out and meet him there. They’d be safe enough; the blackout would hide them.’
‘Except on moonlit nights and in summer, when it was supposed to be light until eleven at night,’ she shrugged, determined to play devil’s advocate.
‘When people are in love and they know they might not have a lot of time, they find a way. I would’ve.’
‘All right. Point taken! So tell me – what is he like, your airman?’
‘He’s tall and slim – thin, almost. He’s got fair hair and it’s cut short at the sides. I suppose what they’d call a regulation cut. But it’s thick on top, and a bit flops over his right eye. He has a habit of pushing it aside.’
‘So what are you going to do, Cassie – about the airman, I mean?’
‘I don’t know. I want to help, because he’s looking for his girl and there’ll be no peace for him until he finds her – or more to the point, until she finds him. I reckon, you see, that he’s rooted to what was once an airfield.’
‘Trapped in a time warp, you mean?’
‘Exactly. Look, Jeannie – are you with me or are you against me? I’d like to know.’
‘Why? So I can help you?’
‘No. It’s me Jack Hunter is interested in. Seems I must be a bit of a medium and he’s latched on to it. So it’s all going to be up to me. But you can help by believing that I’m not going out of my tiny mind.’
‘Somehow I don’t think you are, Cassie. Your vibes and his must match, I suppose, or why has Beth seen him, and not Danny? She told me about it years ago and swore me to secrecy in case people thought she was bonkers. She was scared witless, though. Like she said, if she sees him again and she’s in the car, she’ll put her foot down and get the hell out of it.’
‘Where do you think I should start? Where did the Smiths go when they had to leave Deer’s Leap? If we knew that we’d be some way to finding Susan.’
‘If she wants to be found. And, Cassie – you’re not going to let this business interfere with your writing, are you?’
‘Of course I’m not. Bill’s parents might have known where Susan Smith went to, but I don’t think they’re around, somehow.’
‘If they were, lovey, I doubt they’d be able to remember that far back.’
‘Don’t be too sure! Aunt Jane was born in 1915, but she remembered people going mad when World War One ended. She always called it the Great War.’
‘All right then. There just might be someone down in the village who remembers the Smiths – even knows where they went. But how do you go about finding them? Do you knock on every door in Acton Carey, or get the vicar to read it out from the pulpit next Sunday? You’ll get nothing out of that lot, Cassie. I reckon they know about the airman, too. Bill knows you’re a writer. They’d clam up on you.’
‘So that rules out the village. Y’know, Bill figured Susan Smith is about seventy-two or -three, and that isn’t old these days. Aunt Jane was eighty when she died, and bright as a button. I’ve been telling myself that at the worst, Susan Smith might not be alive, but I think she is. All I can hope is that she won’t slam her door in my face if I get lucky and find her.’
‘You really want to go on with this, don’t you, Cassie?’
‘Yes. I’m his only hope.’
‘Even though he thinks Susan is still living at Deer’s Leap?’
‘Even so. But just say I did find her – would she be willing to go along with it?’
‘I don’t know. But take it that she would – what do you both do? Drive up and down the lane until he’s in need of a lift? Or do you camp outside Deer’s Leap and wait for the kissing gate to start creaking? How long would it take, Cassie?’
‘That’s anybody’s guess. But it didn’t take me long, did it? He found me the first time I came here. But there’s something neither of us has touched on. OK – so we’re lucky – we find him first try! How is he going to recognize her? She’ll have changed, over the years. She’ll be old enough to be his grandmother now, and he’s looking for a girl of eighteen or nineteen!’
‘It won’t be easy, but if he accepts her it might be all he needs to convince him it was all a long time ago; that he’s dead, I mean. But what if Susan doesn’t believe in ghosts? What if she does, and is too scared to give it a try? What if she’s happily married? She’ll have children, by now, and grandchildren. Do you think she’ll want a past love raked up?’
‘Yes, I do, because I believe they were desperately in love. No matter how happy she is now, she won’t have forgotten her first love. I wouldn’t have forgotten him if it were me. He really was something, Jeannie.’
‘Oh, Cassie! Can’t we forget your airman, just for a little while?’
I grinned and said of course we could! Any time at all! And if she didn’t mind, I wasn’t in love with him, though he intrigued me – a lot!
In love with someone who, if he’d lived, would have been old enough to be my grandfather? I wasn’t that stupid!
Or was I? Because Jack Hunter would never be old. He was a young man my own age, and that was the way he would stay. And he’d go on thumbing a lift to Deer’s Leap for ever if someone didn’t help him.
‘Look – the sun is trying to get through. There are all sizes of wellies in the utility room. Beth never gets rid of any that are half decent. There’s sure to be some that’ll fit,’ Jeannie smiled. ‘Let’s go and sniff in some nice cool air.’
It was fresh again after the rain and the storm. The sun was shining the raindrops that still clung to everything, and the deep pools of water.
‘Let’s go puddle-jumping,’ I laughed, determined to say no more about the matter that shouldn’t be talked about. And anyway, we wouldn’t see the airman. Jeannie only half believed in him, so her vibes would be very negative. He wouldn’t appear.
‘Shall we take Hector?’
‘No! He’ll get wet through, then shake himself all over us!’
We took him for all that, and sloshed through sodden grass all the way to the end of the paddock, where the land rose. Then we walked on to the top of the adjoining field Jeannie said was called Wolfen Meadow.
‘Over there,’ she pointed. ‘You can’t really miss it, can you?’
Below, to our left lay a huge, flat area. It had no trees nor hedges and was fenced all round, as far as we could see, with wooden railings. And just to confirm our findings, a long, narrowing jut of land pointed in the direction of Deer’s Leap.
‘It’s the same shape as the diagram in the bomber station book. We should have brought it with us,’ I said. ‘Then we could imagine exactly where everything used to be.’
‘Do we want to?’ Jeannie said soberly. ‘I mean, if there really is such a thing as vibrations, then over there must be thick with them.’ She nodded in the direction of where RAF Acton Carey had once been, her face strangely sad.
‘Well, I do believe in vibes, and there would be all kinds if we cared to take them in. Relief, at getting back from a raid, for one. And what if a pilot was trying to make an emergency landing? The air would be white with sheer terror, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Do you think that’s how Susan’s pilot was killed, Cassie?’
‘I don’t know. According to the book, it was during the daylight raid on a flying bomb launching site. That was all it said.’
‘Poor Susan,’ she whispered. ‘I wonder how it was for her?’
‘I think,’ I said as I gazed in a kind of trance over that flat piece of land, ‘that she wouldn’t even be told. They weren’t married, so she wouldn’t be his next of kin. The telegram would go to his parents. I read, somewhere, that aircrews used to leave letters behind to be sent to people. Maybe Jack left one addressed to Susan Smith at Deer’s Leap. I’m almost certain the family was still there on 8 June.’
‘Hm. I must have a look at it tonight – take it to bed with me – if you don’t want to read it, that is …’
‘No. Not tonight. You’ll find it interesting, Jeannie.’
‘I think I will.’ She turned abruptly and began to walk towards the stone wall of the paddock. ‘And I’ve had enough of ghosts for one day, if you don’t mind. Let’s get the bikes out and go to the Rose. We could eat there, if you’d like.’
She laughed out loud, almost as if she were trying to shake off the spell of the past, then set off at a run, calling to Hector, her short-cut hair bobbing with every stride.
