Using her grandfather’s stick like a staff, Jo starts to make her slow ascent up the hill.
52
The Christmas Eve ghosts
Two men watch her as she passes the gates of Highgate Cemetery. Both are wearing three-piece suits: one has a large beard and a trilby perched on the back of his head; the other has longish grey hair swept back from his face, a small pair of spectacles balanced on his nose. Despite the snow, they do not appear to feel the cold.
‘Wha’ ye be thinking, Will?’ the man with the beard asks the other.
His companion thinks he’s laying the Cornish accent on a bit thick tonight. But that’s John for you. Soon he’d be calling him, ‘My lover.’
‘Tha’ we should get ourselves down the rub-a-dub for a pint.’
The other man nods, and pulls his hat forward on his head.
William Foyle thinks he made that too easy, and racks his brain for some cockney rhyming slang John Lobb won’t know. He perks up. He could always invent a few phrases. That’d get him.
‘Well, what ye be thinking of them three?’ John asks, as they turn in the direction of their favourite pub.
‘Not so bad,’ William replies. ‘They got us pegged,’ he laughs.
‘Not so far out on old Issy either,’ John agrees. ‘Where be he tonight?’
William snorts. ‘To Shabby with Georgie. Saw ’em ’eading for a bus.’
John wants to know but hates to ask. In the end, curiosity gets the better of him. ‘Shabby?’
William chortles, ‘Shabby … Westminster Abbey. Said summat about giving old Georgie the last laugh. Said as ’ow they’d have a picnic in Poet’s Corner.’
Both of them chuckle at this, and William links his arm with John’s.
‘’ow about Karl?’ William asks.
‘Off with Claudia, as per,’ John replies. ‘Them two, they don’t ’alf fight. But he says to me, he does, “That woman never bores me.” Can’t say fairer than tha’ I tell him.’
‘And ’utch?’ William enquires.
‘Same as last year,’ John nods. And from somewhere in the cemetery (if you listen very carefully) comes the soft tinkling of a piano.
‘Off with George Michael again, then,’ William concludes.
‘Tha’ be right,’ John agrees. He then recalls something much more important. ‘Remember it be your round.’
‘Na, you got that arse about tit, my son,’ William replies.
The argument continues all the way down the hill.
53
Christmas Day
By the time Jo gets to the top of Highgate High Street, she begins to think she has made a mistake. How will she ever track Eric the Viking down? Perhaps he works all night? Where will she even start? She could be inside a warm church with mulled wine – or curled up by the fire – with Ruth and Malcolm. She thinks of the woodland sitting room. Instead of this comfort (and probably more nibbles and a whisky), she is heading back to a cold shop and flat. And some of the electrics are definitely not working – maybe she could lose power in the flat too? In the distance, she hears the faint peel of church bells. Then, closer by, the sonorous tolling of midnight.
It is Christmas Day.
As she turns into the alleyway, she sees the glow. Instead of the blank white of her makeshift cover, the shop window is patterned with flickering orange. Had she left the heater on? She should have checked the fuses, the wiring, when the lights didn’t work. She runs to the door, scrabbling for her keys. Is she burning her mum’s inheritance to the ground? She thinks of all that paper. And wooden shelving. She pushes open the door, and suddenly realizes this is a mistake. Brendan (fire and safety officer at the bank) always said, ‘Let the oxygen in and you feed the fire.’ Jo instinctively steps back, fully expecting the backdraught that Brendan had promised would kill her.
There is nothing. Just the gentle sound of classical music. It reminds her of the cello she heard playing earlier. There is a piano playing along with it. A memory of a melody she may have heard as she passed by the Highgate Cemetery gates comes back to her.
