The Ghost Tree Read online

  She and Rick supported each other through the heartbreaks and trials that beset the marriage, but something in their relationship died with their hopes of a family. They began to drift apart and it was just after their tenth wedding anniversary that Ruth had rebelled and ended both marriage and career.

  ‘There was a lot about your mother that your dad didn’t like, wasn’t there,’ Harriet said cautiously. ‘Even when we were at school. I remember you telling me about her aristocratic ancestors.’

  ‘And those he hated above all. Poor Mummy. I’m not sure why he ever married her, but they were happy as long as she toed the official line.’ Ruth paused. ‘I suspect he didn’t realise when he first met her how well connected the family was, but as soon as he did all his left-wing prejudices kicked in with a vengeance. He found her stories intensely embarrassing. It would have destroyed his street cred if his Marxist pals had found out.’

  Harriet smiled. ‘But she didn’t have a title or anything?’

  ‘Good lord, no. We’re talking generations back; hundreds of years even. The blue blood had worn extremely thin by the time it reached Mummy and, in me, well, it’s virtually non-existent! No more than the occasional effete gene.’ Ruth laughed. ‘But back in the eighteenth century one of my great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers,’ she was counting on her fingers, ‘a chap called Thomas Erskine, was Lord Chancellor of England. It sounded incredibly grand and impressive and sort of out of a fairy tale – what?’

  Harriet had let out a strangled squeak. ‘Lord Erskine was one of Dion’s spirit guides!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You wouldn’t credit it, would you! What a coincidence!’ Harriet gave a gurgle of delight. ‘I knew I’d come across the name somewhere, but I’d forgotten it was you who had told me about him. A neighbour of mine lent me a book about Dion to read on the train and start filling in some background for my next chapter, and it mentions him! Those séances I told you about? Various exotic people like Confucius came to instruct her in the esoteric arts when she was at the start of her career as an occultist, and Lord E, as she called him, was one of them!’

  Ruth gazed at her, bemused. ‘Why? How?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. In fact, you can tell me when you’ve done your family research! I’ll leave the book with you when I go and you can read it yourself. It’s a bit intense, to be honest, downright incomprehensible at times, but I love all this mystical stuff! I suppose I couldn’t live in Glasto and not know a bit about it. I’ve friends who are deeply involved in it all. Did your mother ever mention that he had a spooky side?’

  ‘No.’ Ruth was still staring at her in disbelief. ‘When I was old enough to learn what discretion was and realised what a difficult man my father could be and that I could be trusted to keep quiet, Mummy did tell me stories about them all and I loved listening to them. They were everything our lives at home weren’t. Romantic and exotic and part of history, but not spooky, no. Far from it.’ She gave Harriet a tolerant smile. ‘What I liked was that they all had huge families and, unlike Dad, seem to have been so proud of where they came from. Hence my new hobby. I want to find out about them. And being in Edinburgh is perfect because that was where the story started.’

  ‘And you’re not afraid your father’s ghost will haunt you if you do this?’ Harriet looked at her quizzically.

  ‘If he does,’ Ruth retorted firmly, ‘I shall have a stern word! I’m doing this for Mummy as much as me. She would have loved it.’

  3

  Sitting opposite Timothy Bradford at the kitchen table, Ruth found herself studying his face for the first time. He had pale pimply skin and mouse-coloured hair. When standing up he was the same height as she was but he had slumped into the chair and was leaning back, looking up at her, his expression guarded. He obviously resented her knock on his bedroom door and the invitation down to the kitchen.

  She had seen Harriet off on the train at Waverley a couple of hours before and walked slowly back towards her father’s house in quiet, refined Morningside, in the south-west of the city. A lively autumn wind had risen and caught her hair as she crossed the Meadows, the area of parkland lying between the city and her destination, the leaves flying in clouds from the trees. As she neared Number 26 her pace had slowed. She was not anxious to see Timothy again but, if he was at home, this was the time to face him.

  ‘I wanted to thank you for looking after my dad,’ she began. ‘It was really good of you. I’m sorry it took me so long to find out he was ill.’ She paused, hoping he would acknowledge the fact that he could have made the effort to contact her, but he ignored the remark. He was watching her through narrowed eyes.

  ‘So, when are you going back to London?’

  His question threw her completely. This was her line.

  ‘I’m staying here,’ she replied after the smallest of hesitations. ‘There’s a lot to sort out. So, I was going to ask you if you could let me know when you’re planning on leaving.’

  She saw a flash of something in his eyes. Anger? Shock? Indignation? She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was immediately hidden, to be replaced by his previous bland stare. ‘I hadn’t planned on leaving, Ruth. Your father made it clear that this was my home as long as I wanted to stay here. He told me I was the son he had always wanted.’

  In the end, with very bad grace, he agreed to move by the Thursday. The implication in his grudging acceptance of her request after she had threatened to go to her father’s solicitor, was that it would only be a matter of time before he returned.

  As a house guest, he was for those last few days exemplary. He was neat, tidy and quiet. She barely saw him. She never met him in the kitchen or on the stairs. She wouldn’t have known he was still there at all had he not from time to time played his radio very softly in the evenings upstairs. Her father had given him the use of the two small rooms on the top floor and the guest bathroom which sat below it on the half landing. Once or twice she had tiptoed up when she knew he was out and tried the doors. Both were locked.

  On the day stipulated in her ultimatum he moved out. She had been to the shops. Pushing open the front door she stopped in the hall. The house felt different; empty. She knew at once he had gone. Dropping her bag on the floor she stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up, then she caught sight of an envelope on the hall stand. It contained a postcard – a picture of the Scott Monument in the rain – and a set of keys.

  Thank you for your brief hospitality. I am sorry I outstayed my welcome. I will return when you have gone back to London, Tim

  That was all. No forwarding address, nothing.

  ‘I don’t think so!’ She found she had spoken the words out loud.

  She ran upstairs two at a time. Both doors on the top floor stood open. She hesitated in the doorway of the first and looked round. He had left the window open and the room was cold, immaculately tidy, the bed stripped, the furniture neatly ordered. The wardrobe doors were slightly open. She peered in to find a mixed collection of empty coat hangers, nothing else. The second room, which overlooked the narrow parallel gardens at the rear of the long terraced street, was of identical size and layout except that the bed had been pushed against the wall to serve as a sofa. On the table there was a tray with neatly washed cups and saucers, an electric kettle, a couple of plates and an assortment of knives and forks and spoons.

  In this room there was a range of fitted cupboards across the full width of one wall. Their doors were closed but she could see from where she stood that at some point they had been forced open; the wood was freshly chipped and splintered around the keyholes. Her heart sank. Pulling open the first door she saw the cupboard was full of boxes and suitcases, hat boxes and cardboard files, carelessly stacked on top of each other. With a sense of rising despair she opened the next door. That too was stuffed with boxes and papers. Only one cupboard appeared to have been left untouched. It contained a hanging rail and on it there were some half dozen of her mother’s dresses, some of the tailored tr
ousers she had loved and a slightly moth-eaten fur coat.

  It was the first time Ruth had cried since her father died.

  She found herself sitting on the makeshift sofa sobbing uncontrollably. These were all her mother’s things. She recognised them; she could see letters and papers scrawled with her mother’s large cursive handwriting; she remembered the old handbag that lay on top of one of the boxes, the little make-up case, her hair brushes, her faded silk bathrobe, scarves, hats.

  Had her father pushed them all in so carelessly, or had someone else forced open the cupboards and ransacked them? It had to be Timothy who had so terribly violated her mother’s privacy. Who else would have done it? Her father was a meticulous man. If he had kept her mother’s things, he would have kept them neatly. Standing up, Ruth fingered them miserably. Now, when it was too late to talk to him about it, was this a sign of her father’s love and his loss when her mother died? He had bullied his wife, and harangued her, questioned everything that made her who she was and made her life unbearably unhappy, and yet he had kept all these memories of her. It doubled the insult that Timothy had gone through the cupboards and then shoved the contents back out of sight, not even bothering to hide his depredations.

  Why hadn’t she come up to Scotland sooner? Unable to reconcile herself to her father’s treatment of her mother, she had never visited him again after her mother died, not until these last weeks, when he was too ill to speak to her. It had been his next-door neighbour, Sally Laidlaw, who had found her phone number and called her. Timothy had done nothing to contact her and seemed to have been surprised that she existed at all. He had been living in this house for several months and her father had not mentioned to him even once, or so Timothy claimed, that he had a daughter living in London.

  Suddenly she couldn’t bear to stay there a moment longer. Running downstairs, her cheeks wet with tears, she went into the front room. She didn’t turn on the light. She just sat there as the colour faded from the sky outside while indoors, behind the heavy net curtains, everything grew dark.

  It was only as she was falling asleep that night that it occurred to her to wonder if Timothy had stolen anything.

  She had made the room next to her father’s into her base when she had moved into the house; the small box room next to it had been occupied by Harriet for the few days she had stayed. A carer had slept there during her father’s last weeks, but Harriet’s vivacious personality still filled the room now, as did the scent of her various lotions and creams. ‘Glasto’s best,’ she had joked as she was packing to leave. ‘All herbal; all guaranteed to give me a luscious skin or spiritual insight or both. Here, have them.’ She had pushed several bottles into Ruth’s hands. ‘Your need is greater than mine. They will soothe your aura. I can always get more. And here’s the book I told you about. I’ve marked the first place Lord E is mentioned, though he seems to have guided her through her whole life.’ She clasped her fingers round Ruth’s wrists. ‘Remember, for a couple of weeks or so I won’t be too far away. Call me, any time, if it all gets too lonely.’

  It was a complete surprise when next morning Ruth received an email from her father’s solicitor inviting her to the office to discuss an ‘unexpected problem’.

  James Reid had been a friend of her father’s for many years. The tall, grey-haired man who rose to greet her with great courtesy, pulled out a chair for her then returned to his own side of the desk and produced a folder which he aligned on his blotter without opening it. This was an office, she noticed, where all signs of modernity – computer, scanner, printer – had been relegated to a shelf along the back wall beneath a solid phalanx of old law books. It was somehow comforting.

  ‘I’m sorry to ask you to come in so soon after our telephone conversation,’ he said once she was settled, ‘but there is something that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.’ They had spoken briefly on the phone after her father’s death, and again at the funeral. Her father’s affairs, he had assured her then, were relatively straightforward. Donald Dunbar had left her, his only child, everything, the house and all his money of which there was quite a substantial sum. Now James Reid glanced up at her with what appeared to be some anxiety. He was a handsome man, perhaps in his mid-sixties, she guessed, and was blessed by a natural expression of wise benevolence. She felt her stomach tighten with anxiety.

  ‘A possibly contentious issue has arisen.’ He paused.

  Ruth felt her mouth go dry. ‘What’s happened?’ It came out as a whisper.

  ‘Do you know a Timothy Bradford?’

  Her heart sank. ‘Yes. He was staying with my father in the last months of his illness.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  ‘Capacity?’ She echoed the word helplessly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was he there as a friend? A guest? A carer?’

  ‘A bit of each, I suppose. I don’t really know.’

  ‘Not a relative?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘And you hadn’t met him before?’

  ‘No. I had no idea he was even there until I came to Edinburgh. I assumed he was some kind of lodger. He claims Dad never mentioned me. It was a neighbour who got in touch to tell me about his illness.’

  ‘So your father didn’t tell him he had a daughter?’

  ‘He said not.’

  ‘I see.’ He sighed. ‘Mr Bradford has written to us informing us that he has a copy of your father’s will. A far more recent will than the one which I have, leaving everything to you, which was originally written fifteen years ago.’ He paused for a moment. ‘The new will leaves the house and all your father’s possessions to Mr Bradford.’ Before Ruth had a chance to interrupt he went on, ‘He further claims that he is your father’s son by a liaison formed in the late 1970s before your father and mother were married. I am sorry. This must be an awful shock to you.’

  Ruth sat speechless for several seconds. ‘I can’t believe it. Daddy would never have done such a thing.’ She looked across at him helplessly. It wasn’t clear whether she was thinking about her father’s affair or the fact that he had changed his will.

  ‘I find it incomprehensible,’ James Reid said gently. ‘I have known your father for over forty years and I remember no mention of such a circumstance, but we are forced to take this claim seriously. The will is, as far as we can see, properly drawn up and signed and witnessed by someone from a reputable firm. I am so sorry.’

  ‘Who was his mother?’ At last Ruth managed to speak.

  ‘He doesn’t give her name.’ He opened the folder on his desk. It contained a single sheet of paper. ‘He gives no details of how long he has actually known your father, or of how he came to be living in Number 26.’ He looked up at her. ‘As soon as the will is processed, he wants vacant possession of the property. In other words, he wants you to leave.’

  4

  Ruth took a cab back from the lawyers, terrified that she would come home to find Timothy had returned. Her hands were shaking as she inserted the key in the lock, but to her relief the front door opened normally. She closed it behind her and drew the bolt across, then she paused to listen. The house was silent.

  Tiptoeing into the sitting room she sat down on the edge of the sofa just as she had the night before. Velvet-covered, under a tartan rug, it was placed in the window so the light fell over her shoulder. She remembered from her childhood how it had been a favourite place for her mother to sit and read. Now it was dusty and faded; the room smelt stale and cold and unloved. The whole house felt abandoned and empty. Even the ticking of the clock had stopped. She had hated that clock as a child. It had underlined the echoing quiet of the place, the passing of time, her loneliness as the only child of two older parents, and she had felt it was mocking her with every jerky movement of its hands.

  James Reid had assured her that nothing would happen while he appealed on her behalf against the new will. The absolute worst that could happen was that, if it was proved genuine, she would have to share t
he inheritance. As her father’s undisputed daughter, she was entitled to at least half of everything. He also told her that she was quite justified, at least for now, in changing the locks if she was nervous; after all, whether or not Timothy was related to her, he was still a stranger.

  Her phone made her jump. It was Harriet. ‘How are things going? I’m loving it here in North Berwick. Liz and Pete are being so kind. I can stay as long as I like, so I’ll be here for a while, working on my book.’

  The sound of her voice broke the spell. Ruth stood up and, walking round the sofa, drew back the curtains that had blocked half the light from the room. She stood staring out as she relayed the morning’s events.

  ‘Shit!’ Harriet summed up in one word.

  ‘I’d never given the inheritance a thought; of course I hadn’t. I’d spoken to James on the phone after Daddy died; he had told me that my father’s will, which he made after Mummy died, left everything to me.’

  Harriet snorted. ‘I told you Timothy gave me the creeps. What a bastard! So, what happens next?’

  ‘I wait to hear from James. He is formally going to contest the will. Apparently, if Timothy is genuinely Daddy’s son, he can claim half the inheritance, whatever the will says, but then so can I.’

  ‘Ouch. I’m sure he’ll sort it out. Keep calm, Ruthie. It’ll be OK. There’s no way that vile toad could be a relation of yours.’

  Switching off her phone, Ruth sat for a moment, staring into space.

  The house and all your father’s possessions, his money …

  ‘Don’t panic,’ James had said as he shook hands with her at his office door. ‘Your father’s bank accounts are frozen and nothing will happen for a while. These things take time.’