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come any further, you know.’ I didn’t want to make him do anything he didn’t want to do.
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to.’ But he didn’t make a move forward.
    ‘We could just sit in the garden and read the books and look at the house,’ I told him.
    ‘I want to come in though,’ he said, but his body betrayed him and he stayed rooted to the spot like a tree stump.
    ‘Do you want to hold my hand?’ I asked. He nodded. I went back and took his hand and said, ‘If you get scared just tell me, and we’ll leave straight away.’ He nodded again and we slowly stepped forward down the hallway. He giggled with excitement.
    ‘Have you seen her? The ghost ?’
    He whispered the word, like the mention of it might provoke an appearance.
    ‘I haven’t, no. I haven’t seen her, but I have heard her,’ I told him.
    ‘What does she sound like?’
    He held my hand tighter in anticipation of the answer. I could feel the blood thrumming quickly around his warm fingers. He stepped closer to hear my answer.
    ‘She sounds like she’s dying,’ I said. ‘I live over at the far side of the quarry and sometimes at night you can hear her wailing. On still nights it echoes and carries and sounds like wolves. Over the years people who don’t know the story have rung the police but the police have stopped coming because they’ve never found anything.’
    ‘Maybe they’ve stopped coming because they’re scared,’ said Jake.
    He was so close now he was almost under my feet. I sensed he was keener and more scared at the same time. We’d either be going right into the house or running back out into the garden and I couldn’t tell which.
    ‘Well, they do say that policemen who have caught all kinds of criminals and seen dead bodies smashed up in road accidents won’t come back in here after they’ve been in once.’
    ‘Really? Let’s go a bit further.’
    I had to stifle a laugh at that. We reached a doorway on the left and looked in and saw a shell of a room. It was brighter in there; the sun was strong enough to cut through the thick garden shrubs and the cracked and dirty windows and the light made Jake braver. He let go of my hand and walked in.
    ‘Was this the room he shot her from?’ he asked. I looked up at the ceiling and saw there were enough cracks and scuffs there for it to seem plausible.
    ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Can you see that mark on the ceiling there? That looks like it could have been done by a bullet.’
    Jake grinned as he peered up. He was more excited than scared now and was keen to see the rest of the house. We wandered around downstairs and found most of the rooms to be as bare as the first room. In what must have been the kitchen there were still some cupboards on the wall, and a sink, but other than that, nothing.
    ‘Do you think there are rats?’ Jake asked. I told him of course there were rats, and he was almost as pleased by this as the thought of the shooting and the ghost. We went upstairs next and he wanted to hold hands again, but I told him I would have to go first to check that the floorboards would take our weight. I creaked my way slowly up the stairs and then shouted for Jake to follow me. There were three bedrooms, all empty, and a wreck of a bathroom. The wallpaper was still clinging on desperately in patches in some rooms, as if the structure of the house depended on it. One strong shoulder charge at any of the walls and I was sure I could bring the whole place down. We sat down in the room where I told Jake Mrs Lorriemore had ended up dead. We rested against a wall and listened to see if we could hear anything ghostlike. When there was nothing that we could even pretend might be a ghost I grabbed his shoulder and said, ‘Jake. What was that?’
    ‘What?’ he asked, and leant forward to listen.
    ‘That!’
    ‘There isn’t anything,’ he said, and I turned quickly and shouted a big ‘BOO!’ at him. He screamed so loudly the noise ran into every room in the house