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  ‘Just come down to shop. We have a house up in the hills, you must come and see it. Darling, look who’s here.’

  A bronzed Jimmy Purchase approached across the square. Like Sylvia he seemed in fine spirits, and endorsed enthusiastically the suggestion that Bertie should come out to their house. It was a few miles from the city on the slopes of Mount Ortobene, a long low white modern house at the end of a rough track. They sat in a courtyard and ate grilled fish, with which they drank a hard dry local white wine. Bertie felt his natural curiosity rising. How could he ask questions without appearing to be – well – nosy? Over coffee he said that he supposed Jimmy was out here on an assignment.

  It was Sylvia who answered. ‘Oh no, he’s given all that up since the book was published.’

  ‘The book?’ ‘Show him, Jimmy.’ Jimmy went into the house. He returned with a book which said on the cover My Tempestuous Life. As told by Anita Sorana to Jimmy Purchase.

  ‘You’ve heard of her?*

  It would have been difficult not to have heard of Anita Sorana. She was a screen actress famous equally for her temperament, her five well-publicised marriages, and the variety of her love affairs.

  ‘It was fantastic luck when she agreed that Jimmy should write her autobiography. It was all very hush hush and we had to pretend that he was off on assignments when he was really with Anita.’

  Jimmy took it up. ‘Then she’d break appointments, say she wasn’t in the mood to talk. A few days afterwards she’d ask to see me at a minute’s notice. Then Sylvia started to play up—’

  ‘I thought he was having an affair with her. She certainly fancied him. He swears he wasn’t, but I don’t know. Anyway, it was worth it.’ She yawned.

  ‘The book was a success?’

  Jimmy grinned, teeth very white in his brown face. ‘I’ll say. Enough for me to shake off the dust of Fleet Street.’

  So the quarrel was explained, and Jimmy’s sudden absences, and his failure to return. After a glass of some fiery local liqueur Bertie felt soporific, conscious that he had drunk a little more than usual. There was some other question he wanted to ask, but he did not remember it until they were driving him down the mountain, back to his hotel in Nuoro.

  ‘How is your cousin?’

  Jimmy was driving. ‘Cousin?’

  ‘Mr Wallington, Sylvia’s cousin from South Africa.’ Sylvia, from the back of the car, said, ‘Alf’s dead.’

  ‘Dead!’

  ‘In a car accident. Soon after he got back to South Africa. Wasn’t it sad?’

  Very few more words were spoken before they reached the hotel and said goodbye. The heat of the hotel room and the wine he had drunk made him fall asleep at once. After a couple of hours he woke, sweating, and wondered if he believed what he had been told. Was it possible to make enough money from ‘ghosting’ (he had heard that was the word) a life story to retire to Sardinia? It seemed unlikely. He lay on his back in the dark room, and it seemed to him that he saw with terrible clarity what had happened.

  Wallington was one of the Small Bank Robbers, and he had come to the Purchases looking for a safe place to stay. He had his money, what Holmes had called the loot, with him, and they had decided to kill him for it. The quarrel had been about when Wallington would be killed, the sound that wakened him in the night had been Wallington’s death cry. Jimmy had merely pretended to go away that night, and had returned to help Sylvia dispose of the body. Jimmy dug the grave and they put Wallington in it. Then the cat had been killed and put into a shallow grave on top of the body.-It was the killing of the cat, those savage blows on its head, that somehow horrified Bertie most.

  He cut short his holiday, took the next plane back. At home he walked round to the place where he had dug up the cat. The Hobsons had put in bedding plants, and the wallflowers were flourishing. He had read somewhere that flowers always flourished over a grave.

  ‘Not thinking of trespassing again, I hope, Mr Mays?’

  It was PC Harris, red-faced and jovial.

  Bertie shook his head. What he had imagined in the hotel room might be true, but then again it might not. Supposing that he went to the police, supposing he was able to convince them that there was something in his story, supposing they dug up the flower bed and found nothing but the cat? He would be the laughing stock of the neighbourhood.

  Bertie Mays knew that he would say nothing.

  ‘I reckon you was feeling a little bit eccentric that night you was doing the digging,’ PC Harris said sagely.

  ‘Yes, I think I must have been.’

  ‘They make a fine show, them wallflowers. Makes you more cheerful, seeing spring flowers.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bertie Mays meekly. They make a fine show.’

  VAMPIRE

  Hilary Norman

  Do you believe in vampires? Probably not. Neither did I until I met William and then, along with everything else in my frame of reference, that changed …

  We met ten years ago at a wine and cheese party – the splendid kind where the Bries overflow ripely, the Stiltons crumble, and the wines are never plonk.

  I remember I came manless to the throng: something I greatly loved doing, gregarious and youthful as I was then. There was always someone to talk to I didn’t care if they were male or female, I just enjoyed people. And so it was the second I clapped eyes on William Caulard; I enjoyed him.

  He was at the buffet, a bottle of claret in his hand, and it was his fingers I noticed first. They were beautiful; tapering and white. And then I saw his eyes. They were gazing into the wine; the darkest, blackest eyes I’d ever seen.

  I remember feeling intrusive, but I spoke anyway. ‘Have you tasted it?’

  I recall he drew his eyes from the dark liquid with what seemed like pain; but I remember, too, that when they refocused on me, the pain was dislodged and swam away and clear, frank pleasure took its place.

  ‘Yes.’ His deep, vibrant voice touched a nerve in my spine, making me quiver.

  I saw that the bottle was still corked.

  ‘I tasted it at its birth, before it was captured and imprisoned in this bottle.’

  I read the label. ‘1961 … Was that a good year?’

  He smiled, and his lips stretched generously and linked with his eyes. ‘Quite good, yes,’ he said, ‘but I sampled the first drops of the first vintage.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘I am old older than I look.’

  It was true. He did not look old; he had the posture and leanness of a man of twenty-five. But I watched him and knew he was, as he said, old. Curiously, it did not trouble me at all.

  ‘What is your name?’I asked.

  He told me, and asked mine.

  ‘Miranda.’

  Again he smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said.

  We left together, William Caulard and I, and went to Hampstead Heath, and though it had been cloudy and moist when we left the party, as soon as we set foot on the soft turf of the Heath the clouds parted and the moon, full and cool, guided us to the sweet-smelling copse where we sank to the ground and made love.

  ‘Plighting our troth,’ I remember I whispered, and then blushed. ‘Shakespeare.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I was in Stratford when he wrote the lines.’

  ‘Are you a ghost?’ I asked, wondering.

  ‘No.’ His lips, warm and firm, brushed my neck. ‘But you, my Miranda, like Juliet, were a virgin.’

  It was true. I had been pure and innocent, in spite of many previous boyfriends; but there I lay, stretched out on the damp grass, with my strange first love. ‘If you’re not a ghost, William Caulard, then what are you?’

  ‘A man.’

  I shook my head, and my long hair tangled with the nettles. ‘Not just a man. Tell me, please.’

  ‘A man,’ he insisted. ‘All else must wait.’

  And so he made me his again, and before first light, William Caulard brought me to my door and asked me to become his wife.

  ‘