Read Online Hiding From the Light by Barbara Erskine - Free Book Online Page A

he stopped, looking into the large upper room. He frowned. Something in there had changed from when he had been in there earlier.
    ‘Problem?’ Colin was immediately behind him, Joe and Alice at the rear.
    ‘No.’ Mark walked into the room. The last person up here had been Emma. She had seen something. Felt the atmosphere. He stared round thoughtfully. ‘Feel anything?’
    ‘Apart from cold?’ The others had trooped in behind him. Colin shivered.
    ‘Cold is a start. This is August.’
    Colin strode over to the window and glanced down into the street. The window sill was level with his knees and he had to stoop to see out of it. ‘We expected bad vibes. What would a haunted house be without them?’ Hunkering down he reached for the window latch and pushed the small casement open. ‘The room just needs a bit of fresh air. This place has horrendous rising damp and probably dry rot and death-watch beetle and every other scourge that old buildings are heir to. Any of that would be enough to put off a buyer, you know.’ He stood up and faced the others. ‘Mark?’
    Mark was staring at the brick wall. ‘I saw something move. There. In front of the wall.’ His face had gone white.
    They all followed the pointing finger and looked hard at the bricks. The temperature in the room had plummeted. For a moment they stood in total silence, no one daring to move. The traffic noise from the High Street had ceased and the quiet was unnaturally claustrophobic.
    ‘Can’t see anything. Shall I go down for the camera?’ Colin said quietly. He glanced at Alice. She was gazing at the wall with a slight frown on her face. If she was scared she was hiding it well.
    ‘No.’ Mark stepped over beside him. ‘No, it’s gone, whatever it was.’
    Outside a car hooted.
    ‘Probably a spider,’ Joe put in firmly. He rearranged his lanky frame, folding his arms nonchalantly.
    ‘Probably.’ Turning, Mark stared out of the window, taking a deep breath of the air flooding into the room. A strong smell of traffic fumes rose from the street below, where cars paused to pass each other in the narrow thoroughfare. Suddenly the room felt marginally warmer.
       
    The interview took only twenty minutes from beginning to end. They could tell it was going to be a disaster from the moment Stan Barker walked into the shop.
    ‘I’m not going upstairs.’ He stood, uncomfortable in his best suit, just inside the door.
    Colin eyed the florid face, the too-tight collar, the jazzy tie, and glanced at Mark with a raised eyebrow.
    Mark gave a barely perceptible shrug. ‘Perhaps you could stand there, at the bottom of the stairs? I just want to ask you a few questions then we’re going to do some shots of the shop itself.’
    As interviewer-cum-presenter he was going to remain out of shot. If necessary he could get Colin to insert one or two angles of himself later. They always took a few interviewer shots in case.
    ‘So, Mr Barker, how long have your family owned number one Church Street?’
    Colin, with the camera, had positioned himself beside him; Joe had pinned a mike to Stan’s tie. Stan had the look of a man facing a firing squad.
    ‘My grandfather bought it just after the war.’ He hesitated. ‘The old house was split into two and turned into shops about the turn of the century, I reckon. The lad as owned this half never come back. His wife wanted shot of the place so it was going for a good price.’
    ‘And what kind of a shop was it then?’
    Mark’s question seemed to floor him. He hesitated, then he shrugged. ‘Butcher. He was a butcher, my granda.’
    They were going to have to extricate every word. It was like drawing teeth.
    ‘And what happened next?’
    ‘He weren’t well, so he suggested my dad took it over. Well, he didn’t want to be a butcher so he said no. They got a man in to manage it. Old Fred Arrow. He only lasted a year.’
    Silence. Stan’s eyes were riveted to the microphone baffle on top of the