The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

Just before the road widened for the motorway there was a lay-by with picnic tables and litter bins. It was on this spot that Ranulf’s old friend Marmaduke Franshaw had passed on and become a ghost. He had been practising with his longbow when there was a sudden thunderstorm, and Marmaduke, who should have known better, took shelter under a tree and was struck by lightning.

Ranulf and Marmaduke had shared a tutor, they had ridden together and courted the same girls. Marmaduke had been a keen sportsman, able to follow the spoor of any animal he was hunting. If anyone had noticed a large lorry carrying animals it would be him.

Ranulf sat down on a milestone and prepared to wait.

Sunita’s first stop was in the town where the old ghost with head lice was living – the one who had been at the audition but decided to return to her friends. It had stuck in Sunita’s mind that the old woman had said she lived in a bus shelter near the slaughterhouse.

The word ‘slaughterhouse’ made Sunita feel sick, but if there was any trafficking in stolen animals for slaughter she would have to look into it.

‘No, can’t say I’ve noticed anything,’ said the old woman when Sunita had tracked her down. She bent over a brazier to stir something in a pot, and Sunita saw the lice, silver in the moonlight, drop one by one into the stew. ‘It’s not used now, the slaughterhouse; it’s all locked up. I’d have noticed if anything had come in. They make an awful din, these great lorries – like trains they are, with iron cages and all. Nasty things.’

Beside Sunita, The Feet stirred restlessly. They did not think being opposite a slaughterhouse with an old lady who dripped lice was bad for Sunita; they did not think anything at all – but they felt it through the skin of their toes and the soles of their feet and they moved closer to Sunita.

‘Fond of you, aren’t they?’ said the old lady, looking down at them.

She beckoned to some of the other ghosts who lived rough, but no one had seen anything, and Sunita and The Feet went on wearily gliding south. It was going to be a long night.

The first ghost whom Brenda met as she glided east to the seaside was Fifi Fenwick, exercising her bull terriers. Phantom dogs are usually black, but Fifi’s bull terriers had stayed the same colour they were when they were alive – white with an occasional brown ear – so Brenda saw them at once.

Fifi was immensely interested, of course, to hear that the cattle were not buried where they were supposed to be, and very anxious to help, but she had seen nothing.

‘I mostly stay on the beach,’ she said. ‘It’s easier for the dogs. But I’ll tell everyone at the Thursday Gatherings, of course – they may have heard something. Those lorries make a devilish noise – even when they drive at night they shake the windows.’

She asked after Brenda’s mother and was sorry to hear that she had not become a ghost but stayed where she was, underground.

‘You’ll miss her,’ she said, and Brenda agreed that she missed her badly.

‘Though of course if she hadn’t made me marry the boot manufacturer, Roderick wouldn’t have shot me, and Mummy and I would have been together longer.’

‘There’s a big garage on the way to Seahouses,’ said Fifi. ‘It’s open all night and they’re doing a road survey there. Something about widening the road. They might be able to help you.’

And she called her dogs to heel and strode off up the beach.

Mr Smith, like all men who have made their living by driving taxis, had a very good sense of direction. He could see the roads between England and Scotland in his head as clearly as he had seen the veins on his hand when he still had proper hands. And of the three main roads that led north over the border, the most likely one for a heavy vehicle to take was the road on the flat plain between the coast and the Lammermuir hills.

And as luck would have it, it was there that an old friend of his, who had given up taxis and become a lorry driver, had met with a fatal accident.

Hal Striver had gone head-on into an outsize transporter which had skidded on black ice – one of those juggernauts that should not have been on the road at all – and since then Hal had haunted the garage and the transport cafe near the site of the accident.

He was quite a well-known ghost, not particularly shy, and drivers eating their egg and chips often saw him wandering between the tables. But what Hal mostly did was watch the traffic – he’d been on the roads all his life and to him cars and lorries had personalities, like people. And when he saw a juggernaut, the kind that killed him, he would clench his fists and call rude words after the retreating lorry.

Mr Smith saw him at once. He was standing in the forecourt of the garage, staring at the road, and he hadn’t changed at all. He still wore the blue overalls he had worn when he was driving, and the flat cap, and for a moment Mr Smith was worried because, of course, he himself had changed tremendously.