Sir George looked at Rollo. The boy’s face was lit up and excited, and he hated throwing cold water on his hopes.
‘Look, Rollo, I have every respect for the ghosts. Ghosts are important and venerable. But they’re ghosts. And banshees are banshees. They don’t belong to the real world. The world where animals are infected and have to be buried safely and put away.’
‘Sunita knows about the cattle. She knows. We have to find out what happened to them and where they are.’
Sir George sighed.
‘Rollo, when we want something very much we will believe all sorts of things. You want to believe that the cattle are still alive and so do I, but—’
‘They are alive. I know they are. They’ve been stolen and taken somewhere. I know. You should see my zoo magazine … animals are always being stolen.’
Sir George shook his head. ‘What would be the point of stealing them? No one could get money for them — they’re the only herd of white cattle in the country. They’d be recognized at once.’
But after he had sent Rollo back to bed he lay awake, turning over what the boy had said. It was nonsense — of course it was nonsense. It was wishful thinking. Propped up on his pillows, Sir George remembered the D-Day landing. His best friend had been shot and fell beside him. Later, when there was a lull in the fighting, he went to the field station to see him and the doctor told him there was no hope, but George couldn’t believe it.
‘He’s going to get better,’ he kept saying. ‘He’s got a good colour.’
But the doctor was right. His comrade had died that night.
All the same, thought Sir George now, perhaps he would get in touch with the ministry and ask them to confirm the identity of the vets. And it might be a good idea to have a word with Lord Trembellow.
Rollo had gone to bed at last; all the children slept; the castle was silent.
But the ghosts were not asleep. As the clock struck midnight they glided one by one out of the nursery windows and set off along the road which led through the village.
No one saw them — they moved invisibly, and fast. At the first crossroads they separated. Ranulf and his rat went west, towards the hills and farms of the Lake District. Brenda took the road to the east, which led to the villages and resorts of the coast. Sunita and Mr Smith glided on till the road divided once again. Then Sunita and The Feet made their way southwards, heading for the big towns. Mr Smith went north.
They had said nothing to the children. A Ghost Search is best carried out silently and without witnesses — for the people that must be sought out and questioned are often shy of the undead; they will only help or speak to others of their own kind. And it was from phantoms like themselves that the ghosts of Clawstone hoped to discover what had happened to the cattle.
Ranulf’s ancestors had come from the Lake District; the de Torquevilles had owned big tracts of land there; the wicked brother who had imprisoned Ranulf had been Sheriff of Westmorland. The roads that carried the traffic now were built on the tracks and lanes that Ranulf had known as a boy, and many of them were still steep and narrow. If a truck big enough to take a load of cattle wanted to get through, it would have to take the big motorway to Keswick.
‘Oh, do be quiet,’ said Ranulf to the rat.
But the rodent sensed that they were returning to his home ground. He had been a lakeside rat, one of six who had moved to the ancestral home of the de Torquevilles, and he swooped up and down Ranulf’s chest as if he was on a skating rink.
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.