Transgressions by Sarah Dunant Page B

From the couple I’ve come across they usually seem to make their presence felt as soon as they find the right person.”
    I don’t believe this, she thought. It’s absolute nonsense, like watching some dreadful New Age documentary on television. I don’t believe a word of it. But even as she thought it, she knew that she did. “I . . . well, I haven’t always been alone here. I mean, I lived with someone for the first two years. He’s only recently moved out.”
    “And all this has started since?” She nodded. He made a little noise with his tongue. “Well, then, I’d say that’s what you’ve got.”
    He stood up and slipped the new key into the lock, then turned it to and fro. It clicked out and in smoothly. He handed it to her, along with a couple of spares.
    “What should I do?” she asked, panic-stricken that now that he was finished he might go and leave her.
    He bent down and started packing up his tools, “I suppose that depends on you. I mean, on how upset it makes you living with it. Sometimes I gather they just go away. Something about the energy around them. I can’t say I understand that really. You could always see a priest. Come to think of it, that woman I told you about—with the open windows—I think that’s what she did in the end. Got some kind of exorcism done on the place. Though I don’t know how much good that’ll do you.”
    “But I don’t believe in God.”
    He shrugged. “I don’t believe in luck but I still do the lottery every week. You could always give it a try. It’d be cheaper than fitting new locks, that’s for sure.”
    He was writing something on a pad. Maybe he carried certain addresses with him in his head. “Still, you won’t be bothered with burglars for a while.” He looked up. “I can knock off the tax if you’ve got cash. Otherwise the boss insists on a check with a banker’s card number, though, course, you don’t need to put your address on.”
    It took her a while to realize the last bit was a joke. She stared at him as he handed her the bill. It hadn’t all been a joke, had it?
    She laughed. “I’ll . . . er . . . I’ll get you a check. It’s in my study.” She started to go up the stairs, then she turned. “You’re not . . . I mean, you really think that’s what this is?”
    He looked up at her and shrugged. “Listen, you asked me what I thought, and I told you. I said you’d find it daft. With tax that’ll be one hundred and seventy-nine pounds forty, including the call-out charge.”

 
     
    seven
     
    S he lay awake for hours after he left, the kitchen door locked, the hall light on, Millie heavy in sleep at the end of the bed.
    In the semidarkness of the room, the house felt as it always did: empty, quiet, nothing to get worked up about, unless of course you chose to infect it with your own anxiety. But even as she lay there, theoretically scared witless by the prospect of some kind of presence around her, she felt okay. Despite whatever it was.
    Whatever it was . . . That was the point where it all came apart. How exactly do you think about something you don’t believe in? How does one visualize something that doesn’t exist?
    What had the locksmith said? That it/they usually make their presence felt as soon as they find the right person. Is that what had happened with her? She’d split up with Tom and in the spaces left in between she’d become a conduit for some kind of lost spirit that had been hovering around, looking for someone appropriate to latch on to. She remembered reading somewhere how poltergeists tended to favor young women, girls on the edge of puberty. Maybe hers was only a learner, had mistaken her fondness for Van Morrison for teenage rebellion.
    She shook her head. No. It was absurd. All of it. There was nothing living in this house but her. Her and her subconscious. And since when had that been so demented as to be obsessed with the movement of CDs around kitchen surfaces? No. The only supernatural thing