Misty, who was still running the pub with her Italian husband, Marco, had told her they’d never sensed any sort of other-worldly presence since Jules and Kian had left, and the cream leather boot that Jules had placed on a mantlepiece in the library the day of their departure – yes, they’d had a library by then – had never been moved other than by human hand. It was funny, that, because it used to move about all over the place when Kian and Jules were there, turning up between her and Kian’s pillows at night; alongside Jules’s shoes inside a cupboard as though trying to blend in; it even showed up in the car once, as though it was ready for a day out. For a long time Jules had been convinced Kian was doing it as a tease, despite his denials, but after her mother had found the story of Ruby Gideon in an old newspaper cutting at the Kesterly library she’d actually started to believe that they weren’t alone at the Mermaid. Girl loses life in fire, the small headline in a late-nineteenth-century edition of the Kesterly Chronicle (now the Gazette) had read.
