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‘Can’t really carry ten fence posts with me back the way it is, now, can I? Young lad like Edward always needs the exercise.’

Which Kelly had to agree was reasonable enough.

During their chat, Old Ned had also clarified a few things. He had told her that the very first parade a hundred years ago had gone unreported, which tied in with the missing newspaper article Kelly had been looking for at the small village museum.

After leaving Old Ned to his work, Kelly headed back towards the village, finding a pretty coffee shop where she ordered a pumpkin and hazelnut spiced latte and sat down in a window seat with a view over the main road and the increasing number of garish, glowing jack o’ lanterns that had begun to appear as Halloween drew ever closer.

Then she took her computer from her rucksack, along with her notebook and the book she had borrowed from Glynnis Flowers at the museum.

It was a mostly pictorial history with only a few short passages of textual description. The pictures, the most recent of which could have been stills from any number of modern Halloween parades, progressed backwards into the past in a gradual, almost imperceptible manner, from bright, Americanised Halloween imagery into something gloomier, darker and more terrifying.

The costumes lost their bright technicolour and became drabber and greyer. Pure white sheets covering ghosts became rags and shreds of old linen. Masks went from being ghoulishly colourful to nightmarishly sinister.

Some of the close-up shots, after the photographs had become grainy black-and-white or sepia images, were really quite terrifying. People held up horrific jack o’ lanterns carved from fist-sized turnips and potatoes while wearing masks adorned with crow’s beaks and ram’s horns.

Kelly found herself flicking through the pages faster and faster.

There were multiple shots of the parades themselves and the parade floats, along with others that were line-ups of organisers or participants, many of which had been annotated with names, dates and estimated ages.

To her surprise, she spotted the name Glynnis Flowers, aged eight, dressed in an old maid outfit not dissimilar to those worn by Esmeralda and Miranda.

In another photograph, dressed as a miniature vampire, was someone called Martin Longwell. Probably his actual name rather than the Longtooth that he called himself now.

In another was a young man holding up a paper lantern, a Viking hat on his head, with Lars written underneath. The date, 1984, meant Lars would be around sixty years old now, which Kelly thought he had aged rather well for.

But it was the ancient pictures that interested her the most.

There, right at the very start of the book, was a picture of nine grainy figures. Their names were printed beneath them.

One was Barry Longwell, perhaps a relative of Martin. Another was Jeremy Dawkins, maybe a relative of Edward and Clive; something she hoped to clarify before too long.

There, at the edge of the group, standing with his arm around a middle-aged woman, was a man wearing a bowler hat.

Beneath him was the name: Jack Mellion (The Times).

Whatever happened to him?

Kelly stared at the picture for a long time. It was grainy, the features difficult to make out. But definitely, she felt a stirring inside her, the sparking of a mystery.

What had happened to the journalist who had come down to report on the very first Halloween parade?

Had he simply gone back to London without anyone noticing? Had he run away from his job? Eloped with a mistress?

Or had something happened to him here in Briar Speckles?

Kelly rubbed her chin. Perhaps somewhere in this village the answer still remained.

19

A Question of Fortune

The mystery of The Times reporter Jack Mellion’s disappearance ignited an old spark in Kelly—one she had indulged at university, armed with a brand-new satellite package containing all the major streaming services and, therefore, access to as many unsolved mysteries as she could possibly handle. In addition, she had always been a massive fan of pulp detective fiction. Back in her flat in Brentwell, she had an enormous bookcase devoted entirely to mysteries, while she never went anywhere without one in her bag.

She decided to set herself a new task: to discover what had happened to Jack Mellion.

With a little more time before she had to meet Glynnis, Kelly went online and did a search for the missing reporter’s name.

Of course, when investigating the disappearance of a man who had vanished almost a hundred years earlier—having himself been born in the previous century—there wasn’t much to find.