‘Kind of.’
The groundsman smiled, revealing the gaps where several teeth should have been. ‘They’ll turn up. Sooner or later we all turn up here.’
‘It was the creepiest thing ever,’ I told Mel, who happened to call me on the drive home, when the incident was still fresh in my head.
‘I tell you what is even more spooky,’ Mel said. ‘What if this Henry guy of yours isn’t real?’
‘What do you mean, not real? The man carries a bag of Werther’s Originals in his pocket and drinks Starbucks coffee when I bring it in.’
‘Apparitions can do stuff like that,’ said Mel, taking a quantum leap into the twilight zone, her old stomping ground.
‘Apparitions? Do you mean like ghosts? Is that what you’re saying? That Henry is a ghost?’
‘I’m just offering up a perfectly plausible explanation,’ Mel said, settling comfortably into the kind of argument that used to occupy us for hours in our student days. ‘Think about it. He’s always there when you are. He doesn’t interact with anyone else. He helped you resolve your feelings about your mum and now that you have, he’s mysteriously disappeared. Maybe he’s not a ghost at all. Maybe he’s an angel.’
‘Okay. Hanging up now,’ I said, just about managing to stifle my amusement.
‘The truth is out there,’ Mel said, trying very hard not to laugh herself.
‘Sure it is,’ I said, as I severed our connection.
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ Rhys asked me later that evening, shifting slightly on the settee so that I could position my laptop more comfortably on my legs.
‘I’m trying to track someone down.’
‘Intriguing.’ Rhys leant forward to rest his chin on my shoulder, the better to see my screen, where my search bar was still visible.
Retirement homes near me.
‘Mel thinks the person I’m looking for is a ghost.’
‘Okay. I’m officially hooked now. Do you need the internet or a Ouija board?’
I glanced back over my shoulder and gave him a quick kiss.
‘I think the web should do it.’
It would have been all too easy to allow myself to get distracted by Rhys. Lord knows, it never took much for him to take me from nought to sixty. But whatever it was that had ignited the first embers of concern in the cemetery was still quietly smouldering away several hours later.
‘Henry, the man I’ve made friends with at the cemetery, hasn’t been there on the last two or three times I’ve visited.’
‘And that’s worrying you?’ It was a perfectly reasonable question.
I wrinkled my nose. ‘I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because he’s old and doesn’t appear to have any family to worry about him. And after months of seeing him there practically every time I go, it’s strange when suddenly he isn’t.’
‘But he’s only been missing a couple of times?’
Rhys was playing the part of devil’s advocate extremely well.
‘I know. I’m being ridiculous for worrying. I mean, there’s probably a hundred good reasons why I haven’t seen him. He could be on holiday or have gone somewhere else for a while.’
‘Like another astral plane?’ Rhys asked, his eyes twinkling.
I gave his shoulder a gentle shove, but he captured my hand and didn’t release it.
‘You’re really concerned about this old chap, aren’t you?’
I nodded.