The Drowning Pool. Syd Moore

with her husband or neighbours, she’d be strapped into the “ducking stool” and dunked in the water.’

      A small piece of wood exploded in the fire, sending sparks over Martha. We all jumped.

      Martha brushed them off her jeans and laughed. ‘Is that someone telling me I’m right or that I’m wrong?’

      ‘I suppose that’s quite likely to be true,’ Corinne said. ‘Who knows? It’s a shame about Doom Pond.’

      A relative newcomer to the town I’d failed to notice the pond and asked her where it was.

      Corinne’s voice became doleful. ‘Underneath those horrid mock-Tudor flats in Leigh Road.’

      We all went ‘Ah!’ and nodded.

      I said that I had looked at a flat there.

      ‘What was it like?’ asked Sharon. ‘Never been inside one of them.’

      I thought back. God, it had been horrible. Not the interior or the layout but the atmosphere. There was a sharp sense of misery lurking in the corners. It had hit me as soon as I’d walked through the door. But I was still raw then. I reckoned it was just the similarity to my flat back in London and the emotional wreckage that had surrounded me there. But I simply said, ‘It was too small. Smart enough, good finish.’

      Anyway, Corinne was off again so we returned to her pretty face flickering in the firelight. ‘Before the flats there was a supermarket on the site. My friend’s mum used to work there. She said the shelves were wonky. You used to put the tins on one end and they’d slide down the other and onto the floor. Then one day she went to work and it had gone. The whole place had slid into the pond.’

      Martha shifted her weight from the left buttock to the right. ‘So, is that why they call it Doom Pond?’

      Corinne shook her head. ‘Nah. It used to be referred to locally as the Drowning Pool.’

      A flurry of unseen wings took off somewhere in the darkness.

      ‘Really?’ Goose bumps appeared across the bare flesh of my arms. The name sent a shudder right through me. ‘Why the Drowning Pool? What else happened there, apart from dunking scolds? Blimey, did they actually drown people?’

      Corinne shrugged. ‘I guess it must have had something to do with local witches.’

      ‘Local witches?’ The casual comment intrigued me. ‘You say that as if they were commonplace.’

      Corinne’s eyes flitted across Martha and Sharon then back to me. ‘Sarah, this part of the country is riddled with folklore. I know you wouldn’t think it now but Essex was once known as “Witch County”. The village of Canewdon is meant to be the most haunted place in England. And there was the wise-man and sorcerer Cunning Murrell in Hadleigh.’

      Sharon straightened herself. ‘So did he get done then? For being a witch?’

      ‘No,’ said Corinne. ‘He was actually quite well-respected by the community, although he obviously still had a fearsome reputation.’

      Martha leant forward and threw a couple of twigs on the fire. ‘So witches got subjected to all sorts of ill treatment yet Mr Murrell’s skills were, er, more appreciated?’

      Corinne opened her mouth to reply but Sharon was in there immediately. ‘Because, my dear Martha, he was in possession of a cock.’

      I sniggered. Martha laughed and poked the fire. ‘You’re about right there.’

      ‘So,’ I said, steering the conversation back to the pond topic. ‘Why the “Drowning Pool”? You said because of the witches. What have they got to do with the pond?’

      ‘Oh right,’ Corinne nodded and took a sip of her wine. You could see she was enjoying the limelight. ‘They used to “swim” them there: the witches would get tied up, sometimes right thumb to left toe, other times they were bound to a chair, then they would be thrown in the pond. If they sank and drowned they were innocent, if they floated, they were a witch, and would be dragged off to the gallows to be hanged.’

      Martha said, ‘Talk about a no-win situation. Poor women.’

      I sent up a silent prayer of thanks that I hadn’t bought that flat.

      ‘So,’ said Corinne, anxious to go easy on the tragedy and high on spooky. ‘That’s why locals say it was haunted. By the restless souls of the witches and innocents drowned there.’

      ‘And Sarah Grey,’ said Sharon sadly.

      I went, ‘Wooo.’

      But nobody laughed this time.

      Martha started talking about a ghost in the cemetery and we all crowded in. The stories picked up and whirled on and on into the midnight hour, with wine flowing, the girls howling and the fire roaring.

      I now understand, as I’m writing it down, that what we were doing, without realizing it, was creating some kind of séance. We stirred things up, opening a rift. Things got channelled down.

      But that’s all come with the benefit of hindsight. If only I’d had a clue at the time. Things were, of course, happening but nothing really registered until the girl on fire.

      But I need a drink before I start that one.

      Chapter Two

      That June was one of the hottest we’d had for years, which, on the plus side, meant that Alfie and I were able to spend a good deal of time down in the Old Town, a cobbled strip of nostalgia severed from the rest of the town by the Shoebury to Fenchurch Street train line. We liked it down there, crabbing, paddling and building sandcastles on the beach. Although Alfie was too young to miss his father, back then Josh’s absence still stung like a fresh wound, so I tended to overcompensate with painstakingly organized ‘constructed play’ and serious quality time. But it was fun. Alfie was now four, a lovely boy with his dad’s well-humoured outlook and a steady stream of gobbledegook that made me smile even on bad days.

      On the down side, the heat-frayed tempers amongst students and staff at the private school where I taught Music and Media Studies. A few miles into the hinterland, surrounded by acres of carefully landscaped gardens, St John’s had been one of the county’s few remaining stately homes. It was converted from a family residence into a hospital during the First World War. In 1947 it became a private secondary school. Since then its buildings had encroached onto the lawns in a steady but haphazard and entirely unsympathetic manner. The block in which I worked was a 1980s concrete square that, rather surprisingly, managed to churn out excellent academic results and was in the process of expanding over the chrysanthemum gardens with another inappropriate modern glass structure.

      Despite the new build however, the recession was eating into the public consciousness and the economy’s jaws were contracting. As a consequence our day students were being pulled out left, right and centre.

      My boss was Andrew McWhittard. A forty-year-old unmarried, bitter Scot with a malevolent mouth. Tall and lean with a smother of thick black hair, he caused quite a stir amongst the female support staff when he arrived to head up the team. The honeymoon lasted two weeks, by which point he had revealed himself to be an HR robot – built without a humour chip and programmed only to repeat St John’s corporate policy. Personally, I found him arrogant in the extreme. When we were first introduced he gave me this look like he couldn’t believe someone with my accent could possibly work in a private school.

      You live and learn.

      McWhittard was a bully at the best of times and of late had started reminding us that pupils meant jobs, and the loss of them did not bode well for our employment prospects. He loved the fear that generated amongst us, you could tell.

      A couple of administrators had gone on maternity leave and had not been replaced. The unspoken suggestion was that we absorb the admin ourselves. I only taught three days a week but my paperwork increased substantially and what with the marking, exams, reports, open days and parents’ evenings,