Ghost Song (27 page)

Silly!
said Anna's voice in her head.
You already know what's behind the wall. You've known for four years. I told you I was getting nearer,
said Anna.

Shona hated the way Anna tried to grab her attention when something interesting was happening. She ignored her and edged down the first two steps, ready to scoot back into the dining room if anyone saw her. Her heart was thudding but she went down a third step and then a fourth until she could see all the way into the brick-lined cellar. There were the Water Board men rigging up lights; they had tried running an extension lead up to the hall, but Grith's wiring was so old that none of the plugs had fitted the extension, so Cousin Elspeth had looked out the storm lanterns they used in power cuts. The men had large torches as well, and they were setting out bags of tools and a dustsheet and they were exclaiming over little puddles of water on the ground. Shona could see the water that had seeped out from behind the wall: it gleamed slimily in the light and it looked like black blood.

But there was no blood that night. Don't you remember, Shona, that there was no blood?

Shona's mind began to fill with the familiar fear. For a moment she could hear the mortar being slapped into place, just as it was in the nightmare, and she could smell the wet cement and the old bricks that had been taken from the ruined wall in Grith's gardens… And then she thought: how do I know that about that old wall being used?

Because you saw it happen,
said Anna's voice.
You saw them carry the bricks down here and build the wall. The bricks came from the old garden wall—they didn't dare draw attention to themselves by ordering anything from a builder's yard.

The ruined garden wall had been all that was left of a much older house that had stood here a long time ago. When Shona was very small and guests still used to come to Grith, some of them had sketched the wall or painted it in watercolours. Ivy grew over parts of it and people said it was picturesque and Gothic, and how nice to see these fragments of the past. Shona realized she could remember the wall being there but not when or why it vanished.

In the underground room, the foreman was being stern about the trickling water. ‘See that, Mrs Seymour? That'll be where the problem is. Straight on the other side of this wall. That's where your pipes are. Mains water, and sewage and waste alongside, very likely. Not a good arrangement, but I daresay it's been like that for a long while.'

‘I suppose it must have been. You aren't going to knock out the wall, surely?'

The foreman said he was very sorry, but that was just what they were going to do.

‘Oh no,' said Mother at once. ‘No, I can't possibly give permission for that,' and Elspeth planted herself in front of the wall and said doughtily that it was a sad day if two unprotected females had to stand by and allow men to damage their home.

‘I'm afraid this is an emergency situation,' said the foreman kindly but firmly. ‘It gives us powers to go wherever necessary. We don't need anyone's permission. Maybe it'd be best if you went back upstairs, Mrs Seymour. And Miss Ross as well. No? Then stand aside now…'

They had sledgehammers and mallets, and the sledgehammers, plied with energy, fell bruisingly on the bricks. Showers of gritty-looking dust came down, but although the wall shivered it remained stubbornly in place. ‘Again,' said the foreman, and the hammers struck the wall again. Old, bad-smelling brick dust began to cloud the cellar, and the pounding of the sledgehammers began to resonate inside Shona's head like a drumbeat. Or was it a frightened heart, beating in panic?

The bricks were falling away, breaking up as they hit the ground, and with them came the bad-drains smell again, but much more strongly. The lantern light flickered and as the workmen moved back and forth they cast misshapen shadows on the walls, exactly like the figures in the nightmare. The nightmare was coming closer…

Then one of the men said, ‘Here we go—stand well clear, everyone.' He swung the sledgehammer one last time and, with a tumbling crash, a large section of the bricks fell away leaving a black jagged-edged hole.

Mother and Elspeth were gasping and coughing and backing away from the wall, and for a moment Shona was afraid they would come up the stone steps into the cleaner air and catch her, but they did not.

When the dust had cleared a bit the foreman picked up one of the lanterns, and Shona felt sick and dizzy because the nightmare was wide open and after all these years she was going to see straight down into its black core.

The hole they had knocked out was at waist height and beyond the wall was a tiny space, not much larger than a cupboard. It looked as if it had been part of the much earlier house that had stood here in days when a secret cubbyhole might be a necessity of life. People living here might secretly have been on the side of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses which they had learned about in school—red roses for Lancaster and white for York—and they might have hidden soldiers. But Shona did not think you could have got more than a couple of people in there together and even then it would have been a squeeze.

The light showed a network of pipes, massive things, like the thick bodies of coiled serpents or giant black worms tangled together… But there was something else in there that the lantern's light picked up: something that had been standing behind the wall and something that was still standing there, staring out at the occupants of the room, even though it must have been blind for a very long time…

Shona began to tremble. The thing in the wall still had the remains of dry dusty hair and there was skin over the face, although the lips were pulled back from the teeth.

The foreman said in a strange voice, ‘Oh Jesus,' and snatched up the nearest mallet, frenziedly knocking out more bricks, while the other two men scrabbled at the remaining ones with their bare hands. When the rest of the bricks finally came away, the thing toppled forward, and fell in a hunched-up heap on the dustsheet as if grateful to lie down after such a long time. The bones were held together by the shrivelled leathery skin and it was possible to see the remains of what looked like a suede jacket.

‘Oh Jesus,' said the foreman again, staring down at the terrible thing. ‘It's a— Oh God help us, it's a dead body. Years it must have been there—bloody years. What do we do? Get a doctor or the police? Somebody better phone them. For Christ's sake, who's that screaming?'

Shona could hear the screaming as well and it must be coming from someone standing very close to her, because it felt as if it was inside her head. She clapped her hands over her ears to try to shut it out but it went on and on. Inside it was a dreadful voice saying that this was the old nightmare, only this was real, it was
real
… Mother and Grandfather really had walled up a woman that night and the woman had been there all these years…

Elspeth, silly old Elspeth with her large face frowning, was clumping up the steps and grasping Shona by the arms, and Shona no longer cared about being caught because the nightmare had come true and nightmares were not supposed to do that, and she was more terrified than she could ever remember being in her whole life.

The workman said, ‘For pity's sake get the lass out,' and Shona was aware of being half carried across the hall and up the stairs to her bed.

T
HE MOIL POLICE DID
not immediately take away the thing that had stood behind the wall in Grith House. They took photographs of it and scrapings of the bricks and the earth floor, and only when they had done all that did a police ambulance come to remove the body. The cellar was sealed up for several days so no one could go down there while all the tests were being made and the dead woman's identity was being established. Mother and Elspeth were asked lots of questions. No one asked Shona any questions, and her mother took two extra nips of whisky each night and said they would not discuss it; it was all too upsetting.

The policemen came back after a while, and said the body was that of Margaret Seymour's younger sister. There was no doubt whatsoever, said the inspector in charge of the case. They had checked dental records and they were very sure.

Mother said quickly, ‘Oh, but it can't be. My sister left here a long time ago. Four years it would be. She went to London—she was always one for the bright lights and Moil was too quiet for her. She was a good deal younger than me, of course. Ten years, in fact. We never had much in common, and after she left we lost touch.' She dabbed her eyes, and Shona, listening unnoticed, thought: but you and Grandfather put her behind the wall. I saw you do it. I thought it was a bad dream, but it wasn't, it was real.

The two Cheesewrights, also questioned, confirmed that everyone believed Miss Ross had left Moil four years ago, or it might be nearer five. Edna had always thought her bound for a bad end, in fact. Swinging London, said Edna, as one referring to an incomprehensible and somewhat alien world. Hippies and discos and trying to see how many people could be crammed into a telephone box, put in Mona. They knew all about it; they read the newspaper articles. They were not in the least surprised that old Mr Ross's younger daughter had ended up behind a wall; there would be a man in it somewhere, they said, mark their words.

Questioned about this, Mother said, well, yes, her younger sister had had a lot of friends, but she and her father had not known many of them.

Men? Boyfriends?

‘Oh yes, I'm sure she had boyfriends,' said Mother. ‘Not here, though. Not in Moil. It's such a very small place, you see. But she had friends in York and in London. She spent a lot of time in London. There were several people she stayed with, but I don't think I'd have any names or phone numbers. Not after all this time. I'm not sure I ever had them, in fact; they were so much younger, you see.'

‘Why do you think your sister went to London?' said the inspector. ‘Was there a letter—a phone call?'

‘There was a row,' said mother, speaking slowly, as if, thought Shona, she was testing each thing in her mind before saying it. ‘A row with my father—he was a bit old-fashioned in outlook. He didn't always approve of the way my sister behaved and lived.'

‘A row about anything specific? About a particular man?'

‘I don't think so. Just over her staying out late or being extravagant. She'd treat Grith as an hotel, coming and going with no warning, no consideration for others. She had her own bit of money—our mother died in a car crash when we were quite young, and her money was invested in a trust fund for us. Not a fortune, but it meant my sister didn't need a regular salary in the conventional sense. She did a bit of modelling—clothes and underwear—for a few of the smaller magazines. And demonstrations for cosmetics in the big stores sometimes. That kind of thing.'

‘Yes, I see,' said the inspector thoughtfully, and Shona saw he was forming a picture of a butterfly—a frivolous extravagant young woman who flitted between Moil and London, mingling with people on the fringes of modelling and magazines, and possibly encountering all kinds of odd characters as a result.

The cause of death had not yet been discovered, although, as the inspector said, it was a fairly safe assumption that the poor girl had been murdered—why else would the body be so carefully hidden? There were a few tests that could help establish how Anna Ross had died, he said, but there was only so far they could go with that: they were not magicians. There were no fractures to the skull or to any bones so they were testing for poison, but after four years there were only so many tests that could be made. The problem was that there was no ‘overall' test they could make—you had to know which poison you were looking for. For instance, if you tested for strychnine, that would tell you if strychnine was present or not, but it would not tell you if any other poison was present. Arsenic, say, or morphine. And four years was a long time for most poisons to remain detectable anyway.

But as far as they could discover, no one had had any motive for killing Anna. No one had benefited financially by her death—her share in the trust fund left by the dead mother would go back into the pot. Mrs Seymour would benefit by that of course, but it was clear that the police did not really think Margaret Seymour had murdered her sister and walled up her body for the sake of an extra bit of money in a trust fund.

So they would see if they could trace any of her London friends, said the inspector, although after all this time it might be difficult and there were things in people's lives that they might not want dragging into the light of day.

‘What kind of things?' said Mother, bewildered.

Well, jealous lovers or slighted wives, said the inspector apologetically. As for the macabre tomb itself—was Mrs Seymour absolutely sure there had been no kind of disturbance at Grith House around four years ago? Had the family been away during that year, perhaps? Or had any workmen been in? Builders, drainage people? Because you could not, said the inspector, apparently without irony, brick somebody up behind a wall in five minutes and you could not do it without a fair amount of disruption either.

Mother said, ‘Yes, we did go away four years ago. We often did at my daughter's autumn half term. It's a nice time of year for a little holiday. No crowds. My father hardly ever came with us, but I think he did that year.'