Property of a Lady (5 page)

Still, it’s very unlikely there’s anything in the least paranormal or supernatural here. It’s my belief that all but a tiny percentage of so-called ghosts are due to one of three causes, and I’ll set those three causes down here, just for the record.

The first and most common cause of ‘hauntings’ is man-made: spoofs done for money or malice or to gain a rather shallow fame. If I sat down to make a list of all the fraudsters the society has uncovered— Well, life’s too short.

The second biggest cause of ghost-sightings is self-delusion or self-mesmerism – not necessarily conscious, but often infectious. ‘I see a white figure,’ cries someone, with such conviction that everyone else in the room instantly sees a white figure as well.

My third belief is contentious, but, put simply, I think strong emotions can leave an imprint on a place. Like entering a room and knowing that, despite the polite manner of the occupants, minutes earlier a vicious, cat-spitting row was in progress.

I’ve posited that last theory many times when I’ve lectured, and every time I do so, I remember how it’s said that in Hiroshima the white-hot radiation of the atom bomb pasted the shapes of men’s shadows on to walls, so that you could still see those shapes in the ruins years afterwards. When I think about that, I remember the young army captain with the slow smile who was stationed in Hiroshima, and how, if he had come back, we would have been married. Is his shadow imprinted on some shattered wall, I wonder? It’s absurdly sentimental to think that, but there are times when I do, even now, nearly twenty years on. (And if anyone reads this and thinks the smudge on the page is due to a tear, let me state categorically that it isn’t. It’s whisky from the flask in my suitcase. There’s nothing wrong with a little tot of whisky on these expeditions, although it’s not advisable to get roaring drunk, of course.)

Anyhow, to conclude, what I do
not
believe is all that stuff about the fabric of time wearing thin, and it being possible to sometimes look through to other ages. (Except that if it were possible, Charect House would be the one place where I’d be able to do it.)

8 p.m.

Supper an hour ago in the Black Boar’s minuscule dining room. Plain cut off the joint and vegetables. Perfectly adequate. I’m not one for fussed-up food.

I had a glass of beer in the bar afterwards. The local stuff is so fierce that it would peel varnish from wood, but I wanted to get into conversation with one or two of the locals. That’s always useful for picking up fragments of gossip. If ghosts are likely to walk anywhere, they’ll generally walk in a public house where the drink’s flowing. They’ll often take up permanent residence at the bar if you aren’t careful.

I was ready to insert a carefully-prepared mention of Charect House into the casual bar-room conversation. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance. It seems a local child is missing, and the men were assembling in the bar to help with the search.

‘Evie Blythe,’ said one of them when I asked. ‘Only seven, poor little mite. Been gone since yesterday afternoon.’

‘How dreadful. Do they think she’s been taken by someone?’

‘That’s the concern. Don’t seem very likely, though. We don’t get much crime in Marston Lacy. Bit of drunk driving, the occasional housebreaking. Not many kidnappings. Still, there’re peculiar folk around these days.’

An extremely elderly gentleman seated in a corner, mumbling beer and crisps through an overgrown beard, was understood to say there was evil everywhere in the world and always had been, you had only to read your Bible to know that. Sin and lipstick and modern music, that was where all the blame lay. He showed signs of becoming loquacious until somebody took another pint of beer over to him.

A couple of policemen came in and spread out maps of the area. They divided the terrain and assigned two men to search each section. Torches were distributed, and the Black Boar’s manager came in with flasks of coffee for the searchers to take with them. I would have offered my help if it had been likely to do any good – appalling to think of a small child lost and helpless somewhere in the dark, or, God forbid, at the mercy of some pervert. But I had no knowledge of the area, and they weren’t likely to trust a complete stranger.

But when the sergeant started telling the men to be sure to investigate all empty houses, I thought it advisable to enter the conversation and explain my presence. The customary reaction is usually derision or contempt. Men mostly laugh patronizingly, and women either shriek with pretended fear or want to involve you in intense conversations so they can relate their own encounters with the paranormal.

Marston Lacy behaved slightly differently. At mention of the house’s name, an unmistakable stir of unease went through the listeners – exactly like one of those hammy horror films where the traveller enters the wayside tavern and innocently asks for directions to Castle Dracula. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Black Boar’s inhabitants had pelted me with garlic or started drawing pentacles on the floor.

The sergeant was made of stern stuff, however. He merely said, ‘Ah yes, Charect House. Got a bad reputation, that old place.’

‘So I believe.’

‘I’d better have a note of your address, if I may, miss. Just routine, you know.’

I supplied my name and address and added, perhaps slightly maliciously, that Mr Joseph Lloyd at the council offices would vouch for me. (He’ll hate it if the police do contact him and he has to admit the local authority called in a ghost-hunter! That’s a thought that gives me immense pleasure.)

‘And you’re actually going to spend the night at Charect House, are you, miss – uh, Dr Wilson?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘They say William Lee’s been seen at Charect a time or two,’ put in the much younger police constable rather hesitantly.

‘More than a time or two from all I ever heard,’ observed somebody else.

‘Rot,’ said the police sergeant with determination. ‘William Lee’s dead and under the ground and been there more than seventy years, so let’s have no more nonsense about dead folks walking around. It’ll be clanking chains and creaking gibbets next,’ he said with an air of good-humoured exasperation.

The young constable volunteered the information that they had, in fact, checked Charect House earlier in the day. ‘We went right through it, cellar to attic,’ he said.

I heard one of the men from behind him mutter, ‘Rather you than me.’

‘Well, it was done to proper police procedure, and there was nothing to be found,’ said the sergeant, raising his voice as if to make sure no one missed the statement. ‘Nothing at all. Not William Lee, nor anyone else. It’s a bleak old place, though, I’ll say that for it.’ He looked back at me. ‘Best be on your guard.’

‘I will.’

‘And if you see anything suspicious, send for us.’

‘Of course.’

10 p.m.

As is often the way, Charect House’s personality is entirely different by night. From being a rather forlorn old place, with sagging timbers and rotting floors, it’s become deeply forbidding. Even from the track leading up to it, it looked as if it was leaning forward to take a look at whoever was brave or foolhardy enough to approach it. But I’ve seen more glaring-visaged houses than you can shake a stick at, and I know it’s simply an illusion: the effect of shadows and clouds behind an erratic roofline. Prop up a sagging roof joist and nail a few tiles into their proper place, and everything’s rose-tinted.

I bounced the estate car up to the front door and set about unloading the cameras and tape recorders. And now I’m inside the haunted house and night has fallen. That looks dramatic, written down, but when you get down to it, haunted houses are seldom very dramatic. They’re generally chilly, and the worst part of the vigil is boredom. That’s why I keep a journal to help pass the time.

10.45 p.m.

I’ve positioned the cameras and tape recorders all over the house – in the long drawing-room, in the dining room, and in the hall, where there’s a view of the stairs. There’s a smaller room, probably once used as a morning room, but I haven’t bothered with that. I haven’t bothered with the kitchens, either. But I’ve put cameras in the two main bedrooms. They all have light-sensitive settings, so that any movement within their range will trigger the shutter. I’ve got a Polaroid camera in here with me.

There’s no power on, of course, but I’ve got a good supply of batteries for the recorders, which I’ll have to replace at regular intervals. For my own light I’ve got two electric torches and a couple of oil lamps – what used to be called bullseyes. I will do a good deal for the furtherance of the Society’s work, but I’m blowed if I’m going to sit all night in the pitch dark.

There’s quite a lot of furniture in the house. I hadn’t expected that, and it means I can make myself reasonably snug – although I do draw the line at actually lying down in one of the sarcophagus-sized beds upstairs. I may be a cynic and a sceptic, but I’ve read all those gothic ghost tales about ravished marriage beds and spectral bridegrooms. Not that I ever got as far as a marriage bed or a bridegroom, spectral or otherwise, and I shouldn’t think I ever will, not now. Still, they say what you’ve never had you never miss, and I’m having a very full and interesting life without all that bouncing around in beds and having to put up with a man’s moods and wash his socks. (Although in the privacy of these pages, I’ll admit I wish my army captain and I had done some bed-bouncing before he went off to be frizzled to death by that wretched bomb. That’s what you get for trying to stay virtuous when all around you are flinging virginity to the winds. Ah well. Can’t be helped now.)

More to the point, I’ve rigged up a makeshift desk in the drawing room – I suspect it was once a library, with all the shelves that are still in place, so I think I’ll refer to it as that for the rest of this report. I’ve beaten about three pounds of dust out of an old wing chair, and I’ll be perfectly cosy.

I’ve put a large truncheon on the side of the chair – and never mind how I acquired it! If there’s a child-stealer prowling around and he lights on Charect as a likely lair, he’ll get very short shrift from me. On the other hand, if William Lee, dead for over seventy years, turns up, he’ll have to be given quite different treatment.

Note to self:
interesting to hear those references to William Lee in the Black Boar. I do know the house was built in the late 1700s by a John Lee of Shrewsbury, so William must have been a descendant. If the house passed down through the Lee family that would explain why I didn’t find any land transfers or transfers of title when I searched – at least, until after WWII, when the place seems to have been passed from one government department to another until it ended up with J. Lloyd’s council committee.

11 p.m.

I think one of the police searchers must have wound up the old grandfather clock while they were searching the house for the missing girl. It seems slightly whimsical of them, but you can never tell.

The clock stands in the corner, and it’s ticking wheezily to itself as I write this. It’s a florid, quite ugly, piece of Victoriana, but the ticking is rather a companionable sound.

It was at this point Nell knew she could not read Alice’s diaries here, not in this room with the clock ticking scratchily to itself, and not in this house at all.

With extreme care she folded the papers into her bag, got up from the dusty floor, and went out.

FIVE

I
t was several hours before she was able to read the diaries. Beth was home from school at four o’clock and wanted to do her homework before her permitted television time. At some stage in the next few years she would no doubt become recalcitrant, listening to incomprehensible music and rebelling against every kind of authority, but at the moment she was seven years old and diligently bent over a page of sums. Nell supervised the sums, agreed they were boring, but explained they could come in useful, then sat with Beth to read the allotted chapter of a book for next day’s reading class.

It was eight o’clock before Beth was finally in bed, with the array of fuzzy animals who kept her company and the curtains left slightly open.

‘So I can watch the moon go over that tree before I go to sleep,’ she explained. ‘Then I can say goodnight to the moon an’ he can say goodnight to me, then everything’s safe.’

‘You’re safe anyway,’ said Nell, wanting to hug the small figure tightly to her, but knowing Beth would shy away as she nearly always did from any physical demonstration.

Tonight though, Beth did not immediately lie down. She looked at Nell from the corners of her eyes and said, ‘I s’pose nobody can get in here? While I’m asleep?’

‘No, of course not.’ This sounded slightly worrying. Nell sat on the edge of the bed, prepared to talk about it as much as Beth wanted. ‘We’re absolutely safe. All the doors are locked.’

‘What about that, um, thing. The rhyme?’

‘What rhyme?’

‘The one about the dead man knocking on the door.’

Something cold and extremely unpleasant prickled across Nell’s skin, but she said, as lightly as she could, ‘Darling, that sounds horrid. Where did you hear that?’

‘I can’t remember. But the dead man knocks on the door an’ there’s a spell that means all the locks open, on account of it being a dead hand that’s knocking.’ Beth was huddled against the pillows, hugging her knees, not looking at Nell. In a small, scared voice, she said, ‘I thought – s’posing Dad tried to do that? I’d want him to come back, but not – um, not as a dead person knocking to come in.’