The Chandelier Ballroom (27 page)

He was all Nigel Price had said he was – a useless apology for a man. To him it seemed it was happening to someone else. All he knew was that instead of going to fight for his country, perhaps die for his country, his dying would be ignoble and that grieved him. There would be no embarkation leave, no visiting his parents, no marrying Valerie – just as well to be hung.

While convoys of troops rattled the streets of southern England, few hardly noticed a briefly worded report of a corporal hung for murder, except the man’s grief-stricken parents and a grieving girl called Valerie.

Clearing up from the fire was being carried out with a sense of urgency which had more to do with the fast-approaching allied invasion – no longer hush-hush, though the exact date was still secret – than any concern for the actual owner of Crossways Lodge, living in Canada in a private nursing home for the aged.

The house, like so many other vacant properties – business premises, shops, schools – had been taken over by the army preparing for the coming invasion. Returning it to its owner required it to be as near as possible to its condition prior to being commandeered.

Fortunately the damage was confined to the passage. The wall of the big room used by the officers had been blackened but still remained intact, although much of the pine cladding had been burnt away. The doors to the two rooms further along needed to be replaced, the rear door and kitchen door were completely gone, though the one at the far end of the passage survived.

What was a surprise was a small door discovered across from the kitchen. Protected by the pine cladding that had once concealed it, it was merely scorched. Quickly forced open, a tiny cellar was found. A few shelves with a few empty wine bottles gathering dust proved it to most likely have once been a wine cellar. More interesting were twin mounds of earth side by side, looking suspiciously like graves.

Obviously not a military matter, the police instantly summoned, excavation did indeed reveal each to contain a partial skeleton still with some dry flesh and skin adhering.

Estimated by the police to have been there around twelve years or so, the exceptionally dry cellar accounting for withered flesh and skin still remaining, the odd thing was that there was no sign of any clothing on either body. The pelvic bones at least showed one to be male, the other female, a fact eagerly picked up by local newspapers, to be read with horror by those living in Wadely, a stone’s throw from the terrible deed.

‘Twelve years!’ exclaimed Mrs Dunhill, who had cooked for the Butterfields when they had Crossways Lodge at that time. She now looked after the village hall, held the key and helped run the Women’s Institute, consequently had her finger on every pulse.

‘I remember him,’ she told several neighbours. ‘Butterfield. Horace. His wife, Millicent I think it was, left him when he took up with a young bit of stuff. What was
her
name? Cecily? Celia? Yes, that was it, Celia, a really stunning young woman but a gold digger – eventually left him for someone else as I recall. Just … went off, vanished.
That
was around twelve years ago. I remember him moping around the house, drinking himself silly. Then they found him in his own lake, drowned. Probably drunk. Some say it was an accident but others say it was suicide. Makes you wonder though.’

It did, and produced a lot of thoughtful nods. What if the two bodies turned out to be those of the young woman and her lover? What if they hadn’t run off? What if Horace Butterfield had murdered them? It was possible. At the time some had suspected him to be a bit of a criminal who’d come into money, and criminals often did that sort of thing, didn’t they?

They waited with bated breath to find out what more the papers had for them, along with the other equally exciting and horrific story that had taken place again on their very own doorstep, of the army sergeant killed by a corporal who’d apparently left him for dead, hiding his dreadful deed by setting fire to part of Crossways Lodge.

He’d been court martialled and put under sentence of death and now Crossways Lodge lay empty, the entire army unit having left a week ago, among thousands of allied troops now landing on Normandy beaches.

Norman Bowers wasn’t one of them. Valerie Prentice would never see him again. Her family told her she was lucky to be rid of him.

‘But I did love him,’ she wept pitifully.

‘Of course you did, dear,’ said her mother. ‘And we know how hard it must be for you. But it would have ended up a life of misery. We wouldn’t have wanted that for you. Even if what happened hadn’t, heaven knows how he would have turned out had you married him.’

‘I have to say I never completely took to that young man,’ said her father, his tone cautious as she faced him with reddened eyes. ‘You have to admit he was a bit strange at times. He never really spoke much to us, as if he was never at ease with us, almost as if we weren’t good enough for him.’

‘He never ever said that,’ she sobbed. ‘He was just naturally shy with people.’

‘Well, he shouldn’t have been, not with us, his prospective in-laws.’ Her father looked awkward. ‘To put it bluntly, love, if you don’t mind me saying, I always felt that he was looking down at us, so to speak.’

She burst into fresh tears. ‘That’s not true, Daddy. He never said a bad word against you. He always said that you were nice people.’

‘And don’t you think that says it all?’ put in her mother, laying one hand on her husband’s shoulder as if to help cement his words. ‘If he’d said he liked us very much, that might have been more normal. But
nice people
? Who did he think he was?
Nice people
!’

Her lip curled disparagingly, making Valerie cringe in support of what she’d thought an innocuous remark on his part, wishing she’d never relayed it to them, thinking they’d be pleased.

‘You always said you liked him, Mummy.’

‘Yes, we did say that. But I object to the
people
bit.
People
! As if we were
below him
. But he was your choice, you were in love with him and I suppose he was in love with you. Even so, I was worried for you. Now I know I was right to have been. I can now see there was something more to him than we realised. Personally, I think you’ve had a narrow escape. You should thank your lucky stars for that rather than moping. One day you’ll meet a nice young man who’ll truly be the one for you and you’ll forget all about this.’

In the end, having cried for days, she took their advice, and when it was all finally over, she had to agree that they were right.

The letters he’d written to her almost every day until the end had proved that he’d become strange, ranting and raving about having been haunted by the ghost of a woman he’d taken to be her at first, his letters filled with apologies for having believed it. Not that she’d read all of them, her parents made sure of that, aware of how much distress they would cause her. Valerie had let them open the letters and scan their contents, reading aloud parts of them enough for her to realise how unstable he had become. At first they were filled with words of love, pleading for her to stay faithful, begging her to reply, but on her parents’ advice she refrained from doing so. Demanding to know why she didn’t, they soon turned to words of anger, accusing her of cold-heartedness, of having no pity; that he never thought she’d turn out to be that kind of girl, whatever that was, all of it deemed too nasty for her to read. Finally they became filled with self-pity, going on about ghostly visitations, at the same time condemning her for thinking so ill of him, and so erratic that she could see the wisdom in her parents’ advice to stay well clear of him. Whether it was the fate that faced him or some hovering, deep-rooted fault in his nature coming to light, she could feel herself being tormented by him until she thought she too was going mad.

It was almost a relief when his letters stopped, showing his life to have ended. It felt almost sinful to finally be free to get on with her life.

It was a long time before Valerie Prentice stopped having dreams of walking along a street and seeing him coming towards her. But slowly they faded. She was eventually to meet a nice Air Force chap, actually meeting him while walking along a street, in fact accidentally cannoning into him as she turned a corner. Two years later, the war over, they married.

With accounts of the trial and execution of the corporal accused of killing his sergeant coming on top of the discovery of two bodies buried in a cellar at Crossways Lodge, it didn’t take long for both events to be coupled together to make a whole, proof that there were indeed strange and unexplained occurrences at the house.

‘You can’t wonder at stories of that place being haunted,’ Jennifer Wainwright remarked absently to the next in the queue lining up for their various pensions, allowances and stamps at her post office counter.

The elderly woman whose pension she’d been counting out had raised the subject by saying, ‘That big house is still empty, you know. I shouldn’t think anyone would fancy living in it considering what’s happened there in the past. Fancy being told the place you’ve got your eye on is haunted. I wouldn’t want it.’

It had sent Jennifer’s mind winging back to when she had known Joyce Johns-Pitman.

At that time the girl had been worried sick by what she had seen or imagined she had seen. Jennifer had scoffed at her then. But in the light of what that condemned corporal had said he’d seen, it now all seemed to fall into place. Maybe Joyce hadn’t imagined what she said she’d seen. Whatever or whoever the woman was, she had been right, Joyce’s husband had been unfaithful, and in a shock of rage she had stabbed him to death. Terrible thing to have happened, she’d been such a nice girl, a decent friend. But to go off her head like that. Apparently she was in an asylum now, insisting still that she had been visited by a ghost who’d spoken of her husband’s infidelity.

Jennifer knew how easily it could happen. Still the village post mistress, she had never remarried after her husband left her for another woman all those years ago. She put no trust in any man, no matter how good and faithful he might appear, and the story of a woman warning of a partner’s unfaithfulness had seemed as plausible then as it did now.

Her lips now lined, her cheeks sallow, the corners of her eyes behind her glasses edged by crow’s feet, she knew she looked tired, gone the smooth features Joyce Johns-Pitman had known. But for a moment she was young again, listening to the spooky goings on in Crossways Lodge as she handed her elderly customer her week’s pension.

‘I was once told something strange about that house,’ she said as the woman gathered up her pension and slipped it into her handbag. ‘People living there then were sure it was haunted.’

‘Haunted?’ echoed a young woman, moving up to the counter in her turn as the old lady wandered off. On the point of buying stamps for the letter she was sending her husband now somewhere in France, she looked awe-struck.

‘I thought everyone here knew,’ Jennifer began, then pulled herself up sharply. ‘Oh, of course, you wouldn’t have. You’ve not lived here that long.’

As post mistress she knew everyone, but for a second this face had escaped her, forgetting that she was relatively new to the area. The woman was only too glad to enlighten her.

‘I rent a couple of rooms down the road,’ she explained in a sing-song Birmingham accent. ‘My husband being stationed here I come down to be with ’im a bit longer, knowing he’d be moved on during D-Day.’

She was becoming quite chatty to Jennifer’s dismay, her queue of customers beginning to fidget, she known for her efficiency in not keeping people waiting overlong.

‘Now he’s in France with all the others,’ the woman continued, ‘I’ll probably go back home. No point staying ’ere now. Before he left he told me of the sergeant killed by that soldier. What d’you mean by the haunting?’

‘Oh …’ Jennifer looked beyond her to the queue now joined by yet another customer. She needed to bring this conversation to a close. ‘Some talk around here quite a few years ago, that’s all.’

‘I did read something in the paper about that one what was arrested telling the court of seeing a strange woman what vanished right before his eyes,’ the young woman continued blithely, the lengthening queue of no concern to her. But Jennifer was becoming ever more aware of it.

‘No doubt to make himself sound insane and be acquitted,’ she said, letting the end of the sentence drop as termination to the conversation, smiling sweetly but looking beyond the woman to announce ‘Next!’, adding, ‘Hello Mrs Gordon,’ compelling the young woman to move away.

Of course, the corporal’s story in court of an apparent apparition had gone around the village like wild fire, as had the discovery of the two bodies.

On their very own doorstep, it was on everyone’s lips. Like hungry vultures over a carcass, they devoured every last snippet of whatever meagre information the newspapers gave out about the case, which wasn’t much, more being devoted to the progress of the allies in France than home news. It was from local newspapers that they gleaned the most.

Mrs Evans, once cook to those who’d bought the house after the death of Horace Butterfield, the Johns-Pitmans, delighted in telling everyone at the WI how Mrs Johns-Pitman had told her of having been suddenly confronted by the strange figure of a woman.

‘The way she described her, I thought at the time it might have been the floozy that man Butterfield had been carrying on with, that maybe she’d decided to come back to him, her not knowing he’d drowned himself. Not that I knew her. But I heard tell of her. Mrs Johns-Pitman wouldn’t have known her either, she being before my employer’s time, and of course none of us knew then that she’d been murdered. It was merely assumed she’d gone off with someone else.’

The identity of the strange sighting only began to be guessed at after Mrs Dunhill, cook to the Butterfields, was prompted to relate a story Mrs Butterfield had told her about the huge chandelier her husband had bought in some London antique shop for his then newly constructed chandelier ballroom, as he’d decided to call it.