The Ghost Hunters (45 page)

Detective Mayfield, whose tie was loosened and whose shirt was more grey than white, heaved his broad frame out of his chair, chewing his lip as he pondered the question. He was around fifty, pale-skinned with a midnight shadow looming on his jowly face. ‘The details are scant. No one got a good look at the assailant’s face. The attacks happened at night, so …’

‘So it is easy for the witnesses to exaggerate their reports,’ I said vigorously. ‘What they don’t remember, their mind fills in for them.’

‘You think they’re lying, Miss Grey?’

I met the detective’s gaze and saw that it was laced with envy. Whatever did he think of this fiery young woman who was telling him how to do his job? In truth, I didn’t care. They were
the ones asking for my help. And my qualifications were, well, unique.

‘Not lying. But possibly mistaken.’

Catching an unpleasant scent of sweat and beer, I went to the detective’s cluttered desk and leaned over the map on which he had marked the locations of the attacks.

‘The way I see it, you have two possible scenarios. Either there
is
a ghost, or you’re dealing with someone who is impersonating the legend of Spring-Heeled Jack – someone who wants to fool people there is a ghost at large. Mass hysteria and fear of the unknown do the rest.’

The detective glanced at the younger officer who had brought me in. ‘You’re right, Officer Westron. She seems to know her stuff.’

‘And
she
is still here,’ I said forcefully.

‘You’re a sceptic, Miss Grey?’

I blinked. Memories flashed across my mind: Mother at home, scrubbing damp from the walls; the wretched outline of a dark figure, encroaching ever nearer.

‘I’ve met ghosts. They don’t behave like this. They certainly don’t drop their cloaks or pull women’s dresses with steel claws.’

I turned and went over to Westron, who was already feeding a sheet of paper into his typewriter, presumably to write up his handwritten notes. ‘Here’s what I recommend you do: put an article in the newspapers, laying out the evidence. Shoot down the myths that have built up around this character, Spring-Heeled Jack. Because I can guarantee you, it’s not a ghost stalking London, it’s fear. When people are scared, they’ll believe anything.’

I turned to face the detective. ‘Take the fear away. Expose
the facts, shine light upon the problem, and watch it dissolve.’

‘You think that will work?’ Mayfield asked. The frown etched into his weighty face suggested he didn’t.

‘I guarantee it.’

As if a switch had been flicked, the detective nodded and instructed Officer Westron to telephone ‘that expert in South Kensington. What’s his name?’

‘Harry Price?’ Westron ventured.

‘No!’ I heard myself say, and both men snapped their heads round in my direction, clearly surprised.

I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. ‘Let me do it. I’ll write the article.’

*

‘So it seems this city is blessed with two psychic experts, Miss Grey.’

Three months had passed. In his office on Fleet Street Bernard Jenkins, the editor of
The Times
, was smiling as he leaned back in his chair, admiring the pages of that day’s edition. ‘We had an excellent response to your piece on Spring-Heeled Jack. The letters pages have been humming with speculation ever since.’

‘Splendid. I’m glad.’

In truth I was annoyed with myself for letting down my friend. I had telephoned Amy and apologised but every time I had asked to see her she had said she was busy. Half of me felt guilty but I was satisfied too. Reports of ‘The Terror’ had fallen since I had forgone an evening with her to help the police. And my boss at Jupiter Film Locos was impressed with my article’s reception. Indeed, when he learned that I had worked for a ghost hunter, he even joked that I might assist with the scripts on future horror films.

‘Perhaps you’d consider writing more for us?’

‘No, thank you. When it comes to psychical research, I suppose you might say I’ve retired.’

Yet even as I said this, I wasn’t sure I believed it.

Looking back, it seems ridiculous that I should have seriously considered agreeing to the editor’s request after the lengths to which I had travelled to distance myself from the subject. Yet the idea was oddly appealing, and not just because it was flattering to be asked or because I sensed I was making myself useful. No, the temptation to agree was far more visceral than that.

‘Won’t you reconsider, Miss Grey? You’ll be handsomely paid. Surely there are some unusual affairs you might investigate, and write about for us?’

I remembered, then, the way Price had reacted when Wall’s articles had threatened his own popular status, the way his jealousy had erupted. If I did this, I knew it would anger him intently. And of course I was still bitter.

‘I’m sure I can find some.
If
I do this,’ I replied.

‘Wonderful,’ said Jenkins. He was smiling, I think because he sensed my latent desire to say yes. ‘Mr Price … he’s not the easiest man to deal with.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Someone warned me about him a while back,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. ‘An old colleague. Said he’s had his fingers burnt with Price, that he can’t be trusted.’

Naturally I asked him who had said this.

‘Vernon Wall. He’s a journalist. Do you know him?’

‘I used to know him.’ Then I thought, I wish I still did.

Did it strike me as unusual that the journalist who had expressed such interest in me at Borley had never tried to contact me since – no telephone call, not even a letter? I can honestly say that it didn’t. Since our time together at the Rectory, I’d had
leisure to reflect. I saw now what had probably been true all along: that I had treated Wall poorly by siding with Price. It was Wall’s story first, even if he had been responsible for drawing crowds of visitors who upset the Smiths’ lives.

Jenkins shrugged. ‘Trust or not, Harry Price pays his bills.’

‘Bills?’

He nodded. ‘Just this week he placed an advert with us calling for assistants to help with an investigation of a haunted house somewhere in Essex.’

‘An advert … What investigation?’ I leaned forward. ‘What house?’

*

‘I won’t pretend your letter didn’t surprise me, Miss Grey.’

The old man I had tracked down at his college rooms in Oxford spoke with such a rasping voice I assumed he must be a keen smoker. He wasn’t. Indeed, something far worse was at work upon him.

‘How many years is it now since we corresponded?’ he asked me on the staircase at the entrance to his set of rooms.

‘Ten,’ I said, with a note of apology in my voice.

‘And not a word from you since then.’ He gave a reflective sigh and then, perhaps seeing a wider problem not yet evident to me, he nodded and his expression grew serious. ‘I assume you are here because of Borley?’

I told him I was.

‘Then you’d better follow me.’

He led me along an oak-panelled corridor into his rooms which, for such a wealthy college, were colder and less welcoming than I would have expected. The threadbare carpet and the lingering odour of damp were impssible to ignore. Impossible, also, not to see the troubling thoughts brewing behind
my host’s eyes as he invited me to sit with him at a large oval table.

‘Dr Chipp, I know you went back to the Rectory all those years ago, after you were at university with Harry Bull. I know you had an … experience. The story of how your dogs vanished from your car while you slept is the talk of Sudbury town even now. The villagers are still frightened.’

His mouth had tightened. ‘That was a long time ago. Why have you come to see me?’

‘Because I need to speak to somebody who understands about that place,’ I answered.

I told him then some – but not all – of what had happened since he had written to Price at the end of the last decade with details of the Borley problem. Wanting his help and at the same time fearful of what he might tell me, I felt as if I was about to receive the results of a dreaded medical test. ‘I realise I might be overreacting … but I feel there is danger around me. As though something is drawing me to the Rectory even now.’

I reached down to my handbag, which I had left at my feet, opened it and took out the cutting given to me by the editor of
The Times
:

Dr Chipp was silent, his expression hovering somewhere between sadness and fear. Finally he said, ‘You think it’s the same house?’

‘I know it’s the same house.’ The editor at
The Times
had given me the details. What I didn’t know was why Price was suddenly involved with the case again, after he had so readily dismissed it.

‘Your companion is making a grave mistake,’ said Dr Chipp. His statement was devoid of doubt.

‘He’s not my companion,’ I said. ‘Not any more.’

But this detail seemed irrelevant to Dr Chipp. As he sat in silence, I had the impression that this was a man who had lived for too long with a burden – something, perhaps, that he wanted to share with others, but didn’t feel able to express. ‘That place is thoroughly evil,’ he said eventually. ‘The Rectory stains you, pollutes lives.’

I hesitated, feeling the apprehension his words evoked.

‘You’ve been there, I assume?’

I nodded. ‘Oh yes, a couple of times.’

‘Then you will already have experienced troubled thoughts, no doubt. Strange phenomena, nightmares?’

If Dr Chipp harboured any doubts, they didn’t show. His voice was adamant.

The terrifying thing, of course, was that he was right. My dreams had worsened and were always the same: the figure of a woman in robes advancing on me. And now, suddenly, whenever I looked in a mirror I glimpsed something below my neckline. I had begun avoiding mirrors for fear of what I might see.

Of course it didn’t help that Mother’s mental lapses were worsening. She still rose early to collect and open the post, but began to forget she had done so, forgetting also to lock the front door. Her mental condition wasn’t the sole cause of the distance that
was opening between us. That was due to a bigger mystery: the partition wall that divided our bedrooms and, from within, the faint but insistent tapping, scratching sounds. Like everything else we didn’t understand, we had learned not to speak of those sounds, to do our best to ignore them even if they refused to ignore us.

‘I’ve come because I believe something is wrong, something is happening to me. And because something needs to be done.’

‘Then you
have
felt it too?’

He wanted me to level with him, I realised.
Folie à deux
: a madness shared by two.

The old man leaned forward. His face in the low light was sallow.

‘Some years after visiting the Rectory I came here to the college, but within weeks I heard a restless rapping coming from the walls. I never located the source. Soon I started seeing things – quick movements out of the corner of my eye. Oh, I tried to ignore them, but when my scout informed me, in a state of some distress, of what she had seen one morning while cleaning my office – well, I knew then that something had followed me from Borley.’

‘What did she see?’ I asked.

‘A woman, dressed from head to toe in black robes.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘After that, the troubles became progressively worse. As you can see, my health is not good. And there have been too many … accidents over the years.’

‘Accidents?’

‘Fires, family deaths. Everyone close to me has gone.’

‘How do you explain it?’ I asked quickly.

‘I’m not sure I can.’ He hesitated in a way that made me anxious. ‘It was said that Henry Bull, who built the Rectory,
was taken in with stories of haunting, that he would study the occult, try to summon up evil. If that’s true, who knows? Perhaps he let something through from the other side which drained the life from him.’

‘You mean a curse?’

He frowned. ‘Possibly. I disapprove of that term. It diminishes the gravity of the thing.’

‘Then what would you call it?’

His lips curved downwards as he contemplated my question. ‘I would call it an execration: an attempt to inflict harm upon the living through supernatural influence. Hexes are associated with places, people, or, more commonly, objects.’

‘All right, well, if there is a curse – an execration – at work, then how do we stop it?’

‘I was hoping you might tell me.’

Marianne Foyster’s warning came back to me then.

‘I think that whatever is haunting us feeds on the lies of the living,’ I said. ‘Deception. I think a woman – a nun – was murdered in that house centuries ago by someone who deceived her, and that some fragment of the suffering he caused her remains.’

Dr Chipp was frowning. ‘You’re saying her soul is punishing the living for her murderer’s sin?’

‘I know how it sounds …’

But did I? Or had I become a woman who could no longer differentiate between what was real and what was not?

I had to know, so I asked him the only question that seemed reasonable – the question that was the reason for my visit.

‘Dr Chipp, are
you
guilty of some deception?’

He did not say what his sin was. He didn’t need to.

‘We all tell lies, Miss Grey. That’s what humans do. Even you, I imagine.’

He knew. And if I was in danger, it was because I had hidden too much – from Price, from everyone. The greatest and guiltiest secret. I pictured the ancient brass medallion we had found in the Rectory – octagonal, embossed with the likeness of St Ignatius – the wall writings and the fury burning in Marianne Foyster’s eyes; and beneath these memories, playing like a terrible record, the curious scraping sounds from behind the wall at home.