The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery (7 page)

So I have been poor and I have been rich, and I prefer infinitely to be rich, for I have a great fondness for the good things of life. Well-cut clothes, silk shirts, good food and wine and a comfortable – if possible, luxurious – house or apartment in which to live. I like dining in the homes of the wealthy and influential, and I also enjoy the company of ladies whose lives allow them – by which I mean give them enough leisure – to be beautiful. Here I should make it clear that although I have bought many lovely things and stolen many more, I have never bought or stolen ladies. The many enjoyable associations I have formed have been entirely of the ladies' free choice. I will admit to having a weakness for raven-haired, porcelain-skinned ladies, preferably of impeccable lineage. But I am a gentleman and I do not give names.

This weakness, however, made my association with Leonora Gilmore all the more surprising and also unexpected, since Leonora possessed none of those attractions. A strange little creature, with a face like a pixie from some painting depicting a fantastical scene. I once arranged for what I like to call the transfer of a Hans Makart painting – I think it was called
Titania's Wedding Feast
or something similar – in which one of the attendant sprites resembled Leonora so greatly, she might have sat as a model for the painting. She did not, of course; apart from the fact that Makart was painting long before Leonora was born, her own upbringing would have stopped her. I never met her parents, but I formed an opinion of repression and coldness.

I would have liked you, thought Michael, coming briefly up out of the narrative. Even though you were clearly a roaring snob and it doesn't sound as if you had a moral to your name, whoever you were, I still think I'd have liked you. What your journal is doing in an English house in the twenty-first century though, I can't imagine. But you knew Leonora – God knows how or where, but you did, and on that score alone I need to find out more about you.

He read on:

I have made something of what people would call a speciality in my work. The occasional painting, certainly, but more particularly the small and the exquisite. Silver snuffboxes, enamelled patch-boxes, jade figurines. Jewellery, of course. Icons, naturally.

One of my more cherished memories is of a visit to an exhibition of religious icons in Moscow. I had gone there in a professional capacity – which is to say I intended to liberate at least four of the choicest icons – and I had several discerning clients (I prefer to call them clients) eagerly awaiting them. None of the clients knew, not with any certainty, that I stole the objects they so greedily purchased, but most of them must have guessed. However, they all knew that if they were to inform the—

Michael had not been able to find an exact translation for the next word, but he thought it was a reasonably safe bet that it was intended to convey police, or the equivalent.

—it would have meant the end of their supply of jewellery and beautiful objects. More to the point, it would also have meant the end of my career and a sojourn in prison.

I found it very useful that in old Russia – by which I mean the Russia of the Mongols, the land of the Firebird – it had never been customary to sign icons. That often meant there was no provenance. My grandfather always held that if a piece did not have a provenance, then all that was needed was to create one for it, and the more exotic, the better. My father specialized in stealing jewellery, but my grandfather was a very good forger and he taught me something of the craft. He was also extremely skilled at replacing genuine artefacts with his own creations. If you've ever been in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, (although now we have to say Petrograd), and stood in front of a certain portrait with, let us say, Tzarist connotations … Let's just say he fooled a great many people, my grandfather.

But that evening at the icons exhibition, as I walked through the warm, perfumed rooms, I overheard someone say to a companion, ‘A beautiful exhibition. Some very rare pieces.'

The companion replied, half serious, half jocular, ‘Let's hope Iskander hasn't heard about this evening's display.'

The other man said, curiously, ‘Is that his real name?'

‘God knows. I've heard he has several aliases. They say he switches names to suit whatever villainy he's currently engaged in. But whether he's called Alexei Iskander or something else entirely, if he knew about tonight he'd have cleared most of the rooms inside ten minutes, and our exhibition would be over.'

I didn't clear the rooms, but I did appropriate six icons, all of them beautiful, all of them highly valuable, although the speaker was wrong about the time it took me. It was a little under eight minutes.

And so I come to the real start of my story, which begins in the disastrous year of 1914.

1914. It's almost like a milestone, that date. A dark, bloodied landmark jutting out of history's highways like a shark's tooth, warning the human race never to venture into that kind of darkness again. (I make no apologies for the extravagance or the emotion of that sentence; a man may surely succumb to emotion when describing the rising of the curtain on the most brutal, most wasteful war of all time.)

Censorship was still muzzling books and newspapers in Russia at that time, and thousands of people had no idea that Europe was a simmering cauldron, fast approaching boiling point. People in cities probably knew something of the situation, and because I was living in Moscow I suppose I knew as much as most of them – which is to say not very much at all. But I did know that the balance of power which several countries had striven to maintain was starting to crumble. That was hardly surprising considering the complexity of political and military alliances. If you pull out one strand of an intricate tapestry, the entire thing will unravel, and by the summer of 1914 several strands had been pulled with some force. I've never unravelled a tapestry (although I've acquired and sold a few most profitably), and I certainly never fully unravelled the tangled strands of Holy Alliances or Bismarck's League or any of the Austro-Hungarian pacts.

I am still not entirely sure why I felt such a compulsion to become involved in those snarled strands. I wonder now if my profession had begun to bore me – even if it was becoming too easy. Perhaps I wanted a new challenge, or perhaps I simply wanted to be able, afterwards, to say that I had been part of it all, that I had been there amidst the tumult and the chaos, not exactly helping to make history, which would have been a massive conceit (even for me), but to witness history being made. Recording history for future generations. The more I thought about that, the better I liked it.

So I set about persuading several newspaper editors to take me on to their staff as a freelance war correspondent, because war there surely would be, even the optimists agreed about that. I explained to them that I would be a highly suitable person to send to the troubled areas of Europe to write about the unrest. Not only was I able to write interesting and informative prose, I said, but I had travelled quite extensively. I had reasonable proficiency in French, I could make myself understood in German and I even had a smattering of English as well. ‘Smattering' was something of an exaggeration there, but they accepted my claim, (fortunately without putting it to the test). What really clinched the matter, though, was that without actually saying so, I managed to convey that I had the entrée to a number of privileged houses. I do think I did that rather well, and if they ended up believing I dined at the Kaiser's table regularly and was on intimate terms with several members of the Imperial Royal House of Habsburg, it was entirely due to their own naivety.

So a number of agreements were made. The financial remuneration varied from paper to paper, but on one topic the editors spoke with the same voice. That was the matter of the censorship laws. Did I understand I must not write anything that might be construed as seditious or subversive?

I did.

And would I give my word as a gentleman (ha!) that I would not write or imply anything that might be regarded as propaganda or likely to incite anarchy?

I said politely that my word could be considered to be given, and could be regarded as my bond.

In fact I have met many anarchistic and even revolutionary-minded people who make delightful and stimulating companions, although sometimes inclined a little to bigotry and fanaticism, and curiously averse to regular washing, as if they consider their ideals too high-minded to be bothered about soap and water. For myself, I had then, and have now, no particular animosity towards the Romanovs.

I did have considerable animosity towards the miserliness of some of the newspapers employing me, though. The travelling costs turned out to be paltry, barely enough for even the most basic of train journeys. Indeed, at one point I began to wonder if this entire scheme might as well be forgotten, but the compulsion to see what was happening in the world, to know about it at first-hand – to
record
it for others to read – still had me by the throat as viciously as a wolf in a winter forest.

I should make it clear that my contempt for the meagre travelling expenses was not born from mere hedonism; I am perfectly prepared to sacrifice comfort if the cause is sufficient. What I am not prepared to do is travel in third-class railway carriages, where the only seating is wooden benches, where the washing facilities are non-existent, and where the only food is the greasy bread and fat bacon brought by other wayfarers for their private sustenance. It would have been undignified to ask for more money though, so before leaving I made a few judicious sorties into a number of rich homes. The careful selling of the items I removed provided funds for more acceptable travelling conditions, and I left Moscow in a first-class compartment, ate my meals in a well-appointed dining-car, and slept in the best hotels until I reached my destination.

My destination. That exercised me a good deal. Simply, I could not decide where I should go. The kaleidoscope of power-balance and of friendship and enmity between countries had been shifting with bewildering rapidity throughout that summer – so much so that I changed my mind half a dozen times.

But it was becoming clear that Germany wanted France. And to get France, the German armies had to take the neutral countries that lay between. Above all, they had to take Belgium – small, peaceable Belgium with its gentle defences but its key position. That meant my articles could only be written from one place. The place I strongly suspected was about to become the epicentre of the fight.

And so it was to Belgium that I went.

Michael had translated with reasonable ease to this point, but from a cursory glance at the next couple of pages it looked as if ‘Alexei Iskander' had merely been making background notes about the opening moves of the war. The page was spattered with the names of Prussia and Austria, together with mention of the German Chancellor Bismarck and also the German Army Chief of Staff, along with a few references to the Habsburg Archdukes and Duchesses. It seemed safe to assume that most of these references were detrimental.

He was just thinking he would try to translate at least another couple of paragraphs in the hope of getting to Iskander's arrival in Belgium and his meeting with Leonora, when he was pulled out of Iskander's insouciant world by the realization that footsteps were coming up the steps from the underground room.

He went cautiously to the door and peered out. Luisa was emerging from the underground room, her eyes still with the same unfocused look, and her movements still disconcertingly puppet-like. She closed the door in the panelling, locked it, and returned the key to the drawer in the small bureau. Michael watched her ascend the stairs and waited until he heard her walk across the landing and open and close her bedroom door. It was just on two a.m. He closed Iskander's journal, switched off the laptop, and went determinedly up to his own room, undressed and got into bed.

Surprisingly, he slept extremely well. He had expected the images conjured up by Iskander, as well as the trip to the underground room, to keep him awake, but the old bed was comfortable, and he did not wake until the soft bleeping of his travel alarm at half-past seven. It was a good feeling to realize the night had passed and he would not need to spend another one inside Fosse House.

Seen by day, the house was no longer the brooding mansion of fiction, and the storm had blown itself out. Thin sunshine slanted in through the old windows and painted a pale gold haze across wood and glass and silk. The silk was frayed, the wood dull and the glass grubby, but seen like this the house had a dim charm of its own, and Michael could sympathize with Stephen Gilmore's longing to come home and to see the lamps glowing in the windows as he walked along the drive.

Last night, when Luisa had murmured about breakfast, Michael had at once said he would forage for himself, then make an early start in the library. Accordingly, he went along to the kitchen, where he made toast and ate a bowl of cereal. After this, he took himself and a second cup of coffee along to the library.

When he opened the curtains a faint mist lay over the gardens. The library windows looked across to an old walled garden, with a wrought-iron gate. Michael wondered if he could go out there to take a look later on. There was something intriguing about walled gardens – they were the kind of green and darkling places where secrets might linger, and where the enquirer was warned not to trespass, not to speak or even whisper, in case, in the words of the de la Mare poem, ‘perchance upon its darkening air, the unseen ghosts of children fare'. Seen at this hour, Fosse House's walled garden looked as if ghosts of any age might congregate there.

Somewhere in the house a clock chimed eight o'clock, and, as if answering, from beyond the house came a deeper chime of some distant church tower. A bird flew out of a tree and twitteringly dive-bombed the lawn for its own breakfast, and the spell of the old garden splintered. The chimes died away, and Michael forgot about ghosts and sat down at the big leather-topped table, to step into the past.