The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales (4 page)

I’m caught on the hop this time, I admit it. Coming out with poetry. He’s never struck me as the type. Never done it before.

‘Thomas Sterns,’ he says, ‘that’s what T. S. stands for. Not many people know that.’ And he’s smiling the same sly smile because he thinks he’s bested me. Won another round. ‘
Four Quartets
.’

‘I know,’ I snap, though I shouldn’t let my feelings show.

His face is ablaze with cunning. He wags a finger at me. Points. ‘But which one? Guess. Air, Water, Earth, Fire? Guess.’

I can’t indulge him any further in this. It’s no good for him, can’t be. Won’t get us anywhere.

‘Why didn’t she go to the bingo that Thursday?’

My voice is level, but there’s enough displeasure in it and he hears and withdraws again, angry I’m not playing along. The praying hands, the bowed head, the crumpled shoulders, the swallowing and swallowing. My throat is dry too.

For an age, he is silent. The room is heavy with disappointment, with misunderstanding. He feels I have let him down and he might be right, but it can’t be helped. We need to get somewhere. Make progress. The water gurgles in the old iron radiator. Beyond the door, the monotonous rattle of a trolley and the slide of a bolt somewhere further along the corridor.

We don’t have much time.

I swallow. ‘Why didn’t Mrs Nash go to bingo that Thursday?’

‘She did,’ he says, sullen again. ‘Forgot her purse. Came back.’

‘Or she guessed.’

‘No.’

He shrugs, the shifty fidget of a child. A quick up and down of the shoulders. Guilt? Is it guilt? I can’t tell. Feigning uninterest, certainly.

I help him on his way. A firm hand in the small of the back. ‘She was suspicious, wasn’t she? Pretended to go, then came back to spy on you.’

‘It wasn’t my fault.’

‘No.’ I change tack. ‘An accident, when all’s said and done. Her fault, not yours. Stairs were too steep.’

And he looks at me for a moment with such gratitude that I feel happy. Actually happy.

‘She’d no cause to go on at me all the time,’ he says. ‘I said I’d move the box, just not got round to it, but . . . the smell, you see. Like seaweed or fish. Rotting fish. Thought it was coming from the box, she did.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No.’

I look him in the eye. ‘So then what happened?’

I say it quietly and carefully, but it doesn’t work and he shakes his head, sent spiralling back to the beginning again. The bare bones of the story are the same – the tenant in Number Three going off, Mrs Nash asking him to clear out the room, the box sitting in the hall with the carriage clock and the painting of the Pyrenees. This time, though, no funeral and no lawyer. The brown envelope spilling money. Fifty-quid notes.

I’m getting impatient. ‘So,’ I say, ‘the twenty-first of October, Thursday, you decide to do it.’ I clap my hands and he jumps. ‘That’s it. Just like that, you decide today’s the day to make good on your promise. Pick up the box and you see all that money, yes? Been there all along. Put it in the pocket of your trousers, yes? Then you open the door down to the cellar. Yes? The paint’s peeling, isn’t it, chipped? You promised you’d have a look at that too, didn’t you?’

He frowns. ‘She was always on at me,’ he says. ‘Never gave it a rest, all the time on at me.’

‘So you open the door, yes, and you look down, but it’s too gloomy to see anything. Isn’t it, isn’t that right? You can’t see anything down there, so you don’t know what’s down there. You put out your hand, feel around, looking for a light switch.’

‘Wired wrong. Upside down.’

‘But you do find the switch. Flick it up. Sickly yellow light down there.’

‘Sickly yellow light.’

I nod. ‘And straight away, you know there’s something wrong down there, don’t you?’ I lean forward. ‘You can smell it, can’t you? Smell of the sea. Of rotting fish.’

He puts his hands over his ears. He doesn’t want to hear any more. He is seeing it all now, smelling it, remembering the cold on his bare skin and the dust and the cobwebs, the decay and damp of a cellar in a seaside town. He doesn’t want to be back at that cellar on that Thursday the twenty-first of October 1965.

But that’s why he’s here. Why we are here.

‘Not blood,’ he says, ‘it was a sweet smell.’

‘You didn’t think it would be so bad, did you? You rolled up your sleeves – didn’t want to spoil that pullover.’

‘Oranges . . .’ he whispers.

‘You pick up the box and carry it down,’ I say, pushing him further. ‘Know you’ve got to do something before she gets back. The smell’s too bad down there. She’s bound to notice.’

‘Ten steps down.’

‘Eight,’ I correct him. ‘Quite a weight, that box. All that stuff in it. Three or four trophies, a shield with his name on it. Bowls, wasn’t it?’

He’s shaking his head, sticking to the first story. ‘Painting and a carriage clock and cuff links and the money.’

‘There all along,’ I say.

He is shaking his head. ‘There all along. Thought it was under the mattress.’ His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Why did she come back? She’d never have known. We would have been all right.’

‘The box was heavy,’ I say.

I see his expression. He’s frightened at how much I know, how much he has already told me. He is staring at me, clear brown eyes, a little yellow. Medication yellow.

‘I could manage.’

I admire his courage, but I can’t let myself be deflected. ‘You have dust on your cuffs, and that annoys you. It’s your best shirt and you need it for the weekend.’

He nods. ‘The Gaumont. Saturday night.’

‘The girl, yes,’ I say, impatiently. We are doing well, but we have to stay in the house. I can’t let him get away from me. We have to go down into the cellar, him and me. Only then will the last pieces of the jigsaw fall into place.

‘So you managed, of course you did. Strong chap like you. On the up.’ I hesitate. ‘But she came back. Called out, didn’t she?’

‘Caught me by surprise.’

‘That’s right, so you slipped. Lost your footing.’

He flushes. ‘It was dark.’

‘Of course it was. Could have happened to anyone, in the dark.’

‘She shouldn’t have come back.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She scared me.’

‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘Her fault really. If she’d left well alone.’

‘Her fault.’

I can see beads of sweat on his forehead, a sickly yellow. Skin sickly yellow. Or is that Turner? Lying on the floor of the cellar, like a dummy. One of those mannequins in Reynolds department store on the front. I pull the handkerchief from my pocket and wipe my face. He does the same – great minds think alike – and he looks better for it.

I put my handkerchief away. ‘That’s when she saw him. Over your shoulder, looking over your shoulder.’

‘Screamed.’

‘No call for it,’ I say.

He’s nodding. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her. Tried to explain.’

‘But she starts screaming, that’s the thing, says she’s going to call the police.’

‘I reach up, just wanted to talk to her. Got hold of her ankle.’

I shudder, remembering the saggy nylons like loose skin on her leg, the sponge-like flesh beneath. Her tumbling down the wooden steps, taking us both down with her. The box and the silver plate rattling down to the cellar floor. The weight of her lying on top of me. Not waking up.

‘Banged my head,’ he says. ‘Out for the count.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I say. ‘Bad luck she came home. She didn’t have to scream.’

‘She didn’t have to make such a fuss. I only wanted to explain.’

‘You’re telling me, you’re telling me,’ I say, ‘never a truer word spoken. I like that.’ I stop. Take a breath. Let my shoulders drop. ‘I like that.’

I start picking at a thread on the sleeve of my jacket, a heavy twill much too warm for our room. There’s blood on the sleeve, that’s the thing. All that money. All that money stashed away. Thought it was under the mattress in Number Three. He found me looking. I didn’t mean to hurt him, but Turner went for me. Pushed him. Hit his head. Down he went. Taking him down to the cellar, knew he’d be safe there. Mrs Nash never went down there, couldn’t manage the steps.

If she hadn’t have come back, she’d never have known.

‘Never a truer word spoken,’ I say.

There’s a noise at the door. The sound of the key being turned in the lock and the bolt being shot back. We are out of time.

The orderlies come in. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, we call them, on account of their size.

‘All right, Jim? Time for your medication.’

I let my eyes slip away, warning him not to say anything in front of them. Not to admit to anything. It’s not murder if you don’t mean to kill someone. Turner or Mrs Nash, not his fault. Checking he’s quiet now. And he is. He’s sitting silent as the dead in the corner of the room, not saying a word. I put my finger to my lips just in case. They can’t see him. They don’t know he’s here.

‘Yes, I’m all right,’ I say.

‘Here you go then.’

I hold out my hand obediently. The quicker it’s done, the quicker they’ll go and we can get back to business. Tweedledee drops two yellow pills into my palm. Sickly yellow. I take the paper cup and swallow, drain the water and hand the cup back. Tweedledum ticks something on his list, then they are wheeling the trolley out of the room again.

‘Someone be round with supper soon,’ he says.

I put my hands over my nose, keen for them to be gone so we can resume our conversation. I can’t believe they can’t smell it. The rotting fish, the seaweed. Just like before. I want them to go. We’re at the interesting part now. The reason we’re here.

‘See you tomorrow,’ says Tweedledee.

‘Tomorrow it is,’ I say.

I wait for the bolt again and the key again, then I turn round.

‘Thought they’d never go,’ I say. ‘Now, where were we?’

But he’s gone. I’m on my own. Pity. A pity.

I lie back on the bed. It doesn’t matter though. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Start again. Get to the bottom of things tomorrow. I must ask them to do something about the smell. The rotting fish, the seaweed. Someone’s going to notice soon. Someone’s bound to notice. I look around for the box, but that’s gone too.

He’s taken it. Perhaps he’s already taken it down to the cellar.

‘Tomorrow it is then,’ I murmur. ‘Never a truer word spoken. All right for some, all right for some.’

Author’s Note

When I started ‘Duet’, I had in my mind to write a doppelgänger story. Literally meaning ‘double walker’ in German, a doppelgänger is a shadow self – a living ghost – supposed to be someone’s double. In traditional ghost stories, it is only the owner of the doppelgänger who can see this phantom self and is often – usually – a harbinger of death. In stories of bilocation, a person can either spontaneously or willingly project his or her double, known as a ‘wraith’, to a remote location. This double is indistinguishable from the real person and can interact with others just as the real person would.

However, during the writing process, things went their own way and it became a story about conscience. Like Lady Macbeth being unable to wash her hands clean of Duncan’s blood or the murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ – who imagines he can hear the heart of the old man he’s killed beating under the floor and so gives himself away – guilt exacts a heavy price.

The story also seemed to belong in the 1960s, an era of landladies and oddball misfits living in a seaside town where events might go unnoticed for some time.

RED LETTER DAY

Montségur, the French Pyrenees
March 2001

Red Letter Day