The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery (32 page)

‘A lady who had spent her formative years inside a convent?'

They look at one another. ‘Leonora?' said Nell.

‘I think it might be.' Michael looked back at the dark well of the oak chest. ‘Let's not move anything,' he said. ‘We'll have to report what we've found, but for now let's quietly close the lid and leave it to the professionals to lift her out.'

‘The annoying thing,' he said as they sat in the library, waiting for John Pargeter to arrive, ‘is that we still don't know what happened. We're still only seeing shadows; we still haven't got down to the reality. “Shadows inside the rain,” Stephen said somewhere in Luisa's journal – or Luisa thought he said. And that's what we're getting.'

‘We probably won't ever see or know what the reality is,' said Nell, sadly.

But they did.

Pargeter and Associates

Solicitors and Notaries Public

Walsham

November 201—

Dear Dr Flint,

RE: ESTATE OF LUISA GILMORE (dec'd)

It was very pleasant to meet you at Fosse House recently, although the circumstances, of course, were sad. However, my colleagues and I are very grateful for all your help over this somewhat complex matter.

We are also very grateful to Mrs West for her excellent advice and assistance over the selling of some of the more valuable furniture, china and glassware, and we are delighted that we have now been able to confirm the arrangements for her to handle the sale of the items discussed. (A separate extract regarding this has been sent to Mrs West at her Quire Court shop.) The sketch referred to as the Holzminden sketch is, I understand, already attracting some interest, and we will probably accept the suggestion that it is sold at auction by a specialist firm.

I am extremely sorry, however, that you and Mrs West had the distressing experience of finding human remains in the house. As you know, the police had to be notified of the discovery – any dead body has to be reported, no matter how long it might have been dead – and a post-mortem was conducted. I do not yet have the results, but hope to let you know when I do. I can tell you, though, that the small crucifix you found in the oak chest is thought to be around a hundred years old, and possibly French in origin.

However, knowing your research into the Gilmore family history, I think you will find this next information of interest. Found beneath the body, at the very bottom of the oak chest, was a small sheaf of papers. They are handwritten and in English – very good, even colloquial English, although the writer appears not to have actually been English. I have taken photocopies and am enclosing them with this extract. They raise a number of interesting possibilities, and certainly suggest the identity of the body.

The funeral for Miss Gilmore is to be next Thursday, at the local church. Do please let me know if you, or anyone from Oriel College, would care to attend.

Kind regards,

John Pargeter

Michael read John Pargeter's extract twice. Then he read the opening lines of the enclosure. After this he reached for the phone to ring Nell.

‘W
e ought to read it together, I think,' said Michael, having provided Nell with a drink and seated her on the small sofa, where the light of the desk lamp fell across her hair. Wilberforce, who liked Nell, but would not admit it sufficiently far to actually sit on her knee, had positioned himself on the sofa arm.

‘This is like old times,' said Nell, curling her feet under her and accepting the drink. ‘Are these papers going to provide any answers, though?'

‘I don't know. I only read the first sentence, then I tripped over Wilberforce to reach the phone to tell you,' said Michael. ‘I don't know if this will give any more answers. But I think it's our last shot.'

‘You didn't say who wrote it when you phoned,' said Nell. ‘But I'm assuming it's Leonora.'

‘I expected it to be Leonora,' said Michael. ‘But it isn't. It's Iskander.'

He flattened out the papers, put one arm round Nell, and they began to read.

It's a tradition for writers from my country to pour out their souls in an orgy of confession and a raging tempest of dark angst and
weltschmerz
, not to mention the beating of breasts and rending of garments. I am perfectly happy to immerse myself in
weltschmerz
, but I am not inclined to be penitent, and if anyone's garments are to be rent they will not be mine.

It may be vain to believe someone, somewhere, at some time, will want to read what I have written, but although I do not admit to many faults, I do admit to some, and vanity is probably one of them, so I will believe it.

I have decided to write this in English. I learned a good deal of the language while in Holzminden and also on my travels, and I'm rather proud of my skills. And since this deals with events in this English house it seems appropriate.

It was the very young owner of this house who caused me to come here. Stephen Gilmore. A gentle soul, Stephen. He believed entering the conflict between his country and Germany to be noble and inspirational. Like thousands of other eager, idealistic young men, he went off to war, to the sound of cheering crowds, with flags waving and military bands playing, seeing only victory and glory. No one had warned them about the horrors and the despairs and the nightmares lying in wait.

I saw the nightmares, but I saw them from a distance, reporting for my newspapers. Like those stylish and disdainful reporters at the Crimean War, I sat on a safe hillside or in a field, partaking of smoked salmon and Chablis, exchanging languid observations with other newspaper men and writing about the theatres of war – theatres as bloody as anything ever dredged up from the pit of the Grand Guignol.

But bodies were shattered, eyes and limbs were splintered. And minds cracked.

When I met Stephen Gilmore in the prison camp at Holzminden where I had been ignominiously taken after being captured at Verdun, at first I thought him weak. Later I came to understand he was far from weak: he had fought his nightmares and his demons and he still fought them. A weak man would have given in to them. Stephen had not.

My reasons for escaping from Holzminden were not entirely altruistic. I genuinely wanted to get Stephen out of the camp, but I wanted to escape for myself, as well. I wanted to rejoin Leonora.

Leonora. She was like no lady I have ever met before or since. She was seventeen, convent-bred, small-boned and fragile with one leg slightly askew so that she limped when walking. She had a rather sallow skin, dark hair and eyes, and no one would ever have called her a beauty. But the moment I saw her I knew that even though I might live a dozen lives, and even though worlds might burn and mad Prussian emperors storm across continents, I would never feel the same about anyone ever again.

Astonishingly, the convent years had not quenched Leonora's natural
joie de vivre.
Despite her sheltered life and the nuns' teaching, she took to the life of burgling as smoothly as silk. She took to love-making with the same delight as well. In my defence, I did try to fight that temptation, but one night, somewhere on the borders of Holland, Leonora metamorphosed from obedient waif into beckoning sprite. Like the fantasy play
Love in a Dutch Garden
, which I saw at the beginning of the war, a harlequin moon lay against midnight skies, and violet twilight enveloped the old rose gardens of a wayside inn. Nightingales even sang outside our windows. And no man is an angel all the time, and certainly not in such a setting. On that night, like Scaramel in the play, I was tempted and I yielded.

Afterwards, with the Kaiser's crazed stranglehold tightening on Europe, I left Leonora in Holland, in a comfortable, safe guest house with comfortable, safe people, and made my way back into Germany to gather more material for war articles.

If only I had not done so.

I have to be honest and say the first escape attempt from Holzminden was never intended to include Stephen Gilmore. I thought his mind was too fragile for him to cope and for me to trust him. But somehow he became involved, and it was as easy to abstract two German officers' uniforms for the attempt as one. And he was Leonora's cousin … So I took the risk.

On my own I might have succeeded. I might have talked my way through the guards – my German was very good by then – but Stephen, fearful and damaged, drew attention to our ploy, and found himself surrounded by armed guards. In desperate panic, he snatched a gun from them, although God alone knows how he managed that, and retreated into the gatehouse.

It was certain he would have been shot – all the camps had orders to fire on escaping prisoners – and the guards were already taking aim. From where I stood, held by two of them (but not very firmly), the only thing I could think of was to create a diversion. No one seemed to have realized that I, too, had a gun – a Luger pistol which had been with the stolen German uniform, and which was more or less hidden in the belt. There are times in life when you have to take risks, and I took one then. I fired the pistol, not particularly aiming at anyone. The fact that it hit one of the senior officers – actually the camp commandant's repulsive brother – was unintentional and disastrous. Everyone assumed that Stephen, cornered and panic-stricken, still in possession of the gun, had fired the shot. No one noticed when I kicked the Luger into a corner of the courtyard, because everyone was running around shouting orders. The commandant flew into a rage, I was hauled off to the cells, Stephen was dragged out of the gatehouse, and we were both sentenced to death – I for the escape attempt and impersonating a German officer, and Stephen for the same crime, along with the attempted murder of Heinrich Niemeyer.

To have confessed I had fired that shot at Heinrich would not have made matters any better. We would still have been executed. That was when I knew I had to get Stephen out of Holzminden and back to England.

Somehow I did it. I drugged some of the guards and bribed the others (there are times when having been a successful burglar is very useful), and we got out. I am not providing any more details, because I intend to write my memoirs, and I am not giving away the facts here. Suffice it to say we escaped, and I got both of us into Holland, to where Leonora was living.

I do not feel it to be any part of this statement to describe my reunion with Leonora; I shall say only it was a night to make the gods sing and the poets weep with joy.

The next day, by fair means and foul, by hedge and by stile, and despite the vagaries of the ferry system, the three of us reached England and this house.

We should have been safe here. How could I know that Karl Niemeyer – as mean and brutal a man as ever walked God's earth – would send his men to hunt us down all the way to Norfolk and Fosse House?

Michael leaned back for a moment, then turned to look at Nell.

‘I think we're about to find out what happened,' he said. ‘Are you sure you want to know?'

‘Yes. I met Iskander while I was chasing Hugbert,' she said. ‘And I rather like him. He was a rogue, wasn't he, but he had quite a lot of – well, of what he'd probably call honourable feelings. Let's go on.'

‘Onwards and upwards,' said Michael, turning to the next page.

We had almost a week of relative peace at Fosse House. Stephen prowled around the rooms, occasionally venturing into the gardens, I made a start on my memoirs, using the library as my study, and between times Leonora and I—

Well, there is a walled garden here, and it is like a secret garden from a children's fairy story. Each afternoon Leonora and I went into that garden, and there was only the scent of the apples from the old trees overhead, and the feel of the soft moss beneath. No one disturbed us. No one knew we were there. We did not care that it was a cold English autumn – we hardly noticed.

When I met Stephen in the camp in Germany, he talked about wanting to see again the lamps burning in the windows of his home. It was an image he clung to. Tonight, in the drawing room at the front of Fosse House, I have lit those lamps for Leonora.

Earlier this afternoon I took a long walk. Stephen thought I was exploring the area, but of course I was reconnoitring the terrain. There aren't many large houses hereabouts, but there are some, and the coffers needed replenishing if Leonora and I were to make any kind of living—

I returned to Fosse House two hours ago. Twilight was falling – it's an odd kind of light, the English twilight. Smoky and strange. Walking up the drive, I had the feeling that something was near to me – something friendly and inquisitive, and that if I knew how or where to look, I should see it. Writing this, I've had the same feeling – as if there's something (someone?) wanting to see into the room, curious about what I'm writing.

As I came along the drive I liked thinking how Leonora would be waiting for me – and Stephen too, of course – and how we would make a meal for ourselves in the big old kitchen, and then eat it in the dining room with the windows overlooking the gardens. I am perfectly prepared to eat in a kitchen, in fact I have had some extremely pleasant encounters in kitchens, but if there is a comfortable dining room, with a polished table and silver cutlery, I will choose that every time. Even if it means helping with the washing up afterwards.

Approaching the house, I became aware of something wrong. At first it was only a feeling, but then it was more definite. Sounds. Movements. They were confused at first, but gradually they coalesced into stealthy footsteps and low murmuring voices. Then, clearly and sharply, a voice called Leonora's name, and the desperation and anguish in the voice cut through the dusk like a sword. I stopped, listening intently, and when the cry came a second time I knew it was from the gardens behind the house. I ran forward, making for the narrow path at the house's side. It's almost enclosed by trees and shrubs, and rather dark and narrow.