When Last I Died (13 page)

"How long had you been in the new house when Bella Foxley came to stay with you?"

"Well, she came almost at once; that is, once the funeral was over. Tom and I did not stay for that. Then we heard about the will, and when we knew that poor Aunt Flora had left the house and furniture to Eliza, it was difficult, I thought, for Bella to remain. She ought to have gone back to the Home, of course, to work out her notice...."

"Ah, yes," said Mrs. Bradley. "She gave in her notice before Aunt Flora's death, I believe."

"Yes, I suppose she must have done, to get in the complete month." She paused. Then she exclaimed, "But that's a proof, surely, of what I've been saying! She
did
kill poor Aunt! She must have had it all planned before she went down there! Wicked, wicked thing! Didn't I tell you!"

Mrs. Bradley did not take up the challenge. She merely remarked that Bella hated the work she had been doing, and to this Muriel agreed.

"I suppose another post of the kind she had held would be comparatively easy to find," Mrs. Bradley added; but Muriel could offer no opinion on this.

"At any rate," she said, "she had no home to go to, and she said she felt bad, after Aunt's death and the funeral and everything, so we agreed to put her up, although we didn't really want to; but she kept hinting and hinting, in the way relations do, and in the end we felt we had to invite her, especially as she had found the house for us, and had visited us before.

"She was very good about everything, I must say. She paid well for her board and lodging, and I shouldn't have minded keeping her on for a month or two if it hadn't been for the way the house behaved."

"The way it behaved?" said Mrs. Bradley, intrigued.

"Oh, yes. It was dreadful. Not only frightening but dangerous. Things thrown about and furniture upset, and people creeping about in slippers after dark. It terrified me so much that I had to leave, and Bella was frightened, too, and she came with me. But Tom wouldn't leave—he said it was the most interesting house he had ever known. He researched, you know, in such things, and wrote books and articles. It didn't pay very well. We were always rather hard up. Still, the rents for those sort of houses are always very low, so we hadn't the usual expenses, and my poor Tom was very, very happy."

She paused again, looking sadly back at the difficult but, seen in retrospect, desirable, happy past.

Revenge, thought Mrs. Bradley, might appease whatever strife was hidden behind that weak, anxious and, if one had to admit it, rather peevish little face.

"I thought," she said aloud, "that Bella did return to the Institution for a time?"

"Only to get her things. She stayed one night, that's all— or was it the week-end? It's so long ago now, and what happened later was so awful, that I really don't remember every little thing."

"I think it must have been the week-end," said Mrs. Bradley, thinking of the diary—although, as she immediately admitted to herself, it would have been easy enough for Bella to have transferred the episode of the boy Jones and the foreign bodies in the food from the time when it had really happened to the date on which it was chronicled in the diary. She was greatly intrigued by the diary. Its frankness, lies, evasions, and inventions made up such a curiously unintelligible whole.

"Did you see the two boys whom the police interviewed in your village?" she inquired.

"Boys?" said Muriel. "I don't remember any boys." Yet her colour rose as she spoke.

"Two boys had escaped from the Home at which Bella Foxley was employed, and at one point it was thought that the police had found them in that village."

"Oh?" Muriel looked thoroughly alarmed. "Oh, really? I never heard anything about it. How funny—how curious, I mean. No, I had no idea——"

"Naturally," said Mrs. Bradley, as one dismissing the subject. "I suppose there is no complete and exact record of the happenings in the haunted house, by the way?"

"Record? ... Oh, yes, of course there is! But ... oh, well, you could see it, I suppose. There is a typed copy somewhere, but I don't know where it went. The psychic people—the Society, you know—had one copy, and then there was a carbon. The copy I've got is in Tom's own handwriting, and I don't know whether I ought to lend it. Besides—forgive me; I don't mean to be rude, and I can see you take a real interest—I mean, not just curiosity and all that—but what are you trying to do? Even if it could be proved that Bella did push Tom out of the window, it wouldn't help. She's dead. She committed suicide, and, as I say to people (when I mention the subject at all) if that wasn't a confession, what could be?"

"I see," said Mrs. Bradley, "and I know I'm tiresome. But if I could just see the entries about the hauntings I should feel so very grateful."

"Well—all right, then," said Muriel, "but I can't let you take it away."

"It is very kind of you to let me see it at all," said Mrs. Bradley. "Is it a complete record?"

"You'll see that it goes right up to about—well, when Tom fell the first time."

She went over to the writing desk in the corner, rummaged, and brought out a stiff-covered exercise book containing perhaps a hundred pages of thick, blue-ruled paper. She looked at it, turned the pages; then thrust it back into the drawer.

"I've remembered where the typed copy is," she said. She took the cushions off an armchair and removed a brown-paper package.

"Here you are," she said. About forty sheets had been used, and Mrs. Bradley read them carefully. Then she turned to the last page. Upon this a summary of the hauntings had been worked out, dated and timed.

"I should be glad to be allowed to make a copy of this summary," she said. "It may be extremely important."

"Important for what?" inquired Muriel. Mrs. Bradley, making rapid hieroglyphics in her notebook, did not reply. When she had finished she read through all the entries once more before she put the typescript together and handed it over. It tallied pretty well with the diary.

Muriel put it into the desk, and came back to the hearth.

"He was murdered," she said. "Blackmail."

"I know," said Mrs. Bradley. "Just one more point. You knew of this haunted house, how long before your husband's aunt died?"

" About a month."

"As long as that? By the end of December?"

"Yes. It must have been as long as that, because we had to give a month's notice where we were. That was in the haunted flat in Plasmon Street."

"Yes, I see. That seems quite clear. It's been very good indeed of you, Mrs. Turney, to talk to me like this, and I am interested—more than I can tell you—in your story."

"Well," said Muriel, rising with the guest, "won't you stay and have a cup of tea or something? I'm sure it's been really nice to have a chat with somebody about it. But nothing can bring Tom back. Still, it's very kind of you to take an interest. I am ever so glad you called."

Mrs. Bradley was glad, too. Dimly she was beginning to see quite a number of things, all of them interesting; some astonishingly so.

"Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust; And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie."

R
ALEIGH
.

MRS. BRADLEY'S application for permission to hold séances in the house at which Cousin Tom had met his death was granted by Miss Foxley, and the séances were duly held. They were not conducted by Mrs. Bradley, although she was an interested participant.

She went twice to the house before the first séance, and contrived to dispense with the services of the caretaker as guide.

"Just as you like, mum," he said, when she pointed out that his voice and familiar tread did not give the spirits, if there were any, a chance, "although I didn't think, when I first had the pleasure of showing you round, as you was one of them fakers."

"One of those what?" said Mrs. Bradley.

"Well, you've heard of poodle-fakers, haven't you? I calls these here ghost-hunters spirit-fakers."

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Bradley. "A spirit-faker, in the full technical sense of the term, is a person who fakes, or manufactures, spirits for the purpose of deceiving the earnest seeker after psychical phenomena."

"Oh, ah," said the old man, deflated. He handed her the keys. "No good me telling you which is for which door. You'd never remember 'em all," he continued. Mrs. Bradley accepted the formidable bunch.

"I shall proceed according to the method of trial and error," she said. Lugubriously the old man watched her approach the drawing-room, and then he shuffled away to his dinner.

Mrs. Bradley had chosen her time carefully. She had discovered the hour at which the custodian dined, and the average amount of time he spent over his meal. She knew that she had approximately two hours at her disposal. It was her intention to make a thorough examination of the house and to repeat this examination, if she thought it necessary, once more before the first séance was held. She had arranged that this séance should be held after dark, and had rented the house for the twenty-four hours beginning at ten in the morning.

She did not go into the drawing-room until the caretaker was out of sight. Then she unlocked it and went straight across to the window. It was in front of this window that the body of Cousin Tom must have fallen. Taking a folding ruler from her skirt-pocket, she measured the height of the room. She had already formed a mental estimate of the height of the bedroom window-sill from the ground, and her measurements showed the drawing-room ceiling to be twelve feet high.

She wanted to go upstairs and measure the height of the bedroom from which Cousin Tom had fallen, and prove to her own satisfaction that, allowing for flooring, there was no secret cavity between the rooms. She was trying to account for the
poltergeist.

If, as she supposed, the phenomena were not genuine, then it was necessary to discover some hiding place from which the perpetrator of what had turned out to be a very grim joke could have emerged and to which he could have returned whilst 'haunting' the house.

There was the possibility, of course, that the phenomena might be genuine, and this point she did not overlook. Nevertheless, in as much of the literature relating to
poltergeist
activity as she had been able to procure, there seemed no evidence of anything beyond mischief and a certain amount of childish spite behind the
poltergeist
manifestations. Murder, for instance, seemed quite outside the scope of
poltergeist
behaviourism, and she had not the slightest hesitation in accepting, as a working hypothesis, Mrs. Muriel Turney's conviction that Cousin Tom had met with foul play.

The house itself, as she had realised upon her first visit and in spite of the somewhat irritating presence of the old man, was a most extraordinary place. Stone-built in the most hideous and uncompromising style of the middle of the nineteenth century, it retained evidence of having been erected on the site of a very much older building, for in some respects it adhered to the Elizabethan ground-plan upon which an earlier house had been built.

Of all the picturesque features of its foundation, however, it retained nothing but some panelling by the side of an obviously reconstructed fireplace in the dining-room.

The windows were large and rectangular, and opened up and down by means of sashcords, some of which were in need of replacement. The staircases were narrow and Victorian, even the front one. On the servants' staircase there was not room for two people to pass.

It was a cheerless house; sinisterly cheerless, for the bright sunshine streamed in through the windows, particularly of the drawing-room, which faced south, and of the bedroom immediately above it, and yet a kind of spiritual dankness seemed to permeate every part of the building.

Mrs. Bradley was particularly free from morbid fears and nervous fancies, but she would not have been in the least surprised, she felt, as she went from room to room, tapping, pacing and measuring, to turn round and find the ghost of Cousin Tom, of Bella Foxley, or even of Aunt Flora, standing in the doorway watching her. As for the front stairs, she stood quite two minutes in the bare and chilly hall looking at them before she could bring herself to mount.

Once on the first floor, however, she shook off this irrational sensation, and explored as fully and measured as carefully as she had done down below.

In connection with the alleged activities of the
poltergeist
she did establish one thing. That was that the contents of the bedroom from which (or in which) Cousin Tom had met his death could be shot over the banisters into the hall without trouble, and that anybody decanting furniture, ornaments or anything else portable into the well provided by the turn of the stairs, would have ample time to escape before the investigators could catch him. As for the sound of his footsteps, that, to a convinced ghost-hunter, would not necessarily convey any doubts.
Poltergeists
can be heard to move about, she had read, and, in fact, their footsteps were often audible without anything being visible.

The route taken by a person playing practical jokes or hide-and-seek with a victim would most likely be along the passage to the bathroom, she deduced. This passage, unlighted for about half a dozen yards beyond the bedroom door, proceeded, under a square-topped archway and down one step, to a fairly large bathroom and to the back stairs. These stairs led down to the kitchen and up to the attics, and were lighted at the top by a large window which overlooked the almost enclosed courtyard. This window, oddly enough, could be closed by shutters on the inside of the glass.

The bathroom door opened on the right of the passage, at the end of which was another bedroom which overlooked the garden. There was a rather similar passage at the opposite end of the landing, but on this side there was no bathroom, and the bedrooms were considerably smaller.

There was one item of particular interest which she had overlooked on her previous visits. This was that a small room, apparently a dressing-room, opened off the side of what, to herself, she called Cousin Tom's room, but the communicating-door had been papered over, so that, at a casual glance, it was unlikely that the fact that it was not quite flush with the rest of the wall would be apparent.

She went over and examined it again when she had explored the bathroom passage to its end. The job of disguising the doorway had been so well done that it almost seemed as though deliberate thought had been given to the possibility of hiding it. She ran her finger round the opening, being very careful not to press hard enough to break the wall-paper, and then went into the adjoining room to study the doorway from that side. The same neat, careful job had been made, and she now noted more particularly a fact which had struck her before—that the opening from the passage leading into this smaller room was not, and never had been, a doorway in which to hang a door— it was merely an arch which had been formed by removing bricks from the passage wall.

Whether these alterations had any sinister implication still had to be discovered. She noted them, and passed on. The attics, which she thought might repay inspection, proved disappointing in that they were entirely empty. Whatever lumber the house might once have harboured was not now on this top floor. She inspected the boards closely. They were dusty, but not unduly so, and she supposed that these rooms, in common with the other parts of the house to which the public were not usually admitted, received attention at intervals from the caretaker and his daughter. There was an absence of cobwebs which suggested that the last cleaning of the attics had been of fairly recent date.

She walked over to the window in each room and looked out, but beyond an extended view of the country around the house, the windows had nothing to offer. She tested the catches. They were rusty, and it did not seem as though the windows could have been opened for some considerable time, certainly not when the rooms had last been cleaned.

The attics did not cover the whole of the floor beneath, but belonged, it seemed, to the older part of the present structure, for the rooms on the opposite side of the house had no attics built over them. The lower roofs could be seen from two of the attic windows. The courtyard could not be seen from any of the upstair windows except the shuttered window on the stairs.

She was about to descend the narrow stairs when she noticed what seemed to be ventilation holes in the partition wall at the top of the staircase. When the attic doors were shut this partition wall was in darkness. She looked back, and saw that one of the doors which she believed she had shut and locked was swinging slowly open.

With a feeling more of interest than of anything approaching alarm, she went back to find out what had happened. She had not anticipated anything in the way of a supernatural occurrence, but she was relieved, all the same, to discover that the trouble was due to a defective lock and did not emanate from the realm of the spirits.

She pushed the door wide open, and went back to examine the air-holes. It was now obvious that they ventilated a large cupboard, or small, unlighted room, on the opposite side of the passage. The door of it had been papered over to match the rest of the decorations of the attic corridor, and again, like the door into the dressing-room on the floor below, would, in the ordinary-way, pass unnoticed. She traced the outline of the door beneath the paper, closed the attic door again, and this time, fastened it securely, and then, with some part of her theory if not proved, at any rate capable of proof, she returned to the first floor and made an exhaustive search.

Nothing further was to be discovered there, however, and she spent the next three-quarters of an hour in checking the plan of the house which formed the only illustration to the little guidebook she had purchased on her previous visit, and in preparing a sketch-plan of her own on which she marked the door with the faulty lock, the position of the two attic cupboards, the blocked-up and papered-over communicating door between the largest bedroom, and the window with the inside shutters and the dressing-room at the top of the stairs.

Her next objective was the courtyard. This was a rectangular strip of garden which had been made almost into a quadrangle by the addition of the newest wing. It was overgrown with tall weeds, the willow-herb flourishing particularly. There was a well at one corner, close to the scullery door. A couple of boards formed the cover. She removed them, peered into the well and then replaced the boards.

Although it was broad daylight, the courtyard looked eerie and desolate. It was silent, too, and the surrounding buildings seemed to shut out the sun. It was curious, she thought, that none of the windows, even of the new buildings, overlooked it. It seemed chilly out there. Mrs. Bradley made a careful exploration, even parting continually the long weeds to make certain that the surface of the courtyard was everywhere the same. This examination yielded nothing.

She left the house before the caretaker returned to it. Then, later in the afternoon, she sought him out, and asked him one or two trivial questions before she put to him the important query suggested by her visit.

"What has become of the well-cover, I wonder?" she said, in the most casual tone she could command.

"Well-cover? It was covered with two planks last time
I
were here," he responded stupidly. "What do you mean about a well-cover?"

"I shouldn't have thought two planks would have been sufficient to cover so deep a well, and one which has the opening level with the ground," replied Mrs. Bradley. "But, of course, it's no business of mine. One thing, I see that you are able to keep the flap of the cellar staircase screwed down. That's something."

"If any of the visitors brings children, I keeps my eye on things," said the old man. "Anyway, this yere courtyard beant on the reg'lar routine. Nothing to see out here. I've give up most of the garden, too, I 'ave. Just keep the front a bit tidy. I thought maybe some of them it belonged to might pay a jobbing gardener to come in now and again. It's a mort of work for an old fellow like me, and I can't keep upsides with it nohow. Barring the little wife of that poor gentleman as was killed, and she only come the once, I don't believe anybody's took that much interest in doing a bit of spade-work. Seems a shame, like, don't it?"

Mrs. Bradley emphatically dissented from this view, but she did not say so. As soon as she left the haunted house this time she went back to Miss Biddle.

"I'm becoming a nuisance," she remarked, "but there is one thing I want to know, and I don't know of anybody else who can help me. These screamings and knockings that seem to have been heard before the death of Mr. Tom Turney ...?"

"I'never heard them myself," Miss Biddle confessed, "but I know who did, and that's my daily woman. But weren't they heard
after
the death?"

"What kind of witness would she make? I mean, is she the kind to exaggerate what she heard?"

"Oh, yes, certainly. On the other hand, she certainly did hear something. I put down in my commonplace book what she said at the time, and I attach importance to it because it was the first that anybody heard, it seems, of that part of the hauntings, so that it could not have been the result of hearsay, or owing anything to village gossip."