Ghost Song

by Rayne, Sarah

  But as far as they could discover, no one had had any motive for killing Anna. No one had benefited financially by her death—her share in the trust fund left by the dead mother would go back into the pot. Mrs Seymour would benefit by that of course, but it was clear that the police did not really think Margaret Seymour had murdered her sister and walled up her body for the sake of an extra bit of money in a trust fund.

  So they would see if they could trace any of her London friends, said the inspector, although after all this time it might be difficult and there were things in people’s lives that they might not want dragging into the light of day.

  ‘What kind of things?’ said Mother, bewildered.

  Well, jealous lovers or slighted wives, said the inspector apologetically. As for the macabre tomb itself—was Mrs Seymour absolutely sure there had been no kind of disturbance at Grith House around four years ago? Had the family been away during that year, perhaps? Or had any workmen been in? Builders, drainage people? Because you could not, said the inspector, apparently without irony, brick somebody up behind a wall in five minutes and you could not do it without a fair amount of disruption either.

  Mother said, ‘Yes, we did go away four years ago. We often did at my daughter’s autumn half term. It’s a nice time of year for a little holiday. No crowds. My father hardly ever came with us, but I think he did that year.’

  ‘Ah. And where exactly…’

  ‘We always stayed at a little bed and breakfast place in Whitby. I can let you have the address: I dare say they’d confirm it. We haven’t been for about three years—certainly not since my father died—but if it’s still the same people they’d remember.’ She did not say that Grandfather had decided there was no need for these holidays and their own home was good enough for them.

  ‘But you did go to this Whitby place four years ago? With your father and your daughter?’

  ‘Yes. I could probably check the exact year but I’m sure it was four years ago.’

  ‘That means the house would have been empty while you were away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would anyone come in during that time? Had anyone a key?’

  ‘One of the Cheesewright sisters would have come up one of the days, just to make sure everything was all right. They help with the cleaning and cooking. They have a key.’

  ‘But no one else? No workmen?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  The inspector and his sergeant exchanged a look, and it was immediately clear to Shona—she supposed it was clear to her mother and Elspeth as well—that the police were deciding the killing and the walling up had been done while they were all at Whitby: perhaps that Anna had returned to Moil unknown to her family, and had had someone with her who had killed her and then hidden the body. It was a pretty far-fetched thing to have happened, but then the whole situation was far-fetched.

  The Cheesewrights were surprised that Shona did not remember her mother’s sister. ‘Your aunt,’ said Edna Cheesewright. ‘You must remember her. Very lively, she was.’

  ‘A pretty girl,’ put in Mona.

  ‘A bit artificial, of course. All that make-up she’d put on her face.’

  ‘And slimming all the time so she’d have a good figure for all the modelling and photographing she got paid for. Cottage cheese, that was what she ate—sloppy tasteless muck. And she’d have that stuff like chopped-up straw for breakfast instead of a proper Christian plate of bacon and eggs. Muesli or some such she called it.’

  ‘No one else ever touched it,’ put in Edna.

  ‘I should think not, it looked like bird food.’

  ‘Your aunt was a one for the men as well, the little madam,’ said Edna. ‘But there, we won’t speak ill of the dead.’

  ‘Indeed we won’t. But don’t you remember her at all, Shona? She’d take you out many a time, and go to all your school concerts. You’d have been seven—maybe eight when she went away.’

  ‘When we thought she went away,’ corrected Edna. But Shona had no memory of this pretty lively aunt who had apparently liked make-up and bright lights and men, and been careful of her figure for the modelling work. And whom everyone believed had gone to London, but had turned up behind a wall in Grith’s cellar twenty-four hours earlier and had been part of an old nightmare.

  ‘Just imagine,’ said Edna, ‘we all thought she was in London all these years, but all the time Anna Ross never left Grith.’

  Anna Ross. Anna. As soon as she heard the name, it seared through Shona’s brain like a white-hot knife.

  Anna was no longer a shadow in the mirror or a whispering voice in the dark, she was a real person—she had been Mother’s sister—and she had been here all along, standing behind that wall. ‘You must never go into the cellar,’ her mother had always said, and her grandfather had locked the door and pulled the screen across it so people would forget the door was there.

  Shona wanted to ask her mother about what she had seen that night four years ago, but she did not dare. Over the last couple of years Mother had developed a way of staring coldly at people if she did not like what they said: she quite often stared at Shona in this way and Shona hated it. But what would be far worse than Mother’s frosty stare was if Mother confessed to being a murderess. Was that possible? Might she say, ‘Yes, your grandfather and I killed Anna four years ago and bricked up her body in the cellar so no one would know. Your grandfather said she was wicked and immoral so we punished her.’

  Shona thought she could just about cope with having an aunt who had been murdered, but she was not sure if she could cope with having a mother and a grandfather who had done the murdering. The plan she had always had to one day leave Grith House suddenly seemed more important than ever. She had thought Elspeth was stupid when she talked about locking bedroom doors, but now Shona took to locking her own bedroom door every night, and to be careful never to be on her own with her mother, unless Elspeth or one of the Cheesewrights was within shouting distance.

  But the thing she found most puzzling of all—the thing she did not dare mention to anyone—was why, if Anna had died when Shona was eight years old, she had no memory of her.

  But you do have a memory, said Anna’s voice. It’s only that it’s buried right down at the very deepest part of your mind. It’s a bad memory, Shona, the worst memory of all…

  The worst memory of all. Something that must never be allowed to thrust its way into the light. Never … Shona did not dare look at this deep memory, but she knew it was there. Anna knew as well.

  It was after this that Anna started to get into Shona’s dreams. This was far worse than the shadowy shape in the mirror or the whispering voice, because in the dreams Anna screamed and writhed in agony behind a brick wall, begging to be let out. Several times Shona woke from these dreams crying and terrified, and her mother came to see what was wrong. The nightmare could not be told, of course, so Shona mumbled something about monsters and being chased. Mother said there was nothing to worry about; she would fetch a nice soothing hot drink from the kitchen. Everyone had nightmares at times, she said, and Shona would grow out of them.

  But Shona did not grow out of them. At times they went away—for weeks and even months on end, and then, just as Shona was thinking they had finally stopped altogether, they would start again. Sometimes they came three or four times a night. When, years later, she came to London she thought the dreams would stay behind at Grith, but they followed her, like the spiteful ghosts they were.

  Shona hated the nightmares, and now she was grown up with a proper life and a smart job with the Harlequin Society, she found them vaguely shameful. ‘It’s a child’s thing to have nightmares,’ she said to her GP, when a particularly bad bout finally drove her to seek help. ‘Not something for an adult.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘But to have them night after night,’ said Shona, who was tired and jumpy and headachy, and fed up with not being able to concentrate properly on her work.

  ‘Yes, that is perhaps
more unusual. Have you thought about talking to someone—no, I don’t mean a psychiatrist, I mean one of our counsellors, to see if there’s anything at the root of them? Sleeping pills would just deal with the effect and I’d rather get at the cause if we could. I see from your notes you’ve only been in London a few months. And you’re very young to be here on your own, as well. Just nineteen. I expect you’re still finding your feet, making new friends, working hard. That’ll mean a certain degree of stress, which won’t help. I could make an appointment with one of our people—they’re very helpful and discreet.’

  ‘I don’t think I will,’ said Shona. ‘Not at the moment, anyway.’ Not ever, she thought. ‘I’d really rather just have a sedative or some sort of sleeping pill for when they get out of hand.’

  He was reluctant, but in the end agreed, emphasizing that she must only take the pills if absolutely necessary. ‘They’re apt to become habit-forming,’ he said. ‘That’s why we tend to fight shy of them for patients.’

  Shona said she understood and promised not to go over the top with them.

  Nor had she. Three or four times a year she had to resort to the pills, but no more than that. A couple of times, returning to the surgery for a repeat of the prescription, the doctor talked again about an appointment with a counsellor, but Shona always declined. The second time he did this, she switched to a different surgery. Nearer her place of work, she said, when asked the reason for the change. It would be easier for her to get there. She did not say she disliked the searching way the doctor looked at her. The new set-up was a big impersonal health centre, where she hardly ever saw the same doctor twice and where no one talked about underlying causes or finding the root of the nightmares.

  She continued to be strict about taking the pills because she did not want to draw attention to herself by repeating the prescription too often, but on the night before she and Hilary were to drive to Somerset to meet Madeleine Ferrelyn, she woke abruptly at three a.m., with her heart pounding and a feeling of dizziness.

  It had been the familiar nightmare of screaming from behind the brick wall, of course, and Shona finally struggled out of sleep with the screams still echoing in her head. As she woke up to her familiar bedroom her heart was pounding and her head felt dislocated, as if something had wrenched it in two then put it back together, but had not quite lined up the two halves. She listened to see if Anna’s hateful whispery voice was in her mind, but it was not. Anna liked to keep her guessing about that: she could be silent for weeks—even months—then just as Shona was starting to think she had gone for good, she returned.

  Shona got up to make a cup of tea, which she drank looking out of the big window with the view of the old wharf. Even at this hour there were people about which she found comforting.

  After she had finished the tea she got out road maps and spent fifteen minutes or so studying the route they would take to reach Fosse Leigh and Madeleine Ferrelyn. It did not look like a very long journey.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  June 1914

  THE JOURNEY TO Bosnia and Sarajevo was going to be a very long one indeed, and from what Sonja Kaplen had said, it sounded as if it might be a rather uncomfortable one as well. Toby contemplated the prospect with mixed feelings.

  He had mentioned casually to his mother that he was thinking of running over to Paris while the theatre was being spruced up during June. Just a week or two with Frank and old Bunstable, he said, hoping a week or two would be sufficient duration for Tranz’s expedition. They wanted to get a bit of local colour for a musical comedy sketch Frank had in mind, said Toby, and when his mother expressed interest and enthusiasm, he felt like the lowest worm in creation. He felt even worse when he realized he would have to drag in Frank and Bunstable and ask them to keep out of circulation.

  I’m hating this, thought Toby. I’m sprinkling enough lies round to make me feel like Ananias and I’m spinning enough deceptions to rival Judas, but I can probably tell them the truth when I get back. And part of him was starting to feel excited about what was ahead. He had never done anything like this before, and the farthest he had travelled was to France on a couple of occasions, and Italy on another.

  Three days after he had attended Tranz’s meeting with Alicia, Toby was summoned to a restaurant in Soho. He had expected this; he had thought Tranz’s people would want to meet him properly before including him in the protest party, but he was rather pleased that it was Sonja who brought the message. She delivered it to the Tarleton where, as luck would have it, Toby was rehearsing. He broke off and persuaded her to come into the green room, routing out Bob Shilling to make tea for them.

  Sonja seemed to like the theatre; she asked about the inscription over the stage door. ‘Something about pleasing everyone, isn’t it?’

  ‘Please one and please all, be they great, be they small,’ said Toby. ‘It’s attributed to Richard Tarleton—the man this place is named for. He was a sixteenth-century clown actor, and a genius at writing and performing what they called very long humorous songs. Not much different from what we do here today. It always delights me to have those words there, although I don’t know who actually ordered the engraving. I’m only recently finding out how little I do know about the Tarleton. Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes, very much.’

  ‘I haven’t shown you all of it—some of it’s a bit dark and spooky.’

  ‘I should think it would have to be. It’s quite an old building, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, very. There’s an underground room I used to think was haunted. I went down there when I was about five and frightened myself half to death. I was convinced someone was staring at me from dark corners.’ Toby had no idea he had been going to say this and was rather annoyed with himself for having done so. She’ll think you’re the worst kind of idiot, he thought.

  But Sonja looked at him thoughtfully, and said, ‘All really old buildings hold some kind of atmosphere, don’t they? Sometimes it’s good and happy, but if something bad has happened in a building it can hold that badness. And some people are more sensitive to that kind of thing than others.’

  Toby said, ‘As an explanation for ghosts, that’s masterly.’

  ‘Have you actually got a ghost?’

  ‘Certainly we have a ghost. No self-respecting theatre would be without one. But he was never especially frightening and he hasn’t been seen for years, so we think he’s probably moved on to more profitable haunting grounds. In here’s the green room. I’m afraid it’s dreadfully messy but no one ever has time to tidy it up.’

  But Sonja clearly liked the green room’s comfortable untidiness and the casual way in which performers and stage staff wandered around. Bunstable had brought in his evening’s supply of kippers and had placed them on a cool section of windowsill to keep fresh. Encountering objections, he pointed out that they were well wrapped up, promised not to toast them over the gas fire again, and settled down tranquilly with a copy of the Evening News.

  A Rose Romain dancer came in, searching for green cotton thread with which to darn Elise Le Brun’s tights, because Elise could not be doing with holes in her tights when on stage and wanted them by six sharp. A double-act who tap-danced and sang banged the door crossly against the wall and demanded to know if Mr Chance had realized their names were spelt wrong on the poster outside, and more to the point did he or anybody else care, and really, dear, what was the sodding point of appearing in a theatre that couldn’t even get your name right, excuse our French, miss.

  Toby told Bunstable to take his kippers to Bob Shilling’s room where the majority of the company would not have to endure the smell as well as the plaintive miaows of Codling the theatre cat who would trade his soul for a kipper, and suggested to the Rose Romain dancer that Le Brun be told to darn her own tights. He politely asked the tap-dance act how they were spelling their name that week, because as far as he could make out it changed according to the seasons or whether there was an R in the month.

  ‘What nationality ar
e they?’ asked Sonja when the aggrieved tap-dancers had taken themselves off. ‘Mexican or something like that?’

  ‘Golders Green, undiluted,’ said Toby, straight-faced, and Sonja laughed.

  ‘You’re quite strict with them all, aren’t you?’

  ‘I have to be or they’d be like a rabble of badly behaved children. Fortunately they all have an immense respect for my mother, who was very successful at this theatre, so for most of them I’ve got a bit of her authority.’

  ‘But you also hold them in considerable affection, I think.’

  ‘That’s rather astute of you,’ said Toby. ‘Yes, I do. Not many people outside the theatre see that. Most people only see what’s on the surface.’

  ‘What’s under the surface?’

  ‘A sort of fellowship, I suppose. We understand one other—there might be all kinds of feuds and bitching, with people stealing jokes or songs or lovers, but we all go through the same agonies and the same doubts and panics. It doesn’t matter if you’re a song and dance act or a juggler or if you train performing seals to jump through hoops. When you stand in the wings waiting for your call, the stage fright’s the same for everyone and that creates a tremendous bond.’

  ‘Yes, I see that.’

  ‘Would you like to come to tomorrow night’s show? I’ve got a new song and I’m quite pleased with it.’ They were going to use the Cinderella scullery backcloth again, but Rinaldi had had the fireplace painted out and a few gargoyles and cobwebs painted in to create a haunted-house look. He was a marvel with paint and a brush. ‘I’ll get you a box all to yourself and take you to supper afterwards,’ said Toby.