by Guy Sheppard
‘ “So what did ‘she’ do to make you feel so threatened?” asked Philip.
‘ “She demanded to know by what right I thought I could harm her sweetheart so cruelly?”
‘ “Doesn’t mean you did anything to her.”
‘ “She spoke to me plainly enough: “Sir, did you not bind yourself to me by all the obligations of nature, duty and oath and still you would hurte him which I treasure moste?”
‘ “Best leave him,” I said, “he’s still in a state of shock.”
‘ “Peter’s right, old chap,” agreed George. “He needs to rest. Those rat bites look nasty.”
‘It took all three of us to lift him to his feet and steer him back to the bungalow. There we sat him down at his dining room table. Still he refused to unclasp his bloody fingers.
‘With great reluctance, Philip followed us back down the track to Coberley Hall.
‘ “What a loser! Kill a fiend is what he said, but he was just full of pathetic excuses.” ’
*
I looked Peter in the eye.
‘The thing is, I’m still at a loss…’
My enthusiastic raconteur watched hot ash fall from his cigarette while his hand tried not to tremble. As did mine.
‘Father O’Connell’s undoing was his obsession with evil, Inspector, I’m damned if it wasn’t. On his shelves was a 1603 edition of Henry Boguet’s Discours des Sorciers. In it was his ‘Examen of Witches’ or instructions on how to recognise those who have renounced ‘God, Baptism and Chrism.’’
‘Doesn’t mean he saw evil where there was none.’
‘You decide, Inspector. We discovered him still sitting at this very table where we had left him, dry drool sealing his lips. He sat bolt upright and was staring blankly into space as if the last thing he’d seen had appeared at that window. He was dead, of course.’
‘Can you, like, remember what the medics said?’
‘It was suggested that the rat bites had poisoned him in a matter of hours, but that’s not the oddest part, Inspector. He sat at this very table with his pen resting on a line in his book of Common Prayer in which he had scribbled a few words: We men are the monsters now.’
*
I took a deep breath and the room smelt doubly awful. For a moment I thought I could detect some mephitic presence from the grave that clung to the rotten wallpaper and moth-eaten carpets, something noisome and poisonous. Of course I knew that a man had it in him to shock himself with his own savagery. Each night, did I not dream such terrors, about myself? But to scare oneself to death?
‘If the rat bites didn’t kill him, what did?’
‘We villagers have a story we sometimes tell to frighten the kids, Inspector. Ever since Countess Lucy starved to death in Coberley Hall, she has continued to curse the house and its lands with her sorrow. She is forever doomed to grieve for the captain she would bring back from the grave until she can find a way to make him feel love again. Take care, Inspector. Through your heart-ache she would restore her lover’s.’
‘I very much doubt that,’ I said irritably.
‘No one has yet proved worthy of her. Instead, their portraits hang unwanted on her wall as poor reminders of her one true soul mate, Captain Digby, cruelly lost in the English Civil War.’
Suddenly Father O’Connell’s remark held new meaning for me: and we shall be changed.
‘Seriously? You think her curse killed the old fool?’
‘What worse affliction is there than to be told that you have lost the love of your life? What sentence of excommunication, profane oath or imprecation is worse than to feel that you have been abandoned not only in this world but the next? How terrible to fear that in the afterlife there can be no love? That night in the barn, Father O’Connell hoped to glorify himself by going to meet some fallen angel, but instead he came face to face with his own demon.’
‘He was heart-broken? Yeah, okay, but for whom did it break?’
‘Did I not say, for the love of the God he had forsaken.’
‘Doesn’t mean I want to hear all about it.’
‘I think you want to hear very well. Last night, Lord Hart didn’t exactly believe that it was his dead brother he saw but, like O’Connell, nothing surpasses the dread and desire that come with the temptation.’
‘You saying that his bruised mind won’t let Philip go, no matter what the abomination that comes through the door?’
‘It’s that or be left alone with nothing.’
‘It comes to something when a man’s grief can be used against him.’
‘Is it not written in scripture, “Thou scarest me with dreams and terrifiest me through visions?” ’
*
I dismissed the tenet of the accusation, if not the words with which I was accused.
‘Yeah. Probably never happened. But you’ve got to admire the local ghost busters, haven’t you?’
Of my own haunting it was as yet impossible to speculate.
‘You can be sure of one thing, Inspector, whatever visited Father O’Connell at his window that fateful night had nothing to do with divine intervention, I’m sure of it. He sat dead in his chair and his eyes were wide with amazement. He was not a good man, I’m damned if he wasn’t. Bigotry was an in-dwelling and attendant spirit which, when freed, turned cruel and malignant. He’d gone into that barn with only one thing in mind. The ugliest bogy man is but the reification of our own worst feeling – our willingness to kill.’
‘A bogy man, eh? That’s a strange name for such a cruel intention.’
‘Imagine if grief, pain or guilt, could detach themselves from us to become a living, walking shadow of what we most regret ever doing? Wouldn’t you feel cursed, Inspector? Wouldn’t that feel like evil? To be able to see yourself pursued by something of yourself?’
‘Sounds positively heretical. But none of this nearly suggests why the curse should bother me. Ever since Lizzie died I have done my utmost to be less and less bound by any feelings for others, have discounted what love I have left, have been that heartless.’
‘What makes you think Lady Lucy doesn’t feel cursed, too?’
*
All that time wasted chatting to Peter, the mist had grown thicker across the fields. I begged a ride home in his battered truck but he wouldn’t hear of it. Instead he waved me a most perfunctory goodbye and drove off with only his dog for company. Somehow he seemed to take it for granted that we had done our best by each other, that from now on we must definitely work together to solve any mystery. I was not so sure. Either way, I had no further immediate use for him.
My lack of gratitude did not mean I was thankless.
Rather, I thanked him to leave my affairs alone.
27
That evening I sat in my room too troubled to write in my ledger. Instead, on my lap lay Lady Lucy’s receipt book. In an entry for 1642 she had recorded how gargling infusions of hedge mustard in a mixture of scented honey might improve her voice, I noticed. Once a man stole a dead woman’s secrets he had it in his power to reveal them to all and sundry. After he decided that her writing was no longer her property alone he could treasure or destroy it quite treacherously in a cold act of betrayal. He could be blind and deaf to her bequest to live again through his own sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. In order to deny life to the dead he had better refuse to respect, love and admire her mortal remains after they had lain so long under the soil. He would do best to be so cruel as to dismiss all his and her feelings, I asked myself?
Otherwise, was I no better than those superstitious villagers who told silly stories of ghosts to their children?
In the air came a faint perfume of dried flowers, either valerian or violet.
‘How hunted and alone you must have been when the enemy stood at your gate ready to burn down your barns and steal your horses,’ I said aloud.
Scribbled elsewhere in the receipt book’s margin was a barely legible afterthought, penned in a great hurry: ‘I fear the provision of corn a
nd malt will not hold out, if this damned war continue. Poor Lady Jordan. They do saye that she hath been quite distracted since the siege of Cirencester and now only plays with dolls.’
Countess Lucy could withstand her own feelings of anxiety but not of greater tragedy.
*
A moment later I heard knocking. At first I ignored the harsh echo of each hollow rap, but not for long the urgency of the raps echoed. Someone stood at the shot-riddled front door downstairs, I realised. I jumped off my bed. There was no denying such a brutal summons at such an hour. Each blow reverberated in rooms all about me until the whole house felt at war.
I descended the staircase in a great hurry.
‘Don’t do it, Colin.’
I stopped dead in the gloomy entrance hall and looked round. Lord Hart sat on a stool, his face lit by a flickering sconce against the wall.
‘You serious?’ I asked, seeing him level his shotgun at me in the candlelight.
‘It’s not who you think it is.’
‘So tell me, how do you know?’
‘Open that door and you’ll get your head blown off.’
He had set aside his dragon cane and held the gun steadily and firmly. Clothed in nautical, light-blue blazer and blue deck shoes, he wore his tinted glasses at the end of his nose. In his perpetually dark world he was a host who liked to dress to impress, but still he refused to draw the bolts on his door.
There was no sign of James or anyone else.
‘Forgive me,’ I said, steel entering my voice. ‘I don’t mean to interfere, but what harm can it do to inquire who it is?’
Despite what I knew of his volatile personality, I was surprised to see a tear roll down his cheek. Not until then did I realise what a mask of make-up he wore.
‘Think of me as not being mens sana in corpore sano, Colin, but that thing out there isn’t someone either of us wants to meet. It certainly isn’t Lizzie. Believe me, it’s your worst possible nightmare. Go ahead, consider yourself sounder in mind and body than me for the moment because you may be right, but you and I have one thing in common at least. We both know what it means to keep faith with the dead.’
I found his remark repulsive but brave. For a man to keep guard like that on such an icy winter’s night he had to be positively reptilian. In order to be that reptilian he had to hold out against all warmth, ardour or affection. In a bid to stay cool, calm and collected under siege he could be no good to anyone else, he could only be his own cold comfort.
Whereupon I turned on my heels and left him to grin and bear it. For at that moment there came a profound silence, a dark stillness, a breathless expectancy. And I, Colin Walker, aware of the fix I was in, conscious of how much I did and did not yet know, but already stricken, placed my hand on my heart to steady its raging pulse, slow its vibrating beat and check its battering-ram blows.
28
‘You see anything, Inspector?’
I shook my head. I could picture separate parts of the scene but not yet the sum total of what I pictured.
‘Fool left the Calor gas on, did he?’
‘Or maybe because he can’t be sure what he did says it all?’
Susan squared her shoulders and swelled her chest. By the dark look she gave me, it was clear that she had already come to a few conclusions of her own.
‘You should have called me sooner,’ I said sternly.
She wiped her work-stained hands with considerable emphasis on her apron. It was half way between acknowledgement and dismissal. We were standing behind the barns at the back of the farmyard opposite Slack’s Cottage.
‘It was a pretty loud bang, Inspector.’
‘Yeah. I mean, what happened to him?’
‘He was in my kitchen eating cakes when it happened.’
‘It literally resembles a war zone.’
I directed my gaze back to the sea of soot and ash at my feet. What had once been a man’s home was now a pathetic, smouldering wreck. It was hardly possible to distinguish between the vehicle’s sloping towing end, where its owner had sat on his sofa watching a TV, from the opposite, squarer one where he had stood doing his washing and cooking. The fire had peeled off the roof like a sardine can and exposed all those clever slots and holes into which the happy caravanner had liked to fold his tables and clothes.
‘He didn’t, like, think to tell me himself?’
‘Too scared, Inspector.’
‘Of me?’
‘Not you, the other one.’
‘Which other one?’
‘Do you even care, Inspector?’
‘Where is Paul Mitchell now?’
Susan shot me a surly glance.
‘He has run off to live with his sister in London.’
‘Because of this other person you mentioned?’
‘Scare someone half out of their wits and you might forget to turn the gas off, too, Inspector.’
*
I gave the caravan a closer examination. Judging by the way the supporting jacks had sunk into the mud the chassis had not moved for years. Our retired tractor driver had holed up here in his old age, out of sight and out of mind until one big boom had blown his little world to kingdom-come.
I unearthed a jerrycan from a patch of blackened grass.
‘This other person have a name, to your knowledge?’
‘Does it matter, Inspector?’
‘H’m, well, yeah, I very much think it might.’
‘All I can say is that somebody came knocking on Paul’s door very recently.’
The can of petrol had no cap and hot fuel had melted its handle like wax, I noted.
‘Do you, by any chance, have the sister’s address?’
Susan took hold of a pitchfork and began to poke about among the wreckage for clues.
‘People say you’re a top detective in London, that they do.’
‘Doesn’t mean I still am.’
‘Now it’s your job, as the new owner of Coberley Hall, to look after your tenants.’
I flipped over a fallen TV satellite disc in disgust with my toe.
‘Most people don’t think I’m fit to look out for anyone any more. They say I’ve broken God’s sacred trust.’
‘Doesn’t mean you can’t be our guardian angel?’
‘Doesn’t mean I should.’
Of my own tentative investigation, it was too soon to make anything at all. Instead, I followed Susan’s gaze to the horizon. High on a hill, beyond the frozen fields, stood an imposing house as yet unknown to me.
‘Someone has to see how one thing leads to the next, Inspector. Someone has to have the eye that discerns everything, the past and the future, the heavens and the Earth, the blessed and the damned. Knowledge is vision. Whoever has that has real power and the rest of us live in fear of him, that we do.’
‘In a way, yeah, but does that make me God’s detective or the Devil’s?’
‘You should at least do a forensic examination to rule out arson.’
‘And if I no longer have faith in myself?’
‘Then what will it take to make you have a change of heart?’
‘If I knew that I might never have come to Coberley.’
*
A moment later, I hastened away. Other than a few tractors that passed up and down the narrow lane each day, any evidence of someone else’s presence was minimal. I enjoyed the sense of solitude, if not my own solitariness. The steep little road was, at this point, strewn with freshly scattered twigs and fir cones, I noticed. A muddy slide marked the bank down which everything had been kicked by man or animal on a track worn smooth.
I hurried on, anxiously to wonder if anyone could ever haunt himself with something that was as much the present as the past. That I could sense some hideous simulacrum move with me among the trees I did not disbelieve, yet admitted the absurdity of the sensation. Of parallel progress I was doubly conscious. With my unfounded unease came a chill.
As for Susan’s remarks I considered them ludicrous. I paid her
no notice, nor did I necessarily plan any action in consequence of it. Instead, I gritted my teeth and gave a sly grin.
Why ask someone to be their heavenly angel when they had already fallen?
*
‘For God’s sake, help! Help me! Anyone?’
It was not quite a scream but I had taken one more step when the urge to scream back took hold of me. At the top of the lane a grey horse lay in the road, I observed. It had reared right up and over with someone still in the saddle. Metal shoes had sliced white moons on the tarmac.
Now the stricken animal lay in a mess of its own droppings which were quite difficult to avoid. I had to step between splodges of hot, steaming dung or else tread in some very unpleasant urine. Of course the rider was in a panic, but it was hardly my field of expertise when the apparently dying gelding rolled its blank eyes into its sockets. Pinned by her leg was a woman dressed in smart boots and Jodhpurs. It was Laura Simmons.
‘You hurt, at all?’ I cried, otherwise breathless and speechless.
‘For God’s sake, Colin, pull him off me.’
I seized hold of the bridle, shouting. The gelding heaved its head and neck away from the road but failed to stand. The willpower seemed to go out of him in my presence.
Next moment, Gemma came running out the yard behind me.
‘Don’t stand there dithering, Detective. Boot him in the bum before he does any more damage.’
‘He’s rolled on Laura already.’
‘Not her, him. He might twist his gut if we don’t act fast.’
*
We were all three trying to determine why the gelding had taken ill so unexpectedly, when back in its stable he began to eat his hay as if nothing had happened. That was often the way with horses, apparently.
Altogether exhausted and smelly, we retreated across the yard to Gemma’s wooden bungalow.
‘Should have known it wasn’t colic when I put my ear to his stomach,’ she said. ‘Too much rumbling and gurgling.’
‘Just dropped with me,’ confirmed Laura, rubbing her sore knee and nose. ‘There was absolutely no warning. It was like sticking a knife into his heart, it was so quick. I don’t know who Pluto thought you were, Colin, but you scared him shitless.’
