Easterly was not his usual chipper self.
‘It was just footsteps,’ he told us, ‘in Veronique’s room when Hi went to get ready for bed. Hi knew she was below stairs folding linen and Mr Hesketh was downstairs locking up, so Hi called out, Who’s there? Come out! Hi am armed and dangerous. Hi got the Bible from my room—’
‘To what end?’ Sidney Grice leaned back aggrievedly.
‘It was all Hi could think hov for a shield.’ The footman got a quill from his pocket and scratched under the plaster. ‘And Hi thought a ghost could not hattack a man holding the scriptures.’
‘Why,’ Mr G’s finger swung towards him as a compass needle to the north, ‘when you heard footsteps, was your first suspicion that it might be a supernatural presence?’
‘Because Hi knew no living soul could be up there.’ Easterly clutched at his own neck.
‘Did you go up?’ I asked, and a draught crooked the flames until they licked the wax.
‘Yes, miss.’ The footman’s voice dropped. ‘Hi crept up and flung open the door and jumped in.’ Easterly mimed a little leap. ‘But there was nobody there. Hi searched under the bed and in the wardrobe and looked out hov the window.’
The flames struggled up.
‘Did you open it?’ Sidney Grice’s finger sank back.
‘No, sir. It is barred and screwed shut.’
Mr G bent his knees as if preparing to jump. ‘There is more.’
Easterly puffed up his cheeks and blew out. ‘Hi was just about to go when Hi heard something h’else.’ He steeled himself to tell us. ‘Laughing.’
My guardian’s finger tracked towards the footman. ‘What kind of laughing? Male, female, young, old, soft, loud, high- or low-pitched, brief, prolonged? Enlighten us.’
Easterly pinched his lower lip and tugged upon it.
‘Satanic.’ He stared into the shadows. ‘Ha demon from hell.’
And, with perfect timing, the candles blew out.
84
✥
Catching the Scream
DEAR SWEET KATE, chestnut hair, long and wavy, a pretty doll’s face with big brown eyes emptying of sleep and filling with alarm.
Mouth opens, breast heaves and I catch a scream in the palm of my hand.
‘Oh, sweet Kate, if you make a sound, Hi will run you through. Understand? Understand?’
Kate nods and I take my hand away and she only whispers, ‘Please.’
‘You don’t have to say please. Hi am going to do it anyway.’
I pull down the sheet and Kate shivers, deliciously.
Her nightdress has four buttons but I soon rip those off and Kate makes a sound like a kitten when I get on top of her.
‘You dirty beast.’
I twist my head, and it’s Angelina, and I see she has an old banister spindle. She’s got it raised and I’ve got my arms sort of under me, and all I can do is say, ‘Wait your turn.’
And she’s swinging it down and I try to twist away and it comes smashing into the back of my head, and I struggle up, but I feel a bit woozy and she’s got it raised again, and I charge straight into her and knock her on the floor with me on top, and get hold of her head and bang it on the boards and shout, ‘See! That hurts.’
And she doesn’t answer, but she’s still struggling, and I bang it again and again, maybe ten times, until there’s blood leaking out of the back of it and she goes limp and quiet, and I’ve seen enough death tonight to recognize it. And when I look back sweet Kate has gone.
85
✥
The Sound of the Devil
EASTERLY SQUEALED.
‘Was that an imitation of the laughter?’ Sidney Grice sighed. ‘If so, it was not outstandingly Beelzebubic. Stay where you are.’
The candles on the mantelpiece were still burning and Easterly had started towards them, but he froze obediently mid-turn.
‘No, sir. It was just me being nervous.’
‘Re-create the sound accurately,’ my guardian instructed and the valet baaed like a lost lamb.
‘It was not really like that,’ he confessed.
I stifled a laugh. ‘What happened next?’
Easterly flapped his arms. ‘Hi ran out and downstairs, and pretended Hi wanted a cup of water, and waited until Mr Hesketh was going up and went with him. Mr Hesketh is not afraid hov hanything.’
‘You may see to the candles now, Easterly,’ Cherry instructed and he went to the fire to light a spill, wedging the unlit end under his plaster and sheltering the flame with his injured right hand as he returned, his lower face disconcertingly vivid and the upper melted away.
I saw a man with no face once. He spoke my name in blood.
The candles briefly dazzled as they ate into the gloom.
‘I wish to converse with your maidservant now,’ Mr G announced, and Cherry signalled her assent to her footman.
‘You seem very interested in this haunting,’ Cherry remarked when there were only three of us.
‘The subject of ghosts falls within the top eight thousand categories of things about which I am curious.’ My godfather’s hand crept spiderlike towards his tea. ‘Only fourteen points ahead of panpipe recitals.’
He reached his saucer and withdrew in a reverse scuttle.
‘Do you believe any of it?’ I asked sceptically, but Sidney Grice had a hand cupped to his ear.
‘Oh hark, I sense the approach of the slender Gallic target of the bizarrely christened Sou’ Easterly Gale Nutter’s ill- concealed aspirations.’
The footfalls came closer, bringing another light with them.
‘Hi shall wait in the hall,’ Easterly comforted Veronique.
The spill still projected from his plaster, no doubt to deal with his endless itches.
‘You shall wait below stairs,’ Mr G informed the footman and he dissolved away.
Veronique looked towards the fire.
‘Sit.’ Sidney Grice directed her to the empty chair between him and Cherry. ‘I may develop a fear of interviewing perpendicular French maids, which could prove deleterious to the execution of my professional duties but convenient for the criminal classes.’
The maid looked for guidance to her mistress, who patted the chair.
‘Why are you so frightened, Veronique?’ I asked.
Veronique knitted her fingers. ‘She is a ’orrible ’ouse,’ she burst out. ‘I am sorry, Miss Mortlock, for you are a kind lady, but she is a ’ouse possessed by the devil.’
My godfather rested his hands on the table as though conducting a séance. ‘Justify that remark with factual evidence.’
‘I ’ear ’im in my room,’ she affirmed vehemently. ‘I ’ear ’im drag dead bodies and ’e – ’ow you say? – cackle. ’E speaks to me – murder, murder.’
I put a hand on Veronique’s sleeve, moving within her line of vision and slowly so as not to startle her. ‘Murder, not murderer or murderess?’
Veronique sucked the tip of her left thumb. ‘It is ’ard. ’E speaks in whispers.’
Her thumb slipped into her mouth.
‘But you are sure it is a male voice?’ I stroked the back of her wrist.
‘I imagine a man devil,’ she said. ‘But I never see ’im.’
‘Where does the voice come from, Veronique?’ Cherry questioned, and the maid touched her hat to check it was still clipped on straight.
She weaved her fingers in the air. ‘All around my ’ead,’ adding defiantly, ‘but not inside ’er like ’Esketh tell me.’
‘Goodbye,’ Sidney Grice said brightly.
Veronique rose in a panic.
‘I will see you along the corridor,’ Cherry promised.
She took a candle from the mantelpiece and, a minute later, I heard her call for Easterly to come up.
‘Where on earth is all this leading?’ My tea was cold but I drained it.
‘I have absolutely no idea.’ Sidney Grice stood and hurriedly straightened the tea tray and its contents. ‘But I know it is leading somewhe
re.’
Cherry returned. There was a hesitancy in her manner.
‘Has something else happened?’ I asked in concern.
Cherry went to an escritoire in the corner and returned with a bundle of perhaps half a dozen envelopes.
‘I received this today... from my mother.’
She passed the top letter to me.
The stamp was Swiss but the postmark was smudged.
I read aloud for my guardian’s benefit:
My Darling Cherry,
Please excuse the brief nature of this letter but I am anxious to catch the post as the service is very irregular here.
Thank you for informing me of your father’s death.
I shall not be such a hypocrite as to feign grief, though I am sorry for any you feel.
Please do not think of delaying the funeral, as I shall not be attending.
Agostino and I are tired of Lake Geneva and are moving on.
I shall send you our new address as soon as we are settled.
Forgive me,
Your ever loving
Mama
Cherry Mortlock’s eyes were darkly underscored and reddened at the inner corners.
‘I am so sorry.’ I made to hand the letter back, but Sidney Grice abstracted it en route.
‘Present me with all the other maternal epistles you have conserved.’ He clicked his fingers, as if at an inattentive waiter, and Cherry passed him the rest of the pile resentfully.
‘The earliest is from Bognor where she went on a rest cure,’ she said bitterly, ‘and, it transpired, met Montanari.’
‘How remarkable.’ My guardian laid the missives side by side and upside down. ‘They are written in exactly the same handwriting.’ He laid one copy on top of another and held them so close to the candlelight that I feared they would burst into flames.
‘What else did you expect?’ Cherry took the letters firmly from him, knocking the tea tray slightly askew.
‘Why, nothing else at all.’ He put his pince-nez away.
Cherry watched, her expression unreadable, as Mr G hastened to rectify her clumsiness, and only when he was satisfied with his rearrangement of the crockery did he turn his attention back to announce, ‘Bedtime for you, young ladies.’
‘You have asked for this,’ Cherry warned and Sidney Grice shrank back in horror as she set about disarranging his work. ‘And, if you should get murdered in the night,’ he cringed as she tilted a saucer, ‘please do so as noisily as possible. I should hate not to be there for the kill.’
86
✥
The Roar of the Demon
‘NO ONE WILL save you.’ The roar of the demon shakes the house. ‘They are all dead-dead-dead,’ it shrieks.
Down the stairs, I go, two at a time into the darkness, following the pound of her feet. If she’d had the sense to creep I might never have found her in a house this size, not in the time I have left.
She’s along the corridor. Her footsteps are more padded now by the carpet, but I can still hear them.
And then they stop. In the pitch-dark of that hellhole, Kate Webb starts to creep.
I stand in the corridor and listen. Nothing except me panting and my heart banging, and a voice in my head saying: Think. Where will she have gone?
Maybe to the Garstangs. The candle still shines through their open door and they are still dead, and exactly where I left them.
Where would I go? Not to Brian because I don’t suppose she even knows exactly where his room is. I would try to get out. The doors are locked and she doesn’t have a key. Her only chance is a downstairs window, but there are so many of them.
I go to the top of the marble stairs and I’m about to go down when I hear a creak. The fifth step on the wooden stairs in the tower.
I creep down them and stand in the hall, listening. If I go to the wrong room it will give her time to open the shutters and get out, and then I will be caught and people will know what I did and why, and what will happen to poor Nathan then?
I am just about to start searching the rooms one by one when I hear it. A definite click. There’s a bar being lifted, and then another, and I think: Where would I try to climb out? Not into the garden where I could be trapped, but at the front, the first front window, the main drawing room. I’m so sure I’m right, I don’t even worry about the noise. Speed is what matters now. I rush to the door and throw it open, and there she is, sweet little Kate, one slender leg over the sill, the wind in her chestnut hair, an inch away from freedom and life, but I’m on her. I throw her to the ground and slam the shutters closed, and I can’t even dream about what happened next. The demon had taken over by then.
Merciful Jesus, I think, as I kneel beside her body, she looks like a saint.
*
George Pound put a thumb and forefinger in his philtrum. ‘From the disarray of her nightdress and the bruising – quite apart from the knife wounds – I thought she had been… interfered with.’
87
✥
The Mattress Murder
CHERRY AND I did not change into our nightwear. If anything happened we wanted to be ready to deal with it.
‘We shall sleep with our door open a fraction,’ Hesketh promised, ‘so that we can hear if you need us. I am a very light sleeper.’
‘Shut and secure your door,’ I told him. ‘You will have no trouble hearing my scream. I frightened a Bengal tiger off with it once.’
Cherry smiled. ‘I cannot compete with that. The last time I screamed at a mouse, it ignored me.’
It had been arranged that the male servants would sleep in Angelina Innocenti’s old quarters across the corridor.
We closed and wedged our door, looked under the bed and in the wardrobe, pulling it out a few degrees to make sure nobody had tunnelled through the wall. There were no side tables, so we put our two enclosed candles on the mantelpiece.
‘I am sure Mr Grice would have noticed if anybody had,’ Cherry commented.
‘Not much escapes him.’ I patted the mattress and felt round the sides.
Cherry watched me. ‘Why are you doing that?’
‘It is not a pretty story.’
‘Tell me,’ she urged.
‘A man called Edgely Kinforth desired his best friend’s wife. He waited until she told him she was visiting her mother and decided to murder the friend by cutting a slit in the bottom of the mattress, taking out some of the stuffing and hiding inside it.’ I paused, wishing I had not begun. ‘When he felt somebody climb into bed he stabbed upwards nine times until the body fell still and the blood soak through the casing. He wriggled out just in time to see his friend come into the room, and discovered that the wife had changed her mind and stayed at home.’
Cherry was aghast. ‘I have never heard about that.’
‘The friend was part of an international conference.’ I sat on the edge of the bed. ‘And it transpired that the woman he had lived with was not his wife at all but a woman from whose earnings he had been living. Her body was dumped in the Thames and in no fit state to be autopsied by the time a mudlark found it washed up in the estuary. That was barely reported. Who is interested in yet another woman who should have known better?’
She sat on the other side.
‘And what of Edgely Kinforth?’
I rested my boots on a cloth at the bottom of the bed.
‘It turned out that was not his real name. He escaped police custody and it is believed that he stabbed another prostitute to death outside St Pancras Station. There were some reports of a man answering his description in the King’s Cross area, but they have never been confirmed.’
‘Were you involved in that case?’ Cherry asked in horrified fascination.
‘Mr Grice was asked for advice.’ I plumped up my pillow. It was quite well filled. ‘And he told them to look in the Whitechapel area.’ I propped the pillow vertically against the wall.
Cherry pulled a blanket over herself. ‘Do you think he will murder again?’
Cherry shivered. ‘What a sheltered life I lead in my cottonwool world.’
‘I am sorry.’ I looked at her face, so pale and anxious. ‘I should not have told you.’
‘I asked you to.’
A floorboard creaked and we sat up straight.
‘Is that you, Easterly?’ I called.
‘Hesketh, miss,’ came the reply. ‘I have secured the house and am going to my room now. May I wish you both a good night.’
Two more boards creaked and a door closed.
Cherry lay on her back. ‘Actually, this bed is more comfortable than mine. Maybe I will make Veronique swap. My bed is narrower and hard,’ she paused, ‘as… a… rock,’ she finished slowly. ‘Can you hear that?’
I listened and was just about to say that I could not hear anything except the sounds of a house settling when I heard it – something scraping. I put a finger to my lips. There it was again – a faint shuffling.
I put Cherry’s raven hair back and murmured close to her ear, ‘Do you have rats?’
Her breath was cool on my cheek. ‘I do not think so. Perhaps mice.’
‘Too big to be a mouse. Where is it coming from?’
‘I am not sure.’
And then something else. A whisper. Murderer.
Cherry’s lips had not moved but they parted numbly now.
Murderer. A loud suspiration close by, and then louder still and, hoarsely, You WILL die.
The candles danced wildly, casting us on to the walls in writhing tortured shadows.
‘Who is there?’ I called.
And there was a laugh, low and mocking. ‘Die.’
There were footfalls somewhere in that room.
‘Where are you?’ I shouted uselessly.
There were footfalls in the corridor coming to our door now, and I am ashamed to say that we clutched at each other. Something struck the woodwork and Cherry let out a sob.
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 38
