But they were quite different kinds of nightmares. No rape.
Inside the white ship, the tiny skeletons began to move.
‘Pleasant to see you again so soon!’ Mr Makepeace flung back his silver hair from his high, mottled forehead with a huge hand. His deep-set little eyes took in my weariness, and Hermione’s, that was even showing through her expertly-applied make-up. He gave a little smile, but kept his thoughts to himself. Probably told himself you never knew what young people got up to these days . . .
Hermione consulted her notes. ‘We have dug up a large model steam-yacht called the Circe.’ She was so calm, she might have been reading the nine o’clock news.
‘The Circe,’ said Mr Makepeace. ‘Oh yes, I remember the Circe. How my poor father hated her! It spoilt our family breakfasts for all of three months.’ He made a strange wheezing sound, that I thought might be laughing, and lit another cigarette from the tip of his last. It was such a poverty-stricken thing to do. And he obviously wasn’t strapped for cash . . . I told myself I mustn’t let my mind wander.
‘What was the matter with her?’ asked Hermione innocently, so innocently.
The old man frowned. ‘She was too big. Vulgar. But then the Neptunes were always trying to outdo each other. I believe it took three people to get her into the water. And we had to make new jigs and buy new machine tools. Four feet in length was our usual limit, and that was stretching it. It cost that fool a fortune. But he didn’t care. He never cared about mere money. Threw it around like water. As I said, vulgar, vulgar.’
‘What fool?’ asked Hermione.
‘J. Montague Wheeler,’ said Mr Makepeace heavily. ‘Ever hear a name like it? J. Montague Wheeler, with his silly great cigars. My father said he could hardly get his mouth round them. Everything had to be the biggest, for J. Montague Wheeler. That damned boat cost him nearly two thousand pounds, back in 1913. When a man could bring up a family on two guineas a week! He could have had another Rolls-Royce for the money. We had to make each part from scratch – couldn’t use any of our standard parts at all.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Every damned thing had to work. Steering-wheel actually turned the rudder. Engine-room telegraphs actually responded in the engine-room. That took some doing, I can tell you, with sixteenth-of-an-inch brass rods! My father said it was almost as if the damned fool wanted to make himself tiny, like Alice in Wonderland, and sail the damned thing himself!’
I actually broke out in a cold sweat at that point, while the old man made his queer wheezing laugh. But Hermione didn’t turn a hair, only coughed politely into her hand.
‘He must have been very rich,’ she said.
‘Rich as Croesus. And didn’t he let you know it! No breeding, no breeding at all. Oh, my poor father. He said he wouldn’t make another, for all the tea in China. And then, to crown it all, we didn’t get paid for the work. For seven years.’
‘How was that?’ asked Hermione. And even her voice trembled. With fear? Or with the excitement of the chase? Strange girl, Hermione. Nice, but strange.
‘Damned fellow vanished. Clean as a whistle. Took his family with him, too. Done a flit, my poor father said. Bankrupt. Nearly tore his hair out by the roots. But, you know, he mustn’t have taken all his money with him. Because we were paid, seven years later, in 1920. Too late to do my poor father any good of course. Dead, serving his country. Killed at the Battle of Jutland, aboard HMS Cheshire. My eldest brother was running the firm by then. But we never made another as big as Circe. Is she for sale?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ said Hermione. ‘But if she is you’ll have first refusal.’
The old man rumbled his approval. ‘Any other way I can assist you, my dear?’
‘Could you tell me any more about this J. Montague Wheeler?’
‘M’father said he had the manners of a money-lender. East End money-lender. Very sharp about the pennies, for all his big spending. Went over the bills with a fine-tooth comb. We had to account for every penny. Of course, you’ve seen his photograph? With the rest of the Neptune lot? Showed you the other day . . .’
‘Would you mind if we saw it again?’
The old boy bent to a low drawer in his desk, grunting so much I was afraid he might have a heart attack. Then the same mounting-card was passed across the desk; the same kerb of the Wheatstone Pond, the same trestles, and boats, the same row of pudgy sepia Edwardian faces, solemn behind big moustaches.
Well, not all the same, actually. J. Montague Wheeler was the same in general appearance, but there was one difference. Apart from dark eyes set too close together, which gave him a foxy look, and a too-long, fleshy nose, J. Montague Wheeler seemed to know a secret, and was gloating over it even in the face of the photographer. He had that little irritating kind of smile that makes you want to bash the owner’s face in, after a bit. It was as if something intending no good was creeping up behind those good pompous self-made men, to do them down. And only J. Montague Wheeler knew about it, and rejoiced. His expression undercut the whole solemn picture. The longer you looked at it, the more it dominated the whole picture. Why had no one ever noticed it before? Why hadn’t his friends noticed it at the time? If they were his friends . . .
‘Looks a nasty piece of work, doesn’t he?’ said old Makepeace.
‘He’s . . . the only one with two sons?’ asked Hermione. ‘He has a hand on two boys’ shoulders.’
‘I don’t know m’dear,’ said old Makepeace regretfully.
‘Do you think we might borrow this photograph, Mr Makepeace? For use in our exhibition?’
He frowned, mountainously. He was obviously charmed by her. But, equally obviously, he didn’t like to part with any of his treasures. Then his brow cleared. ‘Perhaps my no-good son could help you. He’s got all kinds of gadgets in that drawing-office of his. He can make pictures very small, or even enlarge them if you like. Print them in full colour. Send them down the telephone to South America, if you believe all the nonsense he talks. We’ll do you a nice enlargement. That do? Simon? Simon! He raised his voice in an ancient bellow. His son appeared at the door, nervous as an office-boy. ‘Simon, run down to the drawing-office and get the young lady a print of this. Enlarged. Much enlarged, eh?’
‘Would you mind very much if I sent Miss Prentice? I happen to be on the phone to America . . .’
I will draw a veil over family quarrels that don’t concern me. Suffice to say, we got our enlargement, and a very clear enlargement it was.
Chapter 10
We sat in the front of Hermione’s Metro, in the nearest lay-by, and stared at our enlargement. J. Montague Wheeler looked even nastier, enlarged. Every tiny line of his face was visible; they were great men, those old Edwardian photographers; beat the modern boys for detail every time. The impression that the awful man knew some great joke that nobody else knew grew stronger all the time.
And the two boys . . . one about fourteen, one a bit younger. That same look was on their faces too. It boded no good for the other Neptunes; come to that, it boded no good for the whole universe. It slowly made their faces into the faces of . . . certain photographs of the Kray twins, when they were in a relaxed mood . . . certain Nazi faces, wreathed in enjoyment over a game with an Alsatian dog. Faces that had stepped outside life, had seen life’s stage scenery from the back, and knew what a fraud it was.
‘Three of them,’ said Hermione. ‘And three skeletons in the boat . . . it’s a big coincidence.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said, with a dry throat. ‘They don’t look like victims to me. They look more like the ones who did it. And sat back and laughed. They looked as if drowning baby monkeys would be very amusing, as far as they were concerned.’
We stared at the enlargement for another long time, and I for one was feeling worse and worse.
Finally, Hermione said, ‘We can’t sit here all day,’ and rolled up the enlargement and put it back in its tube. ‘We need to know more.’
‘How?’ My voice came out in a sort of wail.
‘If somebody this rich vanished, it’d be in the papers. At the time. What we need is the local Wheatstone papers for 1913 . . . Wheatstone Public Library’s what we need next.’
She started the car, and drove off, fast.
Wheatstone Public Library, in the afternoon, was a good place to lay ghosts. Unlike the rest of gothic Wheatstone, almost in defiance of gothic Wheatstone, it was a simple classical building in red brick and sandstone, like a well-mannered barn.
And the reference library was the least ghostly of all. Durable wall-to-wall carpeting, a neat beech reception-desk where middle-aged ladies requested books on the history of canals around London, the development of the English apple tree, or a reasoned catalogue of the products of the Bow potteries in the eighteenth century. A fat good-natured bespectacled man took eager schoolchildren with spiral-backed notebooks through the development of the London sewage system, or the imports of tanned hides through the East India docks. Not so much educating them as telling them what to write in their projects. The air was loud with demands for rubbers, spare biros, and the tinkle of dropped drawing-board clips.
And along one wall, the row of microfilm machines, which we had to queue for, so great was the demand of housewives doing their family history.
We got machines in the end, and were now busy suffering. The chairs were half-broken rejects from the rest of the library, the machines were so well-used that the spools of microfilm often came out of their clips. The turning-handles ran backwards if you let go of them, and often came off in your hand altogether, if you whirled them too vigorously. And there is something infinitely backache-creating in using a microfilm. Inside, things rattled; the print on the smoky golden screen kept going blurred; it was satisfactory neither to sit back wearing my reading-spectacles, nor to lean forward without them.
I was working through the copies of the long defunct weekly newspaper called the Wheatstone Guardian, while Hermione next door waded through the desert of the equally defunct Wheatstone Advertiser.
Big impressive newspapers, which did not confine themselves to the local news. They thought nothing of spending two columns on the doings of Lloyd George (with regard to the welfare of the citizens of Wheatstone). There were fascinating insights into the middle-aged Winston Churchill, ladies’ fashions for the coming season, a cholera scare in the East End and Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, recommended by all Army doctors to cure everything from enteric fever to whooping cough, by the look of it.
The only comfort was the touch of Hermione’s knee on mine, as she sighed and whizzed through three more pages of foreign news and hat-adverts. It was hot and I kept dozing off. I was just turning the handle now, knowing that if anyone found anything, it would be her.
But her sudden hiss of breath made me come leaping awake, with a thudding heart.
‘Got him,’ she said. I looked across, and saw, small and dim as a postage stamp on her screen, the same pudgy face, the same smirk of a hidden joke. The small headline said:
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF
WHEATSTONE FAMILY
The print was too small and blurred for me to read more. So I just listened as she muttered to herself, and scribbled stuff into her notebook.
‘Aged forty-two at the time of his disappearance. Well-known member of the Neptune Yacht Club. Was in business as an importer . . . oh, an address. Abbeywalk, Belvoir Road, Wheatstone.’
The room whirled around me. I remembered Abbeywalk: the queerness of the place; the heap of abandoned suitcases in the outhouse. But in particular I remembered the last entry in Annette le Feuvre’s poor little diary:
They shall have me, but they shall not have him.
I had thought the ‘they’ had been her parents.
Now all I could think about was the three smirking, sneering faces in the picture of the Neptune Yacht Club (Steam Section).
The room went on whirling round me. The odd, mad behaviour, one Guy Fawkes’ night, of Tony Tanner; just before he disappeared, leaving his precious model boats behind . . .
Where had all those people gone? And the suicides in the Pond? And that crazy fight between the firemen?
There was not just an ancient dreadful evil lingering on in Wheatstone . . . It was still working now.
‘There’s something wrong with that house,’ I think I said. Then I was falling into darkness; the corner of the microfilm machine, the edge of the desk were cold and sharp. But they were the last things I knew.
She had left me lying very comfortably, on the chaise-longue pulled up to her sitting-room window; where the late afternoon sun would lie warm on the tartan rug over my legs, and the reassuring sounds of Kensington, women talking to dogs and men washing down cars, could drift in through the open window. There was whisky to hand; and a flask of coffee; and the latest editions of Harper’s and Cosmo. There was even a cordless telephone. Oh, she had looked after me well. Before she went back to the chase.
I only hoped she’d get home before dark. For her sake and mine.
I dozed a lot, never quite unaware of the sun’s warmth on my face, and the sounds outside; taking care never to drop into the dark depths where faces swam out of the darkness suddenly. It was pleasant just to drift and forget . . .
I’d had one fright: a rattle in the kitchen that had fetched me heart-thuddingly awake. But it was only her cat coming home through the cat-flap, the golden long-haired Suki, slender and elegant as Hermione herself, who had watched me first with caution, then with curiosity, and then come and decisively settled into my lap and gone to sleep.
Cats were wise; cats knew. While Suki slept on me relaxed, no harm could come to me . . .
The cordless phone rang, like a mewling lost mouse. I snatched it up, fumbled with the unfamiliar switches, and managed to remember her number.
‘That you, guv?’ The voice, warm and reassuring, of Sam. ‘You OK? You sound a bit funny!’ There was almost a smile in Sam’s voice; probably at the idea of me shacked up in Hermione’s house. He was much younger than James; his mind was broader. He was of the new generation who didn’t bother to get married. ‘We done OK, guv. We’ve been where you said. Dudley; Stafford. Got a good set of chairs for four hundred. Should get six for them, by the time they’re polished up. And . . .’ he took a deep breath, ‘you ought to’ve seen the Welsh dresser at Martin’s. Young fool had tarted it up wi’ repro brass handles – thought it was Victorian. James rescued the old handles out of the bins in the yard. We knocked him down to two thou. James reckons it’ll be worth five and a half. Late Georgian.’
‘Well done,’ I said. ‘Where is James, by the way? Getting drunk to celebrate?’
Sam gave his infectious little giggle. James, like most Methodists, was a teetotaller. ‘Knocked off early to see some of his holy mates in Birmingham. Bigwigs, I gather. Got something on his mind, James has.’
I cursed James in my mind. I knew what he had gone to talk to his holy mates about. And that after I’d sworn him to secrecy.
Much later, the mewling of the phone wakened me again. The look of the sky, a dimming blue with swallows wheeling, told me how late it was getting, and a tiny paw of panic nudged my stomach. But Hermione was in a high good mood, wild with excitement.
‘Ran Wheeler down to earth, in an old copy of “Strange Stories from the London Evening News”. The reference librarian put me on to it. He’s a bit into the occult, and seems to have his own little book-cupboard, for those he favours. And, of course, this being a Wheatstone story, he knew all about it . . .
‘Wheeler was an East Ender, and a no-good. A rag-and-bone man, no less, and had several convictions for helping himself to stuff left lying about. Used to work the Wheatstone District, back around nineteen hundred and seven or eight.
‘Anyway, Abbeywalk wasn’t built then. There was just a bit of derelict ground, with grand new houses growing up all round it, and a few tu
mble-down sheds among the undergrowth. Apparently he rented the sheds to run his rag-and-bone business from. Caused a hell of a stink among the nouveaux riches around there, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.
‘And then, and here’s the crazy thing, suddenly he has lots of money to spend. Enough to buy the land he had been renting, and then he suddenly begins to build the present house, about 1911.
‘People apparently hated the new house almost as much as they hated him; but again, in those free enterprise days, there was nothing they could do.
‘Then he starts flinging his money about, trying to get himself popular, trying to buy his way into their society. There was no Mrs Wheeler: said he was a widower; but he flung himself into the social whirl all right. Garden fêtes for charity; wonderful displays of fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Night; inviting people to dinner. But he didn’t get very far, wasn’t liked. And complaints of strange noises coming from the house late at night, with lights on in the windows until 5 a.m., and the sound of orchestras playing, and yet no one seen coming or going. And a fuss about one or two children vanishing and never being seen again. Nobody important of course . . . little serving-girls, boot-boys whose parents were too poor and crushed to make much fuss.
‘And then he joined the Neptune Yacht Club. Damned fool secretary let him join because he lived out of the district himself, and didn’t know what Wheeler was like. Apparently it was very grand, the Neptune in those days. Wheeler tried to win the yacht-sailing races, but was almost too fat to handle the boats he bought; so he failed. Much laughter. Then he turned his hand to steam-yachts. Won the concours d’élégance, in 1912, by sheer weight of money, and Ross and Makepeace skill . . .
‘There was another move to get rid of him, but it failed. And he vowed to come back the following year, and show such a thing as would not be believed. District all agog, in spite of themselves.
Spectral Shadows Page 17
