The Ministry of Ghosts

by Alex Shearer

  ‘Anyway, I’ve had the feeling for a long time that there are ghosts about in St Bindle’s parish, and not just one, but a few of them.’

  ‘Are they up to no good, do you think?’ Mr Gibbings asked.

  ‘Couldn’t really say,’ the Reverend answered. ‘They might be bad ghosts, they might be good. In fact I don’t think they do much at all. But they’re there, hanging about, and who knows what they’ve got in mind?’

  ‘So … something has happened recently?’ Mr Copperstone said.

  ‘Yes, it has,’ the Reverend Mangle said.

  ‘Bumps in the night?’ Miss Rolly asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Apparitions?’ Mrs Scant said.

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘This all sounds very promising. Please go on,’ Mr Copperstone said.

  ‘Well, last night, I was asleep in the vicarage, which is right next to the church. Mrs Mangle –’

  ‘Oh, there’s a Mrs Mangle, is there?’ Mr Copperstone said, with a note of surprise.

  ‘There is,’ the Reverend said. ‘And a splendid woman she is too.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘And there is also a small Mangle, aged two years one month.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And another Mangle on the way.’

  ‘A Mangle on the way. Well, that is good news,’ Mr Copperstone said. ‘Isn’t it, Mrs Scant? One can never have too many Mangles.’

  She tried to look as if she thought it was good news, but in truth, she wasn’t bothered either way.

  ‘Now, although our view of the church graveyard is blocked by the church itself, we can still hear things going on there, even if we can’t see them.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Anyway, last night, I was wakened shortly after midnight by the sound of eerie voices –’

  ‘Eerie voices?’

  ‘Almost like the voices of ghostly children –’

  ‘Ghostly children.’

  ‘And they seemed to be chanting this weird and primitive chant –’

  ‘Really?’ Mr Copperstone said. ‘So not just weird, but primitive too.’

  ‘Anyhow, I woke Mrs Mangle up with a soft poke of the elbow –’

  ‘I’m glad it was just a soft one,’ Mr Copperstone said.

  ‘And I said, “Do you hear that?”’

  ‘And did she?’ Mr Copperstone asked.

  ‘She did. So I got up, and I went to the window, and though I could see nothing, because of the church being between us and the graveyard, I could make out this faint glow of light – like a candle burning.’

  ‘A candle!’

  ‘And I thought to myself, bell, book and candle, I thought. There’s something going on here. So I got my dressing gown and I said to Mrs Mangle, “I’m going to investigate, my dear. You wait here, where you’ll be safe.”

  ‘“Reggie,” she said, “is this wise?” I said, “A vicar has to do what a vicar has to do.” And then I kissed her goodbye, in case I should never return, and I went down and put on my Wellingtons, and I picked up my Bible – the very heavy one, that’s good for trouble – and out I went into the night.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ Mrs Scant said. ‘What a brave man.’

  ‘I was only doing my duty,’ Reggie Mangle said modestly.

  ‘But all the same,’ Mrs Scant said. ‘Fearless, I call it. Fearless.’

  ‘So out I went into the night, like I said. The chanting noise had stopped, but the glow of light was still there, leaking around the stones of the church walls in the dark. I went on, stepping careful and trying to keep it quiet. But then, just as I was coming up behind the yew tree, I trod on a stick, and it cracked like a gunshot, and I stumbled and tripped over a bit. By the time I was steady again, next thing I heard were ghostly voices and rustlings and commotions, and by the time I was out from behind the bush, the ghosts or apparitions, or whatever they were, had fled.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mr Copperstone said, disappointed.

  ‘But they left some things behind them. Let me show you. See what you make of this. May I?’

  And the Reverend Mangle hoisted up the holdall with one hand and set it down upon Mr Copperstone’s desk.

  As the others watched closely, he pulled back the zip, and then he extracted from the bag two strange objects.

  The first was a wooden leg.

  And the second was a kipper.

  ‘I put the kipper in that plastic sandwich bag myself,’ the Reverend explained. ‘When I found it, it was just lying on the ground. So what do you make of that? I mean, if this is the Ministry of Ghosts, then you must be the ghost experts. So what’s a wooden leg and a kipper doing in the graveyard, after midnight? Is that spooky, or what?’

  There was a silence. Mr Copperstone’s staff looked at him, wondering what he might say. None of them actually knew that their Saturday Boy and their Saturday Girl had been out in the graveyard ghost hunting the night before, but it didn’t take much to put two and two together, and to surmise that they had, and that the Reverend Mangle had disturbed them, and they had fled, leaving some of their equipment behind them.

  ‘Well … ’ Mr Copperstone didn’t quite know how to go on after that. Then he had a thought. ‘What might be your theory, Reverend?’ he said.

  ‘Levitation,’ the Reverend Mangle said. ‘You know how ghosts are supposed to be able to move things about by the mere power of the mind –’

  ‘I have heard –’

  ‘Opening doors and banging drawers and emptying wardrobes and flinging the contents about and scaring cats and –’

  ‘Yes, yes, we are familiar with the basics, Reverend.’

  ‘Yes, of course you are. Anyway, my theory is that there are ghosts in the graveyard of people buried there. I reckon that one of them had a hankering for kippers.’

  ‘A hankering for kippers? Well, it’s a possibility.’

  ‘And the other lost a leg in some old battle, say the Battle of Waterloo, maybe, back in 1815.’

  ‘That is a long time ago,’ Mr Gibbings said.

  ‘There are gravestones in the cemetery even older than that,’ the Reverend Mangle informed him. ‘So I reckon that he has lain in his grave there for many a long year, but he has not rested easy, because when they buried him, they did not include his wooden leg along with the rest. And so he can never find peace or move on to the next life, until he gets his wooden leg back – or a substitute very much like it.’

  ‘It’s a plausible theory,’ Mr Copperstone conceded. ‘But –’

  ‘And as for the kipper,’ the Reverend Mangle said. ‘My theory is that a ghost in the graveyard had levitated that kipper all the way from Good Coddley’s Fish Shop – if you know it. It’s the local fishmonger’s. I believe that somewhere in the graveyard is buried a person whose last wish was to eat a kipper before they died.’

  ‘Eat a kipper?’ Mr Copperstone said. ‘It is a somewhat unusual final request –’

  ‘And maybe they’d even asked for a kipper, and the kipper was on the way, and maybe even the very knife and fork was in their hands, and the kipper was right there on the plate, and they were just about to take a mouthful, when – bang!’

  ‘Bang?’

  ‘They snuffed it. And they never did get their kipper at the end. And so now, they can’t move on to the next life either, because they haven’t had their kipper.’

  ‘Not had their kipper,’ Mr Copperstone echoed. And he looked around the room at his staff, who were maintaining admirably blank expressions and straight faces.

  ‘And that ghost will not be at peace until a kipper is there with him, lying by his side in his final resting place,’ the Reverend Mangle said. ‘And the same applies to the wooden leg. But as I don’t know what grave the kipper and the wooden leg apply to, there’s nothing I can do. Otherwise I’d do my best to help them and get a shovel. But I can’t go burying a kipper in the wrong grave, can I? That would upset the person in there, if it was the wrong place. And then they’d start haunting the cem
etery too, because they’d had a kipper buried with them and they didn’t want it there. So I’ve come here for advice. What do you think I should do now? Should I hang onto the kipper, or should I bury it, or should I take it back to the vicarage and give it to the cat? I know it’s been on the ground, but a cat wouldn’t worry about that. Cats’ll eat anything. Off the ground or not. So what do you think?’

  Mr Copperstone made a steeple of his fingers and peered through them at the Reverend Mangle.

  ‘Reverend,’ he began, ‘first I would like to applaud your actions in bringing these matters to our attention. You have come to the right people.’

  ‘Yeah, though funnily enough I didn’t know you were even here until recently, when someone must have polished up your brass plate. I thought the place was empty.’

  ‘Quite. But my thoughts are that you should leave these articles with us here, and we will look into them … ’

  ‘Oh, would you?’ the Reverend Mangle said, with both relief and gratitude. ‘It’s such a busy parish, I’ve got so much to do, and to take on one more thing –’

  ‘Not at all. You leave your leg and your kipper with us, Reverend, and we shall get to the bottom of them. Yes, we shall get to the bottom of your leg and we shall get to the bottom of your kipper as soon as we can. And if we are unable to get to the bottom of them, we will want to know the reason why.’

  ‘Then I shall do as you say,’ the Reverend Mangle said, rising to his rather enormous feet, the ones that had so startled Thruppence Coddley and Tim Legge in St Bindle’s Church cemetery the previous night. ‘If you’ll excuse me then, I must do my rounds and visit my parishioners. I must off and bring comfort to the elderly, round at the Dun Working Rest Home for Seniors, and then when I’ve finished that, I need to be getting to the hospital to cheer up the patients in intensive care. And then I have to call in at the school one day this week and chat to the children. I’ve not been there yet. Too busy.’

  ‘Don’t let us keep you from your good works,’ Mr Copperstone said, rising to usher the Reverend Mangle to the door. ‘Mrs Scant will see you downstairs, I’m sure. Thank you for having come to us to report these matters. If only the rest of the public were as diligent and as fearless and as observant as yourself.’

  ‘Not at all,’ the Reverend Mangle said modestly. And he bade goodbye to Miss Rolly and Mr Gibbings, and then Mrs Scant saw him down the stairs to the front door. He took his now empty holdall with him.

  ‘I do apologise for not offering you any tea,’ Mrs Scant said. ‘It totally slipped my mind.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ the Reverend said. ‘I’m awash with tea most of the day. Endless offers of tea and cakes, everywhere I go.’

  He patted his stomach, as if to say, one must try to lay off the cake and to keep the weight down. And then he was off, and the door was shutting behind him.

  What a nice man, Mrs Scant thought. Rather intimidating on a first encounter, but charming when you get to know him. Pity about his cauliflower ear, but then vegetables are supposed to be good for you.

  18

  Further Searching

  The loss of one old wooden leg from the storage cellar of The Legge Works was of no great importance to Tim Legge’s father. He hadn’t even noticed its absence and probably never would.

  The cellar was stacked with remnants from a bygone era, objects that the family firm had once produced but for which there was no longer any demand.

  Wooden legs – who wanted them? Wooden yokes for milkmaids, from which to suspend two wooden pails, for the carrying of full cream milk – who needed them? Wooden frames for hitching up four fine horses together, so that they could pull some gentleman’s carriage along the street – well, you could start your car up now, couldn’t you, or hop on your skateboard, or get on your bike.

  Round at Good Coddley’s, it was similarly unlikely that Thruppence Coddley’s father, George, was going to notice that he was short of a kipper.

  He had so many kippers there, in the fridge, in the cool room, in vacuum-sealed bags, hanging up in the smokehouse, that he would no more feel the loss of one kipper than a billionaire would feel the loss of a penny piece.

  So neither Tim nor Thruppence was really worried that having had to abandon these things in St Bindle’s churchyard the night before was going to get them into any trouble. But what they had seen there, what they had heard, and the sight and sound of the appalling, flat-footed, asthmatic monster (otherwise known as the Reverend Reggie Mangle) stayed with them throughout the day.

  ‘We’re going to have to be more careful next time,’ Thruppence said to Tim, when they spoke briefly at break.

  ‘What do you mean, next time?’ he said.

  ‘Well, we can’t give up just because we’ve had a minor setback, can we? Or just because we ran into the undead. We’ve still got a job to do and ghosts to find, and people depending on us to do it.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe so, but –’

  ‘So let’s go back round to the Ministry this afternoon, and we can fill them in on what’s happened, and then get another look at Grimes and Natterly’s Manual of Ghost Hunting.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Or are you getting cold feet, Tim? Is that it? Would you rather that I went and got a ghost on my own?’

  Tim did his best to look offended and to stand on his dignity.

  ‘Of course I’m not saying that. I’m seeing this through right to the end. When Tim Legge says he’ll do something … ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Then he does it, usually, eventually, though it can sometimes take a while.’

  ‘I’ll see you by the front door of the Ministry, first thing after the final bell this afternoon.’

  ‘Yes, but, Thruppence, what about last night? That thing that was coming for us, that big, horrible zombie thing that was making all the wheezing noises, and that we heard shuffling through the cemetery like it was one of the living dead!’

  ‘It was just one of the living dead, that’s all! I’ve been telling you so all day.’

  ‘Yes, and what if it comes back for us? What if it saw our faces? What if it knows where we live?’

  But just then, a large figure with huge hands and great (flat) feet, all dressed in sombre black, came lumbering through the gates of Eustace Scool School.

  Tim saw him first.

  ‘Thruppence! Thruppence! Look! It’s come for us! The undead – he’s back!’

  Thruppence’s eyes followed Tim’s, and gazed to where his extended arm and trembling hand pointed. For a second she too experienced a wave of fright – well, maybe more than that, terror. She too for a moment believed that the end had actually come. But then, as the huge, horrible monster turned around, to politely enquire of a pupil where the headmistress might be found, she saw the flash of white collar around the apparition’s throat. A flash of white, clerical collar.

  ‘Tim – it’s the new vicar.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It must be. They said at assembly there was a new one and he’d be coming round to say hello. That must be him.’

  ‘So that was the vicar we saw in the graveyard last night?’

  ‘He must have heard us. We must have woken him up and he came out to investigate. It’s not the undead after all, it’s the vicar. My mistake, but anyone can make one.’

  ‘Well I don’t think vicars should be allowed to look like that,’ Tim said. ‘I don’t think it’s right that vicars should go about looking like all-in wrestlers and great big undead zombies that someone’s just dug up from a hole in the ground. If a vicar’s going to be a vicar, he should look like one. He should have a bald head with a bit of hair round the outsides, and be a bit tubby, and have podgy fingers and a big smile and go around saying, “Bless you”. He shouldn’t be seven feet tall and have feet like tennis rackets.’

  The Reverend Mangle spotted the headmistress at the far end of the yard, and hastened over to greet her. On his way he passed Tim and Thruppence, but he gave no sign of recogniti
on. He just said good morning to them, and then smiled, and gave them a view of his gold teeth and the gaps among them, where action in the boxing ring had dislodged a couple of incisors.

  ‘He seems nice enough to me,’ Thruppence said.

  ‘For one of the undead,’ Tim added.

  And then the whistle went, and break was over.

  Thruppence reached up, put her key into the lock, and turned it. She walked into the cool shadows of the vestibule, with Tim Legge following behind her.

  ‘Hello! Anyone in? We’re here?’

  ‘We’re up here in conference! Please come right up!’ old Mr Copperstone’s voice called.

  Up they went to the office, where they found Mr Copperstone behind his desk, facing Mrs Scant, Miss Rolly and Mr Gibbings.

  On Mr Copperstone’s desk was a wooden leg, and next to it, in a plastic bag, and starting to smell slightly, was a kipper.

  ‘Ah!’ Thruppence said. ‘I see you’ve got our stuff.’

  ‘The Reverend Mangle found it and brought it round,’ Mr Copperstone said. ‘He seemed to think that it might have something to do with ghostly activities in his cemetery.’

  ‘Well, it did, sort of,’ Thruppence said.

  ‘Can I have my leg back?’ Tim asked.

  ‘We were trying to trap a ghost last night,’ Thruppence explained, ‘all according to the manual, but the Reverend Mangle interrupted us – not that we knew it was him.’

  ‘No. We thought he was a big bogey,’ Tim said. ‘Though when I say bogey, I don’t mean the kind of bogey that you’d find up your no—’

  ‘I don’t think you need to elaborate, Tim,’ Thruppence said. ‘I think we know what you mean.’

  ‘Just saying,’ Tim said.

  Mr Copperstone steepled his hands in his thoughtful way.

  ‘So you had no luck in the cemetery?’ he said. ‘Ghost-wise?’

  ‘No,’ Thruppence said. ‘But that doesn’t mean we’re giving up. We’re going to take another look at the ghost hunting manual, if that’s all right with you, and then we’re going to soldier on.’

  At this Miss Rolly bubbled over with excitement and enthusiasm and approval.