by Lorna Gray
It wasn’t a happy voice. It was a low stutter of ‘m’s, like a moan. My first thought naturally enough was of Mr Winstone. My second was for that missing housekeeper.
There it was again, to my left behind a low door into this second barn. It was a low mumble like an injured soul might make, or a hostage, bound and gagged. It made me grasp another concept of horror. The one where a forgotten woman lay unheeded for days on end.
The cobbled space between house and barn was empty. So were the long terraces of the garden. There was no other sound of life here. Other than the dog, I mean. He was at my heels and the only sound he made was the faint click-click of claws on the cobbled ground.
It was the stuff nightmares are built on. I had to ease open the door into an ancient space. I had to wake to the guilt of knowing I’d meant to look last night for conclusive signs that the housekeeper really had left, only I’d been distracted by the way Freddy had appeared. The door was set on surprisingly well-oiled hinges between ancient walls several feet thick. Within was a long narrow stone-flagged passage that ran like a cave along the painted face of wood-panelled stalls and loose-boxes and pillars that supported a low hayloft. This barn had been a tithe barn in its former life – a vast storeroom for a medieval wealth of grain – but its recent job had been to house the Manor stables and, like the rest of this place, its grandeur stood as a monument to neglect after the loss of the son. A set of heavily bolted carriage doors stood at the far end as a bar to freedom and daylight. All the Manor buildings seemed to have issues with good light. The only light here came from about five unglazed slits spread along the barn’s length and the small open door by my side. Dust hung in the narrow beams of sun-shot air, waiting for a breeze.
Mrs Cooke the housekeeper wasn’t here. No one was, at least no person. The murmur came from a lonely goat living in quiet luxury in the stable that was tucked at the end of the row beneath the steps to the hayloft. I’d never met a goat before. This one had his own lancet window and he was a friendly beast, albeit slightly alarming when his head suddenly appeared at eye height, with his front feet hooked over the stable door. He was also rather too interested in the forgotten parcel of groceries in my hands. I left him with a promise to return later with the scraps.
The dog left me at the kitchen door. Alone again in the dry stillness inside I laid out my collection of salad stuff and wondered just how exactly I expected this meagre fare to do for the squire’s lunch. Then I remembered that the note my cousin’s friend’s had added to her letter had included the name of the woman who would sell me eggs. It seemed that someone lived by day in this place after all. She was tiny and crabbed and the luxurious cluster of eggs she unearthed in a vacant cowshed behind the steward’s house was a far cry from the paltry one egg allowance Putney residents had enjoyed each week provided that they were in stock. Our transaction was also mildly illegal but I was hardly going to complain, particularly when she was kind enough to give me butter and half a loaf of bread for the Colonel’s lunch too.
Phyllis’s letters were always a source of information. Apart from the recent missive that was presently lodged in my suitcase and bore the crucial invitation to visit and directions to her door, I also had the memory of a hundred or so more that spanned the years and had come from various corners of the world. She was, as implied by my father’s use of the unattractive term spinster, an unmarried woman of independent habits. But I didn’t think she entirely warranted the term when she was in fact only thirty-one and, besides, I thought it a terrible way to summarise the contribution made by a woman who belonged to that generation of intellectuals who were recruited immediately in 1939 to lend their expertise to the various specialist branches of the War Office. Phyllis had been called up to do something very interesting with maps; her background was in geography.
My letters to her were the childish musings of a girl penned during the quiet times at the chemists. Phyllis’s bold and witty replies were invariably written from obscure locations made even more obscure by the heavy hand of the censors, until they said only that she was well and that the weather was fair – meaning Scotland, I thought – or bracing – perhaps Shetland – or enjoyably temperate, which I took to mean somewhere hot and therefore foreign. The impressive Grecian vases nestling amongst her mother’s clutter in the hall told their own story about where that might have been.
Unfortunately, I had neither my cousin nor one of her letters to guide me now. I was setting the hardboiled eggs to cool in a fresh pan of cold water – indoor taps in this kitchen, of course, presumably drawing spring water from a delightfully hygienic cistern – when I heard a clunk from the depths of the house. It manifested itself into a clatter from the floor above, followed by the bang of a door slamming at the front of the house. It reverberated along the passage and into the dining room and from there to me in the kitchen. It even made me cast an anxious glance out through the window in case a sudden squall had blown in, which it hadn’t, and then it made me recollect my suitcase left any old how by the kitchen table, as if I were expecting the Colonel to invite me to stay.
I moved to retrieve it and found it wasn’t there. But someone was indeed at the front of the house. Scurrying through the gloom of the dining room and then the passage, I learned that the bang had been a door being flung open. I’d assumed it had been the sound of it blowing shut. The distinction mattered because now I found the weighty front door thrown wide, letting in sunlight and flies, and a man heading up the stairs.
He was a short man in a dark suit and he had a suitcase in his hand. My suitcase.
He was oblivious to me. He seemed intent on marching upwards two steps at a time. There was a car outside, black and ordinary, like a cab the Colonel might have taken from his solicitor’s office. I reached the curving scroll at the foot of the banister as the driver’s foot disappeared out of sight.
I called some form of surprise up at him and set foot upon the stairs, I believe because I thought he was a respectable cab driver taking the passenger’s bags to his room and he had somehow managed to confuse my bags for the Colonel’s and it was my duty to correct the mistake. Only then the nature of the man’s gait changed. Before it had been confident, decisive. Now, at the sound of my voice, he snapped round and charged with a clatter of footfalls back into view again. I heard his breathing. Rapid and light and not very friendly at all. There was a rush and a thump and a lasting impression of the beautiful plasterwork on the ceiling as I reeled for the banister. I thought for a moment he must have launched off the top step and landed on me. Then I thought he must have bolted blind straight past and caught me with the case. Finally I realised he hadn’t done either and had the sudden cringing discovery that the man was beside me.
This space was light. White walls, white plasterwork and blinding sunlit glass. The tan case swung above me at about the height that might batter my head. There was a moment when a hand caught in my hair. Then it let me go with a suddenness that shocked almost as much as the impact had, leaving me to discover pain beneath my arm that would later reveal itself as a vivid bruise and also to taste the unpleasantness of a cut lip where I had bitten it while clutching painfully at the solid support of the wooden rail.
There was a crash below as he charged out through the door and missed his step, to turn an ankle where the stone flags met gravel. Then there was a roar as an engine kicked into life. I twisted there, hanging from my wooden anchor, catching my breath, and watched as a battered black Ford veered unevenly away up the curve of the drive towards the lane. I thought he turned right at the end, downhill.
I did nothing. The only thing I could state and did state later with any confidence was that this imposter’s bald head was most definitely a long way removed from Mr Winstone’s lean attacker.
Chapter 7
It was easy to trace where he had been. He’d allowed himself some time, I think, to search the house before our encounter in the stairwell. The evidence implied he must have been on the point of leaving unti
l some sudden recollection drew him to race back inside with the bang that had brought me scurrying. It occurred to me that perhaps he had left some telltale mark behind, made some error that would allow us to identify him, and that was why he had dashed back in – in a determined effort to retrieve it.
If so, it wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms. He’d left doors swinging into the little room that opened from the wall beside the little table with the lamp on it – a library – and also the study where the telephone stood. At the swift glance I cast in through the door of each, the shelves of the library were untouched, but perhaps the bottles on the drinks trolley in the study were fewer than they had been. He had, of course, also made a thorough tour of the kitchen and helped himself to my suitcase.
The door of the kitchen was probably how he had got in. I’d bolted the front door firmly as I’d left with Freddy last night and it showed no signs of a forced entry now. I bolted it firmly once more and crept upstairs. I know why I went stealthily, as if I were myself a burglar. It was because the house suddenly felt cold and alien again and I wished I wasn’t here.
Upstairs I found a series of three or more closed doors and a long passage that served as a gallery with a further collection of doors just distinguishable at the far end. It was darker again up here and the whole place smelled of mildew and old polish.
I was being watched. Not by the balding man or any possession of his. There was nothing to indicate he’d even been up here before the moment I caught him on the stairs. Instead, my audience was the row upon row of photographs on the wood-panelled walls. Hard Victorian gazes judged me severely as I passed. The women had sharp noses and the menfolk wore unattractive beards that sat beneath the jaw. Then I was greeted by the woman from the photograph in the study downstairs, this time glamorous in her Great War wedding suit. In the next she was smiling tiredly with black hair and extraordinary deep-set eyes and a very young boy in her lap and a badly concealed bulge around her middle. The same eyes were met in the portrait that followed this tranquil family scene, but this time in a young man. Even in hand-tinted colours in this gloom, the intelligent blue gaze of her teenage son shone out of the shifting features of one who might have been designed for the life of a musician or perhaps an orator. I knew which son this was. The clue was in those eyes and the height which matched Mrs Abbey’s idea of a ghost. He was older in the next and this portrait gave an even stronger sense of the handsome face with a flair for drama, yet here I thought I could perceive a tinge of something colder, sadder. Harder. Perhaps it had been taken after the accident that had lamed him. Even so, even with the slightly defiant challenge of the supple lines of that mouth it would, I thought, have been easy to have liked him.
By contrast, the next photograph showed a different kind of man. He was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty. It came with a peculiar twist of pity that I observed how unexciting this person seemed compared to the brother who had looked so much like their mother. It proved how misleading an impression could be when it was formed purely by hearing a voice on a telephone. The present man must be older. His voice had led me to imagine a man with easy confidence and my mind had countered it by presuming he would turn out to be the sort of officer whose chin retreated into his neck just as his forehead advanced on his hairline. This young man in the photograph was neither. His brother burned; this man was subdued, a level gaze in a blandly unemotional face. He was followed by a sequence that captured the career of his father – a senior military man distinguished by an ever-increasing collection of medals – and I thought I could perceive something of a similarity between the Colonel and his older son, particularly in the set about their mouths. Neither looked like they smiled easily. Above it all I was remembering my complaint about Mrs Abbey and how hard I found it to be certain I knew who and what she really was. I suspected the same rule would apply to this man.
The floorboards at the end of the row creaked. I had drifted down the length of the gallery, to be standing just shy of the black corner where a second, narrower flight of stairs turned out of sight up to the attic floor. That sense of trespass returned violently. It carried the message that at any rate I ought to know precisely who and what the younger brother was. He was dead and the sort that left a terrible memory for his neighbours.
The thought dawned that it was not my job to find the traces left by that imposter. The air up here was not still and settled after his invasion. He was here, brooding and silent, and waiting for me to climb onwards from this unexpected encounter with the images of masters past and present. I whirled and raced for the lifeline of the telephone downstairs and the police station that could be reached through it.
I was woefully unprepared for the sudden tilt of my heart as I reached the stairs and a man emerged from the blaze beaming in through the freshly unbarred front door. His figure took form below, ascending as I prepared to race downwards.
I snatched at the banister rail. Only he wasn’t charging into the attack like a burglar. He was running his hand along the rail himself as if he had every right to be there as he climbed steadily towards me. There was a stick in his other hand. The sight forced my mind to swing violently away from the dread of a renewed confrontation with a returning imposter to a jolt that was altogether less tangible; less easily digested in the light of day. At the heart of his silhouette, I could feel he was watching me. For a second my legs actually carried me down a few more steps, as if I might attempt my own version of the wild leap down the stairs and bolt past him for the door.
Then in the next second my mind sharply observed that my appearance had surprised him just as much as he had surprised me. More than that, I saw that he had noticed my impulse to escape and was instinctively bracing himself to put out that arm to intercept it. It made him real. It made his shape become more solid. My hand tightened on the banister, snatching me to a halt where my feet weren’t quite yet ready to do the job themselves. He stopped too; or rather the instinct that threatened immediate action passed into something less intimidating as he read the manner of my appearance more clearly. And then my eyes adjusted to take in his features.
‘Emily, I presume,’ Captain Richard Langton said from his position about seven or so steps beneath me, and placed himself firmly in the land of the living. ‘Why are you up here?’
Like his portrait on the wall, the Colonel’s older son was unsmiling. Below I heard a mutter from a more aged person who was passing from the stairwell into the passage and onwards towards the kitchen. Outside, beyond the newly opened front door, a man was dragging cases out of the back of a shabby cab and stacking them on the drive.
The Captain’s steady climb reached me and I stepped aside to allow him to retain his grip on the banister. I remembered the sense of pity that had met my examination of his portrait and was disorientated by it. It stole my capacity to speak sensibly. I said in a shaken rush, ‘You’re limping. For a moment I thought—’
Later I would be forever grateful that intelligence briefly put in an appearance and checked the end of that sentence. I had been about to say that for a moment I’d thought he was his brother.
Instead, I found that he was surveying me with the sort of calm scrutiny that scorched. I imagine he saw a silly young woman in a summer frock with a pale face and standing on the stairs in a house where she had no right to be. I saw that he was a good few years older than the young man in his photograph. He didn’t tower over a person as his brother must have done, but was tall enough to have seemed nicely built had it not been for the debilitating distraction of the cane, and I had the slightly embarrassing thought that the voice on the telephone had been an indication of the presence of the real man after all. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. His ordinary single-breasted suit over shirt and tie would have done for any reasonably wealthy man of the day.
So much I grasped as he turned his attention to my question. I heard him say with creditable mildness, ‘I sprained something tangling with an idiot who was running for the same train. It’l
l ease off soon enough. What are you doing up here?’
Then, sharper, ‘There’s blood on your ear.’
I put a hand up. My fingertips came away stained with a thin film, like grease. I had been bashed about the head by my case after all. The memory went through me like a bolt. Followed by the memory that I had been on my way to telephone for the police. I found that my eyes must have drifted past him onwards down the stairs at the thought because his head half turned to follow my gaze as if unsure that I wasn’t acknowledging a presence beyond him. There wasn’t anyone there, of course. His gaze slowly returned to me, watching me more closely. I imagine he was wondering if my sudden desire to move onwards was driven by the shame of snooping. I had an overwhelming urge to show him my empty hands, palms uppermost.
Instead I scrubbed away the blood on my fingers and gabbled anxiously, ‘There was a man. In this house. I was preparing your father’s lunch and he was in here. He stole my case. I’d only left it here while I went to the shop. I came through into the stairwell and he ran past me into a car – he’d been looking about the house, I think. He’d been into your library and the study. I came up to see what he’d been doing upstairs. I don’t know who he was. After what happened to Mr Winstone last night I thought, well … I don’t know. He bashed me as he took off and, as I said, he took my case.’ A hesitation before I added nonsensically, ‘It had all my clothes in.’
I had to suddenly reach past him for the banister. Not because I was in any way unequal to the distress but because my words were coming out so quickly that I ran out of breath. I found that his hand had flashed to my elbow to steady me. It was done with the same instinctive reflex that would have formerly intercepted my flight. It meant to save me from tipping head first down the stairs but it hurt too because his walking stick was trapped beneath his hand and my flesh.
