Antique Dust

by Robert Westall

  ‘They’ve poisoned Tigger,’ I shouted. ‘They tried to poison me, but they’ve poisoned Tigger. He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Linda. Then, sharp as lightning, ‘Get a grip on yourself, Dave. Get a grip. Phone the police! Are you alone? Lock the doors. I’ll be home as fast as that car will carry me.’

  A chill hand clutched my heart. Another car driven fast, late at night . . . Nevinson . . . Gordon. ‘Don’t drive yourself,’ I shouted. ‘Come by train. Get a taxi from the station . . .’

  ‘But Dave . . . the expense . . .’

  ‘Damn the expense.’

  When I put the phone down, I was calm again. Became the technician. It hurt less that way. I had evidence against them, Burridge and Mrs Nevinson. A dead cat and a half-eaten pasty. Even though they’d removed the rest of the pasties, as if they’d never existed. My God, suppose they’d stolen Tigger’s body? I ran back, frantic again. But he was still where I’d laid him. I tried the kitchen window, found I’d fastened the catch without thinking, and thanked God. The crumbled pasty still lay on the floor. I went round and checked and secured every door and window. Then I started to ring the police.

  Which police? Not Besingfield police. Maybe the Inspector at Besingfield had had his warts removed by Cunning Burridge as a boy. Or was having his baldness cured.

  I rang Manningtree police. We’re just on the border of the two sub-divisions. The phone played me up something cruel. I couldn’t hear the 999 operator for the buzzings and clickings, and she certainly couldn’t hear me. I tried over and over again. At one point I could have sworn I heard Burridge’s voice say, ‘It’s no good, Mr Dobson.’ But I couldn’t vouch for my state of mind by then. Then I tried a dash for my car, but that wouldn’t start either. I ran back into the house, terrified they had removed the evidence in my absence; but double-glazing is pretty stubborn stuff to break through.

  I realized that Burridge was putting the hex on everything I was doing.

  I should have to be very, very primitive.

  I had a new garden shed, a few yards from the kitchen-door. In it is a spare gallon can of petrol. I soaked the shed in petrol and set a light to it by throwing in a burning ball of paper. I didn’t want a nasty accident that would leave me a mass of flames.

  The shed burnt nicely; my neighbours, bless them, came running, and phoned Manningtree police from their own houses. I suppose there were so many trying to phone in the end that Burridge couldn’t hex them all.

  I must hand it to the Manningtree police: they were pretty sharp. They had a lot of trouble getting to me. Cars inexplicably broke down; radios suffered from a lot of static. But they got to me in the end and listened to my story. (Thank God I managed to keep my voice cool.) When I mentioned Burridge, they ran the corpse and the pasty straight into the path. labs in London. They had no more trouble, once they crossed the Deben. Cunning-men, apparently, can’t use their powers across large stretches of running water . . . or so the Inspector told me. He also told me they had their own cunning-man in Manningtree, who sounded rather nicer than Burridge. Not that they were against cunning-men, but attempted murder was attempted murder . . .

  They told me later that the London forensic boys had a lot of trouble tracing the poison. The stuff inside poor Tigger had metabolized, and was no longer traceable. But they got a trace in the pasty, after a rare struggle. Something to do with toadstools . . .

  ‘If we hadn’t found that, sir, we’d have thought the cat had died of heart failure.’

  ‘Or me?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Point taken.’

  They caught Burridge and Mrs Nevinson at York, heading north on an overnight coach. Burridge had nothing to say. But Mrs Nevinson turned Queen’s evidence and sang like a canary. About Nevinson as well. It promised to be the kind of trial that would double the circulation of the News of the World overnight.

  Once they were lodged in Colchester Gaol, a flatness came down. We buried Tigger – what was left of him – under his favourite tree in the orchard. The marks of his claws were still clear on the bark. Then there was nothing left to do but wait.

  Except that my old restlessness to see the Ugly House persisted. In the evenings now, though. I’d hold out, sometimes till near midnight. Eating apples and biscuits obsessionally, playing records, watching telly. Anything to jam the tug of the Ugly House. But by midnight I’d be in the car and driving. Then I’d sit for hours, staring at its dark, empty windows. Almost as if I was waiting for it to fall down. Always feeling that strange, patient, waiting hate, like a cat at a mousehole. Linda would always come with me and sit silently. Only once she gave way and burst out, ‘What does Nevinson want? What does he want?’

  Then, one night, Reg Totton called, before I could get really restless; he stood in my hall, cap in hand.

  ‘He’s dead!’

  I didn’t need to ask who.

  ‘Heart attack?’

  Reg shrugged; told me what he knew.

  Burridge had been put in a cell in Colchester Gaol with two other men. Hard nuts, associates up on a robbery-with-violence charge. He had protested; explained his need to be on his own. The Governor had refused his request.

  Next morning, both the hard nuts had requested interviews with the Governor; asked to be moved. Request refused. That evening, there was a terrible fight in the cell. The pair of them half killed each other and had to be hospitalized. Two more men were moved in with Burridge.

  The same thing happened again; only that time, when they were moved out to the prison hospital they were not replaced.

  Next morning, the men in the cells on either side had asked for transfers, and been refused. All five of them. By nightfall, one had fallen down a spiral staircase and broken his leg. Two more were in hospital, doubled-up with stomach cramps. Another, left alone, tried to hang himself.

  They checked the last man; he held his wrists behind him, but they saw the blood trickling down the whitewashed wall.

  That little cell-block was now empty, except for Burridge. Wardens grew reluctant to go down it, to check on him. It was strangely cold, they said; far colder than outside. And it was damp, increasingly damp. Flagstones glistened that had always been dry. And the smell. Prisons are pretty smelly places, but . . . One warder had called it a hating smell, not a human smell at all.

  And Burridge just sat. Whenever they looked in, he was always sitting in the same place. Not eating, not drinking. Not looking up when he was spoken to.

  That night the warders on duty failed to check Burridge out. They didn’t say anything to each other, but they both knew they’d lost their nerve. They could no more walk down that short whitewashed side-corridor than fly in the air. By the time the morning shift came on, the smell, the cold, the wetness could no longer be ignored.

  They went along and found Burridge still sitting there. Dead. Rigor mortis had set in; they couldn’t get him into his coffin till the next day. They said he looked about two hundred years old, but that grim little smile was still on his face.

  All I said was, ‘Thanks for letting me know, Reg. Now we can get on with the access-road.’

  Reg looked at me like I was mad. ‘You maybe had a chance when he was alive, Mr Dobson. He might’ve changed his mind. But now . . .’

  ‘Have a drink, Reg. You’re upset!’

  ‘You wait and see,’ he said, turning to go.

  Burridge had no relatives. But he had a lawyer. I got a court order to remove his belongings. The lawyer shrugged.

  ‘Nobody will move them. Only a cunning-man would move another cunning’s belongings.’

  And nobody would, not for twice the asking price. I went as far as Norwich and Ipswich.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘we’ll bulldoze the lot.’

  ‘You won’t,’ said the lawyer. ‘You won’t find anyone to do it.’

  I found them. An Irish demolition firm in Grantham. Fervent Catholics to a man, and fearing neither man nor beast, drunk or sober.

  ‘We’d demolish the
gates o’ hell themselves, if the price was right, yer rivirince.’

  They arrived next evening, with their big jib and swinging iron ball. Only ten hours late.

  They’d had no trouble till they crossed the Deben.

  There was a big crowd next morning, way back down the access-road, stationed in the little shortened street-ends the demolition had left. Not coming too near, but you could see them bunching, peering between the houses.

  Nearer, but still not very near, every senior Council official who could wangle his way out of the office on any excuse whatever: the Chief Executive and his deputy, the Treasurer, the Chief Planner, the Chief Architect. I could tell from their muttering that they were making bets; the Treasurer was making the book, and I gathered the odds were against me doing it.

  The jib-and-ball had been parked in position overnight. Now it refused to start. The Irishmen fiddled with it, removed various bits of the engine and blew through them and put them back again. But still nothing happened.

  I heard laughter behind me; and that set off the last burst I ever felt of that terrible rage I had come to know as Nevinson. I pushed through them, jammed the bits back on the engine any old how, got into the cab and pressed the starter like a man possessed.

  She fired first time.

  I’ve never used a jib-and-ball; but I’ve watched one being used often enough to get the hang of it. Anyway, I was so seized with this rage that I was beyond caring. I shoved the thing into first, and manoeuvred for my first swing, just above the front door. I heard warning shouts, but I ignored them.

  And then the jib, the ball, the whole machine on its caterpillar tracks began to tilt. Slowly, slowly, like a great ship slowly sinking, we heeled over until it, and I, were lying on our sides, the engine roaring irrelevantly.

  I believed in witchcraft at last.

  Only it wasn’t.

  The Chief Architect was dragging me out of the cab. The Chief Architect was pointing. Beyond the jib, where the earth had fallen in, was the broken end of a tunnel into darkness. An arch, and a pointed arch at that. The Chief Architect was babbling about Early English groin-vaulting, and crypts, and priceless finds, and finally his sincere conviction that the broken arch, and the base of the Ugly House itself, were part of the long-lost Besingfield Castle . . . a priceless find, a new jewel of heritage for the nation, please contact the National Trust . . .

  You’ve won, Burridge, you bastard. We’ll never be able to pull it down now . . . I looked up at the windows of the Ugly House . . .

  And I saw him looking down at me. Maybe other people would say it was just a collection of ragged lace curtain and shadow playing hell with my guilty conscience. But I knew it was Burridge looking down at me, clear as day.

  I looked round, quite calmly, to see if anyone else had noticed. Oh, yes. Tetley was standing three yards away, staring up at the same windows, so close that I could hear the panting of his breath, and see the paleness of his face, and the dew of sweat that broke out all over it. So I knew I wasn’t mad.

  It made me feel quite kindly towards Tetley. So when I had calmed the demolition foreman down and reassured him he wouldn’t be the loser financially, I took old Tetley out for a stiff whisky. I looked across at him fondly. His whole bald head was covered with half-inch bristles of new hair. But whereas his previous remnants were blond, the new hair was dark . . .

  ‘You saw him,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I saw him,’ he said, taking a deep gulp of whisky.

  ‘So he won – he’s got his rotten house for ever now.’

  ‘Who?’ he said.

  ‘Burridge,’ I said. ‘You saw him. You came out all in a sweat.’

  ‘I saw him. But I didn’t come out in a sweat for Burridge. I knew he’d be there.’

  Suddenly, it was as though somebody had walked over my grave.

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Didn’t you see him, in the window next to Burridge?’

  ‘Who, for God’s sake?’ I was yelling now. Heads were turning all over the pub.

  ‘Nevinson,’ he said, and drained his glass. ‘Nevinson was in the next window. They’ve got each other for ever now. In that house.’

  ‘How do you know it was Nevinson?’

  ‘Nevinson had red hair.’

  The Ugly House still stands. The National Trust received it gratefully, and there was talk of opening it on Sundays, but nothing came of it. It stands heavily locked and empty to this day, and people prefer not to walk past it at night.

  I moved away from Besingfield, and lived with Linda happily ever after. We had, as Cunning Burridge forecast, first a boy and then a girl. They gave Tetley my old job. I met him at a conference of CTOs last month. He had enough hair for all the Beatles put together, but it’s still dark in the middle and blond round the edges. People think he has it dyed . . .

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Westall was born in North Shields, Northumberland in 1929. After taking degrees in fine art from Durham University and London’s Slade School, Westall worked as an art teacher and was also a freelance journalist and art critic for The Guardian.

  It was not till later in life that Westall turned to fiction, having been inspired to become a writer after telling his son Christopher stories about his childhood during World War II. His first book, The Machine Gunners, was published in 1975 when he was 45; it was a major success, winning the Carnegie Medal, and has been recognized by critics as a lasting classic of children’s literature. He would go on to publish over 40 books for young readers, including works that drew on his boyhood during the war, stories involving cats, and tales of the ghostly and supernatural. Besides The Machine Gunners, Westall is perhaps best known for The Scarecrows (1981), which won him a second Carnegie Medal and which his obituary in the Independent called ‘one of the most searing and haunting child-eyed views of divorce yet to have been written’, and Blitzcat (1989), which won the Smarties Prize. The Watch House (1977) and The Machine Gunners were also adapted for television serials.

  After retiring from teaching in 1985, Westall worked briefly as an antique dealer, an experience that partly inspired his sole work of fiction for adults, the ghost story collection Antique Dust (1989). The first edition’s jacket lists his hobbies as ‘nosing round old buildings, studying cats and looking for the unknown’ and notes that ‘he has never seen a ghost but has not yet given up hope’.

  Robert Westall died in 1993 at age 63.