Ten and a Quarter New Tales of Read online

  ‘I shan’t do that.’

  ‘Did you hear me say to leave that bloody fridge where it is or did you not?’

  By then I was really intrigued. Why should Digby care where I kept the fridge? And why did it excite him so? He looked angry enough to turn me out almost before I had moved in. I didn’t want to lose the flat, so I gave in and said I expected I would get used to it.

  At once he was his old self again, the ‘cheerful soul’. He smiled and patted my shoulder. ‘Of course you will, sonny boy. Sorry about that outburst, I get a bit edgy sometimes – money worries, you know.’ And off he went back to Lily.

  The minute he had gone I tested the point in the kitchen. I plugged in the iron and it functioned perfectly. Then I switched off the electricity in the meter cupboard, took the point off the wall and examined it. There was nothing wrong with it.

  Now to move the fridge. Immediately I saw – or thought I saw – the true reason for Digby’s bad temper. Whoever had done the wallpapering had botched the job at the bottom of the alcove where he had apparently run out of paper and left about a foot of bare plaster … or rather, plasterboard.

  I tapped the half-papered panel and it rang hollow. Of course, I thought. Of course. It wasn’t really an alcove at all but a doorway and Digby, when constructing this flat, had removed the door which communicated with the other large room and boarded up the space. He wanted to stop me getting into that other room or even knowing there was a way in.

  The alcove panel was screwed fairly lightly in place but the last thing I was likely to find was a screwdriver. The funny thing was, though, that when on the off-chance I looked in the drawer under the sink the only object in it happened to be a screwdriver. I never had a very high opinion of Digby’s intelligence and now it fell even further.

  The man didn’t want me to get into that room, yet had fallen into a guilty rage as soon as I showed signs of interest in the alcove and had also left a screwdriver handy for a little breaking and entering.

  I was determined to break and enter.

  The panel came away easily. On the other side of it was a room about the same size as my whole flat filled with what I knew at once to be the unsaleable contents of the shop Digby used to have in Chelsea: old armchairs with broken seats, wicker tables and brass-topped tables, lithographs in thick frames, incomplete sets of encyclopaedias, a birdcage, Victorian basins and water jugs, medical books, something that might have been an early dentist’s drill, and dominating everything, a huge wardrobe with brass handles. I poked about in this lot for a few minutes. It was stuffy in that room and everything was coated with dust, the kind of dust that is not a patina but a fur. I couldn’t understand why Digby hadn’t wanted me to go in there. Because he didn’t want me to see this evidence of his failure? Surely not. He talked freely about his failures.

  I stood in front of the wardrobe and stared at it, and something told me that whatever it was Digby didn’t want me to find was behind those marble-veined doors.

  Leave it, I said to myself, it isn’t your business. Old Digby is keeping something grotesque and undignified in there – pornography or objects of fetishism … But I was already opening the door.

  What I saw made me jump backwards and almost fall over the birdcage and the medical books. Hanging in the wardrobe from a hook in the centre of the top of it was a skeleton dressed in the red trouser suit Olivia had worn when she saw me off at Heathrow more than a decade before.

  I remembered reading somewhere that it takes about ten years for a corpse to become a skeleton. I imagined Olivia’s body – that exquisite body – slowly rotting inside those clothes, the hair falling from her head, the eyes … At that point I plunged back through the hole in the wall and into my bathroom to be very sick.

  Luckily, I had a bottle of brandy with me. I poured myself a stiff measure and then another. My phone hadn’t yet been installed so I dashed down the stairs, nearly falling down that steep top flight, and ran hell for leather to the phone box on the corner.

  What happened next makes me look all kinds of a fool. The police came, no less than three of them plus a doctor. They hauled Digby out and he was the picture of guilt, protesting that this was an outrage and an infringement of his privacy and what would his friends think? Apparently, a couple of friends had just dropped in to see him and Lily. We all trooped upstairs. I let them into my flat and through the hole in the wall we went.

  The detective inspector, whose name was Doyle, opened the wardrobe. Inside it, all on hangers, were two skirts, two dresses and the red trouser suit.

  ‘But it was there,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t there now, sir,’ said the inspector.

  Digby, looking very grave and solemn, picked his way across the room. There on the floor, somewhat huddled up, lay the skeleton.

  ‘That,’ said the doctor, ‘is a hundred years old.’ He prodded it. If you take a look you can see it’s been wired.’

  ‘All this junk,’ said Digby, giving me a magnanimous smile, ‘comes from a shop I used to have. I inherited the skeleton and the medical books from an ancestor.’

  ‘Not dear old Ambeach of the Royal Free?’ said the doctor.

  ‘My great uncle,’ said Digby and after that they all got very matey, poking at the skeleton and looking at its teeth, while Digby explained that the clothes in the wardrobe belonged to his former wife and had been left behind when they split up.

  Everyone seemed to have forgotten about me until Digby gave me one of his slaps on the back.

  ‘Cheer up, sonny boy,’ he said, ‘We all make mistakes. Now why don’t we all go down for a drink?’

  ‘We’re on duty, you know, sir,’ said Doyle in a tone that indicated he wouldn’t let duty come between him and a drink. His eye gimleted me. ‘I should say Mr Dashwood has had quite enough already.’

  Lily glared when we all walked in. There were two other people with her, a man and a woman. I heard Doyle say, ‘Ah, the skeleton in the cupboard,’ as he was introduced to Olivia. Then the floor came up and I passed out.

  When I came round, the law had departed and Lily had disappeared. But Olivia and her husband were still there. She was as beautiful as ever.

  ‘Here she is, in the flesh,’ said Digby. ‘Make old bones yet, won’t you, doll?’

  ‘I can’t understand what possessed me,’ I said. ‘I must have lost my mind.’

  Digby couldn’t have been nicer about it. He laughed and joked. He told all his friends and all the tenants in the house. In fact, he laboured the point too much, but I hadn’t the heart to reproach him after he had been so kind. Everyone in the neighbourhood must have got to know how I had had a hallucination of a skeleton hanging in a cupboard and had accused Digby of murdering his second wife.

  Not long after that, he asked me if I would like to buy the flat I was living in – the whole top floor in fact, including what we had all come to call the ‘skeleton room’ – and the price he named was so modest I didn’t hesitate.

  ‘I’m in low water, sonny boy,’ he said, ‘but those few thousands from you will just about tide me over till something else turns up.’

  ‘Lily can’t help?’

  ‘Let’s say she won’t. It’s her money. I daresay it gives her the one pleasure she gets out of life.’

  On the day I paid Digby and the flat became mine, I asked him and Lily to come up for a celebration drink. They arrived at seven, Lily looking particularly grumpy, and the Scotch she consumed didn’t improve her temper. I suppose she and I put away the best part of half a bottle between us; but Digby stuck to soda water, saying he had nervous indigestion.

  As usual, Lily talked about money. She took a gloomy view of the state of sterling. ‘Mark my words,’ she said, ‘we shall all see the pound revalued before we’re much older.’

  Sound though she was in these matters, she was wrong there. She at any rate will never see it. Suddenly, in her abrupt way, she announced at nine that it was her bedtime and got up to leave us. Digby said he w
ould stay a bit longer. Lily went off and after that – well, I don’t think I can do better than to tell you what happened when the police came.

  Digby and I hadn’t touched Lily’s body. It lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of that steep staircase. Somehow or other we both knew she was dead. It was a different doctor that came but the senior officer was Inspector Doyle.

  ‘I heard Mrs Ambeach scream,’ I said, ‘and then the crash. After that the front door closed and …’

  ‘Do you realize what you’re saying, Mr Dashwood?’ Doyle leaned towards me, sniffing my breath. ‘Do you know what you’re implying?’

  Digby said gently: ‘Mike, sonny boy, who could have closed the door when you and I were sitting in here together?’

  But he had gone to the door with Lily, gone outside briefly with Lily … ‘I heard her scream and fall and then the door closed …’ I stopped and looked at Doyle.

  ‘Be careful what you say, Mr Dashwood. You’ve had a fair bit of drink. I’d call you a heavy drinker. You must be sure of your facts this time. We haven’t forgotten what happened here a couple of months back. Now, when you heard Mrs Ambeach scream and fall, where was Mr Ambeach?’’

  I couldn’t repeat my folly all over again, could I? Accuse Digby a second time and a second time doubtless be proved wrong?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I think I have had a bit too much to drink. Mr Ambeach and I were sitting in here. Mrs Ambeach said good night and closed the door and then we heard her scream and fall.’

  There was an inquest and the verdict was Accidental Death. Digby was very upset about losing Lily and he didn’t even get the consolation he expected. Her investments turned out to be pitifully small. It had been all talk with her.

  But since then, things have started looking up for Digby as they usually seem to. He has met a very nice woman, a widow, who runs a flourishing business her husband left her. The only difficulty is that though she is prepared to live with him, so far she has turned down his offers of marriage.

  ‘I expect she’ll give in,’ Olivia said to me. ‘Digby is a great manipulator and he’s prepared to go to endless trouble to get what he wants.’

  ‘I suppose he is,’ I said.

  The Haunting of Shawley Rectory

  I don’t believe in the supernatural, but just the same I wouldn’t live in Shawley Rectory.

  That was what I had been thinking and what Gordon Scott said to me when we heard we were to have a new rector at St Mary’s. Our wives gave us quizzical looks.

  ‘Not very logical,’ said Eleanor, my wife.

  ‘What I mean is,’ said Gordon, ‘that however certain you might be that ghosts don’t exist, if you lived in a place that was reputedly haunted you wouldn’t be able to help wondering every time you heard a stair creak. All the normal sounds of an old house would take on a different significance.’

  I agreed with him. It wouldn’t be very pleasant feeling uneasy every time one was alone in one’s own home at night.

  ‘Personally,’ said Patsy Scott, ‘I’ve always believed there are no ghosts in the Rectory that a good central-heating system wouldn’t get rid of.’

  We laughed at that, but Eleanor said, ‘You can’t just dismiss it like that. The Cobworths heard and felt things even if they didn’t actually see anything. And so did the Bucklands before them. And you won’t find anyone more level-headed than Kate Cobworth.’

  Patsy shrugged. ‘The Loys didn’t even hear or feel anything. They’d heard the stories, they expected to hear the footsteps and the carriage wheels. Diana Loy told me. And Diana was quite a nervy, highly strung sort of person. But absolutely nothing happened while they were there.’

  ‘Well, maybe the Church of England or whoever’s responsible will install central heating for this new person,’ I said, ‘and we’ll see if your theory’s right, Patsy.’

  Eleanor and I went home after that. We went on foot because our house is only about a quarter of a mile up Shawley Lane. On the way we stopped in front of the Rectory, which is about a hundred yards along. We stood and looked over the gate.

  I may as well describe the Rectory to you before I get on with this story. The date of it is around 1760 and it’s built of pale dun-coloured brick with plain classical windows and a front door in the middle with a pediment over it. It’s a big house with three reception rooms, six bedrooms, two kitchens and two staircases – and one poky little bathroom made by having converted a linen closet. The house is a bit stark to look at, a bit forbidding; it seems to stare straight back at you, but the trees round it are pretty enough and so are the stables on the left-hand side with a clock in their gable and a weathervane on top. Tom Cobworth, the last rector, kept his old Morris in there. The garden is huge, a wilderness that no one could keep tidy these days – eight acres of it including the glebe.

  It was years since I had been inside the Rectory. I remember wondering if the interior was as shabby and in need of paint as the outside. The windows had that black, blank, hazy look of windows at which no curtains hang and which no one has cleaned for months or even years.

  ‘Who exactly does it belong to?’ said Eleanor.

  ‘Lazarus College, Oxford,’ I said. ‘Tom was a Fellow of Lazarus.’

  ‘And what about this new man?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think all that system of livings has changed but I’m pretty vague about it.’

  I’m not a churchgoer, not religious at all really. Perhaps that was why I hadn’t got to know the Cobworths all that well. I used to feel a bit uneasy in Tom’s company, I used to have the feeling he might suddenly round on me and demand to know why he never saw me in church. Eleanor had no such inhibitions with Kate. They were friends, close friends, and Eleanor missed her after Tom died suddenly of a heart attack and she had had to leave the Rectory. She had gone back to her people up north, taking her fifteen-year-old daughter Louise with her.

  Kate is a practical down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman. She had been a nurse – a ward sister, I believe – before her marriage. When Tom got the living of Shawley she several times met Mrs Buckland, the wife of the retiring incumbent, and from her learned to expect what Mrs Buckland called ‘manifestations’.

  ‘I couldn’t believe she was actually saying it,’ Kate had said to Eleanor. ‘I thought I was dreaming and then I thought she was mad. I mean really psychotic, mentally ill. Ghosts! I ask you – people believing things like that in this day and age. And then we moved in and I heard them too.’

  The crunch of carriage wheels on the gravel drive when there was no carriage or any kind of vehicle to be seen. Doors closing softly when no doors had been left open. Footsteps crossing the landing and going downstairs, crossing the hall, then the front door opening softly and closing softly.

  ‘But how could you bear it?’ Eleanor said. ‘Weren’t you afraid? Weren’t you terrified?’

  ‘We got used to it. We had to, you see. It wasn’t as if we could sell the house and buy another. Besides, I love Shawley – I loved it from the first moment I set foot in the village. After the harshness of the north, Dorset is so gentle and mild and pretty. The doors closing and the footsteps and the wheels on the drive – they didn’t do us any harm. And we had each other, we weren’t alone. You can get used to anything – to ghosts as much as to damp and woodworm and dry rot. There’s all that in the Rectory too and I found it much more trying!’

  The Bucklands, apparently, had got used to it too. Thirty years he had been rector of the parish, thirty years they had lived there with the wheels and the footsteps, and had brought up their son and daughter there. No harm had come to them; they slept soundly, and their grown-up children used to joke about their haunted house.

  ‘Nobody ever seems to see anything,’ I said to Eleanor as we walked home. ‘And no one ever comes up with a story, a sort of background to all this walking about and banging and crunching. Is there supposed to be a murder there or some sort of violent death?’

  She said she didn’t know, Kate h
ad never said. The sound of the wheels, the closing of the doors, always took place at about nine in the evening, followed by the footsteps and the opening and closing of the front door. After that there was silence, and it hadn’t happened every evening by any means. The only other thing was that Kate had never cared to use the big drawing room in the evenings. She and Tom and Louise had always stayed in the dining room or the morning room.

  They did use the drawing room in the daytime – it was just that in the evenings the room felt strange to her, chilly even in summer and indefinably hostile. Once she had had to go in there at ten-thirty. She needed her reading glasses which she had left in the drawing room during the afternoon. She ran into the room and ran out again. She hadn’t looked about her, just rushed in, keeping her eyes fixed on the eyeglass case on the mantelpiece. The icy hostility in that room had really frightened her, and that had been the only time she had felt dislike and fear of Shawley Rectory.

  Of course one doesn’t have to find explanations for an icy hostility. It’s much more easily understood as being the product of tension and fear than aural phenomena are. I didn’t have much faith in Kate’s feelings about the drawing room. I thought with a kind of admiration of Jack and Diana Loy, that elderly couple who had rented the Rectory for a year after Kate’s departure, had been primed with stories of hauntings by Kate, yet had neither heard nor felt a thing. As far as I know, they had used that drawing room constantly. Often, when I had passed the gate in their time, I had seen lights in the drawing-room windows, at nine, at ten-thirty and even at midnight.

  The Loys had been gone three months. When Lazarus had first offered the Rectory for rent, the idea had been that Shawley should do without a clergyman of its own. I think this must have been the Church economizing – nothing to do certainly with ghosts. The services at St Mary’s were to be undertaken by the vicar of the next parish, Mr Hartley. Whether he found this too much for him in conjunction with the duties of his own parish or whether the powers-that-be in affairs Anglican had second thoughts, I can’t say; but on the departure of the Loys it was decided there should be an incumbent to replace Tom.