The Phantom of Barker Mill

by steve higgs

  ‘Good morning, Tempest.’ Amanda called out from halfway up the stairs. I had expected that it would be her as visitors at this time would be unusual and it was now 0928hrs, bang on punctual for her 0930hrs appointment.

  I got up and moved around the desk, so I could meet her at the top of the stairs rather than sat imperiously behind the desk. As I got to the office door Amanda was just getting to the top of the stairs. She smiled at me and shook my hand as we went back inside and sat in the two seats by the window that overlooks Rochester High Street outside.

  ‘Would you like a tea?’ I asked, being polite.

  ‘No, thank you. I just had one.’ she replied. ‘Shall we get down to business?’

  ‘Of course.' I leaned across to my desk and grabbed a notebook and pen which I keep there. I had made some notes to make sure I went through everything I thought necessary. ‘This isn't an interview thankfully, so we need not bother with any daft questions. I do feel it pertinent though to point out that I have never run a business before, never had to consider employing anyone before and largely have no idea what I am doing.'

  ‘Yes, I got most of that from speaking to you. Lack of experience does not seem to be holding you back though, Tempest.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but I wanted to make it clear that you are looking for a job at a business that has not been long established, is reliant largely upon idiots as its customers and may not have longevity. Forewarned and all that.’ I crossed warn her what she is getting into off the list.

  ‘Understood. I do not believe there is all that much to worry about. I believe that you will continue to get clients and will be able to build and expand this business if you choose to. I am throwing my lot in early based on that belief.’ I wondered if she was right. There did seem to be no end of people trying to engage my services.

  Amanda and I talked for well over an hour and she left just before 1100hrs. By that time, we had established wages and expenses, what could and could not be charged to the firm's account, how we would share the workload, sift clients and how we would respond to those we elected not to represent. I took her through my business plan so that she understood the overhead and what she added to it, where our breakeven point was, where we started making profit, and how we could maximise profit by tackling the right cases. Amanda had asked whether I had considered getting an admin assistant to deal with sifting emails, responding to clients and dealing with invoices and expenses etcetera. I had, and when I had considered taking someone extra on it had been for precisely those tasks. Now that there were two investigators instead of one, I still needed the admin assistant but the added overhead it created, which was holding me back before, was now even greater on the concerns list. Despite that, I suspected she was entirely right and that our time was best spent solving cases and billing hours than it was sifting emails and shuffling paperwork. I had promised to give it some thought.

  With everything seemingly settled, Amanda had gone to work, she was not actually on duty today but needed to see HR and officially quit. I guess she wanted it done. Before she left, I had brought her up to speed on my latest cases - there were none. My next task was to look for more work I had told her. She was due to officially start at the business full time in four weeks but was going to tag along on anything I was doing from now on, provided she was not still working one of her final shifts for Kent police.

  With the office empty once more, I turned to my computer and read my emails. Client enquiries came via email or phone and occasionally by regular mail. I preferred email simply because I could sort and dismiss the truly crazy ones, not so easy to do once they are on the phone unless one is prepared to be rude. The email app claimed I had one hundred and thirteen unread emails. I performed a very basic sift to get rid of the spam, then started at the oldest unread email and went through them one by one.

  The first email was from herbert27@googlemail.co.uk. Herbert believed his supervisor at work was a ghoul and wanted me to provide him with a safe method of ensuring that once he had killed him he would stay dead. I filed that under probably need to inform the police and moved on. The next email was from prettyprincessy@aol.com. She (I assumed a she, but it could easily be a three-hundred-pound sweaty man in a tutu and a tiara sending the email) needed to engage my services because she had been cursed with a fat spell. I was unsure what to do about this case. There would be no fat spell, just cupboards full of inappropriate foods and a bin filled with takeaway cartons. I felt inclined to help but was certain there was nothing I could do that I could justify being paid for.

  There were several enquiries that held merit, but from a business perspective, almost all the enquiries were asking me to bill them money to find the perfectly ordinary explanation for the problem they faced. With an admin assistant to sift these, I suspected that the ninety minutes I had just spent on it could have been used to solve several without even the need to leave the office.

  One case though stood out as both immediately solvable and directly associated with my line of work. The client, Paul Blake had fairies in his garden. In his email, he explained that had told everyone, called the papers and TV but no one would listen to him or take him seriously. Whenever he was able to get a person to come to his house the fairies would not show themselves. He was begging me to bring whatever specialist paranormal equipment I might have to record them and prove their existence.

  I called the number he had given in his email.

  He answered with, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mr. Blake, this is Tempest Michaels of the Blue Moon Investigation Agency. You emailed me about fairies in your garden.'

  ‘Oh, thank God. They are out there right now. I am going nuts that no one believes me. How soon can you get here?’

  ‘Mr. Blake before we go any further, I think I must explain that I do not believe you have fairies in your garden. I am a paranormal investigator, but nothing I have yet seen has proven to be even slightly paranormal.'

  ‘Well, you are about to be shocked to your very core, Mr. Michaels.' I could almost hear his knowing smile. I was certainly curious.

  ‘Okay, Mr. Blake. If you are quite sure you wish to engage my services, this is what it is going to cost.' I outlined my appearance fee with the aim of putting him off. He was however convinced that he was on the cusp of making the scientific discovery of the century and that I was the key to it. Furthermore, he was happy to pay whatever I asked. I took his address and left the office.

  Paul Blake lived in Seal, a small town not far from the very nice town of Sevenoaks. Getting there was simple enough as I would take the A25 out of Maidstone. It linked a whole series of towns and villages going from East to West across the south of England. I could not afford to live in Seal, so felt a little happier about taking his money. My journey took twenty-four minutes and the satnav delivered me right to his door. I say door, but what I mean is his lengthy driveway. There were small terraced houses in Seal, I had passed a few of them on the way. Paul Blake, however, lived in an Oast House on the outskirts of town. His house was fantastic.

  I pulled up at the front of the house, the gravel driveway crunching magnificently beneath my tyres. Before I could get out of my car, Mr. Blake was already bounding out of his front door.

  ‘Mr. Michaels? Thank goodness you got here so quickly. The fairies are in the garden now.' He was perhaps in his early sixties and had a shock of hair sticking out madly from his head at every angle. It was turning from grey to white and matched his overgrown mustache. Much the same effect could be achieved by sticking one's finger into an electrical socket or perhaps simply ignoring one's appearance for a decade or so. He was wearing faded denim dungarees but there was no evidence of any other attire. He may have been wearing some form of underwear but socks, shoes, and a shirt were absent. The dungarees, and to a lesser extent Mr. Blake himself, were covered in spatters of paint in myriad different colours. I passed no judgement, but he was certainly an individual that could be considered eccentric or flamboyant or
some other descriptive that would never be applied to me.

  I shook his hand as I exited my car. ‘Please show me.’ I asked. I might as well indulge him.

  He turned and scurried back into the house, his bare felt seemingly oblivious to the cool air and painful bite of the gravel beneath them. As I followed him, I noted that I had already dismissed one of my explanations for the fairies: He wore glasses, but they were devoid of spots on the lenses.

  His house was filled, and I mean filled, with canvasses on which all manner of objects were painted. Some I could discern as a pot or a vase of flowers or in one what appeared to be a cat humping another cat. Mostly though, they looked like globs of paint thrown erratically at a white background. I acknowledged to myself that I knew nothing about art. It was a knowledge gap I felt no need to bridge, but it meant my opinion, should I feel it necessary to air it, was worthless. For all I knew, Mr. Blake was a famous and respected artist and had paid for his lavish house by selling his work.

  He threaded his way through the house between canvasses stacked against walls, against furniture and on top of furniture and came to his kitchen. The kitchen was boldly inconsistent with the rest of the house and was not only tidy but also minimalist, modern and devoid of any clutter.

  He stopped by the window in his kitchen where it overlooked his well-tended garden. He smiled broadly and pointed. I stared where he was indicating.

  ‘Can you see them?’ he asked in a tone that suggested I was blind if I could not.

  I continued staring. I thought to myself, not for the first time, that I should have refused the case. The poor man was clearly seeing things and taking his money felt wrong. Then my heart stopped.

  I squinted my eyes and continued to stare. I had seen something. A few seconds passed. Then a sparkly pink light zipped in front of a clipped privet hedge.

  ‘I knew it!' exclaimed Mr. Blake loudly, making me jump. He had been watching my face and had clearly seen my expression change. He began to perform a jig next to me. Disbelievingly, I continued to stare at the same spot in his garden. Once again, a tiny streak of light zipped in front of the hedge. This time it had an orange hue. Then two lights simultaneously moving in different directions, one pink and one blue.

  ‘The pink one I call Delila. The blue one is Bartholomew.' Mr. Blake told me. He was utterly serious. 'I have identified seven different fairies so far. Each has their own colour. Those bloody doubters. Fairies I told them. No one believed me. No one. Oh, I cannot wait to see all their faces when I am on TV and can publicly say that I told them so. I cannot wait.'

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, dear fellow. I need to get a closer look.’ I said, moving to his back door.

  ‘Yes, Yes. Of course.' he replied, an enormous smug grin still stuck to his face.

  I needed to get a better look because I wanted to find the cause of the dancing lights. Since it could not be fairies it had to be something else. Right? I certainly hoped it was something else because finding fairies would mess with my sense of reality in a major way. The little whizzing balls of light were thus far defying explanation to the extent that calling them fairies made sense.

  Mr. Blake had a neat garden path for me to walk down but I stepped off it and onto his neatly manicured lawn as I neared the place where I had seen the lights.

  ‘Are they still there?' whispered Mr. Blake from behind my right shoulder making me jump once again. In his bare feet, he had made no sound at all.

  As I paused and looked, a little light did in fact zip across the same spot. Behind me, Mr. Blake let out a barely suppressed noise of excitement. A shadow then fell across the garden as a cloud moved to block the sun and the lights instantly winked out. I took a few steps to my right and scanned around in the trees nearby. It took only a few seconds to spot what I had expected to find.

  I went back to the spot I had been standing in next to Mr. Blake and waited for the cloud to continue its path and once more reveal the sun.

  ‘I can bring you your fairies, Mr. Blake.'

  ‘Can you?’ his voice full of awe and so excited I worried that he might faint.

  ‘In just a moment, yes. It may not be what you have expected or hoped for though.’

  He gave me a quizzical look.

  The shadow cast by the cloud moved across the garden, bathing us in sunlight once more. A second or so later the fairies reappeared, dancing in front of the privet hedge just a few metres away.

  Mr. Blake squeaked with excitement again when I took a step forward. I only took two paces though then stopped under a silver birch tree. I reached up into its lower branches and after a few seconds of fiddling, I withdrew a broken and tangled coloured-glass windchime. It had been snagged in the tree and had not been visible until I stepped beyond the tree and looked for it.

  ‘Here are your fairies.’ I said handing the windchime over. ‘Light was refracting through the glass and causing the moving lights you have been seeing.’

  His reluctant hands took the windchime from me. His mouth was opening and closing as if he was supposed to be talking but could find no words inside his head. When he looked up at me again his eyes were filled with tears.

  ‘You were supposed to prove that I have fairies.’ he wailed.

  I genuinely felt sorry for him. ‘I'm sorry, Mr. Blake. I did state during our first phone call that I did not believe you had fairies. I'm afraid there is no such thing.'

  He looked miserable.

  ‘Can you put it back where it was?’ he asked meekly. His voice barely more than a whisper and threatening to break into sobs. ‘I think I would prefer to continue seeing them and pretend to myself. I will miss Delila otherwise.’

  I nodded, took the windchime from his unresisting grasp and did my best to fix it back where it had been, tangled and forgotten in an old silver birch tree.

  As I stood back, the lights appeared once more, dancing across the privet hedge.

  Mr. Blake smiled as a single tear ran down his left cheek.

  I was very glad to collect my fee and get back into my car. Despite doing exactly what I said I would do, I felt as though I had just told a child that Father Christmas was not real while simultaneously setting fire to their presents.

  I pointed the car in the direction of my office and left Mr. Blake and his fairies behind me.

  My Office. Thursday, 7th October 1511hrs

  The clock on the wall told me it was 1511hrs. I had done nothing much constructive for the last hour so decided it was time to knock off. It was sunny out if a little cool, but the smell of autumn was ripe, promising conker battles for the kids, sweet chestnut stuffing freshly made for my Sunday roast and the glorious changing colours of the countryside. I got up to leave, grabbed my bag from the desk to pop a few pieces of paperwork in it and just as I was leaving, the phone rang. I sat on the corner of my desk to answer it.

  ‘Blue Moon Investigations. Tempest Michaels speaking. How may I help you?’

  ‘Mr. Michaels, jolly good. My name is Margaret Barker. I believe I need to engage your services.' The lady's voice told me lots. She was educated or well bred, probably had money and was used to having people do as she asked. The accent I could not place though. Distinctly English but it just came across as posh to my untrained ear rather than giving me a region of the country.

  ‘I can make myself available at your convenience.’

  ‘Today would be convenient, Mr. Michaels. Can you meet with me this afternoon?' she asked.

  ‘I can, but I think it prudent to establish what it is you wish to engage my services for before I commit to anything further. Can you outline the nature of your enquiry please?' I had no other cases to distract me, but without a little more detail I could easily be suckered into investigating a ghostly goldfish. Plus, she had not yet told me where I would be going.

  ‘Well, Mr. Michaels,' she started and then paused as if gathering her thoughts or taking a moment to determine what she wanted to tell me. ‘My Husband was killed three days ago. The police are c
laiming natural causes because he had a heart condition, but he is,' she paused again, ‘was the owner of the Barker Steel Mill in Dartford. The Barker Mill has long been plagued by a phantom, a phantom that causes accidents and breaks equipment and has been responsible for deaths in the past. Now, I wish to be clear that I do not believe there is an actual phantom involved here, but I do believe that the recent sightings reported by the staff are real and that my husband was murdered. In essence, there is a murderer dressing as a phantom and I want you to catch him.' There was some distress to her voice, which given that her husband had died very recently, seemed perfectly normal. I was going to take the case, there was no doubt about that.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. Barker. I can be in Dartford within the hour, does that suit you?' My interest was definitely peaked. A murder, a phantom, a history of acts blamed on an apparition. Honestly, I could not wait to get started.

  I could hear Mrs. Barker making hmming noises. ‘Very good, Mr. Michaels.' she replied after a few seconds. Her voice was breaking, she was struggling to get the words out without crying. ‘I will meet you at my private residence.' She gave me the address and disconnected. I had promised to be there by 1630hrs.

  I swung myself off the desk and back into my seat behind it. I grabbed the mouse and clicked it a couple of times while moving it to make the computer wake up. I did not need to set off yet, it was only about a half hour drive to the address she had given me, so I was going to spend a few minutes researching the Barker Steel Mill and in particular the phantom.

  The search did not take long, in fact, all I had to do was type Barker Mill Phantom into the search engine and it pinged back images, newspaper report extracts, and a Wikipedia page. The phantom had first been reported in 1912 when two deaths had occurred. There was a grainy black and white photograph that showed what appeared to be a cloaked figure on a walkway above the mill equipment.