Ghosts from the Past

by Sally Spedding

  Nevertheless, on my way upstairs with Mollie and Buck to unpack their few belongings, I couldn’t hold back.

  “Mollie, you’re only twelve, but as our eldest child, you should still set an example.” I lowered my voice as we arrived at the front bedroom off the landing, which smelt worse than stale. Where everything was coated in a layer of yellow dust. “You are never to be alone with Stanley Bulling again. We couldn’t say that to you in front of his parents, but I’m saying it now.”

  “Why?” she protested. Hot, red-faced. Pushing her thick hair hard off her forehead, then flinging her doll on to a small wicker chair. “He’s so funny. Called himself a dickey. ‘Ee aw, ee aw.’ Remember it, Buck?”

  He shrugged and hurried to the one window. Wide open to the afternoon’s heat.

  “Besides,” she fixed me with an accusing look. “We’ve not had much fun lately, have we? I think he’s nice.”

  “He could be a murderer,” said her brother, staring out. He’d sampled the bed and chosen his, nearest to the broiling view outside. He knelt on its blue cotton cover, swaying back and fore. “That’s why his parents didn’t talk about him.”

  “You were laughing loudly enough,” I said. He glanced round, and suddenly I felt like Queen Victoria who’d reportedly been hard and cruel to all her children.

  “I wanted to see if he’d confess, didn’t I?” He challenged. “I’m not stupid.”

  “Nor am I!” snapped Mollie. “And it was you who wanted to join him when he first waved at us.”

  “But I never sat on him.”

  “That’s enough,” I said, laying out pyjamas and a nightdress that Mrs. Myers had kindly given us; wondering where to put the rest of their clothes and where we could have a proper wash. Especially me, before anyone commented on my smell. “And you must tell either me or your father if you see him again round here. Promise?”

  Only Buck nodded, then held up something in his hand.

  “Hey, what’s this shell doing here?”

  “And not a very pretty one, either,” Mollie sneered.

  “Let me see,” I said. However, not being a seaside person, I was hard-pressed to identify its thin, delicate coils of the palest grey. I held it to my ear, because my mother once said shells can echo the sound of the sea; the rise and fall of waves. And here, miraculously, in this stuffy room belonging to somewhere we’d been no part of, I imagined I could hear an ocean.

  “There are some letters inside it too,” I said, tilting the unusual specimen towards the window, trying to read those black, handwritten words that lay beyond its irregular edge. I rubbed the first with a damp finger. The ink obviously indelible, meant to survive.

  TIR-NU DEPI LEMAL

  “Perhaps they’re a secret code,” said Buck, also straining to look. “And as Mrs. Bulling said this had been Stanley’s room, perhaps he wrote them.”

  “Possibly.” Yet everything about that wide-jawed, small-eyed son of theirs suggested he was neither reader nor writer.

  “There’s almost something almost French about them,” I said, recalling my long-ago lessons with Sister Mary at the Church of England convent in Iwerne Minster. “Mal means bad or evil, and hadn’t that poor murdered worker ended up here from Mauritius?”

  “Yes,” said Buck. “Angelid Menelos.”

  “Clever you,” Mollie muttered sourly. “Stanley told me he was really helpful. Good with the pigs and everything. He was really upset when the police found his head and that leg. He’d have protected him with his life, he said.”

  Silence, in which she seemed more than than ever to be slipping away from us. I shivered. Those black words in the shell niggling into my brain.

  “We need to think about schools for you both,” I said, to change to a more pressing subject. “We’ll have to ask the Bullings what there is in the area. I’m thinking of the future. Your future.”

  Mollie picked up her hair brush and without any mirror, began creating a parting. “I don’t want to think about school. I didn’t like my last one, and anyway, here’s different.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Buck. “You’ll end up a pauper.”

  She pouted her lips and made faces at her reflection in the window’s glass. Something I’d not seen her do before, and I was just about to comment on it when she demanded to know where her best summer dress was. “This one’s filthy. Look! I want to look nice here, not like some gypsy.”

  “For Stanley, eh?” Buck said then ducked out of the way of her flying doll which hit the window sill instead and flopped to the floor. A crack had formed right across its porcelain head.

  “Enough!” I shouted, suddenly seeing Matthew Crane in her hard, wild blue eyes.

  I picked up her doll and handed it to her, suppressing a growing panic.

  Deliver us from evil…

  That was what the shell’s writing had meant.

  *

  Five o’clock, and how I wished we were back at Wombwell House with its comfortable kitchen without the constant smell of pigs. I’d promised Rita Myers that I’d keep in touch with her somehow or by the occasional visit, but she’d doggedly refused to come here. Why, she’d not said, and it was no good guessing.

  “Don’t you like your room?” Ann Bulling, fully awake, asked the children coming down the stairs in front of me. “Have you chosen which side of the bed you’re to have?”

  “Yes, on the door’s side,” bragged Mollie.

  The old woman hesitated as if the bed itself harboured a terrible secret.

  “Stanley preferred that, too.”

  “It still smells of him, but I don’t mind.” My daughter interrupted, aware of me looking at her.

  “Ugh.” Buck held his nose. “How can you say that?”

  “We really need somewhere to wash ourselves properly,” I said, steering the conversation away from her son. “The flies are getting worse, and it’s so hot.”

  Ann Bulling’s wrinkly eyes skimmed oner my body. A thin smile twitched her cracked lips.

  “You work, you wash, simple as that. We’re not the Ritz you know. Nothing comes for nothing.’”

  “But we’ve been working on your water pit already.”

  Ann Bulling shook her grey head. “Doesn’t count. That was a trial.”

  “So, what can I do?” Mollie piped up first.

  “Feed the pigs and sweep then mop the store room floor.”

  “And me?” Buck obviously seeing this as one big adventure. School plans forgotten.

  “Help your Pa dig the pit some more once night falls. Until then, take the pig slurry over to the midden. Wear something over yer face and watch out for horseflies. They like young meat.”

  Young meat.

  How those two words brought another shiver under my clothes that were too itchy, too heavy against my skin.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “He’s too young. Besides, he’s been wheezing badly. I shouldn’t have let him go near their barn this afternoon.”

  Ann Bulling pointed a knobbly finger at me, while Buck looked miserable.

  “Who’s paying?” she demanded. “You or me? Anyway, Mrs. Parminter, I’ve other plans for you.”

  “What plans?”

  “You’ve got alert eyes. Don’t seem to miss nothing. And because we’ve no dog, you can be our guard.”

  Mollie laughed out loud while Buck shared my puzzlement.

  “Guard? Why?”

  “Watching out for our Stanley. He’s not welcome here any more, and we don’t trust the police to do their job. Never have. He slaughtered Mr. Menelos the way no butcher ever would and could kill again.” She drew closer. Her body sweat rank. Pee and sweat fermenting. “Besides, you heard the constable. He’s diseased as well. We don’t want to become lepers. Nor you. And if you see him day or night, you’re to tell us. Or,” that finger wagged again, “no pay. For any of you.”

  “Blame that foreigner,” Mollie said, avoiding my eyes. “They never wash, do they?”

  I barely heard her. Just then
, my pressing question more important.

  “Would I be on guard in the day or during the night?”

  “Both.”

  Jesus…

  “But that’s impossible.”

  A thin shrug folllowed.

  “Up to you. I’d have thought you needed the money. You and your family.”

  Even as she spoke, I was planning to leave with the children. Whatever Will had agreed, they weren’t going to exist here like slaves. Nor me. I’d take them to Norwich. Find any other kind of work for myself, and them a respectable school in time for the autumn term. I’d also speak to Constable Lambert and ensure any sale money from the broken trap wouldn’t be long coming in.

  “Thank you,” I replied, returning her peculiar smile. “It seems I’ll be doing everyone here a service.”

  *

  I’d meant to ask the crone for cleaning materials to scrub that bedroom free of dirt and dangerous germs, but the opportunity hadn’t arisen. As it was, Buck and Mollie followed me outside into the late afternoon heat. Their squabbling over who’d be paid the most, fading like dew in an early sun.

  I saw Will and Walter Bulling together in Priest’s Field not far from the river bank. Both using long sticks to prod the hard ground as if testing it for more digging. Both deep in concentration. I felt a sudden rage towards him. How dare he bring us here for me to keep an apparent killer at bay. To put our children at risk. And this rage made me begin to run until something to my left made me stop. The lowering sun directly in my face, blinding my sight, but no so much that I couldn’t see a man stalking along between the poplars.

  A man who could either have been the Bullings’ dangerous son or that deceitful opportunist who only earlier that afternoon had grunted his way back into my life.

  42. NICHOLAS.

  Tuesday 15th November 1988. 4.35 p.m.

  My trance had ended in a near collision with a parked truck in an adjoining lay by just outside a village called Upwell. Fortunately, no-one had seen me veer off the road, and although those dipped headlights behind me for so long, had disappeared, I still sensed I was being followed.

  I had to phone Piotr. Fast. If that crashed car at Catchwell Crossing was a Fiesta, and God forbid, mine, perhaps he’d needed it for some reason and sneaked back to The Vicarage while I’d been busy getting ready to go to Aldeburgh. Or perhaps someone else had helped themselves. After all, the padlock to that old barn wasn’t much use. But surely there were plenty of other small, red cars within say, a fifty-mile radius. Yes, surely?

  I told myself to stop panicking until its make and number plates matched up. Meanwhile, I couldn’t afford to jump the gun. I had to stay in the background, unable to even contact a neighbour or one of my loyal flock to check its makeshift garage. There was already enough mud sticking to me, what with the quarry episode and both Piotr and my slippery sister at large somewhere. Up to God knew what. And five minutes later, a sign for the University of West Norfolk loomed large in the darkening afternoon.

  Here we go.

  *

  4.45 p.m. and lights a-plenty still on in most of its windows and someone was still manning the main car park’s entrance. A guard in dark green livery. Older than me, which was reassuring. My name and other identification were in place. My number plates helpfully obscured by mud.

  “John Lyon,” I said, making sure he registered that medddler’s Colchester address. “I’ve a good friend who works here. Professor Stephen Vickers. Dean of History. He’s agreed to see me at five o’clock.”

  The pock-marked guard checked his watch and handed me back the failed cop’s card. “Not sure he’s in at the moment, but Greg Lake, his Archive Technician may be able to help.” He waved me on into the car park. Half-empty and, judging by the vehicles on show, those employed here were well paid. Nothing less than three years’ old, I noticed, and no sign of George Chisholm’s black Pajero. An aggressive tank if ever there was.

  My sense of relief didn’t slow me down. Rather, the opposite, and I parked instead by the Science faculty next to the Humanities block. Less well lit and with more cars to distract from mine, just in case. Foolishly I’d turned my Peugeot’s heater up too high and was frying. I prayed the short walk to the Humanities block would reduce my colour. I mustn’t appear agitated in any way and, still imagining it might be Piotr mangled up on that rural railway line at Catchwell Crossing did more to cool me down than the falling temperature outside. In fact, by the time I reached Reception and the woman at its desk who uncannily resembled my dead wife, I was noticeably shivering.

  I fielded her quizzing well enough, but when she remarked that the John Lyon whom she’d briefly met on Monday had been somewhat slimmer and possessed more hair than myself, I began to stutter. A boyhood affliction which always re-appeared in times of embarrassment.

  “L... Lyon… it’s not an… an… uncommon name,” I countered, whereupon

  she closed the Visitor’s Book with a sudden air of weariness. Probably had a husband and kids to feed at home. I took the advantage and asked more fluently where Stephen Vicker’s office was.

  “Along the corridor, though the double doors and second door on your right. It’s clearly labelled with the professor’s name.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have to say, though,” she lowered her voice. “Entre nous, he’s not been the same since last Friday. Perhaps you can cheer him up.”

  “If anyone can, it’s me.” Yet as I set off along the obviously new cord carpet, and despite my lingering smile, my stomach was in freefall. I had to get the predatory Vice Chancellor George Chisholm off my back once and for all.

  I’m John Lyon, remember?

  *

  On my way I passed numerous framed displays of student and post-graduate work, plus a huge historical map of the area, showing the villages of Hecklers Green and Longstanton to be much more populated in the 1700’s than after the great War. The church of St John the Martyr prominently marked.

  I’d just pushed my way through the double doors into a more brightly lit space when I heard another door being closed, before a moving shadow to my left caught my eye. I stopped instinctively, pressing myself into a handy alcove, hearing my own raised heartbeat as this shadow lengthened, connecting to the figure of a man I instantly recognised. Same new trenchcoat and polished leather brogues.

  Dear God, no…

  And God must have listened because the real John Lyon continued striding on past me, deeper into the building. A green file held together by four matching elastic bands and clearly marked WOMBWELL FARM tucked tight under his arm.

  I’M RELYING ON YOU, NICKY. AND TIME’S RUNNING OUT

  *

  So, he’d got there first.

  Damn.

  He’d come from Stephen’s office, but where was my less-than-friendly brother-in-law? Perhaps I should have stayed to look for myself. Even tried to find the cling-on called Greg Lake, but that green file pulled me towards it like a magnet as my alter ego took one bend after another, following the FIRE EXIT signs. He must have had a key. Known his way around, unlike me, and just then, every step he took, symbolised yet another nail in my coffin.

  The steel fire door clunked shut behind him. I had to be more careful but was soon closing in on that pale trenchcoat across the gloomy, wet car park to where a cluster of cars stood next to a forbidding security fence. As I quickened, I realised what a useless detective he must have been. He’d not looked behind himself once.

  Fool. Failure fool.

  However, he must have spotted something unusual while unlocking his driver’s door. My reflection perhaps? My fear? For he spun round, a mean look in his eyes as he faced me. That file still in place.

  “Well, if it’s not the Reverend Nicholas Beecham,” he sneered. “What the Hell are you up to?”

  My reply was to raise my right knee to catch him in the groin, but he was ready. Kicked it back. I heard the click of bone. Mine. Then felt pain searing through the joint before I hit the groun
d.

  “May the Devil eat your soul!” I yelled, scrabbling against the gritty tarmac to gain a hold. “And spit it out.”

  He stood over me. A heavy, leather shoe pressing his full weight on to the top of my right hand.

  “I’d better not see you again, Reverend, unless you’ve something useful to say on the whereabouts of your sister, her husband and Piotr.”

  Stephen as well? Was this another sick trick?

  “I’ll get you for assault,” I managed to mumble, thinking how on earth could I drive without my right hand. “I’ve friends in the police and the judiciary. I’ll explain how I gave you hospitality when you needed it. A bed, if you please. So, you may not be seeing your nice Lea Villa in Rowhedge Road for some time.”

  That seemed to work, but not for long. He stepped off my hand, made for his car, then shouted back. “I’m on to you, Reverend, so better behave yourself. You’re too old to be a playground bully.” And with that, he got in, closed his door and circled away without lights into the dark. However, within five seconds he was alongside me again. His new car’s engine whispering malevolently. “And by the way, if either Stephen, Catherine or Piotr have been harmed in any way, you’ll be the first to be fingered. Especially as Piotr Polanyi happens to be Catherine’s son.”

  *

  What?

  I felt sick, dizzy. Stupefied. How was it possible she had a Polish son? That idiot was lying. Had to be. She’d have told me, surely? This was unbelievable. And then I realised that if true, perhaps Piotr didn’t know either. He’d certainly never mentioned her. My spinning brain tried to make sense of it all as I struggled to my feet. My right knee barely able to take my weight. My palm studded with loose aggregate.

  Fuck. Agony.

  This wasn’t my car park. Somehow, I had to find it without going back into the Humanities Faculty block. And even if I did reach my Peugeot which wasn’t an automatic, could I even drive it?