“Yes,” said Pascoe. “I’ve no doubt that a hundred years ago the air round here was full of falling girls. While in America they were fighting a war to stop the plantation owners screwing their slaves!”
“You’ll have to watch that indignation, Peter,” said Dalziel. “It can give you wind. And no one pays much heed to a preacher when you can’t hear his sermons for farts. Where was I, now? Oh yes. This lass. Since that day there’d been a lot of stories about people seeing a girl falling from the roof of this old mill. Tumbling over and over in the air right slowly, most of ’em said. Her clothes filling with air, her hair streaming behind her like a comet’s tail. Oh aye, lovely descriptions some of them were. Like the ones we get whenever there’s an accident. One for every pair of eyes, and all of ’em perfectly detailed and perfectly different.”
“So you didn’t reckon much to these tales?” said Pascoe.
“Not by daylight,” said Dalziel. “But standing there in the mouth of that dark passageway at midnight, that was different.”
Pascoe glanced at his watch.
“It’s nearly midnight now,” he said in a sepulchral tone.
Dalziel ignored him.
“I was glad when the sergeant stuck his head through that little window and bellowed my name. Though even that gave me a hell of a scare. “Dalziel!” he said. “Take a look up this alleyway. If you can’t see anything, come in here.” So I had a look. There wasn’t anything, just sheer brick walls on three sides with only this one little window. I didn’t hang about but got myself round to the front of the house pretty sharply and went in. There were two people there besides the sergeant. Albert Pocklington, whose house it was, and his missus, Jenny. In those days a good bobby knew everyone on his beat. I said hello, but they didn’t do much more than grunt. Mrs. Pocklington was about forty. She must have been a bonny lass in her time and she still didn’t look too bad. She’d got her blouse off, just draped around her shoulders, and I had a good squint at her big round tits. Well, I was only a lad! I didn’t really look at her face till I’d had an eyeful lower down and then I noticed that one side was all splotchy red as though someone had given her a clout. There were no prizes for guessing who. Bert Pocklington was a big solid fellow. He looked like a chimpanzee, only he had a lot less gumption.”
“Hold on,” said Pascoe.
“What is it now?” said Dalziel, annoyed that his story had been interrupted.
“I thought I heard something. No, I mean really heard something this time.”
They listened together. The only sound Pascoe could hear was the noise of his own breathing mixed with the pulsing of his own blood, like the distant sough of a receding tide.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really did think …”
“That’s all right, lad,” said Dalziel with surprising sympathy, “I know the feeling. Where’d I got to? Albert Pocklington. My sergeant took me aside and put me in the picture. It seems that Pocklington had got a notion in his mind that someone was banging his missus while he was on the night shift. So he’d slipped away from his work at midnight and come home, ready to do a bit of banging on his own account. He wasn’t a man to move quietly, so he’d tried for speed instead, flinging open the front door and rushing up the stairs. When he opened the bedroom door, his wife had been standing by the open window naked to the waist, shrieking. Naturally he thought the worst. Who wouldn’t? Her story was that she was getting ready for bed when she had this feeling of the room suddenly becoming very hot and airless and pressing in on her. She’d gone to the window and opened it, and it was like taking a cork out of a bottle, she said. She felt as if she was being sucked out of the window, she said. (With tits like yours and a window that small, there wasn’t much likelihood of that! I thought.) And at the same time she had seen a shape like a human figure tumbling slowly by the window. Naturally she shrieked. Pocklington came in. She threw herself into his arms. All the welcome she got was a thump on the ear, and that brought on the second bout of shrieking. She was hysterical, trying to tell him what she’d seen, while he just raged around, yelling about what he was going to do to her fancy man.”
He paused for a drink. Pascoe stirred the fire with his foot. Then froze. There it was again! A distant scratching. He had no sense of direction.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled in the traditional fashion. Clearly Dalziel heard nothing and Pascoe was not yet certain enough to interrupt the fat man again.
“The sergeant was a good copper. He didn’t want a man beating up his wife for no reason and he didn’t want a hysterical woman starting a ghost scare. They can cause a lot of bother, ghost scares,” added Dalziel, filling his glass once more with the long-suffering expression of a man who is being caused a lot of bother.
“He sorted out Pocklington’s suspicions about his wife having a lover first of all. He pushed his shoulders through the window till they got stuck to show how small it was. Then he asked me if anyone could have come out of that passageway without me spotting them. Out of the question, I told him.
“Next he chatted to the wife and got her to admit she’d been feeling a bit under the weather that day, like the ‘flu was coming on, and she’d taken a cup of tea heavily spiked with gin as a nightcap. Ten minutes later we left them more or less happy. But as we stood on the pavement outside, the sergeant asked me the question I’d hoped he wouldn’t. Why had I stepped into that alley in the first place? I suppose I could have told him I wanted a pee or a smoke, something like that. But he was a hard man to lie to, that sergeant. Not like the wet-nurses we get nowadays. So after a bit of humming and hawing, I told him I’d seen something, just out of the corner of my eye, as I was walking past. “What sort of thing?” he asked. Like something felling, I said. Something fluttering and falling through the air between the mill wall and the house end.
“He gave me a queer look, that sergeant did. ‘I tell you what, Dalziel,’ he said. ‘When you make out your report, I shouldn’t say anything of that. No, I should keep quiet about that. Leave ghosts to them that understands them. You stick to crime.” And that’s advice I’ve followed ever since, till this very night, that is!”
He yawned and stretched. There was a distant rather cracked chime. It was, Pascoe realized, the clock in Eliot’s study striking midnight.
But it wasn’t the only sound.
“There! Listen,” urged Pascoe, rising slowly to his feet. “I can hear it. A scratching. Do you hear it, sir?”
Dalziel cupped one cauliflower ear in his hand.
“By Christ, I think you’re right, lad!” he said as if this were the most remote possibility in the world. “Come on! Let’s take a look.”
Pascoe led the way. Once out of the living-room they could hear the noise quite clearly and it took only a moment to locate it in the kitchen.
“Rats?” wondered Pascoe.
Dalziel shook his head.
“Rats gnaw,” he whispered. “That sounds like something bigger. It’s at the back door. It sounds a bit keen to get in.”
Indeed it did, thought Pascoe. There was a desperate insistency about the sound. Sometimes it rose to a crescendo, then tailed away as though from exhaustion, only to renew itself with greater fury.
It was as though someone or something was caught in a trap too fast for hope, too horrible for resignation. Pascoe had renewed his acquaintance with Poe after the strange business at Wear End and now he recalled the story in which the coffin was opened to reveal a contorted skeleton and the lid scarred on the inside by the desperate scraping of fingernails.
“Shall I open it?” he whispered to Dalziel.
“No,” said the fat man. “Best one of us goes out the front door and come round behind. I’ll open when you shout. OK?”
“OK,” said Pascoe with less enthusiasm than he had ever OK’d even Dalziel before.
Picking up one of the heavy rubber-encased torches they had brought with them, he retreated to the front door and slipped out into the dark night.
The frost had come down fiercely since their arrival and the cold caught at his throat like an invisible predator. He thought of returning for his coat, but decided this would be just an excuse for postponing whatever confrontation awaited him. Instead, making a mental note that when he was a superintendent he, too, would make sure he got the inside jobs, he set off round the house.
When he reached the second corner, he could hear the scratching quite clearly. It cut through the still and freezing air like the sound of a steel blade against a grindingstone.
Pascoe paused, took a deep breath, let out a yell of warning and leapt out from the angle of the house with his torch flashing.
The scratching ceased instantly, there was nothing to be seen by the rear door of the house, but a terrible shriek died away across the lawn as though an exorcized spirit was wailing its way to Hades.
At the same time the kitchen door was flung open and Dalziel strode majestically forward; then his foot skidded on the frosty ground and, swearing horribly, he crashed down on his huge behind.
“Are you all right, sir?” asked Pascoe breathlessly.
“There’s only one part of my body that feels any sensitivity still,” said Dalziel. “Give me a hand up.”
He dusted himself down, saying, “Well, that’s ghost number one laid.”
“Sir?”
“Look.”
His stubby finger pointed to a line of paw prints across the powder frost of the lawn.
“Cat,” he said. “This was a farmhouse, remember? Every farm has its cats. They live in the bam, keep the rats down. Where’s the barn?”
“Gone,” said Pascoe. “George had it pulled down and used some of the stones for an extension to the house.”
“There you are then,” said Dalziel. “Poor bloody animal wakes up one morning with no roof, no rats. It’s all right living rough in the summer, but comes the cold weather and it starts fancying getting inside again. Perhaps the farmer’s wife used to give it scraps at the kitchen door.”
“It’ll get precious little encouragement from Giselle,” said Pascoe.
“It’s better than Count Dracula anyway,” said Dalziel.
Pascoe, who was now very cold indeed, began to move towards the kitchen, but to his surprise Dalziel stopped him.
“It’s a hell of a night even for a cat,” he said. “Just have a look, Peter, see if you can spot the poor beast. In case it’s hurt.
Rather surprised by his boss’s manifestation of kindness to animals (though not in the least at his display of cruelty to junior officers), Pascoe shivered along the line of paw prints across the grass. They disappeared into a small orchard, whose trees seemed to crowd together to repel intruders, or perhaps just for warmth. Pascoe peered between the italic trunks and made cat-attracting noises but nothing stirred.
“All right,” he said. “I know you’re in there. We’ve got the place surrounded. Better come quietly. I’ll leave the door open, so just come in and give a yell when you want to give yourself up.”
Back in the kitchen, he left the door ajar and put a bowl of milk on the floor. His teeth were chattering and he headed to the living-room, keen to do full justice to both the log fire and the whisky decanter. The telephone rang as he entered. For once Dalziel picked it up and Pascoe poured himself a stiff drink.
From the half conversation he could hear, he gathered it was the duty sergeant at the station who was ringing. Suddenly, irrationally, he felt very worried in case Dalziel was going to announce he had to go out on a case, leaving Pascoe alone.
The reality turned out almost as bad.
“Go easy on that stuff,” said Dalziel. “You don’t want to be done for driving under the influence.”
“What?”
Dalziel passed him the phone.
The sergeant told him someone had just rung the station asking urgently for Pascoe and refusing to speak to anyone else. He’d claimed what he had to say was important. “It’s big and it’s tonight” were his words. And he’d rung off saying he’d ring back in an hour’s time. After that it’d be too late.
“Oh shit,” said Pascoe. “It sounds like Benny.”
Benny was one of his snouts, erratic and melodramatic, but often bringing really hot information.
“I suppose I’ll have to go in,” said Pascoe reluctantly. “Or I could get the Sarge to pass this number on.”
“If it’s urgent, you’ll need to be on the spot,” said Dalziel. “Let me know what’s happening, won’t you? Best get your skates on.”
“Skates is right,” muttered Pascoe. “It’s like the Arctic out there.”
He downed his whisky defiantly, then went to put his overcoat on.
“You’ll be all right by yourself, will you, sir?” he said maliciously. “Able to cope with ghosts, ghouls, were-wolves and falling mill-girls?”
“Never you mind about me, lad,” said Dalziel jovially. “Any road, if it’s visitors from an old stone circle we’ve got to worry about, dawn’s the time, isn’t it? When the first rays of the sun touch the victim’s breast. And with luck you’ll be back by then. Keep me posted.”
Pascoe opened the front door and groaned as the icy air attacked his face once more.
“I am just going outside,” he said. “And I may be some time.”
To which Dalziel replied, as perhaps Captain Scott and his companions had, “Shut that bloody door!”
It took several attempts before he could persuade the frozen engine to start and he knew from experience that it would be a good twenty minutes before the heater began to pump even lukewarm air into the car. Swearing softly to himself, he set the vehicle bumping gently over the frozen contours of the long driveway up to the road.
The drive curved round the orchard and the comforting silhouette of the house soon disappeared from his mirror. The frost-laced trees seemed to lean menacingly across his path and he told himself that if any apparition suddenly rose before the car, he’d test its substance by driving straight through it.
But when the headlights reflected a pair of bright eyes directly ahead, he slammed on the brake instantly.
The cat looked as if it had been waiting for him. It was a skinny black creature with a mangled ear and a wary expression. Its response to Pascoe’s soothing noises was to turn and plunge into the orchard once more.
“Oh, no!” groaned Pascoe. And he yelled after it, “You stupid bloody animal! I’m not going to chase you through the trees all bloody night. Not if you were a naked naiad, I’m not!”
As though recognizing the authentic tone of a York-shire farmer, the cat howled in reply and Pascoe glimpsed its shadowy shape only a few yards ahead. He followed, hurling abuse to which the beast responded with indignant miaows. Finally it disappeared under a bramble bush.
“That does it,” said Pascoe. “Not a step further.”
Leaning down he flashed his torch beneath the bush to take his farewell of the stupid animal.
Not one pair of eyes but three stared unblinkingly back at him, and a chorus of howls split the frosty air.
The newcomers were young kittens who met him with delight that made up for their mother’s wariness. They were distressingly thin and nearby Pascoe’s torch picked out the stiff bodies of another two, rather smaller, who hadn’t survived.
“Oh shit,” said Pascoe, more touched than his anti-sentimental attitudes would have permitted him to admit.
When he scooped up the kittens, their mother snarled in protest and tried to sink her teeth into his gloved hand. But he was in no mood for argument and after he’d bellowed, “Shut up!” she allowed herself to be lifted and settled down comfortably in the crook of his arm with her offspring.
It was quicker to continue through the orchard than to return to the car. As he walked across the lawn towards the kitchen door he smiled to himself at the prospect of leaving Dalziel in charge of this little family. That would really test the fat man’s love of animals.
The thought of ghosts and hauntings was c
ompletely removed from his mind.
And that made the sight of the face at the upstairs window even more terrifying.
For a moment his throat constricted so much that he could hardly breathe. It was a pale face, a woman’s he thought, shadowy, insubstantial behind the leaded panes of the old casement. And as he looked the room behind seemed to be touched by a dim unearthly glow through which shadows moved like weed on a slow stream’s bed. In his arms the kittens squeaked in protest and he realized that he had involuntarily tightened his grip.
“Sorry,” he said, and the momentary distraction unlocked the paralysing fear and replaced it by an equally instinctive resolve to confront its source. There’s nothing makes a man angrier than the awareness of having been made afraid.
He went through the open kitchen door and dropped the cats by the bowl of milk which they assaulted with silent delight. The wise thing would have been to summon Dalziel from his warmth and whisky, but Pascoe had no mind to be wise. He went up the stairs as swiftly and as quietly as he could.
He had calculated that the window from which the “phantom” peered belonged to the study and when he saw the door was open he didn’t know whether he was pleased or not. Ghosts didn’t need doors. On the other hand it meant that something was in there. But the glow had gone.
Holding his torch like a truncheon, he stepped inside. As his free hand groped for the light switch he was aware of something silhouetted against the paler darkness of the window and at the same time of movement elsewhere in the room. His left hand couldn’t find the switch, his right thumb couldn’t find the button on the torch, it was as if the darkness of the room was liquid, slowing down all movement and washing over his mouth and nose and eyes in wave after stifling wave.
Then a single cone of light grew above Eliot’s desk and Dalzie’s voice said, “Why’re you waving your arms like that, lad? Semaphore, is it?”
At which moment his fingers found the main light switch.
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