‘Did he find anything of interest?’ he asked.
‘Yes, one document, which he actually clutched to his chest when he discovered it. I’ve no idea what it was, or where it is now. Uncle Max may have sent it in the post to someone else.’
‘Another mystery,’ said Michael. ‘Somehow, Cath, I don’t think the truth of this strange business will ever be brought out into the light of day.’
That night, I stood once more beside the cheval glass in my dressing room. I had sought out my darkest dress, which would serve the purpose until I went to a mourning warehouse tomorrow. There was much to do, particularly with respect to my uncle’s funeral. When would the authorities release his body for burial?
Outside, the gaslights had been lit in Saxony Square, and all was quiet. I was now the mistress of this house. Why had Uncle had a premonition of his own death? The answer could only be that he knew the character of the deadly woman who had visited him….
There was something that I intended to do as a matter of urgency. I would write to the man who hadn’t laughed at my belief in ghosts, and tell him all that had happened. I would tell him, too, the little scraps of conversation that Milsom had overheard. He had told me to confide in Michael about the sinister discovery at Mayfield Court. Well, I would return the confidence and tell him of my uncle’s murder. I would look out his calling-card, write to him first thing in the morning, and send the letter to his home address, a farmhouse in the Warwickshire countryside.
I was conscious of a throbbing headache, and went to bed early, refusing dinner. I was surprised and relieved when I fell into a sound sleep almost immediately.
NOTE. Reading through what I have written so far, I can scarcely credit how gullible I was at that time. I always had an uneasy suspicion that I was too naïve, even for a twenty-year-old; but I was more than that, wasn’t I? You and I have been married now for ten years, and I have always been quietly grateful for your saving me, when the need arises, from the consequences of my own continuing gullibility!
(March 18, 1905)
5
A Letter from Saxony Square
‘Dad, there’s a postman coming across the yard. Whatever can he want?’
Herbert Bottomley paused in the act of eating his breakfast of fried gammon and eggs. The dim farmhouse kitchen, as always in the morning, resounded to the noise of his girls, vying with each other to help their mother get him ready for work and out of the house. The baby was crawling under the table. Judith, their eleven year old, was brushing his overcoat, and scolding him under her breath for his untidiness.
‘Well, Poppy,’ said Bottomley, ‘maybe he’s bringing us a letter.’
Poppy, a fair-haired girl of fourteen or so, looked doubtful.
‘Maybe he wants to buy some fresh vegetables,’ she offered, but at that moment she heard the flap of the letter-box raised, followed by the slap of something falling on to the flags of the front kitchen. With a shriek of delight Poppy dashed out of the room, and in a few moments had returned with a bulky letter, which she handed to her father.
‘What’s it say, Dad?’ she asked eagerly.
Bottomley had looked at the postmark: London W. Franked at Grosvenor Street Post Office, 10.00 a.m., 14 August. He thrust the envelope in his pocket.
‘I’ll not know what it says, Poppy, until I’ve read it. Now while I finish my breakfast you can rescue Baby from under the table. She’s untying my boot laces again. Judith, that’s enough with the brush – there’ll be no coat left by the time you’ve finished.’
Mrs Bottomley, busy at the kitchen range, looked at her husband. He’d not been his usual cheerful self since he’d come back from finding a little skeleton at Mayfield. Any crime involving children sat heavily upon him.
‘Herbert,’ she said, ‘that letter – is it police business?’
‘It is, Esther. It bears a London postmark, which tells me who it was that sent it. I’ll take it out to the barn and read it before I saddle the horse.’
Bottomley finished a cup of strong tea that had accompanied his breakfast, and embarked upon the ritual kissing of his daughters before donning coat and hat and leaving the house. Behind the farmhouse, and across a narrow lane, there stretched a smallholding of about an acre, well tilled, and planted with a range of vegetables.
At the far end of the large field was a barn. Bottomley went in, and sat down on a bench. From an overcoat pocket he produced a pair of wire spectacles, and tore open the letter.
He had realized at once that it had come from Miss Catherine Paget, but had not anticipated the devastating news that it contained.
11, Saxony Square
London, W.
14 August ’94
Dear Mr Bottomley
My dear uncle, Maximilian Paget, has been cruelly murdered. It happened yesterday, 13 August, while I was absent on a visit to the theatre with my friend Dr Michael Danvers.
Our housekeeper, Mrs Milsom, told me that Uncle Max was expecting a lady visitor to tea at half-past three. He told her that she was not to ask the visitor’s name, but to show her into the parlour. Milsom told me that the woman came in a private-hire carriage, and that the driver came down from the box to open the door. The woman was clothed entirely in black, and wore a long mourning veil, as though she were a recent widow. Milsom said that she was a lady in her bearing and manner of speaking, and about sixty years of age. Milsom took her through to the sitting room, where Uncle was waiting to receive her. He seemed quite at ease, and rose to greet her. When Milsom returned to the room a short time later, she found him in the last extremities of poisoning, and the woman gone.
Milsom told me that she had heard a few words of the conversation between Uncle and the woman. I reproduce those words exactly as she heard them. She heard the woman say: ‘The old fool gets loose, and God only knows what he’ll blab about unless we get him permanently under restraint.’ She said that Uncle seemed agitated, and she heard him say, ‘Shall we make away with him?’ or ‘Are you going to make away with him?’ Milsom became frightened, and went into the kitchen passage, but not before she heard the woman say the single word ‘Forshaw’. I write these details for what they are worth. They mean nothing to me.
‘But they do to me, my dear,’ Bottomley muttered. He recalled the fragment that he had discovered in the burnt remnants of letters in the incinerator at Mayfield. Gabriel Forshaw tells everybody that he will go to Africa. He continued to read Catherine’s letter.
Uncle was poisoned with aconitine, or wolfsbane, placed in his teacup. The policeman investigating his murder is called Inspector Blade, of “C” Division, and he can be found at Little Vine Street Police Station.
Dear Mr Bottomley, you were so kind and understanding when we met at Mayfield Court, which is why I am writing to you about Uncle’s death. I took your advice and confided in my friend Dr Michael Danvers. My uncle very much approved of him as a suitor, and I hope one day that he and I will be married.
Please feel free to show this letter to your inspector, if you wish to do so. I think you told me his name, but I have forgotten it.
Yours sincerely
Catherine Paget
To Saul Jackson, Barrack Street Police Office in his native town of Warwick was a kind of home-from-home. No matter how far afield his investigations took him, the familiar surroundings of Barrack Street helped him to think more clearly. Or so he thought. The front of the premises was occupied by Sergeant Hathaway and his three uniformed constables, but the back room, with its scrubbed and sanded floorboards, was the undisputed territory of himself and Detective Sergeant Bottomley. A laconic notice, pinned on the door, read: Detectives. Knock and Enter.
Sergeant Bottomley sat in the window seat, waiting for his guvnor to finish reading Miss Paget’s letter. So it was two murders, now. Little Helen Paget out here in Warwickshire, and Mr Maximilian Paget up in London. And both murders, it would seem, committed by a woman.
‘I’m thinking of what Rose Potter told us, sir,’
said Bottomley when Jackson had put the letter down on his desk, ‘about overhearing that conversation between Hector Paget and his wife. It was all about a monument to a man called Gabriel Forshaw. It’s just a name to us, but maybe we could flesh it out with a few facts.’
‘And then there’s Miss Helen, Sergeant,’ said Jackson, ‘your little ghost. Rose Potter says she’s still alive. What do you think? Maybe she’s telling lies. Or maybe she’s telling the truth. Because if the lady she claims to have met is not Helen, then the skeleton almost certainly is. It’s time we made a move. I’ll contact this Inspector Blade in London, to let him know that we’re investigating a linked crime here in Warwickshire.
‘Meanwhile, I want you to go after this “Miss Helen” that Rose says she met. It’s vital that you establish the identity of your skeleton as soon as possible.’
‘And what will you do, sir?’
‘Me? I’ll go to this place Upton Carteret, and see what I can find out there. Whoever Gabriel Forshaw was, he seems to have a monument of sorts at Upton Carteret. The only way for me to find out is to go there.’
It had been a hot, tiresome train journey from Warwick, involving a change at Copton Vale Central, where Jackson had caught a little single-carriage train that had skirted the old town of Coventry before plunging into a belt of seemingly impenetrable woodland. Saul Jackson was a Warwickshire man born, but this part of the county was completely unknown to him.
Finally the train had drawn up to a wooden platform, where a sign-board informed the inspector that he had reached Monks’ Stretton. The man in the ticket office at Copton Vale had told him to get off here – ‘alight’ was the word he used. You always alighted from a train, apparently. The sign-board also told him that the little exit gate would take him on to the public footpath to Upton Carteret.
The footpath bordered a seemingly endless array of ploughed fields, sheltered by tracts of woodland. The dark-blue sky was cloudless, and there was not a soul in sight. It was on hot August days such as this one that Saul Jackson began to feel his age. His clothes seemed to hang heavy about him, and his boots pinched more cruelly than usual. The trouble was that he was becoming stout, and stout men could never abide hot weather. Perhaps he would exercise more in future.
The path began a steep climb through a grove of young birch trees, and suddenly Jackson found himself on the crest of a hill, from which he could look down at the village of Upton Carteret. It was just after ten o’clock on Friday, 17 August.
Upton Carteret had a wide main street of beaten earth, with cottages and shops on either side. At the end of the street, nearer the foot of the hill, stood an alehouse, a single-storey whitewashed building, with a small shady garden furnished with a few rustic tables. A sign painted below the gable-end told Jackson that this was the Carteret Arms.
Opposite the alehouse was an ancient church. Here, perhaps, he would find some kind of monument or inscription relating to Gabriel Forshaw, ‘the man of the fragment’. Jackson descended the hill path, and made his way into the churchyard, where he sat down thankfully on a stone bench set beneath the grateful shade of a sturdy old oak.
How quiet it was! Even the birds, Jackson mused, had been defeated by the heat of the August day, though a few bluebottles managed to buzz and drone among the gravestones. Jackson recalled the words found on the charred fragment of paper that he and Bottomley had found in the ravaged garden: … inscription on their monument in Upton Car…. Presently, after he had rested, he would examine some of the gravestones, and then quench his growing thirst at the Carteret Arms.
Facing the bench where he sat, and half hidden by tall rank grass and weeds, was a row of three tombs, which seemed in his fancy to be huddling together for company. They were built of soft sandstone, which had proved no match for the clinging ivy that was twining its way across the deeply-incised inscriptions. Jackson drew in his breath. Surely Providence had led him to this secluded spot? There in front of him he saw the name that the veiled woman had uttered before she had murdered Maximilian Paget.
All three monuments, it seemed, provided last resting places for a family called Forshaw.
Forshaws…. John Forshaw, gent, died 3rd March, 1798, aged 58, a benefactor of the poor, deeply regretted by Monica, his wife…. Edward Forshaw, died 15 December, 1853. Also Laura, beloved wife of the above, died 7 March, 1861, and buried at Leatherhead…. Also Henry Forshaw, brother of the above John, unfortunately killed, 14 September, 1862.
These were some of the names that Arabella Paget, the dominating wife of Hector Paget, had been talking about when Rose Potter had lingered in the passage to hear what they were saying. Forshaws….
It was too hot even to think, today. It was very peaceful in this secluded spot – no wonder his eyes were shutting! This was an old, closed churchyard: there’d be no more burials here, and probably hadn’t been for years. His eyelids drooped, and for a few minutes he yielded himself to the pleasurable sleep of a man fatigued.
He jerked awake as a lusty bluebottle droned past his ear. He saw it alight on one of the three adjacent tombs, where it began an erratic progress across an incised epitaph, added near the bottom of the third tomb. Yes! There he was!
Also Gabriel Forshaw, beloved son of the above Henry, perished of a fever at Bonny, in Nigeria, 7 August, 1865, aged 24 years, and buried there.
He recalled another of the rescued fragments of burnt paper: …Gabriel Forshaw tells everybody that he will go to Af… Well, it was true. Whoever Gabriel was, he had suited his action to his words, and had gone out to Africa, never to return. Could he safely conclude that poor Gabriel had nothing to do with the business in hand? Perhaps. But that black-garbed murderess had uttered the name ‘Forshaw’. It was too early to dismiss anything from his mind as irrelevant.
‘Bonny?’ said Jackson aloud. ‘It wasn’t so bonny for that young fellow of twenty-four, who died there thirty years ago.’ Gabriel…. He’d have been fifty-four, now, perhaps with a wife and grown children of his own, had not the fever claimed him in far-off Africa.
Suddenly, Jackson realized that he was not alone in the churchyard. He became aware of an old clergyman sitting on another stone bench placed in the shadow of the church. The figure seemed to emerge from the dim shade of a clump of over-hanging beeches like a photographic image slowly appearing on a glass slide.
Why had he not seen the old man? Probably because he was sitting so very still, almost motionless. He looked cheerful enough, but very frail and wraithlike. His hands rested on a stout walking-stick. He wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, and was rather carelessly dressed in a rusty old black frock coat which contrasted with the starched whiteness of a Roman collar. Perhaps he was the rector?
The old cleric was regarding him with an amused smile. The figure was so like a wraith that Jackson almost jumped in alarm when he began to speak.
‘I heard you make a rather droll remark about Bonny just now, sir,’ said the old clergyman. ‘It was a terrible place for fevers, you know – still is, I expect. And a very convenient place to choose if you wanted to explain away the sudden disappearance of a healthy young man like Gabriel Forshaw. You know, as you get older – and I’m well over eighty – you begin to get impatient with the conventions.’
‘The conventions, sir?’
‘Yes. Agreeing with people so as not to make a fuss. Did I know you at Exeter? Sometimes, I….They said it was fever, you know, and we all acquiesced. It was thirty years ago, you see, and we were younger then. Convention was all-important. But it was murder, right enough…. I don’t suppose it matters much, now. All the Forshaws are dead and gone, lying peacefully in those three great tombs till the Last Trump. But you won’t find Gabriel there; and you won’t find him in Bonny, either…. Are you a resident here? My name is Walter Hindle, and I suppose you could say that I’m a visitor to Upton Carteret.’
‘I, too, am a visitor here, sir,’ said Jackson. ‘My name’s Saul Jackson, and I’m a detective inspector in the county constabulary.’
‘A detective? So, I’m not the only one to be undeceived by a contrived legend. But it was a very long time ago. I shouldn’t bother yourself about it. How hot it is today, Mr Jackson! Very hot indeed.’
The old gentleman’s head nodded, and he fell asleep. Jackson, his eyes half closed, listened to the droning of bees, and felt the heat of the morning sun on his back. What a strange old man…. He seemed to have emerged from the background of ancient beeches like a ghost. What did he say his name was? He’d sit there for a little while longer. It was a day for sleeping….
So this was Bonny, dark, dank, beneath the scorching African sun! Whose funeral was this? They were burying Gabriel Forshaw in a jungle graveyard. But hadn’t someone said that it was not true? They were singing hymns and beating drums. ‘He is not there’, said a stern voice, ‘you must look elsewhere.’
Jackson woke with a start, and looked around him. The old man had gone. He moved uneasily on the stone bench. The sun was passing now over the church, and the graveyard was being invaded by shadow. Had he dreamt the whole thing? Had there really been an old clergyman sitting over there on the other stone bench? Was he a ghost – a revenant, they called them – coming soundlessly to visit his last resting-place? Or had he been a dream-figure, suggested by the names of all those Forshaws carved on the three tombs?
Whether man of flesh and blood or a dream-figure, the old cleric had certainly been talkative – and his talk was of that dangerous variety that could lead to trouble. He had blandly accused someone – or some people – of murder, and then had advised Jackson, a police officer, to do nothing about it.
Ghosts of Mayfield Court Page 7