But that could not be. He was long dead, killed when a horse had bolted, and thrown him, leaving her a widow with two young children. The horse had stood beside his dead body, nonchalantly cropping the grass. She had fetched Colin’s gun, and shot the beast herself.
From far off, a voice was calling her. What horror was she to face now?
‘Bella, Bella! Where are you, my dear, dinner’s about to come in.’
The dark dreams receded, and she found herself standing at the top of the stairs, looking down upon Sir Leopold Carteret, his hand extended to take her in to dinner. She gasped in sheer relief, and left the ghosts of the past in order to join her noble husband in the dining room.
Nothing must happen to him. She had told him that if the truth ever came to light, he was to deny all knowledge of past deeds. Of her children, a son as ruthless as herself, and a half-imbecile daughter, he knew nothing. They had been brought up in London, where her great wealth had secured them the best of care and education. They had their parts to play in her schemes, but they would never be a threat to her husband, who knew nothing of their existence. Nothing could ever be traced to him. He must remain what he was, squire of Upton Carteret, baronet, and wealthy aristocrat. If she went to the gallows – or the madhouse – then Leopold was to be her legacy.
‘Master!’
The labourer’s voice came urgently to Jackson from somewhere deep in the day’s excavations. He looked down into one of the dark pits that the digging had created, and saw the man, his face shining in the torch-light as he looked up at him. He scrambled down the precarious slope into the floor of the pit.
‘Master, this stone tank that my spade’s uncovered lay in the foundation of this part of the house. I think it may have been an ice pit. But now it’s a coffin, as you can see. Take a look.’
It had been a good idea to recruit these twelve farm labourers, thought Jackson. Some of them had been laid off, and were glad of the money that he offered them. All were used to the cruel hard work associated with arable farming. They had started to dig just after nine that morning; it was now after seven in the evening.
The labourer had revealed the remains of a body, partly preserved, so that Jackson could see the wizened, mummified face and the shock of hair. He noticed a long slab of granite, which the labourer had dragged off the stone tank: this body, unlike that of little Helen, had not suffered the depredations of hungry rats.
The digger stood resting on his spade, looking down at the remains.
‘He’s still got his clothes on, master,’ he said, ‘so they must have been in a hurry to get him safely buried. They’re old-fashioned clothes, like my old father wore. What will you do with him?’
‘We’ll raise him just after dawn, and take him to the police mortuary in Copton Vale. But there’s a gentleman waiting in the police van who’ll come down now, and have a preliminary look at him. What’s your name? I forgot to ask.’
‘Samuel Vokes, master. My old father used to tell me about this house, and the Forshaws who lived here. Fine folk they were, too, though not gentry. So you reckon this here body was one of them?’
Jackson smiled, and shook his head. This was no time for sharing confidences.
‘That remains to be seen, Mr Vokes,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you to stand guard, while I go to fetch the gentleman who’ll cast an expert’s eyes over those remains.’
Doctor Venner was wearing a long overcoat and a kind of cap fastened with straps beneath his chin. Evidently he had come prepared for a certain amount of dirt, and the unexpected chills of a summer’s night.
He slid down into the pit, and produced a dark lantern from the valise that he carried. Placing it open on an exposed piece of brick footing, he bent down close to the remains, and slid both hands behind the head. They saw him prise open the jaws, and peer inside the mouth. Then he slid, rather like a serpent, the length of the body, and felt the legs, still clothed in trousers. They heard him utter a little grunt of satisfaction, and Jackson proffered a hand to help the police surgeon out of the pit.
‘What do you think, sir?’ asked Jackson, drawing Venner aside out of earshot. ‘Can I assume that we have uncovered the murdered remains of Gabriel Forshaw?’
‘How old was this Gabriel when he died?’
‘Twenty-four, sir.’
‘Then no, Jackson. This dead man is not your Gabriel Forshaw. He was a man approaching fifty, with only a few teeth remaining. I can’t say more than that until I’ve opened him up, which I’ll do tomorrow, if you can get him to Copton Vale before midday.’
Doctor Venner picked up his dark lantern, blew out the candle, and returned it to his valise.
‘I’ll not stay any longer, Jackson,’ he said. ‘It’s time I took myself home. If you find any other bodies, send them along tomorrow, too. Oh, and by the way: that man in the pit had his head cloved in with a spade. Good evening.’
‘You’re looking radiant tonight, my dear! You are the brightest, lightest thing in this room. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that you’re the light of this entire house.’
Lady Carteret looked across the dining table at her husband. There were three people in the world whom she loved: Sir Leopold, and her two children by her first husband. Of the three, it was her husband she loved the best.
That compliment that he had just turned – he meant, and, of course, she had retained her good looks into late middle age. Yes, he meant it. He was a slight man, by no stretch of the imagination a heroic figure; but he was an aristocrat to his fingertips, enormously respected in the county. He knew all her secret plottings, and pretended that none of them existed. Whenever she was with him, she felt safe. He had an almost uncanny power of denial, as though he really believed his various untruths. Whatever came to pass, he must not be harmed.
The meal, superbly presented by their Belgian chef, and served with all the skills of well-trained footmen, began to bring a welcome calm to her nerves, and she relaxed. What did that policeman hope to find? And if he did find anything, how could he link it to her? It had all happened a lifetime ago.
The wines seem to have been particularly well selected that night. She felt disinclined to withdraw and leave her husband to his port and cigar. She looked across the table at him, and he immediately interpreted her unspoken wish. He said a few words to the head footman, and coffee was served at the table, together with a sweet dessert wine.
It has all been worth the danger and the anguish. She had rescued this dear man from what would have been a scandalous crash involving social and financial ruin, and he had repaid that with utter love and loyalty. He had given her the social cachet that she had hitherto lacked. Her title, and her position in the county, were a kind of impregnable armour. Yes, she was safe with Leopold, and with their factor, Mr Lucas, a man who had the knack of making things happen. Lady Carteret relaxed in her chair, and sipped the sweet dessert wine.
Just after nine o’clock Samuel Vokes, who had moved deeper into the ruins to work with two of the other men, uncovered a bricked-up recess in what had probably been the wine cellar of the house. Part of the wall had crumbled away, and all three men saw the twisted and desiccated body that had been concealed there.
Saul Jackson watched as Vokes and his helpers pulled down the crumbling wall with their pickaxes. This body, too, was fully clothed, and the material had survived the passing decades well. It was frustrating not to have Venner there to make a quick but skilled examination. The body, arranged in a sitting position with knees almost beneath the chin, certainly looked like that of a young man. A lantern was brought, and the inspector surveyed the remains.
The dead man had been wearing a jacket of some kind of serge material, and it was possible to see a flapped pocket on the side facing Jackson. Leaning forward, he gingerly slipped his hand inside. He had assumed that the man’s killers had rifled through his clothes, and did not expect to find anything, but his fingers closed on something soft, which he withdrew.
It was a damp-stain
ed diary, its pages stuck together in a solid block; but the mildewed cover opened easily enough, and Jackson saw written on the flyleaf in lead pencil, the brief inscription: Gabriel Forshaw. January 1865.
‘Does this mean you’re finished here, master? If so, we’ll all be off to our homes.’
‘Yes, we’ve finished here, Mr Vokes,’ said Jackson. ‘And I’m going to tell you something now that you’re free to tell your neighbours. This body – bricked up here in this cellar wall – is that of a man called Gabriel Forshaw. It was said that he’d gone out to Africa in the sixties, and died there of fever. There’s an inscription to that effect on one of the Forshaw monuments in the churchyard. But it wasn’t true, Mr Vokes. Gabriel Forshaw was murdered, here, in the grounds of his own house, by two men. Done to death. And when that was over, one of the men killed the other with a spade. Dead men tell no tales.’
‘Murdered? I’ve heard that old tale of the man who went out to Africa…. So he was murdered? Well, it doesn’t do to have a pot of money, does it? Somebody’s bound to try and get it off you, one way or another. I’ll bid you good night, Mr Jackson. Murdered, you say? The wife will be very interested to hear that. Her grandma was in service here when this was a real house, not this sad ruin. Yes, she’ll be very interested….’
She had long ago withdrawn to a separate bedroom, because her ‘nightly fits and starts’, as Leopold called her nightmares and sleepwalking, had made sleeping with her husband impractical for both of them. When she retired to bed that night, she had looked out of a window, and had seen the fitful flames of the torches in the ruins of Waterloo House across the fields. Would they find it? And would it matter, after all these years – a lifetime – since Hector and another man, a discharged labourer desperate for work and prepared to do anything for money, had made away with Gabriel Forshaw?
She woke in the depth of night, and found herself once more in the library, a room that she hated and feared: a long, claustrophobic chamber, its walls burdened with thousands of old, rotting books which no one had ever read. The two fireplaces, one at each end, threw a pale light into the room from their glowing embers.
Hector was there, as real as he had been in life. He was standing near the fireplace further from the door by which she had entered, so that he seemed far distant.
‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘it would never have done, to have a witness to that. Dead men tell no tales.’
She stumbled out of the library into an old gallery, leading to the former servants’ quarters of the Tudor part of the house, quarters that had long been abandoned and bricked up after that part of the mansion was remodelled in the seventies. Her brother, Walter, was standing at the end of the gallery, his arms folded, his eyes regarding her with the kind of resigned pity that he had always shown towards her. Was he dead? Or was this a phantasm of the living? He began to speak, but she could not make out the words.
And then she saw, standing beside him, sheltering under his protecting arm, the figure of a young girl. She was still wearing the dark olive-green dress with the lace at collar and cuffs, that she had worn that night. She stood motionless, looking at her, but saying not a word. Helen Paget, aged ten….
Would Walter protect her from the fury of that wandering spirit? He had long ago been removed from her influence, adopted by a well-to-do merchant, John Hindle, whose name he had taken, and brought up as a Congregationalist. But she had always been fond of him, her own brother – dangerously kind, until she had realized that her affection for Walter, as his mind degenerated, would probably lead to her own death on the gallows. Would he protect her, now? Was he still alive?
At last, Walter’s words began to make sense. A book had appeared in his hand, and he was reading from it. The little girl, still circled by his arm, looked up trustingly into his kindly face, as he read a line of verse from the book.
‘An orphan’s curse would drag to hell a spirit from on high.’
Lady Carteret felt a surge of blind despair, and at the same time experienced a chilling cold. She looked up, and found herself back in her bedroom, shivering in her thin nightdress. Her nocturnal perambulation among the ghosts was at an end.
If things continued like this, she would be overcome by raving madness. It was time to shake off these craven fears and assert herself once more. That man, that Jackson, had evidently declared war on the Carteret family. Well, it was time to take that war into the enemy’s camp. There were things to do. Tomorrow, she would begin her counter-attack by writing a letter.
That girl…. That daughter of old Paget, she was another of the brood. Things had been going very well with respect to her, but perhaps more drastic methods were needed. True, she had the Deed of Release safe, snatched from the dying hand of Maximilian Paget, but when she had examined it, she had seen that it was an open deed: if no special legatee was named, then enquiry had to be made to seek out the next legitimate heir. She and Hector had slaughtered their way to a fortune, and the Forshaw money would stay where it was. But that girl was a Paget; had she inherited her family’s love of wealth? Would she be content with her uncle’s meagre legacy? Perhaps.
But then again, perhaps not. There would be copies of the Deed of Release, and the girl, if so inclined, could make a legal challenge to secure the fortune to herself. An open deed allowed for that, but then people would start probing and, like that man Jackson, might find out more than was good for her. So tomorrow, she would write a letter.
That night, she left the candles in her bedroom lit, and contrived to sleep fitfully until the welcome dawn.
The guide employed by Messrs Cook shepherded his little flock of foreign visitors across The Ring, and so out of Hyde Park and into Kensington Gardens. It was early in the morning of the 31 August, and a Friday, so he would not be on duty again until the coming Monday.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he intoned, ‘we have now entered Kensington Gardens, in which is situated Kensington Palace, one of the Royal residences. The building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and built between 1689 and 1691.’
‘You say it is a palace, yes? The good Queen Victoria dwells there?’
‘No, sir. She does not.’ Foreigners required not only courtesy but firmness. ‘William the Third and Mary the Second, joint sovereigns, both died there, as did Queen Anne, and George the Second. Her Majesty Queen Victoria was born there in 1819.
‘Stretching in front of you—’
‘And this palace, the citizens can go there, to visit, is it not?’
‘No, it is not – no, they don’t. But the state rooms are being restored, and it is said that they will be opened to the public in about six years’ time. The palace is currently the residence of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise, and her husband the Marquess of Lorne.
‘Stretching in front of you is the Long Water, which is a continuation of the Serpentine, which we saw in Hyde Park. This waterway leaves the park at Albert Gate, over in that direction, and so joins the London main drainage system. We shall now—’
‘And that black object, floating in your Long Water, what is the meaning of that? An old custom, yes? Ach! Mein Gott! It is a dead man!’
Foreigners! The French weren’t too bad, but these Germans: nothing but questions! Better find out what the fellow was talking about. The guide walked over to the edge of the Long Water.
Inspector Blade and Sergeant Bottomley looked down at the drowned and sodden corpse that had been hauled out of the Long Water. It lay on the well-cut grass of Kensington Gardens, where a canvas screen had been hastily erected to preserve the sight from curious eyes.
The Cook’s guide had made a brief statement, and had furnished them with his name and address; he and his volubly excited party had left the gardens by the way that they had come.
‘I failed, sir,’ said Bottomley. His flushed, homely face regarded the body of the Reverend Walter Hindle with an expression of anguished distress. ‘I stayed behind in London when the guvnor went back to Warwick partly to make sure that not
hing happened to this poor old gentleman. But they got the better of me in the end.’
‘You can’t be everywhere at once, Sergeant,’ said Blade. ‘You were very wisely keeping an eye on that young lady in Saxony Square. So don’t reproach yourself. Ah! At last! Here’s the duty police surgeon. He’ll take a quick look, and then arrange for the body to be removed to Brompton Road. Doctor McMaster, will you look at this man lying here dead?’
The doctor was a lean, red-headed man with a poker face, and a twinkle in his eye. He looked Inspector Blade up and down before kneeling down beside the body.
‘Dead, is he? How do you know that? Since when were you last in medical school?’
‘As always, Dr McMaster, you’re a model of courtesy. Will you please examine that dead body? You’ll be better able than me to say whether it’s dead or not.’
The Reverend Walter Hindle’s face was that of a man who had quietly fallen asleep. His eyes were closed, and his mouth slightly open. His white hair clung in sodden strands to his forehead. He was wearing the clothes in which Bottomley had last seen him. Herbert Bottomley thought: he’s been drugged into unconsciousness, probably with chloral hydrate, then brought out here to be thrown away like so much rubbish….
McMaster seized the corpse by its shoulders and turned it on to its left side. A stream of water immediately poured from its mouth. He roughly examined the head for wounds, grasping the corpse by the chin, and moving the head from side to side with a callousness born of long experience as a police surgeon. Then he sat back on his heels and looked up at the two policemen.
‘He died by drowning. Brought here from somewhere and put into the water. He may have been drugged first – probably was. I can do a full post mortem this afternoon. Do you know who he is?’
Ghosts of Mayfield Court Page 16