by T E Kinsey
Daisy did as she was asked and, with the tension broken, the room erupted into nervously excited chatter.
The rest of the evening at the Dog and Duck had passed comparatively uneventfully. Mr Snelson left almost as soon as the lamp was relit, but the rest of us remained for a while. The apparition was discussed at some length as the sandwiches were devoured, and Madame Eugénie had taken several bookings for private consultations on the next day. I had felt somewhat cheated that the séance had lasted only a few minutes, but the others were abuzz, having expected nothing so exciting as a full-blown apparition, still less one that made such an extraordinary accusation.
Mr Snelson had been questioned at length but, though clearly shaken, was adamant that he had no idea what the spirit had meant when it had pointed at him and called him a murderer. Nevertheless, Daisy avoided him for the rest of the night, casting suspicious sidelong glances his way, and refused to say goodnight to him when she had eventually shown us all to the door.
We had arrived home late and had both slept in. I had made breakfast and we were sitting together at the kitchen table in our dressing gowns, eating scrambled eggs in companionable silence. Once the second pot of tea had begun to revive us, I ventured a question.
‘What did you think, then, my lady? Are you still sceptical?’
‘I’m curious, certainly,’ she said, sipping her tea.
‘Curious?’
‘Of course. Either we witnessed a genuine psychic event last night, in which case I should like to know more. Or Madame Eugénie is a fraud, in which case I should very much like to know how she did it.’
‘You can’t possibly think that was a fraud. How could she have done all that? How did she know that the doctor’s late wife was named June. I didn’t know that. Did you know that? And there was a ghost. Which touched Mr Snelson from the other side of the table. With its hand. Deathly cold.’
‘We certainly witnessed all of those things,’ she said. ‘But what did we really see? If it were real, it was quite the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some pretty astonishing things in my time, I can tell you.’
‘Daisy was convinced. She was all of a pother.’
‘Daisy’s always in a state about something,’ she said. ‘She does so love to be the centre of attention, that girl.’
‘I suppose. But I thought it was an extraordinary experience. I’m only sorry it was so short.’
‘Yes, I did feel a little cheated. We were seated for, what, five minutes? I do hope you didn’t pay a lot for the tickets. You must let me pay for mine.’
‘No, my lady, it was my treat. I have a spare shilling, too, if you fancy a private reading. You could find out what the future holds for you…’
She laughed, and the smile lit her face. ‘No, pet, you save your money. I’ll take my chances and let life unfold as it may.’
I smiled. ‘As you wish, my lady.’
I began to tidy away the breakfast things. ‘Do you have any plans for today, my lady?’ I said as I put the dishes in the sink.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, impishly. ‘I was thinking that maybe we could… go to the pub.’
I’m ashamed to say that I gaped like some manner of gaffed fish. ‘You want to go to the pub, my lady?’ I said.
‘Not for myself, pet, but it’s so obvious that you do. And it might be nice to have a bit of a poke about. See if we can’t find out a little more about our visitation of last night. Let’s nip over there at lunchtime and see what’s what.’
‘Right you are, my lady. In the meantime, would you care for some cake?’
She laughed. ‘We’ve only just had breakfast.’
‘Yes. But. There’s cake,’ I said, with the tiniest hint of desperation as I indicated the pastry-filled kitchen.
‘Perhaps we should take some with us to the pub. We might persuade Joe to make us a pot of tea.’
The storm had finally blown itself out, and now that it was light we were able to see some of the havoc it had wrought. The lightning-struck tree just down the lane from the house had been almost completely destroyed. Its massive trunk had been split almost in two and stripped of all its bark, while its elegant limbs lay scattered around the field. There was more debris in the lane and the village green resembled nothing less than a swamp. As we rounded the green we could see that there were slates missing from a couple of shop roofs, and at least one chimney pot lay smashed in the road.
‘They don’t muck about when they have storms down here, do they?’ said Lady Hardcastle as we opened the door to the pub and stepped in.
‘No, my lady. Nothing like quality of a decent Welsh storm, of course, but they try their best.’
‘They do, they do,’ she said. ‘I say,’ she said slightly more loudly. ‘Anyone at home?’
Unusually, the pub was deserted.
‘That’s odd, my lady,’ I said, opening the door to the public bar and looking through. ‘There’s no one here, either.’
‘Joe?’ shouted Lady Hardcastle.
‘Daisy?’ I thought I might try a bit of shouting, too.
There were clomping footsteps on the stairs behind us and Joe appeared in the doorway.
‘What’s all the racket?’ he grumbled. ‘Who the devil… Oh, it’s you m’lady.’
‘It is, Joe, it is,’ she said. ‘Are you all right? We were beginning to get worried about you.’
‘Oh, I’m fine, m’lady. I was just upstairs checking on Madame Eugénie. Locked herself in her room, she has.’
‘Oh dear. Why?’
‘There was a bit of a to do in the night. We had to get her out of bed to deal with it.’
‘A “to do”?’ said Lady Hardcastle with more than a hint of a mischievous twinkle in her slate-grey eyes.
‘A right old to do,’ he said, toothlessly, ‘and no mistake.
‘Were the spirits getting rowdy on your beers and spirits?’ she said.
‘They didn’t need no booze to get ’em goin’,’ he said. ‘There was bangin’ and crashin’ and carrying on. I got up to see what the matter was, saw the mess and went straight up to get Madame Eugénie. She come down and waved her hands and swayed a bit and muttered some stuff and it all calmed down. Then she went back into her room and I a’n’t seen her since.’
‘How extraordinary,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Did she say what had caused it?’
‘She reckons ’twere that ghost you summoned up last night. I said no good would come of it. I told Our Ma. I said, “You shouldn’t go messing with t’other side.” She just laughed and said, “Let Daisy have her fun, Joe.” But I were right, weren’t I.’
We had never met, nor even seen Mrs Arnold. I always assumed, given his own old age, that “Our Ma” was his wife rather than his mother, but other than speculation we had nothing to go on.
‘It certainly seems as though strange things are happening,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Was there any damage?’
‘Damage? Couple of chairs knocked over, couple of glasses broke. But come with me, m’lady. Let me show you the strangest thing.’
He led us through the public bar to the skittle alley. The scores were kept on a small chalkboard screwed to the wall which he indicted with the flourish of a stage magician revealing his latest illusion. Written in chalk in a shaky hand were the words “NELSON MURDERED ME”. It was signed in an equally shaky hand with what looked like “Mummy Bear”, but I couldn’t be sure.
‘Who’s Nelson?’ I said. ‘Anyone we know?’
‘Mr Snelson what bought the old Cooper house up the way,’ said Joe.
‘A sloppy ghost, then,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘Beg pardon, m’lady?’ he said.
‘Missing off the S.’
‘Oh, I get you. No, it’s his first name, i’n’t it.’
‘Oh how precious,’ she said, delightedly. ‘Nelson Snelson. That’s altogether too wonderful. Flo, dear, can we change your surname to Lawrence? You shall be Florence Lawrence.’
‘Only if you agree to be Emily Demerly, my lady,’ I said with a frown.
She laughed, still tickled by the whimsical mischief exhibited by Mr Snelson’s parents. ‘But who is this Bear? Whose mummy is she? And what’s this about murder?’ she said.
‘Don’t know nothing about it, m’lady,’ he said. ‘But Daisy said as how that ghost you saw last night had accused him o’ murder – I reckon it must be he.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Lady Hardcastle dubiously.
But it made perfect sense to me. ‘Ghosts are unquiet spirits,’ I said. ‘They most often have something on this side that they need to finish. Seeing his murderer brought to justice would fit the bill.’
‘But “Mummy Bear”?’ she said, still unconvinced. ‘The “ghost” we saw was a man.’
‘It’s not an especially clear signature,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s not Mummy Bear at all.’
‘Hmmm,’ she said again. ‘Perhaps.’
I decided a change of subject was in order. ‘It’s quiet in here this morning, Joe. We were expecting you to be busier.’
‘They all be clearin’ up after the storm, miss,’ he said. ‘They’ll be in later I reckons.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘We brought some cakes and pastries.’ I offered him the basket that I had packed with some of the surplus from our kitchen.
‘That’s very kind of you, miss,’ he said, looking a little nonplussed.
‘Perhaps we might buy a pot of tea?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.
This seemed to amuse Joe. ‘Tea, m’lady?’ he said with a grin. ‘In a pub? Whatever next?’
‘Well we don’t have a tea room and despite my frequent protestations it sometimes can be too early for brandy, so I thought a nice pot of tea and a bun in convivial surroundings might be pleasant. You have a kitchen, you have tables and chairs; I thought it might be a nice little money-spinner for you.’
He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then made up his mind. ‘You know,’ he said with another toothless grin, ‘I reckons you might be right at that. I’ll fetch Our Ma’s teapot and you can have your elevenses here in the snug.’
He shambled off in the direction of the stairs.
‘Do you have a scientific explanation for all this, my lady?’ I asked once he was out of earshot.
‘Not yet, no,’ she said, looking around. ‘There don’t seem to be any signs of a burglary, and all the residents were apparently in bed – Joe had to get up to see what the matter was, Madame Eugénie had to be roused from her slumbers and Mrs Arnold has, to my knowledge, never ventured from their private rooms. And yet there’s a small amount of mess and a message on a black board. It’s a mystery, Flo dear. A mystery.’
‘Or it’s the ghost of Mummy Bear,’ I said.
‘Getting up to make porridge? It’s a starting point, I suppose.’
We could hear Joe in the pub’s kitchen clattering about with what I hoped wasn’t “Our Ma’s” best china – it would be returning to her dresser in pieces if it were.
After a little more clattering and at least one extremely colourful toothless oath, Joe emerged from the kitchen with a tea tray.
‘Blow me, but ’t is harder work than pourin’ a pint or makin’ a round of sandwiches,’ he said. ‘I might have to talk to Daisy about makin’ the tea when she gets in.’
We thanked him and he shambled off again to make good the ghost’s mess.
‘I say, Mr Arnold,’ said Lady Hardcastle as he picked up a chair. ‘What do you know about this Mr Nelson Snelson?’ She seemed to be taking great pleasure in the poor man’s name.
‘Not so much, m’lady,’ he said, sweeping up a few fragments of broken glass with a dustpan and brush. ‘He bought the old Cooper house last November time while you was away. Come from Gloucester, they say, had a company up there. Timber, I think they said. Sold up and come down here for a quiet life in the country is what I heard.’
‘There’s a lot of that about,’ she said. ‘No rumours that he was a murderer?’
Joe laughed. ‘No, m’lady, nothin’ like that. But seems as there should have been, eh?’
‘If the ghost of Mummy Bear is to be believed, then perhaps there should,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she was seeking revenge from the timber merchants for chopping down her forest home.’
She was clearly determined to mock the ghost idea so I decided not to remind her yet again that the ghost had been a man.
‘When are you expecting Daisy?’ she said after munching a slice of lemon cake.
‘Not till lunchtime, m’lady,’ said Joe. ‘She helps her dad in the mornings, then comes over here for the lunchtime rush.’
Daisy’s father was the local butcher.
‘I’m keen to find out more about the mysterious Madam Eugénie, you see,’ she said. ‘I thought she might be able to tell me a little more about her.’
‘Reckon she’d be the one to ask, yes,’ said Joe, setting the last table straight. ‘There we goes. Fit for a king now. Can I get you ladies anything else?’
‘Would you be a poppet and refresh the pot, please, Mr Arnold,’ said Lady Hardcastle with a smile. ‘We’ll have a little more tea and then we’ll biff off and see what adventures the day holds in store.’
‘Right you are, m’lady,’ said Joe, picking up the teapot. ‘I’ll have to look into getting some crockery for the bar. You reckon this’ll catch on?’
‘Bound to,’ she said. ‘People love a cup of tea and a gossip in the morning. Think of the extra trade.’
He shambled off.
Having finished our tea and cakes, I retrieved the now empty basket from Joe and we went out into the weak sunshine. We did a little shopping which took far longer than usual with everyone still very keen to talk to Lady Hardcastle, first to enquire after her health, and then to press her for details of the séance, news of which had already spread. We told them what we knew, which always prompted a flood of additional questions for which we had no adequate answers. What they most wanted to know was what Mr Snelson had said in response to the accusation, but we had to relay that he had left without saying a word.
Eventually we had the few items I needed for supper as well as some laundry soap and some white thread, but Lady Hardcastle was still full of beans and itching to investigate her new mystery.
‘Come on, pet,’ she said, striding off down a side road towards the houses behind the shops. ‘Let’s go and pay a call on Mr Nelson Snelson.’
‘As you wish, my lady,’ I said, though I confess I didn’t really think it was such a terrific idea.
We navigated as much by instinct as knowledge, up the hill towards the only house that we judged grand enough to be the new home of a retired merchant. It was a moderately sized, square Georgian house, painted dazzling white and we approached the dark green door and tugged firmly on the bell-pull.
An elderly man in a slightly dated butler’s uniform opened the door and looked imperiously down at us.
‘Yes?’ he said, managing to draw the word out to much more than its natural length. ‘How may I help you?’
‘Good morning,’ said Lady Hardcastle, breezily. ‘Is Mr Snelson at home?’
‘I’m afraid the master is not at home, madam, no.’
‘No matter,’ she said, delving into her handbag for her silver card case. After a considerable amount of rummaging and some impatient muttering, she managed to find the case and triumphantly presented the ageing butler with her card.
‘Would you be so kind as to tell him I called,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I could call again? When might be convenient?’
He looked at the card and there was a slightly more deferential tone in his voice as he said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know, my lady. He is… otherwise engaged and may be so for some time. I shall endeavour to encourage him to send you a note should he… return.’
‘Thank you,’ she said with a warm smile, ‘That would be most kind. Good day.’
He bowed slightly and closed the door.
‘Can’t blame the chap
for not wanting visitors,’ she said as we made our way back down the hill to the green. ‘Village gossip moves at a terrifying pace. I think he’s wise to stay in his burrow for a while until the fuss dies down a little.’
As we walked home, we chatted inconsequentially, and Lady Hardcastle suggested the possibility of a drive in the new motorcar tomorrow if the weather held, but neither of us mentioned the haunting.
We ate a light lunch and I was just contemplating which chore I should undertake next, when the doorbell rang. To my immense surprise, it was Sergeant Dobson.
‘Good afternoon, Sergeant,’ I said as I opened the door. ‘How lovely to see you. To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘Afternoon, miss,’ he said, touching the brim of his helmet with his forefinger. ‘Sorry to trouble you. Is your mistress at home?’
‘To you, Sergeant,’ I said, ‘she is always at home. Please come in.’ I stood aside and let him into the hall where he removed his helmet and I placed it on the table for him. I led him through to the dining room and invited him to sit while I fetched Lady Hardcastle from her study. For reasons I can no longer recall, we had agreed that the dining room was the best place to receive visitors. Perhaps we thought the drawing room too informal. I forget.
I knocked on the study door and poked my head round.
‘Sergeant Dobson to see you, my lady,’ I said.
She was sitting with her feet on her desk, reading a large, thick book. She took off her spectacles and sat up straight in her chair, swinging her legs off the desk as she did so.
‘I’m sorry, pet,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even hear the bell. Did he say what he wanted?’
‘No, my lady. I just put him in the dining room and came to fetch you.’
‘Right you are. Let’s go and find out, shall we?’
We walked through and I opened the door for her, following her in. The sergeant rose to his feet and inclined his head in greeting.
‘Good afternoon, Sergeant,’ said Lady Hardcastle, sitting down and motioning that he should also seat himself. ‘A pleasure as always.’