The Ghost Writer

by John Harwood

  The doors were opening as I came up the front steps. A small eager crowd surged in ahead of me and dispersed among the registers, leaving me alone with Deaths 1945 to 1955. All I wanted was not to find anything.

  Nothing for the second half of 1949. Or the first, second or third quarters of 1950. But in the register of deaths for Oct.-Dec. 1950, I found my own name.

  Montfort, Gerard Hugh Infant District of Westminster

  Filly killed us all, one by one. You too. She killed you too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet.

  I filled out the form for Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, with the sensation of ordering my own death certificate. By express, £24 for a guaranteed twenty-four-hour turn-around; they might have it by late afternoon. Then I went over to Births, where I found him in the second quarter of 1950, also District of Westminster.

  There was no entry in Marriages for either Phyllis May Hatherley or a Hugh Montfort. No Hugh Montfort in Deaths either; I searched both registers all the way through to the end of 1963, the year my mother married Graham John Freeman in Mawson.

  Under her maiden name, it struck me as I was leaving the registry, prompting a sudden crystal-clear memory of my mothers drawn, anxious smile, already middle-aged in the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece in Mawson. And then of the picture I had found in the study, my amazingly youthful mother with an infant on her knee. Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant. Deceased.

  From an internet café I wrote to Alice, telling her what I had just discovered, in the spirit of a castaway consigning a message to a bottle.

  I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY IN HUMANITIES READING Room Two in the British Library searching The Times on microfilm, first for an engagement notice for Anne Hatherley and Hugh Montfort, which I didn't find, and then from 1 October 1950 for any mention of Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, Deceased. After twenty minutes of that, I realised I was wasting time: the death certificate would give me an exact date. I went back to 6 October 1949, the day of Iris Hatherley's death, and began working through the home news pages, looking for any small item-it would have to be small, as neither Hatherley nor Montfort appeared in Palmer's Index. When my shoulder began to ache, I went out onto the gallery and leaned over the sheer precipitous drop to the marble concourse far below, thinking how little it would matter if I slipped over the edge.

  At 3.30 I rang the FRC; the certificates hadn't arrived and wouldn't until Monday morning. I decided to carry on for another hour-the mechanical concentration at least kept me from thinking about Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant-then have something to eat and go up to the house for the last time. There would still be plenty of daylight left.

  Back at the microfilm reader, I remembered something from Miss Hamish's letter: Pitt the Elder-Edward Nichol Pitt of 18 Whetstone Park, Solicitor-had advertised repeatedly for news of Anne. Whom he had last seen on 26 October 1949. I might as well know exactly how his advertisement had read. Starting at the end of November, I began scrolling through the personal columns, day by day. And in the column for 16 December 1949 I found

  Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Hugh Ross Montfort, late of 44 Endsleigh Gardens WC1, please communicate with Pitt & Co. Solicitors of 18 Whetstone Park Holborn.

  The same advertisement appeared twice more, at fortnightly intervals. I went on through February and March, expecting any moment to see a parallel advertisement for Anne. I had worked up a steady rhythm by now, picking up the columns in fast forward, five days a minute, six minutes to the month. At the end of June I stopped to check Miss Hamish's letter. Mr Pitt had been anxious when she went to see him in February 1950. 'He alerted the police, and advertised repeatedly. Surely he wouldn't have waited another four months. I was working fast but carefully, checking each date to be sure I didn't miss any; I knew I wouldn't have missed even one advertisement. I went all the way through to December, but I didn't find one.

  LIGHT FROM THE STAINED GLASS FLOWERS FELL LIKE splashes of blood across the drawing-room, spilling from chairs and sofas into the darker red of the carpet, around the fireplace, in great elongated streaks along the wall towards the dining-room. Ten to seven on yet another improbably perfect evening. I carried my bag of cleaning materials on through to the library and set to work.

  Scrubbing at the stains beneath the chesterfield reminded me of childhood humiliations in Mawson, things that happened while you were asleep, but were still your fault. I felt very strange indeed: something akin to the disembodied sensation of severe jet lag, as if my physical and emotional selves had parted company altogether, but my mind seemed perfectly clear. At the moment-when not brooding on the disappearances of Anne and Hugh-it was simply refusing to accept that the whispering voice could have been anything other than a nightmare.

  So far I had kept well clear of the planchette: from where I knelt I could just see the vertical stub of pencil, above the edge of the table. The sight induced a mental logjam: I know I didn't write those messages; it couldn't have moved by itself; the messages did appear; no one else could have written them., round and round, jumbled together with thoughts of Alice, and missing persons, and Staplefield, and Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant, deceased in the borough of Westminster. My half-brother, you could say, except that I had only been born because he had died. I was his ghost; or he was mine, I couldn't quite decide.

  I packed away the cleaning things and stood up, looking around the alcoves at the thousands of volumes I had scarcely begun to examine. When Miss 'Hamish died, Ferrier's Close would presumably go to some distant Hamish relative. The library would be sold and dispersed, the house bought by some commodities broker, or converted into luxury flats. Judging from the agents' windows along Hampstead High Street, it would fetch several million pounds as it stood.

  T HIS COULD HAVE BEEN MY INHERITANCE, SAID A SMALL REBELlious voice. I recalled my fantasy of taking tea with Miss Hamish on the terrace at Staplefield, its sweeping lawns and formal gardens ranged before us. Which had once been the view from here, I thought, staring at the undergrowth encroaching on the dry, desolate courtyard, the wreck of the pavilion beyond. I feel, young man, that you are the rightful heir to all this… She had actually said something like that, in her letter. Yes: 'I am an old woman, and must think about my own will as well as fulfilling my duty to the estate.'

  I sat down at the table-as far as possible from the planchette-and re-read, yet again, her account of her visit to Pitt the Elder in February 1950. By then he had already placed three advertisements seeking news of Hugh. Anne had last been seen in Mr Pitt's office on 26 October 1949. How could Miss Hamish possibly not have known that Hugh Montfort had also disappeared, at almost exactly the same time? The disappearances must have been linked; the police would have been working on that assumption.

  'Phyllis would never accept a penny from me,' Anne had said. Not in anger but very despondently'. As if she'd tried to persuade Phyllis, and failed. Extraordinarily generous, especially if she already knew that Phyllis was pregnant by Hugh. Which could well have been the reason for Hugh's disappearance: fleeing his responsibilities. Just as it could have been Phyllis who got Mr Pitt to place those advertisements; he was the family lawyer, after all. But again Miss Hamish would surely have known about it.

  And if Anne thought Phyllis should have her share in spite of everything, why not will it to her anyway and let time decide? Leaving an entire estate to an outsider, even 'my dearest and most trusted friend Abigail Valerie Hamish' was a huge decision for a girl of twenty-one. Maybe Anne just couldn't bear to admit-even to herself-that she hadn't forgiven Phyllis.

  Nothing about Miss Hamish's letter suggested confusion, or failing memory.

  Except that she wasn't once mentioned in Anne's diary. And on Miss Hamish's own account, Anne had written just three short notes to her dearest and most trusted friend during those last crucial weeks of her life. Why hadn't she, at the very least, written to say, Dear Abby, I'm going to leave everything to you? The lawyer would certainly have asked. 'How do you know this young woman will accept you
r bequest? What is to happen if she doesn't? Who is to inherit if Abigail Hamish dies before you do?'

  'My dearest and most trusted friend Abigail Valerie Hamish'. They had shared the same initials. Abigail Valerie Hamish. Anne Victoria Hatherley. That was how they'd met, of course. The alphabetically minded schoolmistress who believed in order in all things.

  I was reading with a pencil in my hand, as I often did when concentrating. Now I saw that I had been doodling variations on the two names at the foot of Miss Hamish's page: AVH ANNE VICTORIA HATHERLEY ABIGAIL VALERIE HAMISH MISS A V HATHERLEY MISS A V HAMISH

  The last set of letters rearranged themselves into

  MISS HAVISHAM

  I almost laughed. Great expectations, indeed. A two-million pound bequest, courtesy of Miss Hamish-Havisham? This message comes to you direct from your subconscious.

  Like 'Miss Jessel'? And the whispering from the gallery?

  That was a dream.

  But how had it-the whispering voice in the dream-known about Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant? That had come as a complete, paralysing shock.

  Coincidence. The register entry interpreted the dream, not the other way round.

  You've seen the scratches in the cupboard. You know all about that, the voice had whispered. But I didn't. I glanced up at the gallery. Though it was still almost full daylight outside, shadows were gathering in the alcoves.

  There was one other possibility. Apart from a choice between ghosts and hallucinations. Miss Havisham. Hamish. Ridiculous, of course. But at least rationally ridiculous, unlike escaped subconscious minds writing messages on butcher's paper.

  Purely for argument's sake: she could have lied about the stroke. She had access to keys. She knew the house. She might have seen the black thread. And as the sole beneficiary of Anne Hatherley's will, she even had a motive for murder.

  Ridiculous, nonetheless. Aside from everything else, she could have had Anne declared legally dead after seven years, taken possession of the estate, and either moved into Ferrier's Close or sold it.

  Unless she was afraid the process might spark a fresh investigation into Anne's disappearance. Such as a more thorough search of the house and grounds.

  Which Miss Hamish had kept unoccupied and overgrown for fifty years.

  Ridiculous all the same, because if Miss Hamish had murdered Anne, she Would never have answered my advertisement. Let alone given me the keys to the house. Besides, Miss Hamish couldn't have answered my second question, or whispered those words from the gallery, because I hadn't told her about Alice. So not only ridiculous, but impossible.

  Unless Miss Jessel and Miss Havisham had joined forces.

  Alice is so beautiful, we all love her.

  Terminal paranoia beckoning. Time to leave. I picked up Anne's diary, again with my eyes averted from the planchette at the other end of the table, and headed for the front stairs.

  THOUGH SUNLIGHT WAS FILTERING IN THROUGH THE TREES above the stairwell windows, I could not help glancing over my shoulder every time a board creaked. I realised as I approached the second-floor landing that I couldn't even recall what I was doing here. But if I turned back now, I might lose my nerve altogether; and I still had to get the downstairs shutters closed and make my way out of the house by torchlight. Forcing myself not to tiptoe-or run-I moved swiftly across the landing and into Anne's room.

  A patch of light fell across the floor. The closet was still open. I replaced the diary, slid the panel into place and closed the door firmly. As I did so, the cupboard above the bed swung open.

  You've seen the scratches in the cupboard. But the floor of the empty cupboard was unmarked, and for a disorienting instant I thought I had simply imagined them. Then I remembered that the scratches were on my mother's side.

  I had a sudden horrible vision of some monstrous creature concealed, scrabbling loose in the dark, dropping on to Anne's bed. But the side panel separating the two cupboards was entirely solid; so was the section of wall which formed the back of the cupboard in Phyllis's room. And the cupboard floor was firmly screwed to the frame below; I tried one of the screws with a small coin to make sure. The cavity below, directly between the two beds, didn't seem to be accessible from either side of the partition. There was no loose panelling, and certainly no door. Only a tarnished electrical socket, still connected to a lamp on the bedside table. The lamp, I noticed, had no switch of its own: to turn it on, you had to reach down to the power point.

  I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal. What would Alice think of me if I didn't see this through? The question, which I had managed to suppress until now, propelled me along the corridor to my mother's room, which was much darker, because the overgrown window faced north.

  Again I shone the torch on the deep gouges in the cupboard floor. Too straight for claw marks, surely: more as if something very heavy had been forced into the cupboard. I noticed, too, that the heads of the screws that secured the floor were burred.

  It's only the wiring, I told myself, some long-ago electrician, making repairs. The bedside lamp and socket were identical to the ones next door, but there seemed to be a lot more cord. Crouching beside the bed, I drew out a dusty tangle. The cord from the socket ran to an ancient double adapter: from there, one lead went to the bedside lamp. The top of the light bulb was blackened; broken ends of filament glinted in the torch beam.

  The other lead vanished through a hole in the panelling just below the frame of the headboard.

  She's dead, of course, but you know all about that. I tried the coin on one of the screws in the cupboard floor and felt it give. Too fearful even to look over my shoulder, I removed a second screw, and then a third, tugged at the edge of the panel and the rest flew out as it came loose. Darkness and floating dust, and then, in the torch beam, an extraordinary piece of apparatus. A bulbous glass tube about a foot long, draped in cobwebs, appeared at first to be floating in a black void. Then I saw that it was suspended above a wooden base-plate by an arrangement of slender rods and clamps. The tube had nipple-like protrusions at both ends, and another emerging from one side, all three with fine silver rods running through them and soldered to what looked like electrodes, small concave sections of silvered metal. Insulated wires connected the tube to an imposing black metal cylinder mounted on the wooden base.

  I had seen a picture of something very like this-and recently. Here, in the library downstairs, in the book about martyrs to radiation that looked as if it had been dropped in the bath. Just a glimpse as I'd flipped through the pages: the glass tube clamped vertically on a stand, the black cylinder on a bench nearby, presided over by two bearded Victorian gentlemen.

  'Alfred's infernal machine.'

  'I used it in a novella'…that was it, 'The Revenant': the glass tube Cordelia broke in the studio when it slid out of the green dress. The dress Imogen de Vere had worn in Henry St Clair's portrait.

  I understood at last how my mother had murdered her sister without attracting the slightest suspicion. Viola, all unwittingly, had drawn up the plan for the perfect murder, and Phyllis had executed it ruthlessly. Anne had died without ever knowing who-or what-had killed her.

  Three minutes later I was back in the library with Viola's letter in my hand, staring at a picture of the first X-ray photograph ever taken: the skeleton of a hand shrouded in ghostly flesh, the black band of a wedding ring stark against the fingerbone. The hand of Anna Rontgen, wife of Wilhelm Conrad von Rontgen, discoverer of Rontgen rays, as they were then called, taken in December 1895. The machine upstairs was called a fluoroscope; the vacuum tube that generated the rays had been named after its inventor, Sir William Crookes. Like several other distinguished Victorian scientists, Crookes had divided his energies between science and'séances, especially the'séances conducted by an attractive young medium named Florence Cook.

  In the spring of 1896, thousands of people had queued at exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe to place their hands, even their heads, in primitive X-ray m
achines and see the skull beneath the skin. Thousands of fluoroscopes had been sold in that first year: to physicians, engineers, prospectors, amateur scientists and cranks of all persuasions. One of them must have been Alfred Hatherley.

  I shall never forget that day at the Crystal Palace: I think of it whenever I read 'The Relic'. It destroyed the illusion of immortality, the feeling of infinite time that one enjoys when young. Alfred was obsessed-he had to have one. But it seemed to me pure evil, a thing of darkness.

  Viola had been right: the machines were appallingly dangerous. A Viennese doctor subjected his first patient, a five-year-old girl, to 32 hours of radiation in an effort to remove a mole from her back. All her hair fell out; her back burned and blistered horribly. Thomas Edison's assistant Clarence Dally was the first to die, in hideous agony, at the age of thirty-nine, with both arms amputated in a vain attempt to stop the cancer from spreading. An early radiologist described the pain of X-ray burns as 'worse than the torments of hell'.

  And this was what my mother had knowingly inflicted on Anne. There was no question of concealment any more. I would have to tell-I wanted to tell-not Miss Hamish, the truth was too appalling-but the police. Fifty years too late, but they could close the file.

  As I moved around the table to replace the book on the shelf, the planchette caught my eye. I had meant to scoop up the sheet of butcher's paper and crumple it without looking: that way I would never be certain that I hadn't dreamed the messages. But the idea now seemed childish; I knew perfectly well that 'Miss Jessel' would still be there.