by Mina Carter
Trepidation filled her as she cautiously approached the coffin. It looked really old, black wood decorated with dull brass studs in a simple panel pattern.
Looking at each other as they stood beside the coffin, Becky and Helen both nodded, they reached out shaking hands to lift the lid.
Becky shrieked. Inside was a body, and it looked far too fresh to be Victorian, despite being dressed in clothes from that period.
“Let’s get out of here!” Helen exclaimed frantically.
They rushed back to the storage room and shut the door quickly.
“We have to call the police!” Becky told the cleaner. “That should have been bones, but it wasn’t!”
Helen nodded her agreement and hurried to the kitchen, Becky on her heels.
“I need a cigarette,” the cleaner said tremblingly.
“You’re not the only one. I think I’d like to go outside too. I’m not liking it in here right now.”
“You and me both.”
Though no stranger to death because of her job, Becky just hadn’t been prepared for what they had come across.
* * *
After standing outside the front door while they each had a cigarette and waited for the police to come, Becky felt a little more settled. She was about to suggest going back indoors when a car appeared on the drive. Having expected the police, she was shocked to see her mother’s car coming towards her.
Having her mum and Imy arrive just after finding a body didn’t strike Becky as the best timing ever.
“Hi, Mum!” Imy called over as she bounced from the car, her natural fair curls bouncing even more than she did. Then she frowned. “What’s happened?”
“We, um . . . Well, we just found a body in a hidden room. We’re waiting for the police.”
“A body? Are you serious?” Becky’s mother demanded, looking horrified.
Before Becky could respond, another car tore down the driveway and squealed to a halt in front of them, throwing a few small stones across the ground. Out jumped two police officers, who rushed over and asked quickly what had happened.
Becky and Helen filled them in, then showed the way to the storage room. Armed with torches, the two officers made their way into the hidden room, disappearing around the corner at the end. All Becky could see was the moving beams of the torches. It was several minutes before one of the officers reappeared. Becky frowned when she saw he was smiling. He had a cute smile.
“You did the right thing calling us, but there’s no need to worry. It’s some kind of wax effigy, I think, but it’s not human remains.”
“Why on earth would anyone put an effigy in a coffin in a hidden room?” Becky wondered aloud. It was such a bizarre thing to do. The Victorians had done some weird things, but that seemed to take the biscuit. Of course, it did explain why the figure had been dressed in such old clothes.
Feeling a bit of an idiot for calling out the police for what was essentially a human-sized doll, Becky flushed. “I’m so sorry we wasted your time. I don’t know anything about this house. I only got here yesterday. I guess I freaked.”
“Not to worry. I think anyone would have made that mistake. It’s a very life-like effigy.”
Becky looked up at the policeman, noticing him properly for the first time. He was probably in his late forties, and kind of cute, in an understated way. With almost black, short hair and piercing blue eyes, a robust, wide-shouldered build and a quite sweet smile, he was the sort of guy Becky would happily date. A quick glance at his left hand showed he was either unmarried or divorced.
Why was she eyeing the man up?
Shaking herself a bit, she saw the police to the door, still apologising for calling them out for no reason. She was assured several times that she had done the right thing. Once they had left, she turned her attention to greeting her mother and daughter.
Becky hugged them both, and then introduced Helen to them. After the shock of thinking the effigy was a body, Becky suggested they all went to the kitchen and had coffee. She was still feeling a little jittery. The whole incident had rattled her, but she felt a desire to find out why the coffin had been hidden there. How long that would last remained to be seen.
Thinking Helen would probably want to leave early after her shock, Becky assured her she could forget the bathrooms for that week and saw her to the door, apologising for dragging the poor woman into such a shocking discovery.
“Well, that was quite an arrival,” Brenda said with a great deal of understatement. “I wasn’t expecting coffins and bodies, even wax ones.”
“I feel like such a twit for calling the police. If I’d just checked, I would have found out there had been nothing to worry about.”
“It’s not exactly a normal thing to find, Mum,” Imy pointed out. “Anyone would have freaked out.”
“I’m going to try and get that thing removed. I’ll call the solicitor in a bit and tell him what happened. Until everything is sorted out, I think I need to check before we do anything.”
“Can I see it?” Imy asked inquisitively.
“If you want. It’s a bit grim in there though.”
Imy clapped her hands, looking far more excited than Becky felt about going into that room again. Maybe the room could be opened out and decorated so it wasn’t such a creepy place.
“That’s freaky,” Imy commented when she, her mother and grandmother were standing by the coffin, staring at the effigy inside. Now she was looking at it again, Becky could clearly see it wasn’t a person’s body. With light hair and what looked like glass eyes, the effigy stared up at the ceiling. It was startlingly realistic, but the fact it was made of wax was obvious looking at it a second time.
“It’s like a mourning doll,” Brenda commented. “The Victorians who could afford it would have an effigy made of a deceased child and keep it. Sometimes they’d even change its clothes and lay it in a crib as if it was alive.”
“That’s just weird,” Imy told her grandmother.
“And this isn’t a child. It’s a young woman. Why the hell would anyone put it here? No one can see it.” Becky frowned.
“Mourning dolls were made with the back of the head flat so it laid in the coffin better.” Brenda reached her hand into the box.
“What are you doing, Mum?” Becky exclaimed.
“Feeling the back of the head. Don’t be a baby. It’s not like I’m going to hurt it.”
Becky held her breath as her mother’s hand slipped under the head of the effigy. She really didn’t like this. There was something extremely wrong about the whole thing.
“The hair feels real,” Brenda said, withdrawing her hand. “The head isn’t flat.”
“Real hair?” Imy asked.
“Yep. They’d use the hair of the one who’d died to make it more realistic. It might be bizarre to us, but the Victorians found a lot of comfort in them. They usually made just a bust of an older child though, not this sort of thing. This needs looking at by someone who knows more about it.”
“I’d like to know who she was,” Becky remarked. “There has to be something behind her being stashed down here.”
“Maybe there’s records in the house somewhere?” Imy suggested.
“There is someone I could ask. I met a lady yesterday in the museum in Wimborne who knew Gran and Alice when they were young. Maybe there was some family gossip she heard about this.”
“Can we get out of here?” Brenda asked and Becky nodded. She didn’t like this strange little room that stored nothing but a doll in a coffin.
Before checking with Mr Kennet as to whether she could have the thing removed, Becky decided she needed to think about something else for a while.
Becky showed Brenda and Imy to the rooms sorted out for them, and then sat on the bed with her arm round her daughter while her mother unpacked. Before the furniture could be used for Brenda’s clothes, it had to be emptied of the room’s previous occupant’s belongings.
It seemed the room had last been used by
a younger woman. The clothes weren’t quite those of an adult, but they certainly weren’t a child’s. The dresses were all light colours and had been made no later than the turn of the twentieth century.
“We need to move all these to one of the other rooms,” Brenda said as she laid a lemon yellow silk dress on the chest at the end of the bed. “I wonder whose room this was.”
“I might be able to work that out,” Becky told her. “I found a family tree and made a copy of it. I’ll go and get it.”
She ran down to the library and grabbed the family tree off the desk. As she left the library, a slight movement in the corner of her eye made her stop. She looked towards it, but there was nothing there. It had probably been an insect flying by, although it had felt almost like there was a person there.
Actually, now she was thinking about it, Becky hadn’t seen any insects inside the house. Normally at this time of year, flies were a constant annoyance. They slipped inside even if you kept all the doors and windows shut. It was a bit odd there were none in the house.
She dismissed the thought and went back up to her mother’s room, sitting on the bed with the family tree. It covered several sheets of paper and she laid them out to match up all the wonky lines she’d drawn between all the names.
They studied the lines linking through Becky’s ancestors, taking a guess the young woman would have been in her later teens, judging by the design of the clothes. They finally settled on the name Philomena Frippe, who had died at the age of seventeen. There hadn’t been any details of her death on the family tree, so that would remain a mystery. Philomena had been the older sister of Agatha and Alice’s father.
Becky found it odd to think she was related to all these people who had lived such a comfortable life in this large house. Having been brought up as working class, she had spent years on end only just getting by. When Jeff had first set up the building business, they had to survive for months on end with barely more than Becky’s nurse’s wage to live on. Yet her grandmother had grown up in relative luxury. Compared to a working class girl at the same time, Agatha’s life would have been one of comfort and ease. The Frippes had essentially been landed gentry.
Once they had finished moving all the clothes to Alice’s old bedroom, thinking no one was going to sleep in the room the old lady had died in, the family moved on to the room Imy was going to use. They began to look at what was in the cupboards and drawers, searching for clues to who had last used the room. It seemed to have been a lady’s room. On the dresser was a set of scent bottles, pots and pin dishes. The brush set consisted of a round hairbrush, two long clothes brushes, a hand mirror, a shoe horn, a button hook and a comb. They were all silver and decorated with a quite plain line border. A rummage through the drawers of the dresser revealed a blue satin lined box all the pieces fitted into.
Deciding the set would be best put away, they carefully placed the pieces back in the box and put it back in the drawer.
Next they moved to the wardrobe. The clothes were from the thirties, all long and elegant. Several of the dresses were bias cut, meaning they would have clung to the wearer’s body. There were only a few dresses that had more a forties look to them.
Returning to the family tree, they came to the conclusion the room had been that of Alice and Agatha’s mother, Madeleine, who had died in nineteen forty aged fifty-two.
With the unpacking finally done, Becky gave her mother and daughter a tour of the downstairs rooms, although she skipped the rooms behind the kitchen. Retiring to the kitchen to have coffee and talk about Brenda and Imy’s impressions of the house, Becky wondered who she could get in to help with removing the coffin and its strange contents. It should probably be in a local museum, which gave her an idea and she got out her phone.
Mrs Hanham listened to Becky’s tale of discovering the secret room and what had been inside it in silence. When Becky had finished, all Mrs Hanham could say was, “Well, I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“The reason I called was I was hoping you would know of someone who could come and help move it from the room it’s in. I think it could go into one of the outbuildings for now. As soon as the paperwork is dealt with, I’d like to donate it to the museum. To be honest, I find it a bit creepy.”
“Well, it would certainly make an interesting exhibit. I think there’s a Victorian death exhibition scheduled for December and it would make a fascinating centrepiece for that. And I can get someone to come and help move it. Some photos of it in situ would add the air of mystery to it. I’ll make a couple of calls and be in touch in an hour or so, if that’s okay?”
“That’s perfect. Thank you, Mrs Hanham.”
Feeling relieved the coffin would be out of the house soon, Becky filled the others in on what Mrs Hanham had said. As photography was a hobby of Imy’s, she looked at her daughter when she mentioned Mrs Hanham had wanted pictures.
Imy couldn’t wait to start. She rushed upstairs to get the camera it had taken Becky weeks of overtime to afford as a Christmas present.
Although she wasn’t too happy about returning to the secret room, Becky had no intention of letting her daughter go in there alone. Having found something so odd, Becky didn’t like the room at all.
Imy spent nearly an hour making sure she had the best pictures she could get of the coffin and the effigy. They were just coming out when Becky’s phone rang.
“I’ve arranged for my son and two grandsons to come out and move the coffin,” Mrs Hanham told her. “The museum curator will also be coming. He’s never heard of anything like this before and wants to see everything as you found it.”
“That’s brilliant! My daughter is a good photographer and she’s been in there getting as many pictures as she can get of everything. She’ll put them on her computer so the curator can look through them while he’s here.”
After confirming what time the visitors were coming out, Becky sighed in relief. The night before she hadn’t known that thing was under the same roof, but she wasn’t sure she would sleep now she knew it was there.
Imy was ensconced at the kitchen table with her laptop, loading all the photos. “How the bloody hell did that happen?” she exclaimed suddenly, staring at the screen.
CHAPTER SIX
BECKY JOINED HER immediately and peered at the picture. She wasn’t quite sure what she was meant to be seeing. It was just the effigy laying in the coffin.
“Look at the eyes,” Imy prompted.
Doing so, Becky gasped loudly. The effigy’s eyes were shut. She knew they had been open when they had lifted the coffin lid, and every other time they had looked at it, so how could they be closed in the picture?
“Could it be the way the flash caught them?” she asked, knowing it was nothing like a satisfactory explanation.
“No, the lids are closed. You can see the lashes on its cheek.”
“Maybe they move, you know, like those dolls that have closing eyes?”
Imy zoomed in on the eyes of the effigy. “I don’t think so. If they did, there would be a line at the top, but the wax is completely smooth there.” She pointed to the top of the eyelids and Becky could see she was right.
“I’m going to look at the rest a bit more closely.”
Becky felt increasingly tense about the strange effigy as Imy studied each photo minutely.
“Um . . . Mum? The eyes have moved in some of them,” the girl said, her voice trembling. “Look at these two.”
Hesitantly leaning in to study the two pictures side by side, Becky’s heart leapt to her throat when she saw what her daughter had spotted. One picture was taken from the foot of the coffin and the eyes were definitely looking straight at the camera, not up at the ceiling. The second picture was taken from the side, up near the head, and the eyes were still looking directly at the camera.
Becky prided herself on being rational, but there was no rational explanation for that. She knew one thing for certain though: she wanted the thing out of the house, as soo
n as humanly possible.
All three of them jumped when the loud doorbell clanged through the house, echoing all around them. Becky ran to see who had arrived, praying it was Mrs Hanham’s son and grandsons.
Becky didn’t recognise the man stood on the doorstep at first, then she looked at his bright blue eyes and remembered he was one of the policemen who’d been out earlier. The one she had thought was cute. If she was honest, she was relieved there was someone else they could show the pictures to.
“Sorry about just turning up like this,” he began. “You seemed a bit spooked earlier, so I thought I better call in and make sure you were all okay.”
“I’m glad you did,” Becky admitted. “I’m even more spooked now. Something really strange has happened.”
He was immediately moving into the house, seeming hyper-alert. “What is it?”
“I think I should show you. Before I do, do you remember if the effigy’s eyes were open or closed when you looked at it?”
“They were open. I remember they were looking straight up. It was a bit freaky actually.”
At least Becky wasn’t the only one creeped out by the thing. “Come and look at some pictures of it my daughter took them for the local museum. I’m going to donate the thing to them as soon as I possibly can.”
The policeman followed her to the kitchen. Becky didn’t want to look at the pictures again, so sat down to face the back of the computer screen.
“What the hell . . . ?” the policeman said when Imy showed him what she had found. Becky realised she didn’t even know his name, but right now he was focused on the pictures, so she would wait to ask. “How the hell could that happen?”
“Your guess is as good as ours,” Becky told him grimly. “I’ve got some people coming round to move it out of the house in a bit. I can’t cope with it being so close.”
“Do you know who the effigy represents?” he asked, frowning.
“No idea. The clothes are Victorian, but I’d have to research them to know exactly when they were made. Mum thinks it might be some kind of mourning doll, which means the hair is probably from the person who died. That’s about all we’ve got on it.” Becky gave him a weak smile. “I don’t even know your name. I didn’t catch it earlier.”