As he made his tour of inspection, Mike congratulated himself on his purchase. With only one previous owner since the conversion, the architectural and design finishes throughout were as good as its gets. The kitchen range was state-of-the-art. There was double glazing and loft insulation. The levels had been re-timbered in polished pine. What more could you possibly ask for in terms of blending the best of the old with the new?
Yet Mike still had an uneasy feeling that the asking price had been too cheap. This was several years before the credit crisis of 2008–10, and at a time when property prices were soaring steadily. Although mortgaged up to the hilt, he had never in his wildest dreams believed he would be able to afford such a property. Both he and his agent had been amazed when the seller agreed to a figure well below the asking price. Apparently he was leaving the country and wanted a quick sale.
Poppy had been ecstatic when she’d heard the news. It was everything she had always wanted, a house with a garden in the country. ‘I’ve only ever had a window box before,’ she confided to her jealous girlfriends at work.
But when the removal vans had finally come and gone, and the Lumleys were installed in their new home, the task of sorting everything out seemed colossal. Jennifer, for example, wanted broadband for her computer; Mandy wanted Sky television. Poppy looked wistfully at her town wardrobe of smart office work-wear outfits, party frocks and designer shoes. ‘We really are living in the country now,’ she sighed. ‘It’ll be Hunter wellies and moleskin breeks from now on.’
It took them a full week to get the household up and running. It was the school holidays so at least the girls were at home all day to help out, and Mike and Poppy had taken a week off. Although Jennifer talked endlessly on her mobile phone and complained incessantly that she had better things to do, it all eventually fell into place. By the following weekend, a sense of normality had returned to the family’s routine.
Normality of the sort that Jennifer accused Mandy of stealing her make-up and favourite T-shirt, an allegation which Mandy vehemently denied. The next day, there was a similar row. Mandy had been in Jennifer’s room again, this time using her shampoo.
When Poppy went into Jennifer’s room in the afternoon to see for herself, she called out to Mike in concern. The girls had gone out for a walk and she led Mike directly over to Jennifer’s dressing table.
‘Somebody’s been smoking in here,’ she said.
Sure enough a lingering pungent odour was immediately apparent.. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, neither of the girls smoke,’ said Mike. ‘You know that.’
He himself had given up long before he had met Poppy, but he knew that her dislike of smoking stemmed from her father’s habit of forty cigarettes a day.
‘Well, how else do you explain the smell?’ she snapped, gesticulating as she did so. ‘This is all I need!’
When Jennifer returned to face a barrage of hostile questioning, she flared up in resentment. ‘You know I don’t smoke,’ she screamed at her parents. ‘It must have been Mandy when she was going through my things!’
‘I’ve never been near your stupid things!’ shouted Mandy in response.
Their parents looked at each other helplessly. ‘We’ll leave it for now,’ said Mike, who hated any kind of row or confrontation.
All the same, when Jennifer set off to the village the following day, Poppy sneaked back into her room and once again, there was a lingering smell. ‘Do you know what?’ said Mike when she summoned him. ‘That’s not cigarette smoke. That’s pipe tobacco.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said his wife. ‘Why would Jennifer smoke a pipe?’
The idea seemed so absurd that they both burst out laughing, which to some extent relieved the tension. But not for long. ‘Well, if Jennifer hasn’t started smoking a pipe, who has?’ said Poppy, rounding on her husband.
‘You surely don’t think I . . .’
‘No, of course not, but somebody has definitely been smoking in this room,’ she said, throwing open the windows to let in the outside air. As she did so, she ran her finger along the sill and lifted the tip to her nose. ‘I suppose we should be thankful that it’s not marijuana. We’ll just have to keep our eyes open.’
Although Jennifer was entering that appalling teenage phase of mandatory rebellion, she was an intelligent girl who, despite silly crushes on boys and hating to be told what to do when she always knew better, genuinely loved her parents. As she lay in bed at night, a thousand fantasies passed through her thoughts, the majority involving Roy Spooner, a rising star of the school’s football team. She had recently been to the cinema with him to see Lord of the Rings, but now that she had moved out of town she wondered if he would want to have anything to do with her ever again. She closed her eyes trying to imagine him leaning over her to kiss her goodnight. When she opened them she thought that she could smell him, but then realised that it was not Roy at all that stood before her. It was a horrid old man who smelled of tobacco smoke.
Jennifer screamed and, hurling herself out of bed, raced along the corridor to her parents’ bedroom. When finally they managed to make some sense of what she was telling them, both Mike and Poppy went to investigate. The bedroom was empty, but the air was filled with the smell of stale tobacco smoke. ‘I just can’t understand it,’ said Mike, examining the radiators and opening up the fitted wall cupboards. ‘It has to be coming from somewhere.’
Yet there was clearly nobody there. Poppy was all for calling the police, but Mike restrained her. ‘What on earth do we say to them? That there’s been a break-in when all of the doors and windows are shut? Let’s leave it until the morning.’
For the remainder of that night Jennifer occupied the guest bedroom, and the next day moved her belongings to her new quarters. On his way to work Mike looked in on the nearest police station and was seen by a lady officer who listened attentively to what he had to say.
‘What age did you say your daughter was?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘But she’s sixteen.’
‘I see,’ said the policewoman. ‘Has anything like this happened before?’
‘No, never.’
‘And you say that you only moved into the house ten days ago?’
‘Yes.’
The woman paused and put aside her pencil. ‘I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but there’s been a problem at this address before. I take it the previous owner didn’t mention anything about it to you?’
Mike looked puzzled. ‘No. I never met him.’
The policewoman smiled and consulted the contents of a file she had withdrawn from a filing cabinet. ‘It appears that there have been several previous incidents reported. All of them of – er – should I say, a supernatural nature.’
‘What are you saying?’ said Mike astonished. ‘That the steading is haunted?’
The policewoman looked at him sympathetically. ‘It would appear so,’ she said.
‘Don’t tell me you believe in all that stuff?’ said Mike.
‘We come across all sorts of strange goings-on in our work,’ she replied with stoicism.
Having arranged that somebody from the station would pay them a visit in the early evening, Mike drove to work where he telephoned Poppy to report on what had taken place. As he had expected, the pitch of her voice rose in irritation. ‘Is that the best they can do?’ she responded angrily.
That evening the Reverend Hamilton of St Matthew’s Church paid them a visit. ‘I received a call from the police this afternoon asking if I would look in on you,’ he explained when Mike opened the front door and invited him in. ‘I understand that Gideon Somerville has been causing you a few problems.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Mike. ‘Who is Gideon Somerville?’
The Reverend Hamilton shook his head. ‘On that basis, I conclude that nobody has told you about him?’
Mike turned to Poppy, and she shrugged her shoulders. Meanwhile, Jennifer and Mandy had entered the room. The minister, informally d
ressed without the collar of his calling, nodded to them as they sat down on either side of the fireplace. ‘I wouldn’t want you to have nightmares about what I’m about to tell you,’ he continued.
‘It’s all right,’ said Poppy confidently. ‘We don’t hide anything from our children.’
‘Quite right. Quite right,’ said the Reverend Hamilton. ‘All the same, it’s not a pretty story.’
A while ago, he explained to them, back in the 1970s it was, the steading which they now occupied was used for storing agricultural equipment by Gideon Somerville. An unmarried tenant farmer in his forties, he late in life became engaged to a local girl whom he had previously employed to cook and clean for him. According to local gossip, she had really set her cap at him and bossed him about something terrible, always fussing over how he dressed and, in particular, encouraging him to stop smoking. On the eve of their wedding, however, she vanished without a trace.
‘Her family and Gideon searched high and low for her, but she was never found,’ said the minister. ‘Then the rumours started. Some claimed she’d gone off abroad; others whispered he’d done her in. Gideon was notorious for having a bad temper. Most folk around here were amazed she should even have given him a second glance. But then love can be a funny old business, whichever way you look at it.
‘Anyway, the police were contacted and Gideon was questioned, but seemed genuinely distraught at her absence. Nobody could prove anything and eventually the investigation was called off. After that, Gideon became a recluse and began drinking heavily.
‘He kept his distance from the village and the folk around here avoided him. I can remember coming here to see him when I first started my ministry at St Matthew’s. It was a complete waste of time. His appearance alone was a shock. He resembled an old tramp, unshaven and unwashed. He reeked of pipe tobacco. I think he must have chewed it.
‘Although I hate to concede defeat, I knew at once there was nothing I could do for him. He wouldn’t allow me the light of day and made it perfectly clear I was unwelcome on his land. So, much to my shame, I left him to get on with whatever it was he did. The next thing I heard was that he’d died of liver failure or some such disease. I was genuinely sorry to hear that. Nobody deserves to die alone, and when they had tracked down his nearest relative, the lawyers asked me to preside over his burial service.’
The Reverend Hamilton shook his head sadly. ‘A sorry soul. And that would have been the end of it, except when it came to light that the rumours about the girl had been right all along.’
Mike exchanged glances with Poppy and their daughters. ‘You mean that . . . ?’
The minister nodded. ‘He had indeed murdered his fiancée.’
‘But apart from the smell of tobacco, what does that have to do with us?’ asked Mike after a shocked silence.
‘Ah,’ said the minister. ‘I’ll explain.’
For over forty years, the scandalmongers had insisted Gideon Somerville had done away with his bride on the night before their wedding. But it was not until the farm and steadings were sold for development that the terrible truth emerged. During demolition work, the diggers had unearthed the skeleton of a thirty-year-old woman wrapped in a blanket and buried under the floor of an outhouse. Through forensic and tooth analysis, it was confirmed that these were the remains of the missing housekeeper.
‘And all those years he’d had her under his feet less than a stone’s throw from the farm,’ said the minister, shaking his head.
‘But from what I’ve been told, the old farm house was on the other side of the river in the new housing development,’ said Mike. ‘Why should Gideon turn up here?’
The minister faced him. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but this is where he used to come to escape from her nagging. Locals say he came over here for a smoke of an evening, and after she disappeared, he slept here. Guilty conscience, no doubt. He needed to distance himself from the scene of his crime.’
‘So what you’re telling us is that our home is haunted by a horrid old farmer who murdered his future wife and still likes to go out for a smoke at night?’ said Poppy, shuddering.
‘Exactly.’
‘And you mean to say the previous owner knew about this and didn’t tell us?’
‘Under the circumstances, would you?’
The Lumleys, as a unit, were speechless. Then Mike spoke. ‘So is there anything we can do about it?’
‘That’s exactly why I’m here tonight,’ said the Reverend Hamilton.
The exorcism that followed was conducted along the prescribed pattern of prayers and a leading towards the light. ‘Especially difficult when the soul of the departed is being sent to Hell,’ explained the Reverend Hamilton with a grimace. ‘Knowing what we know, there’s no guarantee it will work.’
However, by the following month all traces of the putrid tobacco smell had dispersed. The story of Gideon Somerville nevertheless continued to bother Mike and Poppy, especially as they knew where and when it had taken place, and in living memory. ‘It’ll be impossible if and when we decide to sell up and move on,’ complained Mike.
‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Poppy reassured him.
Of course, there was an up-side to this gruesome saga. Jennifer remained in her new bedroom and never again accused her sister Mandy of interfering with her make-up and clothes. Moreover, both girls revelled in telling the story of Gideon Somerville to their school friends who, despite being dependent on public transport, were all too eager to travel out of town to stay in the guest room at weekends.
Six months later Roy Spooner was promoted to captain of the school football team and he and Jennifer became what is nowadays generally known as a serious item.
‘Living in the country’s not so bad after all,’ she informed her mother as the family sat down to dinner one night. ‘It’s not nearly as boring as I thought it would be.’
13
THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Raven’ (1845)
It was well over twenty years ago that an elderly lady of my acquaintance confessed to me that in her sleep she had seen fire falling from the sky over southern Scotland. Her nightmares started in the summer of 1988, six months before Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the small town of Lockerbie.
Dreams are common to everyone, although only occasionally do we recall their content in detail. Watch a sleeping figure while he or she is dreaming and the eyelids and mouth twitch and flicker and the eyebrows furrow. Something involuntary is taking place.
Jolyon Spence from Moulin in Perthshire was in her mid-twenties when she experienced a series of vivid dreams. ‘They always came around dawn in that half-sleep when the ghosts start to appear,’ she said.
‘I was in a car with a man at the wheel and two children in the back seats. We were all being very happy and jolly, although it was pouring with rain outside. The car was heading along some nondescript Highland road with trees on either side. I don’t remember the rain being particularly heavy but all of a sudden there was this great roaring noise and a mountain of rocks and mud came crashing down in front of us.’
Jolyon told me the nightmare repeated itself until she met her husband Ted. When they married in 1991, they stopped. Michael and Nicholas were born, and as they were growing up, she and Ted rented a house for the summer holidays at Killin in Perthshire.
‘Mike and Nick absolutely adored it,’ she recalled nostalgically. ‘They got to sail and water ski on Loch Earn and their dad took them fishing. It was lots of fun, but one evening, it was my birthday and we’d been out to dinner at a local restaurant. We were travelling back through Lochearnhead when I suddenly had this awful sensation of impending doom. I looked at the road ahead of us and it was just exactly as it had been in my dream. It was raining. Ted was cracking jokes and the boys were laughing, a
nd before I knew what was happening, there was a massive landslide. Fortunately, my husband slammed on the brakes and we swerved into a ditch.’ Thankfully, nobody was hurt and they were not alone in their plight. Around fifty other motorists were trapped in their cars until a helicopter from RAF Kinloss arrived to fly them to safety. Heavy rain from the tropical storm Bonnie was blamed.
‘It was a horrific shock at the time, and a miracle that we weren’t all swept away,’ said Jolyon with a shudder. ‘But although I didn’t exactly realise it at the time, it’s reassuring to know I’d been forewarned, even if it was thirteen years before anything happened.’
Aside from warning, dreams can have a practical application.
Having been born and brought up beside the hamlet of Pencaitland, Avril Kirk is no outsider to East Lothian folklore, and today lives in the village of Humbie, where she has been researching her family tree.
One of her first discoveries was that her great-great-grandmother, Agnes Bone, had been born in Dunbar. Now, Avril already knew that Agnes’s daughter, her great-grandmother, had been born illegitimately at Skateraw, a tiny coastal community, and because of this, she had begun her research in that area, but found nothing.
Disappointed, Avril had almost given up when one night she had a dream about a small harbour and heard a voice telling her to look to the left. ‘I naturally assumed it was Skateraw Harbour,’ she said.
The very next day she and her husband Malcolm set off to visit their granddaughter in Dunbar and because of the dream decided to make a diversion to Skateraw on the return journey.
‘We were passing the old Parish Church when I suddenly felt an impulse to stop and have a look at the graveyard,’ she recalled. ‘For no particular reason, I found myself standing in front of the grave of George Robertson. I’d not come across any Robertsons in our family, and was about to move on when I noticed his wife’s name was Agnes Bone!
‘She must have married shortly after giving birth to my great-grandmother. By some unexpected chance I’d found her grave while looking for her birthplace!’
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