The Haunted Lady

by Bill Kitson

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Adam, as an aberration it seems to be relatively harmless so far.’ Sometimes, Eve has a talent for comforting me that is equal to one of Job’s friends.

  On the drive home I remarked to Eve that, for once, it seemed that our jaunt had not resulted in serious consequences for anyone. I thought I heard her mutter something that sounded like the word ‘paranoia’, but my thoughts had moved elsewhere. We were passing Dinsdale Museum and, as I glanced sideways at the building, I stamped on the brakes, to the alarm of my passenger and the annoyance of the driver behind me. I pulled to the roadside to allow him to pass and waved an apologetic hand in response to his glare.

  ‘What on earth did you do that for?’ Eve demanded. ‘Is there something wrong with the car?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, but I suddenly thought of something.’

  ‘It must have been really important for you to risk life and limb in that manner, not to mention that gentleman’s temper. What was this sudden thought?’

  ‘When DS Holmes told us about the attempted burglary at the museum, didn’t he say that the intruder had been trying to break into the storage area?’

  ‘Yes, he did, but that hardly seems like a valid reason for dangerous driving.’

  ‘Yes, I admit it was a bit over-dramatic, but I suddenly remembered what you’d told me and I believe I know what the burglar was after. I’m only surprised that neither of us thought of it earlier.’

  ‘Go on then, explain what you think he was trying to steal. Take your time, because it might give my stomach chance to return to its normal location.’

  ‘If Andrew Kershaw arranged for Casper Harfleur to renovate that diptych on behalf of St Mary’s Church and then gave it to Mark Bennett to store until the church roof repair had been completed, where would the most logical place for Bennett to put it be?’

  ‘In the museum storeroom, naturally, but that doesn’t make sense, Adam. Surely, once the church was reopened there would be no reason for Bennett to hold onto the painting, would there?’

  ‘Possibly not, but by the time that situation arose circumstances had changed dramatically.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘The old vicar had died, and Debbie Kershaw was either dead or dying. Added to that, following his wife’s death, Andrew was in no fit state to bother with anything like the painting, from what we’ve heard.’

  ‘That may be true, Adam, but there was nothing wrong with Bennett, either physically, mentally or emotionally.’

  I was unable to provide a counter-argument to Eve’s logic at the time, and it was only much later, that I came up with a possible explanation. Even to me it seemed a bit far-fetched, but then, we do far-fetched extremely well at Eden House.

  ‘What if Bennett had been acting on instructions? What if someone told him to leave the diptych in store and forget about its existence?’

  ‘Why would anyone have done that? And who are you referring to? Who is the mysterious “they” in your argument?’

  ‘I can’t say why they would want it to remain hidden, unless there’s something about that painting we don’t know. As to who might have asked Bennett to hide it, there again I can’t say, but if I had to hazard a guess, Andrew or David Kershaw would be my joint favourites.’

  This new theory, wild though it was, would require testing, if only to disprove it. But to do so we would need to enlist the help of someone with a vested interest. With that in mind, despite Eve’s reluctance to accept my hypothesis, I decided to contact Rev. Phillips and put the evidence before him. If he bought into the idea, he could then contact the museum’s new curator to request a search of the storage are for what was, in effect, church property.

  My phone call to the vicarage must have inspired Michael to action, because within half an hour he rang back. ‘Would you be free tomorrow morning? I’ve provisionally arranged with James Evans, the new curator to go through the museum storeroom and archives to look for the diptych.’

  ‘I’ll check with Eve, but I think we’re OK. What time do you have in mind?’

  We decided on eleven o’clock which gave us chance for a leisurely breakfast before the drive to Dinsdale. I offered to collect Michael and Chloe from Elmfield on the way through.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When we arrived at the vicarage next morning, I can’t say I was surprised to see three people emerge.

  ‘Mum couldn’t bear the thought of being left out of the action,’ Michael told me apologetically as they got into the car.

  ‘Seeing that she was the one who started this treasure hunt, I think it would have been grossly unfair not to include her.’

  I was interested in the way the relationship between Chloe and her future mother-in-law – subject to Chloe and Michael actually getting married, of course – was developing. From their body language it seemed that they were getting along very well. I concentrated on the road while listening to the conversation between Eve and Chloe taking place in the back seat.

  Eve asked Chloe about getting to and from the vicarage. ‘It’s a fair distance from Elmfield Grange,’ she pointed out.

  ‘That’s true, though it’s a lovely walk as long as the weather’s fine, but it can be horrid if it’s raining. As I can’t get a driving licence Michael insists on ferrying me back and forth, or making me stay at the vicarage. That’s OK while Marjorie is here, but I couldn’t do it at any other time. The more prudish of Michael’s parishioners would frown on that. The very thought of their vicar and his fiancée sleeping under the same roof without a chaperone would be enough to turn them into Methodists.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Michael smile quietly at Chloe’s joke. His smile died, however as she continued. ‘Happily that isn’t a problem at the moment. Michael’s more concerned about my stalker.’

  ‘What stalker?’ Eve asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing serious, just my joke really, but there’s this man who keeps following me around.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘Chloe’s exaggerating a bit,’ Michael interrupted. ‘We’ve seen him a couple of times, that’s all, but I’m not prepared to take any chances. You read such terrible things in the newspapers these days.’

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘Not by name or anything like that,’ Marjorie chipped in, ‘but I’ve seen him before and so have you. It’s that man you described, the one we saw at the railway station. I saw him yesterday evening, standing outside the vicarage.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry too much about him. It’s probably nothing more than coincidence, because he seems to get everywhere. He was at Dinsdale Gala yesterday.’

  ‘Adam’s right,’ Eve said, ‘he’s seen that man loads of times in all sorts of places.’

  ‘He’s a bit strange though, because he never seems to speak to anyone. Nor does there seem to be any purpose behind his appearances. He simply stands there looking around at what’s going on. It’s almost as if he’s afraid that someone will accost him, or try to start up a conversation, because one minute he’s there and the next minute he’s vanished.’

  ‘Well I’m not going to let him worry me, or stop doing things or going places because of him,’ Chloe stated emphatically.

  We reached the museum ahead of schedule and there were only a handful of cars and a coach standing outside the building. The reason for the coach became apparent when we went into the foyer, where a group of children in the uniform of Dinsdale Grammar School were being marshalled for a tour of the exhibits by a harassed-looking teacher and one of the guides.

  When the party entered the art gallery I wondered idly if the guide would include a description of the murder in his commentary, but decided that would be in extremely poor taste.

  We moved past the chattering group and reached the curator’s office. The newly appointed incumbent introduced himself after Michael identified each of us. ‘I’m Jim Evans, and I’m still getting to grips with this job. What happened at the reopening d
idn’t help.’

  Evans was a sturdily built man, in his early thirties, I guessed. For a moment I wondered if he was a little on the young side to be awarded such a prestigious position, but then remembered that Mark Bennett had been even younger when he’d been appointed.

  The curator led us to the rear of the building, where he paused to unlock a connecting door. ‘The storage facility is on three levels,’ he explained. ‘In addition to what you can see from the outside there is also a large basement that stretches the length of the building.’

  He pushed the heavy door wide, correcting his statement as we filed through. ‘Actually, I suppose you could say it has four levels, because in addition to the first floor there’s a section in the attic – a mezzanine floor, you could call it. That was added when the museum ran out of space elsewhere and they had to create an additional area. It’s used for a lot of the smaller artefacts, giving more room for the larger exhibits below. However, in view of what we’re looking for, I don’t think we need to spend too much time up there, unless the paintings have been removed from their frames. I believe the items are mostly ancient and prehistoric artefacts. Sadly there are no dinosaur skeletons, which would doubtless have appealed to groups such as the one visiting today.’

  Having delivered his little joke, Evans flicked a couple of switches. As we waited for the fluorescent lights to warm up, I sniffed cautiously. The musty smell of undisturbed items that had been gathering dust over the years was unmistakeable.

  ‘I suggest we start on the upper floor, then work our way down, ending with the basement,’ Evans told us. ‘To be honest, I haven’t been down there yet, so I’m quite keen to see what it contains.’

  There could well be more boring ways of passing a few hours on a bright, warm sunny day than examining relics in the dim light of a museum storeroom, but offhand I can’t think of any. By late lunchtime we had completed our search of the upper level and almost finished rummaging through the ground floor without any success. If my theory was correct and the diptych was in the museum, we had either overlooked it, which was a distinct possibility given the quantity of items and the way they were stacked, or it was in the basement.

  It was mid-afternoon before we emerged into the relative glare of the museum proper. In addition to being grimy, having acquired a liberal coating of the dust that covered most, if not all of the storage area, we were weary and somewhat dispirited by our failure.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t appreciate how bad it was in the cellar,’ Evans told us. ‘At a guess, I’d say the building work contributed a lot of the dust.’

  Even he seemed a little subdued, although his search of the basement had revealed several treasures of which he’d previously been unaware. The others seemed to have accepted that the diptych hadn’t been stored in the museum after all, but I was still unconvinced and voiced my opinion that we might have missed something.

  Eve apologised on my behalf. ‘Adam doesn’t like to surrender a pet theory, even if he’s totally wrong,’ she explained. ‘What exactly do you think we missed? Short of lifting all those pallets the artefacts in the basement were placed on and looking beneath them, we’ve searched every square inch of the place.’

  To the astonishment of everyone, including Eve, I picked her up, whirled her round and kissed her, before setting her gently back on her feet. ‘Thank you, my darling Eve, now we know where the diptych has been hidden.’

  Eve straightened her hair, then her jumper, before addressing the others. ‘Sorry about that; Adam often behaves strangely. Please don’t worry, though, he’s relatively harmless. You simply have to be patient and await the explanation. Quite often that will be in English, and sometimes it will even be understandable.’

  ‘Pallets!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said “pallets”.’

  ‘Oh, for a moment I thought you were swearing.’

  I could tell by their expressions that the others had been under the same misapprehension. ‘What about them?’ Eve asked.

  ‘It was your mention of pallets that triggered a memory of something I’d seen in the basement. At the back wall – all those shelving units stood on pallets, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but what of it?’

  ‘No, that’s what we assumed, but we were wrong.’

  ‘Wrong, how were we wrong?’

  ‘They weren’t all on pallets. One shelf unit was standing on what resembled a pallet unless you looked at it closely. It had a sealed end and sides, like a small crate. If we go back downstairs I’ll show you what I mean.’

  When we stood in front of the shelf unit, the difference between its support and that of the others was obvious. ‘All we have to do is lift the artefacts off, remove the unit and we can get at the container,’ I told them.

  That might sound like a simple, task, but even with six of us working it took a long while to remove everything that had been stacked on the quasi-pallet.

  The container was nothing like the pallets in appearance. It was a large, shallow rectangular box, measuring approximately four feet long by three feet wide and with a depth of roughly eight inches. Even the wood used in its construction was different.

  As with everywhere else in the storeroom there was an accumulation of dust on the top surface. There were also two extremely large spiders that scuttled for cover once their hiding place had been revealed. As the shrieks of the female members of our party died away, Evans, who was nominally in charge of proceedings, highlighted our next problem. ‘I’ve got a crowbar for opening crated exhibits, but I’d be loath to try it on that. So how do we open it?’

  We began by dragging the container clear of the surrounding shelves so we were able to scrutinise it with the advantage of slightly better light. Even then, there seemed to be no way of opening the container, short of prising the surfaces apart with the crowbar, or a hammer and chisel. When I mentioned this, Michael objected. ‘That can’t be right. For one thing, you could easily damage the painting, if it is inside. Also, we ought to be able to figure out how the container was sealed in the first place.’

  ‘That’s all very well, Michael, but there are no screws or nails showing,’ Marjorie pointed out.

  ‘We could do with a torch,’ Evans suggested.

  ‘How about my lighter?’

  Michael’s suggestion brought him under fire from his mother.

  ‘You haven’t started smoking, I hope?’

  ‘No, mother, I use it to light candles in the church and the gas fires in the vicarage.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then. But wouldn’t this be better?’ With that, she dug into the large handbag she always toted and with a flourish worthy of a magician, produced a small pocket torch.

  With the additional light provided, Eve said, ‘Look down the edges. There appears to be a row of tiny circles along each side.’

  ‘I reckon the screws have been hidden by these wooden caps.’ I pointed to a couple of them. ‘The work is extremely good. If you look closely, you can see that even the grain has been matched to the surrounding surface.’

  ‘That sounds like an awful lot of trouble for something that’s no more than a box,’ Marjorie said. ‘I could understand it if this was a valuable piece of furniture but it’s only a container.’

  ‘I agree, but it seems to be the only possible way to open it,’ Michael insisted.

  ‘I don’t understand why it was done, though.’

  ‘The only reason I can think of,’ Eve told her, ‘is that the person who constructed it didn’t want anyone to know what was inside, or that it was anything other than a pallet. It’s only thanks to Adam’s eagle eye that we didn’t dismiss it altogether.’

  I blinked, surprised by what sounded like a genuine compliment. I waited for the backhander but, for once, nothing came.

  ‘There is a way we could find out, as long as we take care not to damage anything,’ Evans said. He produced a penknife and opened one of the blades, a sharp, narrow piece of steel
with a fine tip. ‘I propose to run this very carefully around the circumference of one of these circles. If we’re right, these dowels will have been glued in. By now the glue will have dried and hardened, so with luck I should be able to break the seal without harming the surrounding wood, or what is beneath.’

  He knelt on the floor and we watched with bated breath as he worked slowly, with infinite patience, until eventually a long cylindrical piece of wood popped out and landed on the surface of the container. Using the torch, we examined the hole that had been created and sure enough deep inside we could see the head of a screw. ‘Bingo,’ I breathed. ‘Now all we have to do is take out them out then unscrew the top.’

  ‘That might not be as easy as it sounds,’ Evans replied. ‘If the container has been down here for a long number of years, the screws might have rusted and weakened. Unless we’re careful they could break off when we try to remove them. I think it would be a good idea to get our caretaker on the job. He’s more at home with this sort of thing – and he’s got the tools.’

  It was ten minutes before Evans returned accompanied by a middle-aged man dressed in a brown warehouse coat; almost regulation issue for a caretaker. He spent a couple of minutes looking at the container, before glancing at his surroundings. I think he would have scratched his head, if he hadn’t been wearing a flat cap. ‘I don’t reckon anybody’s been down here for donkey’s years’ He gestured to the contents of the shelves. ‘That lot’s been here since before I started working in the museum, and I started in sixty-six. I can even remember the date because it was a week before we beat Germany in the World Cup Final.’

  He rummaged in his tool kit until he found a box cutter. With the aid of this, he set to work carefully removing the remaining dowels. At one point Evans mentioned the possibility of the screws rusting. The caretaker stared up at him and shook his head. ‘They’re brass. Brass doesn’t rust. It’ll corrode, but enclosed like this, these screws will be as good as the day they were fitted.’