by Diane Janes
Rachel Hewitt was a real golden girl: that rare combination of academic and socialite – popular, lively, clever. When she failed to show up for lectures one Monday morning, everyone was surprised but not overly concerned. Rachel had mentioned that she was thinking about going home for the weekend, so when friends knocked on her door in Halls and got no reply, they assumed she had decided to go at the last minute, then missed her train back on Sunday evening. When she still failed to appear on Monday afternoon this theory started to falter, and by Tuesday evening someone got anxious enough to phone her family – who said they hadn’t seen her at all. At this point Security were alerted. When they opened Rachel’s door with the pass key, they found her lying on the bed wearing the same clothes in which she had last been seen the previous Friday. She had been strangled.
The window of her room was open and only one floor up. It was in a part of the building immediately above a flat-roof extension – an easy enough entry and escape route for her killer; although he could equally have let himself out into the corridor to make his getaway. The doors had Yale locks which sprang shut if you didn’t wedge them.
There had previously been reports of a prowler on the campus. One girl claimed to have seen a shadowy face at the window when she was taking a shower; someone else had startled a guy mooching around the parked cars late at night. For the rest of the year, male students set up night-time patrols of the grounds, but nothing further was seen. The police interviewed dozens of possible suspects and witnesses, but the investigation appeared to get nowhere. The whole faculty was agog with it; and of course Danny became the recipient of the wretched Timmins Prize – which, as Simon pointed out, he would probably have won anyway – but Rachel Hewitt’s death had turned the whole thing sour, making any kind of celebration inappropriate. For my own parents, the whole episode was confirmation of their wisdom in insisting on my staying at home in Birmingham to study. To the danger of lax morals in halls of residence could now be added the dangers of lax security. They had always been worried that, if not kept a strict eye on, Katy would get into some sort of trouble.
The boys soon lost interest in the story of Agnes Payne and neither of them mentioned Rachel Hewitt – there was really no reason why they should. Once their tea was finished they went back to digging, neither willing to be the first to admit that they’d had enough for the day, or that the work was much harder than originally envisaged. However, when I went out later that afternoon to tell them our food was almost ready, Simon was holding out his blistered hands for Danny’s inspection, turning them over and forlornly displaying broken nails.
‘Jeez,’ said Danny. ‘Don’t be such a girl.’
They were both laughing, but I could see that underneath it Simon really hated the way his hands were getting messed up.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Stop messing about. The meal’s nearly ready.’ The word ‘meal’ was a cop-out, because I knew that Simon called it dinner whereas I was used to calling it tea.
‘We’re coming right now,’ Danny said. ‘You look good enough to eat yourself.’ He picked me up bodily and gave me a hug while he pretended to gnaw at my neck, tickling me while I shrieked and made futile attempts to get away.
That evening we sat in the garden until it was too dark to see. Danny played his guitar and we sang: sometimes all together, sometimes just him.
‘You’ve got a smashing voice,’ Trudie told him. ‘And you’re nice-looking as well. You could make it as a pop star, I bet. Simon, don’t you think Danny would look great on Top of the Pops?’
Simon didn’t answer because he was discouraging a spider who had taken an interest in his can of beer.
‘Go on,’ urged Trudie. ‘Sing something else.’
‘Shall we give them ‘‘Bridge over Troubled Water’’, Si?’ Danny suggested.
Whether doing Simon and Garfunkel or Morecambe and Wise, they were a polished double act. They went back a long way – an enduring friendship with its own private jokes, which inevitably meant that they often referred to people and events I had never heard of. I desperately tried not to mind that Simon knew so much more about Danny than I did, recalling that without Simon there would be no rich uncle’s house, and without the house no chance of spending the whole summer with Danny. But whenever Simon was around I couldn’t entirely escape the feeling that I was the newcomer in our trio. No wonder it irritated me like hell that by the end of our first full day as a quartet Trudie was behaving as if she had known the others for years.
SEVEN
After Trudie’s arrival our days fell into more of a pattern: while the lads worked on the big garden project, Trudie and I would engage in our housekeeping duties for a while, then lie in the sun, reading the books and magazines we found in the house. When the boys tired of digging – which was not infrequently – we played hand tennis or rounders, using a bat improvised from a piece of old chair leg discovered in the shed. Then Simon found an ancient croquet set and we played with that too – using rules of our own devising. In the evenings we talked and sang and played cards – mostly daft games like Cheat and Crazy Eights – forced to manufacture our own entertainment because the house had no television set.
‘Weird,’ said Trudie. ‘Fancy having no phone and no telly.’
‘He doesn’t live here most of the time,’ said Simon. ‘It used to be my grandmother’s house until she died, and she always preferred the wireless.’
‘Weird,’ repeated Trudie.
There was an old radiogram in one of the downstairs rooms, but we could not coax anything from it, beyond a few snatches of foreign babbling and a lot of static. We relied instead on a battery-operated transistor radio, permanently tuned to Radio 1. We caught occasional news bulletins, but everything seemed to be happening a world or two away.
Trudie had only been with us for a couple of days when the teapot with the pink roses on it disappeared. It was Trudie herself who drew our attention to the loss, which indeed the rest of us might never have spotted at all, because she was the only one who ever used the best tea service. Soon afterwards we missed an ugly vase which had previously languished on the kitchen window sill – a hideous yellow object, from which a cluster of purple pansies stood out in relief; then the washing-up liquid vanished, followed by a pair of nail scissors which Simon had left on the kitchen table. The two latter items reappeared within a matter of hours, both in exactly the same place from whence they had vanished, but the vase and teapot were not returned. During the next couple of weeks a whole variety of objects went walkabout – most of them being found again, hours or sometimes days after they were missed.
My first theory was that Trudie was organizing these little disturbances to draw attention to herself and her ‘gifts’, which had not been taken particularly seriously by anyone to date. Then I began to wonder whether it was all an elaborate scheme to cover up the fact that she had broken the teapot and was too afraid to own up to it. When I noticed the disappearance of a glass paperweight from the library, I developed a new idea. Trudie never seemed to be short of cash and I speculated that some of the household ornaments and china might be finding their way to the antique shops in Leominster. Whenever Simon drove into town, Trudie invariably went along, usually with her Greek bag slung over her shoulder.
I put this theory to Danny as we lay in bed one night, but he didn’t rate it very highly. Danny had taken to Trudie and he was always loyal to people he liked; besides which, he lacked my feminine curiosity. The fact that Trudie managed to sidestep all my casual enquiries about who she was and where she came from had apparently passed him by completely. Whenever I drew this to his attention he only speculated that perhaps she was being deliberately mysterious – ‘She may not want to admit she’s younger than us and hasn’t been around much yet.’
‘All the same, those things haven’t grown legs and walked away by themselves. Don’t you think we ought to say something to Simon?’
‘Trudie says it’s the ghost of Murdered Agnes, trying t
o attract our attention,’ said Danny, mischievously.
I snorted. ‘Murdered Agnes, my foot. It only started after Trudie arrived. I think we should ask Simon if she went off on her own at all, when they went to Leominster together the other day. There’s going to be hell to pay if his uncle gets back and finds loads of stuff missing.’
Danny was in an infuriating mood and pretended to snore. I was not going to be deflected. ‘I’m going to tell Simon tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Tell him what?’
‘What I think.’
‘Anyone would think you don’t like Trudie,’ he said.
‘Of course I like her,’ I said. ‘That’s not the point.’ Or maybe it was the point. I pondered this as I lay in the darkened bedroom, watching the place where the curtains made a paler patch against the wall. Ever since her arrival, Trudie had joked and flirted with Danny and I had had to pretend not to mind. While I had no objection to the presence of someone who would get Simon out of our hair, maybe I wasn’t so keen on the idea of an unattached Trudie floating around. I told myself it was nonsense of course – in spite of her various idiosyncrasies, I couldn’t help liking Trudie. She was warm and friendly and very easygoing. She did more than her share of the cooking and washing-up and was happy to fall in with whatever anyone suggested by way of recreation. She just happened to be one of those people who habitually throws an arm around someone’s shoulders, or ruffles their hair – there was really nothing in it – and anyway Danny never took the slightest notice. I wasn’t jealous of her, if that was what he meant.
Although the pond excavation had ascended our list of priorities, we still enjoyed a lie-in every morning. It was almost eleven when I got up the next day and no one else was stirring. The first thing I saw on entering the kitchen was the paperweight from the library. Like a number of other items, it had reappeared in the centre of the kitchen table, rather than the spot from which it had originally vanished. I knew Trudie must have put it there, but it spooked me all the same. I comforted myself with the thought that it was safe and sound. Hopefully everything would be returned in due course – then no one would get into any trouble over missing valuables. The fact that I had threatened to voice my suspicions to Simon the night before made me feel hot with embarrassment.
Although I think we were all secretly convinced that Trudie was behind the missing objects, we more than half pretended to go along with her talk of restless spirits and poltergeists. It was a bit of a laugh and there was no point getting into a direct confrontation over it. The items were mostly trivial and invariably reappeared; and besides, there was no hard evidence of Trudie’s involvement. If challenged she could have argued that any one of us might equally be responsible. Pushing the point was tantamount to accusing her of telling lies, so we kept schtum – which in turn developed into a sort of vague acceptance of the presence of Agnes Payne.
All of us were pretty light-hearted about this – even Trudie, who affected to believe herself more closely in tune with these matters than the rest of us. It was a sort of running joke – when anything at all was mislaid (a not infrequent occurrence in a household as disorganized as ours) someone would incline their head and say knowingly, ‘Agnes again . . .’ But although Agnes managed to defuse the difficulties which stemmed from our general untidiness, there was no conveniently insubstantial scapegoat for the various other problems which cropped up with depressing regularity: when one or other of us rose with a head throbbing from the previous night’s over-indulgence to discover something disgusting blocking the sink, or when our bare feet encountered dried mud which had been trodden in the day before.
The day the paperweight made its reappearance was particularly hot and sticky, so all of us were grateful for the onset of evening when the temperature reduced to a more tolerable Regulo 3. It was still stuffy indoors, so we had carried our food outside and were all sitting on the parched grass, nursing plates of fish fingers and beans (I had taken a turn to provide our meal), when there was an almighty crash behind us. I shrieked, Danny swore, Simon and Trudie both jumped up.
‘Jesus-Moses, what the hell was that?’ exclaimed Danny.
Simon was standing up, looking towards the house. ‘There’s something on the terrace,’ he said.
The terrace was a paved area which ran along one side of the building. There was grass growing between some of the slabs, but apart from that it was uniformly grey. We could all see the garish splash of yellow and purple which had appeared on the stones, where Simon was pointing.
We abandoned our plates on the lawn before approaching the spot uncertainly, with no one apparently in any hurry to get there first. It was an anticlimax. A jagged chunk of pottery was lying a few inches from the wall of the house. It was a fragment of the ugly vase which had previously stood on the kitchen window sill. The thing had evidently smashed with considerable force, because the other pieces had flown several feet across the paved area and beyond.
‘There’s no one around,’ said Simon. ‘Where the heck has it come from?’
We all looked up. Trudie’s open bedroom window was immediately above the point where the vase had fallen.
‘It’s been open all day,’ she said, in answer to an unasked question.
‘Do you think someone’s got into the house?’ I asked.
After a brief debate, the boys decided to undertake a thorough search of the premises, having first stationed Trudie and me at the front and back doors respectively. I stood in the kitchen, hopping from one foot to the other and straining to catch any sound from elsewhere in the house. As usual I had fallen in without demur: biddable Katy who always goes along with everything, then ends up standing with her heart in her mouth, waiting for the Mad Axe Man to appear.
But it was Simon who eventually entered via the door from the hall, to report that there was no sign of any intruder.
‘I don’t believe there was anyone else here,’ Trudie announced, when we had reassembled on the back lawn. ‘I think it was a sign that Agnes is getting more restless. Maybe she wants us to do something for her – hold a seance or something.’
Danny was poking at his congealed beans with his knife. ‘I’m a Catholic,’ he said. ‘We don’t go in for that sort of shit’
‘I don’t think we ought to start messing around with stuff like that,’ I said. I couldn’t help thinking that the way the vase had made its dramatic entrance – right under Trudie’s open window – was highly suggestive. She couldn’t have thrown it out herself, because she had been sitting with the rest of us in plain view: but maybe she had found some way of rigging it, so that the vase would inevitably topple out of the window at some point during the evening.
‘If we go on ignoring her, things may get worse,’ Trudie persisted.
‘Well, I don’t want to do it,’ I said, confidently expecting Danny to second this opinion; but he was preoccupied with organizing the plate in his lap, and didn’t appear to hear me.
‘I don’t mind giving it a go,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t see what harm it could do.’
‘Well, if everyone else wants to do it, I don’t mind joining in,’ said Danny. Ignatius Loyola he certainly wasn’t.
‘You’re not scared, are you, Katy?’ Simon asked. ‘I thought you said you didn’t believe in ghosts and all that sort of stuff, when we were talking about it the other night.’
I sensed the mockery in his voice. I hated being teased. ‘No, I’m not, and no, I don’t.’
‘Looks like three to one anyway,’ said Simon. ‘Democratic decision of the majority.’
‘You don’t have to be there if you don’t want to,’ said Danny, in a vaguely conciliatory tone. I tried to catch his eye, but he was still poking at his plate and didn’t notice. He had to be joking. There was no way I was going to sit somewhere on my own in that big empty house, while the other three had a shot at calling up the spirits. I was about to say something else when he burst out: ‘Bloody hell. There’s a bug in my food.’
Trudie leant across,
so that her hair draped over his shoulder. ‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s just a bit of burnt breadcrumb.’
‘It’s obvious Trudie fixed the vase to fall out of the window,’ I said crossly.
She rounded on me at once. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What I said. It’s just another of your little stunts – to draw attention to yourself.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Simon said. ‘How could Trudie possibly have made the vase fall out of the window when she was sitting here with us?’
‘There are ways of doing it.’
‘All right then, name one.’ Simon threw out the challenge with a triumphant sideways glance in Trudie’s direction.
‘I don’t know. I’m not a member of the Magic Circle.’
‘Well, neither is she.’
‘How would you know? We don’t know anything about her.’
Danny put his plate on the grass before reaching over to squeeze my knee. ‘Come on, Katy,’ he said. ‘Let’s not make a big deal out of it.’
‘Well, I’m fed up with all this silly Agnes business. Things disappearing and everyone pretending to believe in it all. Simon doesn’t really believe in it. He’s only pretending he does now to be provocative—’
‘How would you know what I believe?’ Simon interrupted.
‘You’re only backing Trudie up because you always disagree with me about everything on principle.’
‘Maybe that’s because you’re always wrong.’
‘Come on, guys,’ Danny pleaded. ‘You’re ruining the whole evening.’