Yes, they had been very frightened, or she and her daughter had. Her son-in-law had made a thorough search of the whole house but found nothing, seen or heard no one. At ten-thirty they had all gone into the hall and listened outside the drawing-room door and she and her daughter had heard voices from inside the room, women’s voices. Stephen had wanted to go in, but they had stopped him, they had been so frightened.
Now the interesting thing was that there had been something in the Sunday Express account about the Rectory being haunted by the ghosts of two women. The story quoted someone it described as a ‘local antiquarian’, a man named Joseph Lamb, whom I had heard of but never met. Lamb told the Express there was an old tradition that the ghosts were of a mother and daughter and that the mother had killed the daughter in the drawing room.
‘I never heard any of that before,’ I said to Gordon Scott, ‘and I’m sure Kate Cobworth hadn’t. Who is this Joseph Lamb?’
‘He’s a nice chap,’ said Gordon. ‘And he’s supposed to know more of local history than anyone else around. I’ll ask him over and you can come and meet him if you like.’
Jospeh Lamb lives in a rather fine Jacobean house in a hamlet – you could hardly call it a village – about a mile to the north of Shawley. I had often admired it without knowing who had lived there. The Scotts asked him and his wife to dinner shortly after Mrs Grainger’s appearance on television, and after dinner we got him on to the subject of the hauntings. Lamb wasn’t at all unwilling to enlighten us. He’s a man of about sixty and he said he first heard the story of the two women from his nurse when he was a little boy. Not a very suitable subject with which to regale a seven-year-old, he said.
‘These two are supposed to have lived at the Rectory at one time,’ he said. ‘The story is that the mother had a lover or a man friend or whatever, and the daughter took him away from her. When the daughter confessed it, the mother killed her in a jealous rage.’
It was Eleanor who objected to this. ‘But surely if they lived in the Rectory they must have been the wife and daughter of a rector. I don’t really see how in those circumstances the mother could have had a lover or the daughter could steal him away.’
‘No, it doesn’t much sound like what we’ve come to think of as the domestic life of the English country parson, does it?’ said Lamb. ‘And the strange thing is, although my nanny used to swear by the story and I heard it later from someone who worked at the Rectory, I haven’t been able to find any trace of these women in the Rectory’s history. It’s not hard to research, you see, because only the rectors of Shawley had ever lived there until the Loys rented it, and the rectors’ names are all up on that plaque in the church from 1380 onwards. There was another house on the site before this present one, of course, and parts of the older building are incorporated in the newer.
‘My nanny used to say that the elder lady hadn’t got a husband, he had presumably died. She was supposed to be forty years old and the girl nineteen. Well, I tracked back through the families of the various rectors and I found a good many cases where the rectors had predeceased their wives. But none of them fitted my nanny’s story. They were either too old – one was much too young – or their daughters were too old or they had no daughters.’
‘It’s a pity Mrs Grainger didn’t tell us what kind of clothes her ghosts were wearing,’ said Patsy with sarcasm. ‘You could have pinpointed the date then, couldn’t you?’
‘You mean that if the lady had had a steeple hat on she’d be medieval or around 1850 if she was wearing a crinoline?’
‘Something like that,’ said Patsy.
At this point Gordon repeated his wish to spend an evening in the Rectory. ‘I think I’ll write to the Master of Lazarus and ask permission,’ he said.
Very soon after we heard that the Rectory was to be sold. Noticeboards appeared by the front gate and at the corner where the glebe abutted Shawley Lane, announcing that the house would go up for auction on 30 October. Patsy, who always seems to know everything, told us that a reserve price of £60,000 had been put on it.
‘Not as much as I’d have expected,’ she said. ‘It must be the ghosts keeping the price down.’
‘Whoever buys it will have to spend another ten thousand on it,’ said Eleanor.
‘And central heating will be a priority.’
Whatever was keeping the price down – ghosts, cold or dry rot – there were plenty of people anxious to view the house and land with, I supposed, an idea of buying it. I could hardly be at work in my garden or out with Liam without a car stopping and the driver asking me the way to the Rectory. Gordon and Patsy got quite irritated about what they described as ‘crowds milling about’ in the lane and trippers everywhere, waving orders to view.
The estate agents handling the sale were a firm called Curlew, Pond and Co. Gordon didn’t bother with the Master of Lazarus but managed to get the key from Graham Curlew, whom he knew quite well, and permission to spend an evening in the Rectory. Curlew didn’t like the idea of anyone staying the night, but Gordon didn’t want to do that anyway; no one had ever heard or seen anything after ten-thirty. He asked me if I’d go with him. Patsy wouldn’t – she thought it was all too adolescent and stupid.
‘Of course I will,’ I said. ‘As long as you’ll agree to our taking some sort of heating arrangement with us and brandy in case of need.’
By then it was the beginning of October and the evenings were turning cool. The day on which we decided to have our vigil happened also to be the one on which Stephen Galton and his wife moved out of Charlie Lawrence’s cottage and left Shawley for good. According to the Shawley Post, he had got a living in Manchester. Mrs Grainger had gone back to her own home in London, from where she had written an article about the Rectory for Psychic News.
Patsy shrieked with laughter to see the two of us setting forth with our oil stove, a dozen candles, two torches and half a bottle of Courvoisier. She did well to laugh, her amusement wasn’t misplaced. We crossed the lane and opened the Rectory gate and went up the gravel drive on which those spirit wheels had so often been heard to crunch. It was seven o’clock in the evening and still light. The day had been fine and the sky was red with the aftermath of a spectacular sunset.
I unlocked the front door and in we went.
The first thing I did was put a match to one of the candles, because it wasn’t at all light inside. We walked down the passage to the kitchens, I carrying the candle and Gordon shining one of the torches across the walls. The place was a mess. I suppose it hadn’t had anything done to it, not even a cleaning, since the Loys moved out. It smelled damp and there was even fungus growing in patches on the kitchen walls. And it was extremely cold. There was a kind of deathly chill in the air, far more of a chill than one would have expected on a warm day in October. That kitchen had the feel you get when you open the door of a refrigerator that hasn’t been kept too clean and is in need of defrosting.
We put our stuff down on a kitchen table someone had left behind and made our way up the back stairs. All the bedroom doors were open and we closed them. The upstairs had a neglected, dreary feel but it was less cold. We went down the main staircase, a rather fine curving affair with elegant banisters and carved newel posts, and entered the drawing room. It was empty, palely lit by the evening light from two windows. On the mantelpiece was a glass jar with greenish water in it, a half-burnt candle in a saucer and a screwed-up paper table napkin. We had decided not to remain in this room but to open the door and look in at ten-thirty; so accordingly we returned to the kitchen, fetched out candles and torches and brandy, and settled down in the morning room, which was at the front of the house, on the other side of the front door.
Curlew had told Gordon there were a couple of deckchairs in this room. We found them resting against the wall and we put them up. We lit our oil stove and a second candle, and we set one candle on the windowsill and one on the floor between us. It was still and silent and cold. The dark closed in fairly rapidly, the red fadin
g from the sky, which became a deep blue, then indigo.
We sat and talked. It was about the haunting that we talked, collating the various pieces of evidence, assessing the times this or that was supposed to happen and making sure we both knew the sequence in which things happened. We were both wearing watches and I remember that we constantly checked the time. At half-past eight we again opened the drawing-room door and looked inside. The moon had come up and was shining through the windows as it had shone for Mrs Grainger.
Gordon went upstairs with a torch and checked that all the doors remained closed and then we both looked into the other large downstairs room, the dining room, I suppose. Here a fanlight in one of the windows was open. That accounted for some of the feeling of cold and damp, Gordon said. The window must have been opened by some prospective buyer, viewing the place. We closed it and went back into the morning room to wait.
The silence was absolute. We didn’t talk any more. We waited, watching the candles and the glow of the stove, which had taken some of the chill from the air. Outside it was pitch dark. The hands of our watches slowly approached nine.
At three minutes to nine we heard the noise.
Not wheels or doors closing or a tread on the stairs but a faint, dainty, pattering sound. It was very faint, it was very distant, it was on the ground floor. It was as if made by something less than human, lighter than that, tiptoeing. I had never thought about this moment beyond telling myself that if anything did happen, if there was a manifestation, it would be enormously interesting. It had never occurred to me even once that I should be so dreadfully, so hideously, afraid.
I didn’t look at Gordon, I couldn’t. I couldn’t move either. The pattering feet were less faint now, were coming closer. I felt myself go white, the blood all drawn in from the surface of my skin, as I was gripped by that awful primitive terror that has nothing to do with reason or with knowing what you believe in and what you don’t.
Gordon got to his feet and stood there looking at the door. And then I couldn’t stand it any more. I jumped up and threw open the door, holding the candle aloft – and looked into a pair of brilliant golden-green eyes, staring steadily back at me about a foot from the ground.
‘My God,’ said Gordon. ‘My God, it’s Lawrence’s cat. It must have got in through the window.’
He bent down and picked up the cat, a soft, stout, marmalade-coloured creature. I felt sick at the anticlimax. The time was exactly nine o’clock. With the cat draped over his arm, Gordon went back into the morning room and I followed him. We didn’t sit down. We stood waiting for the wheels and the closing of the doors.
Nothing happened.
I have no business to keep you in suspense any longer for the fact is that after the business with the cat nothing happened at all. At nine-fifteen we sat down in our deckchairs. The cat lay on the floor beside the oil stove and went to sleep. Twice we heard a car pass along Shawley Lane, a remotely distant sound, but we heard nothing else.
‘Feel like a spot of brandy?’ said Gordon.
‘Why not?’ I said.
So we each had a nip of brandy and at ten we had another look in the drawing room. By then we were both feeling bored and quite sure that since nothing had happened at nine nothing would happen at ten-thirty either. Of course we stayed till ten-thirty and for half an hour after that, and then we decamped. We put the cat over the wall into Lawrence’s grounds and went back to Gordon’s house, where Patsy awaited us, smiling cynically.
I had had quite enough of the Rectory but that wasn’t true of Gordon. He said it was well known that the phenomena didn’t take place every night; we had simply struck an off-night and he was going back on his own. He did too, half a dozen times between then and the 30th, even going so far as to have (rather unethically) a key cut from the one Curlew had lent him. Patsy would never go with him, though he tried hard to persuade her.
But in all those visits he never saw or heard anything. And the effect on him was to make him as great a sceptic as Patsy.
‘I’ve a good mind to make an offer for the Rectory myself,’ he said. ‘It’s a fine house and I’ve got quite attached to it.’
‘You’re not serious,’ I said.
‘I’m perfectly serious. I’ll go to the auction with a view for buying it if I can get Patsy to agree.’
But Patsy preferred her own house and, very reluctantly, Gordon had to give up the idea. The Rectory was sold for £62,000 to an American woman, a friend of Judy Lawrence. About a month after the sale the builders moved in. Eleanor used to get progress reports from Patsy, how they had rewired and treated the whole place for woodworm and painted and relaid floors. The central-heating engineers came too, much to Patsy’s satisfaction.
We met Carol Marcus, the Rectory’s new owner, when we were asked round to the Hall for drinks one Sunday morning. She was staying there with the Lawrences until such time as the improvements and decorations to the Rectory were complete. We were introduced by Judy to a very pretty, well-dressed woman in young middle age. I asked her when she expected to move in. April, she hoped, as soon as the builders had finished the two extra bathrooms. She had heard rumours that the Rectory was supposed to be haunted and these had amused her very much. A haunted house in the English countryside! It was too good to be true.
‘It’s all nonsense, you know,’ said Gordon, who had joined us. ‘It’s all purely imaginary.’ And he went on to tell her of his own experiences in the house during October – or his non-experiences, I should say.
‘Well, for goodness’ sake, I didn’t believe it!’ she said, and she laughed and went on to say how much she loved the house and wanted to make it a real home for her children to come to. She had three, she said, all in their teens, two boys away at school and a girl a bit older.
That was the only time I ever talked to her and I remember thinking she would be a welcome addition to the neighbourhood. A nice woman. Serene is the word that best described her. There was a man friend of hers there too. I didn’t catch his surname but she called him Guy. He was staying at one of the locals, to be near her presumably.
‘I should think those two would get married, wouldn’t you?’ said Eleanor on the way home. ‘Judy told me she’s waiting to get her divorce.’
Later that day I took Liam for a walk along Shawley Lane and when I came to the Rectory I found the gate open. So I walked up the gravel drive and looked through the drawing-room window at the new woodblock floor and ivory-painted walls and radiators. The place was swiftly being transformed. It was no longer sinister or grim. I walked round the back and peered in at the splendidly fitted kitchens, one a laundry now, and wondered what on earth had made sensible women like Mrs Buckland and Kate spread such vulgar tales, and the Galtons’ panic. What had come over them? I could only imagine that they felt a need to direct attention to themselves which they perhaps could do in no other way.
I whistled for Liam and strolled down to the gate and looked back at the Rectory. It stared back at me. Is it hindsight that makes me say this or did I really feel it then? I think I did feel it, that the house stared at me with a kind of steady insolence.
Carol Marcus moved in three weeks ago, on a sunny day in the middle of April. Two nights later, just before eleven, there came a sustained ringing at Gordon’s door as if someone were leaning on the bell. Gordon went to the door. Carol Marcus stood outside, absolutely calm but deathly white.
She said to him, ‘May I use your phone, please? Mine isn’t in yet and I have to call the police. I just shot my daughter.’
She took a step forward and crumpled in a heap on the threshold.
Gordon picked her up and carried her into the house and Patsy gave her brandy, and then he went across the road to the Rectory. There were lights on all over the house; the front door was open and light was streaming out on to the drive and the little Citroën Diane that was parked there.
He walked into the house. The drawing-room door was open and he walked in there and saw a young girl lying
on the carpet between the windows. She was dead. There was blood from a bullet wound on the front of the dress, and on a low round table lay the small automatic that Carol Marcus had used.
In the meantime Patsy had been the unwilling listener to a confession. Carol Marcus told her that the girl, who was nineteen, had unexpectedly driven down from London, arriving at the Rectory at nine o’clock. She had had a drink and something to eat and then she had something to tell her mother, that was why she had come down. While in London she was seeing a lot of the man called Guy and now they found that they were in love with each other. She knew it would hurt her mother, but she wanted to tell her at once, she wanted to be honest about it.
Carol Marcus told Patsy she felt nothing, no shock, no hatred or resentment, no jealousy. It was as if she were impelled by some external force to do what she did – take the gun she always kept with her from a drawer in the writing desk and kill her daughter.
At this point Gordon came back and they phoned the police. Within a quarter of an hour the police were at the house. They arrested Carol Marcus and took her away and now she is on remand, awaiting trial on a charge of murder.
So what is the explanation of all this? Or does there, in fact, have to be an explanation? Eleanor and I were so shocked by what had happened, and awed too, that for a while we were somehow wary of talking about it even to each other. Then Eleanor said, ‘It’s as if all this time the coming event cast its shadow before it.’
I nodded, yet it didn’t seem quite that to me. It was more that the Rectory was waiting for the right people to come along, the people who would fit its still unplayed scenario, the woman of forty, the daughter of nineteen, the lover. And only to those who approximated these characters could it show shadows and whispers of the drama; the closer the approximation, the clearer the sounds and signs.
The Loys were old and childless, so they saw nothing. Nor did Gordon and I – we were of the wrong sex. But the Bucklands, who had a daughter, heard and felt things, and so did Kate, though she was too old for the tragic leading role and her adolescent girl too young for victim. The Galtons had been nearly right – had Mrs Grainger once hoped the young rector would marry her before he showed his preference for her daughter? – but the women had been a few years too senior for the parts. Even so, they had come closer to participation than those before them.
Tales from the Dead of Night Page 9