Ghoul Brittania

by Andrew Martin

  Mr Blundy was quite the fascist in some ways, but even though commercial property was the backbone of the business, he’d never act for a developer he thought ‘rapacious’. He was also generally very decent to all of us, and a rare exception to the rule that all public school products are treacherous bastards. For example, he was always on at me to take articles. (An articled clerk is a trainee solicitor, or was back in the seventies, whereas a solicitor’s clerk was just a solicitor’s clerk). I told him I was looking to find a filling station or car showroom to run with my brother – that was always the long-term plan, and I made no secret of it – but Mr Blundy said I had a natural talent for drafting, and he was giving me wills, deeds of trust and statements of claim to draw up from day one. He’d come up to me with a document and say, ‘Now Geoff, I could give this to Bob, but I want a safe pair of hands on it’, and he’d give a wink to Bob Grafton.

  Our office was in Little Stonegate, which is a sort of courtyard off Stonegate proper. Stonegate is old, but Little Stonegate is older. I mean, parts of it are Norman. Today – I kid you not – it is ‘York’s Restaurant Quarter’, but in Mr Blundy’s day it was so many storehouses with blacked up windows and doors that looked as though they weren’t meant to be opened ever again. As the light faded on a winter’s afternoon, you could barely see across from our offices to the storehouses on the other side; then the lamp in the middle of the court would be illuminated – about four o’clock sort of time – and the buildings opposite would come back in all their complete deadness.

  I remember those winter afternoons in the office, and how made-up I used to feel, with a secure job right in the middle of the beautiful ancient City of York. I mean, picture the place in 1976: 360-odd pubs (one for every day of the year, it was said), and about as many churches to counterbalance; dusty little sweetshops, blackened City Walls, diesel engines winding in and out of the dirty great station under the endlessly falling rain. But it was on one of these afternoons – late in ’76, when I was 21 years old – that I began to have the first inkling of what life and death are all about.

  Bob Grafton was drafting a long will, been at it all day. As usual, he made a soft popping sound as he drew on his pipe. I was working on a simpler will – a Mr Paul Kay of Burton Stone Lane was leaving his house and his stamp collection and not much else, to his two daughters. I was smoking; occasionally reaching out for ‘Theobald on Wills’, occasionally yawning. (Well, it’s better than a sleeping pill is ‘Theobald on Wills’). The clock was ticking, the main office fire…well, that ticked too, if it was going right, and it certainly was just then. Outside in the gloomy court, the rain was falling. Mr Blundy was in his office which was not known as ‘Mr Blundy’s Office’, but the ‘inner-office’, and he made no trouble at all about Bob Grafton using it if Grafton wanted to speak to a client in private. On this occasion, though, Mr Blundy was in there on his own, and the door was shut, which might mean he was about his trusts.

  Mr Blundy was a trustee many times over… I suppose because he was trustworthy. A trust, putting it crudely, is property given by the settlor to a trustee who holds it for the benefit of a third party: the beneficiary. Usually the settlor is just about to die, and usually the trustee is not paid for the responsibility he takes on. In practice, even in sleepy old York, the beneficiary is very often a chap’s mistress, or the child he had fathered by that mistress, and in these cases the trust is usually kept secret for obvious reasons. Hence ‘secret trusts’.

  Now some secret trusts are more secret than others. Generally speaking, Mr Blundy would let Bob Grafton in on anything. I admit that certain trusts were kept in Mr Blundy’s deeds safe when not being worked on, but… well I suppose I’m saying it was unusual to see his door closed.

  At four o’clock, Nelly Drew gave me a smile over her typewriter. It wasn’t really for me though. It meant she could hear through the closed door that Mr Blundy was dictating. The office had just acquired a dictating machine. It was the idea of Bob Grafton who was go-ahead in spite of his pipe, and Mr Blundy had not been keen at first. I heard him say to Bob Grafton, ‘You know, I’ve just got ingrained prejudice against speaking to inanimate objects.’ He came round to it eventually though, even if he’d never quite mastered the machine. It was quite a laugh to watch him, and quite a laugh to think of him using it, hence the smile from the beautiful Nelly.

  Then we heard Mr Blundy’s telephone ringing, and the dictation stopped as he took the call. A few minutes later he came out of the inner office looking odd. I don’t know quite what it was about him, but Bob Grafton spotted it too, and he took his pipe out of his mouth, sharpish like. Mr Blundy put the tape of his dictation onto Nelly’s desk for typing up. He then took his coat off the stand, and turned and nodded to all of us at once, whereas normally he’d have a word for each of us individually at knocking off time. But that’s not the point. The point is it wasn’t knocking-off time. It was barely five o’clock. As he walked out of the door, Bob Grafton looked up and said, ‘I say, Bill…’ which was the equivalent of somebody shouting at the top of their voice in another kind of office.

  When Mr Blundy had gone, Nelly, holding the tape, looked close to tears. Mr Blundy had not said ‘Goodnight’ to her. Bob Grafton put his pipe on his desk and stood up.

  ‘Has he got anything on tonight, Nell?’

  She looked at the office diary, which was always kept open on her desk.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I said, ‘He’s probably going to the post office on his way to The Grapes.’

  After a while, Nelly put on her earphones and started typing the dictation. At six, Bob left and Nelly carried on typing. I liked watching her type; I liked watching her do anything. At six twenty-five we were both still in the office, and I thought: this is becoming rather erotic. I should mention that I was something of a Jack-the-Lad back then: feather cut, Chelsea boots, 100 per cent polyester suit with bell-bottomed trousers and lapels that were wider than me. (I’m a skinny little bugger, always have been). And now Nelly was looking back my way. I knew she had a bloke in the background but I thought: what’s happened with our boss has stirred her up somehow, put her in the mood. Still looking at me, she said, ‘Come here’ in a really excitingly rude way. She was pressing buttons on her tape machine. She took her earphones off as I went over, and passed them to me. ‘Listen to this,’ she said.

  The dictation was just Mr Blundy giving advice to a client about something. Landlord and tenant stuff. Then I heard, on the tape, the ringing of Mr Blundy’s phone, and he hadn’t knocked the machine off, so I got his end of the phone call, or the first few seconds of it until he realised he was taping himself and switched off the recorder.

  ‘Blundy’, said Mr Blundy. (That’s how he always answered the phone). Then, ‘Hello’ (rather short, that). Another pause, and then ‘How lovely to hear from you. How are you?’ (I thought: he was expecting this call, but he doesn’t like the person he’s speaking to). Then Mr Blundy said, very slowly: ‘But the Morley child has been dead for more than 50 years…So I don’t see how that can be possible.’

  The day after Mr Blundy had started acting oddly, he came into work at eleven looking worn out, and asked Nelly to book ten rooms at the Viking Hotel (the best York had to offer at the time) for a date two weeks hence. They were to be for ‘a party from London’ and it was all to be done in his name. Then he went into the inner office and shut the door.

  Soon after that, I put on my rally jacket, and stepped out into the rain to go and measure a pavement. Personal injury claim against the council, you see. There was always a lot of tripping over in York, probably on account of those 360 pubs and all the cobbled streets. I’d go out with my tape measure, and report that the cobble or paving stone stood proud by an inch and a half. It was always an inch and a half, and the person who’d tripped would get £50 or a hundred if they’d broken a bone, or bugger all if they’d tried the same thing on before.

  It was raining when I went in search of my paving slab, whi
ch was in Coney Street, just outside the menswear shop: John Collier’s. But I was thinking of a different John as I wondered through the busy medieval streets: Mr John Morley, confectioner. When Mr Blundy had spoken of the long-dead ‘Morley child’, he must have meant the child of John Morley, who himself had died sometime before the last War, and who, I happened to know, had been a friend of Mr Blundy’s father. He wasn’t on a par with the Rowntrees or the Terrys, the really famous sweetmakers of the city, but I’d seen pictures of him in the York guides and histories that I liked to read: dark, good-looking…evidently a serious-minded chap in a black suit. He didn’t look as though he made sweets for a living, somehow.

  Morley’s Mints – that was the most famous line, the ‘core business’ as they say today. There were green ones which were peppermint, and white ones which were peppermint as well, not spearmint as you might hope for the sake of a bit of variety. There’d been a few other kids’ lines that had come and gone over the years.

  The most interesting thing about Morley’s was the factory, which was just downriver of the city centre. It was like a great black cliff, and with all the windows black as well. Above the topmost line of windows was written ‘Morley’s of York’ in letters that were illuminated in red at night, and would glow in the rain like a warning sign to those on the other side of the river, Fulford way. Or those red words – the reflection of them – would lie on the surface of the black water at night, as if the river was time flowing on, but ‘Morley’s of York’ remained constant. You’d never get planning permission for a thing like that now. It blocked off a quarter mile of river frontage and cast this great shadow on the houses on the opposite bank. (And I do believe the prices of those houses rocketed when Morley’s factory was pulled down in 1981).

  Well, I’d measured the paving stone, and was coming back through St Helen’s Square when I saw Mr Blundy. I thought: he must be heading for Betty’s Tea Rooms, but it wasn’t tea time; it wasn’t even lunchtime. And he was crossing the Square in the wrong direction for Betty’s. I followed him down Blake Street, which runs off the Square; it was absolutely bucketing down by now, and Nelly was right: he didn’t put his umbrella up. I was glad to see him sticking to his guns there at least. He turned right at the end of Blake Street and I thought: he’s making for the Minster. The Minster bells were ringing in a crazy sort of way, and it seemed as though the sound was drawing him in, but he veered left, and walked up the steps of the church that stands before the Minster: St Wilfred’s. That was the Catholic church, and as he walked through the door, the crazy pealing of the Minster bells stopped and was replaced with a steady chiming of a single bell. I stood still in the rain by the war memorial and counted: eleven o’clock.

  There didn’t seem to be any doubt about it: Mr Blundy had come off his rails.

  I walked back to the office, and reported all this to Bob Grafton and Nelly, who had news of her own, which she’d already mentioned to Grafton. A deed box was missing from the deeds safe in the inner office. I asked whether the box had had a label, because they generally do.

  ‘In re Morley,’ said Bob Grafton.

  (Trusts are labelled ‘In re…’ meaning ‘In the matter of ’, and after that comes the name of the settlor).

  ‘Who’s taken it then?’ I asked.

  ‘Bill has,’ said Bob Grafton, and I could tell he was shaken, because he never spoke of Mr Blundy as Bill in front of third parties.

  I asked him what the objects of that trust were.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bob Grafton, but he was now sucking on his pipe in a way that made me think he meant to find out.

  He quit the office soon after, and came back mid-afternoon, by which time Mr Blundy himself still hadn’t returned.

  Bob Grafton sat on his desk, and told Nelly and me what he’d found out. He’d spoken to Charlie Whittle, an accountant who did work for us; he audited the accounts of some of the trusts, and that gave him knowledge of the secret ones. Now he was a bit of a loose cannon was Charlie Whittle – always getting divorced, and thrown out of golf clubs. He was more like a barrister than an accountant in that respect. His tipple was ‘gin and fizz’ and that’s the kind of chap he was. Over a couple of these at The Grapes he’d told Bob Grafton what he remembered of In re Morley. It was quite technical; I was never very well up on trust law anyway and nor, come to that, was Bob Grafton, but this is the gist of what he said.

  In re Morley was actually two trusts, created by John Morley of Morley’s Mints. There were currently three trustees: ‘two chaps from London’, according to Charlie Whittle, and Mr Blundy, who’d inherited his trusteeship from his own father, who – as mentioned – had been a good friend of John Morley’s, both of them being York aristocracy, so to speak. One trust was for the maintenance in good health and happiness of a certain Mr Saul Chadwick. (Lucky him, I thought.) The beneficiary of the second trust was a club: a ‘philosophical society’ of some kind. Charlie Whittle – not being a very philosophical sort of bloke himself – had not understood what this involved, and did not see why philosophers needed to do research anyway. But he knew that this club or society had a good amount of money to spend in pursuit of its objects, and that two properties in central York were to be kept at its disposal. They could do with these whatever they wanted, and what they wanted to do with them was nothing. They were to be kept empty.

  ‘What properties?’ I said.

  ‘Whittle could only remember one,’ said Bob Grafton. ‘The River House – that big place in Skeldergate.’

  ‘When was the trust made?’ I said.

  ‘Whittle couldn’t remember.’

  ‘….Because this Chadwick must be getting on. John Morley died before the last War, didn’t he?’

  Bob Grafton, re-lighting his pipe, was nodding, ‘But the trust might have been made in 1939 for all we know – and Chadwick might have been very young at the time.’

  That night after work I walked through the rain, and down the steps off Ouse Bridge that take you into Skeldergate. It was partly out of sheer curiosity, and partly because I felt that if I could crack the mystery of Mr Blundy’s odd behaviour that might make Nelly Drew come across. A sordid little scheme, you might think, but I was a randy bugger back then.

  Skeldergate…

  I tell you, it was made for rain that street… Cobbled in those days, with a great gutter down the middle, and close at hand the river, for more supplies of water if necessary. This was central York, but you wouldn’t have known it, since it was always deserted. There were a few businesses: a place that sold beds, a place where an old bloke occasionally – when he could be bothered – auctioned off old bikes, but they were the sort of places that carry the announcement on the door: ‘By Arrangement’, ‘By Prior Appointment Only’. The street was separated from the river Ouse by some big buildings that had once been warehouses (for cargoes that, even in the Seventies, had been transferred to road long since), and these would generally have derricks sticking out of the front, like great rusty gibbets. There was also the headquarters of the York Sea Cadets, whose building was called the S.S… something or other, and which they pretended was a ship.

  And then there was The River House.

  I hadn’t known it was called The River House, but as soon as Bob Grafton had mentioned the place, I’d recalled that John Morley had lived there. He must have been attached to the river, John Morley, since this place where he’d lived and raised his family was only a little way upstream from his factory. From the river-side, it looked like one of the warehouses, only better kept and without the indignity of a word like ‘GRAIN’ or ‘FLOUR’ painted on it in giant letters. I should mention that Skeldergate features in a Wilkie Collins novel, No Name, (not quite up there with The Moonstone if you ask me), and he refers to ‘the dingy warehouses and joyless private residences in red brick.’ Well ‘The River House’ was one of the joyless private residences, except that nobody resided there.

  Standing in Skeldergate I was looking at the rear of the
property. At all the windows were wooden shutters, closed and stripped of paint or varnish. No light came from within. I stepped back from it and looked up at the top windows. I then began to hear a rising whistling noise, which I thought it might be the Sea Cadets a few doors along, because they did go in for whistling, piping each other aboard their warehouse-cum-ocean-going vessel. But this was not the night for the Sea Cadets; their building was silent and dark. Becalmed.

  The whistling carried on – now with another sound beginning to rumble underneath it, and I felt very… I think the word is ‘vulnerable’ standing there in the rain in Skeldergate listening, but I knew I had to wait for whatever came next. When the next thing started I took a single deep breath and stepped back. The River House was going to burst; it had to. Hundreds… No, thousands of tons of water were cascading through it. Not that there was any sign of water on the outside. There was no leakage whatsoever, but for thirty seconds I stood in front of that house and heard water falling within it. When the noise stopped I was somehow released, and I turned away and walked fast out of Skeldergate and up Micklegate with the feeling that anything could happen at any time. On my way up Micklegate, I clattered into a milk bottle; it spun on the slimy pavement, and I thought: ‘It’s going to bloody stand up again of its own accord…It bloody is!’ And I couldn’t look back at it, just in case. I was running by the time I hit the doorway of the The Kestrel pub, and when I walked up to the bar, I said ‘Hello, good evening, how are you?’ to the landlord which was an attempt to prove everything was normal, and which of course proved the exact opposite. I was what they call ‘badly shaken’, and I was shaking too. If somebody had said to me that common phrase (which I have never heard anybody say to anybody), ‘You look like you could use a drink’, they would have been right, and I set about some pints of John Smith’s, while rolling fag after fag and playing Rolling Stones records on the juke box.