By Horror Haunted

by Celia Fremlin

  For what sort of a story was this?—that there, in the middle of the deserted street, a policeman had been standing as if on point-duty, waving Mervyn on with imperturbable authority, across the pavement, through the glass, and crash into the front counter and deep-freeze compartment of a middling-sized grocer’s shop? A young policeman—younger even than these two—with one hand held up to stop the imaginary traffic along the dark, silent street, while the other beckoned Mervyn imperiously to his destruction?

  *

  They wrote it down, though; painstakingly, and without comment, as was their duty; and if they glanced at one another meaningly across the hospital bed, Mervyn could not see it, for his head, with its weight of bandages, did not turn easily; and his left eye, anyway, was still covered with a dressing.

  He could follow their fingers, though, as they wrote: the one set large, and pink, and slow, and with a look of being liable to chilblains; the others long and pale—more like a pianist’s hands than a policeman’s.

  Neither set of fingers—thank goodness—were short and stubby, with bitten nails like a schoolboy: those fingers which he remembered so well from all those years ago. Fingers which used, so reluctantly, to hand Mervyn first five-pound notes, then ten-pound ones, and, finally, cheques for fifty pounds or more as the price of his silence. Those fingers, too, had belonged to a policeman; a young policeman, Constable Allinson, right at the beginning of his career, and just as boyish and silly as these two.

  Sillier. For only a very silly young man would have got himself into debt like that; and, having got into it, would then have tried to get out of his difficulties by accepting bribes from a well-known criminal, whose picture had been in the papers a dozen times over the years. And to accept them, too, in a corner of a pub on a Saturday night, thinking—poor innocent!—that the noise and the clatter all around would be a sufficient cover for the transaction! Never realising that someone watching from right the other side of the room would be able to put two and two together without needing to overhear a single word! Such a give-away young Allinson’s face had been that night! The silly young fool—anyone could have spotted, that evening, that he was up to something!

  Luckily, it was only Mervyn who did. To have had a second blackmailer on the job would have ruined everything—halving the profits while doubling—no, quadrupling—the dangers.

  Anyway, for weeks afterwards, all had gone beautifully. First, five pounds a week … then ten pounds … and it was at this point that Mervyn (he realised later) had begun to miscalculate. Had he settled for the £10, he might still have been getting it to this day; but unfortunately success had gone to his head. It was like the excitement of the chase … the thrill of the roulette wheel … he had finished by over-reaching himself, and pushing his victim just that little bit too far. Forcing him to sell-up everything in his mother’s house … to get deeper and deeper into debt … to get into the hands of the money-lenders….

  But it wasn’t Mervyn’s fault—was it?—that the silly goop had finally committed suicide! Mervyn hadn’t asked him to do that—would, indeed, (if consulted) have earnestly dissuaded him from such a course. Dissuaded him, in particular, from setting about it in such a bungling sort of a way—jumping from a window not quite high enough, and thus lingering for nearly three weeks before he died; during which time he might quite easily have betrayed Mervyn—either deliberately, or in some sort of drugged delirium.

  But he hadn’t. Mervyn had had a nasty three weeks waiting for the chap to be safely dead; and even after that, it was months before he’d felt really secure. For a long time, every phone call, every ring on the doorbell, had set him sweating with fear, wondering if enquiries had been set in motion … if the silly swine perhaps had said something with his stupid, dying breath …?

  Gradually, of course, Mervyn’s fears had faded. For nothing happened; no one came to question him; and gradually, as the months went by, he began to feel safe again—even, in the end, began to forget about the whole unfortunate episode. It must be twenty years since he had given it so much as a thought—until last Saturday. Until the night of his accident.

  This was the part of the story he couldn’t tell to anyone. Certainly not to these two well-disciplined officers of the law, who were right now so punctiliously concealing their total disbelief in even the part of the story he had told them. The implausibility of the facts he had revealed was as nothing to the implausibility of the fact he was keeping to himself!

  What would they have made of this hidden part of the story, he wondered? What sort of glances would they by now be exchanging if he were to reveal to them the most important circumstance of all—namely, that he, Mervyn, had clearly recognised the young policeman giving those insane signals in the empty road? Recognised him, without any doubt at all, as a man who had been dead for over twenty years?

  *

  Was it without any doubt? For the hundredth time since he had recovered consciousness, Mervyn combed through his piercingly vivid recollections for some element of uncertainty; some slight fuzziness of detail which would allow him to believe that it had all been a dream—a delusion—an hallucination brought on by shock.

  That’s what any outsider would conclude—of course they would! They would make much of the fact that the flash of recognition had only come to Mervyn at the very end of the experience—at the very moment of impact, when the blood must already have been streaming down his forehead. At the beginning, when he had first caught sight of the policeman in the road ahead, he had assumed, naturally, that this was an ordinary, real-life policeman on duty at an ordinary, real-life road-junction. It had struck him, momentarily, as odd that there should be a policeman there at all at this deserted hour of the night, with so very little traffic to control; but the thought had passed; and (like any good driver) he had obeyed the signals automatically, and without conscious reflection. It was only as the storm of glass crashed about him that he became aware of the policeman’s face, as it were in close-up, barely a yard away from his own. Allinson’s face. Smiling, as Mervyn had never seen him smile in life. Smiling, as a man smiles when revenge is at last within his grasp….

  *

  “That’s enough, if you please!” the little red-haired nurse with the bright blue eyes was saying firmly to the two policemen. “I’m sorry, but we mustn’t allow Mr Maynard to get over-tired. If you’d like to come and speak to Sister …?”

  Yes, Nurse, of course, Nurse, we quite understand, Nurse…. Yes, Sister, No Sister…. Thanks a lot, Mr Maynard…. Hope you’ll be O.K. soon, Mr Maynard…. At last it was over. At last they were gone, and Mervyn felt gratitude towards the little nurse who had brought this about—even though she’d only been doing her job, obeying Sister’s instructions. For once, he endured her bustling, bothersome ministrations without complaint … rearranging his pillows … adjusting the cage over his leg. Even the penicillin injection, which he usually so dreaded, gave him a sense of comfort and security. They were looking after him. They knew what they were doing. Amid all this bustle and practicality, there was no room for the supernatural. Allinson would never be able to get at him here. Not so long as they kept busying themselves around his bed like this…. Not so long as they didn’t leave him alone….

  Luckily, his operation was fixed for this very afternoon—already he had missed breakfast, and was right now missing lunch, in readiness for it. Surely, with the ordeal so close, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask that someone stay with him till he went down to the Theatre?

  “Nurse!” he began diffidently, “Nurse, I’m feeling—you know—a bit scared. You won’t go away, will you …?”

  She laughed, of course, at his fears, as it was her duty to do. She assured him that the operation would be nothing—absolutely nothing! No need for him to worry about it at all! And as to being left alone—why, there wouldn’t be time to leave him alone! What with the shaving, the marking-up, the pre-med injections … from now on he wouldn’t be getting a minute to himself!

&
nbsp; “It’ll be like Piccadilly Circus around here once we get going on you,” she teased him.

  “And you’ll be here—you yourself?” he insisted. It seemed very important, somehow, that the faces around him this afternoon should be familiar ones. “You aren’t going off duty, or anything? You’ll be around all the time until they come and fetch me to the Theatre …?”

  She laughed—a sweet, conspiratorial sound.

  “You bet I will! Actually, I’ll be the one who’ll be fetching you,” she assured him. “Please don’t worry so much, Mr Maynard, it’s bad for you!”—and with that she was off down the ward, her brisk little heels clicking on the parquet as she moved. Even though she had left him for the moment, Mervyn still derived solace from the quick, decisive little movements she made as she went from bed to bed; bending, straightening-up, whisking objects from here to there … concentrating single-mindedly on her allotted tasks.

  Efficiency! Efficiency and routine! They were like Holy Water, which the Powers of Darkness cannot cross!

  *

  He must have dozed for a little, because the next thing he knew it was two o’clock, visiting time. The ward hummed with flowers and greetings and murmuring voices … it was like waking into a hive of bees. Mervyn had been told that, for him, there were to be no visitors this afternoon, as he was supposed to rest before his operation; so he was surprised, and not a little dismayed, to learn from Sister that he was to have a visitor after all.

  “Only for a couple of minutes, though,” Sister warned. “It’s the police again. They just want to know …”

  “The police!” Mervyn’s bandaged head jerked up from the pillow, winced, and then he sank back, his face whitening. “The police? The same ones, do you mean, the two who came this morning?”

  Sister seemed taken aback by the urgency of his manner, and set herself to quell it in the ways she knew so well.

  “Now, now, Mr Maynard, don’t get yourself into such a state about it! I understand it’s only a formality. No, it’s not the same gentlemen who came this morning, it’s a plain-clothes man this time. From the C.I.D….”

  *

  The C.I.D. Where Allinson would have finished up, no doubt, if he had lived. If he hadn’t ruined his career before it had properly started….

  Was it as a C.I.D. man, then, that he would choose to rise from his grave, laughing, when he set off on his ghostly journey from Peckham Cemetery …?

  Peckham Cemetery. Yes, that would be right. Peckham was where, in his lifetime, Allinson had walked his beat … where, no doubt, he had done point-duty, in the Peckham High Road…. This geographical coincidence occurred to Mervyn now for the first time, but before he had had time to dwell on its implications, Sister was back, and in her wake came a heavily-built, middle-aged man in a black suit.

  Middle-aged. That was something. Or do the dead age in their graves, as they lie waiting? Age as they would have done in life … putting on weight, the thin young shoulders becoming stooped, the wheat-blond hair fading to this grizzled no-colour on the big, balding head …?

  *

  No. This couldn’t be Allinson. Neither dead nor alive, neither old nor young, could Allinson ever have acquired that high, dome-like forehead, that aquiline, aristocratic nose. Never, by any means, natural or supernatural, could these worn, regal features have evolved from the round, snub-nosed face on which, towards the end, the freckles had stood out like gun-shot against the greenish, panic-stricken pallor….

  No, it wasn’t Allinson. Mervyn let out his breath in a sigh of total thankfulness, and answered readily the two or three innocuous questions that were put to him. He watched the firm, bony fingers jotting down his answers. Not a bit like Allinson’s fingers. Nothing like it at all.

  And now, the danger of being left alone and unprotected was virtually over. They were beginning to gather at his bedside … to move to and fro through his drawn curtains. First one, and then another, and then two or three together, with basins, bottles, implements … shaving, painting, injecting. It was like Piccadilly Circus, just as the little nurse had said … and at this thought, he looked around. She’d said, hadn’t she, that she was going to be here during the preparations … was going with him to the operating theatre …?

  “Where’s the little nurse?” he asked Sister. “The little nurse with red hair, and very bright blue eyes?”

  Sister turned and stared.

  “‘Little nurse with red hair’?” she repeated. “We haven’t got such a nurse on this ward…. Do you mean Nurse Wilding—?” She gestured across the ward in the direction of a nurse neither little nor red-haired nor blue-eyed, but big and busty and tow-coloured.

  *

  “Funny you should say that, Sir,” one of the porters observed a minute later, when Sister had been called away—(already the two porters were here, ready to transfer Mervyn from his bed to the trolley that would bear him away to the Theatre). “Funny you should be talking about a little red-haired nurse…. Or have you heard the story? The story about this ’ere bed you’re lying in …?” And without waiting for an answer, he plunged forthwith into the narrative. How twenty years ago, or thereabouts, a young policeman had been brought in, terribly injured, and had been put into this very bed that Mervyn was now occupying; and how a little red-haired nurse, such as Mervyn had just described, had been set to “special” him, spending all her duty hours at his side. For three weeks he’d lingered, and for a time it had seemed that he might recover. Meanwhile, the little nurse had fallen deeply in love with him. All through the long hours of the night, she would be sitting at his bedside, soothing, encouraging; bending close to catch his whispered sentences; infusing into him courage, and the will to live; pouring into his broken body all she had of youth, and hope, and love. And when, in spite of all that could be done, he died, she, too, had killed herself.

  *

  Very sad. Very romantic. The porter came to the end of the story while he and his mate were already manoeuvring Mervyn on to the trolley; and it was then, just as they’d settled him there, and had taken hold of the handles to wheel him off to the Theatre—it was then that Mervyn caught sight once more of the little red-haired nurse. She was hurrying—almost running—along the ward towards him.

  “I told you, didn’t I, Mr Maynard, that it would be I who’d be fetching you, and not Mr Allinson,” she said, as she slipped her little hands past those of the porters, and got a grip upon the trolley’s handles.

  As she ran, pushing the trolley before her, her heels made no sound of clicking on the polished floor.

  AN UNSUSPECTED TALENT

  “BUT, PETER, IF you do get the job, just think what we’ll be able to do! Move out of this poky little house, for a start …!”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not a bad little place,” interposed Peter mildly, setting down his coffee-cup and gazing amiably round the cramped living-room, warm and lived-in, but over-full of furniture, and with books spilling over from the shelves on to every available surface. “I like it,” he concluded thoughtfully. “I really do. I’ve got quite fond of the place. And the garden, too. Do you realise, Phoebe, that the Cox’s Orange Pippin we put in will be fruiting next year? Five years, they said; it seemed such an age, didn’t it, at the time? But now …”

  “It still seems an age to me!” snapped Phoebe; and then, forcing a softer tone into her voice (for it would never do to start a row, tonight of all nights), “I don’t mean we haven’t been happy here,” she amended. “Of course we have! And this was a very nice little house—for when Tim and Jenny were tiny, and when you were just a Sales Representative. But you’re on your way up now, darling, and we must move up with you! Now that you’re going into Management, we must re-think our whole life-style! We must begin to …”

  “Hey—hang on a minute, darling! I haven’t even got the job yet! We shan’t know till tomorrow whether …”

  The little frown, nervous and diffident, was back on Peter’s face, and as always it filled her with irritation
. Why couldn’t he look his best, when something important was at stake?

  “Smile!” she ordered, the word snapping from her lips involuntarily, like a small scream. “Smile, Peter, smile!”—and at once he did.

  How handsome he was, with his blunt, broad features, his generous mouth, and wide-set eyes! Handsome, and sunburnt too. Sunburnt from gardening, and from taking the dog for strolls, and from playing French cricket on the lawn when he should have been working—fury surged back into her, and a maddening, familiar frustration. With those looks, with that charm, he could have got anywhere by now, if only he’d had the drive!

  Take this interview tomorrow, for instance. He’d known for months that he was in the running for the new post as Export Manager; had known, too, that his only serious rival for the job would be Gerald—Gerald Mannering, four years’ Peter’s junior, and with nothing like Peter’s experience, and integrity, and ability to get on with staff. It should have been a walk-over; and that it wasn’t, was entirely Peter’s own fault.

  He just wouldn’t do the right things. The things you have to do in order to get on in this world. He wouldn’t go to the right parties—join the right clubs—meet the right people. “They’re boring!” he’d complain; or “But I don’t like golf!”—as if that had anything to do with it! Even now, with this marvellous chance of promotion in the offing, he had still refused to do any of the things that a normally ambitious man would have done to improve his chances.

  Like inviting A.J. to dinner, for example. A.J. (as Mr Jensen, the Managing Director, was always called) was the man on whom the new appointment largely depended, and it had seemed to Phoebe perfectly obvious that Peter’s first move should have been to invite this august personage to dinner: to give him an evening of glittering conversation and marvellous food—the sort of evening which she, Phoebe, would have been able to create to perfection!