It was time to call in the big guns: the sort of psychologists who look into ghosts.
I found Harry Chisholm, a fellow Canadian who makes his living writing about science, in his local, the Duke of York, and told him a load of rubbish about doing a piece for a Sunday paper on Hampstead ghosts. Could he give me the name of a parapsychologist?
“Ken, they’re all nutty! You want somebody sane and reputable. You want, pardon me, the MacKenzies. He’s a mathematician and she’s an experimental psychologist, both at University College. Here’s his number. Call them up. Ghosts are only their hobby!”
My only problem was: should I use Wenks or Mackenzie in ringing up my rescuers? I decided on Wenks, and the MacKenzies made an appointment to visit my house two evenings hence.
He and she turned out to be not Mr. and Mrs. but father and daughter, dazzling daughter. Connie stood five-feet-eight in her highly decorative Mary Quant as she asked me questions off her clipboard. Her father, Angus, was off checking and measuring in the dining room, while the two of us walked up and down the livingroom.
“Cycle tape applied as crosses. Very ingenious,” she noted. “Are you religious?”
“No,” I said. “My girlfriend thought of it.”
“Ah. Is she religious and staying here with you?”
“Good heavens, no! She got the idea from a film.”
“I see.” Her violet eyes gave me the benefit of the doubt.
“You know, Hamlet. Where he uses his sword like a crucifix in case the ghost of his father is really an invention of the devil.”
“Oh, of course.”
“Your eyes are just the color of heather coming to bloom,” I said, quite, quite forgetting myself.
“So I’ve been told,” she said, peering into the fireplace my ghost had used as an entry.
I retreated to my study, leaving unplayed my trump card of also being a MacKenzie — occasionally.
I did as the MacKenzies asked, and they spent two nights holed up with me in my bedroom, listening. On the first night, I placed a board emblazoned with a red Scotchlite cross in each fireplace, facing up toward the chimney opening. We were treated to a frenzy of smashing and crashing, but all out-of-doors. The only casualties were the redwood furniture and the Plexiglas fountain in the garden.
On the second night, I removed the placards from the fireplaces and the MacKenzies heard the full treatment: a night-long ravaging of the first floor.
All Angus had to say was: “Has it ever touched the kitchen or the bedrooms?”
All I could answer was: “No.”
“We’ll be back in a few days,” he said. “In the meantime, can you give us a bit of breakfast? Connie will cook if you don’t, but she’ll hate it.”
“Daddy!” she protested.
Connie laid on a very nice breakfast while Angus discussed with me the possibility of my seeing a psychiatrist in case all the furniture upheaval emanated from conflicts within myself.
“Really, Daddy, I don’t know why I put up with your primitive ideas. There’s some perfectly logical explanation here and you needn’t carry on trying to make Ken sound as if he’s...”
I was just admiring how shining brown is Connie’s hair and how truly heather violet her eyes are when there was a voice from the doorway of the kitchen. Shelagh.
“I know several terribly reputable psycho-people in Harley Street who deal with problems of this sort,” she announced, clearly having no time for Connie, the cook-psychologist.
“This wretched thing you’ve been wanting has turned up, so here it is, use it in good health, and I hope I never see or hear of you again, EVER, Rob Mackenzie!” She turned on her heel and left, having first thrust into my hands a gorgeous old brass warming pan on which she had stuck a red Scotchlite cross. Obviously, she had meant it as a patching-up present, but Connie’s presence had put her off altogether. Leaving the MacKenzies to sort out the Rob Mackenzie crack on their own, I raced after Shelagh and was, very shortly, chatting things over with one of her Harley Street psycho-people at an improbable number of guineas per hour. His verdict was I seemed okay to him and that I either did have a ghost or else I had been spending too much time listening in on the House of Lords where everybody, Bedford and Bath excluded, appeared dead for centuries. A second psychiatrist, called in as a consultant, told me to lay off martini cocktails on an empty stomach.
Meanwhile, back in Jolly Row, Connie and her dad seemed in no way to be able to curb or contain my visitor. Once or twice Shelagh came by, but it was clear our relationship had cooled; she made unnecessary mention of the captain in the Horse Guards who had taken to squiring her about. She took away the modern pictures for their own safety, and shook her head sadly over the balloon lamp and the Scandinavian settee which, by now, looked more appropriate to a barrow in the Portobello Road than to the pages of House and Garden. I was bloody well fed up because the Whatever It Was, let in so the MacKenzies could record it, had taken to ripping the phone out of the wall and to snapping off light bulbs at their bases. I was also, by now, convinced that my ghost must have some kind of history known to a local historian or elderly resident of the neighborhood.
I, therefore, set to work and struck gold, or the promise of it, at the news agent’s.
“The only way I know e’s still alive is e’s ould ousekeeper comes in ere to buy your thrillers. Great fan of yours, e is. Asn’t set foot out of e’s ouse these last ten years is my best guess, but e’s just the man for the task. Must be upwards of ninety years and e’s family’s lived ereabouts for generations.”
The Honorable Decimus Peyton-Lennox was so terribly old and fragile and transparently thin that for a second I thought I had come on a Hampstead ghost operating in the open.
“Haven’t been in Jolly Row in years,” he gasped. “A charming little street. The brick fronts remind one of what Hampstead must have looked like when Keats lived here, poor chap. A country town dotted with the houses of city fellahs, large establishments built cheap.”
“Actually, mine’s the only one left in Jolly Row with its original brick. Not painted up or plastered over, you understand. It’s been closed up for years; some problems with the estate, I believe.”
“Aha!” Mr. Lennox’s triumph appeared to overcome his voice. At last it came back: “Aha!” In the interim I had died a thousand deaths.
“You know something about my house?” I inquired solicitously.
“Jolly Row. Jolly Row. Murders there, a very long time ago. I remember as a mere lad, my grandfather and his chums talking about it once or twice, lowered voices, of course. Something nasty that had happened when they were still young men. Perhaps even, some of their friends carried off in it. Murders. A mass of people killed, all at once. How d’ye suppose it was done? I can’t remember. No blood, though. No blood. Poison. It was poison. ’Bout the time of that second war with the Yanks.”
All this information, you realize, took the old gentleman just under half an hour to convey, what with him needing to cough or lie down or take tea or sit up. But, in these intervals, my mind was racketing around at a terrific rate, cataloguing possible sources of information: old newspapers, histories, public records. It might take some time but, if my noisome spook didn’t keep me up all night every night, I would be more than up to it. I wanted my house back from It.
“I’ve narrowed it down to two cases,” I told the MacKenzies over tea late the next week. “The first happened in the winter of 1801 and had to do with a man shooting his wife, her lover, and her mother.”