“Decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat,” the elder Mackenzie cackled.
“What’s the other one, Ken?” Connie had abandoned her clipboard but was still, scientifically or unscientifically, interested.
“My ghost, I’m sure of it. Mad Maud, the Harrowgate Hag. Ever heard of her?”
There was a slight pause as the M’s ran over their mental inventory of unearthly creatures.
“No,” they replied.
“Maud worked first as a serving girl, then as a cook in several establishments up north in and around Harrowgate, until someone happened to notice that people seemed to die unexpectedly wherever our Maudie prepared the vittles. An old aunt here, a child there, once or twice the master of the house or his wife. Nothing out of the way, unless you counted up the deaths.”
“If no one noticed the deaths, why was she called ‘mad’?” my brainy Connie asked.
“Because she had the terrifying habit, when crossed in some way, even by a child, of rushing out into the nearest available open space and shrieking her head off while she dashed about. Since she was very bad-tempered, she did this sort of thing often enough to be noticed...”
“Your visitor fills that bill of particulars except it doesn’t shriek,” Angus observed.
“Agreed. At any rate, Maud left Harrowgate under a cloud and turned up as a cook...”
“At No. 11 Jolly Row,” Connie pronounced.
“Dead right. Maud worked at No. 11 for almost a year without incident. Oh, a footman did die without warning in that year, but that may just have been statistics rather than Maudie operating. The crunch came, however, with the wedding of the eldest daughter at No. 11. She had made rather a good match and her father, one John Wexcombe who had made a fortune off slaves and rum but came of humble origins, was so delighted that he gave each servant in the household, and there were dozens, a present of money. To cut a long story short, Maud didn’t get as much as she had expected, there was a row, she did her customary chasing and screaming, this time on the heath, but then she quietly settled down to the massive preparations for the wedding supper. Rumor has it the master had promised her a more generous settlement at some later, unspecified time. Maud had to feed, you see, somewhere between sixty and seventy-five people, accounts differ as to the exact number, and the sole survivor, a serving girl of fourteen, could hardly be expected to stand around counting bodies, now could she?”
Connie’s eyes were very wide. “Ken, you’re saying she killed off the lot? All those people? How on earth...”
“She fiddled with the punch, didn’t she?” Angus was clearly enjoying the hunt. “Even the children at an affair like that would be given a taste of the punch. Am I right?”
“Indeed you are. The punch was intended for the wedding toasts so the master, in another burst of generosity, sent a batch of the stuff downstairs to the staff. The toasts weren’t even finished before people, above and below-stairs, began to drop like flies. When all was silent, Maudie came up to the party, which filled both rooms of the first floor, to view her handiwork. It appears she was so overcome by the incredible success of her revenge against the double-crossing Wexcombe that she took an impromptu slug of the fatal punch herself, realizing her blunder too late, of course. The little girl saw it all from behind the curtain where she had hidden when people began to gasp and fall dead. No one could get her to speak for days, not surprising under the circumstances. When she did, though, she said Maud had shouted: ‘Where’s me money, y’devil Wexcombe, where’s me money?’ before she died, and the penny press of the day really went to town, even to exposing Maudie’s career in Harrowgate. Thank God they did or I’d still be in the dark.”
“It may sound old-fashioned to you, Ken,” Angus said, “but I’d call in the local High Church parson for an exorcism rite. It seems to work when the visitor’s been named.”
“In this case, old man, I don’t think it would work. You see, I quite by accident picked up another piece of information in my investigations which, for the present, I intend to keep to myself. Maud’s the one who needs to know it. And I shall tell it to her when she arrives tonight.”
Arrive she did, at the stroke of midnight. The banging on the knocker began, then stopped straightaway (I had left the front door ajar), and there was the usual tumult of flying furniture downstairs. I lay in my bed upstairs, having fortified myself with a stiff shot of Scotch, frightened enough at the audacities I had planned to have second thoughts. There was only one thing to do, though, if I was ever to have peace.
“Hey! Ho! Maud! Maudie! Where are you, you great old fool? What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? I haven’t yet heard one of your famous shrieks, you old monstrosity! Let me have a look at you, you faking terror...” I don’t know if you have ever tried to shout insults at the tops of your lungs while your larynx is constricting out of sheer fright, but I can tell you it is a painful business. Especially when you discover your efforts have worked and there is a mass of screaming air roaring up the staircase toward your bedroom like a Boeing 747 gone berserk.
She, it (I don’t know, what to call something that has no discernible shape) zoomed into my room through the door, left ajar as downstairs, and immediately hurled my extension phone and bedlight across the room. There wasn’t anything else in the room, entirely Queen Anne, she seemed inclined to pulverize and, since I had taken the precaution of unplugging the phone, no real damage was done there, either. She caromed off the walls a couple of times, then shot out of the room and I could hear her banging around in the other bedrooms, all unfurnished. When I finally got my voice going again by the expedient of having a long draw on the Scotch bottle I had thoughtfully put in my bed with me, I yelled to her:
“The trouble with you, Maudie dear, is you believe everything you read. You hear that?” (She was having some fun smashing windows downstairs at this point.) “Did you hear what I said, or are you deaf as well as dumb...”
The door of my room flew wide open with a resounding crash.
“...the trouble with you,” I continued squeakily, “is that you believe everything you read. You really believe you’re smashing up the house of that John Wexcombe, don’t you? That it’s his wretched strange furniture, bought with the slave and rum money he should have given to you, you’re breaking to bits. Well, you are an enormous, bloody fool!”
While I was saying this, she/it was slowly, then a bit more rapidly, then quite rapidly indeed, lifting up and abruptly dropping the foot of my bed. In fear of being shaken to death, I shouted out my bit of information: “They’ve changed the house numberings on Jolly Row twice over! This house isn’t your No. 11. This house was your No. 6. Your No. 11 is now No. 19! Got it? You’re haunting the wrong house, you bleeding idiot! You numskull!”
There was a sudden pause in her bouncing of me and my bed. I had got her attention. Rather uncomfortably for me, I must add, since she was holding the foot of my bed at a 45-degree angle from the floor.
“The big white house on the corner, that was John Wexcombe’s! It’s been painted over, that’s all. It’s the same house, right down to the Indian-head brass knocker on the front door. Only they’ve changed the number!”
She let down the foot of the bed with such a terrific thump I thought I was a goner, especially when, instantly, all the slats let go, tumbling me, exposed and vulnerable, out onto the floor. The room became a whirling cyclone of boards and pillows, bits and pieces of my phone and lamp and, something new for Maud, entire hulks of my antique furniture. From the corner where I eventually landed, half-crushed but kept out of sight by my former bed’s headboard, I watched fascinated as my mattress flew about like a magic carpet, as my highboy did a little jig on its slender legs.