It was getting too dark to see much, so, trusting, that no one would see the glow of it, she switched on her torch. There was nothing to be discovered on the ground floor, so she mounted the stairs, retaining the poker as a weapon.
Just as she reached the bedroom described by O’Hara, she thought she heard sounds from below. She opened the door of an enormous built-in cupboard and stepped inside.
‘Nellie!’ cried a man’s voice. ‘Nellie! Where the plague have ee got to, woman?’
Mrs. Bradley awaited with interest the next part of the proceedings. She could hear doors being opened and shut, and, as the footsteps grew fainter and the man went towards the kitchen, she emerged, and, switching on her torch again, made a rapid survey of the floor. Except that, unlike the downstair floors, this one had been scrubbed recently, there was nothing remarkable about it.
The remaining bedrooms were dusty, cobweb-tapestried to an almost incredible degree, unfurnished and undisturbed.
Mrs. Bradley was leaving the last of them when an angry bellow came up the well of the stairs.
‘Oh, there ee be, Nellie, confound ee! Why the devil don’t ee answer when I calls you?’
Mrs. Bradley slipped into the corridor and came on noiseless feet to the head of the stairs. There was a slight recess in the wall. She flattened herself into this and waited for the man to ascend. She still held the poker. She hoped he would not bring a light, but was ready to knock it out of his hand if he did.
He had no torch. She could hear him stumbling up the stairs.
‘Nellie!’ he bellowed. Mrs. Bradley allowed him to walk past her. Then she slid out of her alcove and descended the stairs. She replaced the poker on the hearth from which she had taken it, came out to the side door and ensconced herself in the shadows. She waited. The man came downstairs as soon as he had searched the upstair rooms.
‘Nellie!’ he called desperately. ‘It do be you, don’t it? Answer me, girl! Where be ee?’
Mrs. Bradley let him get half-way down the kitchen passage, and then she gave an eldritch screech of laughter. She heard a startled oath, and then the sound of a panic-stricken voice shouting:
‘Nellie! Nellie! For God’s sake! It do be ’aunted after all! Where be ee, girl? Why the old Nick don’t ee answer?’
Mrs. Bradley sped down the weed-grown drive and ran for dear life along the lane in the direction the others had taken. Then she slowed down, and, by the time the woman reappeared, Mrs. Bradley was patiently toiling up the long, rutted slope of the hill.
‘She’ve got long legs, your grand-daughter,’ said the woman. ‘But you keep all on up along here, and you’ll pick her up in good time.’
Mrs. Bradley thanked her, and toiled on. Half-way up the hill, Laura emerged with conspiratorial caution from a bush, and, crossing the hill, they made a detour, aided by the map, and reached George and the car without passing the farmhouse again.
‘I’m sorry you had to come so far after us,’ said Laura, ‘but I felt bound to go on a bit after she left me in case she turned round and spotted me, and began to suspect us of something. I was worried about you, though I hope you had time to snoop round? It didn’t seem to take you very long.’
‘I did nicely, thank you, child. The bedroom floor had been scrubbed, as those young men told us. I think I’ll have a word with the County Police when we get back.’
‘Will they think a scrubbed floor enough to go on?’
‘Time will show, child. It is the question of the heavy man’s failure to arrive at the hospital which will interest them. There was a man in the house, by the way. I am reasonably certain that he is the woman’s husband, and that they are there to get the house aired or for some innocent and similar reason. When the new tenants are installed we may be able to find another excuse to call. Meanwhile, there are more profitable fields to explore. Did you get very wet in that hedge?’
‘Soaking,’ said Laura complacently. ‘Did the man in the farmhouse see or hear you?’
‘He both saw me and heard me, child. I gave an eldritch cry, like Tam Lin’s fairy queen, and I am afraid I may have conveyed to him the impression that the house is haunted. It seemed, from what he said, that there is a tale of a ghost. If there is, it might be as well to find out the details. There is scope for many strange things in a house which has the reputation of being haunted.’
‘I’d like to have seen the bloke’s face when you screeched in his ear,’ observed Laura.
‘I did not screech in his ear,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘But you might screech in George’s, and tell him I want my dinner.’
Chapter Six
—«♦»—
‘ “Heaven rest his soul! … He has lain these ten years in a house that he’ll never leave.” ’
Ibid. (Peter the Goatherd)
« ^ »
I want you,’ said Mrs. Bradley, fastening her brilliant black eyes upon those of the Chief Constable, ’to have your young men look up all the cases in which people have disappeared during the past few weeks.’
‘Past twenty years, you mean,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘We don’t go in much for disappearances in these parts except disappearances under ground in the usual regrettable course of events, you know.’
‘When was the last disappearance of the kind I mean?’
‘In 1939, I think, just after war had broken out—or just before. I can’t remember.’
‘None since?’
‘None that have been brought to my notice.’
‘And before 1939?’
‘I’d have to look up the reports.’
‘I wish you would. What happened in the 1939 case?’
‘Officially we’re still looking for the fellow. He disappeared in what the Irish call “the dark of the moon,” and has never been heard of again.’
‘It was a man, then?’
‘Yes, I believe it is mostly men who disappear. Debts, or bigamy, or get tired of their homes, I suppose. Crime, sometimes, of course… suicide… drowning. It was rather odd about this chap, though, because, so far as we could tell, he didn’t come under any of the known headings. As a matter of fact, we didn’t even know he’d disappeared until the following-year, when some relatives in London wanted to billet themselves on him during the blitz. He couldn’t be found, so they asked us to try to trace him. We had no luck, and as there was nothing against him, so far as we knew, we gave it up.’
‘How old a man was he?’
‘Twenty-seven, I believe. Youngish, anyhow.’
‘Didn’t you think he might have joined the Army?’
‘He had a bad heart, it turned out. According to his doctor, there wasn’t the slightest chance of his having been accepted for any of the Services, or of his having been able to do much good, even for A.R.P.’
‘Why did nobody mention his disappearance sooner? A year seems a very long time.’
‘Since the death of his father in 1932, he seems to have lived by himself. He was an artist and a bit of an archaeologist. The people who were enquiring for him were his uncle and aunt. They had quarrelled with his father and had lost touch with the son, but when the fun began in London, of course, they wanted somewhere to go, and thought of this nephew, only to find his place deserted.’
‘Was there no clue at all to his disappearance?’
‘Never a one. I never knew such a case. We began our enquiry according to routine, but beyond establishing the fact that he’d left word with the tradespeople that he wouldn’t want anything delivered after some date or other in March— that was the March of 1939, of course—we got nowhere. As there was nothing criminal about the case, we weren’t particularly worried… after all, a man has the right to shut shop and clear out of his home if he wants to… but there was just one odd thing. The uncle said that his nephew had written to them at the time of Munich, and, after a few facetious remarks about gas-masks, had stated soberly that he was certain war was coming, and that if they ever wanted a refuge he was perfectly willing to put them up at his cottage. ’The uncle even produced the letter. We still have it, and, as it happened, the grocer the fellow used to deal with had kept the note telling him to ease off sending supplies. When we compared the two, though, there was no doubt that they had been written by different people. We got the uncle to write a piece for us, and put the handwriting experts on to all three scripts. There was no doubt that all three had been written by different people. We then recorded the fingerprints on the various documents, and also those in the empty cottage. There were the young man’s prints, of course, all over the furniture, and it seemed, from the comparisons we were able to make, that the letter sent to the uncle was genuine and had come from the nephew. There were other prints in the cottage, but none which corresponded to any of the prints on the scrap of paper sent to the grocer or to those made, at our request, by the uncle and aunt. We got no further.’