She wanted to go upstairs and measure the height of the bedroom from which Cousin Tom had fallen, and prove to her own satisfaction that, allowing for flooring, there was no secret cavity between the rooms. She was trying to account for the poltergeist.
If, as she supposed, the phenomena were not genuine, then it was necessary to discover some hiding place from which the perpetrator of what had turned out to be a very grim joke could have emerged and to which he could have returned whilst 'haunting' the house.
There was the possibility, of course, that the phenomena might be genuine, and this point she did not overlook. Nevertheless, in as much of the literature relating to poltergeist activity as she had been able to procure, there seemed no evidence of anything beyond mischief and a certain amount of childish spite behind the poltergeist manifestations. Murder, for instance, seemed quite outside the scope of poltergeist behaviourism, and she had not the slightest hesitation in accepting, as a working hypothesis, Mrs. Muriel Turney's conviction that Cousin Tom had met with foul play.
The house itself, as she had realised upon her first visit and in spite of the somewhat irritating presence of the old man, was a most extraordinary place. Stone-built in the most hideous and uncompromising style of the middle of the nineteenth century, it retained evidence of having been erected on the site of a very much older building, for in some respects it adhered to the Elizabethan ground-plan upon which an earlier house had been built.
Of all the picturesque features of its foundation, however, it retained nothing but some panelling by the side of an obviously reconstructed fireplace in the dining-room.
The windows were large and rectangular, and opened up and down by means of sashcords, some of which were in need of replacement. The staircases were narrow and Victorian, even the front one. On the servants' staircase there was not room for two people to pass.
It was a cheerless house; sinisterly cheerless, for the bright sunshine streamed in through the windows, particularly of the drawing-room, which faced south, and of the bedroom immediately above it, and yet a kind of spiritual dankness seemed to permeate every part of the building.
Mrs. Bradley was particularly free from morbid fears and nervous fancies, but she would not have been in the least surprised, she felt, as she went from room to room, tapping, pacing and measuring, to turn round and find the ghost of Cousin Tom, of Bella Foxley, or even of Aunt Flora, standing in the doorway watching her. As for the front stairs, she stood quite two minutes in the bare and chilly hall looking at them before she could bring herself to mount.
Once on the first floor, however, she shook off this irrational sensation, and explored as fully and measured as carefully as she had done down below.
In connection with the alleged activities of the poltergeist she did establish one thing. That was that the contents of the bedroom from which (or in which) Cousin Tom had met his death could be shot over the banisters into the hall without trouble, and that anybody decanting furniture, ornaments or anything else portable into the well provided by the turn of the stairs, would have ample time to escape before the investigators could catch him. As for the sound of his footsteps, that, to a convinced ghost-hunter, would not necessarily convey any doubts. Poltergeists can be heard to move about, she had read, and, in fact, their footsteps were often audible without anything being visible.
The route taken by a person playing practical jokes or hide-and-seek with a victim would most likely be along the passage to the bathroom, she deduced. This passage, unlighted for about half a dozen yards beyond the bedroom door, proceeded, under a square-topped archway and down one step, to a fairly large bathroom and to the back stairs. These stairs led down to the kitchen and up to the attics, and were lighted at the top by a large window which overlooked the almost enclosed courtyard. This window, oddly enough, could be closed by shutters on the inside of the glass.
The bathroom door opened on the right of the passage, at the end of which was another bedroom which overlooked the garden. There was a rather similar passage at the opposite end of the landing, but on this side there was no bathroom, and the bedrooms were considerably smaller.
There was one item of particular interest which she had overlooked on her previous visits. This was that a small room, apparently a dressing-room, opened off the side of what, to herself, she called Cousin Tom's room, but the communicating-door had been papered over, so that, at a casual glance, it was unlikely that the fact that it was not quite flush with the rest of the wall would be apparent.
She went over and examined it again when she had explored the bathroom passage to its end. The job of disguising the doorway had been so well done that it almost seemed as though deliberate thought had been given to the possibility of hiding it. She ran her finger round the opening, being very careful not to press hard enough to break the wall-paper, and then went into the adjoining room to study the doorway from that side. The same neat, careful job had been made, and she now noted more particularly a fact which had struck her before—that the opening from the passage leading into this smaller room was not, and never had been, a doorway in which to hang a door— it was merely an arch which had been formed by removing bricks from the passage wall.
Whether these alterations had any sinister implication still had to be discovered. She noted them, and passed on. The attics, which she thought might repay inspection, proved disappointing in that they were entirely empty. Whatever lumber the house might once have harboured was not now on this top floor. She inspected the boards closely. They were dusty, but not unduly so, and she supposed that these rooms, in common with the other parts of the house to which the public were not usually admitted, received attention at intervals from the caretaker and his daughter. There was an absence of cobwebs which suggested that the last cleaning of the attics had been of fairly recent date.
She walked over to the window in each room and looked out, but beyond an extended view of the country around the house, the windows had nothing to offer. She tested the catches. They were rusty, and it did not seem as though the windows could have been opened for some considerable time, certainly not when the rooms had last been cleaned.
The attics did not cover the whole of the floor beneath, but belonged, it seemed, to the older part of the present structure, for the rooms on the opposite side of the house had no attics built over them. The lower roofs could be seen from two of the attic windows. The courtyard could not be seen from any of the upstair windows except the shuttered window on the stairs.
She was about to descend the narrow stairs when she noticed what seemed to be ventilation holes in the partition wall at the top of the staircase. When the attic doors were shut this partition wall was in darkness. She looked back, and saw that one of the doors which she believed she had shut and locked was swinging slowly open.
With a feeling more of interest than of anything approaching alarm, she went back to find out what had happened. She had not anticipated anything in the way of a supernatural occurrence, but she was relieved, all the same, to discover that the trouble was due to a defective lock and did not emanate from the realm of the spirits.
She pushed the door wide open, and went back to examine the air-holes. It was now obvious that they ventilated a large cupboard, or small, unlighted room, on the opposite side of the passage. The door of it had been papered over to match the rest of the decorations of the attic corridor, and again, like the door into the dressing-room on the floor below, would, in the ordinary-way, pass unnoticed. She traced the outline of the door beneath the paper, closed the attic door again, and this time, fastened it securely, and then, with some part of her theory if not proved, at any rate capable of proof, she returned to the first floor and made an exhaustive search.