Dial a Ghost (3 page)

But it was kind, dithery Miss Pringle who engaged the office boy. He was called Ted and she gave him the job because he looked hungry and his parents were out of work. He was a nice boy, but there was something he hadn’t told the ladies – and this ‘something’ turned out to be important.

After the agency had been going for a few months Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering began to specialize. Miss Pringle dealt with the gentle, peaceful ghosts – the sad ladies who had been left at the altar on their wedding days and jumped off cliffs, and the cold, white little children who had fallen off roofs in their boarding schools, and so on. And Mrs Mannering coped with the fierce ones – the ones that were livid and revolting and rattled their chains.

And every evening when they had finished work, the two ladies went to the Dirty Duck and ordered a port and lemon and told each other how their day had gone.

‘I had such a delightful family in just now,’ said Miss Pringle. ‘The Wilkinsons. I just must fix them up with somewhere to go, and quickly.’

‘I think I saw them. Not bloodstained at all, as I recall?’ said Mrs Mannering.

‘No, not at all. You could say ordinary, but in the best sense of the word. They told me such interesting things about the war. Mrs Wilkinson used to queue for three hours just for one banana, and the old lady once held down an enemy parachutist with her umbrella till the police came to take him away. And there is such a dear little girl – she wasn’t born a Wilkinson, they found her lost and abandoned. She could be anyone – a princess even.’

‘It shouldn’t be difficult to find them a home if they’re so nice.’

‘No. Except that there are five of them; I don’t seem to have anyone on my books who’ll take as many as that. They’ve had such trouble in their lives – there was a sister ...’ She told the sad story of Trixie and the flag. ‘And Mrs Wilkinson is so worried about her son. Apparently he was really clever – the top of his class and a patrol leader in the Scouts – and then he got mixed up with this dreadful girl who cadged chewing gum from the American soldiers and sneered at him. It seems to me so wrong, Dorothy, that a family who gave their lives for their country should have to haunt a knicker shop.’ She looked across at her friend and saw that Mrs Mannering was looking very tired. ‘My dear, how selfish of me! You had the Shriekers in, didn’t you? I saw Ted going to hide in the lavatory – and the poor geranium is still completely black.’

‘Yes.’ Mrs Mannering was a big, strong woman but she sat with her shoulders hunched and she had hardly tasted her drink. ‘I really don’t know what to do, Nellie. They’re so rude and noisy and ungrateful. If it wasn’t for the way they carry on about children, I might find them a place – after all they’re nobly born, and people like that.’

‘We can’t have them hurting children, that’s true,’ said Miss Pringle. ‘I wonder what made them the way they are? I gather even the sight of a healthy child drives them quite mad?’

Mrs Mannering nodded. ‘There’s nothing they wouldn’t do to children: slash their faces, strangle them in their bedclothes, set fire to them.’ She sighed. ‘I’m not mealy-mouthed, Nellie, you know that. If someone comes to me with his head under his arm and says “Find me a home”, I’ll say “Fair enough”. I’ve fixed up spooks that played chopsticks with their toe bones; I’ve fixed up moaners and I’ve fixed up dribblers – but I won’t take any risks with children. I really think we’ll have to cross the Shriekers off our books.’

Miss Pringle shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t like to make an enemy of the Shriekers.’

‘No.’ Even Mrs Mannering, tough as she was, didn’t like the idea of that. ‘Well, we’ll give it a bit longer. Perhaps something will turn up.’

The Shriekers were a most appalling set of spooks. They weren’t just violent and cruel and fiendish; they were snobbish as well. Nothing on earth would have made the Shriekers haunt anything as humble as a knicker shop. They lived in a frozen meat store on the other side of the city.

It was a dreadful place, but the Shriekers didn’t mind the strings of sausages that fastened themselves round their throats as they glided about, or the tubs of greasy white lard, or the sides of cut-up animals hanging from hooks in the ceiling. They were so filthy and loathsome themselves that they hardly noticed the stench or the cold or the slime on the floor.

Once it had not been so. When they were alive, the Shriekers had been rather a grand couple. Their names were Sir Pelham and Lady Sabrina de Bone and they lived in a fortified tower beside a lake. Sir Pelham rode to hounds and shot pheasants, and Sabrina wore fine clothes and gave dinner parties and kept a house full of servants. In fact they were so important that Queen Victoria once came to stay with them on her way to Scotland.

But when they had been married for about ten years, the de Bones had a Great Sorrow and this had driven them mad. No one knew what their sorrow was; they never spoke about it, and the grief and guilt of it had turned inwards and made them wilder and crazier with every year that passed. Even before they became ghosts people had been terrified of the de Bones, and now the sight of them sent the strongest man running for cover. Sir Pelham still wore the jodphurs and hunting jacket he had worn when he broke his neck, but they were covered with filth and gore and he carried a long-thonged whip with which he slashed at everything that crossed his path. His forehead had been bashed in by a horse’s hoof so that it was just a mass of splintered bone; his left ear hung by a thread, and through the rent in his trousers you could see his scarred and vicious knees.

His wife was even worse. Sabrina’s dress was so bloodstained that you couldn’t see the fabric underneath, and hatred had worn away two of her toes and her nose, which was nothing but a nibbled stump. She had picked up a phantom python on her travels and wore it slung round her neck so that the evil-smelling eggs it laid broke and dribbled down inside her vest. Worst of all were her long fingernails, from which bits of skin and hair stuck out because of the tearing and scratching she did all day.

Not only were the Shriekers hateful to look at, but they were the most foul-mouthed couple you could imagine. You could hear them shouting abuse at each other from the moment they woke up to the moment they went to bed.

‘Do you call that blood!’ Sabrina would shriek when her husband dripped some gore on to the ground. ‘Why that isn’t even tomato ketchup! I could put that on my fish fingers and not even notice it, you slime-grub!’

‘Don’t you dare call me names, you maggot-ridden cow-pat,’ Sir Pelham would yell back. ‘What have
you
done today, I’d like to know? You were going to strangle the butcher’s boy before lunch and there isn’t a mark on him. And your python looks perfectly ridiculous. You’ve tied it in a granny knot. Pythons should be tied in a
reef
knot, everyone knows that.’

The only time the Shriekers were cheerful was when they were working out something awful to do to children. When they had thought of some new way of harming a child, Sabrina would open one of the containers and take out a pig’s trotter to put in her hair, and string a row of pork chops together to make a belt for her husband, and they would do a stately dance in the dark, cold hall so that one could see how proud and grand they had once been.

But it never lasted long. Soon they’d tear everything off again and bombard each other with pieces of liver and start screaming for more horror and more blood.

The Shriekers had a servant, a miserable, grey, jelly-like creature; a ghoul whom they had found asleep in a graveyard with a rope round his neck. He slept behind a waste bin and every so often they would kick him awake and tell him to cook something and he would totter about muttering, ‘Sizzle’ or ‘Roast’ or ‘Burn’ and swipe vaguely at the sausages with a frying pan. But the cold had almost done for him – ghouls are not suitable for freezing – and the thought of doing their own housework made the Shriekers absolutely furious with the kind ladies of the adoption agency.

‘Those human blisters,’ yelled Sir Pelham, ‘those suppurating boils!’

‘I bet they’re lying in their beds snoring while we rot in this hell-hole,’ shouted Sabrina.

But the Shriekers were wrong. At that very moment, though it was late at night, Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering were putting one hundred leaflets into brown envelopes and sticking on one hundred stamps. The leaflets were addressed to the owners of grand houses and stately homes all over Britain, and offered ghosts of every kind suitable for adoption straight away.

And two days later, one of those leaflets dropped on to the dusty, marble floor of Helton Hall.

Helton Hall was a large, grand and rather gloomy house in the north of England. It was built of grey stone and had a grey slate roof, and grey stone statues of gods and goddesses with chipped and snooty-looking faces lined the terrace. Helton had thirteen bedrooms, and stables, and outhouses, and a lake in which a farmer had once drowned himself. At the end of the long grey gravel drive was a large iron gate with spikes on it, the kind you could have stuck people’s heads on in the olden days, and on top of the pillars sat two carved griffons with evil-looking eyes and vicious beaks.

Helton had belonged for hundreds of years to a family by the name of Snodde-Brittle. They owned not just the house but most of the village and a farm and they were very proud of their name, though you might think that a name like Snodde-Brittle was nothing to be cocky about. Their family motto was ‘I Set My Foot Upon My Enemies’, and if any Snodde-Brittle tried to marry someone who was common and didn’t speak ‘nicely’ they were banished from Helton Hall.

But then things began to go wrong for the Snodde-Brittles. Old Archie Snodde-Brittle, who liked to hunt big game, was run through by a rhinoceros. Then his son Bertie Snodde-Brittle took up hot air ballooning and was shot down by a mad woman who thought he was a space invader, and Bertie’s son Frederick was strangled by his tie. (He had been chasing a housemaid in the laundry room and his tie had got caught in the mangle.)

Helton then passed to a cousin of Bertie’s who was not very bright and dived into a swimming pool without noticing that it was not filled with water, and the cousin’s son was struck by lightning when he went to shelter under the only tree for miles around which was sticking straight up into the air.

Fortunately the cousin’s son had had time to marry and have children, but the luck of the Snodde-Brittles was still out. The eldest son fell over a cliff while robbing an eagle’s nest in Scotland; the next one overtook an oil tanker on a blind bend, and the youngest was hit on the head with a rolling pin by an old lady he was trying to turn out of her cottage on the estate.

That was the end of that particular batch of Brittles and the lawyers now had to search the family tree to find out who should inherit next. It looked as though it would be a man called Fulton Snodde-Brittle, who was the grandson of Archie’s youngest brother Rollo. Fulton had watched eagerly as the ruling Snodde-Brittles were struck by lightning and dived into empty swimming pools and had their heads bashed in by fierce old ladies. But just as he was getting ready to come to Helton, a most exciting discovery was made.

It seemed that Archie had had another brother called James who was older than Rollo. James had quarrelled with his family and changed his name and gone to live abroad, but it now turned out that James’s great-grandson was still alive. He was an orphan, not more than ten years old, and had spent most of his life in a children’s home in London.

The name of this boy was Oliver Smith and there was no doubt at all that he was the true and rightful owner of Helton Hall.

The news soon spread all over Helton Village.

‘It’s like a fairy story!’ said the blacksmith’s wife.

‘Imagine his little face when they tell him!’ said the lady in the post office.

Even the family lawyer, Mr Norman, and the bank manager who was a trustee for the estate, were amazed.

‘It’s really extraordinary,’ said the bank manager. ‘A child brought up in an orphanage. One wonders how he will be able to cope. I suppose there’s no doubt about who he is?’

‘None at all. I’ve checked all his papers. We’ll have to appoint a guardian, of course.’ The lawyer sighed. It was going to make a lot of work, putting a child into Helton Hall.

The Lexington Children’s Home was in a shabby part of London, beside a railway line and a factory which made parts for washing machines and fridges. The building was grimy, and the beds the children slept in were old bunk beds bought from the army years and years ago. Instead of soft carpets on the floor there were hard tiles, some of them chipped; the chairs were rickety and the only telly was so old that you couldn’t really tell whether the pictures were meant to be black and white or in colour.

But there was something odd about the Home and it was this: the children who lived there didn’t want to be adopted.

When there was talk of someone coming to foster a child and take it away, the children slunk off to various hiding places, or they pretended to be ill, and the naughty ones lay down on the floor and drummed their heels. People from outside couldn’t understand this, but it was perfectly simple really. The Home might be shabby and poor, but it was a happy place; it was their place. It was where they belonged.

The children came from all sorts of backgrounds, but there was something a little bit wrong with most of them and perhaps that made them kinder to each other than if they’d been big and blustering and tough. Harry stammered so badly you could hardly tell what he was saying and Trevor had lost a hand in the accident which killed his parents. Nonie still wet her bed though she was nearly ten, and Tabitha couldn’t help stealing; things just got into her locker and wouldn’t come out.