Ghost Song (59 page)

‘Yes. Elise helped with that as well; she came from Southwark herself—she'd lived around the Tarleton since she was small, I think. She knew of two families who loved children and would like an extra one. She swore to me that they were kind and good, and that although they weren't very well off they were reasonably comfortable.'

‘They were,' said Caley. ‘They were kind and warm and no one in the family ever wanted for anything.'

‘I was distraught at the prospect of giving you away,' said Madeleine, her eyes on him. ‘But I couldn't see what else to do. And I trusted Elise—I even had a romantic idea that it would be nice for you to be near to the Tarleton—that you'd hear some of the tales about it, even that you might meet people my father had worked with.' She gave a half smile. ‘It's teenage girls' magazine stuff, isn't it? But I told you I was naive and it was how I saw it. I managed to make over a little money to you—some that my mother had left me and that I inherited when I turned twenty-one—so you would have a little money of your own.'

‘They never told me where that came from,' he said. ‘It was just a bank account—money on deposit in my name. But I thought it could only be from—from you and I was grateful. It felt like a link.' He paused, and then said, ‘I had the other link, though.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘The box of things that had been my father's. The day before they took you, I remember I snatched up photographs and old playbills and things more or less at random, and stuffed them into an old shoe box. I think I wanted you to know there was a link to that theatre.'

‘I did know,' said Caley. ‘I knew from when I was eighteen. I've spent most of my life tracing the links and finding out about the people.' He hesitated, then said, ‘I used to go into the Tarleton quite often. I managed to get a key…'

He stopped uncertainly, and Madeleine at once said, ‘If you got hold of a key I don't care how you did it.'

‘I liked going in there,' he said, ‘I liked the feeling that I was encased in the past, that all the memories and the history were there. It ought to have been eerie, but somehow it never was. I found it friendly. Welcoming. There's an old piano in the green room—out of tune, but playable. I'd learned the piano as a child, but there'd been no piano in my life for years. I began to play again.'

And, thought Hilary, as well as that, you used to sing very softly when you walked through the theatre. Robert and I heard you that night. And I heard you again when you walked up the drive to this house earlier on. But I don't think I'll ever mention it and I don't think Robert will, either. How immensely sad this is.

‘I never wanted you to reopen the place,' said Caley. ‘I loved it so much as it was, with its memories and its history. I know that sounds mad, but it's how I always felt. I never minded the piano being out of tune or the building being dark and empty.'

‘I remember Rinaldi—the Tarleton's stage manager—once telling me it was a place that had its own magic,' said Madeleine, and he looked at her gratefully.

‘It has, hasn't it?' he said. ‘And as the years went along and nothing ever happened, I thought it would never be opened. I thought I was safe.'

‘With your piano and the ghosts,' said Madeleine softly. And then, ‘But don't you understand that you were the main reason I didn't open it.' She leaned forward and took his hand. ‘I knew its history: I grew up knowing it. How people in that part of London had speculated about why it suddenly closed down in 1914; how Toby Chance—the owner at the time—vanished around then. No one ever knew what happened to Toby,' she said. ‘I suspect my father knew, although he never said. But Toby's disappearance set up a little legend of its own. In his day he was the darling of the gallery, the hero of the shop girls and maidservants. My father once said no one else ever got a look in with the women when Toby was around. But you see, it all meant people liked to wonder about the Tarleton and make up tales about it—it almost became a sort of local haunted house for some of them. If I had reopened it when my father died—well, it was still only the 1950s and there were people alive who could remember those old stories. There would have been a flurry of local interest and publicity. And that was what I was so afraid of.'

This time she looked at Hilary, as if saying, help me with this part, and Hilary said, ‘You couldn't risk the truth becoming known. About—about what had happened to you—that you had an illegitimate child.'

‘I didn't much mind for myself, but I minded for you,' said Madeleine to Caley. ‘I visualized you growing up in some nice conventional home. Being happy and secure and settled. I never knew the name of your family, but Elise said they lived quite near to the Tarleton, so I was afraid it would all come out and would harm you.'

Robert, who had been listening with absorption said, ‘And that's why you honoured your father's request.'

‘To begin with, yes. And then, as the years went by, it somehow seemed a good thing to keep the place closed. I met my husband, and we were happy and moderately well off. I told you last night that I came to see the theatre as an investment, didn't I? That was true. Then, later—when it would certainly have been safe to open it up—my husband became ill. It was a long illness—multiple sclerosis—and my whole life was taken up with it. He had quite long periods of remission, and during those periods we travelled a good bit. He wanted to make sure of seeing all the places in the world he had never seen. I wanted to make sure of seeing them with him. I didn't give the Tarleton much thought all those years.'

‘I'm glad you never opened it,' said Caley. ‘But to do so now…'

Madeleine said, ‘We'll talk about that some more. I promise I won't do anything you'd dislike. But I hope you'll come to stay with me here if you can.'

‘Could I?' It was almost painful to see the eagerness in his expression.

‘Only if you want to,' she said. ‘But I hope you will want to.' She hesitated, and then said, ‘You mentioned playing a piano in the old green room.'

‘Yes?'

Madeleine said, ‘I have a piano here. Quite an old one. It's in the dining room on the other side of the hall. I never use that room nowadays. I used to play the piano a little as a child—my father hoped I might have inherited some of his talent so I had music lessons. But I wasn't very good, I'm afraid.'

Caley said, ‘An old piano… How old?'

‘It belonged to my father,' she said very gently. ‘I had it brought here after his death—it was a link to him. I had so many memories of him playing it—writing music on it. It'll be shockingly out of tune, but it could be properly tuned, if—'

‘Yes?' This time it was not just eagerness in his face, it was as if a light had come on behind his eyes.

‘If there was someone who wanted to play it again.'

I
N THE MIDDLE OF
the afternoon, the attic at Levels House was no longer the eerie place it had been the previous night. Hilary switched on the light and contemplated with deep pleasure the task ahead of her.

‘Ferreting into the past?' Robert had said earlier.

‘Yes, but I've got the owner's permission to ferret,' said Hilary promptly, and he smiled in the way that narrowed his eyes.

Caley had returned to London—Robert had driven him to the station for his train after delivering Madeleine to the hospital. Caley had been grateful and a bit awkward. Hilary rather liked him and when she thought how he had wandered in and out of the Tarleton by himself for all those years, and how he must have schemed to get the few hours working for the Harlequin Society, she felt deeply sorry for him. She was not sure if he might need a bit of skilled help to deal with his fixation on the place, and then she remembered that she was nearly as fixated on it as he was. She also remembered that Robert had been so fixated he had smashed open the cellar wall, which she did not think he would normally have dreamed of doing. Perhaps, as Rinaldi had said to Madeleine, the Tarleton had its own particular magic.

A police inspector dealing with Shona Seymour had telephoned just after lunch. The phone was still not repaired, but the call had been transferred to Robert's mobile, as arranged. The inspector sounded rather fatherly; he said he thought Miss Bryant and Mr Fallon would like to know that Miss Seymour was not in a very good mental state; in the early hours of this morning they had called in a doctor as a matter of emergency, and she had been taken to the psychiatric unit nearby. As things stood, there was no question of her answering any charges, in fact for the moment there was no question of actually charging her. Yes, of course they would let Miss Bryant know of all developments, said the inspector. Well, yes, if she could arrange for a small suitcase to be brought in with a few clothes and night things, it would be very helpful. Very kind.

‘I'll do that as soon as I can,' said Hilary, remembering that Shona's overnight things were still at Levels House.

‘We'll need to contact a next of kin,' said the inspector. ‘Would you know who that might be?'

Hilary had a wild desire to say, well, there's a cousin walled up somewhere in Yorkshire, but just said she did not know. ‘But the Harlequin Society might stand as some kind of proxy or take on power of attorney. Sorry I don't know the right term, but you'll get the meaning. She's worked for them for twenty years. There's a governing board—they're a bit inaccessible, and I think it's just half a dozen people scattered all over the country. I could find out about that for you.'

‘Would you do that?'

‘Yes, certainly. Um—would I be allowed to visit her?' Hilary had not wanted to ask this, but she had not been able to bear the thought of Shona alone and perhaps bewildered. A friendly face—even the face of someone Shona had tried to kill twenty-four hours earlier—might be helpful.

‘Best not,' said the inspector. ‘But it's nice of you to offer. We'll keep in touch.'

The hospital had also telephoned, to report that Mrs Ferrelyn had checked out as absolutely fine, but they would keep her with them overnight, and repeat the tests in the morning just to make sure. All being well she would be discharged tomorrow.

Robert was going back to London that evening, but Hilary would remain at Levels House for another day or so. And this afternoon, she was going to take up Madeleine's suggestion that she explore the attic.

As she switched on the light and surveyed the attic, she was dimly aware of sounds from downstairs. Robert was staying to have supper with her before setting off—he said the roads might be less congested late at night—and they were going to have the remains of the chicken casserole. It was nice to know he was in the house and even nicer to think of sitting over a meal with him later on. Hilary smiled at this prospect.

But for the moment, the past was folding itself round her—a very particular fragment of the past: 1914, with the world on the brink of the war that was to end all wars—that ‘frozen instant before the cataclysm'. Had the Tarleton's ghost legend started then? It seemed to be grounded in 1914, and 1914 was when the theatre had closed. Might the ghost be something to do with the Great War? Because whoever you were, Mister Ghost, said Hilary to herself, you do seem to originally hail from then. ‘And what did you do in the war, Daddy?' ‘Oh, I was mutilated by mustard bombs in the trenches, so I wrapped up my face and took to prowling up and down an old alleyway by a deserted music hall, frightening the locals and setting up a really good ghost story by way of cover…' Was the solution to the ghost as simple—as tragic—as that?

She discovered the box with the old records which Shona must have found last night. There were six of them in all; the dates were mostly the early 1900s and the names on the labels were names that had become woven into the fabric of music-hall history. Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno, Charles Coburn… All curios in their way, and from the look of it all original recordings. They might sell for a good deal of money; Hilary would make sure to tell Madeleine about that.

And there it was, the record Shona had played last night. It looked as if she had removed it from the old gramophone and returned it to its box. Destroying the evidence? Hilary suddenly wondered how mad Shona had really been last night.

The label on the record was badly faded, but it was readable. ‘The Ghost Walks. Chance & Douglas © 1914. Lyrics by Toby Chance, music by Frank Douglas.'

Under that, in smaller lettering, were the words, ‘Sung by Toby Chance. Recorded 1914, London.'

Hilary sat back on her heels, staring at the record. This was something Toby had written over ninety years ago—something Madeleine's father had set to music and that had been captured inside this thin circle of black vinyl. The song Caley Merrick knew about, perhaps because the music had been in the box of memories handed down to him, or perhaps because he had sought it out for himself. Whichever it was, it was the song he had sung to himself when he walked through the theatre.

Hilary had never heard of ‘The Ghost Walks', but that did not matter; Toby and Frank Douglas had probably written a great many songs that had not survived. She turned the disc over and saw that ‘All Because of Too Much Tipsy Cake' was on the other side. Hilary smiled, because this was like meeting an old friend.