Ghosts of Mayfield Court (16 page)

Just after nine o’clock Samuel Vokes, who had moved deeper into the ruins to work with two of the other men, uncovered a bricked-up recess in what had probably been the wine cellar of the house. Part of the wall had crumbled away, and all three men saw the twisted and desiccated body that had been concealed there.

Saul Jackson watched as Vokes and his helpers pulled down the crumbling wall with their pickaxes. This body, too, was fully clothed, and the material had survived the passing decades well. It was frustrating not to have Venner there to make a quick but skilled examination. The body, arranged in a sitting position with knees almost beneath the chin, certainly looked like that of a young man. A lantern was brought, and the inspector surveyed the remains.

The dead man had been wearing a jacket of some kind of serge material, and it was possible to see a flapped pocket on the side facing Jackson. Leaning forward, he gingerly slipped his hand inside. He had assumed that the man’s killers had rifled through
his clothes, and did not expect to find anything, but his fingers closed on something soft, which he withdrew.

It was a damp-stained diary, its pages stuck together in a solid block; but the mildewed cover opened easily enough, and Jackson saw written on the flyleaf in lead pencil, the brief inscription:
Gabriel Forshaw. January 1865
.

‘Does this mean you’re finished here, master? If so, we’ll all be off to our homes.’

‘Yes, we’ve finished here, Mr Vokes,’ said Jackson. ‘And I’m going to tell you something now that you’re free to tell your neighbours. This body – bricked up here in this cellar wall – is that of a man called Gabriel Forshaw. It was said that he’d gone out to Africa in the sixties, and died there of fever. There’s an inscription to that effect on one of the Forshaw monuments in the churchyard. But it wasn’t true, Mr Vokes. Gabriel Forshaw was murdered, here, in the grounds of his own house, by two men. Done to death. And when that was over, one of the men killed the other with a spade. Dead men tell no tales.’

‘Murdered? I’ve heard that old tale of the man who went out to Africa…. So he was murdered? Well, it doesn’t do to have a pot of money, does it? Somebody’s bound to try and get it off you, one way or another. I’ll bid you good night, Mr Jackson. Murdered, you say? The wife will be very interested to hear that. Her grandma was in service here when this was a real house, not this sad ruin. Yes, she’ll be very interested….’

She had long ago withdrawn to a separate bedroom, because her ‘nightly fits and starts’, as Leopold called her nightmares and sleepwalking, had made sleeping with her husband impractical for both of them. When she retired to bed that night, she had looked out of a window, and had seen the fitful flames of the torches in the ruins of Waterloo House across the fields. Would they find it? And would it matter, after all these years – a lifetime – since Hector and another man, a discharged labourer desperate
for work and prepared to do anything for money, had made away with Gabriel Forshaw?

She woke in the depth of night, and found herself once more in the library, a room that she hated and feared: a long,
claustrophobic
chamber, its walls burdened with thousands of old, rotting books which no one had ever read. The two fireplaces, one at each end, threw a pale light into the room from their glowing embers.

Hector was there, as real as he had been in life. He was standing near the fireplace further from the door by which she had entered, so that he seemed far distant.

‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘it would never have done, to have a witness to that. Dead men tell no tales.’

She stumbled out of the library into an old gallery, leading to the former servants’ quarters of the Tudor part of the house, quarters that had long been abandoned and bricked up after that part of the mansion was remodelled in the seventies. Her brother, Walter, was standing at the end of the gallery, his arms folded, his eyes regarding her with the kind of resigned pity that he had always shown towards her. Was he dead? Or was this a phantasm of the living? He began to speak, but she could not make out the words.

And then she saw, standing beside him, sheltering under his protecting arm, the figure of a young girl. She was still wearing the dark olive-green dress with the lace at collar and cuffs, that she had worn that night. She stood motionless, looking at her, but saying not a word. Helen Paget, aged ten….

Would Walter protect her from the fury of that wandering spirit? He had long ago been removed from her influence, adopted by a well-to-do merchant, John Hindle, whose name he had taken, and brought up as a Congregationalist. But she had always been fond of him, her own brother – dangerously kind, until she had realized that her affection for Walter, as his mind degenerated, would probably lead to her own death on the gallows. Would he protect her, now? Was he still alive?

At last, Walter’s words began to make sense. A book had appeared in his hand, and he was reading from it. The little girl, still circled by his arm, looked up trustingly into his kindly face, as he read a line of verse from the book.

‘An orphan’s curse would drag to hell a spirit from on high.’

Lady Carteret felt a surge of blind despair, and at the same time experienced a chilling cold. She looked up, and found herself back in her bedroom, shivering in her thin nightdress. Her nocturnal perambulation among the ghosts was at an end.

If things continued like this, she would be overcome by raving madness. It was time to shake off these craven fears and assert herself once more. That man, that Jackson, had evidently declared war on the Carteret family. Well, it was time to take that war into the enemy’s camp. There were things to do. Tomorrow, she would begin her counter-attack by writing a letter.

That girl…. That daughter of old Paget, she was another of the brood. Things had been going very well with respect to her, but perhaps more drastic methods were needed. True, she had the Deed of Release safe, snatched from the dying hand of Maximilian Paget, but when she had examined it, she had seen that it was an open deed: if no special legatee was named, then enquiry had to be made to seek out the next legitimate heir. She and Hector had slaughtered their way to a fortune, and the Forshaw money would stay where it was. But that girl was a Paget; had she inherited her family’s love of wealth? Would she be content with her uncle’s meagre legacy? Perhaps.

But then again, perhaps not. There would be copies of the Deed of Release, and the girl, if so inclined, could make a legal challenge to secure the fortune to herself. An open deed allowed for that, but then people would start probing and, like that man Jackson, might find out more than was good for her. So tomorrow, she would write a letter.

That night, she left the candles in her bedroom lit, and contrived to sleep fitfully until the welcome dawn.

The guide employed by Messrs Cook shepherded his little flock of foreign visitors across The Ring, and so out of Hyde Park and into Kensington Gardens. It was early in the morning of the 31 August, and a Friday, so he would not be on duty again until the coming Monday.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he intoned, ‘we have now entered Kensington Gardens, in which is situated Kensington Palace, one of the Royal residences. The building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and built between 1689 and 1691.’

‘You say it is a palace, yes? The good Queen Victoria dwells there?’

‘No, sir. She does not.’ Foreigners required not only courtesy but firmness. ‘William the Third and Mary the Second, joint sovereigns, both died there, as did Queen Anne, and George the Second. Her Majesty Queen Victoria was born there in 1819.

‘Stretching in front of you—’

‘And this palace, the citizens can go there, to visit, is it not?’

‘No, it is not – no, they don’t. But the state rooms are being restored, and it is said that they will be opened to the public in about six years’ time. The palace is currently the residence of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise, and her husband the Marquess of Lorne.

‘Stretching in front of you is the Long Water, which is a continuation of the Serpentine, which we saw in Hyde Park. This waterway leaves the park at Albert Gate, over in that direction, and so joins the London main drainage system. We shall now—’

‘And that black object, floating in your Long Water, what is the meaning of that? An old custom, yes? Ach!
Mein Gott
! It is a dead man!’

Foreigners! The French weren’t too bad, but these Germans: nothing but questions! Better find out what the fellow was
talking about. The guide walked over to the edge of the Long Water.

Inspector Blade and Sergeant Bottomley looked down at the drowned and sodden corpse that had been hauled out of the Long Water. It lay on the well-cut grass of Kensington Gardens, where a canvas screen had been hastily erected to preserve the sight from curious eyes.

The Cook’s guide had made a brief statement, and had furnished them with his name and address; he and his volubly excited party had left the gardens by the way that they had come.

‘I failed, sir,’ said Bottomley. His flushed, homely face regarded the body of the Reverend Walter Hindle with an expression of anguished distress. ‘I stayed behind in London when the guvnor went back to Warwick partly to make sure that nothing happened to this poor old gentleman. But they got the better of me in the end.’

‘You can’t be everywhere at once, Sergeant,’ said Blade. ‘You were very wisely keeping an eye on that young lady in Saxony Square. So don’t reproach yourself. Ah! At last! Here’s the duty police surgeon. He’ll take a quick look, and then arrange for the body to be removed to Brompton Road. Doctor McMaster, will you look at this man lying here dead?’

The doctor was a lean, red-headed man with a poker face, and a twinkle in his eye. He looked Inspector Blade up and down before kneeling down beside the body.

‘Dead, is he? How do you know that? Since when were you last in medical school?’

‘As always, Dr McMaster, you’re a model of courtesy. Will you please examine that dead body? You’ll be better able than me to say whether it’s dead or not.’

The Reverend Walter Hindle’s face was that of a man who had quietly fallen asleep. His eyes were closed, and his mouth slightly open. His white hair clung in sodden strands to his forehead. He
was wearing the clothes in which Bottomley had last seen him. Herbert Bottomley thought: he’s been drugged into
unconsciousness
, probably with chloral hydrate, then brought out here to be thrown away like so much rubbish….

McMaster seized the corpse by its shoulders and turned it on to its left side. A stream of water immediately poured from its mouth. He roughly examined the head for wounds, grasping the corpse by the chin, and moving the head from side to side with a callousness born of long experience as a police surgeon. Then he sat back on his heels and looked up at the two policemen.

‘He died by drowning. Brought here from somewhere and put into the water. He may have been drugged first – probably was. I can do a full
post mortem
this afternoon. Do you know who he is?’

‘Yes, Doctor, we know who he is. Sergeant Bottomley and I have work to do, so I’ll bid you good morning. Come on, Sergeant. Let you and I go now to Barbary Court and beard that hypocrite Morrison in his den.’

‘I cannot believe it! Cannot. He was here at dinner yesterday evening, wasn’t he, Nurse?’

‘Yes, sir, and then he retired to bed. He seemed quite happy and contented, poor old man. He didn’t come down to breakfast, and we assumed that he had decided to sleep in. He was very old and frail, Inspector.’

‘I’ve sent an orderly to check the doors leading into the alley at the back of the premises,’ said Dr Morrison. ‘Oh, it’s impossible! Are you quite sure that it was the Reverend Walter Hindle that you found?’

‘Yes, Doctor,’ said Inspector Blade. ‘It was him without a doubt. And he’s dead. Drowned in the Long Water in Kensington Gardens.’

The door of Morrison’s office opened, and a man wearing a short white linen jacket entered the room. To Blade’s eyes he looked more like a discharged waiter than a medical attendant.

‘Sir,’ the man stammered, ‘the little door beside the kitchen had been left unlocked. The key’s still in the wall-box. That’s how Mr Hindle must have contrived to get out. Maybe he wanted to go for a walk, or to catch an omnibus. Half the time he didn’t know what he was doing, poor old gentleman.’

‘But it was your duty to see that all doors were locked at night, and only opened after breakfast. And now a patient has died. He must have got as far as Kensington, walked through the gardens, felt faint, and fallen into the water. You are to blame, Higgins. You are dismissed. Collect your week’s wages from the porter, and go.’

The man, hanging his head in shame, left the room.

‘A nice little play, Sergeant,’ said Blade, when they were out in the street. ‘They’d all learned their parts, and delivered them superbly. We’ll leave them where they are for a while, and when the time’s ripe, we’ll sweep up the whole gang.’

‘I don’t think Mr Hindle was there at all, sir,’ said Bottomley. ‘I think that after our last visit they got the wind up, and moved him to some other house. It’s just a feeling I have.’

‘You may well be right, Sergeant Bottomley. I’ll look into it. Meanwhile, I suggest you resume your watch over Miss Catherine Paget. I wouldn’t like to have another murder done on my patch. She’s a brave young lady, but bravery can make people do foolish things. Watch over her.’

13

Catherine's Narrative: Lady Carteret's Story

O
n 4 September I received a letter from Lady Carteret. It was only five days since Sergeant Bottomley had called, and told me of his suspicion, shared with his inspector, that this titled lady had murdered Uncle Max.

The envelope was of the best cream-laid paper, with the coat of arms of the Carteret family embossed on the flap. I opened it, and found a page or two of bold writing, signed at the bottom with a fine flourish of penmanship:
Bella Carteret
.

I held the letter unread for quite a minute. Was this woman mad, to write to me? But then, why should she think that I knew anything about her nefarious doings? She had no way of knowing that I was now an intimate of Sergeant Bottomley. My curiosity got the better of me, and I began to read the letter. I have it still, and reproduce it here.

Suicide? Could this woman be telling the truth? I was in my sitting room overlooking Saxony Square gardens, admiring the steady morning sun, and the attractive architecture of a London square. I enjoy trips to the country, but I am a Londoner at heart.

I remembered everything that Sergeant Bottomley had told me, and was grateful for his warnings; but would it be right to show him Lady Carteret's letter? The assertion that Uncle had committed suicide was basically reasonable: my uncle had been in a very curious, fatalistic mood when I had last seen him, as though he were quite certain of the fate that was awaiting him. He had been anxious that Michael and I should leave him for the theatre – was that anxiety linked to a secret determination to do away with himself?

I would accept Lady Carteret's invitation. Hitherto, she had been nothing but a name. If I saw her in her true role as
chatelaine
of Providence Hall, the wife of a baronet of ancient noble family, then I would, perhaps, be reassured.

But I would take her advice, and come with a companion. I
looked down from my window into the square, and saw Michael crossing the roadway towards my house. He had rather too
stridently
criticized my receiving Sergeant Bottomley, and interesting myself in the case, and Marguerite had abetted him in a way that bordered on impertinence. But who better than my fiancé to accompany me to Providence Hall?

‘No, Catherine,' said Michael, when he had read Lady Carteret's letter. ‘I'm very strongly opposed to this. You don't know these people. What if you are walking into some kind of trap? Leave it alone. If I were your husband, I would forbid you to go. As your fiancé, I can only plead with you to show some common sense. Do not reply to that letter.'

Once again, I felt the spirit of rebellion stirring in my soul. What gave these men the right to lord it over women as though they were some kind of inferior creature?

‘On the contrary, Michael,' I replied, ‘I have every intention of going. You are not my husband yet, and I shall do as I like. Will you come with me or no?'

He flushed, but I detected a secret admiration for my stance. I could see a kind of satisfaction in his eyes. He was not marrying a ninny!

‘Very well, Cath. I'll come. But I'm going as a guard, not a guest. I'll leave you now, and get back to the delights of the dissecting room. Will you write today?'

‘Yes, and Milsom can post the letter to catch the midday delivery. Thanks for agreeing to come. This lady may be right: I wondered myself at times if Uncle Max would do something of the kind. Remember, in that letter he left for me, he accused himself of complicity in a great moral crime.'

We set out together for Upton Carteret on the following Thursday. On receipt of my letter, Lady Carteret had sent me travelling instructions by return post. There was a daily train at 10.45 a.m. from Paddington to Copton Vale, in Warwickshire, where we were to change to a local train for Monks' Stretton. A carriage would be waiting for us there.

It was hot and stuffy in the train from Paddington, and once out of the seemingly endless suburbs Michael drew down the window. We had decided to travel first class, and we were the only occupants of the compartment. He had bought himself a copy of the
Morning Post
from the bookstall at Paddington, and gave it a cursory glance before throwing it down on the seat beside him.

‘Cath,' he said, ‘do you really believe this Lady Carteret's story about witnessing your uncle's suicide? Milsom said that when she found him he was still alive, and in the last stages of toxic spasm. But Lady Carteret said that he was dead when she left the room.'

‘Either of them could have been mistaken,' I said. ‘It was a terrifying moment for both of them, and they may have
misinterpreted
what they saw.'

Michael shook his head dubiously, and was silent for a while. The train's whistle emitted a warning shriek and then plunged into a tunnel. When we emerged into the light, we found ourselves travelling along on the skirts of a vast tract of woodland.

‘Milsom said that there was terror in your uncle's eyes. She said he uttered a shriek—'

‘I know, Michael,' I said, rather testily, ‘but it may be
exaggeration
on her part. Let us postpone judgement on the matter until we have heard Lady Carteret's side of the story.'

I was all for being fair, you see. I had received an excellent education at a private school for girls, where we had learnt of the merits of examining both sides of a question before rushing to judgement. I have since perceived other ways of tackling issues, both those of an intimate nature, and those that concern the public interest.

Michael, who had resumed the reading of his newspaper, suddenly uttered an exclamation of shocked surprise.

‘I say, Cath, look at this! Do you remember telling me about an old clergyman whom Inspector Jackson met in a churchyard? He saw him just a few days ago, in a nursing home somewhere near Pewterers' Hall. Listen to what it says here.

‘“This Friday last, the drowned body of a Dissenting
clergyman
, given as the Reverend Walter Hindle, was retrieved from the Long Water in Kensington Gardens. Inspector W.P. Blade, ‘C' Division, who is in charge of the case, does not think that the unfortunate gentleman's death was an accident. Foul play is suspected, and we are confident that Mr Blade will bring the perpetrator speedily to justice.” What do you think of that?'

I shook my head, but said nothing. This poor old man, I knew, was involved in the whole complex matter of the Forshaw
inheritance
, but I knew nothing in detail. I was very sorry – no, I was outraged, as I always am when the innocent suffer – but at the same time I thought: well, whoever murdered him, it was not Lady Carteret. No ingenious theory could lay that crime at her door.

At last, the train drew up at a long wooden platform, where a notice announced that we were at Monks' Stretton Halt. We alighted, and were met by a liveried coachman, who told us that his name was Andrews. He took us down a short incline and on to a narrow road where a carriage was waiting, its horses both chafing at the bit. Andrews told us that we would be at Providence Hall in just under half an hour.

It was pleasantly cool, sitting in the open carriage, with a light breeze blowing across the ploughed fields lying beneath sheltering tracts of woodland on either side of the road. We came to a village, which Andrews told us was Upton Carteret, but before we came to the main street he turned the carriage away and on to a narrow lane which ran behind an old church. Quite abruptly, we entered a deer park, and a few minutes later we found ourselves coming to a stop on the flagged forecourt of Providence Hall.

I confess that I was for a moment overawed by the grandeur of the ancient Tudor mansion, long and low-roofed, with black and white timbers and diamond-paned windows. Towards the east, the old building abutted on to a Georgian extension in Cotswold stone. I was only a short time on the forecourt, but it was time enough to realize that Providence Hall and its surrounding demesne spoke of wealth and prosperity. For a fleeting moment I recalled the dilapidated and wretched Mayfield Court. These two houses, I mused, belonged to different worlds.

Michael and I were received in the cool, flagged entrance hall of the mansion by a butler who was very obviously part of the established order there. I learnt later that his name was Hopkins, and that he had been in Sir Leopold Carteret's employ for over twenty years.

It was Hopkins who preceded us into the drawing room, a spacious Elizabethan chamber furnished in a mixture of antique pieces contemporary with the house, and comfortable modern furniture and draperies. It was a beautiful, welcoming room.

It was here that I got my first glimpse of Lady Carteret. I had built up a picture in my mind of the woman whom my uncle had called the ‘harpy', and had seen her as a kind of sere and yellow hag with a vicious mouth and a dangerous, half-mad voice. I could not have been more mistaken.

I learnt later that she was sixty-five, but she looked many years younger than that. Her beautifully tended hair was still black, and her complexion, innocent of artificial aids, was flawless. She
was wearing a morning gown of pale blue crêpe-de-chine, with one of the new halter necks. She had been standing before the great open fireplace of the room, and came forward to greet us as we entered. As we were expected, we were not announced.

‘My dear Miss Paget,' said Lady Carteret, ‘I am so glad you agreed to visit us. And this young gentleman is your fiancé, you told me in your letter. You are very welcome, Dr Danvers.'

Her voice, that of an educated lady, was both charming and welcoming. It was from this point that I began to think that Sergeant Bottomley and his superior – how odd it was, that I could never remember his name – were mistaken in their belief that this titled county lady was a deranged murderess.