Property of a Lady(56)

Where now? Opening off this room was a smaller one, with a deep, old sink and an ancient copper boiler. A door opened off that room to the side gardens of the house. I had locked that door earlier, and the key was in my bag in the library. But had he got in by this door? He had caused a door somewhere to open – fly bolt, and bar, and band – but which door had opened to his words? And would it have stayed unlocked?

The singing was suddenly nearer, and I dived across the floor and into the old scullery, which was at a lower level than the rest of the house and had three worn stone steps leading down into it. The stench of clogged drains and damp reared up to meet me like a solid wall, and black beetles and spiders scuttled away from my footsteps, but if the room provided an escape route I would not have cared if it smelt of a charnel house or if the Pied Piper’s battalion of rats inhabited it.

The garden door was directly ahead – a solid, old door with a tiny, glazed panel at the top. I don’t remember crossing the scullery, but I do remember how I felt when my hand closed round the handle. Because I knew at once the stubborn old lock was still in place, exactly as I had left it.

I tried to dislodge it, of course. I threw my entire weight into forcing that door open, but nothing short of a battering ram and four men would have opened it. Or, of course, the key. But the key was in my bag in the library on the ring with the others.

Behind me the door to the main kitchen opened, and the greasy light I had seen earlier cut through the darkness.

I shrank back, then darted behind the old copper. It was thick with cobwebs and verdigris had eaten into it in places. The smell of mould and dirt was almost overwhelming.

He stood in the doorway, still singing softly, and it seemed that the words and the cadences of the song floated across the air in filaments of light, turning the cobwebs into spun gold and scattering tiny specks of soft light everywhere.

“Sleep all who sleep . . . Be as the dead for the dead man’s sake.”

And here’s the most frightening thing yet. I felt my eyelids becoming so heavy that the compulsion to let them close – to slide down into sleep – was impossible to ignore. His voice and the light he carried with him are the last things I remember . . .

When I woke it was to find myself on the attic floor, half lying against a wall. Of the macabre figure, there was no sign, and the house was silent, save for the maddening ticking of the clock downstairs.

I lay where I was, memory unrolling in front of me like a ribbon of road at night. Had he brought me up here, that figure? Why?

It was at that point I realized it was not the ticking of the clock I was hearing. It was the tapping I had heard earlier on. It was up here. Someone was behind the wall.

That’s where they say they found me. Huddled on the attic floor, exhausted and severely dehydrated, my fingernails torn and bleeding.

I think I tried to tear down the wall – when they found me I was sobbing and insisting someone was trapped there. But after the ambulance people had given me some fluids intravenously and got me a bit warmer before trundling me off to a hospital, I understood that it was impossible for anyone to be behind the wall. It was part of the house – the plaster was cracked, old and discoloured. What I thought I had heard would have been a bird or a rat in the roof void, they said. And it’s the logical explanation, of course.

My memory of that night isn’t absolutely clear, even now. It’s blurred, like trying to see through one of those Victorian fogs where insubstantial shapes, fuzzy at the edges, come and go. The memories come and go, and sometimes they’re startlingly – frighteningly – clear, but at others I can’t make out what they are at all.

But one thing remains stubbornly clear. I’m convinced that the figure I saw inside Charect House – the man who tapped at the window and who walked through the dark rooms with that grisly lump of flesh casting its horrid light – is still there.

Brank House. Asylum for the Incurably Insane.

County of Shropshire

Patient’s record.

Name: Alice Wilson.

Address: Goldsmith Mansions, Peckham, London.

Date of Birth: 8th June 1925.

Date of admission: April 1963.

Next of kin: No relatives believed living.

Religion: Church of England.

Diagnosis: Delusional.

Admission: Patient was admitted to Brank Asylum under the Mental Health Act 1959 as emergency case. Later, she became a voluntary patient.

Released into care of: Family connections in New Jersey, USA. Notes forwarded to State of New Jersey Division of Mental Health Services.

The part that leapt from the page and burned into Nell’s consciousness was not Alice Wilson’s macabre experience. It was not even the fact that it really had been Alice who wrote the account for the local history publication.

It was that Alice had apparently gone to live with family connections in New Jersey.

New Jersey was where Liz Harper’s cousins lived.





NINETEEN



Michael’s study felt rather dismal when he finished the call to Nell.

It was just after ten o’clock. He considered seeing who might be in the Senior Common Room, but his room was warm and snug and he thought he would make a stab at deciphering some of the remaining pages of Harriet Anstey’s journal. He had already decided to enlist the help of someone in the history department. They had astonishing methods for enhancing old documents – Michael had only the vaguest idea of how it was done, but he knew surprising results could be achieved.