The first inkling I had that the jest was not as innocent as I had supposed came from Latimer Targe himself. As I have mentioned, he made a living by re-hashing true stories of murder. He was, I would have thought, far too hardboiled a type to busy himself with the occult. The thing did not begin in that way, however.
He joined me as I was strolling beside the lake in the grounds one morning and his silence gave me the impression that he had something on his mind. We paced along side by side for a bit and then he unburdened himself.
‘I say, old man, I’ve been looking up the records,’ he said. ‘I mean the records of this place, you know, this nest of vipers.’
‘Oh, look here,’ I said, ‘surely that joke has grown whiskers by now!’
‘Sorry, old man. Didn’t mean to rib you. There was murder done here, you know. I looked it all up in the county library. Year of 1786. Owner got one of the maids into trouble and when her father – one of the tenants – came up to make a fuss about it, the squire shot him dead.’
‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘Even in 1786 landowners couldn’t murder their tenants with impunity.’
‘Oh, the squire got off. His bailiff swore that the farmer, or whatever he was, had come armed with a dirty great knife and that the shooting had been done in self-defence.’
‘And the court accepted that?’
‘They did. The person who got hanged was the girl. She lay in wait for the squire, persuaded him to dismount from his horse, enticed him into the cottage she had shared with her father and as she followed him into the bedroom she hit him over the head with an axe.’
‘Couldn’t she have pleaded self-defence?’
‘Well, that’s the story as I unearthed it, old boy, but mark the sequel, as they say. This house is haunted.’
‘By the murdered eighteenth-century owner?’
‘Don’t laugh, old boy. No, by the killer herself. Been seen about the rooms looking for the squire all over again.’
‘Your readers are not likely to swallow that one. I thought your stories were strictly factual,’ I said.
‘I suppose a ghost is a fact like any other. Anyway, don’t you be so sceptical. The woman’s been seen, I tell you.’
‘Ah, and, as the priest said to the man who confessed to murder, how many times?’
‘Three in all.’ He repeated it. ‘Three times in all.’
‘By whom?’ I dropped my jocose attitude. A house like mine might well offer a temptation to burglars.
‘Twice by those two girls – they share a bedroom, you know – and once by your partner.’
‘By Niobe? Nonsense! She would have told me.’
‘She thought she’d been dreaming until she got together with Miss Barnes and they swapped stories,’ said Targe. ‘It was Miss B. who told me all about it. I advised her to complain. I was joking, of course, but then Niobe agreed she’d seen it, too.’
I tackled Niobe forthwith. She was in what had been the housekeeper’s dayroom. She had furnished it at small expense but with taste and had retained its cupboards with their ornate, beautifully-wrought brass handles which she saw to it were kept equally beautifully polished by the char who ‘did’ for most of the tenants, according them a day or a halfday a week, as their wishes and, I suppose, their incomes dictated. She was what people who employ charwomen call a superior type, came in her own mini and charged the earth, but she was a splendidly conscientious worker and I am sure earned her princely pay. Anyway, in our out of the way spot, I was glad to get anybody so good and those tenants who queried her prices were soon told to take her services or leave them, and that was that. She and Niobe, for some reason, got on particularly well together.
‘Look here, Niobe,’ I said, as soon as Mrs Smith’s mini was churning up the gravel on its departure, ‘what’s this story about the ghost of a murderess?’
‘It isn’t a ghost,’ she said, ‘and I think you had better have anti-burglar devices put on all the downstair windows because that’s the way she is managing to get inside this place, I’m sure.’
‘She?’ (But, of course, there was only one person she could mean.)
‘Miss Minnie. She’s got this bee in her bonnet about a will of a later date than the one which made the property over to you. I think she’s begun creeping about trying to find it. You would do well to get rid of her, Chelion. I don’t think she’s right in the head.’
‘It’s up to you to get rid of her,’ I said. ‘You were the person who let her have The Lodge.’
‘It’s your property, not mine. I can’t turn her out.’
I had special fastenings put on all the downstair windows and we left it at that. I did not feel prepared to tackle Miss Minnie myself.
(2)
As, I suppose, might have been expected, the next item was a flood of anonymous letters, most of them addressed either to Niobe or to me. They accused us of ‘living in sin’.
‘Miss Minnie again, of course,’ said Niobe. ‘She really will have to go.’
‘On what excuse? She has signed for a three-year tenancy, and we have no evidence to prove that she writes – or, rather, types – the letters,’ I pointed out. ‘Hers is not the only typewriter in the place. Everybody has one except Targe. He sends his stuff out to be typed.’
‘Or, of course, you could marry me and put an end to her nonsense. Where is that note Miss Minnie sent you to tell you not to disturb her on the Sabbath?’ Niobe had spoken the first sentence lightly. On the next she had struck a serious note.
‘I turned it over to you. Don’t you remember?’ I asked.
‘Then it’s been filed. Come along to my office. All typewriters have their idiosyncrasies, so we shall soon know whether her note was done on the same machine as these filthy letters.’
‘I wonder whether anybody else has had one?’ I said.
‘You or I would know, wouldn’t we? One of us puts out the letters on the hall table every day.’
‘Oh, beyond just setting them out, I never bother to look at them,’ I said. ‘I never even trouble to see whether more than one is addressed to the same person. I don’t make piles. I just lay them out face upward and leave people to pick out their own.’
‘Yes, you always were as lazy as Hall’s dog, whoever he was,’ she said. ‘Even at the swimming pool you left most of the work to me. Still, you did pick up one letter which was not meant for you.’
I had noted that she kept her office locked when she was not in it. She unlocked it and we went through the files. Miss Minnie’s curt note was not there.
‘Well, I must have filed it if you gave it me,’ said Niobe. ‘It proves what I said. She is our ghost all right. When she decided to send the anonymous letters she must have got into this room and removed the only bit of her typing we had.’
‘I don’t see how she could have got in here if you always keep this room locked,’ I said.
‘The windows, idiot! That’s why I told you to get them properly fastened at night.’
‘By the way,’ I said, as we went out, ‘it isn’t really Hall’s dog you meant; it was Ludlam’s dog.’
‘Oh, yes? And who was Ludlam?’
‘According to the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer, L.L.D., who states that he got the story from Ray’s Proverbs, Ludlam was a famous Surrey witch who lived in a cave near Farnham. Her dog was so lazy that it even rested its head against the wall to bark.’
‘My home was in Surrey,’ said Niobe, laughing. ‘But,’ she added, sobering down, ‘what are we to do about these letters?’
‘So far as you and I are concerned, I don’t propose to give in to anonymous rubbish,’ I said, laughing in my turn. ‘But we’d better find out whether the letters are a nuisance to any of the others, or whether you and I are especially favoured.’