When Last I Died

found them in that village.'

'Oh?' Muriel looked thoroughly alarmed. 'Oh, really? I never heard anything about it. How funny—how curious, I mean. No, I had no idea——'

'Naturally,' said Mrs. Bradley, as one dismissing the subject. 'I suppose there is no complete and exact record of the happenings in the haunted house, by the way?'

'Record? ... Oh, yes, of course there is! But ... oh, well, you could see it, I suppose. There is a typed copy somewhere, but I don't know where it went. The psychic people—the Society, you know—had one copy, and then there was a carbon. The copy I've got is in Tom's own handwriting, and I don't know whether I ought to lend it. Besides—forgive me; I don't mean to be rude, and I can see you take a real interest—I mean, not just curiosity and all that—but what are you trying to do? Even if it could be proved that Bella did push Tom out of the window, it wouldn't help. She's dead. She committed suicide, and, as I say to people (when I mention the subject at all) if that wasn't a confession, what could be?'

'I see,' said Mrs. Bradley, 'and I know I'm tiresome. But if I could just see the entries about the hauntings I should feel so very grateful.'

'Well—all right, then,' said Muriel, 'but I can't let you take it away.'

'It is very kind of you to let me see it at all,' said Mrs. Bradley. 'Is it a complete record?'

'You'll see that it goes right up to about—well, when Tom fell the first time.'

She went over to the writing desk in the corner, rummaged, and brought out a stiff-covered exercise book containing perhaps a hundred pages of thick, blue-ruled paper. She looked at it, turned the pages; then thrust it back into the drawer.

'I've remembered where the typed copy is,' she said. She took the cushions off an armchair and removed a brown-paper package.

'Here you are,' she said. About forty sheets had been used, and Mrs. Bradley read them carefully. Then she turned to the last page. Upon this a summary of the hauntings had been worked out, dated and timed.

'I should be glad to be allowed to make a copy of this summary,' she said. 'It may be extremely important.'

'Important for what?' inquired Muriel. Mrs. Bradley, making rapid hieroglyphics in her notebook, did not reply. When she had finished she read through all the entries once more before she put the typescript together and handed it over. It tallied pretty well with the diary.

Muriel put it into the desk, and came back to the hearth.

'He was murdered,' she said. 'Blackmail.'

'I know,' said Mrs. Bradley. 'Just one more point. You knew of this haunted house, how long before your husband's aunt died?'

' About a month.'

'As long as that? By the end of December?'

'Yes. It must have been as long as that, because we had to give a month's notice where we were. That was in the haunted flat in Plasmon Street.'

'Yes, I see. That seems quite clear. It's been very good indeed of you, Mrs. Turney, to talk to me like this, and I am interested—more than I can tell you—in your story.'

'Well,' said Muriel, rising with the guest, 'won't you stay and have a cup of tea or something? I'm sure it's been really nice to have a chat with somebody about it. But nothing can bring Tom back. Still, it's very kind of you to take an interest. I am ever so glad you called.'

Mrs. Bradley was glad, too. Dimly she was beginning to see quite a number of things, all of them interesting; some astonishingly so.

Chapter Five

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

'Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust; And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie.'

RALEIGH.

MRS. BRADLEY'S application for permission to hold seances in the house at which Cousin Tom had met his death was granted by Miss Foxley, and the seances were duly held. They were not conducted by Mrs. Bradley, although she was an interested participant.

She went twice to the house before the first seance, and contrived to dispense with the services of the caretaker as guide.

'Just as you like, mum,' he said, when she pointed out that his voice and familiar tread did not give the spirits, if there were any, a chance, 'although I didn't think, when I first had the pleasure of showing you round, as you was one of them fakers.'

'One of those what?' said Mrs. Bradley.

'Well, you've heard of poodle-fakers, haven't you? I calls these here ghost-hunters spirit-fakers.'

'Oh, no,' said Mrs. Bradley. 'A spirit-faker, in the full technical sense of the term, is a person who fakes, or manufactures, spirits for the purpose of deceiving the earnest seeker after psychical phenomena.'

'Oh, ah,' said the old man, deflated. He handed her the keys. 'No good me telling you which is for which door. You'd never remember 'em all,' he continued. Mrs. Bradley accepted the formidable bunch.

'I shall proceed according to the method of trial and error,' she said. Lugubriously the old man watched her approach the drawing-room, and then he shuffled away to his dinner.

Mrs. Bradley had chosen her time carefully. She had discovered the hour at which the custodian dined, and the average amount of time he spent over his meal. She knew that she had approximately two hours at her disposal. It was her intention to make a thorough examination of the house and to repeat this examination, if she thought it necessary, once more before the first seance was held. She had arranged that this seance should be held after dark, and had rented the house for the twenty-four hours beginning at ten in the morning.

She did not go into the drawing-room until the caretaker was out of sight. Then she unlocked it and went straight across to the window. It was in front of this window that the body of Cousin Tom must have fallen. Taking a folding ruler from her skirt- pocket, she measured the height of the room. She had already formed a mental estimate of the height of the bedroom window-sill from the ground, and her measurements showed the drawing-room ceiling to be twelve feet high.

She wanted to go upstairs and measure the height of the bedroom from which Cousin Tom had fallen, and prove to her own satisfaction that, allowing for flooring, there was no secret cavity between the rooms. She was trying to account for the poltergeist.

If, as she supposed, the phenomena were not genuine, then it was necessary to discover some hiding place from which the perpetrator of what had turned out to be a very grim joke could have emerged and to which he could have returned whilst 'haunting' the house.

There was the possibility, of course, that the phenomena might be genuine, and this point she did not overlook. Nevertheless, in as much of the literature relating to poltergeist activity as she had been able to procure, there seemed no evidence of anything beyond mischief and a certain amount of childish spite behind the poltergeist manifestations. Murder, for instance, seemed quite outside the scope of poltergeist behaviourism, and she had not the slightest hesitation in accepting, as a working hypothesis, Mrs. Muriel Turney's conviction that Cousin Tom had met with foul play.

The house itself, as she had realised upon her first visit and in spite of the somewhat irritating presence of the old man, was a most extraordinary place. Stone-built in the most hideous and uncompromising style of the middle of the nineteenth century, it retained evidence of having been erected on the site of a very much older building, for in some respects it adhered to the Elizabethan ground-plan upon which an earlier house had been built.

Of all the picturesque features of its foundation, however, it retained nothing but some panelling by the side of an obviously reconstructed fireplace in the dining-room.

The windows were large and rectangular, and opened up and down by means of sashcords, some of which were in need of replacement. The staircases were narrow and Victorian, even the front one. On the servants' staircase there was not room for two people to pass.

It was a cheerless house; sinisterly cheerless, for the bright sunshine streamed in through the windows, particularly of the drawing-room, which faced south, and of the bedroom immediately above it, and yet a kind of spiritual dankness seemed to permeate every part of the building.

Mrs. Bradley was particularly free from morbid fears and nervous fancies, but she would not have been in the least surprised, she felt, as she went from room to room, tapping, pacing and measuring, to turn round and find the ghost of Cousin Tom, of Bella Foxley, or even of Aunt Flora, standing in the doorway watching her. As for the front stairs, she stood quite two minutes in the bare and chilly hall looking at them before she could bring herself to mount.

Once on the first floor, however, she shook off this irrational sensation, and explored as fully and measured as carefully as she had done down below.

In connection with the alleged activities of the poltergeist she did establish one thing. That was that the contents of the bedroom from which (or in which) Cousin Tom had met his death could be shot over the banisters into the hall without trouble, and that anybody decanting furniture, ornaments or anything else portable into the well provided by the turn of the stairs, would have ample time to escape before the investigators could catch him. As for the sound of his footsteps, that, to a convinced ghost-hunter, would not necessarily convey any doubts. Poltergeists can be heard to move about, she had read, and, in fact, their footsteps were often audible without anything being visible.

The route taken by a person playing practical jokes or hide-and-seek with a victim would most likely be along the passage to the bathroom, she deduced. This passage, unlighted for about half a