When Last I Died

out of earshot of the sergeant, 'I think you ought to finish that business in the cellar, or you may be too late to find what we think may be there.'

The inspector looked sharply at her.

'It wouldn't do not to find them if they're there, ma'am,' he agreed.

'Leave the sergeant to keep an eye on me, so that you're sure there will be no monkey-business,' Mrs. Bradley tactfully observed, 'and get back as soon as you can with something to mop up that water and a few more men to dig.'

The inspector was back in less than an hour. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bradley and the sergeant had tea just outside the summer-house and discussed old-fashioned flowers, women's fashions (of which the sergeant proved to have far-reaching and extraordinary knowledge), and the breeding of pedigree Airedales.

The inspector brought back with him a posse of six men, about a hundredweight of sacking, two more crowbars, a waterproof sheet, some spades, rubber gloves, a coil of rope, three dark lanterns, and a doctor.

He left two men on guard over Mrs. Bradley, who sat with her escorts in the drawing-room, and regaled them with stories of poltergeist activity both real and faked, asked the doctor to remain in the kitchen (upon whose table he proposed to lay the results of his researches in the cellar), and took the rest of his party and their accoutrements with him into the crypt.

They emerged an hour and a quarter later. The inspector himself summoned Mrs. Bradley. He had a triumphant and congratulatory expression, but swallowed from time to time, as though it would have done him good to be sick.

'We've found 'em all right, ma'am,' he said. 'As you're a doctor, and put us on the track, as you might say, perhaps you'd like to be with Dr. Ellis, who is going to give them the once-over, what there is of 'em. Seems to be two boys, according to him, though I couldn't stick it long enough, myself, to be sure of anything. Buried before death, he reckons.'

The gruesome and pitiful task concluded, Mrs. Bradley again found the inspector at her elbow. Half apologetically he laid his hand upon her arm.

'And, although there's, maybe, another explanation, ma'am,' he said, 'it is my duty to warn you that anything you say will be taken down, and may be used in evidence.'

Chapter Eight

THE WIDOW'S MITE

Ah! when will this long weary day have end, And lend me leave to come unto my love? How slowly do the hours their numbers spend; How slowly does sad Time his feathers move!

SPENSER.

MURIEL was hysterical in her denials. She knew nothing about poltergeist phenomena, she said, and nothing about the well in the courtyard. Her husband had earned an honest living, she declared; it was not his fault, poor man, that he had been duped and victimised by that wicked Cousin Bella.

Oh, yes, the photograph was a very clear one. She would have said it was Bella anywhere. No, she could think of no reason why Bella should pass herself as Tessa, unless it was because she had had such a bad scare over the trial for Tom's murder that she thought she ought to take advantage.

Take advantage of what, the police enquired. Why, of the fact of the death; the suicide, Muriel vaguely explained. They pressed the point, and this frightened her, as Mrs. Bradley could have told them it was bound to do. Muriel crawled back into her shell, and the utmost they could then achieve was an alarmed squeaking from her that she did not know a thing more, not a thing.

'The most valuable witness simply thrown away, Mother,' said Ferdinand, after Mrs. Bradley's release and the inspector's apologies. 'Couldn't you do something with the woman? They'll never prove their case without her. She must know all about it, really. She simply wants handling, and the witness-box won't be the best place to do it. She's full of venom against Bella Foxley, and these flat-footed idiots have gone and stamped it all out of her. She's out to save her own skin now; nothing more.'

'I know,' replied Mrs. Bradley.

'After all,' pursued Ferdinand, 'they can't continue to hold Bella merely for impersonating her sister. They will have to prove she killed her, and that won't be any easy matter. The evidence at the inquest on Tessa Foxley was pretty straightforward. Not a doubt in anyone's mind but that it was accidental death, except for that idiot boy, and no one is going to take any notice of him after all this time, even supposing he remembers a thing about it, which he probably doesn't. And it's tricky work, anyway, having the woman up for murder again. There's certain to be a bat-eyed, pudden-brained section of the community who'll paint the newspapers red swearing poor Bella is being victimised. You see if there isn't. The police want a cast-iron case, and they haven't any such thing, unless and until Mrs. Turney comes across with what she knows.'

'The trouble is,' said Mrs. Bradley mildly, 'that the police have succeeded in convincing Muriel that once she owns up to having known about the cellar she might as well adjust the hangman's noose about her own neck. It is most unfortunate, but there it is.'

'Well, something will have to be done,' her son observed. His mother grimaced, but promised nothing. She, like Sherlock Holmes, had her methods, but they required, she felt, careful application.

She left Muriel alone for a fortnight, and concentrated all her energies upon finding out all she could about the history of the haunted house. The prosecution would have to establish that Bella could have known of the cellar. The tale of the hauntings, and the chronology of the buildings, she found in the County History. She perused the account twice, and then copied it out.

There were legends and ill-authenticated stories of the coach, a headless driver, a headless Cavalier, a hanging figure supposed to date from the time of the French Revolution, and, in short, all the usual nonsense. Of true poltergeist phenomena there was no mention in the County History nor in any other printed account of the house. That, however, scarcely mattered. Such phenomena rarely persisted long.^*

^* The longest recorded case of poltergeist activity seems to have lasted about twelve years. This was at Willington Mill, Northumberland. One of the shortest was the famous haunting of the family of Wesley, which lasted for two months.

The history of the house itself as a building next engaged her attention. The County History informed her that it had originally been built on the site of a former monastery, which had been suppressed by Henry the Eighth and reconstituted under Mary. The original dwelling-house had been built in 1541, after nearly all the monastic buildings had been destroyed, but upon the accession of Mary Tudor, the monks were brought back, the Abbey Church was returned to the community instead of being used as a Parish Church, and part of the 'new' house was used by the Abbot as his lodging.

In the next reign, however, the monks were again dispossessed. The house was enlarged by the addition of another wing, and the Church was neglected. The cloister garth became a bowling green, and it was said that the earliest hauntings of the house derived from this period in its history.

During the eighteenth century the house was purchased by members of the Hell-Fire Club, and the hauntings became more serious. One of the members, whilst engaged in his childish anti-godliness, was killed, and, later, the house was burnt down and the last ruins of the church destroyed.

In 1851 the present house had been erected on the site of the ruined building, except for the north rooms which helped to enclose the courtyard. These had been added about thirty years later. The names of previous tenants, with the varying degrees of ill-luck which had attended them, members of their families or any of their servants or friends resident in the house, were appended to the rest of the historical account, sometimes with considerable detail of the hauntings, sometimes baldly.

Of the well in the courtyard there was specific mention, and it was clear that Bella Foxley—or Cousin Tom, for that matter— could have deduced the opening of the passage from the well into the crypt.

'It is supposed,' one writer had alleged, 'that there must at one time have been a priest's hole in the house. This would have been constructed during the short and unlucky tenancy of the Catholic family of Merrill.... There is a strong hint in one of the family papers that access to the priest's hole could be gained by means of the ancient well in the courtyard. This, however, only seems to lead to a cellar under the house....'

That was all that Mrs. Bradley could glean of the history of the house. The tales of the hauntings were ill-authenticated, but at least there was no mention of anything which suggested the activities of a poltergeist. Not that this negative information was of much value, she reflected again, since poltergeist phenomena, besides being usually of fairly short duration, are apt to be episodic, spasmodic, and to attend upon the presence of certain living persons* rather than upon historic wrongs and infamies past and gone.

^*'Its powers, then, seem to be fixed or loaded in the person of someone in the house, preferably a child in the most impressionable months of its life.'— Sacheverell Sitwell.—'Poltergeists.'

On the other hand, this is not invariably true. Cf. the phenomena at Borley Rectory, during the investigations carried out there by Mr. Harry Price and his observers from 1929 to 1939.—G.M.

Mrs. Bradley gave up the records, and returned to Cousin Muriel, again without result. Cousin Muriel, in fact, expressed the opinion that she would go off her head if people did not stop worrying her about those poor little boys. As Mrs. Bradley, looking at her frightened