Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall Read online

  *

  When the curtain first dropped on my life I went into turmoil. Because it had been my job to view people and places in terms of hard, irrefutable facts that would stand up in a court of law, it did me no good to find myself on the other side of the tracks, so to speak. I’d lost face in the world as I knew it. Crashing my car was almost an irrelevance.

  Worse, doctors told me to give up drinking and smoking.

  Really?

  Every condemned man should get to smoke the equivalent of a last chance.

  They promised me I would be fine if I placed all my faith in my police psychiatrist. This was said with the offer of so many pills and such confiding wiles that I had done as I was bidden.

  Until now.

  *

  My phone bleeped again in my pocket. It was Jan texting me as she tried to run me to ground.

  This time I ignored her completely. She was not the only one to feel rebuffed. In the last twenty-four hours my pass into the office had been rescinded and nobody important answered my calls. If I declined to take hers without the ghost of a reason it was because I, too, knew what it was to be ghosted.

  I stepped up to the twisted iron ring and, banging it, felt it jar and numb my bones. Something rattled above me. I looked up to see a flame light a leaded glass window, watched as the wick of a candle flared into a bold little beacon. Beside the flame appeared other points of illumination. Something was all white lustre and pure radiance. They were pearls.

  A moment later the wearer had dissolved back into shadow.

  ‘Hi, there,’ I called hopefully. ‘Can you, like, open the gate for me?’

  Quick to retreat, my bejewelled onlooker chose to double the distance between us.

  Stamping my cold feet again on the frozen ground, I waited.

  I waited quite a while.

  Meantime, the sun in the west set lower and lower.

  ‘I could really do with a hand down here,’ I shouted, executing wild semaphores with my bag.

  Whoever lit the candle with a smoky spill from her fire simply did not worry whether or not I froze to death in the open. How many other poor people before me had bludgeoned these gates, I wondered. Slashed into both wood and wall were all sorts of crooked irregularities. Each hole and crack looked as if they had been plugged long ago with new mortar to patch old wounds made by firepikes, small shot or, God forbid, swords. Staying back from the glass, someone was behaving as if they were disappointed.

  Not that I cared.

  That said, what widower did not soon long to be the subject of someone else’s ludicrously high hopes?

  Then , I did not realise the significance.

  *

  Mercifully, a bolt slid back from its staple.

  By the sound of it, twin interlocking levers slowly freed reinforcing bars top and bottom from their otherwise rigidly fixed positions. Next, some incorporeal hand opened a wicket-door a few inches.

  Such a gatekeeper ‘fears not God nor regards man’, I thought. He called to me without emerging.

  ‘Please state your name, sir.’

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Walker. Is this, you know, where Lord Hart lives?’

  ‘Today is not a good time. Please try again tomorrow.’

  ‘What makes one day different from another?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say, sir.’

  From the tone of his voice, my turning up like this was highly irregular. Worse, it totally belied my own self-importance. When a man was in no mood to parley he expected to be let in whatever the excuse, he at least expected his arrival to take priority over petty security.

  ‘Here,’ I said, thrusting my letter past the door. ‘Let this put a stop to your nonsense.’

  A little old man’s slate-grey eyes bore into the page. Still he behaved as if I might actually have stolen my missive from the real Colin Walker.

  ‘Forgive me, sir. You appear to be who you say you are.’

  ‘There’s no real doubt about it.’

  Instead, he went to prise my luggage from my fingers.

  ‘Just the one, is it, sir?’

  I snatched it back.

  ‘Leave it! Don’t touch it!’

  ‘As you wish, sir, but I take it that you won’t be staying long at Coberley Hall?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  I had no idea just how empty my threat must have sounded. Shamefaced, I lifted my black bag through the narrow door and dived after it, only to have the heavy oak planks bang shut horribly behind me. It was too soon for me to distrust my lack of welcome, if not the distrust with which I was welcomed.

  4

  A spooky old manor-house was a trite, even hackneyed notion, but that didn’t mean that a man should not be able to share in the joke. Pulling my phone from my pocket, I prepared to take a photograph of weather-worn transoms and imperfectly patched dripstones. I aimed my camera at the fortified walls in my first, minor act of ownership or ‘selfie’.

  But walk up and down as I might in the cold, echoing courtyard, I failed to capture its pale, rendered stonework as I saw it, could only manage to photograph blank miasma. No matter how much I pressed or aimed my lens at some new angle, the screen showed a void only.

  Peeved, I put my phone back in my pocket. I seemed to be standing in the midst of some electronic black hole.

  Might I not do what I liked with my own?

  My flat-footed guide looked aghast.

  ‘Has sir quite finished?’

  ‘Just thought I would, you know, celebrate my arrival,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d record the moment in real time but my phone has stopped working.’

  ‘Seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive, sir.’

  ‘How is that different from taking a picture?’

  ‘Seeing is believing, sir.’

  ‘If that were true, ghosts would be real.’

  ‘This way, sir,’ replied the gatekeeper and rattled a set of keys on their chains on his belt.

  It was both rebuke and a genuine, not to say fretful, desire to get in out of the fog. I should show greater respect, he hinted, before I strutted about with my toys.

  *

  For a place that had only a moment ago been invisible to the naked eye, its impressive frontage reared up very wide and tall above me with a stubborn resistance. Not all the exigencies of time, war and people had quite destroyed its ability to impress me, so powerfully did it suggest a distinguished, if violent pedigree. ‘Many a country retreat is rooted in fears, folly and heroics,’ I told myself. ‘Why should this be any different?’

  Everything about the house looked as dark and sealed as a tomb. Set into the window above the porch was an armorial roundel. From where I was standing the heraldic shield’s dull colours would not come to life until I was shut in with them. I assumed it was the same ghastly coat of arms with nine hearts that was embossed beneath the griffins at the top of my letter.

  When gloominess quite took a man’s breath away like that he had to rid his head of romantic notions of a Palladian home of perfect proportions. Other oriel windows with castellated tops jutted from the walls amid hundreds of tiny leaded panes that gleamed like black mirrors. In fact, no part of the ugly building complemented or balanced the other. Its walls, roofs and chimneys stood side by side in an asymmetrical union that hinted at a certain dissent or dissonance not unlike my own.

  Inescapably, such an abode had to have silly dragons for gargoyles but, really, did their teeth have to drip icy rain on my head? Each bloody drop bled red in the last gleams of sun through mist. I was able to shake off the sudden splash of cold but not of unpleasantness.

  *

  Facing me was a door neatly framed with two crudely carved Doric pilasters. A heavily ribbed weather moulding traced the pointed archway over the entrance in a poor precursor to that classical portico that I had already discounted. Someone, at some time, had altered the door in a sop to fashion, they had tried to tack Greek temple onto something Tudor and Jacobean. Chiselled in
stone above the miniature porch were the initials TP and LP next to the date 1638.

  Frankly, to suggest the maximum mystery a house as old as this had to be covered in plants that crept along the ground or up the walls. I was disappointed. No untidy tangle of wisteria hung round the entrance or rooted itself in the oddly sized and elaborately shaped stones that were so suggestive of monastic quoins and dressings. When someone lived in a house constructed from all sorts of pilfered but significant pieces they could do more than imagine its history, they could hear the monks take their vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience. They could listen to the stolen stones speak by themselves, if only they knew how to listen.

  With his head bowed, my processional guide ushered me indoors and dropped the latch quickly behind us.

  ‘Well I never,’ I said, with a groan. ‘Who would have thought anywhere so decrepit could last into the twenty-first century? Time could have stood still here. I just hope nobody has already sold off all my furniture and silver.’

  My guide turned to me and stared. I saw him disregard my grin with horror. He looked right into my pitiable eyes. The wish was father to the thought, he seemed to say, but then thought better of it.

  Suddenly he reverted to butler, valet and general factotum.

  ‘Wait here, sir. I will inform his lordship of your arrival.’

  ‘Please give him my apologies for not phoning.’

  ‘Few come this way to pay their respects, sir. Few choose to make the effort.’

  I stamped my feet. Surely something good about this dreadful cliché of a house had to offset the clammy chill that rose from the cellars?

  5

  Left to myself, I became conscious of an awful noise that marked the silence. This was no pleasing, recurring tick but the grinding mechanical judder of springs, cables and gears. In a corner of the hallway stood a ten-foot high pendulum clock, I noted, all resplendent with oyster veneers and floral marquetry. The front of its case boasted a black bird atop a funeral urn. With its beak turned towards its tail, this was no bird of paradise but rook or crow, whose choice of wood gave it eyes of gold.

  Still I was gripped by my very own cardiac arrhythmia. For, dolefully, then, the clock’s bells sounded in the rest of the house. Heavy brass weights tapped their trajectories to and fro inside their hollow wooden cases like coffins. Each hypnotic ding-dong shook in the same way my eye sockets ached at their edges, they pulsated and throbbed absurdly loudly as though this was how pain should sound.

  Frankly, I thought they’d never stop.

  *

  Not one to stand too long upon ceremony, I marched along the entrance hall and peered through a round-headed archway with broad stone imposts and heavy keystone which marked the beginning of the screens passage. Four hundred years ago, busy pantlers, butlers and other servants had ferried wine and food through here to the great hall from the kitchens.

  Suddenly I became aware of much scratching and fluttering. All that noise from the clocks had sent something into a panic. Almost immediately there was a violent collision. It missed me by a fraction and hit a window. Down it crashed in a cloud of feathers and broke its neck. Another bird was already dead on the floor. I was not entirely sure why a starling had been left to rot at my feet, but whatever the reason it had been there for some time. A dozen maggots had crawled out of the corpse onto the cold black and white diamond tiles after they had feasted on its rotten flesh, then failed to turn into flies.

  Trapped birds were commonplace in old houses, they fell down many a chimney or flew in open doors. I refused to accept that they had to signify anything else or possess any analogous occult qualities.

  Clearly, though, I needed to have a quiet word with the cleaner.

  *

  I knew I should not go so far, or forget where I had come from, but immediately found myself face to face with a hideous long-tailed ray-fish carved into the nearest doorjamb. The goggle-eyed, bare-breasted creature greeted me with such alluring lips and broad smile that I could not help but admire her folded arms. I could dismiss her gesture of grim decidedness, if not of my own indecision. Cut into shiny black oak, all sorts of rhombic patterns had been created by bevel and bezel to create waves and clouds in a way that was both decorative and bizarre. Because this was no fish but a mermaid.

  The other side of the doorway was similar.

  When ignorant men had yet to map every last corner of the globe, many a terrified sailor had claimed to have caught such weird and wonderful creatures on their first far-flung voyages to new worlds. Straight from the ocean, each sinuous and sexy temptress was a fantastic interweaving of fish and human. I smiled. What voyager wouldn’t see devilish sirens with not a soul to speak to for miles around?

  I was in a great hall that had been panelled with well-seasoned oak that had since turned black with age, as if that were now its natural plain colour.

  Advancing to the dais, I deposited my precious black bag on its table’s knotted planks and surveyed all before me. Whoever sat up here every evening liked to do so within sight of the fire. All the appalling old furniture and wall hangings reminded me less of a museum than a theatre. The props positively cried out for a film crew to use them as a backdrop to some dreadful costume drama. I felt like an actor with stage fright. Anyone foolish enough to live here, I told myself, was no simple student or collector of stagy antiquities, they literally lived and breathed according to the ridiculous dictates of some anachronistic previous existence.

  At first opportunity I’d sell the lot.

  On my other feelings it was pointless to ponder. Every burnt child dreaded the fire, but what cold traveller could forgo the chance of a friendly hearth?

  No sign yet of my guide.

  Crudely split beech logs lit up and roared at the slightest prod of my poker. There had come a strong, hot draught of air. It did not blow down the chimney exactly. Rather the flames flashed and flared because of some movement behind me, they became more than spontaneous combustion, they became the fiery, muscular organs of something glowing and living. They spat, hissed and moaned in their own incomprehensible language.

  I jumped at the logs’ roar like some vehement emotion. I registered the slither close by me of the thing that rustled, but not the thing that did the rustling. It might have been another bird.

  I was five years old again, reliving the kick in the back from my so-called parent.

  *

  I was alone except for a man’s hideous portrait that hung in a silvered pine frame over the fireplace. My heart sank. ‘Please, spare me the sinister painting,’ I said aloud. Executed in the style of the Old Masters, the large picture had been daubed with massively too much paint for my taste. The thick oils gave his face a translucency that rendered his flesh china-like and fragile. It was not how an ordinary person could have looked in real life.

  If I was genuinely perturbed it was not simply by the gaze that addressed me, but by the chilly fixity with which it did so.

  My step-father’s ice-blue eyes had been that cold, too.

  The portrait hung very oddly. Clearly this handsome trophy, all pompous pedigree and important descent had once been one of a pair. Cut into the stone chimney breast and framed by geometric patterns of black and brown marble was space for a second picture. With that, the cold air crept from each corner of the hall to reclaim and chill me. Stamping my feet, I began to practise a lordly gait up and down the floor when I stopped to inspect a buffet lined with rather fine and expensive silver spoons, cream dishes, a crizzled glass or two and a wine cooler. I mocked the good health of the dragoon in the picture with an empty tankard.

  Actually, I was in desperate need of a real drink. I had begun to parody the dream when the butler returned.

  ‘Mr Walker! It is absolutely forbidden to remove anything from its proper place.’

  ‘I haven’t, you know, nearly begun to see what’s here,’ I replied, ‘under all the dirt.’

  ‘Just put that back where you found it.’
/>   ‘Okay, okay, yeah. Will his lordship see me now?’

  ‘Lord Hart is not entirely well, sir.’

  ‘Not well?’

  ‘Your arrival has left him feeling a little out of sorts.’

  ‘I hope this doesn’t change anything?’

  ‘If you would like to come this way, sir, I’ll show you to your room in the west wing.’

  Illness I had reckoned without. No wonder that the tone of his letter had been so irrational and desperate?

  *

  It was up the most lavishly carved handrail that I slid my fingertips rather squeamishly. I had passed but a few banisters decorated with oak leaves and acorns when the revulsion in my stomach reversed my step a tread or two. A sacred bearded monkey danced astride a newel post. Overseeing the first landing we came to, this sharp-toothed, catarhine mammal was one of several ghastly monstrosities that lined the stairs while a naked boy Pan blew us all a tune.

  Such figures were the Devil’s imps and familiars from a time when people literally still believed in demons and witches, I decided.

  Then again, my host would not have been the first to fake history, not when the Victorians had practically reinvented everything medieval and Gothic. Somebody had placed these monsters on the stairs to help create a dark mood because that was their weird idea of good fun?

  *

  My worst fears were confirmed when I found myself next to a line of portraits of mounted Cavaliers as I passed along a narrow gallery. All eight anonymous dragoons boasted cool blue eyes and slightly crooked noses and looked resplendent in their large floppy hats and lacy white collars. Like the other Cavalier over the fire in the great hall, they had long curly black hair, little pointed beards and moustaches in a strange familial likeness.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I thought, ‘why do the well-to-do always have to immortalise themselves in such preposterous costumes?’ I found the whole idea of being a Cavalier rather lame, anyway. How could such popinjays ever fight in battle? There ended my curiosity.

  We were about to exit the gallery at the far end of the landing when I noticed the black and gold frame of an altogether different picture. Where the door rested against the wall, whoever hung behind it remained tantalisingly obscured. I stopped dead in my tracks, squinted behind it. To look at an unknown portrait for the first time was not unlike meeting a real person. I had to suspend all feelings of suspicion, embarrassment or even fear, I had to take the new face on trust for a moment.