Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall Read online

  Below him, I wheezed in the thick haze of spores and mould that flew about my head like flies.

  ‘I’m the new owner, DI Colin Walker,’ I cried. ‘You may have known my wife. To you, she was Lizzie Dryzek.’

  Just in time I heard him gargle a big ball of phlegm, had to leap back before a bale big enough to break my leg rolled my way.

  ‘So it’s true, then. Now she’s gone you get to have everything?’

  *

  I rushed to dust frightful wisps of hay off my lapels.

  ‘You moving all these bales by yourself? How come?’

  ‘I am on my own, yes,’ replied Adrian. ‘Absolutely I am. I’ve got four years’ worth of hay here and only the last two are any good for his lordship’s horses. The rest is so mouldy it has to go on the fire. Not that he rides out much any more, anyway.’

  ‘Sounds ambitious. How do you fancy I help you?’

  ‘Make an offer like that round here, Mr Walker and you’ll likely get your hand bitten off.’

  ‘Oh, why’s that?’

  He tipped more bales off the top of the pile while I did, at great inconvenience, quell my disgust and bend down to give him some assistance.

  ‘Ever since his lordship’s brother died he has lost interest in farming.’

  ‘So he really is ill?’

  Adrian paused in mid-heave.

  ‘Lord Hart has started behaving like a recluse but he didn’t always hate it all. Absolutely he didn’t.’

  I began dragging bales to the fire. The blocks of hay, each four feet long, might have been tightly compacted and bound with two lengths of tough, shiny binder twine that cut into my gloves, but unbalance the load and I was soon in trouble. When I put too much pull on one string and not the other, the whole diabolical construction simply split into slices before I could move a muscle.

  ‘Practice makes perfect,’ said Adrian with the same deadpan voice.

  Suddenly I could see his face, albeit in profile. It confirmed that it was stretched and almost fleshless. I could have been looking at a skull itself, since he was clearly a man who liked to work himself to the bone.

  ‘You trying to suggest that the shock of losing his brother has, like, triggered some sort of agoraphobia?’

  ‘It’s not a permanent thing, Mr Walker. You shouldn’t put a label on someone just because you sometimes see them in a wheelchair.’

  ‘More ME than MS, then?’

  ‘Or maybe the fact that he has something on his mind says it all?’

  I watched Adrian descend his pyramid so that I no longer had to address any questions to the dreadful miasma.

  ‘So what is it about this estate that makes people so reluctant to work on it?’ I asked.

  ‘All I know is that one person doesn’t have to be alive for another to love them dearly. Death doesn’t always have the final say, it’s what comes after.’

  ‘He must be bad if he won’t ride his horses?’

  ‘How many of us don’t have regrets?’

  I declined to ridicule his melodramatic empathy, but not its ridiculousness.

  *

  ‘What is that awful stench?’ I asked as Adrian led the way back to a tractor. His mug of lukewarm tea rested on its bonnet.

  ‘That’s rotten food Mr Walker. Absolutely it. Bacteria breaks down organic matter in little or no oxygen by way of anaerobic digestion. The semi-liquid residue comes to us as fertilizer for the fields from the local authorities.’

  ‘But it smells so putrid and maggoty.’

  ‘Gets everywhere, doesn’t it? You can’t breathe in bed at night, sometimes.’

  ‘It tastes horribly metallic. Like something decomposing.’

  ‘That’ll be the ‘digestates’. Everything rots, Mr Walker. Even us.’

  Adrian rinsed out his mouth ready to spit at my feet. With that, he climbed into the cab of the enormous red tractor and reached for a shotgun. He broke open its breach and checked it was loaded. Then he placed it close to hand on the seat beside him, I noted.

  Meantime, a sparrow-hawk perched on a fence post and clawed the feathers off a robin. It shed the breast feathers with its talons in a shower of crimson petals while its victim was still living.

  Never before had I watched a bird act so cruelly, even if peregrine falcons did daily cruise the skies over London.

  ‘If Lord Hart won’t leave his house who decides what to do round here?’ I shouted over the noise of the engine.

  Adrian passed me his empty mug.

  ‘I do, on account of the fact that I have a degree in agriculture and he doesn’t. All he knows is what he learnt from his step-father, Joseph Jones, many years ago. His brother Philip was the same.’

  ‘That’s Lizzie’s father?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘Is it true that he deserted her when she was seven?’

  ‘Deserted? Is that what she told you?’

  ‘For most of her life he was as good as dead to her.’

  Dusting down his bare forearms, my belligerent driver was busy studying the screen on the tractor’s computer.

  ‘Not dead Mr Walker, disconnected. By then her mother was lying safe in her grave but Lizzie couldn’t understand why her father wasn’t able to keep her with him. Absolutely she couldn’t. Once it was done, it was done, though. She didn’t know if it was some sort of punishment. She pleaded and pleaded but that was no good, she was driven away. As you say, she was a child put up for adoption.’

  ‘What else can you tell me?’

  ‘Some things are best forgotten.’

  I stared straight ahead into the distance.

  ‘Would it be fair to say that during her few years at Coberley Hall Lizzie was abused or neglected by someone to your knowledge?’

  ‘What I can say is that she had few new clothes and she literally missed meals. Whenever I met her she was looking for bogy men, bugbears and bogles, she said. A special friend had told her all about them. The thing is, she was so thin she looked like a phantom herself.’

  ‘Lizzie was very imaginative like that, was she?’

  ‘Because those weren’t good times, Mr Walker. The old man was dead and the estate was in trouble again. Lizzie’s mother had been drinking heavily for years right up to the end. Nevertheless, Lizzie didn’t seem unhappy, more guarded.’

  ‘Against her father?’

  ‘Against everyone.’

  ‘Sounds chaotic.’

  ‘It’s always best to take care, absolutely it is.’

  ‘But care about who or what exactly?’

  ‘Do you believe in good and evil Mr Walker? Do you believe that one or the other can stalk a family in response to a great sorrow?’

  ‘As a detective you stop caring about such things after a while.’

  ‘Your wife didn’t. She thought about it a great deal, even as a child. That’s how she came to be in a world of her own. Everyone feared that she had become better friends with the dead than the living.’

  ‘You mean she was so traumatised by the loss of her own mother that she conjured another?’

  ‘Never just conjured, though.’

  ‘Did this ‘other’ have a name, by any chance?’

  ‘She called her the countess.’

  *

  I felt more than a little inquisitive but could not in any way think how best to inquire. Meanwhile Adrian drove across the yard in order to hitch a high-sided trailer to his tractor, ready to ferry more foul food waste to fertilize the fields. I went to head him off but suddenly thought better of it. One wrong turn of those massive black tyres could crush a man to nothing.

  9

  ‘Never thought you’d dare show your face round ’ere, Inspector. Never thought you’d have the nerve after what you’ve done.’

  Susan stood patting gnomes on her patio from where she presided over my advance.

  I did not reply. Obviously, she had taken to brooding about me in my absence.

  ‘So what are you gonna, like, do now then,’ she c
ontinued, ‘with this place, with us, now your wife’s gone?’

  Any more questions and I might have to answer.

  Whacking a wet rag mercilessly from one pointed hat to another, she prepared to crack it my way should I trespass any closer.

  ‘What’s she to you, anyway, Inspector? She’s gone for ever.’

  I slowed my pace very slightly. One false move could only highlight, all too prematurely, any qualms of my own.

  ‘I never realised how little one person could know about another,’ I said. ‘After all, this was once her home.’

  ‘Think it’s easier to know the dead than the living, do you?’

  ‘Why should I listen to you?’

  ‘You’re going to regret it. Honestly.’

  ‘Regret what, exactly?’

  That I was somehow the Devil, though the notion filled her with the vilest dilemma, she now had not the slightest doubt. For a moment she glared at me beside the concrete ramp of an abandoned cattle dock where I had stopped to face her.

  ‘I just want you to know Inspector, that there never was a good reason to disown your wife. You hear what I’m saying? It wasn’t her they should have abandoned. It was Coberley Hall.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘It’s like this Inspector. The poor little thing would hang around Slack’s Cottage whenever she smelt my baking. Some teachers at her school said that she wasn’t quite right in the head, but I never believed that for one moment.’

  Of my own dilemma it was too foolish to dispose.

  ‘Say what you like, I know Lizzie had a very vivid imagination. She could be dark and Gothic. Scary, even. Doesn’t mean I didn’t take her seriously.’

  ‘It’s what she put into her writing and paintings that started the trouble, Inspector. All those fantastic creatures, blood and claws. No teacher would pin them on the classroom wall.’

  ‘What child doesn’t like a good monster?’

  ‘These were so lifelike that they scared the adults. The headmistress said that they reminded her of drawings done by traumatised children who had witnessed a war.’

  Before I could quell this uninvited intrusion into my wife’s history, Susan shot me a dark, cunning smile. She would throw at me things to which, thanks to my studied indifference, I had hitherto been immune.

  ‘Never ask the dead what we can’t the living, Inspector.’

  In a flash her eyes sought to plumb the depths of my marriage that she had convinced herself must have turned sour.

  ‘Okay, just tell me one thing Lizzie drew that you remember fully?’ I demanded.

  ‘She drew the deadliest creatures from the deepest seas.’

  ‘Let me stop you right there.’

  ‘Has no one told you about it properly, not ever, Inspector? They were wondrous things, such as a pair of bearded, three-toed sea-gods whose skinny black chests sprouted pairs of naked breasts. With a man’s bulging cheeks and nose, those louring, sharp-toothed Neptunes popped their eyeballs at us as if they stirred in dire discomfort at being so far from their oceans. Their shark-like lips quite literally seemed to squirm and coil, but then I thought, ‘How can paint come alive?’ When asked where she’d seen them she said that they lived with her in Coberley Hall.’

  ‘All you’re saying is that, thanks to a lot of hideous gargoyles and Jacobean wood carvings, she felt haunted.’

  ‘Not haunted, just guarded.’

  ‘That’s funny. Adrian used that word, too.’

  ‘It was always the same, Inspector. Whenever she was asked why she surrounded herself with such ugly creatures she said that she had to take care.’

  ‘Take care? Are you sure that those were the words she used?’

  ‘Yes, why? Did she say them to you, too?’

  ‘Never you mind. I’m sure that whatever happened back then that his lordship had Lizzie’s best interests at heart.’

  ‘His lordship indeed!’

  ‘Did I say something funny?’

  ‘No proper titled family has owned this land for hundreds of years, Inspector. Him over there is no different from you or me, despite all his airs and graces. You ask Peter Slater. He and the brothers played together on the estate when they were children. Peter knows the family history better than anyone. Joseph Jones began it all, he dreamed up the whole idea of some grand family going back generations to suit himself.’

  ‘You mean it’s all a lie?’

  Susan placed both hands on her hips and tossed her chin.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Joseph Jones was a clever man. He made a lot of money designing underground pipes to heat airfields during the Second World War. Only he could keep them ice-free in a time of national crisis. It’s also true that his family once owned a farm in East Anglia and it was certainly his ambition to recreate his childhood dream, so to speak, which is why he bought what remained of Coberley Court as it was called by then, in the 1950’s. You would have thought that he had discovered some great ancestral link going back centuries, but a rabbit-run other people called it, which sold at auction for a song.’

  For a moment I was dizzy with doubt.

  ‘Not a real nobleman, then, more a fantasist?’

  ‘What man doesn’t like to invest himself with another man’s trappings, Inspector, especially if he can pretend to be grander, richer and more powerful than he really is? What better way to fool some silly young girl who’d fall for a lineage going back centuries?’ Susan added meaningfully. ‘Who doesn’t want to be addressed as his lordship in his own Hall?’

  ‘Don’t look at me.’

  ‘No? I wonder?’

  ‘Well, h’m, okay, but it’s a nasty bit of tittle-tattle. And I don’t understand where the name Hart comes from?’

  Susan uttered a hollow laugh.

  ‘Hart is simply another name for deer and it was in nearby Hartley Wood that rich Norman lords liked to go hunting, but it changes nothing. Many a man has chosen to call himself Lord of Coberley Hall but none ever lived long to enjoy it.’

  ‘Sorry, but I’m not the superstitious type.’

  With that, Susan went back to scrubbing her wet gnomes even harder. She banged a few heads together with considerable anger as though the very air we breathed was corrupted. Of course, it was only that awful recycled food being spread on the fields. No, frankly, it wasn’t. I could stomach the stinking ‘digestates’ but not the air of sour disappointment. I hurried on before she came up with any more of her ridiculous tales.

  *

  It was but a dozen paces downhill from Slack’s Cottage back to the busy main road. There, an endless succession of cars and lorries rushed at me round a sharp bend.

  Quickly, the absence of gaps in the traffic saw me overtaken by a terrible urge – a silly imperative, easily overridden in the beginning but sounding louder and louder in my head. I took a step forward and the command to cross ceased – stepped back and it doubled in volume.

  ‘To hell with it!’ I thought carelessly. ‘No man should have to stand here kicking his heels.’

  Several times I went to step out the end of the lane only to feel the full force of a car’s slipstream strike my face.

  Several minutes passed before I chanced it.

  Which was when I heard them.

  Those words .

  Before I made it across.

  So piercing .

  Not normal words at all. Not like any voice I’d ever known.

  Not that I should not have listened…

  Distracted, I spun round and saw a coach heading straight for me. Its great white front and claw-like mirrors looked set to run me down with a deafening blare of its horn. In the middle of the road I was whirled about by a vertiginous storm – no longer felt my feet touch the tarmac. Light flared at the edge of my right eye. Being a sudden but transitory blaze, the white flash repeated itself like a signal. To see lightning burst into view took me completely by surprise, because what I was seeing did not appear to be anything external. Like bolts from the blue t
he dazzling gleams threw into silhouette black lines between retina and lens. Slowly but surely, flotsam and jetsam began to coalesce to form one material person in detail. It might have been a woman.

  I heard the saxophonic horn and the agonizing squeal of locked brakes, saw passengers tossed forwards in their seats as the coach skidded round me. In a split second I was picked up and flung at one side of the highway – the far side – then onto the grassy bank which kept me from the coach’s rear axle.

  The abrupt somersault, the knock on my head, dazed me but I let out a scream with relief. I clawed at the grass, hauled myself higher up the bank and retched at the smell of hot rubber in my nostrils. It smelt like barbecued bones, hair, flesh. There was nothing more hellish with which to compare it. I could have died in a rash move fraught with disaster.

  Instead the National Express driver expertly steered her vehicle out of its violent manoeuvre. She straightened her vehicle a short distance down the road. It was the 444 bound for London.

  I had just had a very close shave with the same coach on which I had travelled yesterday.

  I sat there shaking and blinking. Lying out of reach and mangled amid the traffic was one of my green Wellingtons. What were the odds that I should have been killed? Yet dead I was not and surely did I still breathe.

  Born of blank hurt, the figure on the opposite side of the road studied me closely. It was as if sheer force of vision were somehow enough to remind me of the terribleness of something.

  Then I heard Susan.

  ‘Are you all right, Inspector? This is a most treacherous corner. A muntjak was hit here only the other day. Adrian and I were going to cook and eat it but someone else dragged it away in the night. You wouldn’t want your brains dashed out like some poor deer, I suppose?’

  Next second, time caught up with me again. My legs worked under me now that I no longer felt literally limbless. I had been blown clear of the coach in a way I still could not fathom. I managed to stand up and wave, someone wanly. Since I had come to little harm I said nothing. Instead I chose to limp away blithely. I kept to the verge in order to look for my path back to Coberley.