Property of a Lady

‘What?’


‘Only that I thought I heard someone knocking the first time I was there,’ he said. ‘It was probably something outside, but it was very macabre.’

Nell said, ‘It was the part where she talked about hearing things not meant for human ears I found so chilling.’

‘The whispering of wolves and of demons,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Alice wrote very vividly, didn’t she?’

‘You think it might all be a form of fiction?’

‘I’d have to have known her before judging that,’ he said. ‘But if it was fiction, it was a peculiar way of writing it.’

‘And let’s remember she hid it in the clock,’ said Nell. ‘If you were writing fiction, surely you wouldn’t do that?’

‘It might have been part of the plan,’ he said.

‘But she put it there forty-odd years ago,’ pointed out Nell. ‘That’d be a very long-term plan. I do take your point, though. An intriguing old manuscript coming to light in an empty house . . . And clocks are often in ghost stories. They’re like cats and mirrors and mountains. They have a secret life of their own.’

‘Alice didn’t sound as if she’d be devious in that way, did she?’ said Michael. ‘If she wanted to write a ghost story, I have the feeling she’d have bombarded publishers.’

‘I rather liked the sound of her,’ said Nell. ‘I’d like to know what happened to her. It’s a pity Wilson is a fairly common surname – it might be difficult to trace. I wondered if it might be possible to find out more about the society she belonged to.’

‘Psychic investigation,’ said Michael, thoughtfully.

‘She called it the Society for Psychic Research,’ said Nell. ‘Which might have been its exact name or just her own shorthand. And there must have been dozens of psychic research set-ups around then – well, there’re probably dozens now.’

‘If the local council called her in, there might be correspondence with an address in their files,’ said Michael thoughtfully.

‘I wouldn’t bank on it. I found a few letters when I was trying to trace Charect House’s previous owners for Liz Harper,’ said Nell. ‘I was looking through land registration documents and transfer of titles, and there were three or four letters written to Alice by someone from the council – asking her to come to Marston Lacy to investigate the house. I think they’d got into the file by mistake. There was a note of exasperation in them, as if the council was only doing it as a last resort. I don’t think there was an address.’

‘I’ll bet the council destroyed anything official and missed those,’ said Michael. ‘Can you imagine any local authority admitting it employed a ghost-hunter?’

‘The society might not exist any longer,’ said Nell.

‘No. And even if we did find Alice, she’d be pretty elderly now. That journal was written in the nineteen sixties, and she mentioned a boyfriend who was killed at Hiroshima.’

‘Nineteen forty-five,’ said Nell, nodding. ‘That means she’d have to be at least forty when she was at Charect.’

‘Yes, and in that case— Hold on, I think this is the turning for St Paul’s Church. Or is it?’ He slowed down, peering doubtfully at the road.

Nell found this uncertainty rather endearing. She said, ‘I think it’s right – I can see the church spire from here.’

‘That’s how I found the place yesterday,’ he said, turning the car into the lane. ‘I just looked for a spire and drove towards it. If I got lost I was going to phone Inspector Brent and call out the cavalry.’

‘But you weren’t sure, not at that point, that Beth would be there.’