John Harwood - The Ghost Writer

Nothing about Miss Hamish's letter suggested confusion, or failing memory.

Except that she wasn't once mentioned in Anne's diary. And on Miss Hamish's own account, Anne had written just three short notes to her dearest and most trusted friend during those last crucial weeks of her life. Why hadn't she, at the very least, written to say, Dear Abby, I'm going to leave everything to you? The lawyer would certainly have asked. 'How do you know this young woman will accept your bequest? What is to happen if she doesn't? Who is to inherit if Abigail Hamish dies before you do?'

'My dearest and most trusted friend Abigail Valerie Hamish'. They had shared the same initials. Abigail Valerie Hamish. Anne Victoria Hatherley. That was how they'd met, of course. The alphabetically minded schoolmistress who believed in order in all things.

I was reading with a pencil in my hand, as I often did when concentrating. Now I saw that I had been doodling variations on the two names at the foot of Miss Hamish's page: AVH ANNE VICTORIA HATHERLEY ABIGAIL VALERIE HAMISH MISS A V HATHERLEY MISS A V HAMISH

The last set of letters rearranged themselves into

MISS HAVISHAM

I almost laughed. Great expectations, indeed. A two-million pound bequest, courtesy of Miss Hamish-Havisham? This message comes to you direct from your subconscious.

Like 'Miss Jessel'? And the whispering from the gallery?

That was a dream.

But how had it-the whispering voice in the dream-known about Gerard Hugh Montfort, Infant? That had come as a complete, paralysing shock.

Coincidence. The register entry interpreted the dream, not the other way round.

You've seen the scratches in the cupboard. You know all about that, the voice had whispered. But I didn't. I glanced up at the gallery. Though it was still almost full daylight outside, shadows were gathering in the alcoves.

There was one other possibility. Apart from a choice between ghosts and hallucinations. Miss Havisham. Hamish. Ridiculous, of course. But at least rationally ridiculous, unlike escaped subconscious minds writing messages on butcher's paper.

Purely for argument's sake: she could have lied about the stroke. She had access to keys. She knew the house. She might have seen the black thread. And as the sole beneficiary of Anne Hatherley's will, she even had a motive for murder.

Ridiculous, nonetheless. Aside from everything else, she could have had Anne declared legally dead after seven years, taken possession of the estate, and either moved into Ferrier's Close or sold it.

Unless she was afraid the process might spark a fresh investigation into Anne's disappearance. Such as a more thorough search of the house and grounds.

Which Miss Hamish had kept unoccupied and overgrown for fifty years.

Ridiculous all the same, because if Miss Hamish had murdered Anne, she Would never have answered my advertisement. Let alone given me the keys to the house. Besides, Miss Hamish couldn't have answered my second question, or whispered those words from the gallery, because I hadn't told her about Alice. So not only ridiculous, but impossible.

Unless Miss Jessel and Miss Havisham had joined forces.

Alice is so beautiful, we all love her.

Terminal paranoia beckoning. Time to leave. I picked up Anne's diary, again with my eyes averted from the planchette at the other end of the table, and headed for the front stairs.

THOUGH SUNLIGHT WAS FILTERING IN THROUGH THE TREES above the stairwell windows, I could not help glancing over my shoulder every time a board creaked. I realised as I approached the second-floor landing that I couldn't even recall what I was doing here. But if I turned back now, I might lose my nerve altogether; and I still had to get the downstairs shutters closed and make my way out of the house by torchlight. Forcing myself not to tiptoe-or run-I moved swiftly across the landing and into Anne's room.

A patch of light fell across the floor. The closet was still open. I replaced the diary, slid the panel into place and closed the door firmly. As I did so, the cupboard above the bed swung open.

You've seen the scratches in the cupboard. But the floor of the empty cupboard was unmarked, and for a disorienting instant I thought I had simply imagined them. Then I remembered that the scratches were on my mother's side.

I had a sudden horrible vision of some monstrous creature concealed, scrabbling loose in the dark, dropping on to Anne's bed. But the side panel separating the two cupboards was entirely solid; so was the section of wall which formed the back of the cupboard in Phyllis's room. And the cupboard floor was firmly screwed to the frame below; I tried one of the screws with a small coin to make sure. The cavity below, directly between the two beds, didn't seem to be accessible from either side of the partition. There was no loose panelling, and certainly no door. Only a tarnished electrical socket, still connected to a lamp on the bedside table. The lamp, I noticed, had no switch of its own: to turn it on, you had to reach down to the power point.

I think of you as my questing knight, facing his last ordeal. What would Alice think of me if I didn't see this through? The question, which I had managed to suppress until now, propelled me along the corridor to my mother's room, which was much darker, because the overgrown window faced north.

Again I shone the torch on the deep gouges in the cupboard floor. Too straight for claw marks, surely: more as if something very heavy had been forced into the cupboard. I noticed, too, that the heads of the screws that secured the floor were burred.

It's only the wiring, I told myself, some long-ago electrician, making repairs. The bedside lamp and socket were identical to the ones next door, but there seemed to be a lot more cord. Crouching beside the bed, I drew out a dusty tangle. The cord from the socket ran to an ancient double adapter: from there, one lead went to the bedside lamp. The top of the light bulb was blackened; broken ends of filament glinted in the torch beam.

The other lead vanished through a hole in the panelling just below the frame of the headboard.

She's dead, of course, but you know all about that. I tried the coin on one of the screws in the cupboard floor and felt it give. Too fearful even to look over my shoulder, I removed a second screw, and then a third, tugged at the edge of the panel and the rest flew out as it came loose. Darkness and floating dust, and then, in the torch beam, an extraordinary piece of apparatus. A bulbous glass tube about a foot long, draped in cobwebs, appeared at first to be floating in a black void. Then I saw that it was suspended above a wooden base-plate by an arrangement of slender rods and clamps. The tube had nipple-like protrusions at both ends, and another emerging from one side, all three with fine silver rods running through them and soldered to what looked like electrodes, small concave sections of silvered metal. Insulated wires connected the tube to an imposing black metal cylinder mounted on the wooden base.

I had seen a picture of something very like this-and recently. Here, in the library downstairs, in the book about martyrs to radiation that looked as if it had been dropped in the bath. Just a glimpse as I'd flipped through the pages: the glass tube clamped vertically on a stand, the black cylinder on a bench nearby, presided over by two bearded Victorian gentlemen.

'Alfred's infernal machine.'

'I used it in a novella'…that was it, 'The Revenant': the glass tube Cordelia broke in the studio when it slid out of the green dress. The dress Imogen de Vere had worn in Henry St Clair's portrait.

I understood at last how my mother had murdered her sister without attracting the slightest suspicion. Viola, all unwittingly, had drawn up the plan for the perfect murder, and Phyllis had executed it ruthlessly. Anne had died without ever knowing who-or what-had killed her.