Paul Magrs - Mystery Lady

‘It just makes me shudder,’ she said. ‘Like a goose stepped on my grave… A horribly fattened goose.’

‘Sit with us,’ I whispered to her. ‘Maybe it’ll stop Timmy trying out any of the sexy stuff.’

She joined me on the banquette opposite Timothy. He’d booked a table big enough for four, though goodness knows why. Maybe he wanted space enough around us so that no-one would overhear his proposal, I suddenly thought in horror.

The candlelight was so beautiful. It made us feel like we really were sitting in Paris, in a tiny little bistro, far away from all our worries and cares.

More bubbly, more chatter.

Timothy, resplendent in a suit swirling with Bridget Riley designs, expounded on his agent’s ideas for his future career. It all sounded rather exhausting and ambitious to me.

Despite the threat of a possibly imminent proposition I was feeling quite relaxed.

‘You just watch,’ Cassandra muttered in my ear as I cracked the glaze on my crème brulee. ‘When he gets back from having a word with the manager, it’ll be lovey-dovey time. You’ll see.’

I glared at her.

But then I saw that her eyes had widened in surprise. ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Look who’s just come in!’

There was a breath of frosty October air sweeping into the bistro just then as the door slammed shut behind a rather bulky lady in a hat and tweed cape. She was staring with great urgency into the candlelit gloom.

‘Who is it?’ I asked Cassandra.

‘It’s the lady from the train,’ she frowned. ‘And look! For some reason, she’s heading towards us!’

Helen Spedding was an expert with an eye like an eagle. She was a freelance copyeditor now, but once she had been a spy she told us. She’d been in France during the war working with the women of the Resistance and she’d got herself into and back out of some dreadful scrapes.

‘Does that surprise you, my dears?’ she said now, guffawing loudly over the cognac the management had brought her. She studied both Timothy and I intently as she sat at our table, hugging a brown paper parcel to her vast bosom.

Timothy looked piqued that she’d barreled into our private bubble and interrupted our tete-a-tete. I was quite relieved, to be honest. I was glad we had a distraction before he could start whipping out any unwarranted bits of jewellery.

‘I’ve had some wonderful adventures in my time,’ the old lady sighed, dipping an elegant finger into the crème anglaise left in Tim’s dessert dish. ‘I know you look at me now and see a bumbling old trout, but my point is, I’m not easily scared. It’s not very easy for anyone to put the wind up me.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Timothy.

She beamed at him. ‘Oh, I saw your television debut last night, young man. Very good. But you needn’t shout so much. You tend to sound slightly shrill when excited.’

Tim blushed. ‘You watch ‘Smashing Tunes’, Miss Spedding?’

‘I like to keep up with the happening sounds,’ she said gruffly. ‘I’m very with-it, you know. I go to a great many underground dancing and drinking clubs at the weekend and one has to know all the correct groovy moves.’

My best friend looked at Helen Spedding then raised his eyebrows at me. I, however, was most impressed by her. I thought she cut a very dashing figure in her tweed cape and her tiny, feathered hat. Her ancient face was like a crinkled map of all the many countries she’d had adventures in.

I cut in: ‘Miss Spedding, you haven’t explained why you urgently need to speak to us this evening.’

‘Oh yes, my dear. I am so sorry for wedging myself into your romantic meal…’

‘It isn’t romantic,’ I assured her.

‘Well,’ she went on. ‘The fact is, I have been following you for a little while. All the way from Manchester, in fact. I was on the same train as you and your companion here this afternoon.’

I nodded at this. ‘I know that,’ I told her .

‘Ah yes,’ said Helen, draining her cognac and gesturing for more by waving the heavy balloon glass above her head. ‘I was attacked! In First Class! Can you imagine it? What the devil ever happened to standards, eh? And no guard came to check what was going on. All the muffled thuds and crashes and screams of pain. No one popped their head round to see that I was okay!’

‘Who attacked you?’ I asked.

‘An enemy agent,’ she said mysteriously. ‘A skinny malinky kind of fella who thought he could put the willies up me. Well, I’ve dealt with worse than him before. I soon sent him packing. But the point is – whoever sent him won’t stop there. There’ll be others. And worse. And it isn’t just me they’ll be after.’

By now Timothy was looking cross. No one had paid him any attention for ages and he couldn’t quite follow what this old dear was telling us. ‘Look, what is all this? It’s like the plot from some kind of silly thriller…’

Helen Spedding shot him a glance. ‘I do hope you’re not going to be an idiot, Mr Bold. You seemed rather more intelligent on the tellybox, somehow…’

‘Tim will be all right,’ I told her quickly. ‘But explain to me, please. Why was this man attacking you? What was he after?’

Her face became dark and cunning. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ She glanced down at her hefty lap and the parcel still resting there. ‘It was this. This parcel contains a manuscript. I’ve been copy-editing it in a secret location for the past fortnight. When I took this job on for Mephistopheles and Company I never realized that it would end up with me being in fear for my life.’

I gasped. Next to me, in the shadowy light of the bistro, Cassandra gasped too.

I was filled with an amazing sense of foreboding. I was feeling excited, too, as we all watched Miss Spedding clear a little space on our tablecloth and thump the parcel down. With slightly trembling hands, she untied the string and opened up the brown paper to reveal a thick wodge of typescript held together by rubber bands.

THE HORRIBLE BOOK OF TERROR

VOLUME 27

Edited by Fox Soames

‘I knew it,’ I breathed. ‘Somehow I just knew it.’

‘This book,’ said Helen Spedding in a lower, more tremulous voice. ‘Somehow this book has… enemies. How can a book have enemies..? But it does. And it isn’t even a book yet. It’s not printed. It’s not even fully assembled yet. It’s just a pile of paper with my corrections in blue pencil. This is the only copy of the whole book as yet in existence. I am about to deliver it tomorrow, to the offices of Mephistopheles and Company in Bloomsbury.’

The old lady was trembling more violently now, as the manager brought her more brandy and she downed it in two thirsty slurps.

She was much more frightened than she wanted to appear.

‘Somebody has… a grudge against this book,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure why. I have read the whole thing. All the stories. And yes… they are horrible. They are ghastly beyond belief. They might even be said to flirt with dark ideas and notions of awfulness… but who would go so far as to attack a book..?’

Timothy and I glanced at each other. His eyes were asking me what on earth I was doing, getting mixed in with a bunch like this. For myself I was thrilled. This was just the kind of stuff I loved.

Miss Spedding was becoming more and more depleted by the minute. Her initial robust presence had dwindled into a mere shadow of what she was. I could see I needed to take charge.

‘Look here, where are you living?’ I asked.

‘A little North Yorkshire village called Ramificashun, just south of Pickering. I’ve been hiding out there, doing my copy editing and living at my sister Edna’s cottage. But that’s been spooky enough, to be honest. They’ve been having some funny do’s there with sudden deaths and unexplained whatsits, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it wasn’t connected to this business of the book.’