Martin Edwards: The Terror

When she went to live at Monkshall she had reached that gracious period of interregnum between child and woman. A slim girl above middle height, straight of back, free of limb, she held the eye of men to whom more mature charms would have had no appeal.

Ferdie Fane, the young man who came to the Red Lion so often, summer and winter, and who drank so much more than was good for him, watched her passing along the road with her father. She was hatless; the golden-brown hair had a glory of its own; the faultless face, the proud little lift of her chin.

‘Spring is here, Adolphus,’ he addressed the landlord gravely. ‘I have seen it pass.’

He was a man of thirty-five, long-faced, rather good-looking in spite of his huge horn-rimmed spectacles. He had a large tankard of beer in his hand now, which was unusual, for he did most of his drinking secretly in his room. He used to come down to the Red Lion at all sorts of odd and sometimes inconvenient moments. He was, in a way, rather a bore, and the apparition of Mary Redmayne and her grim-looking father offered the landlord an opportunity for which he had been seeking.

‘I wonder you don’t go and stay at Monkshall, Mr Fane,’ he suggested.

Mr Fane stared at him reproachfully.

‘Are you tired of me, mine host?’ he asked gently. ‘That you should shuffle me into other hands?’ He shook his head. ‘I am no paying guest—besides which, I am not respectable. Why does Redmayne take paying guests at all?’

The landlord could offer no satisfactory solution to this mystery.

‘I’m blessed if I know. The colonel’s got plenty of money. I think it is because he’s lonely, but he’s had paying guests at Monkshall this past ten years. Of course, it’s very select.’

‘Exactly,’ said Ferdie Fane with great gravity. ‘And that is why I should not be selected! No, I fear you will have to endure my erratic visits.’

‘I don’t mind your being here, sir,’ said the landlord, anxious to assure him. ‘You never give me any trouble, only—’

‘Only you’d like somebody more regular in his habits—good luck!’

He lifted the foaming pewter to his lips, took a long drink, and then he began to laugh softly, as though at some joke. In another minute he was serious again, frowning down into the tankard.

‘Pretty girl, that. Mary Redmayne, eh?’

‘She’s only been back from school a month—or college, rather,’ said the landlord. ‘She’s the nicest young lady that ever drew the breath of life.’

‘They all are,’ said the other vaguely. He went away the next day with his fishing rod that he hadn’t used, and his golf bag which had remained unstrapped throughout his stay.

Life at Monkshall promised so well that Mary Redmayne was prepared to love the place. She liked Mr Goodman, the grey-haired, slow-spoken gentleman who was the first of her father’s boarders; she loved the grounds, the quaint old house; could even contemplate, without any great uneasiness, the growing taciturnity of her father. He was older, much older than he had been; his face had a new pallor; he seldom smiled. He was a nervous man, too; she had found him walking about in the middle of the night, and once had surprised him in his room, suspiciously thick of speech, with an empty whisky bottle a silent witness to his peculiar weakness.

It was the house that began to get on her nerves. Sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night suddenly and sit up in bed, trying to recall the horror that had snatched her from sleep and brought her through a dread cloud of fear to wakefulness. Once she had heard peculiar sounds that had sent cold shivers down her spine. Not once, but many times, she thought she heard the faint sound of a distant organ.

She asked Cotton, the dour butler, but he had heard nothing. Other servants had been more sensitive, however; there came a constant procession of cooks and housemaids giving notice. She interviewed one or two of these, but afterwards her father forbade her seeing them, and himself accepted their hasty resignations.

‘This place gives me the creeps, miss,’ a weeping housemaid had told her. ‘Do you hear them screams at night? I do; I sleep in the east wing. The place is haunted—’

‘Nonsense, Anna!’ scoffed the girl, concealing a shudder. ‘How can you believe such things!’

‘It is, miss,’ persisted the girl. ‘I’ve seen a ghost on the lawn, walking about in the moonlight.’

Later, Mary herself began to see things; and a guest who came and stayed two nights had departed a nervous wreck.

‘Imagination,’ said the colonel testily. ‘My dear Mary, you’re getting the mentality of a housemaid!’

He was very apologetic afterwards for his rudeness, but Mary continued to hear, and presently to listen; and finally she saw…Sights that made her doubt her own wisdom, her own intelligence, her own sanity.

One day, when she was walking alone through the village, she saw a man in a golf suit; he was very tall and wore horn-rimmed spectacles, and greeted her with a friendly smile. It was the first time she had seen Ferdie Fane. She was to see very much of him in the strenuous months that followed.

SUPERINTENDENT HALLICK went down to Princetown in Devonshire to make his final appeal—an appeal which, he knew, was foredoomed to failure. The Deputy-Governor met him as the iron gates closed upon the burly superintendent.

‘I don’t think you’re going to get very much out of these fellows, superintendent,’ he said. ‘I think they’re too near to the end of their sentence.’

‘You never know,’ said Hallick, with a smile. ‘I once had the best information in the world from a prisoner on the day he was released.’

He went down to the low-roofed building which constitutes the Deputy-Governor’s office.

‘My head warder says they’ll never talk, and he has a knack of getting into their confidence,’ said the Deputy. ‘If you remember, superintendent, you did your best to make them speak ten years ago, when they first came here. There’s a lot of people in this prison who’d like to know where the gold is hidden. Personally, I don’t think they had it at all, and the story they told at the trial, that O’Shea had got away with it, is probably true.’

The superintendent pursed his lips.

‘I wonder,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That was the impression I had the night I arrested them, but I’ve changed my opinion since.’

The chief warder came in at that moment and gave a friendly nod to the superintendent.

‘I’ve kept those two men in their cells this morning. You want to see them both, don’t you, superintendent?’

‘I’d like to see Connor first.’

‘Now?’ asked the warder. ‘I’ll bring him down.’

He went out, passed across the asphalt yard to the entrance of the big, ugly building. A steel grille covered the door, and this he unlocked, opening the wooden door behind, and passed into the hall, lined on each side with galleries from which opened narrow cell doors. He went to one of these on the lower tier, snapped back the lock and pulled open the door. The man in convict garb who was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, rose and eyed him sullenly.

‘Connor, a gentleman from Scotland Yard has come down to see you. If you’re sensible you’ll give him the information he asks.’

Connor glowered at him.

‘I’ve nothing to tell, sir,’ he said sullenly. ‘Why don’t they leave me alone? If I knew where the stuff was I wouldn’t tell ’em.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said the chief good-humouredly. ‘What have you to gain by hiding up—?’

‘A fool, sir?’ interrupted Connor. ‘I’ve had all the fool knocked out of me here!’ His hand swept round the cell. ‘I’ve been in this same cell for seven years; I know every brick of it—who is it wants to see me?’