The Secret of Crickley Hall (52 page)

They used smaller lanes mainly, where high hedges gave them some protection against the wind, and passed no other person, motorcar or cart as they struggled on. They had travelled several miles when Magda dropped to her knees, then threw herself to the ground.

'Augustus
…
what have you done?'
she wailed, the words torn away by the howling wind.

Maurice knelt on both knees beside her and tugged at her shuddering shoulders.

'Please,'
he shouted over the noise of the storm,
'we can't stop! There's nowhere to hide!'
He meant nowhere to take cover, but it came out as hide.

She beat at the rough roadway with the heels of her fists, her back juddering as she sobbed. Then, without another sound, she rose to her feet, swaying with the wind. She stared at the boy, but again it was with wide vacant eyes.

'Where are we going?' Maurice pleaded.

But Magda just turned away and walked on as if there had been no interruption to their journey. He quickly caught up and clung to her elbow.

They stopped only twice after that, once when a stout tree branch fell into the lane before them, and again when Maurice tripped over some soft and sodden creature—a rabbit or small fox—lying dead in a puddle on the ground.

Although their weather-hindered journey must have taken several hours, Maurice had lost all sense of time and was surprised when they reached the outskirts of a town. There were no streetlights or gaslights in this part of the country and only a few upstairs windows were lit as they made their way along the road. Magda's bent body was stiff and she seemed to be walking mechanically, like a wind-up toy. She spoke not a word to him, but when they came upon the deserted railway station, he at last understood that this had been their destination all along. The station master's quarters and the ticket office were closed, for these were now the very early hours of the morning, but Magda led Maurice through a side gate and along to the very end of the platform where there was a backless bench. Despite the exposure, she sat them both down and Maurice huddled against her for protection. She remained stiff, upright now, her back ramrod straight, ignoring the boy, lost in her own breakdown.

Leaning close to her ear, Maurice asked, 'Are we catching the train? Are we going to London?'

There was no response, but he assumed that was the idea, to get back to the city where no one would find them and no one could blame them for what had happened in Crickley Hall—and he was, after all,
only
a child. Maurice saw no future beyond that.

As the hours moved on to dawn, the storm abated and the winds died. They weren't to know that the gorge and Hollow Bay had been flooded and that there was no one left at Crickley Hall to bear witness to what had taken place there. No, Maurice and Magda were in their own world, Maurice drenched and shivering, hunched up as close to Magda as he could get, she still staring straight ahead, also drenched but her body rigid, her face expressionless, features hard as if made of stone.

As often was the case in the aftermath of a heavy storm, the morning was bright and clear, the smell of raw damp earth heavy in the air. Somewhere in the distance there came the
clang-clang
of a fire-engine bell.

Still they waited and the sun began to dry out their clothes a little. Eventually, someone strolled out of the ticket office onto the platform, but it was too far away for the man to see them properly. As the hours went by, more people arrived on the platform, but none wandered down to the far end. Only Maurice was looking—Magda was still in a place of her own—and he saw a uniformed station master or guard step out of his office and check his pocket-watch, then glance towards them.

Maurice, sitting on Magda's right-hand side, sat back so that he was shielded by her body. He felt guilty, because they hadn't bought tickets.

All the uniformed man saw was a lone woman dressed entirely in black waiting for the morning train at the far end of the station. She was too far away to make out her features, although he could tell her face was very pale. He checked his watch again, a piece that had served him well for twenty years with its large sharp numbers and fine black hands, then peered in the opposite direction to the single woman, towards the west. He sensed the rumble on the railtracks before he actually heard it, a trick he'd picked up over the years—it was as if the rails were trembling ahead of the sound—and his eyes squinted as he waited for the London train to appear round the bend half a mile away.

For the benefit of the waiting passengers on the platform, he barked out the train's ultimate destination and the major towns it stopped at along the way.

Maurice heard the station man call out London and he ducked his head forward to see the train's approach. It soon chugged in and with a hiss of steam and a squeal of brakes the engine and first carriage came to a halt just past him. Doors began to open and slam shut again. No passengers alighted, for this was the train's first stop after leaving its departure point of Ilfracombe.

He looked at Magda, but she was not paying attention, she was just staring at the cream and dark-red carriage that was opposite them. He tugged urgently at her elbow and she took no notice.

'Magda,' he said in a quick hushed voice as if others might hear, 'we must get on. It'll take us to London. Please, Magda, before it starts up again.'

No response though. She was like an alabaster statue sitting there, so white was her colour, so still was her body.

'Please, Magda!' He was desperate now.

And then, when she wouldn't move, wouldn't acknowledge him, a coldness flushed through Maurice. He was completely alone again. The alliance between himself, Augustus and Magda was over. Augustus would be sent to jail for what he'd done—even hanged—and Magda would lose her job. No, worse than that. For murdering the teacher, Nancy Linnet, she would be put in prison for the rest of her life. Unless she told the police and the judge that he, Maurice, had struck the fatal blow that killed Miss Linnet, and she had only helped him get rid of the body. She wouldn't tell them it was she who had pushed the teacher down the stairs, she would blame it all on him!

He slid a few inches away from Magda on the bench and searched her profile. Would she tell on him? She didn't seem right in the head, it was as if something had closed down inside her. Why wouldn't she speak to him, why did she just sit there?

The slamming of the doors had finished now and he peeked past his silent companion to see the station man looking in the opposite direction, checking all the carriage doors were shut and there were no more passengers trying to board at that end.

Maurice knew he had to make a decision right then. If the police caught him they'd send him to Borstal, where all the bad boys went; or maybe, even worse, they'd put him in a grown-up prison because that's what they did with anyone who had murdered another person. Perhaps they'd even hang him, like Augustus. How old did you have to be before you got the rope?

Maurice ran for the carriage as a whistle blew and, once aboard and the train was slowly moving out of the station, he looked through a window at the solitary figure sitting there on the platform bench. Magda did not seem to see him as he passed.

•

Maurice Stafford—the older Maurice Stafford, no longer a boy but a man of seventy-five years who now lived under a different name—tried to flex his left knee in the limited space beneath the Mondeo's steering wheel. His leg always felt worse when the weather was cold or wet, a flaw in his otherwise healthy body, and he thought back to when the injury had occurred.

•

The accident had happened when he was still a boy scavenging in the ruins of the bomb-blasted city, stealing from grocery shops whose owners displayed their wares—fruit (limited) and vegetables (basic)—outside in boxes on the pavement, or from barrows in the markets. At night he slept in partially demolished houses, and on particularly cold nights he went to the underground shelters that some families still used even though the bombing appeared to have stopped (this was before the flying bombs, the V-1s and V-2s, Hitler's newest weapons, began their reign of terror). Most of the families shared their rations with him after he had explained that his father had died overseas and that his mother was an ambulance driver on call that night—he would tell anxious women that his mother always dropped him at a shelter before she went on to do her duty. It was never difficult to attach himself to families or women.

In fact, he had used a large family group—three boys, one about his own age, two girls and their mother—to get past the ticket collector on the day he'd arrived in the heart of the capital on the West Country train, the day he had left Magda Cribben sitting alone on the distant platform. From their chatter, he had gleaned that the boys and girls were evacuees like himself and that their mother had decided to bring them home to London now that the bombings had stopped; it was simple to merge with them among all the other arrivals, then pass unnoticed through the barrier, the collector having no time to count the tickets.

The hauntings had begun just before he broke his leg—indeed the first one was the prime cause of the injury. It had been a chilly April night and he was in a house whose upper floors had been gutted. Maurice snuck into a corner over creaky floorboards, pulling the collar of the over-sized overcoat that a kindly market porter had given him tight around his neck and jaw. Moonlight shone through two glassless windows, spreading across the floor of what once must have been a front parlour. All furniture and ornaments had been salvaged (or looted), for the room was quite empty save for rubble and shattered glass. Weary from a morning's work and roaming the bustling streets—war or no war, the city carried on as normal, the difference being that most of the women wore cheap, dull or homemade clothes, while the majority of men were middle-aged or elderly, those that were younger usually wearing military uniforms, and there were walls of sandbags protecting doorways and tape criss-crossing windows—Maurice soon drifted off to a fractured sleep, too uncomfortable and cold to lie peacefully.

He wasn't sure what woke him—a policeman outside on his rounds, an ARP warden on his way somewhere—something had interrupted his uneasy slumber anyway. He peeked out from his corner, the lapel tips of his coat touching over his chin. If there had been a noise—maybe a rat scuttling through the debris—it was gone now. Maurice snuggled down again, a shoulder fitting into the corner, but no sooner had he closed his eyes than he opened them again. Squinting, he peered into the shadowy corners opposite. There was someone standing in one of them, he was sure. Someone moving in the blackness. Moving out as if to cross the room in his direction.

He gave a little whimper and drew his knees up to his chest, trying to make himself smaller, less easily seen. The shape stopped in the clearly defined light from one of the windows and he saw that it was a man. And there was something familiar about him, the skinny body, the white hair lit by the moon, the rigid stance. Maurice recognized who it was from that alone.

How had Augustus Cribben found him here in London? How could he know where Maurice sheltered? Why was he naked? How could he walk through the rubble without disturbing it or making a noise? Then the boy realized the moonlight was shining
through
the figure! Maurice caught his breath.

At the orphanage before Crickley Hall, one of the female carers, a hefty woman with a ruddy face and wiry hair, had delighted in telling the children bedtime stories about hauntings, and she had claimed that all ghosts were transparent, you could see right through them. And now Maurice could see the shape of the smashed windows through Augustus Cribben.

The boy's eyes bulged as if ready to pop from their sockets, and the hairs at the back of his neck seemed to divide and stand straight. Was Cribben dead? Was this his ghost?

Maurice screeched, a high-pitched terrified sound that shot through the murky London air. He scrambled to his feet, his shoulder brushing against the wall, wiping off dirt and dust, while the ghost, now unmoving, looked on. The boy screeched again, pushing his back into the corner as if to sink through it. The room had become bitterly cold and Maurice saw his own breath materialize in front of him. The limpid image of Augustus Cribben remained still, but Maurice could feel the eyes, even though they were hidden in shadows, boring into his.

Never before had Maurice been so frightened, not even when he and Magda had ran out of Crickley Hall all those months ago. It was as if something bad, something frigid had seized his mind, his body. What did the ghost want from him?

With a panicky wail, he made a dash for the doorless opening on the other side of the room, skirting round the flimsy vision that merely turned to follow his progress. He was halfway there when the bomb-weakened floorboards collapsed inwards, sending Maurice plummeting down into the basement below.

Timber and bricks fell with him, three bricks joined together glancing off his head, debris of cracked floorboards landing on his left leg, pinning it to the stone floor. The blow to the head, although stunning him and causing blood to pour, failed to distract him from the pain of his broken leg.

Maurice screamed and screamed before passing out and the last thing he saw as he slipped into unconsciousness was a face looking down at him from the opening above. It wasn't Cribben's face.

•

An indistinct bulk sitting in the darkness of the car, he bit into his lip. The rain, the wind, was unremitting and Maurice flinched at the bitter torment of memories.

His mood had changed. The calmness had left him for the moment.

It had been the first of the hauntings that were eventually to undermine his sanity. Followed by the dreams that had lost him his freedom for a while when he was young.

•

The man who had rescued him from the cellar (and perhaps who had chased away the ghost) was an ARP warden called Henry Pyke, and he and his wife, Dorothy, would play an important part in the boy's life from then on.