Dial a Ghost

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Do I look all right?’ asked Lady de Bone.

‘Yes, Mother, you look fine,’ said Adopta. She rearranged a piece of liver in the spectre’s tangled hair and pulled her bloodstained skirt straight.

‘What about me?’ asked Sir Pelham. ‘Does my hoofmark show up properly?’

Addie stood on tiptoe to examine the place where the horse had bashed in her father’s head and said they both looked fine and everyone would be terrified and now it was time to start.

The de Bones were always a little nervous before the doors of Helton opened to the public and the long queues shuffled in to see the Most Haunted House in Britain. The visitors liked seeing Mr Hofmann’s withered head coming out of the dining-room sideboard and they enjoyed Grandma whooping up and down the window curtains, but it was the Shriekers who made them go ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ and hold on to each other in terror and feel that they had got their money’s worth.

It had been Oliver’s idea to open Helton to the public so as to get money for the work he wanted to do, and it was a great success. Trevor was in charge of the car park and Oliver showed people round and Helton had already beaten all other stately homes for attracting visitors.

Three months had passed since Oliver had turned his head and seen the budgie giggling and laughing and falling about, and he and Addie were close now to fulfilling their dreams. Colonel Mersham had come to live at Helton and Matron had sent her sister down to keep house, and you couldn’t have found two nicer people anywhere. As for Fulton and Frieda, no one had seen them since they scuttled away in terror from the hall.

The awful moment when the ghosts saw the nozzle of the EEB people come round the door and believed they were finished, had changed them all. In that ghastly moment, Lady de Bone and Aunt Maud had stopped fighting over Addie and sheltered her, and when they came round again the de Bones realized how wicked they had been and glided off to Larchfield Abbey to ask the nuns for forgiveness.

When they came back, a sensible arrangement was made about Addie. She spent the weekend with the de Bones, learning to say upper-class things and keeping her shoulders straight, and the week with the Wilkinsons, so that she stopped being a tug-of-war ghost and became a ghost with two sets of parents, which is a very different thing. And if she was always glad when Monday morning came round and she could be a Wilkinson again, she kept these thoughts to herself.

With the money they got from the visitors, Colonel Mersham and Oliver turned the stables into a Laboratory for the Study of Ghostliness. The Colonel was in charge of the work, with Uncle Henry to help him, and they made a splendid team. Already Helton was becoming the place to go if one wanted to know about ectoplasm and how it worked.

But the rest of the buildings and the gardens and the grounds filled up with Addie’s pets. Every phantom animal who did not understand what had happened to them was welcome and not one was turned away: not the ghost of the meanest water-flea or the skinniest tapeworm or the most beaten-up rabbit or pigeon with gunshot wounds in its side. The duck-bill in the zoo passed on at last and Addie brought it down to live in the shrubbery, and though she never found a phantom sheep she became quite fond of the python, who had been ill for a long time after the gas made him throw up the budgie, and needed careful nursing. And there was one animal so special and so famous that scientists came from all over the world to see it sitting by the fountain: the shining, pop-eyed and beautiful ghost of the golden toad which Colonel Mersham had brought back from the cloud forests of Costa Rica.

If Addie never turned away an animal in need, Oliver opened his home to every human spook without a place to lay his head. He had told the ladies of the adoption agency to send him any ghosts they couldn’t place themselves, and soon the Hall filled up with bloodstained widows and actresses who had fallen through trapdoors and foolish people who had thrown themselves under trains for love.

There was one ghost, though, who did not appear.

However much they called her, poor Trixie never came to them. But one night as they were gathered round the sundial for the Evening Calling, a spectre did appear. A blowzy, raddled old spook with a puffy face and an out-of-date hairstyle who landed with a bump on the sundial.

‘Coo-ee!’ she called, waving a fat arm. ‘It’s me. Don’t you remember me, Eric? It’s Cynthia Harbottle!’

It was the most incredible shock. Eric couldn’t believe it. He’d remembered her the way she was, of course: a thin girl in a gym-slip with marvellous teeth.

‘I told you,’ said Aunt Maud under her breath. ‘I told you she’d be old.’

Eric was speechless. He knew that if you love people you have to do it for always and perhaps he would have tried, but then Cynthia did the most awful thing. She snatched Trixie’s banana, peeled it — and threw the skin on to the neatly swept gravel path.

That finished it. No Boy Scout could ever bring himself to love a person who leaves litter lying about, and in that moment Eric’s passion for Cynthia Harbottle shrivelled and died.

Fortunately she was only passing, and after she went Eric was a new man. He whistled as he worked, he went for long tramps in the woods, and when Oliver’s friends came down from the Home for the holidays, he showed them all the clever things he had learnt to do when he was a Scout: how to make a noise like a corncrake, how to splice ropes, and which kinds of sticks are suitable for skewering sausages and which are not.

‘I expect Frederica Snodde-Brittle would be just as awful if she turned up now,’ he said, trying to cheer up the farmer, and Mr Jenkins had to agree.

It was just six months after the Rid A Spook people had been to Helton that Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering had a visitor who absolutely amazed them.

‘You cannot be serious,’ said Mrs Mannering when the ghost who stood before them told them what he wanted. ‘You want us to find you a home?’

The spook nodded. He had been an ugly man and he was a hideous ghost with his long, gloomy face and messy moustache and tombstone teeth. Not only that, but his forehead was peppered with gunshot wounds.

‘I’m a ghost, aren’t I?’ said Fulton Snodde-Brittle. ‘I’ve got my rights, same as everyone else.’

‘No, Mr Snodde-Brittle, you have not,’ said Miss Pringle. She was a gentle woman but she was absolutely outraged. ‘You have lied and cheated and been a criminal spook-destroyer and you are not a person we would ever have on our books.’

‘Well, I don’t think that’s fair. My sister ratted on me — she’s gone all soft and I can’t go on living rough on my own.’

The ladies knew what had happened to Frieda Snodde-Brittle. She had been so terrified when she saw Oliver’s ghost that she had decided to stop being wicked and become a nun, and now she was down at Larchford with her head shaved doing humble things like mucking out the stables and scrubbing floors.

As for Fulton, when he found out that the EEB people had cheated him and that Oliver’s spooks were not only well and happy but making him rich, he went quite mad. He found an old gun that his father had used for shooting rabbits, and took off for Spain to find Fetlock and force him to give back the thirty thousand pounds.

Fetlock and Maisie were in a disco when Fulton stormed in and started letting off his gun, and when he had shot three strobe lights and a potted palm tree, he tripped over a bongo drum and the gun went off and shot him through the head.

‘I didn’t ask to be a ghost,’ said Fulton, who had been sent back from Spain in a body bag. ‘I hate the things. But here I am and I want somewhere to live.’

Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering turned to each other. Their eyes met. They smiled.

‘Well, Mr Snodde-Brittle,’ they said, ‘there is one place which might just suit you.’

So that’s where Fulton landed up — among the bikinis and the see-through nighties and the Footsies in the knicker shop.

Oliver goes to visit him sometimes when he and Matron’s sister go to London, but it’s a waste of time. Fulton just rants and raves among the underwear and tries to tear the Wonderbras to pieces with his teeth.

But for the Wilkinsons, his own family and the people who had made him so happy, Oliver, at the end of his first year at Helton, had a most wonderful surprise.

Aunt Maud had tried to share the Hall with the Shriekers, and not to worry when it was Addie’s turn to be with them. But though they behaved so much better, they were still very snooty and she had never felt really at home among the huge knobbly furniture and the brown pictures of things being shot and the heavy fire irons. Oliver had seen this, but it wasn’t till the farm turned in a profit and he’d done some accounts with his guardian that he saw what to do, and it was really very simple.

He rebuilt Resthaven in the gardens of Helton Hall. He built it exactly as it had been, with the bow windows and the stained glass in the bathroom and the pretty porch. He had the door painted blue and the bird table with the rustic roof put up beside it, and found a mat with Welcome on it just like the one that had been there before.

So just fifty years after they lost their beloved home, the Wilkinsons moved into it again. And this time no bombs fell from the sky and the country was at peace.