The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They had forced open the door of the workmen’s hut and the banshees were making tea.

It was a crush with all of them inside — unlike the ghosts, the banshees were solid — but the fug was cosy. They had missed the last bus back to Clawstone, but the banshees had offered to drop them off on their way home.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Ranulf yet again. ‘Why say the cattle are buried here when they aren’t? What is Lord Trembellow up to?’

‘If it was Lord Trembellow,’ said Mr Smith. ‘He may have been had.’

But why?

No one could understand it. The Feet had climbed on to the eldest banshee’s knee and refused to get down.

‘I feel I’ve seen them somewhere before,’ she said, patting the hairy toes.

‘Yes, I feel the same,’ said the middle sister. ‘Somewhere where we went to do a job. A funeral, I suppose, but I can’t think where.’

And the youngest sister nodded and said that she too felt that The Feet were familiar.

But Rollo could think of one thing only. The fate of the cattle.

‘Where can they be?’ he said again and again, and Madlyn sighed because it seemed to her cruel that Rollo should once again be given hope. If the animals weren’t buried here they would be buried somewhere else.

‘All the same, it’s really strange,’ said Ned. ‘Why pretend to bury them?’

They had searched the site, using their torches, but found nothing. After the torrential rain, any hoof marks or tracks there might have been would have been washed away.

The banshees sipped their tea. The fug in the hut increased.

‘We need some more water for the kettle,’ said the middle banshee.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Rollo.

He took the kettle and went out to the tap at the back of the hut. Wedged behind the standpipe was a long thin metal object. He pulled it out and shone his torch on it. It seemed to be the nozzle of a spray-gun. Well, that didn’t help much. The workmen had probably used it to spray paint on to the lorries.

Rollo sighed. If only he could find some real evidence — something to prove that the cattle had been here — but there was nothing.

He picked up the kettle and went back into the hut.

Sir George had been in bed for an hour when he heard a knock, and Rollo, in his pyjamas, put his head round the door.

‘I have to speak to you,’ he said.

‘Good heavens, boy, it’s the middle of the night!’

‘Yes, I know. But it’s terribly important.’

Sir George put on his bedside lamp. He had indigestion after his dinner party, and a headache from the wine.

‘Well, come on then. What is it?’

Rollo came and stood by the bed. ‘We went to say goodbye to the cows,’ he said, ‘and they aren’t there.’

Sir George roused himself. ‘You did what?’

So Rollo told him about the visit to the gravel pit.

‘But Sunita couldn’t get in touch with the spirits of the cows, and the banshees couldn’t wail and that means that the cows aren’t buried in the pit.’

Sir George looked at Rollo. The boy’s face was lit up and excited, and he hated throwing cold water on his hopes.

‘Look, Rollo, I have every respect for the ghosts. Ghosts are important and venerable. But they’re ghosts. And banshees are banshees. They don’t belong to the real world. The world where animals are infected and have to be buried safely and put away.’

‘Sunita knows about the cattle. She knows. We have to find out what happened to them and where they are.’

Sir George sighed.

‘Rollo, when we want something very much we will believe all sorts of things. You want to believe that the cattle are still alive and so do I, but—’

‘They are alive. I know they are. They’ve been stolen and taken somewhere. I know. You should see my zoo magazine … animals are always being stolen.’

Sir George shook his head. ‘What would be the point of stealing them? No one could get money for them — they’re the only herd of white cattle in the country. They’d be recognized at once.’

But after he had sent Rollo back to bed he lay awake, turning over what the boy had said. It was nonsense — of course it was nonsense. It was wishful thinking. Propped up on his pillows, Sir George remembered the D-Day landing. His best friend had been shot and fell beside him. Later, when there was a lull in the fighting, he went to the field station to see him and the doctor told him there was no hope, but George couldn’t believe it.

‘He’s going to get better,’ he kept saying. ‘He’s got a good colour.’

But the doctor was right. His comrade had died that night.

All the same, thought Sir George now, perhaps he would get in touch with the ministry and ask them to confirm the identity of the vets. And it might be a good idea to have a word with Lord Trembellow.

Rollo had gone to bed at last; all the children slept; the castle was silent.

But the ghosts were not asleep. As the clock struck midnight they glided one by one out of the nursery windows and set off along the road which led through the village.

No one saw them — they moved invisibly, and fast. At the first crossroads they separated. Ranulf and his rat went west, towards the hills and farms of the Lake District. Brenda took the road to the east, which led to the villages and resorts of the coast. Sunita and Mr Smith glided on till the road divided once again. Then Sunita and The Feet made their way southwards, heading for the big towns. Mr Smith went north.

They had said nothing to the children. A Ghost Search is best carried out silently and without witnesses — for the people that must be sought out and questioned are often shy of the undead; they will only help or speak to others of their own kind. And it was from phantoms like themselves that the ghosts of Clawstone hoped to discover what had happened to the cattle.

Ranulf’s ancestors had come from the Lake District; the de Torquevilles had owned big tracts of land there; the wicked brother who had imprisoned Ranulf had been Sheriff of Westmorland. The roads that carried the traffic now were built on the tracks and lanes that Ranulf had known as a boy, and many of them were still steep and narrow. If a truck big enough to take a load of cattle wanted to get through, it would have to take the big motorway to Keswick.

‘Oh, do be quiet,’ said Ranulf to the rat.

But the rodent sensed that they were returning to his home ground. He had been a lakeside rat, one of six who had moved to the ancestral home of the de Torquevilles, and he swooped up and down Ranulf’s chest as if he was on a skating rink.

Just before the road widened for the motorway there was a lay-by with picnic tables and litter bins. It was on this spot that Ranulf’s old friend Marmaduke Franshaw had passed on and become a ghost. He had been practising with his longbow when there was a sudden thunderstorm, and Marmaduke, who should have known better, took shelter under a tree and was struck by lightning.

Ranulf and Marmaduke had shared a tutor, they had ridden together and courted the same girls. Marmaduke had been a keen sportsman, able to follow the spoor of any animal he was hunting. If anyone had noticed a large lorry carrying animals it would be him.

Ranulf sat down on a milestone and prepared to wait.

Sunita’s first stop was in the town where the old ghost with head lice was living — the one who had been at the audition but decided to return to her friends. It had stuck in Sunita’s mind that the old woman had said she lived in a bus shelter near the slaughterhouse.

The word ‘slaughterhouse’ made Sunita feel sick, but if there was any trafficking in stolen animals for slaughter she would have to look into it.

‘No, can’t say I’ve noticed anything,’ said the old woman when Sunita had tracked her down. She bent over a brazier to stir something in a pot, and Sunita saw the lice, silver in the moonlight, drop one by one into the stew. ‘It’s not used now, the slaughterhouse; it’s all locked up. I’d have noticed if anything had come in. They make an awful din, these great lorries — like trains they are, with iron cages and all. Nasty things.’

Beside Sunita, The Feet stirred restlessly. They did not think being opposite a slaughterhouse with an old lady who dripped lice was bad for Sunita; they did not think anything at all — but they felt it through the skin of their toes and the soles of their feet and they moved closer to Sunita.

‘Fond of you, aren’t they?’ said the old lady, looking down at them.

She beckoned to some of the other ghosts who lived rough, but no one had seen anything, and Sunita and The Feet went on wearily gliding south. It was going to be a long night.

The first ghost whom Brenda met as she glided east to the seaside was Fifi Fenwick, exercising her bull terriers. Phantom dogs are usually black, but Fifi’s bull terriers had stayed the same colour they were when they were alive — white with an occasional brown ear — so Brenda saw them at once.

Fifi was immensely interested, of course, to hear that the cattle were not buried where they were supposed to be, and very anxious to help, but she had seen nothing.

‘I mostly stay on the beach,’ she said. ‘It’s easier for the dogs. But I’ll tell everyone at the Thursday Gatherings, of course — they may have heard something. Those lorries make a devilish noise — even when they drive at night they shake the windows.’

She asked after Brenda’s mother and was sorry to hear that she had not become a ghost but stayed where she was, underground.

‘You’ll miss her,’ she said, and Brenda agreed that she missed her badly.

‘Though of course if she hadn’t made me marry the boot manufacturer, Roderick wouldn’t have shot me, and Mummy and I would have been together longer.’

‘There’s a big garage on the way to Seahouses,’ said Fifi. ‘It’s open all night and they’re doing a road survey there. Something about widening the road. They might be able to help you.’

And she called her dogs to heel and strode off up the beach.

Mr Smith, like all men who have made their living by driving taxis, had a very good sense of direction. He could see the roads between England and Scotland in his head as clearly as he had seen the veins on his hand when he still had proper hands. And of the three main roads that led north over the border, the most likely one for a heavy vehicle to take was the road on the flat plain between the coast and the Lammermuir hills.

And as luck would have it, it was there that an old friend of his, who had given up taxis and become a lorry driver, had met with a fatal accident.

Hal Striver had gone head-on into an outsize transporter which had skidded on black ice — one of those juggernauts that should not have been on the road at all — and since then Hal had haunted the garage and the transport cafe near the site of the accident.

He was quite a well-known ghost, not particularly shy, and drivers eating their egg and chips often saw him wandering between the tables. But what Hal mostly did was watch the traffic — he’d been on the roads all his life and to him cars and lorries had personalities, like people. And when he saw a juggernaut, the kind that killed him, he would clench his fists and call rude words after the retreating lorry.

Mr Smith saw him at once. He was standing in the forecourt of the garage, staring at the road, and he hadn’t changed at all. He still wore the blue overalls he had worn when he was driving, and the flat cap, and for a moment Mr Smith was worried because, of course, he himself had changed tremendously.

And at first Hal looked very surprised to see a skeleton coming towards him, but as soon as Mr Smith greeted him, his face lit up. ‘Well, well, Doug, old man, it’s good to see you.’ He looked his friend up and down. ‘What have you been up to? Lost a lot of weight,’ said Hal, and burst out laughing. ‘Never thought you’d end up a skeleton. Remember how we all teased you because you were too fat to get into the cab?’

They talked about the old days for a while but then Mr Smith came to the point. ‘I need your help, Hal,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a big truck — perhaps two — carrying a load of cattle. Would have gone through sometime in the last week.’

‘Are you, then?’ said Hal thoughtfully. He lifted his cap and scratched his head. ‘Now let me see…’

In Cousin Howard’s library the children waited. They had been there most of the day, since they woke to find the nursery empty.

There had been no time to panic — Cousin Howard had given them the message which the ghosts had left as soon they woke — but the waiting was hard. They had never known time go so slowly.

Then, in the early afternoon, Sunita came in through the window, carrying The Feet. Both of them looked utterly exhausted and even before Sunita shook her head they realized that there was no news.

Brenda came in soon after that. Her veil was tangled and her bullet holes had dried out on the long journey.

‘Nothing,’ she said wearily. ‘No one’s seen anything.’

Ranulf came next. His shirt had blown open and they could see the weary rat lying like a limp dishcloth against his chest.

Ranulf did not speak; he only shook his head and collapsed on to the couch.

It was hopeless, then. Dead or alive, the cattle were gone.

Mr Smith came last. He too was exhausted. As he touched the floor his leg bones seemed to give way under him and for a few moments he could not get his breath. But when he roused himself they saw that his single eye was shining, and his skull looked as though it was lit up from within.

‘I have news,’ he said. ‘There has been a sighting. All is not lost!’

And he told them what he had discovered.

‘I’ve got this friend, Hal Striver,’ Mr Smith began, ‘and there’s nothing he doesn’t know about motor transport. Well, last week — on Thursday night it was — he saw two big cattle trucks pull up by the garage, and one of the drivers got out and went into the cafe but he didn’t stay more than a minute, and no one else got out. So Hal went to have a look and he saw it was chock-full of cattle, but the animals were very quiet — he thought they must have been drugged. They often drug animals now when they move them. Anyway, Hal had a look inside the cab of the driver who’d got out, and he saw a map on the dashboard and a ring round one particular place.’

Mr Smith paused and the children waited, trying desperately not to show their impatience.

‘Hal reckons he knows where the cattle were going. To a place called Blackscar Island. It’s over the border, in Scotland, off the north-east coast, and it’s a funny place, Hal said. There’s a causeway you can drive over at low tide, but at high tide the island’s completely cut off. No one knows much about it because it’s so isolated and the people who own it don’t like visitors, but Hal reckons he’s seen other loads bound for there.’

‘And it was last Thursday night that he saw them?’ asked Ned.

Mr Smith nodded. ‘The night after the cattle were taken from here.’

‘Did he see what colour they were?’ asked Madlyn.

‘No. It was dark and there were only small gaps in between the slats. But he did say he thought they were horned.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Sunita. ‘Why pretend to bury the cattle and then take them somewhere else?’

No one could understand it.

‘It doesn’t matter whether we understand it or not,’ said Rollo. ‘We shall find out when we get there.’

‘Get where?’ said Madlyn — though she knew, of course.

‘To this island place. To Blackscar.’