Death Trance

Ten

The police sergeant unlocked my cell and Walter Bedford came in at a bustle that was far too fast for the size of the room. He pulled up, and looked at me, and gave his head a little shake, and said, 'John?' as if he were amazed that it was actually me.

Thank you for coming, Walter,' I told him. 'I appreciate it.'

'They say you killed this woman?' asked Walter. He didn't put down his briefcase.

'She was killed, yes. But not by me.'

Walter turned around to the sergeant who had let him in. 'Do you have someplace more comfortable where we can talk?'

The sergeant looked doubtful for a moment, and then he said, 'Okay, there's an interview room across the corridor. But you understand that I'll have to leave the door open.'

'That's all right,' said Mr Bedford. 'Just lead the way.'

We were ushered into a pale-green painted room with a scratched table and two steel-and-canvas chairs. There was an overcrowded ashtray on the table and the whole room smelled of stale cigarette smoke.

'You can open the window if you like,' Mr Bedford told the sergeant, but the sergeant only smiled and shook his head.

We sat down facing each other. Mr Bedford opened up his briefcase and took out a yellow legal pad; then unscrewed an expensive lacquered fountain-pen. At the top he wrote the date, underlined it, then J. Trenton, Homicide. Outside the door, the police sergeant loudly blew his nose.

'Can you tell me what you were doing in this woman's house?' Mr Bedford asked me.

'I was attempting to pay her a visit. I wanted to talk to her.'

'But according to the police you entered the house through the cellar window. Is that the normal way you visit people?'

'I went to the door but I couldn't get any answer.'

'If you don't get any answer at the door, don't you usually assume that there's nobody in, and go away?'

'I was going to, but then I saw somebody's face at an upstairs window. A man.'

Walter Bedford jotted down 'man's face'; and then asked, 'Was it a man you knew?'

'It was a man I knew of.'

'I don't understand.'

'Well,' I said, 'earlier in the evening, Mrs Edgar Simons had given me a ride back from Granitehead Market, and she had mentioned him to me.'

'Had she described him?'

'No.'

Then how did you know that the man you saw at the window was the same man?'

'Because it had to be. Because he wasn't the normal kind of man.'

'What do you mean by that — "the normal kind of man"? What kind of man was he?'

I raised my hands. 'Walter,' I said, 'the way you're questioning me now, I'm finding it very difficult to explain to you exactly what happened.'

'John,' said Mr Bedford, ‘I’m questioning you now the way you're going to be questioned by the district attorney. If you can't find a way of explaining what happened when I ask you direct questions like these, then I can warn you here and now that you're going to find yourself in a great deal of difficulty when it comes to court.'

'Walter,' I told him, 'I understand that. But right now I need your help, and the only way that I can give you the means to help me is if I tell you in a different way. You're getting the facts out of me, but you're not getting the story.'

Mr Bedford made a face, but then shrugged, and put down his pen, and folded his arms. 'All right, then,' he said. 'Tell me the story. But just remember that it will have to be adapted to fit the conventional methods of court questioning; otherwise, whether you're guilty or not, you'll lose. It's as simple as that.'

'You think I'm guilty?'

There was a slight but visible twitch at the corner of Mr Bedford's mouth. 'You were found alone in a darkened house with a murdered woman. Several people saw you riding in her car earlier in the evening, and the police have witnesses who say you were in a disturbed state of mind just before you went to her house. One of them says you were "rambling, and deranged, as if you had something on your mind." '

'Good old Keith Reed,' I said, bitterly.

'Those are the facts, John. And let's face it, they're pretty cast-iron. Of course, if you tell me you're not guilty, then I believe you, but for the sake of saving yourself quite a few years in the penitentiary, you might find it worthwhile pleading guilty. I can always do a little plea-bargaining with Roger Adams, he's an amenable man. Or, you could plead insanity.'

'Walter, I am not guilty and I am not insane. I didn't kill Mrs Edgar Simons and that's all there is to it.'

'You suggesting this other man did? This other man who wasn't quite the normal kind of man?'

I pushed back my chair and stood up. 'Listen, Walter, you have to hear me out. This isn't easy for me to tell; and it won't be any easier for you to believe. But its one saving grace is that it's the truth.'

Mr Bedford sighed. 'All right,' he said. 'Go ahead.'

I walked across to the green-painted wall and stood with my back to him. It seemed easier to explain what had happened to a blank wall. The police sergeant poked his head around the door to make sure I hadn't taken a dive out of the window, and then went back to reading the Salem Evening News.

'Something's happening in Granitehead this spring, although I don't know why. People are beginning to see things. Ghosts, if you like, if that's the easiest way to understand what they are. But in any case, they're images, flickering brightly-lit images, of people who used to live in Granitehead and have recently died.'

Mr Bedford said nothing. I could imagine what he was thinking, though. A cut-and-dried case of homicide while temporarily insane.

I went on: 'Mrs Edgar Simons told me earlier in the evening that she had heard and seen her dead husband, Edgar. She had heard him walking about the house, seen him in the garden. She told me that Charlie Manzi at the Granitehead Market had experienced similar visitations from his dead son Neil.'

'Go on,' said Mr Bedford, in a voice like a trayful of coke ash.

'Very early yesterday morning, I experienced a visitation, too. I heard someone swinging on the old swing in the garden. Then, when I went home in the evening, I heard it again, and I went outside to take a look.'

'Naturally enough,' said Mr Bedford. 'And what was it?'

'Not what was it, Walter. Who was it.'

'All right, have it your own way. Who was it?'

I turned around. I had to face him to say this. 'It was your daughter, Walter. It was Jane. She was sitting on the swing right in front of me, about as far away as I'm standing away from you now, and she was looking at me.'

I don't know what I had expected Mr Bedford to do or say. I think I had expected him to lose his temper, call me a scoundrel and a blasphemer, and refuse to take my case. The notion of ghosts was too much for anyone to swallow, even in the most conducive of circumstances. The idea that a ghost might have murdered an old lady in a house on the Granitehead highway — well, that was beyond even the grimmest of jokes.

I sat down, with my hands in my lap, and looked at Mr Bedford expectantly. The muscles in his cheek were working, and there was no doubt that his forehead had turned extremely red. But I couldn't read what he was thinking by the expression in his eyes. His eyes were turned inwards, into himself, and they were giving nothing away at all.

'If you want me to lay it on the line,' I told him, 'it wasn't me who killed Mrs Edgar Simons. It was the spirit of her dead husband. Now, I know you can't go into court and — '

'You saw Jane?' Mr Bedford suddenly interrupted me, with considerable harshness in his voice.

I nodded, surprised. 'I think so. In fact, I'm sure I did. Old Keith Reed tried to tell me it was St Elmo's Fire or something, but I saw her face, Walter, just as clear as if she were — '

'You're not making this up? You're not trying to taunt me? This isn't some sort of vicious retaliatory joke?'

Very slowly, I shook my head. T don't have anything to retaliate for, Walter. You may blame me for what happened to Jane, but you haven't been bad to me.'

'When you saw her — ' said Mr Bedford, speaking with difficulty, ' — when you saw her — did she — how did she look?'

'A little strange. Thinner, somehow. But it was the same Jane.'

Mr Bedford put his hand up to his mouth and I realized to my astonishment that there were tears glistening in his eyes.

'Did she — speak at all?' he asked, swallowing. 'Did she say anything? Anything at all?'

'No. But I think I've heard her singing. And several times, I think I've heard her whispering my name. You remember in the office, yesterday morning?'

Mr Bedford nodded. He seemed to be so overwhelmed by emotion that he could scarcely speak. 'I've heard about it, of course. Well, nobody admits to it. But you can't look after their births and their marriages and their wills without getting an inkling that something's going on, can you?'

'What's going on?' I asked him. 'I don't understand.'

He sniffed, and cleared his throat, and then burrowed into his pocket for his handkerchief. 'I don't know very much about it. Only what some of my clients have told me. But many people say that Granitehead is no ordinary community, and never has been. Many people say that if you live in Granitehead, the chances of seeing your loved ones again, after they die, are remarkably high. You may know that the town once used to be called Resurrection, before it was changed by order of the governor of Massachusetts to Granitehead. Well, the reason it was called Resurrection was because the dead were said to visit the living, until the living, too, reached the end of their lives.'

'You believe me,' I said, in shock.

'Did you think I wouldn't?'

'Of course I thought you wouldn't. I've murdered an elderly woman, and my alibi is that a ghost did it?'

Mr Bedford tucked away his handkerchief. 'You really saw Jane,' he whispered. 'My God, I wish I could have been there. I would have given a year of my life, just to see her again.'

'I shouldn't make promises like that,' I told him. 'If Edgar Simons' ghost is anything to go by, these whatever-they-are, manifestations, might be extremely malevolent.'

Mr Bedford smiled and shook his head. 'Can you really imagine Jane doing anything cruel, or hurtful?'

'Not the Jane I knew when she was alive, but — '

'Jane would never hurt anybody, alive or dead. She was an angel, you know, John. An angel when she was living; and now she's gone, an angel still. I'm going to have to tell her mother, you know.'

'Walter, I hate to come back to brass tacks,' I told him. 'But I still don't see how you're going to get me off this homicide charge. Not if ghosts are my only alibi.'

Mr Bedford paused in silence for a long time. Then he looked up at me with reddened eyes, and said, 'Mrs Simons was killed in a most remarkable way, wasn't she?'

'Not just remarkable. Impossible. At least for me to have done it. Or anybody human.'

'Well,' said Mr Bedford, 'I think I'll go talk to the district attorney. I'm sure it's going to be possible to come to some arrangement. He's an old friend of mine, you know. We both belong to the same golf club.'

'You really think you can swing something?'

'I can but try.'

He stood up, and put away his pad. He couldn't stop himself from smiling. 'I can't wait to tell Constance,' he said. 'She'll be delighted.'

'I don't really see what you've got to be delighted about.'

'John, my dear boy, we have everything to be delighted about. Well, almost everything. Once you're released, and back at the cottage, we can visit you, can't we, and see Jane again for ourselves?'

I couldn't think what to say. I shook his hand, uncertainly, and then sat down on my chair as abruptly as if somebody had hit me with a sockful of wet sand. Mr Bedford left and I heard his rubber-soled shoes squeaking up the polished police station corridor.

The police sergeant poked his head around the door again.

'What are you sitting there for?' he wanted to know. 'It's back in the slammer for you.'