Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 19, No. 99, February 1952

Only Ghosts Stay Young by Laurence Kirk

You have probably read a Laurence Kirk short story before — his tales have appeared in most of the leading magazines in America — Harper’s, Collier’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, to list only a few. Laurence Kirk’s real name is Eric Andrew Simson, and he is a brother-in-law of one of our favorite authors, F. Tennyson Jesse. Mr. Kirk’s pseudonym has an interesting origin: he was born in Edinburgh, and spent most of his early life in Scotland, on the borders of Angus and Kincardine; his postal address at that time was Laurencekirk.

How broad is the meaning of the word “mystery”? In the publishing business it has come to be pretty much a generic term: pure detective stories, thrillers, tales of suspense, psychological case histories — all these and many others, including even the spy story, are now indiscriminately catalogued as “mysteries.” And surely it is true that EQMM has always interpreted “mystery” in the larger rather than in the narrower sense — indeed, each month we try to give you as diversified and varied a selection of stories as possible. Yet, in the past ten years, we have not strayed over the borderline into the supernatural more than a few times — so infrequently that perhaps we do not have an accurate gauge of our readers’ feelings.

Now, the Laurence Kirk story to which we gave a special award in EQMM’s Sixth Annual Contest is frankly a ghost story. True, there are ghost stories and there are ghost stories, and we think Mr. Kirk’s is an unusually fine one. But perhaps you don’t want ghost stories in EQMM, no matter how good they may be. If so — if you want EQMM to restrict its contents exclusively to tales of detection and crime, in a basically realistic vein — please let us know. But we can’t help thinking that every once in a while — every once in a long while — a ghost story just hits the spot...

It is an error to suppose that ghosts are transparent creatures who only show themselves by moonlight. It is equally an error to think that they drape themselves in white, drag chains behind them, or carry their heads beneath their arms. In reality they are very ordinary folk, like us. The only difference is that you will hardly ever hear them speak.

The ghost I am thinking of lived in a small Kentish country town. She went by the name of Miss Raynor and could be seen in broad daylight in the streets, generally walking in front of you. Far from being transparent, she was rather a stout old lady. But sometimes, even when she was quite close in front and turned a corner, there would be no sign of her at all when you turned the corner after her. That, of course, might be explained by the fact that she had gone into a shop. Or again it might not.

She lived in what was known as The Walled House. It was Queen Anne or very early Georgian and had a very beautiful fanlight above the door. It was quite a small house for the country — five or six bedrooms probably — but I have never met anyone who had been inside it. It was called The Walled House because the garden had a solid twelve-foot wall all around it. The only break in this wall was in Fisher Street, where there was a doorway with an exquisitely-worked iron gate which was always locked. Through this gate you could see over a bit of lawn into the garden behind, and people often paused there in the hopes of seeing Miss Raynor inside. But they never did. The lawn was always mown, however, and the garden well kept. The delphiniums in particular were a perfect joy in their season, against the gray wall. But whatever season it was, when you had finished eavesdropping at the iron gate, you probably came away wondering how one single old lady could keep the garden in such good order and yet never be seen at work in it. It was a little uncanny, and might mean that some of the strange things that were said about Miss Raynor were true. On the other hand, although it was known that she hired no gardener, it was certain that the milkman left milk at the door and that the coal merchant dropped sacks of coal through the manhole beside it; and that both of them had their bills paid regularly. So perhaps there was nothing in the strange things that were said, after all.

This was the situation one warm still sunny afternoon in September 1940, and had been the situation so far as I knew for sixty or seventy years. But that afternoon a frightened German pilot in a medium bomber thought he had a Spitfire on his tail. He therefore dived and unloaded his stick of bombs on the first target he could see, and that happened to be the little Kentish town. The first bomb fell in a pond on the outskirts; the second took a corner off a bakery; the third went bouncing down a street and lay unexploded on the steps of the police station; and the fourth landed slap-bang on The Walled House and blew it to smithereens.

They began to search for Miss Raynor almost before the dust had settled on the remains of the garden. But though they worked for days they never found anything that offered any explanation. There was the wreckage of some furniture, a few silver spoons, broken china and broken glass. But of Miss Raynor there was nothing. Not a finger. Not a drop of blood. No clothes. Not a brooch or a ring; nor the cameo she always wore when she went out. On the other hand they did come across a portion of a silken ladder made out of old bell-ropes; and the air-raid wardens who knew the stories about Miss Raynor began to scratch their heads...

Bombs can do the oddest things both in hitting people and in missing them. In another air raid near Selfridge’s, a taxi with four men in it completely disappeared, and as far as I know no one ever suggested that there was anything supernatural about it. The case of Miss Raynor was a little different, however, because of the stories that had been told about her, and a good many people in the town watched carefully to see what happened next. For instance, if Miss Raynor had really died in 1871, as was supposed by some, there was no reason why a mere bomb should interfere with her appearing in the streets. And again what about her money? If a ghost could sign checks, then a ghost could presumably leave a will. The Walled House had been a valuable property, and even though it was rubble now, it must have been left to somebody.

Most of these questions were answered in time. First, no one ever again saw Miss Raynor walking in the street in her blue cloak and cameo. That seemed to indicate that Miss Raynor had been as real as The Walled House and had departed with it. The question of the money did not quite prove anything either way. There were five hundred and twenty-two pounds three shillings in her bank account, but no trace of any will could be found. None of the local solicitors had ever acted for her, and the bank manager had to confess that he had never set eyes on her. The money was paid into her account direct from government securities, and the milkman and the coal merchant were always paid by check. Neither the bank manager nor his two predecessors had ever seen Miss Raynor in person. So there was a good deal of speculation concerning the nature of her existence.

The talk no doubt would have died down very quickly if it hadn’t been for the vicar. He had always been very scathing about any form of superstition and had refused to believe that there was anything odd about Miss Raynor except that she did not go to church. He was very distressed that there was neither an arm nor a leg left for him to bury in public. He felt that that would have put the whole matter in its proper perspective for good and all. As this was denied him he proposed to hold a special memorial service for her. But here again he was frustrated. The air-raid wardens pointed out that with another raid possible at any moment it was undesirable to gather people unnecessarily in one place. So, finally, he decided to have her name engraved — at his own expense — on her father’s tombstone...

Considering what Miss Raynor’s relations with her father were supposed to have been, it was perhaps a rash thing to suggest. In any case, the stone mason who was entrusted with the work was taken ill and nearly died the night before he was due to cut the first letter. After that no one else would take on the job, and tongues started wagging again.

It was soon after the sudden illness of the stone mason that I went in to see Mrs. Reason. I would have gone sooner but Mrs. Reason had been in bed with her arthritis ever since the bomb fell. Arthritis permitting, there was never any difficulty about seeing Mrs. Reason in spite of her ninety-one years; for she kept a curiosity shop and sold anything from antimacassars to old golf balls. She never remembered who you were nor what she had told you the last time you were there. This last peculiarity gave me an opportunity to check up and see if her stories about Miss Raynor had now altered in any way. For Mrs. Reason was the source of nearly all the stories about Miss Raynor. She was the only living person who had known Miss Raynor when she was a young girl and unquestionably alive.

Mrs. Reason was sitting shelling peas in her usual chair by the fireplace, with all her junk around her. I begged her not to get up and then continued.

“Nice to see you about again, Mrs. Reason. How are you?”

“Poorly,” she replied. “Poorly. But I mustn’t complain at my age... Anything special that you want today, Mr. Spenlove?”

Spenlove is not my name, but I passed that over.

“No,” I said. “I’d just like to have a look round.”

“Go ahead,” she answered. “But you won’t find much. Can’t get the stuff nowadays. Can’t get about as I did. But there’s a nice pair of rummers over there.”

I wriggled my way round to look at the rummers while Mrs. Reason went on shelling peas. One had to wriggle in Mrs. Reason’s shop, for if your front wasn’t in danger of knocking something over your back was sure to be.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Reason shelled another pod and went on acidly.

“So the poor old vicar couldn’t bury her after all!”

I examined the rummers, saying nothing.

“Couldn’t even put her name on the tombstone!” Mrs. Reason continued scathingly. “Well, some people just won’t take a telling, Mr. Spenlove.”

I put the rummers down.

“What did you tell the vicar, Mrs. Reason?”

“Why, the truth! The same as I told everyone else. That Alice Raynor died in 1871. Suicide it may have been — and then again it may not.”

“But, Mrs. Reason, the milk bottles! The bank account! How do you explain those?”

“I don’t explain it, Mr. Spenlove. And I don’t explain either how people saw her in the street. I never saw her — but then I knew she wasn’t there.”

I sat down in the high-backed chair opposite Mrs. Reason.

“What was Alice Raynor like in those days?” I asked.

“Pretty,” she answered. “Very pretty. And gay. And naughty, too. She had dark hair which was parted in the middle and sleeked down the sides of her head. I wore it that way myself then. It was the fashion, you know.”

“She was an only child?”

“Yes, her mother died in childbirth. That was when Mr. Raynor put the wall all round the house.”

“To shut himself in?”

“To shut people out, I should say. To keep Alice for himself.”

“And what was Mr. Raynor like?”

“Hard. Self-righteous. With a spade-shaped beard. You don’t know what fathers were like in those days. Thought the Almighty of themselves.”

“Was there any truth in this elopement story?”

“Of course there was!”

“But if she was kept shut up like that, how could she meet anyone?”

“She went out with her father; they were important gentry, you know. It was at Canterbury it happened. There was some to-do at the cathedral, and this young rip was down from London staying with friends. He sat next to her in the pew.”

“That was the beginning of it?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“There were notes. Billets-doux, they called them then.”

“But how did you know?”

“I was the go-between.”

“I see! And the elopement?”

“I was to keep a lighted candle in my window so long as the way was clear. The candle was there all the night, but he never came. He had been killed in Hyde Park in a duel that very morning.”

“But, Mrs. Reason, surely dueling was finished in England by 1871!”

The old lady gave me a scalding look.

“Dueling is just a form of fighting, Mr. Spenlove. To the best of my knowledge men haven’t finished fighting yet.”

I went on more humbly. “Anyway he was killed?”

“Yes. But of course no one knew then what had happened. I don’t think Alice ever knew why he didn’t come.”

“And if he had come, she was going to let herself down with the silken ladder?”

“That’s right. The pony-carriage was to have been round the corner in Nightrider Street.”

“Were you watching by the window with the candle?”

“Of course!”

“What happened?”

“It was July and her window was open. Ready. Then at three o’clock in the morning — that was two hours after Harry ought to have come — I saw a hand shut the window. A big hand — not like hers at all.”

“And you never saw Alice again?”

“Never. A few days later Mr. Raynor gave out that she had gone to finish her education in Brussels.”

“And after that?”

“Mr. Raynor was found the next morning at the foot of the stairs with his neck broken, and the silken ladder was all entangled about his feet.”

“Was there an inquest?”

“Yes, of a kind. Accidental causes, they said.”

“But you didn’t believe them?”

“Oh, yes, I did. At the time. It wasn’t till two years later that I began to wonder about it, and then it was too late to do anything. Not that I ever could have, they being gentry and me not.”

“Did Alice stay in Brussels all that time?”

“So they said.”

“Well, they must have written to her to tell her of her father’s death!”

“That’s what they said.”

“And she answered the letters?”

“So they said.”

“Then she must have been in Brussels?”

“Not necessarily. If a dead woman could sign checks for over sixty years, she could answer letters for two.”

“You never saw her when she came back?”

“No, that’s what made me begin to think. If she’d been alive she would have come to me. She’d have wanted to talk about Harry.”

“Was she very much in love with him?”

“Desperately. She’d have done anything for him.”

“What do you think really happened, Mrs. Reason?”

“Mr. Raynor knew. He paid the other man to pick a quarrel with Harry and kill him. Of course, he didn’t tell her that. But he saw that she didn’t trust him and he strangled her that very night.”

“And the body?”

“He buried it in the garden.”

“Weren’t there any servants in the house?”

“Yes, two poor scared creatures. They lived in the cottage at the back.”

“Did you ever ask them any questions?”

“No, they left when Mr. Raynor died. Before I’d begun to be suspicious.”

“And was Mr. Raynor’s death accidental?”

“Of course it wasn’t! She was there, haunting him. She tripped him up with the silken ladder.”

I got up slowly and looked at the glasses again.

“How much are these rummers, Mrs. Reason?” I asked.

“Thirty shillings the pair. They’re good ones. You couldn’t do better.”

“Then I’ll take them... Do you think we’ve heard the last of Alice Raynor, Mrs. Reason?”

“I don’t see why, Mr. Spenlove. If she stayed on all this time it must have been for some purpose. Alice won’t go until she gets what she wants.”

I paid the thirty shillings, hoped that her arthritis would improve, and walked home with the rummers in my hand. There hadn’t been many discrepancies in the story since the last time. But the hand shutting the window was new, and before it was to Paris not Brussels that Alice had been sent. These seemed to be signs that I had just been listening to the maunderings of an old woman’s mind. It certainly was odd that Mrs. Reason was the one person who had never seen Alice Raynor in the streets. Odd, too, that the stone mason had been taken ill so suddenly. But how could one get over the milk bottles and the bank account? Surely the simple, obvious explanation was the true one. It was not that Alice Raynor’s body had died and her spirit remained alive; but rather, as is much more common, that her spirit had died while her body remained alive. That happens to many people. And in spite of all the stories, the only reasonable thing to think was that Alice Raynor had really gone to Brussels and really come back, that she had really grown old and really been killed by a German bomb.

Thus I argued all the way home and for several days afterwards; but I cannot say that I ever entirely convinced myself that Alice Raynor had died in 1940, and not in 1871.

There were no more bombs on the little Kentish town during the war; even the doodlebugs flew harmlessly over it, and the rockets never strayed as far as that. After the first cleaning-up nothing more was done to The Walled House: it remained a scar and became a playground for the noisier children. This was partly for lack of labor and building materials and partly because nobody yet knew to whom the wreckage belonged. So the willow-herb planted itself there, as it did in London, and made quite a show where the delphiniums used to be. Nothing more was seen or heard of Alice Raynor, and with the death of Mrs. Reason in 1942 even the stories about the lady of the Cameo seemed unreal and legendary.

Then one day, when the war had been over for eighteen months, they began to pull up the street that led to The Walled House. No one knew what it was all about at first, but then at the same time timber and bricks began to be unloaded where the house used to be, and finally it became known what was going to happen there. We were going to have a brand-new, automatic telephone exchange.

I don’t think anyone was very pleased when they heard about this. For one thing, when the building began to take shape, it was new and low and long and failed to tone in with the old surroundings. And for another, we resisted change in any form. We were quite satisfied with the old system; and though the operators were slow at times, we should miss the cheerful girl who would inform us when we rang a certain number that it was no good because the owner of that number was in Canterbury having a hair-do.

However, when progress is being wished on you there is not much good resisting. The low oblong building grew brick by brick, and soon it was having a roof put on it. We were relieved when we saw that it was a tiled roof and not slate or corrugated iron. At the same time mysterious complicated machinery was being installed inside, and the day came when they took away our old receiver and gave us a dialed one instead. It was another three months before we were permitted to use the dial; but when we did, we were surprised to get our number rather more quickly than we had in the old days. And finally, the first monthly bill came in.

I frowned when I looked at it, and frowned again when I studied the details. I then looked across at my wife Marjorie who was sitting opposite me at breakfast.

“Darling.”

She looked up from the births, deaths, and marriages, which she always studied before she let me have the paper.

“Yes, darling.”

“You’re not having an affair with someone in London, are you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Or going to an expensive dressmaker?”

“No.”

“Then why are you always ringing up Mayfair?”

“But I’m not always ringing up Mayfair, darling.”

“Well, I’m certainly not. And there it is!”

Marjorie studied the list of calls which I had handed her.

“What fun!” she said at last. “I must be having four affairs, not just one. They’re all different numbers!” It was time for me to go to work and nothing more was said on the matter for the moment. When I came home in the evening Marjorie was in a state of great excitement. I should explain perhaps that Marjorie is a very credulous woman. That is, except when I am trying to pull a fast one on her myself. Then she is quite different.

“Darling!” she began. “I think I know what’s been happening.”

“About what?” I asked vaguely. I had forgotten about the telephone bill.

“The calls to Mayfair. We’re not the only ones.”

“Of course we’re not. Everyone gets telephone bills if they have a telephone.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. The Adamsons and the Greggs have both been charged with calls to Mayfair that they never made. They’ve written in, complaining.”

“Oh, well, I suppose they’re bound to have teething troubles with a new exchange.”

“But it isn’t a question of teething troubles at all. Have you noticed that they are all night calls.”

“Well, no, I haven’t.”

“They’re all one and sixpenny calls. They’d have been two and three if they had been day calls.”

“All right. So what?”

Marjorie looked more mysterious than ever and sat down beside me. Then she went on breathlessly.

“It was in Hyde Park that Harry fought his duel, wasn’t it?”

“According to Mrs. Reason, yes.”

“And where did he live?”

“According to the same rather doubtful source, he lived in Hertford Street at the corner of Shepherd’s Market.”

“That’s quite near Hyde Park?”

“Very near.”

“And it’s in Mayfair?”

At last I saw in what direction Marjorie was heading.

“Darling!” I said. “I am quite prepared to believe in ghosts, but I am not yet ready to believe that they mess about with dial telephones.”

Marjorie now thrust the bill at me.

“But look at the numbers!” she cried. “Here’s the first. 0497. And then a week later it’s 0622, and then 0713, and 0944. The numbers are going up all the time.”

“Does that lead us anywhere?”

“Yes, it does. Because the Adamsons and the Greggs have got some of the missing numbers. And the three thousand other subscribers no doubt have got the rest. She’s going through them from the beginning until she gets the right one!”

“Who’s she?”

“Don’t be silly, darling. Alice Raynor, of course.”

“You think she’s trying to get Harry on the phone after all this time?”

“Not necessarily. She may be trying to get the man who killed him. Or his son. Or his grandson. If I were a ghost and someone presented me with an automatic telephone exchange, I could think of quite a lot of things to do.”

I thought I was going to have a bad night after this. When Marjorie dreams, she has a habit of flinging out her left arm suddenly and it falls almost invariably in my right eye. However, this time Marjorie slept quite peacefully. But that did not prevent me having a bad night. First, I was in the new telephone exchange. I knew the engineer in charge slightly and had been over it when it was first opened. It was an eerie experience even in daylight when I saw it. There are dynamos and dials, and batteries and cables; but the main feature of it is half a dozen tiers of shelves with narrow alleyways between them. The interior part of the shelves is a crazy criss-cross of wires: black wires and blue wires and red wires and white wires. But the outside facing you appears to be a collection of metal canisters. These look as though they might contain tea or rice or something innocent like that, but in reality their contents were quite beyond my comprehension. And as you stand there you may suddenly hear a click-click-click in the canister by your right knee: then a click-click-click behind your right shoulder: and finally a click-click-click-click at the far end of the room.

That was how it appeared in the daytime. Now at night it was much more uncanny. I was the engineer standing alone distractedly in one of the alleyways and the click-click-clicks danced around me in the silence like will-o’-the-wisps. My job was to stop poor Alice Raynor from troubling Mayfair; but they all seemed ghosts to me: the mother dialing for the doctor; the householder for the police; the lover to make up a quarrel; the lonely to hear the sound of a human voice. But no sound of any human voice came to my ears. It was click-click-click here and click-click-click over there, click-click-click beside me and click-click-click far away. Ghosts! All ghosts! Will-o’-the-wisps! Finally, I could stand it no longer and ran madly from the building...

I must have slept for a time after that, for next I was walking up Fisher Street before the bombs fell and while The Walled House was still standing. Alice Raynor was in front of me in her blue cloak and cameo, and this time I followed her right into the house, stepping through the heavy oak door in the same way she did. And the moment she was through the oak door the cameo and blue cloak vanished, and she was dressed as Mrs. Reason had described her with her pretty dark hair sleeked down the sides of her head — a girl of twenty-one wearing a simple yellow dress.

I had then one of those moments of extreme clarity which occur in dreams and only in dreams. Outside the house she had appeared as we would have seen her: aging, tiring, thickening; inside, she appeared as she saw herself: a girl of twenty-one. After all, she never Would be more than twenty-one. She was right to see herself like that. And for her there was a timelessness as well as an agelessness. She no longer had to worry because Harry didn’t come for her. He would come, and time didn’t exist. That was why the garden had bloomed so lavishly for nearly seventy years. Harry was coming for her. No doubt it was because the Germans had deprived her of her garden that she was now taking more active measures and making use of the thing that had taken its place...

I had rather a bad headache the next morning. All the crystal clearness of my dreams had vanished and I realized among other things that a call to Mayfair was not just a matter of click-click-clicks at our local exchange. It was a Toll call — Toll B to be exact — and one had to dial O on one’s instrument. A ghost might be able to dial O, and might not; but there were other complications. The call would go direct through our exchange to an operator at Canterbury. She — or rather he at night — would see the light on the panel, plug in, say “Toll B” — and then ask what number was wanted. Having plugged in to the outgoing line he would ask for the caller’s number. Finally, when the receiver was lifted at the Mayfair end, two lights would indicate that the call had been completed and the timing apparatus would begin to work. The operator had no need to listen in to tell when the call was finished: the lights did that, and the timing apparatus showed every tenth of a minute as it passed. Each call of this sort was recorded by the operator on a separate little slip of paper, which found its way finally to the billing department.

All this seemed to me to make it extremely unlikely that even the most practical of ghosts could have anything to do with it. But Marjorie did not share my doubts. She said that neither we nor the Greggs nor the Adamsons had made the calls — therefore Alice Raynor must have made them. And besides, she added, the calls were always made between twelve and one, and that was the hour during which Alice Raynor was going to elope with Harry.

I had a very prompt reply from the telephone manager, regretting that they were having some trouble at the new exchange (this seemed to indicate that the calls to Mayfair from other exchanges were genuine enough) and saying that another bill would be submitted omitting the disputed calls. Nothing more happened for two days; then on the third morning a supervisor called up from Canterbury and asked if we had rung up Mayfair 1321 at 12:29 during the night. I said no, we certainly hadn’t, and the supervisor thanked me and rang off. Marjorie was furious with me over this. She said that if it had been she who had answered the telephone she would have got the whole story out of the supervisor.

Marjorie went off a day or two later to stay with her sister, and I walked round in the evening to The King s Arms which is one of our forty-four pubs. There in a corner, by himself, looking very disconsolate, was the engineer who had shown me round the exchange.

I sat down beside him.

“Well, how’s everything?” I began cheerfully.

He drained off the remains of a pint.

“Awful!” he said feelingly. “Absolutely terrible!”

I immediately ordered two more pints.

“Is it the Mayfair calls?” I asked.

“Of course it’s the Mayfair calls!”

“Is that the only exchange concerned?”

“So far, yes.”

“Well, you’re bound to have teething troubles, aren’t you?”

“Teething troubles! This is a ruddy tusk coming in! A mammoth’s tusk!”

“But I’m sure all the people here understand that it isn’t your fault.”

“I’m not worrying about the people here. That’s nothing to the trouble at the other end. People don’t like being hauled out of their beds at one o’clock in the morning to answer the phone, and then hearing a voice say, ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry!’ It’s uncanny. They don’t like it. And I don’t blame them.”

“Is that what the voice always says?”

“That’s what it says when it says anything. Sometimes it just hangs up when Mayfair answers. It’s always this end that hangs up first.”

I sipped my beer in silence for a moment. I was wondering what the voice really did say. Was it “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” Or was it perhaps “Harry, Harry, Harry!” Or even “Hurry, Harry, hurry!”

“What kind of a voice is it?” I asked.

“A woman’s voice apparently.”

“Quite a young voice?”

“So they seem to think... Of course, we’re only just beginning to check up seriously. There wasn’t any reason to suppose that there was anything wrong with those Mayfair calls until they were all disputed. But now we do check up every single time. Callers sometimes give their own number wrong as well as the other, you know. So we ring the caller’s number back each time — while we’re trying to get the Mayfair number — and we always get a busy signal. It’s very odd.”

“Very odd,” I agreed.

“Of course it’s faulty wiring somewhere. We’ll fix it in time. But you see what we’re up against.”

I thought I knew what he was up against a good deal better than he did. But I saw no point in talking about ghosts to a man with all those technical letters after his name. Instead, I offered him another pint.

He shook his head and rose wearily to his feet.

“It’s enough to make any man take to drink,” he said. “But I’m not going to. I daren’t. I’ve got to get this thing fixed.”

It was then that I had my brainwave.

“Will you do me a favor?” I asked. “I mean, later on when you have got it all put right.”

“Why, certainly... You want to know how we fixed it?”

“No, no. I wouldn’t understand a word of that if you told me.”

“Then what?”

“When it’s all over I just want to know what the last Mayfair number was that was called.”

The engineer looked puzzled, but agreed to do as I wished.

About ten days later the engineer rang me up. His voice was quite different, just as though he had newly fallen in love, and I realized at once that something good had happened to him.

“We’ve got it!” he announced.

“You mean, the trouble at the exchange?”

“That’s it. Stumbled on it quite accidentally. Very interesting technically. I’d like to tell you.”

“I’d like to hear. But as I’ve already said, these things are quite beyond me. I can replace a fuse, and that’s all.”

“It was a fuse that put me onto it, as a matter of fact.”

“Then the fault was here at your exchange?”

“Oh, yes, it was here all right. Look, it’s quite simple really. I’ll tell you.”

“No, no,” I said firmly. “Just the number, please. The last Mayfair number that was called.”

He sounded disappointed, but he gave me the number which for security reasons I shall call Mayfair XXXX.

When I told this to Marjorie she thought deeply for a moment, and then said that it was quite time that I took a little holiday. I knew that a holiday to Marjorie meant a visit to London; and while I like going to London with Marjorie, I also knew that when she takes a husband there a lot of unbudgeted expenses fall upon him.

Nevertheless, we went up to London and stayed in a hotel. Marjorie was in command and immediately after lunch she went and had a long session with Telephone Enquiries. When she came back she was looking very pink in the face and I thought for a moment that she must have had a rebuff and discovered that Mayfair XXXX was the number of a dentist in Shaftesbury Avenue, or something of the sort. But not a bit of it. Mayfair XXXX was the number of a pub called The Crown and Anchor, and it was in Hertford Street at the corner of Shepherd’s Market.

I pointed out to Marjorie that the pubs had just closed and wouldn’t be opening again for four hours; but in spite of that she immediately dragged me off to Hertford Street. There we examined The Crown and Anchor from the outside, noted that the position tallied with what we had heard, and saw that the doors and windows were painted a pleasant shade of green. We then walked along Hertford Street towards Hyde Park. On the way we passed a house agent’s — Dean & Daintree, Established 1851 — and Marjorie said we might as well go in and ask about flats.

I followed her in some trepidation and the trepidation continued when a senior well-dressed member of the firm offered us several flats and houses, all at enormous rents. Marjorie managed to find some objection to all of them and finally said that she hadn’t realized that the district had become so commercialized. The house agent, with a pained expression, asked what she meant, and Marjorie explained that she was referring to the shops opposite and the pub at the corner. She supposed, she added, that it was all the result of the war. Still dignified and still pained, the house agent replied that it was not the result of the second war, nor even of the first. The Crown and Anchor, for instance, had been a pub since 1881. And what had it been before, Marjorie asked, rather too eagerly? It had been a private house, the agent informed her, and it had become a pub because it had been empty for ten years. Why had it been empty for ten years, Marjorie demanded? Because, the agent answered coldly, it had acquired a bad reputation for some reason and nobody would live in it. The pub on the other hand, he added, had a very good reputation and caused no inconvenience of any kind to the residents in the neighborhood.

At this point we withdrew in fairly good order and went and sat in Hyde Park. It was delphinium time and both of us were thinking, not only of the garden at The Walled House, but also of a scene which had taken place somewhere around us, when a young man lay dead on the grass soon after dawn.

Finally, a few minutes after six, we stepped into The Crown and Anchor. There were a few people there already, but they paid no attention to us, and we sat down at the bar and ordered pink gins. Presently the landlord came wiping along the counter towards us and I think he was just going to say something when the telephone rang at the other end.

He looked up, a little anxiously, we thought, and then went on wiping, as a barmaid took up the receiver.

“Have you been having any trouble with the telephone?” Marjorie asked the question in her most innocent manner.

“No, not really,” the landlord answered.

“Some people have, haven’t they?”

“So I believe... And it did ring here three nights running.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. The wife was asleep and I was too lazy to get up.”

“Was that all?”

“It rang again the fourth night.”

“And you still didn’t get up?”

“No. But the receiver was off when I came down in the morning.”

“Was there any explanation?”

“No, we didn’t bother. When anything like that happens we just say it’s our little poltergeist.”

“Poltergeist!”

“Yes. When glasses get broken in the night or someone takes a nip at the port, we just say it’s the poltergeist. Saves a lot of trouble.”

Marjorie and I looked at each other. We both knew that secret drinkers weren’t necessarily ghosts. We knew, too, that the telephone troubles could be fully explained by electronics or something of the sort. But to us at any rate electronics are far more supernatural than ghosts, and we preferred to think that the long period of waiting was over and that Alice Raynor had got to her Harry at last.

So we ordered two more pink gins and drank a toast to their health — to the Lady of the Cameo and her Harry...