The Talking Board Read online

  “The voice.”

  “So you hear it too? And what do you think is causing it?”

  The answer was terse and snappy. “I don’t know. Damp? A broken window? The angry ghosts of my ancestors?”

  “Could it be a ghost?” Marianne asked, knowing full well that it could not be.

  “She thinks so.”

  “Mrs Newman?”

  “Mm. Her. So I think.” The voice was faint now and she faded away, hopefully into sleep.

  Marianne went back to the table and sat down opposite Constable Bolton, who had not moved an inch. He raised his eyebrows at her, and smiled.

  “The plot thickens, eh? Now what, chief?”

  “What do you think?” she asked him, experimentally.

  He shrugged. “You’re in charge. Like I told young Gladstone, I’m happy enough to follow orders. Always the safest way.”

  You mean that it is the easiest way, you lazy lump, she thought. She wondered if she could order him to show initiative, or whether that would trigger some kind of internal breakdown. Instead she left him alone, and went out into the darkened corridor.

  Mrs Newman was coming down the corridor from the main part of the house, with a dark housecoat wrapped around her, and thick woollen slippers on her feet. She still walked with elegance and poise. She had a candle in a holder. “I heard it again,” she said in a low voice.

  “I heard it too,” Marianne said. “I am afraid I might have woken Miss Dorothea Newman.”

  “Oh, Miss Dorothea will have woken at the first scream,” Mrs Newman said.

  “It was not quite screaming, to my ears,” Marianne said. “There was a lyrical quality to it. I could not pinpoint the source. Where do you suspect it emanates from?”

  “Like you, I am not sure. But it is certainly only heard from the vicinity of the Grand Bedroom.”

  “And only this part of the house is used?”

  “Yes. And mostly only this floor, too. Underneath us in this wing, the rooms are all shut up. The kitchens are at the back of the great hall, and the attics above us are no longer used either.”

  “Might I be allowed to look around?” Marianne asked, hating the tentative note she could hear in her voice. She ought to be confident. She was here with at the request of the police, after all.

  “Of course,” Mrs Newman said. “I expected that you would ask. I can accompany you or you can have free rein yourself. I shall inform Mrs Peck in the morning that you are to be allowed full access. She has retired now, I am afraid.”

  “Oh – I rather thought I might look around now.”

  “Now? At night?”

  “Yes. While the noise is fresh in my ears. It might return.”

  “No, it never sounds more than once a night.” Mrs Newman hesitated and finally said, “Well, if you are sure, then you may. Those two doors at the end, the first you come to by the stairs, are mine and Tobias’s rooms.”

  “Tobias?”

  “Ah.” Mrs Newman didn’t change expression. Her fixed gaze was too telling, in a way. She was repressing something. “Tobias is my poor late husband’s nephew. He is but a boy of sixteen, and orphaned. I expect Constable Bolton shall accompany you?”

  “I will go and speak to him,” Marianne said, and smiled.

  Mrs Newman stalked back to her room. Marianne thought, if you call the elder Miss Newman your aunt though she is no blood relation, why do you put a distance between you and this boy, Tobias?

  If a recalcitrant kitchen maid isn’t causing this mischief, then a young man very well might be.

  MARIANNE DIDN’T GO back to speak to Constable Bolton. He was of little use. She took a moment to compose herself, and to just listen to the house settling around her. She was not scared.

  She told herself that she was not scared a few times, until she started to almost believe it.

  Anyway, what was there to be scared of? She did not have any time for spirits, ghosts, phantasms, and anything purporting to come from beyond the veil. She had yet to see a medium who had not relied entirely on tricks and illusions. She hated, with a fierce passion, the abusive tricks played on vulnerable people by those who said they could contact dead loved ones. She was regularly hired by people seeking to expose such tricks, often in the matter of wills and inheritances. After all, fraud was big business. But this was her first official job with the police, and she had to get it right.

  Maybe that was her fear. That she might fail, and lose the rosy future that she had already been building up in her head. A future she had imagined that was of respect, money and crucially, freedom.

  Freedom. Her own house. Hers. That was what she was fighting for: her independence.

  She prowled up the corridor, trying every door as she went. None of them were locked. She peeped into a library, a study, a store room, and a well-used day room of comfortable sofas and couches. This was the only recognisably lived-in room she’d seen. It was crowded with familiar objects and decorated in the overblown style of a few decades previously. Even the fireplace was hung with swags of fabric, and every surface was cluttered with clocks and pictures and china ornaments and potted plants. It smelled a little moist.

  Nothing suspicious revealed itself in any of the rooms.

  She went back to the central hall and found the attic stairs, and crept up to the top floor. A narrow corridor ran the length of the west wing, ending in darkness at the far end, and it was just as Mrs Newman had said. Each room was shut up and unused. Marianne pinpointed the rooms above the Grand Bedroom but they were empty, devoid of everything, with not even a box or a drawer or a plain chair. They were swept clean, and smelled of wood. She went back out to the corridor. The floorboards creaked. She glanced at the far end but the shadows were forbidding and she could not see any doors that she might open. Instead of going to the far end, she retreated.

  Marianne explored the rooms underneath the Grand Bedroom then, finding a closed-up withdrawing room and a silent, tomb-like dining room with a massive long table and chairs all covered in sheets.

  She lifted every sheet, opened every cabinet and probed into every drawer. Dust surrounded her in clouds and her clothes grew thick with the stuff. She had hoped to find a phonograph laid out on a table, just as Bolton had predicted, but there was nothing, and nowhere that she could see to hide one. She’d look again in the morning, in daylight, if daylight could penetrate the murky windows of Rosedene, but for now, she had to concede defeat.

  She slipped quietly upstairs to the room where Bolton was now making himself comfortable in a nest of blankets on the floor.

  “You’re sleeping?” she asked.

  “Why not? If it happens again, I am sure I’ll wake up. If I do not, you may hit me with the teapot.”

  And what use will you be when you wake, she thought. She sat down at the table and waited for the supernatural to come and find her. And she knew that it would not.

  Three

  Breakfast was awkward, not least because Marianne was exhausted and grubby and knew that she smelled slightly stale. She’d slept, in the end, fitfully, on a long low couch. In hindsight, she was slightly annoyed, mostly with herself. She had been so keen to prove her worth, to show that she was as capable as any policeman, that she had not questioned the actual practicalities of spending the night in the house. Bolton was used to night-time escapades, but she was not. Still, she refused to mention her discomfort. She had an image to maintain. And it was not much worse than her freezing rooms at university, to which she had been confined for long hours and days due to lack of funds or chaperones.

  The four of them sat around a small square table in one of the upstairs rooms; Tobias was there. Mrs Newman apologised profusely for the shabby standard of things, explaining that she had not been at Rosedene for long, and had so far made little progress in “improving” the house.

  “Not that it’s my place to do any such thing,” she added. “But for Tobias’s sake, you know...” She trailed off.

  Tobias was a silent y
oung man with knuckles so knobbly and fingers so thin he looked like he had been made out of pipework and string. He ducked his head when Bolton and Marianne were introduced to him, and didn’t say a word. He worked on his eggs with a neat precision, carving them into regulated sections of equal size before eating them with stabs of his fork.

  “Tobias,” Marianne said, after a few minutes of polite small talk. “Have you heard the strange noises at night?”

  He nodded.

  “What do you think they are?”

  He shrugged.

  “Tobias!” Mrs Newman hissed. Then, to Marianne, she said, “Please do allow the boy some slack. He has suffered some personal tragedies of late and ... well. He is not strong. I fear for his heart.”

  “I am so sorry to hear that,” Marianne said, and knew she would not be able to press her question again to the mourning boy without seeming like a monster.

  “So,” Mrs Newman went on. “Of course, there cannot be a ghost here. Or can there?”

  “Of course not. There are no such things. Eminent men and women have been searching for years, but no evidence can be found. Nothing that can be reproduced in a laboratory, anyway,” Marianne said.

  Mrs Newman nodded. “Quite, quite. So I have read. And yet ... what, then, is causing the disturbance? Dear Aunt Dorothea called in a woman with a talking board, you know, to contact the spirits and ask them to stop. It didn’t work, and we were all disappointed.”

  “No, it wouldn’t work. Especially as there are no such things as spirits,” Marianne said, looking intently at Mrs Newman. Her impression from the previous night was that Miss Dorothea did not think it was of supernatural origin. Why would she call in a “woman with a talking board” then? “The unconscious wills of the participants influence the board’s movements and it spells out only what you want it to spell.”

  Tobias stirred. He looked about to speak, but instead took a gulp of tea.

  “I did not think that the elder Mrs Newman believed in spirits?” Marianne said. “My impression of her was brief, but she was dismissive.”

  “No, she does not. But much like me, she was and is baffled by the screams. Sometimes it sounds like a voice, a child’s voice. When one has explored all everyday explanations, what is one left with?” Mrs Newman laughed with something like embarrassment. “Every day I read of new scientific breakthroughs. Electromagnetism! I saw a demonstration and were it not for the man with a beard and a good suit, I should have thought it to be witchcraft. So here we are. If no cause can be found, then ... the truth, however strange, unlikely and awful though it is, must lead us to believe...” She tailed off.

  So did Mrs Newman believe, secretly? Many people did. They pretended to be all full of reason but there still seemed to persist, deep in a human heart, the need to believe in something ... something more. The pain of losing someone was sometimes too much for people to bear. Maybe, they hoped, they were still with us – in spirit.

  Marianne understood. But she hated it, nonetheless. Her own mother had never made any kind of visit from “beyond the veil”, after all.

  Bolton had already finished eating. He patted his lips and sat back, apparently oblivious to the conversation. Mrs Peck materialised to remove the dirty plates, and Tobias took the chance to leap up, mutter something incomprehensible, and quit the room. But he went slowly and awkwardly, noticeably dragging one leg.

  “You mentioned a terrible tragedy,” Marianne said once he had gone. “Might I ask what happened?”

  “He was in a railway accident. Did you not see his limp? His legs were smashed to bits, quite smashed. His parents – my poor dear husband’s cousin and his wife – were both killed outright.”

  Marianne tried to draw out the relationship in her head. So Tobias was not even a nephew, as such, but a more distant relation. “And is he not at school?”

  “Not now. He wishes to return, but ... well, as you can see, it is all quite impossible. He cannot go back at the moment. Maybe in the future. There are ... difficulties. Would you care for more tea?”

  “No, thank you. I should like to examine the rooms once more. Including the Grand Bedroom, if Miss Dorothea will allow it.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  But nothing more was found, and nothing was hidden, and nothing was revealed. Marianne went through every place with patience and dedicated, and found absolutely nothing that she had not seen during her night time exploration. She caught glimpses of Tobias, in and out of his room and the library, but he did not speak. Dorothea Newman was half-asleep and muttering, and Mrs Peck was busy in the kitchens with a limp maid, and Bolton followed Marianne like a half-beaten dog.

  Her head ached. Her body was sore. And she smelled. She gave up before lunch, and trudged back to the railway station with the annoyingly ebullient Bolton. It had begun to rain, only lightly, but every droplet sank into her skirts and made them heavier and heavier. He escorted her to a second class carriage and watched her train pull away, waiting on the platform until she was out of sight.

  Marianne sank back into the corner seat, wedged against the window and surrounded by well-dressed women in a group, all on their way to someone’s house for some reason that seemed to involve lots of whispered gossip and some unexpected screams of uncouth laughter. She closed her eyes and tried to close her ears to it, and looked forward to a wash, a change of clothes, and an afternoon nap in her own bed at Woodfurlong.

  SHE WAS SURPRISED TO find Mr Dry in the hallway when she entered. She was shaking the water off her cape and hat and he hurried forward to help her. He was Price Claverdon’s valet and general man, though he would also accompany Phoebe on shopping trips into London if necessary. Marianne was not entirely sure quite how he filled his days. Price worked long days in the city, and especially more so recently. Still, Mr Dry always moved around the house with a busy air, giving off the impression he was buried under a list of duties.

  Marianne herself, as half-cousin of Phoebe and living at Woodfurlong at Price and Phoebe’s indulgence, had no staff to her name. She let Mr Dry take her wet things with thanks, and asked where the steward or the housekeeper were.

  Mr Dry flared his nostrils. “Both are rather put upon. Mrs Claverdon’s mother, Mrs Davenport, is here,” he said stiffly and formally. And then, in a lower and more normal voice, “And miss, I must warn you: she is frighteningly intent upon changes.”

  “Oh good heavens, no,” Marianne said in alarm.

  He glanced around before leaning in even closer to Marianne. “You have a special relationship with the staff, miss. You might reassure them, if you will. She is here on a mission.”

  “What mission?”

  He looked at her closely and there was a flicker of unease in his eyes. “Against extravagance,” he whispered, and paled, and looked around again, as if he were about to be set upon.

  And perhaps he was, in a sense.

  Marianne understood, and felt a cold fear grip her own heart, too. She nodded, and started out for the Garden Wing, where she lived with her chronically ill father and his chemical experiments.

  She nearly made it before being ambushed.

  The central hallway of Woodfurlong was designed to impress and to welcome guests and strangers alike. It had a large central staircase that swept upwards, interrupted by a landing area halfway where it then split into two curling sets of stairs heading to a gallery lined with cabinets that showed Phoebe and Price’s wealth and good taste. This meant it was difficult to make an unseen entrance, especially if the door to the drawing room upstairs was left open. In this case, it clearly had been, and deliberately so.

  Mrs Ann Davenport, Phoebe’s mother, swooped down the stairs and hailed Marianne. Marianne could not pretend to ignore her.

  “We’ve been waiting for you, Marianne!” Mrs Davenport declared. She gripped the handrail tightly but walked upright and stiffly, determined not to let her age slow her down at all. Phoebe fluttered behind, pulling faces at Marianne that she could not decipher. But t
hey weren’t ones of joy, at any rate.

  Mrs Davenport reached the ground floor and extended her fingers for Marianne to press. They were as dry and papery as the woman herself. She was dressed in shades of grey and cream, in the fashion of three years ago. Her clothing was always of such quality that it never wore out and needed replacing. She wore tiny, exquisite jewels that were priceless heirlooms. She would never have shopped for such things herself.

  And she despised someone who would.

  Vanity and avarice were such worldly sins.

  “Marianne,” she said, in a voice that was carefully kind and warm. The calculation of it, the theatrical artifice, made Marianne wince. “My dear girl. How you’ve ... grown.”

  Marianne felt as if she was too tall, and that she had deliberately done it to annoy Mrs Davenport. Phoebe and Marianne were half-cousins, and after the death of Marianne’s mother, they had spent much of their childhood together. Yet Mrs Davenport was never going to be anything other than the strictly formal Mrs Davenport. It was even an effort for Phoebe to call her mother.

  “Mrs Davenport. How lovely to see you. And unexpected. I hope you are keeping well?”

  “Tolerably so. I thank the Lord every day for my good fortune, my family, my household and my gifts.”

  “As do I.”

  “Hmm.”

  They both knew that Marianne was lying.

  Mrs Davenport swept her critical eye across Marianne and clearly disapproved of her crumpled, stale-smelling state. Although to be fair, Marianne disapproved of her own state too. “And I understand that tragically you are still unwed,” Mrs Davenport said, as if referring to a bad case of haemorrhoids.

  “I have been busy with my studies and now, my work occupies much of my time.”

  “When you marry, you will have far more important work to do.” She smiled thinly. “As you are well aware, I am sure. You know your duty. To the country. I do think it is only fear that is holding you back. But you must fear no longer. I am here to help.”