The Pariah Read online

  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 tray full 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 sock full 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.’

  ELEVEN

  I was released late in the afternoon on $75,000 bail, put up by an Essex County real-estate corporation of which Mrs Constance Bedford was a major stockholder. Outside, it was bright, dry and windy, and I was picked up by Tom Watkins, one of Walter Bedford’s clerks, and driven back to Quaker Lane Cottage.

  Tom Watkins was young and flush-faced, with a fluffy little mustache. He had never been involved with a homicide case before, and I think I quite scared him.

  ‘I read the police report on Mrs Edgar Simons’ death,’ he told me, as he drove. ‘That was some way to die.’

  I nodded. It was impossible to explain to anybody what I felt about the gruesome events of the previous evening. I was still suffering from residual shock, and a kind of persistent nausea. I could actually imagine what that chandelier chain must have felt like, passing right through Mrs Simons’ insides, cold and uncompromising and beyond any human capability to remove. Worst of all, though, I still felt dread. If Mrs Simons’ dearly beloved Edgar had been powerful and cruel enough in his spirit state to impale his widow like that, what would Neil try to do to Charlie Manzi, or Jane try to do to me? And from what Walter Bedford had told me, Charlie and Mrs Edgar Simons an
d I weren’t the only people in Granitehead who had been visited by flickering visions of their dead relatives.

  For some unknown reason, it seemed as if this year the influence of these manifestations was stronger than usual, although I hadn’t really been living in Granitehead long enough to know what ‘usual’ might be. Mrs Simons had said something about the manifestations being seasonal, more frequent and more obvious in the summer months than they were in the winter. Only God knew why that could be: maybe there was more static electricity in the air in the summer, feeding the apparitions with natural power.

  Tom Watkins said, ‘Mr Bedford will get you off of this rap. You just wait and see. He talked to the district attorney already, and tomorrow he’s going to have a meeting with the chief of police. Actually, the police don’t really think you did it, either. They don’t know how the hell Mrs Edgar Simons got herself up on that chandelier chain, but they don’t really believe that it was you who put her there. They had to arrest you as a matter of procedure; and to satisfy the newspapers.’

  ‘It’s in the newspapers? I haven’t seen one.’

  Tom Watkins nodded towards the back seat. ‘There’s a couple of the locals there. Help yourself.’

  I reached over and picked up the Granitehead Messenger. The main headline read, WIDOW IMPALED IN GRISLY GRANITEHEAD KILLING, local antique dealer held.

  Underneath there was a morgue photograph of Mrs Edgar Simons taken when she was ten years younger, and a picture of me that had been taken outside Trenton Marine Antiques when it first opened.

  ‘That’ll be good for business,’ I said, folding up the newspaper and tossing it back on to the seat.

  Tom Watkins drove up Quaker Lane, turned around in a circle outside my cottage, and parked. ‘Mr Bedford said that he’d call you later this evening. Something about making an appointment to drop over.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Is there anything else you need? Mr Bedford said I was to go get anything you wanted.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you. I want a drink more than anything else.’

  ‘You’re sure you’re going to be okay?’

  ‘I’m sure. Thanks for the ride. And tell Mr Bedford thanks, too.’

  Tom Watkins drove off, and once again I was standing alone outside Quaker Lane Cottage, my hands in my pockets, unsure of what lay waiting for me inside, what strange disturbances from a time and a place that I could only guess at. Was it heaven?

  Or hell? Or a shifting, displaced limbo; a half-seen world of distorted psychic energy, where the spirits of the dead faded and flickered like those garbled radio messages which you can pick up during the hours of darkness?

  The house watched me with its neutral, shuttered eyes. I walked up the garden path, took out my keys, and opened the front door.

  Everything was exactly as I had left it yesterday evening. At least I had had the presence of mind to turn off the oven before I ran out, leaving a half-cooked lasagne dinner on the middle shelf. I went into the living-room and the fire was dead, ashes blowing across the rug from the draught which blew down the chimney. My books were laid out on the floor, and propped up against the side of a chair, the painting of the David Dark.

  I crossed the room and looked out through the diamond-leaded windows into the garden. I could just see the back of the swing seat, and the right-hand side of the orchard. In the distance, silvery-gray rain clouds were building up over Salem Sound.

  Seagulls turned and fluttered around the Neck like wind-blown newspapers. I pressed my forehead against the cold window-pane, and for the first time in my life felt unutterably defeated.

  Perhaps I ought to leave Granitehead for good. Sell up the business, and go back to St Louis. There was even a chance that I might be able to get my old job back, at MidWestern Chemical Bonding. I would probably forfeit a few years of promotion, but what was that compared with the extraordinary terror of what was happening here in Granitehead? I was particularly disturbed by the excitement which Walter Bedford had shown when I had told him about the apparition of Jane. There was something grotesquely unhealthy about it, as well as dangerous. The trouble was, I was beholden to the Bedfords not only for bailing me out of jail, but for two-thirds of the finance which had opened up Trenton Marine Antiques and so it was going to be very hard for me to refuse their request to come over to Quaker Lane Cottage and see Jane’s apparition for themselves.

  I was just about to pour myself a drink when there was a ring at the front doorbell.

  George Markham, maybe? Or Keith Reed? It had better not be Keith Reed, I’d give him a flea in his ear for telling the police that I had been ‘rambling, and deranged.’ I called,

  ‘All right, I’m coming,’ and went to answer it.

  Standing outside in the evening wind was Edward Wardwell, in a plaid lumberjack coat and a peaked denim cap. He said: ‘I’m sorry to call on you personally. But I heard what had happened, and I just had to come over from Salem to talk to you.’

  As a matter of fact, I was oddly relieved to see him. It was better to have some company in that unsettled house than none at all . And I did want to talk to him about the painting of the David Dark.

  ‘Come on in,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t lit the fire yet. I’ve only just been sprung, if that’s the word.’

  ‘Do you think your attorney can get you off?’ Edward Wardwell asked, taking off his cap and stepping into the hallway.

  ‘I hope so. He’s my father-in-law. Well, he was my father-in-law, before my wife died.

  Walter Bedford, of Bedford & Bibber. He’s pretty well-connected. Plays golf with the district attorney and gin-rummy with the judge.’

  ‘I’ve met him,’ said Edward Wardwell. ‘You forget that I knew your wife. She and I went on a seminar together, to study maritime history. That was, what, three or four years ago now, up at Rockport. She was a very pretty girl, your wife. All the guys there kept trying to date her. She was clever, too. I was sorry to hear that she died.’

  ‘Well , thank you for that much,’ I told him. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘I’m a beer man myself.’

  ‘There’s Heineken in the icebox.’

  Edward Wardwell followed me into the kitchen and I opened a bottle of beer for him. He watched me closely as I poured it out.

  ‘You didn’t kill that old woman, did you?’ he asked me.

  I looked up at him; then shook my head. ‘How did you know?’ I queried.

  ‘I have a pretty good idea of what’s been going on around here. I don’t work for the Peabody for nothing, you know. I know more about the maritime history of Salem and Granitehead than almost anyone, except maybe the Evelith family. But then I don’t have their books.’

  ‘You know what’s been going on?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, taking the beer-glass out of my hand. He sipped a little, leaving foam clinging to his mustache. ‘Granitehead has always had a reputation for ghosts, just like Salem has always had a reputation for witches. Although the town fathers have done everything they can to play it down, there isn’t any doubt at all in my mind that Granitehead is a nexus between the spirit world, if I can dare to call it that, and the physical world. More than anyplace else in the whole United States. Perhaps anyplace else on the entire globe.’

  ‘So what happened to Mrs Edgar Simons - you don’t think that I was responsible?’

  ‘It’s possible that you were responsible, but in my opinion not likely. What you obviously don’t know is that there have been six or seven deaths of bereaved people in Granitehead over the past ten years, and all of them have been characterized by the extraordinary and inexplicable ways in which they have occurred. One man was found with his head trapped inside a water-pipe, drowned. The newspapers said that he had put his head down through an access hole to discover what had been blocking the pipe up, but the police report reads different. The access hole was tight around his neck, so that it would have been impossible for him to have put his head through it. The doc
tors had to cut off his head to get him out, and then flush his head out of the pipe with a strong jet of water.’

  I made a face, and Edward Wardwell shrugged. ‘Mrs Edgar Simons’ death was no different,’ he said. ‘A physical impossibility. I mean, let me ask you, if you had wanted to kill her that way, how you would have done it?’

  ‘I couldn’t. It was like some grisly kind of conjuring trick.’

  ‘Exactly, and the police know that, too. They have to prove in court that you killed Mrs Edgar Simons, and if you can show beyond any question that it was impossible for any human being to have impaled her on the chandelier like that, you’re home free.’

  ‘Come through to the living-room,’ I said. ‘I’d like to get the fire going before the temperature starts falling.’

  We went through to the living-room, where I got down on my knees in front of the hearth and began clearing out the fire. Fortunately, there were plenty of logs and kindling stacked beside the grate, so I didn’t have to go out to the woodpile. Edward Wardwell put down his beer, and picked up the watercolour of Granitehead beach. He examined it minutely, and when I turned around from the fire to find some rolled-up copies of Newsweek to stuff under the logs, I saw that he was paying particular attention to the ship.

  He said, ‘Out of those six or seven other deaths, only two people were ever charged with homicide, and both of those were released before their cases got to trial. In each case the district attorney said that there was insufficient evidence to proceed. The same will happen to you.’

  ‘How come you’ve made such a study of it?’ I asked him, as I struck the first match, and lit the corner of the rolled-up magazines.

  ‘Because the maritime history of Granitehead and the spiritual history of Granitehead are inextricably intertwined. This is a magical place, Mr Trenton, as you’ve discovered for yourself, and what’s more the magic is real, and violent. It’s not like the Haunted House at Disneyland.’

  The fire began to burn up, and I stood up and brushed my trousers. ‘I’m beginning to realize that, Mr Orwell.’