House of Bones (6 page)

They continued towards the stairs, but as soon as they did so, John heard the noise again, closer this time, as if something was softly hurrying up behind them, intent on catching them before they could turn around. He stopped again, and Lucy stopped, too.

“I heard it,” she said, in a voice as white as paper.

John hesitated for a moment, listening. The corridor was silent, but he had an overwhelming feeling that there were other people here, very close by, waiting for them to turn their backs.

He took hold of Lucy's hand and took a cautious step further, and then another. Then he stopped again, and listened some more.

He was sure that somebody was standing only centimetres away from him, steadily breathing, yet he couldn't see anything at all, not even a ghostly shadow.

He took another step – and, as he did so, he trod on something hard. He looked down and saw that it was a ring. He bent down and picked it up, and held it out so that Lucy could see it. A man's wedding band, made out of twin ropes of yellow and white gold.

“This is Mr Rogers' ring,” John whispered.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Positive. I noticed it when I gave him the key.”

“Then he must have been here, mustn't he?”

John nodded, looking around him. The atmosphere in the house, already threatening, began to tighten, as if a thunderstorm were imminent. Taking hold of Lucy's hand again, he backed slowly towards the head of the stairs, and he was conscious that they were being closely followed. He almost expected to feel breath on his cheek.

“What is it?” asked Lucy, and she was clearly terrified.

“I don't know. I don't know what it is.”

“It's a
ghost
” she said. “I swear it.”

“There's no such thing.”

He reached behind him and felt the newel post on the top of the bannisters. “Let's make a run for it,” he said. “One – two – three—”

They turned and hurtled down the stairs, taking two and three at a time. The instant they did so, they heard the someone coming after them, jumping just as fast. Lucy screamed and almost lost her balance, but she managed to grab the handrail to steady herself.

They bounded down to the hallway and ran across to the front door without looking back. John opened it up, and they rushed outside, down the steps, and out along the shingle driveway. The door slammed behind them with a deafening bang.

They reached Lucy's car and scrambled into it. Lucy juggled with the keys and dropped them on to the floor, but John scooped them up for her and she managed to start the engine.

“You're right!” John panted. “It
is
haunted! I don't believe in ghosts but there's a ghost in there!”

“Let's just go,” said Lucy. She swerved out into the road, nearly knocking an old man off his bicycle. “Oi!” he shouted after them.

They sped through the mid-morning traffic back to Streatham High Road. “We'll have to take this ring to the police,” said John.

“Oh, yes. And where are you going to say that you found it?”

“What are you talking about? I'm going to tell them the truth, that's all.”

“And what do you think Mr Vane's going to do when he finds out that we've borrowed his key and gone snooping around one of his precious houses? He's going to sack us, that's what. And I don't know about you, but I need this job.”

“So what else can we do? Mr Rogers could still be in the house somewhere, couldn't he? He could still be alive. What if he starves to death, because we were too scared to tell the police?”

“We could give them an anonymous tip-off,” Lucy suggested. “You know, like they do on
Crimewatch
.”

John held up Mr Rogers' ring and inspected it from all angles. “I suppose we could. And we could find out more about 66 Mountjoy Avenue, too. Mr Vane must have some kind of file on it.”

“You're not going to start
rifling
again, are you? You're going to get yourself in terrible trouble.”

John didn't say anything. He was thinking about the thing that had followed them down the empty corridor, and the statue lying on the bed. He couldn't get the statue's pale ivory face out of his mind – its unblinking stare; its eerie, terrifying calm. He wondered if it were the statue of a real man, or if the sculptor simply created the most frightening face he could think of.

During his lunchbreak, he went out to a callbox on the corner of Fern wood Avenue and dialled 999. An
old woman in a flowery dress arrived outside just as his call was being answered, and she continued to glare at him all the way through his conversation.

“Emergency. Which service, please?”

“I want to talk to somebody about Mr Rogers who's gone missing in Streatham.”

There was a pause. The old woman glared at him so he turned his back on her.

“Streatham CID, Detective Sergeant Bynoe speaking.”

“Oh, yes. It's that missing man who was on the telly last night. Mr Rogers. I saw him going into 66 Mountjoy Avenue yesterday dinnertime and I didn't see him come out again.”

“Who are you?”

“An anonymous caller.”

“Well, why don't you stop being anonymous and tell me who you are? There could be a reward in this.”

“No, that's all right. I'm just giving you a tip-off, that's all.”

“Was Mr Rogers alone when you saw him?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know? Either he was or he wasn't.”

“Well, I didn't exactly see him go into the house with my actual eyes.”

“Then how do you know he went into the house?”

“I just do, that's all.”

“I'd like to know how.”

“He dropped his wedding ring. Either that, or somebody pulled it off.”

“Where did he drop it?”

“In the house, of course. That's how I know that he was definitely there.”

“So you've been in the house subsequent to Mr Rogers going there?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Listen, Mr Anonymous Caller, I think that you and I need to have a little chat, don't you? Why don't you stay where you are and I'll send a car round to collect you.”

“You don't know where I am.”

“Of course I do. You're in the callbox on the corner of Fernwood Avenue. I've got an officer on his way to see you already.”

John dropped the phone as if it had suddenly burst into flame. He pushed his way out of the callbox and ran across the road. The old woman called out, “Kids of today! 'Ooligans, that's what! 'Ooligans, the 'ole lot of them!”

John was out of breath by the time he got back to the office. Courtney was waiting for him impatiently. “Where have you been? I have to meet a client in five minutes.”

“Sorry.”

“You will be, if I lose this sale. Make some copies
of these floor-plans for me, would you, while I'm gone.”

John was left in the office on his own. He copied Courtney's documents and then he made himself a cup of coffee and walked back to his desk with four chocolate biscuits in his mouth at once. He started to drink his coffee with a loud slurping noise (it was hot, and anyway there was nobody else to hear him) but he couldn't keep his eyes off the door to Mr Vane's room. Mr Vane must have a file on 66 Mountjoy Avenue – and he must know all about the statue, too. Perhaps he was aware that the house was haunted, and that was why he never let anybody handle it except him. Perhaps
all
the houses on his special list were haunted.

He went across to Mr Vane's door and put his hand on the doorknob. No, better not. He might get caught, and Mr Vane wouldn't be so forgiving a second time. It had been risky enough this morning. If Mr Cleat had emerged from the toilet just two seconds earlier, he would have bumped into Lucy sneaking out of Mr Vane's room after putting the key back.

He sat down and finished his coffee. He brushed crumbs from his desk. He looked across at Mr Vane's door. He doodled a cartoon of Mr Cleat with an enormous nose. He looked back at Mr Vane's door.

The next thing he knew, he was sliding open one of Mr Vane's filing cabinets, and rifling through the sour-smelling old documents inside it.

He couldn't find anything in the top drawer, just a lot of old brochures dating back to the 1920s. There was a brand new house for sale in Tooting for £236, but that was in 1924. He tried the second drawer, and that was filled with newspapers, some of them so old that they were dark brown.

In the bottom drawer, however, together with a half-bottle of gin and a pot of glue, he found a large black folder. He lifted out the folder, laid it on one of the few clear spaces on Mr Vane's desk, and opened it. Inside, there were particulars for over a dozen houses. Some of them were obviously years old, but two or three of them were brand new, with glossy photographs stuck to them.

Here it was – 66 Mountjoy Avenue.
A spacious character residence ideal for the larger family. Price on application
. No mention of ivory-faced statues, however, or invisible presences that breathed over your face and chased you down the stairs. But there was a handwritten list of previous owners, and the dates they had lived there. The last time the house had been occupied was four months ago, by Mr and Mrs W. Bennett. Before them it was Mr and Mrs K. Dadarchanji; and before them, Mr and Mrs G.L. Geoffreys.

What struck John was that none of the previous owners had lived in the house for longer than a year, and some of them had moved out within two or three months of moving in. Hardly surprising, he thought, if the owners had experienced the same kind of spooky manifestations as he and Lucy had.

He made a note of all of the addresses in the folder. There was a scattering of local addresses – 113 Greyhound Road; 7 Laverdale Square; 14 Ullswater Road; The Larches, Blackwood Avenue. But surprisingly, most of the properties were located miles away. 93 Madeira Terrace, Brighton. Carstairs House, Pennine Road, Preston. There were even houses in Wales and Scotland.

He heard a noise in the office outside. Quickly, he shuffled the particulars back into the folder and returned it to its drawer. He was darting towards the door when it suddenly opened. He managed to dodge behind it and press himself against the panelling. Mr Cleat came in, dropped a file on Mr Vane's desk, and went out again. John waited until he heard Mr Cleat go into the kitchen before he crept out and closed Mr Vane's door behind him.

Mr Cleat reappeared. “Where have you been? I thought I told you never to leave the office unattended.”

“I've been here all the time.”

“You've been
where
all the time?”

“Here.”

Mr Cleat gave an irritable tut. “I want you to run an errand for me. I want you to take these papers along to Hawthorn & Black, the solicitors. They're in Norbury, so you'll have to take the bus.”

John was quite glad to get out of the office. It was a warm, windy afternoon and the skies above the suburbs were filled with the sort of clouds that looked like dogs, or castles, or fat recumbent giants. Before he caught the bus he bought a chocolate Cornetto and took it on to the top deck, right at the front.

It didn't take him long to deliver Mr Cleat's package. He walked back along the main road, looking in all of the shop windows. He stopped for a while to watch the tropical fish in Norbury Aquatics.

As he was crossing a side turning, however, his attention was caught by a small crowd of people outside a demolition site. There were three police vans there, too, along with two lorries and a clutter of other cars, and a long white Metropolitan Police caravan marked
Incident Unit
.

John looked at his watch. He had plenty of time. He walked into the square and joined the crowd, although he couldn't see anything much. He asked one man what was going on but the man simply shrugged and said, “I dunno.”

John walked up to the police tape and tried to peer over the plywood hoardings, but they were too high. He climbed on to the low brick wall in front of the house next door and then he could see the remains of the half-demolished house and over a dozen police officers in shirtsleeves milling around in front of it.

“Hoi, what are you up to?” shouted one of them, walking towards him.

“Nothing. Just taking a look.”

“Well, there's nothing to see, so 'op it.”

“What's happened?” he asked.

“Don't you watch the news?”

“Sometimes. What's happened?”

“They were knocking this house down and they found some skeletons in it. More than fifty, that's how many they've brought out so far.”

John stayed and watched for a little longer, in case they brought another skeleton out, but after a while he got bored. He bought an
Evening Standard
and took the bus back to the office.

The Norbury “house of bones” story was on page five. He vaguely remembered hearing something about it on the radio but he hadn't really paid any attention. But when he read the second paragraph of the story he felt a prickling sensation all the way up his neck.

“The skeletons of more than fifty people have now been recovered from the house in Norbury,
south London, where demolition workers broke into a bricked-up room on Monday and discovered heaps of human bones.

“Number 7 Laverdale Square had been the subject of a compulsory purchase order to make way for a new road-widening scheme. The last owners, Dr and Mrs Philip Lister, vacated the property over six months ago without leaving a forwarding address, and police are anxious to talk to them.

“A next-door neighbour, Mrs Anne Finch, said that she and other residents of Laverdale Square believed the house had ‘a bad atmosphere' and that sometimes she had heard ‘wailing and shouting' coming from the house during the night – ‘terrible great shouts, like a man roaring through a megaphone'.