Intrigue in the Village (Turnham Malpas 10) (17 page)

Maggie was annoyed, but didn’t say so. Five pounds was five pounds when your washing machine had just packed up. With their money tucked up safely in Dave’s jug and put away in the cupboard, Maggie sat down with the others.

‘Now. We want absolute silence when we begin or nothing will work. Everyone puts a finger on the wine glass, only a light touch remember, the glass has to have room to move. It’s one hundred years old, full of history, and very sensitive. We’ll sit quietly, thinking of questions and I’ll ask the first one to get the ball rolling. Ready?’

There wasn’t so much as a tremor in the fingertips laid gently on the base of the glass. It was another cold night
and the fire was more than welcome, but Linda noticed how the flames wavered about the walls and she wished they didn’t. Five minutes without speaking was beginning to take its toll on her. Just as she was thinking it was all a con, Maggie asked, ‘Is Don still holding his own?’

Within seconds the glass was moving right across directly to ‘Y’, then ‘E’, then ‘S’. A sigh of relief went round the group.

Angie asked the next one. ‘Am I going to win the lottery?’

The wine glass hesitated, then stopped again in front of the letters ‘Y’, ‘E’ and ‘S’. Angie let out a cry of delight.

Greta Jones said, ‘It’ll be ten pounds. Don’t get too excited.’

‘Then again,’ snapped Angie, ‘it might be ten million.’

‘Oh yeah!’

Each of them in turn asked a simple question, so that only an affirmative or a negative answer was required. Maggie felt she was losing their attention. ‘Is there a message for any one of us tonight?’

The glass rocked slightly and Linda became convinced the table had rocked too. The glass spelt out a sentence this time, slowly. Tantalizingly. L-i-n-d-a-m-u-s-t-a-s-k-p-am-f-o-r-a-j-o-b.

Maggie called out, ‘Linda must ask Pam for a job! Pam. Who’s Pam?’

Greta Jones said, ‘Not Pam, Pat. It’ll be a waitressing job. She’ll be short-handed. I did say.’

Linda shivered with fright. ‘Really? I’ll ask her first thing in the morning. Oh God. I feel all squirmy inside.’

‘Shh! Someone ask something else.’

This time a Miss Senior asked her mother if she had any
more advice for the two of them. But the answer was jumbled and they couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Disappointed, Maggie asked the next question, prompted by she knew not what. ‘Dave? Do you have a message for me?’

There was a long silence, once or twice the wine glass rocked, Linda was convinced the table had rocked again. Then hesitatingly the glass spelt out g-e-t-t-h-e-n-e-w-w-a-s-h-i-n-g-m-a-c-h-i-n-e-o-n-t-i-c-k-b-e-f-o-r-e-i-t-s-t-o-o-l-a-t-e.

Maggie was horrified. She blanched. Her finger was glued to the glass and wouldn’t come away. The others took their fingers off and Linda and Venetia began to laugh.

‘Honestly!’ said Venetia. ‘What a laugh. That’s ridiculous. Who pushed it? Come on, who was it?’

Maggie stuttered. ‘But it’s true, it’s broken down, they can’t mend it. It’s too old. No parts. They told me today.’

‘My lord!’ The Senior sisters clutched each other.

Linda muttered, ‘It’s real then.’

Angie cried out, ‘This is dangerous.’

Maggie said, ‘What did it mean “b-b-before it’s too late”?’

‘Too late for what?’ asked Greta Jones.

A deathly silence descended on them all. In the light of the lamp it was possible to see seven ashen faces, which not even the glow from the fire could colour. Eyes were wide, flicking from one to the other, seeking a grain of comfort.

Angie was the first to speak. ‘Come on. Spill the beans, someone. Confess.’

But each in turn shook their heads. In fact, when Angie
looked into their faces she could see none of them were guilty. She swallowed hard.

Maggie stated firmly that she thought they’d done enough for tonight.

‘No. No. Let’s have one more turn.’

Reluctantly, Maggie nodded.

So they started again but everything was confused once more and nothing made sense. Suddenly, out of the jumble came recognizable words: t-e-r-r-y-i-s-w-e-l-l-an-d-h-a-p-p-y.

‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ Mrs Jones shouted. ‘After all this time. Wait till I tell Vince! Oh my God!’ She was quite out of control. Mopping her face with her tissue, fanning herself with her hands, laughing hysterically, filled with happiness. ‘Now that really is it for tonight.’

Venetia asked if Mrs Jones had ever heard of her two boys since they’d disappeared after all that trouble with the police.

Mrs Jones put on a brave face when she replied, ‘Not a word. Not a blinking word.’

‘That’s wonderful for you, isn’t it?’ Angie said. ‘I don’t understand how it happens.’

‘It’s connecting with the spirits, that’s what,’ asserted Maggie.

‘Well, I never,’ said Linda. ‘Talk about being interesting. I don’t know when I’ve had such a good night. Better than the telly, ’cos it’s real. I’ll talk to Pat first thing.’

‘It’s made my day has this. A message from our Terry. Well, well. It’s been terrible not knowing.’

Maggie said nothing. One happy customer was all that was needed to make a success of her ‘evenings’. She’d try this again.

As they picked up their belongings, Maggie asked, ‘Same again next week or back to the usual?’

With one voice they all said, ‘Same again.’

‘Goodnight, Maggie.’

‘We’ll make it nine o’clock next week. The nights are getting lighter and we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. In any case, it’s always better in the dark.’

‘Nine o’clock it is, then.’

The absolutely deliciously alarming thing about it all was that on the following Monday morning the postman knocked at Mrs Jones’s door and handed her an airmail letter from New Zealand. ‘Thought I’d hand it to you personally, Mrs Jones. Not often you get a letter from the other side of the world, is it? Good morning to you.’

It was from Terry. So all that terrible worry that had come to her when Vince had said that if our Terry was sending messages to her from the spirit world, logic dictated he was dead, disappeared. She’d spent a ghastly weekend after he’d said that. But all that was at an end. Joy!

On the following Saturday night, Angie and her Colin won
£
254.42 on the lottery with numbers they’d never used before, and Linda got a job immediately waitressing at one of Jimbo’s functions in Culworth.

The secret of Maggie’s seances was out.

Kate stood in her classroom doorway, watching Mrs Dobbs water the plants in the hall. There was something about Maggie she couldn’t quite put her finger on; a listlessness, a kind of anxiety that hadn’t been there last week, or ever before come to that. ‘Mrs Dobbs?’

‘Yes.’ Maggie turned to look at her.

‘Are you well?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Sure? Nothing worrying you?’

There was a hesitation before Maggie answered, ‘Nothing at all.’

‘I’ve got a letter addressed to you from the education office. I’ve an idea it’s good news.’

Alarmed, Maggie said, ‘Not my notice, is it?’ She thought of the payments on the washing machine she’d had delivered according to Dave’s instructions. She took the letter from Kate and stuffed it into her apron pocket. ‘I’ll read it later.’

‘Of course it can’t be your notice and if it is, which it isn’t, I shall have a lot to say to those nincompoops in the office. Their ears will be burning and no mistake. I don’t want you to leave, believe me. Open it and see.’

‘No.’

Kate was puzzled, Maggie wasn’t her usual self at all. The spring had gone out of her step, and she looked thinner. Added to which she was quiet. If Maggie was in school, then normally everyone knew about it.

Time after time, Maggie had told herself it was only a game. But when she heard that Angie had won on the lottery, that Linda’s name was on Pat Jones’s list for waitressing, and most worrying of all, apart from Dave’s message, that Greta Jones had received a letter from their Terry in New Zealand on the Monday morning after the seance, she’d become completely overwrought.

She felt a great leaden weight lodged somewhere just under her ribs and it wouldn’t go away. It was there when she bent over to squeeze the mop in the school bucket, when she put down Tabitha’s dish and, worse, it was always present as soon as she began to eat. Frighteningly, she’d promised them another of her regular evenings, and she couldn’t see how she could get out of it.

Kate always had time for the children to tell her their news, even though they were at the top of the Junior School age group, because she felt that the children who lived out on the farms needed to catch up on events which had passed them by because of the remoteness of their homes.

That morning Paul Bliss said, ‘Did you know, Mrs Fitch, that Mr Turner,’ he thrust out his chest and his chin and gave a very good imitation of a strong man posing for a photograph, ‘you know, big Mr Turner, well, he’s won loads of money on the lottery. Loads and loads.’

‘Yes, we heard that,’ said Karen from Year Seven. ‘He’s a millionaire.’

Scornfully Paul retorted, ‘He isn’t.’

‘Mrs Turner got told by the spirits she would and she did,’ said Phil Bliss.

Kate laughed. ‘The spirits! What spirits?’

‘Them what come when Mrs Dobbs does her seance,’ said Karen.

‘What nonsense is this?’

Karen gave a long rambling description, grossly exaggerated, about the evening when Mrs Turner had heard she was to have a win. ‘They say it’s all dark and scary and ghosts come to dance on the walls.’

‘Well, I think you’ve all got it wrong. I’m glad Mrs Turner’s won some money, though. Those little twins of hers go through clothes like nobody’s business. Mrs Dobbs doesn’t communicate with the spirits, because no one can.’

Karen stoutly declared that Kate was wrong. ‘She does, Mrs Fitch, honest. You ask her. Them old Senior sisters, the ones you can’t tell which is which, they go. Honest.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. They calls up the dead people and they speak. They calls ’em up every week on Fridays.’ Karen rolled her eyes and the rest of the children made spooky sounds, nudged each other and giggled in pretend fright.

Kate sat looking at her class squatting on the carpet in front of her and thought there might be some truth in what they were saying. Even Karen, with her vivid imagination, couldn’t think up something like this without it being at least partly true.

Karen put up her hand again. ‘And Mrs Jones from down Church Hill, she’s had a letter from their Terry and she hasn’t heard from him for
years
. Mrs Dobbs got a message from the spirits for Mrs Jones and they told her
that their Terry was well and happy and he’s a millionaire in . . . where was it? Oh yes, New Zealand.’

Another child obviously seriously attracted by the idea of communicating with the dead asked if they could get Mrs Dobbs to have a seance at school for them. ‘I could have a word with my grandma. She was deaded when I was five. Mum would be pleased if I did.’

‘Perhaps Paul and Phil could talk with their dad. He’s dead, isn’t he? That’d be nice for Mrs Bliss.’

Kate stamped on this idea immediately and channelled their thoughts into something less sensational by asking Robert Nightingale to show everyone where New Zealand was on the map on the back wall of the classroom. By posing some interesting questions about the country, she deftly drew their news time away from Mrs Dobbs and her activities.

But at the end of the school day Kate went back to thinking about Maggie Dobbs’s Friday night seances and decided to have a word with her. Kate cleared her desk in her little office in good time and was sitting waiting for Maggie when she called out, ‘Is it free?’ and walked in.

‘Oh, sorry. I’ll come back.’

‘No, that’s fine. I just need a word. What’s all this business about then?’

‘What business?’

‘All this that’s going round the village about you and the spirits and ghosts on your walls?’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You do.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Maggie!’ There was a warning note in her voice, which
Maggie knew meant she wasn’t going to let the matter drop.

‘I know nothing. Can I get on now?’

‘Nothing?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘What you really mean is you don’t want to tell me.’

Maggie shrugged. This was one secret Madame Fitch wasn’t going to get out of her, no matter how hard she tried.

‘The children say you hold a seance on Friday nights and call up spirits who send messages to you.’ Kate put her head on one side and looked questioningly at Maggie.

‘I never.’

Astutely Kate declared, ‘I think you’re worried about it. In fact, very worried.’

‘I’m not. I’m here doing my work and earning my money and that’s that. In any case, my life outside this school is nothing to do with you.’

‘Quite right.’ Kate stood up. ‘However, if you do need someone to talk to, I’m a good listener.’