The Whispering House (9 page)

Chapter Eighteen

The Box

“A
T LEAST SHE TOOK
us seriously,” said Sam as soon as they were both outside the front door. “She could have just told us to go home and forget all about it.”

“I suppose so.” In some ways, Miss Murdoch's matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation was what had alarmed Hannah most.

“She wasn't much help, though,” he went on. “Like I said, even if she's right about the poison, we've no way of proving it. Not without an exhumation order, and you need special permission for one of those.”

“How come you know so much about it?”

“Police dramas. They're always digging people up and finding they're stuffed full of poison.”

“Ah.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not really. How am I going to get rid of that doll?”

“Burn it.”

“In the middle of summer? You think I'm going to light a bonfire without anybody noticing?”

“Put it in the garbage, then.”

“They don't collect until next Monday.”

“Well, bury it! Take it to a dump somewhere! What does it matter how you do it, just so long as you get it out of your life?”

“All right, I'll think of something.” She sighed gloomily. “And now I'd better get home and find out what's happened while I've been out. The rate things are going, the house could have fallen down by now.”

Cowleigh Lodge was still standing, however, and when Hannah let herself in at six thirty that evening, her mother's face told her that nothing too disastrous had gone on while she was at school. In fact, Mom was looking quite excited about something.

“You remember I showed you the carpet in my room—how it wasn't tacked down anymore near the window? Well, today I was up there sorting out some boxes, and I saw that it had come completely loose from the floor in one corner and a bit of it was folded over. The draft from the window must have done it, I suppose. Anyway, I'd just bent down to put it back when I noticed that one of the floorboards is sawed off, about a foot from the window, and the spare bit wasn't lying quite straight. So I picked it up to put it back properly, and guess what I found underneath?”

Hannah held her breath. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.

“This!” Mom reached behind her and picked up something from the kitchen counter.

It was a square wooden box, about eight inches across, the lid inlaid with ivory.

“Pretty, isn't it?” said Mom. “Open it. It's not locked.”

Hannah raised the lid, noticing that on the inside of it someone had carefully inscribed the initials L.H. in black ink. There were three things in the box: a small, folded, embroidered handkerchief; a little oval gold locket on a fine chain; and another, smaller box made of papier-mâché. Hannah lifted this out first. The lid wasn't hinged, but it was shaped to fit tightly and needed a lot of coaxing before it eventually shot off, discharging what looked like about half a dozen tiny whitish-brown pebbles, which rolled onto the floor.

Hannah bent down to pick them up. “What are they?” she asked, mystified.

Her mother peered closely, then laughed. “Teeth!”

“Teeth? Ugh!” Hastily Hannah dropped the little collection on the counter. “How horrible!”

“Not horrible, just sentimental. They're baby teeth. I've kept the first ones you lost too.” Mom scooped up the tiny relics and replaced them in their box as Hannah picked up the locket.

“Does this open?”

“Maybe. I didn't look. Oh, yes. See, there's a clasp on the side.” Her mother took the locket from her and gently flipped up the tiny gold clasp to reveal, on one side, a few strands of dark brown hair twisted into a neat loop, and on the other, the painted miniature of a small child. “And this, if I'm not mistaken, is the owner of the teeth. What do you think?”

Hannah didn't reply. Instead she picked up the handkerchief. Carefully she unfolded it. The linen was stiff, the delicate border of leaves and flowers stained with age. But it was something else that held Hannah's attention.

Diagonally within the border, picked out in neat, cursively looped stitching of cornflower blue, were four evenly spaced lines.

To Dearest Mama

From your Loving

Daughter Maisie

Aged 9 years and 2 months

“How nice,” commented Mom, smiling. “And what beautiful sewing! She would have been taught to add her exact age to work like this to show the standard she'd reached by that time. Mind you, I suspect she had a certain amount of help with this. It's pretty impressive for a nine-year-old!”

“The colors haven't faded, either,” murmured Hannah. “This blue is still quite solid.”

“Colors only fade when they're exposed to light. This was probably kept folded in a drawer until it found its way under the floorboards. Goodness knows how it got there. It seems an odd place for a mother to keep her precious little collection—hidden away like that.”

“It might not have been her that put it there.”

“No? I suppose not. Anyway.” Mom began replacing the contents of the box. “What shall we do with it now that we've found it?”

Hannah glanced at the refrigerator. The magnetic letters were still crowded together as she'd left them last night. There was no new message. And yet the finding of the box was significant, she felt sure. Or else why had that corner of carpet been so conveniently turned up? She thought of the wallpaper, the bathroom tiles, the loose screws, the fireplace board. Suddenly she had the bizarre notion that the house was
undressing
. Little by little, it was shedding its bland modern coat to reveal . . . what? Disconnected glimpses into a long-dead world? Or was there, like Sam had said, some pattern—some logical progression to a series of clues that she hadn't yet understood?

She shivered. Then she turned back to Mom. “You choose. It doesn't matter.”

That night she lay awake for a long time, worrying about the doll. How to get rid of it? And when? But she couldn't think properly because her brain kept bombarding her with odd fragments of half-remembered speech. Miss Murdoch's voice:
“In her position, I think I should probably have chosen arsenic.”
Sam's: “
They're always digging people up and finding they're stuffed full of poison.
” And something Emily had started to tell her, weeks ago . . . something that, for some odd reason, made her think of that little locket. At last she fell asleep.

When she woke, it wasn't quite six o'clock, but the sky was already bright outside and her brain felt clear, as if the jumbled thoughts of last night had miraculously ordered themselves while she slept.

Now, suddenly, she knew what to do.

Chapter Nineteen

Passing the Parcel

S
HE DRESSED QUICKLY AND
ran downstairs. The screwdriver was lying on top of the toolbox, where she'd put it after fixing the shelf. Back on the landing, she loosened the screws holding the board that covered the entrance to the loft and moved it carefully to one side. Sam hadn't quite closed the door behind it, so there was no need for the wire coat hanger—she simply pulled the door toward her. Then, with her heart beating uncomfortably fast, she ascended the stairs.

But whatever she'd expected to find, the attic room was just as she and Sam had left it—the dust thick and undisturbed save for their own footprints of almost three weeks ago, the windowsill with the same dead flies. And just inside the door, sprawled unnaturally like the victim of a road accident, lay the doll.

Hannah seized it and ran back down the stairs. On the landing she closed the brown door as quietly as possible, replaced the screws in the board, and went down to the kitchen, where she laid the doll on the table. Then she went into the living room, opened a drawer in the desk, took out a pad of paper, and after a few moments' thought wrote a short letter. She put it in an envelope, printed a name on the front, and went back into the kitchen. In the cupboard under the sink she found a pile of newspapers and a plastic shopping bag. In another drawer she found tape.

The little wooden box was still on the counter where Mom had left it last night. Opening it, she took out the locket and hung it around the doll's neck.

Now for the worst part. With trembling fingers, she grabbed three sheets of newspaper and wrapped the doll tightly, winding the tape around and around. She repeated the process with another three sheets, then more sheets, until the parcel became a bulky, shapeless mass, like the ones in the game she used to play at parties as a very young child. Only this was no game, she reminded herself grimly. The thing beneath those layers was no pretty toy.

Finally she bundled the parcel into the plastic shopping bag, taped the letter to the outside, and scribbled a note to her mother to say she'd gone to school early to look over a few things in a textbook she'd left in her desk. Then she let herself out of the house and walked quickly through the still-quiet streets until she reached the main city precinct and the imposing nineteenth-century building that was the Carlyle Street police station.

“I'd like to speak to Detective Sergeant Bean, please,” she told the man behind the reception desk.

“Detective
Inspector
Bean,” said the policeman reprovingly. “And what might that be concerning, young lady?”

“Sorry,” she said, reddening. “I didn't know he'd been promoted. I need to give him something. It's very important.”

“Oh, yes? So important that you can't tell me what he's likely to expect?” The man looked suspiciously at the shopping bag.

“No. That is, I'd rather give it to him myself, if you don't mind. He knows me,” she added hopefully.

“He does, does he? Might that be socially or, shall we say, professionally?”

“Professionally,” she replied with dignity.

“Is that so? Name, please.” He yawned and pulled a pad of paper toward him.

“Hannah Price.”

The policeman's eyebrows shot up. “Hannah Price? Are you the one who helped to recover that piece of property from the cathedral the year before last?”

Hannah nodded modestly, though it would have been more true to say that it was she and Sam who had recovered it, and the police who had helped.

“Well! Why didn't you say so before?” The man pushed the paper away, his manner suddenly becoming friendly and cooperative. “Now don't you worry, Miss Price. I'm afraid Inspector Bean isn't in the office just yet, but as soon as he is, I'll make sure he gets this.”

“Thank you.” Hannah turned and left the station, feeling as though the worst part of the day was already over. Now she only had exams to worry about.

Chapter Twenty

Change in the Weather

“I
DON'T BELIEVE IT!”
Sam stared at her. They were standing in a corner of the playground at lunchtime. “You took that thing to the police and asked them to do an
autopsy
? Are you crazy?”

“Maybe. It was Millie Murdoch who gave me the idea, you see. When she said that if she'd had a choice, and wanted to poison someone without being detected, she'd have chosen arsenic.”

“So? She was just guessing.”

“And afterward, you said all that about the police digging up bodies and searching for poison.”

“Yes?” He still looked utterly baffled.

“Then I remembered something else. It was that day in the library, when we were studying, and Emily had lost a page of notes on the death of Napoleon. The bell had just rung and I was trying to get away, but she was going on about what she'd found out on the internet.”

“Typical.”

“Yes, well. Anyway, she was saying that toward the end of his life, while he was in exile, Bonaparte got the idea that someone was trying to poison him. Nothing was ever proved, but years later, some of his hair was analyzed and found to contain arsenic.”

Sam raised his eyebrows, but this time he kept quiet.

“So I got to thinking. If it's possible to detect arsenic in a person's hair long after they've died, then it must be possible to detect other things as well. So I thought, If only we had some of Maisie's hair, cut off not too long before she died, we might have a chance to find out what she died
of
. Do you see?”

“No.” He frowned. “At least, I understand what you mean, but . . . we don't have any of her hair. Unfortunately.”

“Oh, yes, we do!” she said softly. “And what's more, we've had it all the time!”

Suddenly the penny dropped. He gasped. “The doll! You mean . . . that wig? It's real hair?”

Hannah nodded.

Sam's eyes sparkled excitedly. Then his face fell. He frowned. “How do we know it's hers, though? It could be anybody's. Her mother's. A complete stranger's.”

For the first time, Hannah allowed herself a small, triumphant smile. “It just so happens that we have another sample. I gave that to the police too.” And she told him about the contents of the little wooden box.

It wasn't often that Sam gave her a look of wholehearted admiration, but this was one of those times, and for a few moments she basked.

The moment was short-lived, however.

“It won't work, you know.” He shook his head regretfully.

“What?”

“All this. Don't get me wrong, I think it's brilliant what you've figured out. But it's too neat. Too . . . perfect. In real life, kids don't really get to deduce answers from far-fetched clues like this and have themselves proved right. That's the trouble with police dramas. They're not real life.”

Hannah bit her lip. She felt as if she'd brought him a nice fat balloon and he'd rewarded her by sticking a pin in it. But what really hurt was that she knew he was right. It had seemed like such a great idea at the time that she hadn't stopped to think about just how ridiculous her request would sound to a policeman, even a sympathetic one like Sergeant—or rather, Inspector—Bean. “Oh, well.” She sighed philosophically. “There's one good thing, anyway. At least we've gotten rid of that horrible doll.”

“True.” He grinned. “That'll be something to cheer you up when you get arrested for wasting police time!”

For the past few weeks, the weather had been getting steadily hotter. The temperature was still rising, but the sky had lost its bright clarity and the air was close. There was talk of storms on the way.

“I hope it stays dry for Saturday,” said Sam, frowning, as they left school that afternoon.

“Why? What's happening on Saturday?”

“The fair's this weekend, dummy! You're coming, aren't you?”

“Oh. Yes. I guess so.”

The Midsummer Fair was a highlight of the city calendar, drawing large crowds of tourists as well as most of the local population. Usually Hannah looked forward to it as much as anyone, but recently she'd had other things on her mind.

“The forecast says it should be okay, just, but they've been wrong before.”

Hannah chuckled. The only other time Sam took the faintest interest in the weather forecast was before a football match. “Don't worry. If it's too bad, we can always go back to my house. It's only half a mile from the common.”

She left him at the school gates and trudged home, wondering anxiously what might be waiting for her this time. But for once, there were no new developments, and her mother seemed, if not exactly cheerful, at least calm that evening. Toby was still missing, but apart from that, things seemed normal enough.

Except that when Hannah went to bed that night, the atmosphere seemed even more oppressive. She opened the window as wide as it would go, but it made no difference to the air inside the room, which stayed humid and stifling. There was something about the damp atmosphere that made her uneasy, and that night, Hannah fought sleep. It wasn't until nearly four that she at last gave in, and then she slept deeply, waking three hours later to the noise of the alarm and a splitting headache.