The Ephemera (12 page)

Harrowfield

When the lawyer left to attend to business in some other part of the building I stood in the doorway of the library at Harrowfield House and beheld a rare treat. It was the archetypal library, the kind immortalised in movies of the nineteen thirties and forties. It occupied two rooms which took up much of one side of the ground floor, high oak shelves stretching along the walls, stout with accumulated knowledge. Subtle lighting picked out the texture of leather, the glint of gold lettering against the sober spectrum presented by the rows of spines. There was a reading table in the centre of the first room, a broad map table in the other.

I breathed in the temple stillness, a hush that was one part anticipation and one part respect, and savoured the prospect of what would be my retreat and my work for the next two or three days.

Then a phone began to warble. It was my damned mobile. Communications technology is the curse of the modern age. That anyone thought it was desirable to be able to be contacted anywhere, any time, no matter how inopportune the moment is beyond me. However, Christine had worn me down with common sense, persuading me to buy one for keeping in touch when I was out—as she put it—on my travels. I could not deny that it made sense, in terms of our business at least, but I didn't have to like it.

I stabbed the answer key.

"Charlie-
boy
. Where are you?"

I hadn't heard the voice for two years, but it was as familiar to me as my old rugby injury.

Massimo Grieve.

My dreams of solitude evaporated.

Fifteen years earlier Grieve and I had shared university digs up in Glasgow. We hadn't got on, though we had managed to co-exist, the way flatmates must, with a minimum of interaction. Perversely, while contact with my friends withered over the years, Grieve had stayed with me. A recurring disruptive force in my life. Possibly he mellowed, or perhaps it was enforced habit that eventually made us friends. Friends of sorts anyway. Our last encounter had been fractious.

"I'm up in the Lakes," I said. "A place called Harrowfield. They asked me up to catalogue..."

"The Douglas Randall place? He's dead is he? Excellent. Listen, Charlie, I'm in Manchester right now so I can be with you after lunch sometime. See you about two? Good. We can catch up then."

The line went dead. Whatever the call had originally been about I would possibly never know, but the mention of Harrowfield had caught his interest. I felt a lump of anticipation settle in my stomach. My first thought had been that Grieve's call was nothing more than coincidence. But coincidences followed him like scavenging crows.

Three things always come to mind about Grieve from the student days: the kind of brain that guaranteed him his first class degree while allowing him to pursue a lifestyle of dope and daytime TV, an infantile fascination with 'True Crime' books and the pages of
Fortean Times
, and the fact that any encounter with him always left you with more questions than answers. Questions like: what was his interest in Douglas Randall; and how the hell did he get the number of my new phone?

~

I was eating a pre-packed sandwich in my car when Grieve arrived. A cold drizzle had begun to streak the windscreen as I chewed and watched the wind toss gulls about over the little lake and its bleak shores. Choppy waves lapped almost up to the walls of the house.

The morning had gone well. An initial inspection had revealed that the library contained a selection of biographies and fiction, small in number but sporting a few intriguing items. Reference books and histories took up the remainder of the shelf space in the first room, but it was the second room that interested me most. As I had expected, the Randall family had assembled one of the most extensive collections of maritime histories and nautical charts in the country. It would fetch a fair amount at auction.

Grieve had changed his car again. This time it was a sleek, Japanese affair, deep metallic blue. The top was down, allowing the rain in and, unfortunately, letting out the jaunty blare of what sounded like a Tijuana Brass rendition of
Spanish Flea
.

The car and music stopped and the roof rolled up smoothly. Grieve got out and stood appraising the house. A leather coat fluttered tent-like about his wide frame, the wind riffling through his springy thundercloud of dark hair. The sideburns if anything were even bushier than last time I'd seen him, and the sunglasses were his customary affectation. He carried a slim metallic case. Perhaps all this was what passed for acceptable dress in the computer consultancy business these days, or perhaps it was just Grieve being an insufferable poser as usual.

I got out to meet him, slightly conscious of the conservative cut of my own Slater Bros suit.

"Impressive, isn't it?" I said.

"I suppose so." Grieve fixed his attention on the house. It loomed—an impassive façade of grey sandstone and glass, peaked and turreted on the top like some combination of chalet and keep. "If by impressive you mean
big
," he muttered sarcastically.

This was another Grieve thing. Never one for bothering with hellos and goodbyes, he suddenly appeared in your life and carried on where he had left off. He'd been here no more than a few minutes and already my back was up.

"Grieve, why are you here?" I asked.

He looked surprised. I wasn't always so forthright. "Same reason as you, Charlie. Books." He laid a patronising hand on my arm. "You know the kind I mean," he went on. "It's been more or less common knowledge that Randall was a dabbler, and rumour has it that over the years he acquired some very rare volumes of an occult nature. It's that old classic pattern: bereavement to spiritualism to dabblings on the dark side."

Glib as it was, this matched pretty closely what the lawyer had told me. Randall had inherited the house and a worldwide shipping business on his father's death in 1948. He had come home to England in the autumn of that year, leaving his young American wife to follow, but she had died before she could join him. Perhaps not too surprisingly, grief-stricken, Randall had become a recluse, especially in the fifteen years since his retirement. Anything beyond those facts of course was total fantasy of the pulpiest kind, the stuff of those hammy seventies horror movies, and just the sort of thing Grieve would go for. The 'rumour' he spoke of could likely be traced to the kind of conjecture that was rife in those post-war years when spiritualism was at its peak.

So that was why he was here. Magick books. I was a little disappointed but not surprised. Grieve's fascination with the occult went back as long as I'd known him. He loved mystery. He aspired to it and he sought it out wherever he suspected two and two could spookily be added to make five. The last time he'd dropped in on me he had been looking for a book of reproductions of the sketches made by the hermit, William Rae. In the twenties Rae had been discovered living in isolation in Sutherland in Northern Scotland. His cabin had been littered with renditions of his, by all accounts very disturbing, dreams, and the pictures were supposed to have been collected into a volume, now much sought after. Of course my contacts had been unable to locate any trace of it and I doubted it had ever existed. In my experience that was how these things usually turned out.

"You know, Charlie," Grieve said, "there are people who would be very interested in preventing these books going to public auction."

"That would be a matter for the estate. Not me," I said, unhappy at the insinuated slur on my professional integrity. Whether these
people
meant himself or someone he was acting for I didn't care to know.

"I understand," he said, "but I'm confident an arrangement can be made."

"Whatever," I allowed myself a smirk at his confidence. "But I haven't seen anything remotely occult yet, I'm afraid."

"Trust me," Grieve said. "They're here." He named some titles. I recognised two. These were not books in general circulation and I doubted there was even one copy of either in the country.

"Well, if you say so, I'm sure we'll find them," I sighed. Getting rid of Grieve could be difficult. Asking him straight out to leave would make him more determined to stay. If he had nothing better to do, I decided, he could hang around until the work was done and he was satisfied that his information was wrong. Following him inside I added, "If by
occult
you mean shipping records."

~

"What's missing from this picture?" Grieve's voice surprised me. I had become so absorbed in my work that I'd almost managed to forget his presence. Entering the library's nautical room I found him bending over the table, reading lamps illuminating the heap of maps strewn across it. I held my annoyance and looked over his shoulder.

He tapped the uppermost map with a forefinger. The chart was a black and white, laminated affair showing the physical geography of a southern part of the Lake District. Dense finger-print whorls represented the profusion of peaks. Towards the foot of the map I recognised a pattern of hills, the way the road snaked down and then curled around, and there, marked by name, was the house.

I shook my head. "What are you on about, Grieve?"

He shot me a look, a little smile. Then he flipped the map up and revealed a modern colour OS map of more or less the same area.

I still didn't see. I said so.

He laid down the first map again and lifted it. Laid it, lifted it. Eventually he said, "The Lake!"

He was right. The older rendering omitted the lake outside the house.

"Nineteen forty seven," he said, pointing. Then the newer map, "Nineteen seventy."

"You're saying the lake suddenly appeared on the map sometime between forty seven and seventy," I said, feeling as stupid as I sounded.

"I don't think geology works that fast," he said pointedly.

I shrugged. I wasn't sure he was right, but decided to let it ride. Sure enough though, on the earlier map the area at the side of the house currently occupied by the lake was clearly marked as an area of open land.
Harrow Field
.

 "Cartographical error?" I ventured.

He produced two more maps, slapping them down a little dramatically. "Not unless they missed it in thirty one and oh-nine as well."

"Perhaps they just copied the old maps and repeated an old error," I suggested. I realised that he was trying to imply something—God knew what—mysterious in all this and I was suddenly determined not to encourage him with it, adding, "or maybe it was a natural disaster?"

He frowned at me then grinned. "Who knows? Shouldn't be too hard to find out though, should it?"

~

When Grieve returned about forty minutes later I tried to ignore him, but was peripherally aware of him inspecting the shelves in a casual, almost bored, fashion. He didn't mention the lake.

"So where do you reckon the magic books are," he said.

I paused in my note-taking, pen poised above the ledger. "Have you tried under M?"

"Very funny."

"Well how about that old favourite, the secret room? That's the traditional place for a forbidden library, isn't it?" I looked over to see a grin illuminating his face, like that of a child that has just tricked an adult into giving him his own way. He seemed to take my suggestion, flippant as it was, as permission to probe around the shelves and began to pull books out at random.

My concentration broken, I watched this performance for a full minute before my patience ran out. "So what about the lake?" I said.

Grieve stopped what he was doing. His impish smile confirmed that he'd been waiting for me to ask.

"It's just a lake," he said. "Except that it appears to have no tributaries." He returned to the reading table and sat down, spreading his hands flat in front of him and stretching his legs underneath. "Oh," he added, "and it's salt water. Aha!"

There was a click followed by a smooth rumbling noise. To my astonishment a square section rose out of the centre of the table. The section was shelved and had the capacity to hold a number of large volumes, but the shelves were empty.

Grieve ran a finger along a shelf, looked thoughtful. "No dust," he said.

"Bravo, Grieve." I laughed. "You've discovered a forbidden library with no books."

Then I stopped laughing as I was suddenly gripped by the conviction that someone else had entered the room. But when I turned I found the doorway empty.

"Charlie?" I heard Grieve say behind me.

Ignoring him, I stepped out into the hall. It was empty too, but there was something unusual. A smell. Fresh, with a sharp tang to it, familiar but out of place against the waxy odour of the house.

"Mrs Caldwell?" I called, thinking it had been the lawyer I had sensed, but she did not reply. The light in the hall had a sullen quality, filtering through the frosted panels around the front door to cast a moiré pattern the colour of beaten copper on the polished wooden floor. I was reminded of the sea at sunset. Then a shadow passed across the glass and the sound of the doorbell made me jump.

Since the bell still did not immediately bring the lawyer, I opened the door myself. Two men stood there in identical blue overalls. The digging tools in the truck parked behind them completed the picture. I led them around the house to the little chapel perched up the hillside. The family plot lay behind it. There was now a biting edge to the breeze coming off the lake, heavy cloud having gathered during the course of the afternoon. The chapel doors were ajar and we found Caldwell inside. While she took the diggers off to the grave site I lingered, intent on a moment more's respite from the wind. A deep chill had settled inside me.

The chapel was a sombre affair, solidly constructed from grey sandstone. Isolated electric lights shed a little warm illumination which only emphasised the shadows. The building was barely large enough for three narrow ranks of pews and the open coffin at the front. From my vantage at the door I could see little of the contents—a supine form in a black suit, pale face at the top, white gloves clasped at waist level.

"Douglas Randall, I presume," said Grieve mordantly as he pushed past me for a better look. I hovered by the door. "Funny how you can tell they were rich even when they're dead," he said. "The gloves are a bit much though. Makes him look like a snooker referee on a rest break. When did he die?"