The Little Stranger (62 page)

She kissed the Testament with a nervous ducking of her head, but repeated the oath, and answered Riddell’s preliminary questions in a strong, clear voice. I knew that her words would basically be an elaboration of what she’d already told Graham, and I dreaded having to hear the story again in more detail. I rested my elbows on the table before me, and sat with my hand across my eyes.

On the evening of the twenty-seventh of May, I heard her say, she and Miss Ayres had gone to bed early. The house was in ‘a funny way’ at that time, because virtually all of its carpets, curtains, and furniture had gone. Miss Ayres was due to leave the county on the thirty-first, and on the same day Betty herself had arranged to return to her parents. They were spending their final few days seeing to all the last jobs that had to be done before the house could be handed over to the agents. They had passed that particular day in sweeping and cleaning the empty rooms, and were very tired. No, Miss Ayres had not appeared to be in low spirits, was not dejected in any way. She had worked just as hard as Betty—if anything, she had worked harder. She had seemed to Betty to be looking forward to leaving, though she had not spoken much about her plans. She had said more than once that she ‘wanted the house to be left tidy, for whoever should live in it next’.

Betty had gone to bed at ten o’clock. She had heard Miss Ayres go into her own room about half an hour later. She had heard it very clearly, because Miss Ayres’s room was just around the landing from her own. Yes, that was the first landing. There was a second landing above, both of them overlooking the hall by the same stairwell, both lit by a glass dome in the roof.

At about half past two she had been woken by the creak of footsteps out on the stairs. At first she had been frightened. Why was that, Riddell asked her? She didn’t quite know. Possibly the house, being large and lonely, was an unnerving one at night? Yes, she supposed that was it. The fear, anyway, had soon passed. She’d realised the steps were Miss Ayres’s. She guessed that she had got up, perhaps to go to the lavatory, perhaps to make herself a warm drink in the kitchen downstairs. Then she heard more creaks, and realised with surprise that Miss Ayres was heading, not down, but up, to the house’s second floor. Why did she think Miss Ayres had done that? She couldn’t say. Was there anything up there but empty rooms? No, nothing at all. She had heard Miss Ayres go very slowly along the upstairs passage, as if she was feeling her way through the dark. Then she heard her stop, and make a sound.

Miss Ayres had made a sound? What sort of sound?

She had called something out.

Well, what had she called?

She had called out: ‘You.’

I heard the word, and looked up. I saw Riddell pause. Gazing hard at Betty through the lenses of his spectacles he said, ‘You heard Miss Ayres call out the single word, “You.”’

Betty nodded unhappily. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘You are quite positive about that? She couldn’t simply have been crying out? Exclaiming, or groaning?’

‘Oh no, sir. I heard it very clear.’

‘You did? And how exactly did she call it?’

‘She called it as if she had seen someone she knew, sir, but as though she was afraid of them. Mortal afraid. And after that I heard her running. She came running back towards the stairs. I got out of bed, and went over to the door, and quickly opened it. And that’s when I saw her falling.’

‘You saw the fall clearly?’

‘Yes, sir, because the moon was so bright.’

‘And did Miss Ayres make any sound as she fell? I know it’s a hard thing for you to recall. But did she seem to you to be struggling? Or did she drop straight, with her arms at her sides?’

‘She didn’t make any sound; only her breath was sort of rushing. And no, she didn’t drop straight. Her arms and legs were waving about. They were waving like—like when you pick up a cat and it wants to be set down.’

Her voice had begun to falter on these last words, and now failed her completely. Riddell had one of the court clerks pour her a glass of water; he told her she was being very brave. But I heard all this, rather than saw it. I was leaning forward again with my hand across my eyes. For if the memory had proved too much for Betty, it had very nearly proved too much for me. I felt Graham touch my shoulder.

‘All right?’ he murmured.

I nodded.

‘You’re sure? You look ghastly.’

I straightened up. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’

Reluctantly, he drew his hand away.

Betty had also recovered by now. Riddell, anyway, was almost finished. He was sorry to have to keep her there, he said; there was one last puzzling point he needed to clear up. She had said a moment ago that, in the seconds before she fell, Miss Ayres had called out in fear, as if to someone she knew, and that then she had been running. Had there been the sound of any other footsteps, or a voice—any other sound at all—either before the fall, or after it?

‘No, sir,’ said Betty.

‘There was definitely no other person in the house, apart from you and Miss Ayres.’

Betty shook her head. ‘No, sir. That is—’

She hesitated, and the hesitation made Riddell study her more closely. As I’ve said, he was a scrupulous man. A moment before, he had been ready to ask her to step down. Now he said, ‘What is it? Do you have something to say?’

She said, ‘I don’t know, sir. I don’t like to.’

‘You don’t like to? What do you mean? You mustn’t be bashful or fearful, here. We are here to ascertain the facts. You must tell the truth, as the truth strikes you. Now, what is it?’

Biting at the inside of her mouth, she said, ‘There wasn’t a person in the house, sir. But I think there was something else. Something that didn’t want Miss Caroline to leave it.’

Riddell looked puzzled. ‘Something else?’

‘Please sir,’ she said, ‘the ghost.’

She spoke fairly quietly, but the room was hushed; the words carried clearly across it, making a great impression on the gathering. There were murmurs; one person even laughed. Riddell glared around the court, then asked Betty what on earth she meant. And, rather to my horror, she began earnestly to tell him.

She told him about the house having been, in her expression, ‘jumpy’. She said ‘a ghost lived in it’; that it was this ghost that had made Gyp bite Gillian Baker-Hyde. She said that then the ghost had started fires, and the fires had driven Mr Roderick mad; and after that the ghost had ‘spoken to Mrs Ayres, and said awful things, that made her kill herself’. And now the ghost had killed Miss Caroline too, by drawing her up to the second landing and pushing or scaring her off it. The ghost ‘hadn’t wanted her in the house, but it hadn’t wanted her to go, either’. It was ‘a spiteful ghost, and wanted the house all for its own’.

I suppose that, having been repeatedly denied an audience at Hundreds itself, she was innocently determined to make the most of the one before her now. When there were murmurs from the crowd again, she raised her voice and her tone grew stubborn. I glanced around the room, and saw several people openly smiling; most, however, were gazing at her in fascinated disbelief. Caroline’s aunt and uncle looked outraged. The newspaper-men, of course, were busily writing the whole thing down.

Graham bent his head to me, frowning. ‘You knew about all this?’

I didn’t answer. The grotesque little story had come to its end, and Riddell was calling for order.

‘Well,’ he said to Betty when the room was silent. ‘You have told us a most extraordinary tale. Not being an expert on ghost-hunting and so on, I hardly feel qualified to comment on it.’

Betty flushed. ‘It’s true, sir. I in’t lying!’

‘Yes, all right. Let me just ask you this: Did Miss Ayres herself believe in the Hundreds “ghost”? Did she think it had done all those terrible things you’ve mentioned?’

‘Oh, yes, sir. She believed it more than anyone.’

Riddell looked grave. ‘Thank you. We are very grateful to you. You have thrown a good deal of light, I think, on Miss Ayres’s state of mind.’

He waved her down. She hesitated, confused by his words and gesture. He dismissed her more plainly, and she went back to join her father.

And then it was my turn. Riddell called me to the stand, and I rose and took my place, with a feeling almost of dread—almost as if this were some sort of criminal trial, with myself as the accused. The clerk swore me in, and when I spoke I had to clear my throat and say the oath over again. I asked for water, and Riddell waited, patiently, while I drank it.

Then he began his examination. He began it by briefly reminding the court of the evidence we had heard so far.

Our task, he said, was to determine the circumstances surrounding Miss Ayres’s fatal fall, and as far as he could see it, there were several possibilities still before us. Foul play, he thought, was not one of them; none of the pieces of evidence pointed that way. It seemed unlikely, too, given the report of Dr Graham, that Miss Ayres had become physically ill—though it was perfectly possible that she had, for whatever reason,
believed
herself to be ill, and that belief might have startled or weakened her to the extent of causing her to fall. Or, if we kept in mind what the family maid claimed to have heard her cry out, we might conclude that she had been startled by something else, something she had seen or fancied she had seen, and had lost her footing as a result. Working against those theories, however, was the height and obvious solidity of the Hundreds banister rail.

But there were two further possibilities. Both were forms of suicide. Miss Ayres might have flung herself from the landing as a way of taking her own life, in a premeditated act, planned in the full clarity of mind—in other words, a
felo de se
. Or she might have jumped deliberately, but in response to some delusion.

He glanced over his notes, then turned to me. I was, he knew, the Ayres family doctor. Miss Ayres and I had also—he was sorry to have to raise this, but he understood that Miss Ayres and I had recently been engaged to be married. He would attempt, he said, to keep his questions as delicate as possible, but he was anxious to establish all he could about Miss Ayres’s emotional state on the night of her death; and he hoped I would help him.

Clearing my throat again, I said I would do my best.

He asked me when I had last seen Caroline. I answered that I had last seen her in the afternoon of the sixteenth of May, when I had visited the Hall with Mrs Graham, my partner’s wife.

He asked about Caroline’s state of mind at that time. She and I had only very recently broken off our engagement—was that correct?

‘Yes,’ I said.

Had the decision been a mutual one?

‘You’ll forgive my asking, I hope,’ he added, perhaps in response to my expression. ‘What I’m trying to ascertain for the court is whether the separation might have left Miss Ayres unduly distressed.’

I glanced over at the jury, and thought how much Caroline herself would have hated all this; how she would have loathed to think of us here, in our black suits, picking over the last days of her life like crows in a cornfield.

I said quietly, ‘No, I don’t think it had left her in undue distress. She had had a—a change of heart, that’s all.’

‘A change of heart, I see … And one of the effects of this change of heart, I believe, was that Miss Ayres had decided to sell her family home and leave the county. What did you make of that decision?’

‘Well, it surprised me. I thought it drastic.’

‘Drastic?’

‘Unrealistic. Caroline had spoken of emigrating, to America or Canada. She had spoken of possibly taking her brother with her.’

‘Her brother, Mr Roderick Ayres, who is currently a patient at a private institution for mental cases.’

‘Yes.’

‘His condition, I understand, is a grave one. Was Miss Ayres upset by his illness?’

‘Naturally she was.’

‘Overly upset?’

I thought about it. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Did she show you tickets, or reservations, or anything like that, relating to this trip to America or Canada?’

‘No.’

‘But you think she meant it, sincerely?’

‘Well, as far as I know. She had the idea’—I paused—‘well, that England didn’t want her. That there was no place for her here now.’

A couple of the gentry spectators nodded grimly at that. Riddell himself looked thoughtful, and was silent for a moment, adding a note to the papers before him. Then he turned to the jury.

‘I’m very interested in these plans of Miss Ayres’s,’ he told them. ‘I’m wondering how seriously we ought to take them. On the one hand, you see, we’ve heard that she was about to begin a new life, and was full of excitement about it. On the other, the plans might have struck you, as they struck Dr Faraday and, I must confess, they’ve struck me, as rather “unrealistic”. No evidence exists to support them; all the evidence, in fact, suggests that Miss Ayres was far more concerned with
ending
a life than with beginning one. She had recently broken off an engagement of marriage; she had disposed of the bulk of her family’s possessions; and she was taking care to leave her empty home in good order. All this
might
speak to us of a suicide, carefully planned and reasoned.’

He turned back to me.

‘Dr Faraday, did Miss Ayres ever strike you as the sort or person who might be capable of suicide?’

I said after a second that I supposed any person might be capable of suicide, given the right conditions.

‘Did she ever mention suicide to you?’

‘No.’

‘Her mother, of course, had recently and most tragically taken her own life. That must have affected her?’

‘It had affected her,’ I said, ‘in all the ways one would expect. It had put her in low spirits.’

‘Would you say it had made her feel hopeless about life?’

‘No, I—No, I wouldn’t say that.’

He tilted his head. ‘Would you say it had affected the balance of her mind?’

I hesitated. ‘The balance of a person’s mind,’ I started at last, ‘is sometimes a difficult thing to gauge.’

‘I’m certain it is. That is why I am taking such pains to try and gauge the balance of Miss Ayres’s. Did you ever have any doubts about it, Dr Faraday? Any doubts at all? This “change of heart”, for example, over your wedding. Did that seem in character to you?’