Confessions from a Haunted House

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Now of course Sid meant to chuck the bomb into somebody’s back garden but it is amazing how panic lends you strength. It is also amazing how close some of those houses are to the flyover. If you doubt me, here was a case in point. Only a few seconds after the case had left Sid’s fingers we heard the tinkle of breaking glass followed by a loud explosion. My heart dropped lower than Idi Amin’s bottom lip. Hardly daring to look, we got out and peered over the parapet.

Oh dear, what a sight met our eyes! This poor old lady sitting in her bath and looking up at us through the hole in the wall where the bathroom window used to be. Even as we watched, another few bricks fell down on top of the shed below. ‘Are you all right?’ I shouted. ‘It’s all right. It was a bomb.’ I was worried that she might think it was a gas leak, you see.

Well, I have to confess that I was surprised. Where a nice-looking old lady learned that kind of language I just cannot imagine. As for what I assumed was her old man in the outdoor karsi – no, it wasn’t a shed – he did not even have the good manners to pull up his trousers before he started sounding off at us. I was quite embarrassed for Harper.

‘Come on,’ said Sid nervously, starting to edge back to the car. ‘They’re all right. Probably due for rehousing anyway.’

‘Or at least a redevelopment grant,’ I said.

Still shaking, we jumped into the car and drove off. Nobody talked very much. We were all thinking what would have happened if the bomb had gone off on my lap. One bang I could certainly have done without.

‘I can’t get over it,’ said Sid. ‘How could we have picked up the wrong bag?’

‘Maybe it wasn’t us,’ said Harper slowly.

‘What do you mean?’ said Sid.

‘Maybe somebody switched the bags.’

‘But that would mean they wanted to kill us,’ said Sid.

‘That’s right,’ said Harper soberly.

‘But—’ cried Sid. Then his voice sort of tailed away. You had to think about the implications of what had happened to us but the more you did so, the more frightened you got.

CHAPTER THREE

For the rest of the journey to Grays Inn I was very jumpy. Very jumpy indeed. I even had the feeling that there was a black limousine following us. Every time we took a turn it seemed to be a few cars behind. It disappeared just after we had passed Chancery Lane and I felt better.

Sid was beginning to feel more like his old self as well. ‘I know, I know!’ he said when I told him I thought we were getting near the address Harper had given us. ‘Don’t think I’m not counting the moments. You realize there must be about three hundred quid’s worth of damage done to this car.’

‘I’m real sorry, Sid,’ said Harper soothingly. ‘Won’t the insurance pay?’ This did not go down very well because, of course, Sid had not got around to insuring his motor. ‘I was going to do that this morning,’ he snapped.

‘The chambers should be just along here,’ I said, always trying to avoid an incident.

I thought a chamber was something you went to the john in,’ said Harper innocently. Sid ground his teeth.

‘It means a lawyer’s offices,’ I told her.

‘All these new words. I must start making a list. I’d never heard of a solicitor until Eileen told me it was a writing lawyer. Now a barrister, he’s a talking lawyer isn’t he?’

‘A barrister is a barrister,’ snarled Sid. ‘Why do you keep having to change the English language?’

‘Here we are, Sid,’ I said to avoid any argument. ‘Number eleven. I can see the sign. Wittering, Stammers and Crachit.’ We had come through an archway and were in a little square of old buildings with a balcony running round and staircases going up into each set of offices. There were pots of flowers on the balcony and a lime tree in the middle of some cobblestones. It was all very picturesque. Harper clearly thought so. ‘Gee,’ she said. ‘This is really Dickensian. I gotta to take a picture of this for the folks back home.’

She sprang out of the car and started snapping everything that did not move. Sid was only interested in his car. He was practically sobbing as he examined the smashed headlight and the dented wing. ‘I blame you for this, you stupid berk!’ he hissed. ‘You and your blooming relations. I can’t wait to see the back of both of you. I’ve a good mind to give you your tube fares and tell you to piss off.’

‘I’m sorry about the car, Sid,’ I said. ‘I—’ I broke off because the wing mirror that I had accidentally nudged had dropped off into the gutter. Luckily Sid was clocking Harper’s rear view as she bent to photograph an antique foot scraper so I swept the mirror under the car with my foot.

‘Cracking looking bird,’ I leered.

‘Uhm.’ Sid was not prepared to commit himself to a favourable impression. I knew he fancied it but he was trying to turn his lust into hate so that it made a neat twosome with his detestation of me. ‘She’s all right if you like American birds. Come on, let’s get inside and get this whole blooming business over with before anything else goes wrong.’

There Sid had a point and I was not loath (good word, eh?) to lead the way up the creaking wooden staircase. I could see what Harper meant about Dickensian. It was very old-fashioned. Right down to the bell that tinkled when I pulled the stopper next to the highly polished brass plate. The geezer who opened the door was no chicken either. He wore a pair of pince-nez on the end of a beaky nose and his back was bent like a shepherd’s crook. The dandruff on his scruffy black jacket was thick enough to show up a yeti’s footprints and you could have gone blind looking for a crease in his shiny pinstripe trousers. He craned forward and blinked at Harper. ‘Ah, Mr Thistlethwaite. Backgam and Winjer versus the Metropolitan Water Board. Come in, come in. Is the overflow still causing your mother aggravation?’

I followed Harper and Sid into the room. Inside what was an outer office were a high writing desk with a ledger on it and a number of tables littered with dust-covered legal documents tied up with ribbons.

Harper was clearly puzzled by her first exposure to the British legal system. ‘I’m Harper Deneuve,’ she said. ‘Mr Wittering wanted to see me.’

The old buzzard scratched his head with a quill pen. ‘Wittering? Wittering? It rings a bell.’ Before anybody could say anything he started shifting through the piles of paper on one of the tables. Dust rose in clouds. ‘Wittering, Wittering. Ah, yes! Witterham and Muffles versus Acton Borough Council. Refusal to licence nude bingo parlour. Appeal against same. Wait a minute. Witterham. No, that’s not Wittering, is it?’ I was all for agreeing with him but the inner door opened and a commanding looking man of about forty swept in. He had the sort of upper-class look of disdain mixed with effortless authority that would make you immediately sign over your grandma’s pension fund monies to any annuity he cared to mention. He looked from us with distaste to the old geezer with contempt. ‘What is it, Sculp?’

Sculp was galvanized as if he had been plugged into electricity. ‘Ah, Mr Wittering—’ the name obviously rang a bell and suddenly it all came flooding back. ‘Mr Wittering! You are Mr Wittering!’

I was glad for Sculp’s sake that Wittering did not have a riding crop in his hand. As it was, the words cut with the force of a lash. ‘Get back to your ledger, Sculp!’

Sculp hopped back to his seat at the high desk like a budgie to its perch. Wittering turned to us and his face split into a smile of transparent insincerity. ‘Forgive him. He’s been with the firm, man and cretin, for more years than any of us care to remember. Now, what can I do for you?’

The last six words were delivered with a hard edge that really meant ‘don’t waste my time, peasants’.

Harper swallowed hard. ‘My name is Harper Deneuve.’

I have seen some quick change acts in my time but Wittering’s switch from haughty disinterest to ultra-grovel was really something. ‘Deneuve?’ He might have been reacting to a new perfume. ‘My dear young lady. No words can adequately express my delight in making your acquaintance. Pray step inside my inner sanctum.’ He was practically bowing as he swept an arm towards the door from which he had emerged.

Harper took half a step forward and then hesitated. She turned towards us. ‘I guess you don’t know these gentlemen. They’re sort of distant cousins a few times removed. They very kindly met me at the airport.’

‘How delightful.’ Wittering’s smile bathed us in grease before he extended his arm again. ‘Enter, all of you. There can never be too many ears to hear good news.’ I glanced at Sid and saw his nose give a familiar quiver. It was like a rabbit walking into a field of carrots. Wittering waved us towards some chairs and swung round to face a mullioned window. His hands strayed beneath the tail of his jacket as if he was speaking in court. Eager once again to show Harper that I cared, I snatched up a chair by its arms so that I could place it smoothly behind her. Regrettably, the arms moved but the chair stayed behind. Sid picked up the chair by its back and placed it behind Harper. She sat down and smiled gratefully at Sid. I was stuck with two chair arms. Looking round carefully to make sure that no one was watching, I dropped them discreetly into a wastepaper basket and leaned against a wall. You can usually trust an old wall.

Wittering spun round like we were playing Grandma’s Footsteps and he wanted to catch us all out. His eyes blazed. ‘Fortunate lady and gentlemen,’ said he. ‘Let there be no beating about the bush. Let the bugle call sound. Let the muezzin call the glad tiding to the multitude from the highest tower. Let there be no impediment to the delivery of the glorious news. Let there be no shilly-shallying or dilly-dallying. Let there be no wasting of time in coming to the point—’

He went on in this vein for what felt like hours until, just when I thought I was going to scream, the telephone rang and he kicked it onto the floor. That seemed to buck him up a bit. ‘Yes, my dear,’ he warbled, giving Harper the full benefit of his beautifully capped gnashers. ‘You are a very fortunate young lady. No doubt your much lamented father told you how he became estranged from his English forbears and went to seek his fortune in the New World?’