Wicked Spirits, page 23
‘Vex Not His Ghost’ was originally broadcast on 6 January 1944 on the BBC Home Service as the seventh episode of the fourth series of Appointment with Fear. It was first published in Rendez-Vous avec la Peur (2006), edited by Roland Lacourbe, under the title ‘Certains Fantômes Sont Susceptibles’ in a translation by Daniele Grivel. This is the first publication of Carr’s original script.
WRITER’S WITCH
Joan Fleming
Amyas gave a loud cry of pain and held his head in anguish; Mrs Pegg looked round the door.
‘Anything wrong, sir?’ she asked with concern. It being a weekday she was not wearing her teeth and, for the same reason, upon her head she wore her husband’s old cap, round the edge of which her curlers bobbed playfully. Her face took on a look of shocked disapproval at what she heard. ‘Anything wrong?’ she asked again, sharply.
Amyas stopped cursing and looked up, but the apparition which he saw through watering eyes in no way mitigated his pain.
‘Yes, everything’s wrong!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve just knocked myself nearly senseless on that blasted beam again!’
Mrs Pegg made a curious sucking noise with her gums, intended, no doubt, to convey sympathy. ‘Tch! Tch! Your poor forehead! ’Ow about a spot of marg?’
Amyas dismissed the kindly suggestion with a snarl, and Mrs Pegg wisely held her peace whilst the pain wore off.
Her silent sympathy caught Amyas off his guard; for three weeks he had fought against an ever-increasing irritation and an urgent need to ease himself by bursting into angry complaint. Now he ceased to fight any longer.
‘I must have been mad, utterly mad, ever to take this lousy little hovel, and to think I was going to be able to write here! Peace and quiet was all I wanted, but I didn’t expect to knock myself silly on these confounded beams every half-hour—’
Mrs Pegg waited; she sniffed, she wiped her nose with the corner of her apron. Then, with great restraint, she said: ‘No, you’re not yourself, sir.’
Amyas looked sharply at her. Who was she (their acquaintance being of some three weeks’ standing) to know whether he was himself or not?
However, his need to talk was greater than his discretion, and he went on bitterly: ‘But I’ve got to be myself, I can’t go on like this! Either I sit at the typewriter doing nothing at all, or else I start moving about and knock myself out, and it won’t do. As you may know, Mrs Pegg,’ he said sternly, ‘last year I wrote a best-seller,’ pause for effect, ‘and this year I must write another. My publisher is waiting for it, thousands of people are waiting for it, and here I am, the stage set, producing nothing, nothing at all! Not one word since I came. It’s all here, mind you,’ he said, tapping his forehead, ‘or was, but I can’t get going.’
Mrs Pegg made her sympathetic noise. She was pregnant with talk; Amyas had known it all along; up till now he had taken immense pains to avoid any sort of mental contact with her. She was, however, an excellent cook, so he sighed heavily, and prepared for the broadside.
‘It beats me,’ she said, ‘how a gent like you could take a place like this, though, mind you, it’s not lousy now! The council ’as been ever so thorough.’
Still nursing his head, but ceasing to rock himself gently to and fro, Amyas asked: ‘What did you say?’
‘I said the council spread themselves, like, over getting this place what you’d call dee-loused,’ Mrs Pegg replied in a louder tone.
‘You don’t mean it was really lousy!’ Amyas exclaimed, sitting up, his pain forgotten.
‘But you’ve just said so yourself, sir; “lousy little ’ovel” was wot you called it, and lousy little ’ovel it was; only tramps ’as lived in it these past ’undred years, till it was condemned.’
‘Condemned?’
‘For years,’ Mrs Pegg went on cheerfully; ‘but it didn’t fall to ruin like it might of; stone-built, that’s why. Then wot with the ’ousing shortage excetra, the council dee-condemned it for the evacuees, see?’
Amyas nodded. He saw only too clearly. He had spent but one weekend at the Crown, seen the cottage, bought it and, at infinite trouble and expense, had had it ‘done up’. He looked round the tiny sitting-room, at the uneven brick floor, the eau-de-nil chintz curtains, the dark oak of the bureau, the shining surface of the gate-legged table, and on it the copper bowl with the nasturtiums foaming from it and tumbling over the side to peer at their reflections in the deep polish.
‘Condemned!’ he whispered.
‘But I must say this,’ Mrs Pegg went on; ‘mind you, it’s a nice little job now, apart from the garden, which you naturally ’aven’t had time to deal with yet’—she looked out through the open door on to the grass plot surrounded by the high brick wall. On either side of the flagged central path the grass was high and a few gnarled fruit trees grew neither fruit nor leaf, but, bowed beneath a weight of years, they were covered with a soft grey lichen which blurred their aged outline. ‘Yes, apart from the garden, it’s marvellous, reely, sir,’ Mrs Pegg mused, ‘what you’ve done in the short time—’
Amyas lifted his head wearily from his hands and, leaning back in his chair, with a heavy sigh he said: ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me all this?’ But even as he said it he knew it was a foolish question. Had he sought or desired anyone’s opinion? Had he ever laid himself open to advice or criticism from anyone in the village? Had he not deliberately avoided the bar of the Crown where he might have been given much useful information about the cottage he was buying?
Mrs Pegg, Amyas thought, was brewing for something. She was poking primly about the bosom of her pink woollen jumper, a sign, he had learned, that a subject of importance was about to be broached. She would fidget thus when about to discuss her wages or how much money Amyas proposed letting her have for ‘the housekeeping’.
‘You wouldn’t of found anyone in the village as would of wanted to talk about the place,’ she said at last. ‘It’s unlucky!’ And she continued to poke primly, knowing that she had, at last, roused Amyas’s full attention. ‘Yes, unlucky!’ she repeated, mouthing the word with enjoyment. ‘The evacs didn’t—’
‘The what?’
‘The evacuees—they didn’t stay long, I can tell you, and then the Army used the place, as an ammunition store, they said, and that scared everyone nearly out of their wits and no one dared even mention the place, in case—’
‘Yes? In case what?’
‘In case!’ Mrs Pegg repeated in a hoarse whisper.
‘ls this some sort of joke?’ Amyas asked coldly; ‘explain yourself, Mrs Pegg.’
A curious look passed over Mrs Pegg’s face. ‘All right,’ she said (rather nastily, Amyas thought), ‘I’ll tell you and be blowed! It isn’t me as ’as to sleep ’ere nights.’ Glancing swiftly to right and to left, she moistened her thin lips and leaned forward. ‘It’s Mary Ann Beehag! She’s never left the place, not since she was ’ung at the cross-roads more nor a ’undred years ago!’
‘Ah, I see,’ Amyas said in his most superior voice; ‘a thief, I suppose.’
‘No, not a thief. They ’ung her at the cross-roads on the way to Marley because that’s where the gallows ’appened to be and that’s what caused it. There weren’t no gallows here, see? She’d never set foot out of this village since she was born under this very roof, and they went and took ’er ’alf-way to the next village and ’ung ’er!’
‘Why, exactly, was she—er—hung?’ Amyas asked, hating the misuse of the verb, but keeping in touch with Mrs Pegg mentally.
Again the look passed over Mrs Pegg’s face which he could only describe as primitive.
‘She was a very bad old woman,’ she said, then she wiped her nose once more with the corner of her apron and turned to leave the room.
Now thoroughly intrigued, Amyas called after her, but she did not come back. He got up and followed her into the tiny kitchen, where she was putting the finishing touches to the salad which she was leaving for his supper.
Amyas leaned against the wall with its brightly shining new cream paint and thrust his hands into his pockets.
‘In what way,’ he asked, ‘was she bad?’
‘Mary Ann Beehag? She was famous!’ Mrs Pegg said. ‘The last of her kind in the county, so they say, to be ’ung.’
‘“Of her kind”?’
‘Aye,’ she replied, giving a lettuce leaf a vigorous shake, ‘and a good thing too!’
‘“Of her kind”?’ Amyas persisted.
‘See here, sir,’ Mrs Pegg said, stopping her work and looking squarely at Amyas. ‘Don’t a-go stirring up mud. Least said soonest mended, eh? Walls have ears!’
‘I simply don’t know what you’re driving at,’ Amyas said, taking out his cigarette-case.
‘You will,’ Mrs Pegg told him, briskly plucking off her apron and hanging it on a hook behind the kitchen door.
‘I’m surprised at you, Mrs Pegg,’ Amyas replied, flicking at his lighter; ‘you, with your electric cooker, and your wireless, and your television, and your bus drive into town to the pictures every week, I really am surprised at your superstitions and your innuendos—’ He could feel her getting angry; no one likes having long words thrown at them by a superior voice. Amyas was beginning to enjoy himself; goading Mrs Pegg was poor sport, but better than sitting in front of a typewriter clawing at the blank spaces in one’s mind. ‘Are you trying to tell me that she was hanged for a witch?’
Silence, whilst Mrs Pegg fidgeted with something in her black mackintosh bag.
‘If so,’ Amyas went on, ‘I am not merely surprised but shocked. Do you know’—he was about to say ‘my good woman’, but stopped himself in time—‘do you know that thousands of poor harmless old women were—er—hung or burned for being, as they say, witches? Poor innocent women like—er—like yourself; tortured and put to death by hysterical, superstitious crowds—’
Mrs Pegg was eyeing him with dislike and Amyas stopped abruptly.
‘Mary Ann Beehag wasn’t no pore innercent old woman,’ she declared soberly; ‘she was an evil witch. Evil as the devil ’imself.’ She opened the kitchen door, hung her black bag over her arm, and looked out at the brilliant afternoon, then with her hand still on the latch she glanced back over her shoulder. ‘And the sun shone,’ she pronounced, ‘right through ’er!’
Amyas gave a shout of laughter as the kitchen door slammed and he heard her feet on the flags outside.
‘“The sun shone right through her!”’ he repeated, with delight.
Ducking his head carefully in the doorway, he returned to the sitting-room and sat down in front of his typewriter.
Gradually the amusement and the animation of the last few minutes left him and he sat, sulky and dejected, lighting cigarette after cigarette and writing not one word. Dully, he turned over the pages of his notes headed ‘Outline of Plot’, which were so drearily familiar to him, and then, with sudden decision, he gathered the loose pages together and tore them across.
‘Dammit, it’s rubbish!’ he shouted.
He stood up, tearing the paper across again and again, and, clutching the pieces in his hand, he strode to the door leading out into the sunlit garden.
Crash went his head against the beam across the threshold, and this time it brought him to his knees, half in and half out of the doorway; everything went black, and there were brilliant flashes in the blackness.
Seeing stars, Amyas thought, like the kids in Comic Cuts when they bang themselves. But this won’t do! It won’t have to go on!
He opened his eyes, and there, in the middle of the flagged garden-path, stood Mary Ann Beehag, looking at him.
And Amyas looked at her.
‘What are you doing in my house?’ she croaked.
‘Trying to write a novel,’ Amyas answered; ‘a best-seller!’
She gave a cackle of shocking, fiendish laughter.
‘What’s that you have in your hand?’
Amyas looked at his hand, carefully and stupidly, as though he were drunk. It was full of torn scraps of paper.
‘The “Outline of Plot”.’
Mary Ann Beehag extended a frightful claw; it was misshapen, gnarled and covered with soft grey lichen which could not hide its aged outline.
Amyas snatched his hand away. He was still kneeling on the threshold. A feeling of cold, dreadful horror came over him.
‘Look!’ he shrieked. ‘Look!’ And Mary Ann Beehag laughed again, a cold, rustling laugh, like the wind in dead leaves.
Amyas’s teeth began to chatter. ‘The sun shines,’ he mumbled, ‘right through her!’
For the old woman stood in brilliant sunshine, and not to the front of her, nor behind her, nor to the sides of her, was there any shadow.
Mary Ann Beehag laughed again, and this time the sound scraped the inner linings of his soul. She said: ‘Yes, only the evil cast no shadow, young man! Give me those—those,’ she repeated impatiently.
Slowly Amyas put out his hand and dropped the torn fragments of his notes into her extended claw, then he watched, fascinated, as she shuffled down the path, a few steps through the long grass, and stooped under one of the dead trees.
‘They’re buried now,’ she shrieked maliciously, and she laughed again—a laugh that reminded Amyas of a certain book reviewer who had slated his last novel. ‘They’re buried now, and we shall see what grows there—’
P.S.—Amyas and his publisher are still waiting.
JOAN FLEMING
Joan Fleming was born on 27 March 1908 at Horwich, Yorkshire. Her mother was Sarah Elizabeth Sutcliffe and her father David was a hydraulic engineer with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway who would in time become manager of the company’s Horwich Locomotive Works.
In later years Joan would say that she owed much to her Lancastrian roots and ‘the terrible climate’ which meant that much of her childhood was spent indoors and fostered her ability to amuse herself by writing dramatic sketches. Joan had wanted to be a writer from childhood and she was encouraged by her father who bought her a typewriter because, she recalled, he said that her handwriting was so large that she ‘exhausted all [her] energy in the physical business of writing’. Nonetheless, it would be some years before Joan would have the confidence and ability to consider becoming a full-time writer.
After leaving Brighthelmston School in Birkdale, where her greatest achievement was winning an award for gardening, she was sent away to a Swiss finishing school, afterwards attending the University of Lausanne. On completing her education, she returned to Britain and went to London, where she soon secured employment as secretary to a young ophthalmic surgeon, Norman Fleming, whom she would marry in 1932. Theirs was a long and happy marriage and they had three children for whom she wrote the stories that were eventually collected in her first book Dick Brownie and the Zagabog (1944). At this time, Joan and Norman were living in Ellerdale Road in Hampstead, North London, and while continuing to write books for younger readers she began attending evening classes in writing fiction, reading her early efforts to an unappreciative professor who made her cringe. Despite what she described as ‘the most punishing experience—not a word of encouragement, nothing’, she decided to move away from children’s literature to writing crime fiction, albeit in a relatively conventional mould. Her ‘adult’ debut, Two Lovers Too Many (1949), features a doctor as its central character and an unusual method of murder.
As the novel was well received, Joan decided to make writing her career and produced a novel annually until she turned seventy. Her practice was to work from 7.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., aiming to type at least 5,000 words a day without even waiting to dress; after lunch she would walk her two dogs and indulge her hobby of buying antiques. Joan would often say that she didn’t take kindly to interruptions, nor did she take criticism well, claiming to have abandoned three novels because she was asked to make changes. Fiercely self-critical, she also claimed that her worst fault was ‘working out a plot and never sticking to it’ and that her ambition was to write a successful play and a ‘really great novel that everyone would respect as a classic’ to stand alongside those of her great hero, Elizabeth Gaskell, author of Cranfield (1853) and North and South (1855).
While she never achieved those self-set goals, Joan Fleming was at her peak solidly in the top tier of crime writers, frequently name-checked alongside Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Nicholas Blake. Her best books are the stunning Young Man, I Think You’re Dying (1970)—her twenty-fourth book—and the earlier When I Grow Rich (1962), whose title quotes the same nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ as Gladys Mitchell had with Here Comes a Chopper (1946). Both of these books won Fleming the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger; she was the first woman to win twice, a feat later equalled by Minette Walters and surpassed by Ruth Rendell.
With a few exceptions—notably two books featuring the Turkish philosopher Nuri Bey—Joan Fleming’s novels tended to be rooted in the places she knew best, like the Cotswolds and North London, but she showed more awareness of contemporary issues than most other British crime writers of the 1960s and ’70s. Such issues included the impact of living in tower blocks, the Irish Republican Army, drug addiction and illegal abortions. In style and characterisation, she has been compared to Patricia Highsmith and also to Christianna Brand with whom she shared a regrettable penchant for jarringly unrealistic character names. And, like Brand, towards the end of her writing career she wrote several gothic novels, which were not as light in touch as her crime fiction.
