Medium for Murder

by Guy Compton, D.G. Compton

Genres: Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Even in the world of murder, things are not always as they seem...

When Ben Anderson first came to stay at Buckleigh Combe in North Devon he found more than a few obstacles to overcome. He was there to research material for his new book, but ended up with far more than he bargained for. The ruined mansion had once been the home of an infamous medium until he had died there in sensational - and mysterious - circumstances: he fell from The Mad Tower.

And before long, Ben finds himself chasing along dark country lanes in the company of a man he is not at all sure he can trust...

Release date: March 15, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 208

Sample

IT WAS a Monday four months later in the last week in August. An old open car with its hood down struggled up the mild incline of the drive to Buckleigh Coombe in the sweltering heat of the early afternoon, its owner urging it on with all the moral strength he possessed. Ben Anderson—Bennet Anders on the book-jackets—rocked backwards and forwards in his seat, muttering encouragement and patting the outside of the car door. The difficulty they were both experiencing was on account of a missing second gear, and Ben’s reluctance to resort to bottom gear, a ratio good for little but grinding coffee and climbing the sides of pyramids. So he took the slope in top gear, expecting each revolution of the engine to be its last.

The drive burrowed up among the spotted laurel-leaves and drooping fronds of cypress. It levelled slightly. A particularly low-hanging branch slapped the car’s windscreen as it passed and tore at Ben’s sleeve. Ben wondered how on earth anybody got along the drive, except on their hands and knees. If he was going to stay here that branch would have to go for a start.

The drive ended in a large cobbled forecourt, the cobbles almost hidden under moss and grass and clumps of nettles. Ben parked his Swift beside what must have been Miss Fuller’s car, a muddy but still magnificent Aston Martin. He sat in his car, looking down on the other’s dusty, lime-spotted roof and realizing why that branch had been allowed to stay. The top of her car came up to the door handles of his. Never mind, at least his car was clean—and from a factory that had discontinued production in 1930. He climbed down from the driving seat.

Bennet Anders was between books. And Ben Anderson was in need of a holiday from London. He had come to Buckleigh Coombe looking for the ghost of a murder, a murder that had been committed four months ago, in April.

Buckleigh Coombe was a rambling, two-storeyed house, a country mansion that had grown down the centuries from considerations of comfort rather than ostentation. It had been the biggest house in the district ever since the original Great Hall was built in 1372, and it needed to make no boast of the fact. Decreasing family prosperity had mercifully left little money to spare for Victorian ‘improvements’. Sir Henry Bewclay had however obstinately kept the family there till 1915, when he had died, leaving it at last to revert to the jungle. When his two sons finally got down to doing something about the old place after the war it was too late. The house was too shabby and too inaccessible even for rich Americans. It eventually went to a local farmer for little more than the value of the land it stood on. The farmer and his son used its stables as store-rooms till their roofs fell in.

The war in 1939 filled it temporarily with evacuees and foster-mothers, but the labyrinthine plumbing and the isolation gradually dispersed them back to the preferred horrors of the buzz-bombs.

In 1946 Buckleigh Coombe had a short rebirth, on paper at least, as a country club. The farmer’s son had come back from the war wondering what to do with his gratuity. But after a few months common sense and his father triumphed. Young Davey Endacott founded instead a champion herd of Devon short-horns and never regretted it. He won prizes with his pigs as well. Buckleigh Coombe gave up, and its condition soon became hopeless.

Bees seeped in through broken windows and took over the ground floor of the East Wing. As the windows of the Great Hall were grown over with ivy, so bats multiplied in the green gloom among the hammer-beams and the grinning faces of the beasts of the house, half dog, half monkey, on their ledges high in the roof. The bats hooked and fidgeted, swooped with hysterical accuracy or sidled twittering out between the mossy shuttering of the rooflights. Mice and rats swarmed everywhere—a family of badgers moved in under the floor of the gallery along the South Front.

Birds nested in the chimneys. They nested also between the chimney-pots, behind the barge-boards, in the gutters, under the gutters, along the rain-water gulleys, in the down pipes, until the entire roof became choked and sodden.

Only the Mad Tower remained unaffected by the surrounding decay. It was one of the oldest parts of the house, a round unadorned tower three storeys high, with thick walls and a few windows. It tapered slightly towards the top, and ended in blunt castellations. Its few windows were mean pointed spy-holes, dating from fiercer, more dangerous, days. Only on the ground floor had new windows been cut, fine Edwardian French windows. Sir Henry had used this tower room, or Small Drawing Room, for entertaining the few tiny house-parties he had been able to gather in the years immediately before his death. He had been the first member of the family to use the tower for any purpose since the seventeenth century, when a son of the then Baron had been confined there in his madness for more than thirty years. Hence its local title—the Mad Tower.

It was a family tradition to leave the tower to its memories, and Sir Henry met considerable opposition to his plan when he brought it into use again. But his intrusion was decent and respectful, and no harm appeared to come of it. No ghosts walked. Sir Henry himself defied all predictions by dying peacefully when his time was come, in his own bed and with the full consolations of the Church.

Yet the Mad Tower was still in some ways a special place, a structure singled out from the rest of the house. No ivy grew on it, no rats gnawed at its timbers, no starlings nested on its roof. It silently resisted all except the death-watch beetle eternally burrowing in its sinews.

And old farmer Endacott said as maybe there was something in the old tale after all. Deserted it was, like it was damned. His son Davey said that were all rummage. The old Baron had had the masonry re-pointed which kept away the ivy, and as for the rest he knew for certain as a family of owls was nesting in the room at the top. There now, said his father—for didn’t they both know as owls was the birds of death?

How Harry Fuller and his sister came to the old house in the first place was much publicized in the reports of the famous medium’s death. The story of the Spirit’s guidance was also told, linked as it was with the sinister manner of Harry’s passing. At the time Harry explained that he knew too much of the apparent inventiveness of the Spirits to take their every word too literally—the writing was often more of a dream-language that it was his task to interpret. But for once the Spirits had said exactly what they meant.

Harry and his sister drove down to look over the house one spiked raw day in early November. The huge key fitted deep into the frost-rimmed keyhole and needed both his hands to turn it. The front door led into the Great Hall and its opening brought the bats from the rafters soundlessly weaving and twittering. Jane had stayed in the car, for she hated old houses and she just knew there would be bats in it.

Harry inspected the old house room by room, testing the floors as he went, folding back the high shutters, looking in every cupboard, often standing motionless in a corridor for minutes at a time, as if the house were something to be listened to. He waved to his sister from an upstairs window so that Jane was tempted to go in to him. But she got no farther than the door, where the smells and the sounds and the sight of the rich carpet of droppings drove her shivering back to the car. She turned on The Dales and waited for her brother.

Harry Fuller and his sister became the new owners of Buckleigh Coombe after very little bargaining. Moseley’s, the house-agents, were only too glad to get it off their books. Harry had essential repairs carried out on the front portion of the house, installed a compact water system and moved into the ground-floor rooms a week before Christmas. He and his sister had a damp black-beetled Christmas.

Their plans for repair and modernization went ahead quickly—until suddenly in April the morning papers carried reports of the death of Harry Fuller.

The celebrated medium had been murdered, and in the most sensational circumstances.

Work stopped on Buckleigh Coombe. The corridors returned to a silence broken only by the footsteps of Jane Fuller and the faint falling of bills through the big new unpaid-for letterbox. Bills for which there was no money.

Harry Fuller had paid out his last penny in the purchase of the house and had been living since then on folly. Only the house, and his car, and a few clothes remained. The house and the car were of course distrained upon, and his sister bought back the latter from his creditors for what she said were sentimental reasons. She also paid for the smallest number of household effects as would allow her to live on there in reasonable comfort. As she had nowhere else to go she was allowed to stay on at a nominal rent until such time as the house should be sold. Nobody believed it ever would be sold, but that was still the wording of the agreement.

Jane Fuller lived on at Buckleigh Coombe, patrolling Harry’s dream palace, feeding the two cats she had bought to combat the scuttling hordes of assorted vermin, driving her brother’s car once a week into Buckleigh Ferrers for the shopping and waiting. Waiting for a particular event.

She was waiting for Harry Fuller’s murderer to be run to earth. Or so she said.

All this Ben Anderson knew. He had even heard of the fabulous motor-car, its thundering horses padding sedately each week down the drive and back again, scarcely aware of being alive even. A journalist called Guy Windsor had made the Fuller case his special interest—Windsor had been lucky enough to be at Buckleigh Coombe on the night of the murder. Ben Anderson had read the reports and the occasional later follow-ups with interest. For one thing, the murderer had not yet been found. The police had been wishing to interview the murdered man’s cousin, Felix Gaunt, in connection with the crime for four months now, and they still showed no signs of being able to find him.

As a rule Ben Anderson took no professional interest in real crime—his view of sooty treetops and the antics of the man out at the back who kept pigeons were sufficient inspiration for him. But he had been between books now for seven weeks, seeking wildly for yet another original twist in the old, old story of man kills man. And the view from his window sparked off nothing at all. It seemed to him that the story of Harry Fuller must be full of original twists—besides, summer was making London very hot and flyblown.

So he wrote to the only house-agent in Buckleigh Ferrers, and two days later he was able to pack his household effects into the back seat of the lumbering Swift and set off for Devon, and Jane Fuller.

It was less than ten miles to Buckleigh Ferrers when the gate on the Swift’s gearbox fractured, depriving him both of reverse and second gear. He made the last ten miles all in a rush and finally switched off in the forecourt of Buckleigh Coombe hardly more than nine hours after he had left Clapham Common East.

He climbed down from the driving seat and honked the big brass bulb-horn. He stood by the front of his car, looking round at the old brown house. He found the sudden silence deafening, and the firm ground beneath his feet buzzed and vibrated. The place was deserted, and birds sang intensely in the closely surrounding trees. Bees flew in and out of a window to his left and the smell of hot car-oil slowly faded.

He reached back and honked his horn again. Then he wandered away to poke in an overgrown flower bed with his foot. The hot afternoon ignored him.

Five minutes later the front door opened and Miss Fuller came out into the light. She was younger than Ben had imagined, upright, briskly dressed arid no nonsense.

‘Hallo, hallo,’ she said.

‘Miss Fuller? My name is Bennet Anders.’

He could see his name jogged her memory somewhere.

‘It’s a lovely afternoon,’ she said. ‘Have you come to advise me on the rats?’

‘I wrote to the agents in Buckleigh Ferrers. Moseley’s. I hope to rent a couple of rooms here.’

She read the letter he offered from the house-agent.

‘Mr. Moseley wrote to me about you. I said I’d believe you when I saw you.’

‘Well, I’m here.’

‘Yes.’

Belief was still suspended. He saw her looking him over. His car would label him an exhibitionist—what could he possibly be wanting here at Buckleigh Coombe? Her next remark showed how he puzzled her.

‘Are you a photographer?’ she said.

‘I take photographs.’

He was just being awkward, and he was not quite sure why. He realized that she did not want him there. He sympathized—she must have had enough of visitors over the last months: policemen, reporters, creditors, lawyers, sight-seers. He had begun in the wrong way. If they became antagonists his stay there would be difficult and probably useless. He must make her like him.

‘I do take photographs, but I’m not a photographer. I hope to come here’—he deferred to her decision in this—‘because I want complete peace and quiet. I’m a writer.’

‘Bennet Anders—yes, I thought the name was familiar.’

‘It’s Ben Anderson really. The other sounds more distinguished.’

‘It simply sounds foreign to me.’

Ben looked at the ground humbly.

‘I’m afraid nowadays it’s smart to sound foreign. At least my books are British enough.’

He had struck the right note. Jane Fuller held out her hand and took it.

‘Well, Mr. Anderson, I’m glad to meet you. I think we may get on.’

‘I hope so, Miss Fuller. I certainly won’t be a trouble to you.’

She turned and led him into the house. Once inside the front door she stopped for him to admire her brother’s restoration of the Great Hall.

‘How magnificent, Miss Fuller. I never imagined it would be anything as fine as this.’

The gilt and crimson on the coat of arms above the huge stone hearth dazzled in the sunlight from high Cromwellian windows. The panelling on the walls had been renewed, the floor resurfaced, the roof timbers scraped and rot-proofed with a brown compound whose antiseptic smell still hung in the sun-slanted air. The hall was bare of furniture—it had all gone to Moseley’s auction rooms three months before. And on the floor in the far corner was an untidy crowd of monkey-dogs down from their ledges in the roof, shabby and grinning.

‘The beasts of the house,’ said Miss Fuller. ‘All twelve of them. The man had just begun on them when my brother was killed.’

Ben walked over to examine them more closely. Two of them had had the peeling paint removed from them and the wormholes stopped.

‘I’m carrying on with the work myself,’ said Miss Fuller. ‘It gives me something to do when it’s too wet for gardening.’

The beasts squatted higher than Ben’s knee, devilish monkey-heads on dogs’ bodies, devilish monkey-tails curling up over their backs to meet their heads, devilish grinning teeth and a devilish potency beneath their lean bellies. Their restoration seemed a strange task for such as Miss Fuller.

Ben returned to the doorway.

‘They lived up on those ledges, did they?’

‘We were afraid of their falling—we took them down as soon as we got here. They really are most rare. Harry assured me they have no evil significance. He said they were merely some kind of mediaeval . . .