A Ghost in the Machine Read online

  But the problem here was a matter of scale. One man, one gun, one target – what reasonable person could argue with that? But weapons of mass destruction within the confines of the home…And it wasn’t as if they were the sort of thing your average man in the street could recognise.

  War memorabilia, fair enough. Badges and medals, ration books, the odd German helmet, shells and gas masks – such sentimental souvenirs could bring back lovely memories to those of a certain age. But you’d have to be a six-hundred-year-old pile of dust, as one historical mastermind explained in the Horse and Hounds, happily to recall Brinkley’s monstrosities.

  One of the first things Dennis had done before moving into the old primary school was knock the place about. This was to be expected – a school was not a domestic dwelling. But instead of a nice conversion, all the interior walls and ceilings had been taken out, leaving a huge, empty shell reinforced with iron girders. Modest living quarters were then built taking up barely a third of the space. All this caused plenty of talk and speculation, which the removal van’s contents – a few tea chests and some ordinary, old-fashioned furniture – did much to defuse. Then, barely a week later, the machines arrived.

  Not that they were recognised as such. Disassembled, their various parts, massive and sometimes strangely shaped, had been transported in specially constructed crates. Four men had carried these into the house and had left several hours later carrying the crates, now dismantled and roped together.

  A short while after this, more men arrived with ladders and scaffolding and were in and out for three days, knocking and hammering. The minute they left, the village was in there, starting with the chairman of Neighbourhood Watch and his consort. Others followed in order of seniority. Alas, all were disappointed. They were courteously received, shown into the rather small living room but not encouraged to browse. And so it continued for the next ten years.

  This meant few of the locals were destined to see the constructions assembled in all their glory, for the windows in the machine room were tall, extremely narrow and very high up. Even by jumping in the air one still only got the barest glimpse of a dangling loop of rope. Or a massive iron claw.

  But Mrs. Crudge, who was allowed to wax the floor-boards on which the machines were precisely placed, relayed sensational descriptions as to their extraordinary appearance. Apparently there were large cards printed and set in glass boxes next to each exhibit, giving a detailed history as to their fearsome capabilities. Some of the boxes had illustrations that Mrs. Crudge said fair turned her stomach. Worse than the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. Not what you’d call a nice sort of hobby at all. And she was quite right. For the war machines were not a hobby for Dennis, but an all-consuming passion.

  He remembered vividly the moment this sprang into being. He was fourteen and until then had shown no genuine interest in anything at all. He played no sports and had no friends – at least none he brought home. Eventually, somewhat shamefaced, his parents admitted to each other that their only child was as dull as ditchwater.

  There was only one TV set in the house and Dennis’s father kept a firm eye on the control knob. So Dennis read, simply because he could and it was something to do. As her son seemed indifferent to subject matter his mother changed his library books when she changed her own. She tried to select an interesting mixture: teenage fiction, true adventure – sailing, mountaineering and so on – biology and the natural world, or history. It was in this section she had come across a work entitled The Soldier’s Armoury: Twelfth to Sixteenth Century.

  Dennis opened it, sucked in his breath and cried, “Wow! Just look at this!”

  The page in question showed a contraption for breaking knees, elbows and neck, then screwing the captive’s head round till his spine snapped. Mrs. Brinkley had barely drawn a protesting breath before her son, tightly hugging the book, rushed to his bedroom and, unlike the unfortunate man in the illustration, never looked back.

  Over the next twenty years Dennis rooted out every scrap of information extant on the period in question. His shelves were crammed with relevant books. Holidays were spent in museums all over the world poring over manuscripts describing battles and photographing weaponry, armour and all the cumbersome but lethal machinery of early war-making. The artefacts were very fragile and only once, in a library in Verona, had he obtained permission to trace a document. This was a map showing the Battle of Montichiari (one thousand lances, seven hundred archers). As Dennis touched the faded, ivory parchment he felt the warm golden earth, running with the blood of warriors, incarnate beneath his fingertips.

  Gradually he built up a small collection: a sheaf of exquisitely balanced longbows; a gun carriage supporting a vast crossbow so heavy that two men were needed merely to handle the bolt; a rusted helmet with a horsehair crest and hinged side pieces.

  He was almost forty before it occurred to him that there was nothing to stop him owning a facsimile of one of the great early war machines themselves. He drew up precisely detailed plans, even though they would never be put to any practical use. He started with the trebuchet, a giant leather catapult on a winch mechanism in a frame thirty feet tall, used for hurling rocks and boiling liquids over castle walls. Dennis followed this with a belfry, a movable tower capable of holding over a hundred men, and began the search for a craftsman with the necessary skills to build them. As this was being done he began looking for a suitable property to house his new treasures.

  Dennis had been delighted with the purchase and eventual transformation of Kinders. Now never an evening passed but that he did not enter the vast space holding the war machines. He especially liked to be there at dusk, when their grotesque shadows met and mingled, spreading like grey mist beneath his slippered feet.

  As he moved about he would hear, in fancy, the whistling rush of a thousand arrows. Or the strain and creak of a cable as the trebuchet’s vast leather sling was winched into a hurling position. Gradually, over the years, these scenes became more and more vivid, incorporating not only an increasingly large amount of grisly detail but also the sound and lately even the smell of carnage.

  For a long time these extraordinary historical recreations occurred only when Dennis was confined within the parameters of the war room. When he closed the door to go about his business the sound and fury immediately vanished. But lately his mind had been breached at other times. Once, to his great alarm, this happened in the office during a discussion with two of his staff. Sometimes, even when asleep, the groans of wounded men and screams of terrified women and children disturbed his dreams.

  Naturally Dennis kept these frightening experiences to himself. Eventually, however, the daily memories of nighttime horrors began to wear him down and he decided to seek help. Loath to visit a psychiatrist – he was neither unhappy nor inadequate in the matter of conscious day-to-day living – Dennis finally settled on a dream therapist. Embarrassedly he told his tale. The woman listened, then suggested various interpretations that all seemed pretty daft to him. As was the suggestion that, every day for a month, he should write the dreams and visions down. But Dennis decided to give this a go and, to his surprise, it worked so well he never had cause to visit her again.

  Mallory remembered speaking to his aunt once about the friendship between her companion and Dennis Brinkley. Like most people he found it surprising, even faintly humorous, and was unwise enough to say so. Carey had been angry at this implication that the unattractive and socially inept did not deserve friends. Or, in the unlikely event that they made one, that this friend should be as plain and clumsy as they were themselves.

  After he had said he was sorry Carey had unbent enough to discuss Benny’s situation a little. As she saw it the relationship was grounded not only in liking, though there was that, of course, but in a tender stability arising from the mutual understanding that neither would ever do the other harm. Benny’s anguished shyness, hidden behind her blundering and rushing and general overeagerness to help was perfectly balanced a
nd gentled into quietude by Dennis’s patient manner and genuine interest in her wellbeing. They were comfortable with each other. Once, Carey explained, she had needed to talk to Benny when Dennis was visiting and had discovered them sitting in wing chairs on opposite sides of Benny’s fireplace with all the calm and gravitas of an old married couple.

  Benny knew nothing of this conversation but now, as she hurried to the front door of Appleby House, the expression on her face completely bore it out.

  “Come in, Dennis. It’s so good to see you.”

  “I did hesitate…a bit soon after the funeral. But I saw Kate’s car drive away and thought you might be in need of a little company.”

  “You’re right, as always.”

  “Are we in the kitchen?”

  In no time they were settled at the scarred deal table. Benny threw away her stewed Earl Grey and made what Dennis always called “some proper char.” She set out the big Mason’s ironstone cups and saucers, yellow and blue with lovely flowers. Really they were breakfast coffee cups but Carey had believed in using anything and everything in whatever way suited you. She would cut ice cream with a fish knife if it was to hand and had once served oysters, complete with lemon slices, shaved ice and seaweed, on a three-tier cake stand. Why, Carey wouldn’t give a fig if…

  “Oh, Benny. My dear.” Her tears were falling like rain. Dennis produced a large, white linen handkerchief, shook out the immaculate folds and laid it close to Benny’s saucer. “I’m so very sorry.”

  “Hnuhh…hnuhh…” Snorting and sobbing Benny wrapped her arms across her chest as if in a strait-jacket, clamping them fast. She gripped her shoulders against the pain. “I was all right…when everyone was here…”

  Dennis waited. He didn’t speak again and Benny was grateful. So many people had said so many things to her during the last few days. Their intentions were sympathetic but the pious generalities meant nothing. Worse, they were an irritation. What did they know of the real, true Carey? Of her relish for jokes and occasional crossness, her raucous laugh and sharp mimicry of various village worthies once their unsuspecting backs were turned. Her love of gossip, good wine and rich tobacco. Recalling all these things aloud and adding to them took so much time the tea got cold.

  “Shall I make some fresh,” said Dennis. A statement rather than a question. He filled the kettle and by the time it started to whistle and shriek again Benny had stopped crying.

  “Is there any cake?” Dennis asked. Not out of greed, though he did have a sweet tooth, but to distract her.

  “Oh, yes, yes.” Benny started bustling about, pulling tins out of the cupboard. One fell and rolled across the floor. Then she remembered that Polly had taken home all the leftover cake from the funeral. “There’s only Battenburg.”

  “My mother’s favourite.” Dennis got out some clean cups. “Though she didn’t like marzipan.”

  “It isn’t home-made.” As Benny put slices of the cake on an almost translucent plate with a worn golden rim the anomaly sank in. “Didn’t like…?”

  “She’d take it all off and just eat the other bits. I used to say to her, why not buy angel cake instead? That was pink and yellow if you remember, Benny?”

  “Oh, yes. Stuck together with sugary grit.”

  Dennis talked on. He moved from his mother’s idiosyncratic eating habits through other family stories, with one or two of which Benny was comfortably familiar, then introduced some strange neighbours who had lived next door to the Brinkleys at Pinner.

  “They had a stuffed armadillo. After dark, when no one was about, they used to take it for walks.”

  “How wonderful!” Benny clapped her hands with pleasure. “Was it on wheels?”

  “They carried it.”

  “You can’t take something for a walk by carrying it!”

  As Dennis extended and embellished this entirely imaginary family, Croydon jumped on to Benny’s lap and started to purr, the first occasion for a long time. She sank her fingers into his cream and orange ruff and massaged his neck. The cat stretched out his chin to facilitate these caresses. Gradually, soothed by the gently meandering conversation, its restful pauses and the rumbling vibration beneath her fingertips, Benny’s heart became less troubled. Her earlier anxieties now seemed fanciful in the extreme. She really must try and put some sort of brake on her morbid imagination.

  It was unfortunate that Dennis was preparing to deliver some information calculated to banish all this hard-won tranquillity. Gossip and the local paper made it inevitable that Benny would hear this awful news one way or the other. Knowing her so well, understanding her wildly nervous temperament, Dennis wanted to be sure it came from him.

  The facts were these. At the village of Badger’s Drift, just a few miles away, an elderly man had been found battered to death in his council bungalow. His seventeen-year-old grandson, who had been living with him for the past five years, had disappeared. Neighbours testified as to ongoing rows, and the youth had already been in trouble for vandalism and fighting. The police were asking for any information as to his whereabouts, and a poster with an up-to-date photograph was already in circulation.

  Benny listened, her face gradually draining of colour. When she could finally speak she cried, “What if he comes here?”

  “There’s no chance of that,” said Dennis firmly. “A crime like this is what the police call a domestic. That means only the family of the mur – perpetrator is at any sort of risk. And in any case, the police seem to think the lad’s already in London.” This last sentence was pure inspiration.

  “I’m all by myself.” Benny had jumped to her feet and looked ready to fly away.

  “Benny, look – where do you want to stay tonight? Over here or in the flat?”

  “At home. This place is so big.”

  “So what we’ll do is go and check it out right now for security, all right? And then we can go and buy anything we need – window locks or whatever – and I’ll fit them straight away.”

  “Oh, Dennis.” Benny sat down again. “What would I do without you?”

  4

  A long time ago, nearly eight years to be exact, though it seemed several lifetimes to him, Mallory Lawson had been a stable, healthy and contented man. He had always wanted to teach and, after leaving Cambridge with a 2:1 in Biological Sciences from Downing College, had obtained a Post Graduate Certificate in Education at Homerton and promptly set about it. He applied first for a junior teaching post in a comprehensive school in Hertford but, to his surprise, did not even get an interview, so took a position at an excellent middle school in the Fens, near Ely. He had already fallen in love with a beautiful girl, Kate Allen, then reading English at Girton, and by the end of his first term in the new school they were married. Kate managed to get her foot in the door of a major London publishing house – the first step towards her ambition to become an editor – and commuted to London every day.

  Young, childless and with only themselves to please, instead of getting lumbered with a mortgage the Lawsons rented a small flat in Cambridge. They entertained friends, went to concerts and theatres, took long, expensive holidays and generally had a wonderful time. While Mallory was at Little Felling he continued to write and research, publishing several papers including “The Transmigration of Whooper Swans” in Nature magazine, which was especially well received. It was at a conference that he met the head of a direct grant upper school at Cheltenham, who suggested he apply for the position of Head of Science there when the vacancy arose at the end of the current term. Mallory did so and, after a nail-biting two weeks on a short list of three and a second interview, was successful.

  At this point in their lives Kate was pregnant. Both of them, tremendously happy at the news, became suddenly and seriously aware that it was time to settle down. Time to do all the responsible things. Buy a sensible family car (Mallory sold the Morgan quickly, even at small profit) and, of course, a house. Three bedrooms and probably just a semi to begin with. Leaving their Cambridge address
with estate agents, they were astonished at details of the local property that started arriving through the post. In Cambridge they knew prices had tripled over the past ten years but that was a university town. Oxford was the same, if not worse. But this was the country, for heaven’s sake.

  In the end, as both wanted to live in Cheltenham itself, they chose a Victorian terraced house, took out a hundred per cent mortgage and used their combined savings to decorate, rewire the place and buy more furniture. Kate gave up her job to freelance and, first-class copy-editors being extremely rare birds, continued to find work. She eased off somewhat after Polly was born and began reading as well as editing manuscripts. This was much less demanding, and easier to pick up and put down when a fractious child needed attention. Not so well paid but you couldn’t have everything.

  And so the Lawsons lived and modestly prospered. Kate fed the family. Mallory paid the heavy mortgage, all the other bills and kept the car on the road. Polly, intelligent, self-willed, secretive even then, thrived. She proved to be good at science, outstanding at maths and very good indeed at games, both on and off the pitch. Everyone wanted Polly on their side.

  When Mallory had been at the Willoughby-Hart School for almost ten years the deputy headship became available and it was discreetly suggested that an application from himself would not be unfavourably received. And so it proved to be. But then, barely a year later, something happened that changed all their lives, and immeasurably for the worst.

  Not too long after this catastrophe occurred, when they were already edging towards what proved to be a bottomless pit of despair, Kate looked back at their happy days in Cheltenham and wondered at her own complacency. But wasn’t everyone like that until something dreadful happened to them? Tutting and sighing and shaking their heads at someone else’s tragedy on the news; enjoying Crimewatch as if it were a drama series but with the added spice that the enactments had once happened for real. Voyeurs one and all, comfortable with the knowledge it would never happen to them.