Writer's Life Read Online Free Page B

time."
    Over at her table, Mina was smiling to herself.
    "He had a place in the village?" I asked.
    "Not far off. He owned the big house up the hill on your left as you come in, set back in the woods. Edgecoombe Hall."
    The very title fired my imagination. It seemed somehow fitting, the very place where Vaughan Edwards would have lived his sequestered, writer's life.
    I decided I'd like to take a look at the place. "Who owns it now?"
    "Edgecoombe Hall?" He shook his head. "No one. It's been standing empty ever since Mr Vaughan went and disappeared."
    I nodded, digesting this. If it were a big house, with a fair bit of land, and perhaps dilapidated, then I imagined that no local would care to touch the place, and Highdale was just too far off the beaten track to make commuting to Leeds or Bradford an option for a prospective city buyer.
    "Why's that?" I asked.
    The publican shrugged. "Well, it's not exactly brand spanking new," he said. "A bit tumbledown, if you know what I mean. And the ghost doesn't help."
At this, Mina looked up from her book. "The ghost ?" She had scepticism daubed across her face in primary colours. She gave me a look that said, if you believe that , Daniel...
    "Only reporting what I was told, love. Don't believe in 'em meself. Old wives' tales."
    Despite myself, I was intrigued. "The ghost of Vaughan Edwards, right?"
    He shook his head. Behind me, I heard Mina sigh with mock despair. "That's where you're wrong, sir. The Hall was haunted—if you believe in that kind of thing—long before Mr Vaughan bought the place. Stories go way back, right to the turn of the century—and I mean the century before last. 1900s. Ghost of a young girl haunts the place every full moon, so they say. Many a local claims to have clapped eyes on it."
    I drank my orange juice and considered Vaughan Edwards. The scant biographical information I had come across had never mentioned whether or not he had ever married.
    I asked the publican.
    "Married? Mr Vaughan?" He chuckled. "Never saw him with a woman—nor anyone else, for that matter. Bit of a recluse."
    "So he lived alone in the Hall?"
    The publican laughed. "Alone, if you don't count the ghost."
    I noticed that Mina had finished her drink and was gesturing to go. I signalled one minute and turned to my informant. "You don't happen to know anything about how he disappeared?"
    Mina sighed.
    The publican said, "Strange do, all things considered. His car was found in the woods, not a hundred yards up from the Hall, on the track leading to the escarpment above the river. A local youth found it and notified the police. They investigated, found he wasn't at the Hall, then traced his footprints on the path leading to the drop." He shrugged. "Strange things was, his footprints stopped before they reached the edge." He paused, considering. "'Course, he could always have stepped off the path and walked to the edge through the bracken."
    "You think that's what he did? Threw himself off the escarpment into the river?"
    "Me?" He gave my question due consideration. "I don't rightly know, sir. He didn't seem the kind to do a thing like that, but then who can tell? You see, his body was never found, which struck me as strange. The river's fast flowing, but there's a mill dam about two miles south of here. The body would've fetched up there, all things considered."
    "So if he didn't kill himself," I asked, "then what happened?"
    "Aha," the publican said, "now that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn't it?"
    He paused, watching me. "Funny thing, though," he went on.
    "Yes?"
    "About a week before he disappeared, he brought in this carrier bag full of books. A dozen or so of his own and four or five others by the Cunningham chappie. He just dropped the bag on the counter and said that the far shelf needed filling, and that was it. Not another word."
    I nodded. "Strange."
    We were interrupted by the arrival of another customer. "Usual, Bill?" the publican called, and moved down the