The Ghost It Was by Hull Richard

Author:Hull, Richard [Hull, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Agora Books
Published: 2018-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

14

Inspector Perceval

But Linnell did not share Gregory’s opinion of his own cleverness. He had regarded the early morning telephone call at two a.m. as erring on the side of melodrama, and he was not at all sure that it was not an ironic retort to his own lecture of keeping news fresh. He took no steps to disturb the morning issue of The New Light. People who fell off towers in remote country houses because they thought that they saw ghosts were in his opinion of little interest, even to the sensation-loving public. He drafted a rather colourless paragraph for the Setting Sun, the allied evening paper, in which he toned down the glaring eccentricities which Gregory had condescendingly considered suitable for the Press. He did not care two straws about it, and he was rather surprised when it went in at all. The matter was of no importance to his mind.

As it happened, though, something was wanted for the next day’s New Light to fill up an odd column, and it must also be remembered that Arthur Vaughan, too, had a friend in the newspaper’s office. The combination of these two accidental circumstances therefore made it fortunate that Gregory had supplemented his telephone message by an express letter. Linnell was able to make up something. He was not quite sure that he understood what had happened, but a little thing like that never troubled him.

Whilst carefully remembering the law of libel, he allowed himself considerable play as to the facts. The resulting account laid a good deal of emphasis on the activities of the figure which the Reverend Cyprian Thompson was so pathetically anxious to describe as nothing but an optical illusion. To tell the truth, Linnell had recently been reading something on the subject of poltergeists, those mischievous spirits who throw things about, and he got them slightly mixed with more orthodox ghosts. Otherwise the paragraph was quite accurate — except that it called Amberhurst Place ‘Amberhurst Park’, talked of the Reverend ‘Cyril Thomson’ as being the ‘vicar’, and referred to the legend of ‘the quarrel of two brothers in the days of Good Queen Bess’. Warrenton’s name was, however, spelt rightly.

This paragraph was to have its effect on several people, but that in the Setting Sun served only to annoy Gregory. Here was he taking all this trouble to be in the midst of events which he considered to be at least exciting, and they dismissed it all in a few sentences with very indifferent headlines. If they had used his copy the whole country would be talking of the exciting events which had been happening around them! He sat down and wrote a coldly sarcastic letter to Linnell (which was an entire waste of time) and refused to allow himself to be appeased by the next morning’s New Light. Once more his own work had been rejected and a far inferior substitute preferred.

On James Warrenton the paragraph was merely an additional irritation. He was being very

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