Free Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories by Margery Allingham Page B

place for a young lady,” he said. “That’s a terrible funny place down there. You don’t want to go there.”
    It was encouraging to hear that the house on the marsh not only existed but that there was something definitely odd about it.
    Our editor was a difficult man whose pet maxim was “If you hear something, go and tear its guts out’.
    His present story sounded unhappily vague. Someone, he said, had come to him at the Thatcher’s Arms in the High-street and told him of a terrorised village which was in a state of near panic because of a ghastly white face, a woman’s face, which had appeared at the window of a lonely house on the marsh. It was my duty to go and bring back the ghost or its story.
    “It’s great,” he said. “Most important thing that’s happened down here since the municipal election. Go and thrash it out. They’ll all be on it.”
    By “all” he meant our rival, the Weekly Gazette, with offices a little lower down the town. I rather hoped they would. Bill Ferguson, their junior, was a friend of mine and I had looked out for him on the road. However, he had not appeared, and I had been depressed at the prospect of unearthing yet another mare’s nest when the postmaster had raised my hopes.
    “I want to see the ghost,” I said cheerfully. “Who’s seen it so far?”
    “There’s a lot on “em seen it,” he confessed unexpectedly. “That’s a proper vision.”
    I got out my notebook.
    “Who’s seen it? Who can I talk to?”
    “They’ll be out at work now,” he said. “Best wait till tea-time. They’ll be home just after five.”
    I looked out through the cluttered window at the sky. It was getting on for four o’clock and as grey and bitter as only a February day on the marsh can be.
    “I’d better see the house now and get the stories when I come back,” I said. “What’s the tale about the house? Why should it be haunted?”
    He eyed me thoughtfully.
    “There was a shootin’ down there years ago,” he said. “Likely that’s it.”
    “Very likely,” I agreed blithely. “Who was it?”
    He was vague, however. At first it looked as though he was hiding something, but at last it became obvious that he actually knew very little.
    “There was a young couple took it from London,” he said. “The lady she got herself drownded and the man ’e shot hisself. Now she’s come back and sets peerin’ out the window. You don’t want to go down there, I keep tellin’ you.”
    “I do,” I said. “Who were these people? When did it happen?”
    The postmaster sighed.
    “That I couldn’t say. Afore my time. I ain’t been here above twenty years. Ah, that’s a dreadful tumble-down sort of a place!”
    In the end he directed me. He was not actively against my going; merely passively disapproving.
    I drove down that chill, windswept little street to the point where the road suddenly ceased to be a road and became a waterlogged cart-track, and where a decrepit gate barred my path. I left my car since it was impractical to take it farther, and set out over the saltings on foot.
    The house came into view after about half a mile of cold and uncomfortable walking. It sat huddled up on a piece of high ground, a miserable wooden shack of a place with a brick chimney leaning crazily on one side. At the big spring tides it must have been surrounded and, having a simple, gregarious nature, I felt I understood the young woman who had drowned herself rather than live in it.
    It was still some considerable distance away, and I plodded on, hoping with cheerful idiocy to see something pretty grisly in the way of spectres for my trouble.
    It is hard to say at what particular moment I suddenly became afraid. Alarm settled down on me like a mist, and I was aware of feeling cold and a little sick long before I realised what it was. I think I must have recognised fear at the instant that I came near enough to the house to see the details of those two upper windows which peered out at me