Cherringham--Ghost of a Chance Read Online Free PDF

visiting this hotel, visiting Freddy for years. If there was something wrong, I would have known it.”
    “Freddy?” Sarah asked.
    “The house ghost. Freddy is the spirit that haunts this place!”
    Jack had another question. “Wrong? What do you mean ‘something wrong’?”
    Basil looked away as if he had said too much.
    “Well, if something had changed with Freddy. Something that posed a danger …”
    “And you noticed — sensed,” Sarah said, “nothing like that?”
    “No. Not during the ceremony.”
    Jack picked up the careful parsing of the ghost hunter’s words.
    “But before? Somewhere else?”
    Basil turned back to them. The man had clearly been rattled by events, but his eyes also showed that he had probably been recently fortifying himself with liquid refreshment.
    He nodded. “Yes. Let me … show you.”
    Basil walked out of his musty guest room, back to the dark hallway. But then he turned left, away from the stairs down, to the far end of the hallway.
    Then he went up the narrow staircase that led to the attic floor of the hotel.
    *
    Sarah watched Basil throw open the attic bedroom door and gesture to the entrance.
    “Got some more visitors for you, Freddy,” he said into the empty room, then turned to them: “Just trying to be polite — you know?”
    Sarah caught Jack’s eye and held back a smile.
    She waited for Basil to enter, but he just hovered at the door.
    He actually seems reluctant to go in, she thought .
    “You brought people up here that night?” she asked as Jack stepped in, ducking due to the low entrance.
    “Yes. Always a big part of an evening devoted to communing with Freddy.”
    Sarah followed Jack into the room. Just a small bedroom, bare floorboards and sturdy cross beams above. A simple metal frame bed. A small table with — oddly enough — a pair of old-fashioned spectacles on it. A large wardrobe in one corner.
    A chest of drawers, the bottom drawer open.
    Clothes actually in it.
    Jack turned to him. “So nothing happened up here? You just walked up with your audience—”
    “ Participants ,” Basil corrected.
    “—up here. To see?”
    “The place where Freddy was found dead. Right where you're standing.”
    “Dead as in murdered?” Sarah asked, looking down at the fatal spot.
    She had to admit — it felt creepy standing here.
    “That's what everyone thought at the time, of course. All that blood. The knife wounds, hard to see how they could be an accident or self-afflicted.”
    “Was this Freddy’s room?” asked Sarah.
    “Largest of the servants’ quarters,” said Basil. “As befitted his rank.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Freddy was to all intents and purposes a butler. Head of the household.”
    “In charge of all the other servants?” said Sarah.
    “Precisely.”
    “Any one ever caught for the murder?” Jack asked.
    “No. The case of Freddy’s death simply disappeared.”
    “Really?” said Sarah. “I thought in Victorian times that murder cases were all the rage?”
    “Oh they were,” said Basil. “But you see, apparently Freddy was a bit of a rascal. He had few friends in the village — at least among the men-folk …”
    “Ah,” said Jack. “But ladies were a different story? So a lot of people were happy to see the back of him, huh?”
    “Something like that,” said Basil. “Anyway, Colonel Allsop and his wife Emily — the owners of the house — moved out the very next day and never returned.”
    “Not surprising,” said Sarah. “Who’d want to live in a place where a murder has been committed?”
    “And the case just died away?” said Jack.
    “Hard to get witnesses together. What with the staff all being dismissed. And then — strangest thing — the colonel’s wife died in a hunting accident …”
    “This colonel,” said Jack. “That the guy in the painting on the stairs?”
    “Bagging a Bengal tiger — yes, that’s him. Painted in India, I believe. A few years before he came home to settle down and