The Coffin Maker's Whisper

The frost had come early that November, and on the Monday morning the setts of Hud Hey were as slick as a butcher's slab. I was at my desk in Haslingden when the message came up from the station. A man was dead at the old coffin works, and half the town was already saying he had been frightened to death.

Detective Constable Mallory fetched his coat without being asked. He was a Haslingden man, born and bred, long in the leg and short on patience for ghost talk. "Frightened to death, Sergeant," he said on the way up Deardengate. "I was born three streets from that yard, and my mother hurried us past it every night of my boyhood. I've known men die of many things. I've never known one die of gossip."

"Haslingden has been known to try," I said. I was only half joking.

Nazier's Yard sat in a hollow behind Back Lane, hemmed in by a blackened gable and a stone wall. Jack Nazier had made coffins there for thirty years. He was a sour, close-fisted man who nailed up his shutters when the funeral processions passed, and he had died in the winter of 1908 without a friend to bury him. Locals said he had made his own box and sulked in it. Jacob Poole had bought the place from the estate in March. He made cotton mops there for the mills and the chapels, and he had a name for paying on the nail.

Constable Birtwistle was at the yard gate, with a lad of fourteen beside him. The lad was Tommy Heys, Poole's errand boy, and he was white to the lips.

"I came at ten to seven, Sergeant," he said. "Wicket door were locked. I knocked and shouted and there were nowt. So I fetched Constable Birtwistle, and we put a shoulder to it. The lock held but the hinges went." He swallowed. "He were just lying there, right behind it. Eyes open. Mouth all drawn back, like he were seeing summat."

I knelt beside the body. Jacob Poole was fifty-four, a broad man in a leather apron. He lay on his side a yard from the wicket, with one arm stretched toward it. His right fist was clenched so tight that the knuckles had gone yellow. The face was dreadful, I will grant that. The lips were drawn back from the teeth and the eyes were wide, so you could see why a frightened town would read terror into it. But I had seen faces like it before, in the pits and the print-works, on men who had gone out of the world by some road other than fear. And I noticed that his lips and cheeks were flushed a strange rosy pink.

It took two of us to open that fist. Inside was the wicket-door key, and the brass of it had bitten into his palm.

Mallory looked at it for some time. "A man who sees a spirit runs," he said quietly. "Or he stands and shrieks. He doesn't go for his key."

"He wanted out," I said. "That's all we know."

Dr. Lomax came at nine. He found no wound, no bruise and no sign of a blow. The heart, he said, might have stopped through terror, though he would not put his name to the word. The coroner opened the inquest and adjourned it, and Haslingden settled on a verdict of its own.

I will not pretend the whispers were hard to come by. Mrs. Elizabeth Pickup, who had sent for me herself, sat in the kitchen on Manchester Road where she had kept house for her brother since her own husband died. She had her hands twisted in her apron and told me everything. Since the spring the yard had been plagued. Windows had gone, one after another, with no one to be seen. Stones had come down on the roof and the flags from the empty dark. Poole's workwomen had heard whispering in the packing room when nobody was in it, and one of them, Ellen Haworth, swore she had been shoved hard between the shoulders on the loft stairs with no one near her. They were all out of work that week, because none of them would go back.

"Jacob laughed at it," Mrs. Pickup said. "Said Jack Nazier was too mean to haunt, because it would cost him shoe leather. But he'd taken to barring the door of a night when he worked late, and he'd gone quiet." She looked up. "Was he murdered, Mr. Cryer?"

"I don't know yet, Mrs. Pickup," I said. "But I'll find out."

I did not. Not for three weeks.

We turned the yard over. There were no footprints in the frost except Poole's own, and the big doors were barred from inside. The wicket was locked, and the only key was the one in his hand. The takings were in the tin in the office, untouched. Nothing was missing from the stock. We looked at three men who might have wished him ill. Hartley Nazier, the old man's nephew, had begged to buy the yard back and been refused. He proved to have spent Sunday night at his sister's in Accrington, and his hands were softer than his temper. Enoch Duckworth, a rival mop maker in Rawtenstall, had undercut Poole for two years, but no one could find that he had ever done more than curse him. Albert Riley, who had watched the yard in Nazier's day, drank hard and bore a grudge for his dismissal. Riley told me that Jack Nazier walked, and that he'd seen him on the loft stairs with his chin on his chest. I asked him whether he had been sober at the time, and he said I'd have to ask the Lord.

The stones, at least, I was able to put to rest. A pair of Hud Hey lads, caught on the croft above the wall with their pockets full of pebbles, confessed to the windows and to a good deal else. They had done it for the pleasure of hearing the town go pale. They swore on their mothers they had never been near the yard on the Sunday night.

That left the whispering and the pushing, and the face on a dead man.

The rooms of that old works were cold even by day, and I stood in them often. The packing room was a long, low chamber by the doors, boarded off from the main floor, with a coke stove in one corner and a crooked iron flue running up into the old glue-house stack. There was a trick of sound in that stack. When the wind came round the gable it made a low breathing noise, now rising and now falling, like a voice that had lost its words. I stood listening to it one afternoon with Mallory beside me.

"There's your Jack Nazier," he said. "My old gran used to say that very sound was him calling for his supper."

"Aye," I said. "But I'll swear he wasn't whispering on Sunday night. Wind was north-east, and the stack was sheltered."

I noticed then what I should have marked from the first. The stove door stood ajar, and the damper was shut tight. The grate held a bed of half-burned coke, grey and crusted. It had never been properly alight, but it had smouldered all night with every vent closed. And Constable Birtwistle, I now remembered, had taken a headache that morning that kept him from his dinner. Young Tommy had been sick behind the wall. They had both put it down to the sight of the body.

On the ninth of December the sweep came to clear the stack, because the yard was to be sold. His boy went up with the brush, and within a minute there was a howl of coughing from the top. Then the soot began to fall, and with it a great black plug of sticks and wool, and a jackdaw dead in the nest. The flue had been blocked solid. A man could light that stove and shut the damper against the cold, and the fumes had nowhere to go but out into the room.

From Cryer’s journal

9 December. Cold, clear, with the first proper snow on the moor. The sweep's boy came down the ladder weeping with soot, and I felt a good deal more sorry for him than pleased with myself. Three weeks I walked round that yard, and the answer was in the room the whole time, shut and silent and no trouble to anyone. I took a dead man's face for fright because the whole town told me to, and I must not do that again. I told Mrs. Pickup this afternoon. She did not cry, but asked only whether he had suffered. I said I thought not much, which is a half-truth I will answer for. Jack Nazier, whatever he was, had no hand in it. I find I am sorry for the old man too, for the town was glad to give him one last unkindness. Mallory, who grew up on those tales, says a Haslingden ghost is the quickest way to a good story and the slowest way to the truth. He says it comes from a lack of chimney sweeps. He may be right.

The Coffin Maker's Whisper

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