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Chapter 4
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All the promising-looking coffee shops had closed up for the day and restaurants were only interested in serving meals. After a few minute scouting the streets, the gang found an Internet café that was still open. The coffee was dubious in the extreme, but the trio’s priority was to be able to sit around a table to discuss the details of Fred’s plan.
“You know, there are times on this trip when I really miss Shaggy and Scooby,” Velma commented.
“Me too,” Fred agreed earnestly. “They would drink this horrible coffee for us if they were here.”
“I was thinking more about the role you’ve lined me up for in this plan, Fred,” Velma continued.
“As bait you mean?” Fred asked, grinning.
“Think of it as demonstrating your versatility,” Daphne encouraged.
Fred nodded in agreement. “Not just the brains of the gang today, but damsel in distress and live bait too!”
Daphne rummaged in her purse for a moment and retrieved a small piece of electronic equipment. “You’ll need this, Velma.”
“A bug?” Velma commented in surprise. “I’m not sure that’s exactly legal here.”
“That’s all right,” Daphne reassured her, “I’m not sure it’s exactly legal back home either.”
“Good idea, Daph,” Fred said approvingly. “We’ll need to be able to monitor what’s going on while Velma’s being bait.”
“Excuse me,” Daphne apologized as she lifted the hem of her friend’s sweater. She found a mildly intimate location for the microphone to nestle then tucked the small box containing the transmitter into the waistband of Velma’s skirt and smoothed the sweater back in place.
Daphne put the earpiece into her own ear and held her hair out of the way as she guided the wire behind her ear and down to the receiver which she had hidden in her jacket pocket.
“Testing,” Velma said self-consciously.
“Loud and clear,” Daphne confirmed.
“OK,” Fred announced with enthusiasm, “let’s catch us a ghost!”
The three friends trooped out into the street and walked the short distance back to Shrewsbury College.
As she re-entered the Library, apparently alone, Velma visited the librarian’s office briefly. “I’m just going to do a last half hour’s research, Miss Wyvern,” she explained.
Fred and Daphne waited outside for a discreet couple of minutes, then walked into the entrance hall, taking care not to be seen by Miss Wyvern. They made their way upstairs to a room that they had previously identified. It appeared to be a small meeting room and contained nothing but a table and six chairs. It was conveniently located right next to the study Velma was once more occupying and seemed never to be locked.
The meeting room had a single CCTV camera mounted high up in one corner. Daphne and Fred sat on the floor, huddled together in the corner with their backs against the wall. They hoped the camera’s field of view was not wide enough to show their feet, but in any case, they had not switched the room’s light on. English summer evenings are long, but even so, the amount of daylight entering through the high window was diminishing rapidly.
Through her earpiece, Daphne could hear the rattle of the keyboard as Velma worked away at the computer terminal. If she listened carefully, she could hear Velma breathing and there were occasional rough sounds from the fabric of Velma’s sweater touching the microphone as she moved.
After what she judged to be ten minutes, Velma made the first move to activate Fred’s plan. She made a small inarticulate exclamation of delight, apparently at what she saw on her computer screen. Her cellphone was lying ready on the desk in front of her. She picked it up, selected Daphne’s number from its phonebook and pressed the green button.
There was an almost inaudible buzzing as Daphne’s cellphone rang in vibration mode. As previously arranged, Daphne pressed the green button on her phone but said nothing.
Velma hoped that her acting skills would be convincing enough to give the impression of a real conversation. “Hi Daphne!” she announced excitedly after hearing the ringing tone stop. “Yes, I’m still in the library… Yes I have… No it’s not the same stuff I saw this morning and lost, it’s all new… Yes, I’m sure it’s important… Can you give me another hour to note all this down? I’ll pack up and meet you and Fred after that… You’re sure that’s OK?… Thanks, Daphne. See you later.” She thumbed the red button on the phone and put it down on the desk again.
The tension was almost unbearable, wondering if the bait would provoke the ghost into action again, wondering even if their hypothesis was right that it was her research that had been the trigger before. Velma could feel her heart pounding and was sure it must be deafening Daphne.
Velma forced herself to unfreeze and at least to go through the motions of having made a significant discovery. She scribbled notes to herself that were indeed just scribble and typed gibberish into her laptop all the while bracing herself for the attack that might not come.
Just as Velma was beginning to think the plan had failed, the secret door in the wall burst open. As before, the figure that entered was a tall veiled woman in a long green Victorian dress. As the ghost pounced on her and bore her down to the floor, Velma was forcibly reminded of how small she was herself; at least a six-footer like Shaggy or a 140 lb Great Dane like Scooby could put up more of a fight.
Daphne heard a sharp click that might have been the secret door opening in Velma’s study. She raised a warning finger to Fred to be ready, but hesitated. She wanted to be sure that the ghost had actually appeared. There was a rasping thud as Velma’s sweater brushed the microphone again, and then the background noises in Velma’s room seemed oddly muted. Daphne was puzzled and hesitated a second or two longer before realizing that the sound was probably muffled by Velma’s own body lying on top of the microphone. She grabbed Fred’s hand. “Now!” she urged, leaping to her feet.
Daphne and Fred raced out into the corridor and into Velma’s study. Daphne’s assessment of the situation proved right. Velma was lying face down on the floor while the ghost was holding her down and tying her ankles together with the inevitable blue polypropylene rope. The ghost leaped up as soon as Fred and Daphne entered the now very crowded study room and, after hesitating for a fraction of a second, fled back through the hidden door.
Daphne was astonished to see that the ghost had already had time to tie Velma’s hands behind her back and to gag her. “We’ll come back for you,” she promised as she pursued the ghost into the secret passage.
“Don’t go away!” Fred advised as he followed Daphne.
“Gnrrph!” Velma commented angrily.
Fred and Daphne split up immediately as they set off after the ghost. Fred glimpsed the ghost ahead of him twice as he ran through the maze of secret passages, the realized that he had lost her. There were dozens of doors out into the public parts of the library and she could have taken any of those and by now could be in any part of the building. He chose one at random and found himself near the top of the main staircase. If Velma’s theory was right, then Fred knew exactly where the ghost would be going. He ran down the stairs three at a time, risking disaster on the smooth stone steps.
As Fred reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a flash of movement in his peripheral vision. He span around in time to see the ghost retreating down the main corridor towards the big public reading room. He gave chase and the ghost immediately dodged into a doorway. Now hot on her heels, Fred followed. He found himself in a tiled room with doors down one side and a line of washbasins down the other. A startled and very indignant-looking woman was washing her hands at one of them.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” Fred apologized as he worked out where he was. Sheepishly, he backed into the corridor, wondering where to look next.
Daphne was acutely aware that she had not seen the ghost since she entered the labyrinth of secret passages and also that she now had no idea of where she was. She had just concluded that the only sensible course of action was to choose a door at random and go back to Velma’s study room when the ghost abruptly burst into the passage in front of her through one of the doors leading out into the library. She faced Daphne for an instant and then turned and fled.
As the ghost hesitated, Daphne had time to take in the Victorian dress, which as Velma had already observed, closely resembled the one worn by the first librarian in the painting on the main stairs, and the strangely veiled face. Daphne prided herself in her expert knowledge of fashion of any period and she was sure that the veil was incorrect. It seemed to be simply a piece of gray muslin, possibly a muslin shawl she thought, wrapped around the head. A real Victorian veil, even one as concealing as the one worn by the ghost, would have been worn as an adornment to a hat. As she set off in pursuit, Daphne concluded that the costume was not as carefully planned as perhaps they had first thought; there was a definite lack of attention to detail.
After turning two corners, Daphne realized with dismay that the ghost was no longer in sight in front of here. More from instinct than anything else, Daphne turned. She was rewarded by the ghost emerging from a door and running off in the direction they had just come. Although Daphne’s long legs easily kept up with the ghost along the straight passageways, her unfamiliarity with the network of secret corridors and consequent hesitation at every corner was giving the ghost the overall advantage and she was steadily leaving Daphne behind.
Velma was annoyed. Being trussed up once was bad enough, but twice in the same day was irritating and, she felt, rather unprofessional. Although her wrists, and ankles were bound, Velma was not actually tied to anything. She wondered if she might therefore still join in the hunt, as she felt certain she knew where it would end up. Daphne had been known to hop quite long distances while tied up, so Velma was sure that with a little determination, she could so the same.
Although she was the only person in the study room, Velma found that it was oddly lacking in space as she tried to get into a position where she could maneuver herself to her feet. The furniture seemed to keep getting in the way however she moved. Eventually, however, she managed to roll onto her side in a clear area of floor and to push herself up into a sitting position with her tied hands. She shuffled carefully backwards until her back contacted a wall. Drawing her knees up and digging her heels into the carpet, Velma laboriously started to force herself upright.
It was with relief that Velma at last reached a standing position. She pushed against the wall to transfer her weight forwards onto her feet. Too late she realized that she had given slightly too vigorous a push and had overbalanced. With her hands tied, Velma was powerless to break the fall as the floor rushed up and knocked the breath out of her.
Fred scouted around the ground floor of the library in the hope of any sighting of the ghost. There were still a few students and staff at work in the reading room, despite the lateness of the hour. He wondered about asking one of them, “Excuse me, but did a ghost just pass this way?” but concluded it would be rude and might invite ridicule.
Plan B: time to meet Daphne, Fred decided, glancing at his watch.
Daphne stopped for breath in her headlong chase through the maze of secret passages. She admitted to herself that she had been outrun and left behind, which was a little humiliating given that she prided herself in her fitness and had been outrun by a woman encumbered by a heavy Victorian dress. Then again, chasing someone while wearing high-heeled shoes put her at a disadvantage, Daphne persuaded herself.
Shoes, thought Daphne. The ghost’s shoes weren’t in period either. As she had been giving chase, Daphne had a clear view of sturdy laced black brogues with Cuban heels.
Smiling to herself as the evidence clicked into place, Daphne chose a door at random and emerged into the library to regain her bearings. She noted where she was and returned to the secret passages, confident that she could navigate herself to the destination she had agreed with Fred.
Velma’s second attempt to get to her feet had been more successful than the first and she was able to move around the study room with the tiny shuffling steps her ankle ropes permitted. She carefully reversed herself up against the door and bent her knees to bring the doorknob within reach of her fingers. She turned the knob and shuffled forwards a few steps to pull the door open and flushed with success, maneuvered herself around it and out into the wide corridor.
Forward progress proved not to be too difficult so long as she hopped carefully, with her weight on the balls of her feet, and leaned slightly forwards to compensate for the weight of her arms behind her. Overconfidence led to an ignominious tumble followed by a repeat performance of getting to her feet by sliding her back up the wall. Velma proceeded more cautiously after that.
At the end of the corridor was the main staircase, all smooth surfaces and unforgivingly hard stone. It stretched away before Velma like an abyss. The floor of the entrance hall looked to be about a mile below her. Experimentally she hopped down to the first step and teetered precariously on the treacherously glassy surface. Velma decided that this was a really bad idea and sat down on the top step. After some thought, she hooked her heels under one of the lower steps. Her bottom slid smoothly forward on the step then dropped to the next one with a tremendous jolt. Velma was glad that the gag at least prevented her teeth from clashing together when she did that. Steeling herself for the bump, she hooked her heels under the next step and pulled.
Fred reached the librarian’s office at the time he had agreed with Daphne, although she was nowhere in sight. He turned the doorknob and entered without ceremony. As he did so, a hidden door, much like many others in the library, sprang open and Daphne emerged into the room. The librarian was immersed in the examination of a manuscript and making longhand notes in a jotter. Startled by the sudden intrusion, she raised her head from her work and looked in some consternation first at Fred then at Daphne, both of whom were staring back at her stony faced.
“Can I help you?” the librarian asked at length, regaining some of her poise and composure.
After bouncing down several dozen spine-jarring steps, Velma rocked herself unsteadily onto her feet in the library’s big entrance hall. She resumed her determined hopping towards the librarian’s office.
Daphne glanced at Fred, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod. “Miss Wyvern,” she began, breaking the icy silence, “our friend Velma came here in good faith and with your permission to study some of the papers in your archive. So far today, she has been set upon twice and left trussed up as if this was a Victorian melodrama rather than a respected seat of learning in the 21st century.”
As if on cue, Velma burst through the door, hopped into the middle of the room, overbalanced and sprawled inelegantly on the librarian’s carpet. “Mmgrwlm,” she apologized through her gag.
“And we think you know exactly what’s going on,” Fred finished for Daphne as she rushed to Velma’s aid.
“Well the description Miss Dinkley gave me earlier sounded exactly like the Lady in Green, the first librarian’s ghost,” Miss Wyvern replied rather stiffly. “I explained to you that we are rather fond of her and regard her as a benign and friendly spirit. I very much regret what has happened to Miss Dinkley today, but if she has angered the ghost in some way, I can only assume that it is because the ghost believes her research to be detrimental to the library in some respect.”
Daphne quickly freed Velma while the librarian was speaking and helped her to a chair. Miss Wyvern poured a glass of water from the jug on a small side table in one corner of her office and offered it to Velma.
Instead of gratefully accepting the water, Velma astonished Miss Wyvern by grabbing and holding her wrist with one hand. With her other hand, Velma reached into her skirt pocket and withdrew a small flashlight. She thumbed it on and pointed it at the librarian’s gloved hand. The fingertips all lit up with an eerie purple glow.
Miss Wyvern gasped and involuntarily let go of the glass. Fred’s reactions were superb; he caught the glass cleanly before so much as a drop of water could spill. With a small bow, he then offered it to Velma.
“Thank you, Fred,” Velma acknowledged with a formal nod of her head. She released the librarian’s wrist and took the proffered glass gratefully.
Miss Wyvern stared at her gloved hands, which had now lost their purple glow.
After a sip of water, Velma explained, “The flashlight is ultraviolet, Miss Wyvern. There was ultraviolet marker dye on the keyboard of my laptop and also on my notepad. It’s quite invisible in ordinary light, of course. Fred, Daphne and I all saw the ghost touch my computer with her gloved hands.” Velma placed deliberate emphasis on the last four words. “And now you seem to have picked up just the same dye on your own gloves.”
“It’s pretty obvious that you and the ghost are one and the same, Miss Wyvern,” Daphne said with an angry edge to her voice. “Perhaps you could explain to us why a professional librarian hits an American visitor over the head and ties her up.”
“Yes, that should be a good story,” Fred agreed.
“It’s the Griffin papers, ”Miss Wyvern explained. “It’s a very special archive and needs to be protected especially well.”
As she spoke, the librarian absent-mindedly peeled her gloves off and deposited them in the wastebasket. She opened a desk drawer and brought out another pair, still wrapped in cellophane, tore the wrapper off and put them on.
“If the Griffin papers need to be looked after that carefully, why invite me over from the States to study them?” Velma protested.
“Well, I thought you were who you said you were,” Miss Wyvern explained. She surveyed the gang’s baffled faces. “I mean, I know now you really are who you said you were but I didn’t this morning.”
“Miss Wyvern, this isn’t making a lot of sense,” Daphne pointed out. “Perhaps you should just explain from the beginning and we’ll try to keep quiet.”
“Well, I’m always very careful about requests to view the Griffin papers,” Miss Wyvern began. “I don’t forbid it, but I’m careful. Your phone call to me sounded like a perfectly ordinary piece of research, which you told me was on behalf of Griffin’s descendants. When you confirmed the arrangements by e-mail, you had the web address of your bookshop in the sig block and I followed that up too. Perfectly legitimate and a very nice shop too by the look of it.”
“Thank you,” Velma acknowledged.
“Usually I am very careful about verifying visitors’ identities if I haven’t met them before and I like to interview them before they do research and sometimes I get them to sign an non-disclosure agreement,” the librarian continued.
“But you didn’t do that with me!” Velma objected. “You didn’t even ask to see my passport.”
“But that’s because I was sure I knew who you were and I was furious,” Miss Wyvern replied. “I didn’t think I could go through the charade of an interview and keep my temper.”
“Huh?” Fred commented.
“I was expecting an American I hadn’t seen before and instead I was faced with Suzanne putting on a fake accent. She hadn’t even made any attempt to change her appearance. I thought it was some kind of a practical joke at first but she was perfectly serious, so I decided to go along with it and see what she did,” Miss Wyvern explained. “Only, I know now that you weren’t Suzanne this morning.”
“I never am,” Velma pointed out dryly.
“Anyway,” the librarian continued, “I kept an eye on what you were doing with CCTV and by watching the transaction log on the computer system. It was pretty obvious which bits of the Griffin archive you were interested in and they are precisely the parts that I wanted to keep confidential.”
“So you decided that an appropriate course of action as a professional librarian was to dress up as a ghost and then tie me to a chair to keep me out of the way?” Velma asked incredulously.
“I felt that some of the traditions of Shrewsbury College Library were at stake. I felt that my great grandmother would not have approved, so I decided to act in her name as her ghost.”
“In a costume you just happened to have handy, I suppose?” Fred demanded sarcastically.
“Well, yes, as it happens,” Miss Wyvern replied. She crossed her office to a closet set into one wall and opened it. Hanging on the back of the door was a green late-Victorian-style dress, complete with bustle. “We sometimes put on Victorian dinners here as a tourist thing and I do a guided tour of some of our more interesting items, dressed up as the first librarian.”
“And the blue rope?” Daphne asked.
“I live on a houseboat on the canal and I refitted it with new white rope last year, so I have miles of that blue stuff lying around. It has all kinds of uses.”
“Like tying me up,” Velma commented bitterly, then continued, “If you live on the canal, you must know Mike and Suzanne.”
“They’re my next-but-one neighbors,” the librarian confirmed.
“So, you had tied me to my chair in the study,” Velma reminded the librarian. “What was supposed to happen next?”
“Well, I would have ‘discovered’ you eventually. I thought that spending half a day or so like that was a suitable response to Suzanne coming here pretending to be an American, only you managed to phone your friend for help somehow.”
“Mystery Inc at its finest, ma’am,” Fred explained proudly.
“When Daphne turned up here, I thought she must be the real Velma at first, because I was expecting an American to visit, and I’d already discounted the woman I believed to be Suzanne as an imposter,” the librarian continued, “but it says Daphne Blake in her passport.”
“Because that’s my name,” Daphne pointed out reasonably.
Miss Wyvern continued her story. “We freed you and you were still insisting that you were Velma, so I left it at that, because I knew you hadn’t got away with any information. Besides, I took the opportunity to lock you out of the Griffin papers on the computer system.
“I went home for a short break later this afternoon, and while I was riding my bike along the towpath, I could see the three of you talking to Mike. Of course, I still thought Velma was Suzanne and I recognized Daphne as the woman who had freed her earlier. I didn’t know what was going on, but it looked like a conspiracy. I decided to wait and watch. I saw you three leave and then Mike a bit later. I decided to see if Suzanne (as I thought) had got away with anything from the library and left it in their houseboat.”
“So you let yourself into Hesperus, expecting it to be empty, only to find the real Suzanne still there?” Velma offered, seeing where the story was going.
Miss Wyvern nodded in confirmation. “Yes, and I panicked and tied her up to keep her quiet.”
“Your ghost dress was back here, so all Suzanne saw was someone in black,” Daphne commented, recalling the information Mike had reported.
“That was me in my work clothes, and I put on a black balaclava too, because I was being a burglar,” the librarian admitted, sheepishly.
“I think you owe Suzanne an apology,” Fred advised.
“I owe her a few pairs of pantyhose too. That’s what I tied her up with.”
“I assume you found nothing on Hesperus, then you came back here,” Velma prompted.
“That’s right. When I got back, I did a quick scan through the CCTV cameras to see how many people were still in the library and where they were and I found you three in the basement. I recognized where you were and that you must have found some way to go straight to the originals of the Griffin papers.”
“You must have worked out at that point that there was more than one Suzanne,” Fred suggested.
“I did later, but I was annoyed that all my precautions with the computer system had been sidestepped.”
“So it was time for the ghost to walk again?” Daphne asked.
“Yes, and I really thought you had all been put off until Velma came back wanting to do more research this evening. I was sure there was nothing left for you to find until I heard her tell you that she’d discovered more.”
“Well, that wasn’t entirely true,” Velma admitted. “After all, it was a trap to catch a ghost, and we had to bait it with something.”
“Well, I have to admit that you caught me,” the librarian conceded contritely.
“I still don’t understand what you were trying to protect. It’s all just old inventions,” Fred objected.
“When this college was founded, right at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, Griffin was a major benefactor, under his real name of course. He believed that if women were well educated, their influence on society would bring peace in the twentieth century, which was then just about to begin. He left all his papers to the college library on the condition that they were well guarded, so that his military ideas should never fall into the wrong hands.”
“The British government for instance,” Daphne suggested.
“For instance,” Miss Wyvern agreed. “He allowed his friend Mr. Wells to use some of his ideas in his books to show how terrible a modern war could be. He foresaw the risk of a century dominated by a technological arms race with the threat of utter annihilation.”
“That’s pretty much what we got,” Fred commented soberly.
“Surely, a century later the risk is past?” Velma ventured.
“A promise is a promise,” the librarian retorted primly.
“A few minutes ago, you referred to the first librarian as your great-grandmother,” Daphne reminded her.
“It’s true,” Miss Wyvern admitted. “And both my mother and grandmother were librarians here too.”
“I was wondering about your surname,” Velma remarked. “Wyverns and Griffins are quite different, but they are both heraldic beasts and make very unusual surnames.”
“Wyvern is a sort of professional alias we have all used,” the librarian explained. “My real surname is actually Jones.”
“Nothing wrong with that!” Fred declared.
“And the connection with Griffins?” Velma persisted.
“Griffin was my great-grandfather, not legitimately but acknowledged. Mary Wyvern died before they could marry, and Griffin left the country after reluctantly agreeing to doing secret government work during the Great War.”
“And must have adopted his pen name of Griffin as his surname when he became an American citizen,” Daphne added.
Velma was excited. “I’m doing this research for my friend Hephzibah Griffin, who is also a great-granddaughter of Griffin. That makes her some kind of cousin of yours.”
“I can only apologize,” Miss Wyvern offered contritely. “I jumped to all sorts of wrong conclusions and looked for plots and conspiracies that weren’t really there, when all the time you were really doing work for my family. I’m really sorry.”
“Apology accepted,” Velma acknowledged, offering her hand to Elizabeth Wyvern.
The librarian accepted the offer and shook hands warmly. “If you come back tomorrow, I’ll show you everything you want and let you take copies for your friend.”
Velma thanked her.
Fred looked a little disappointed. “So the library isn’t really haunted by your great-grandmother’s ghost then?”
“Oh, yes it is,” Miss Wyvern replied with a fond smile, “and she’s a real sweetie.”
| The End | ||
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Text © Copyright Gillian B 2005
Pictures © Copyright Gillian B, Jaguaro, Amanda Dressel 2005
