Professor Parkins is “scrupulously polite and strictly truthful”, James tells us, and on his second morning at the Globe Inn a chambermaid reports that both his beds were slept in, “all the things was crumpled and throwed about all ways”. He says he “certainly never touched the other”. A few lines on he “may have disordered it” while unpacking, and then he adds that he expects “a friend of mine soon”, a gentleman from Cambridge, “to come and occupy it for a night or two”. The only gentleman on offer is Rogers, who proposed exactly that at dinner and was turned down. Either Parkins has just made up a friend for that bed, or after one night in the room he’s written to the man he refused. Rogers does arrive, the morning after it’s all over, “more welcome than he would have been a day before”, and nobody says who asked him.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is the seventh story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and the second bed is there from the first page. Parkins doesn’t “quite fancy having an empty bed” in what he calls his study, and Rogers offers to take it because “it’ll be company for you” and would “keep the ghosts off”. James had ended Number 13 on a landlord offering two shaken men “a double-bedded one”. Two stories later he opens with that room and gives it to a man on his own.

The whistle comes out of a hole at the end of what may be an altar, in a ruined Templar church Parkins has agreed to look over for a colleague, and he pockets it. On the walk back the figure is already behind him on the sand, while the thing is still a nameless tube, with “an appearance of running about his movements” and no gain on him at all. It’s “stationed on the shore in front of the inn” when he opens the casement to tip out the caked earth, before he’s read a letter of the inscription. So when he works out QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT (“Who is this who is coming?”) and decides “the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him”, the answer is outside, and the inn is “not more than sixty yards” from the sea. The other inscription is the one he can’t read, being rusty enough not to “even know the word for a whistle”. Stephen Devereux at Thresholds says it’s set out in a diamond (Gutenberg flattens it to FLA FUR BIS FLE), and that read as “fur, flabis, flebis” it means you will steal, you will blow, you will weep. That makes the blowing his second offence, and the first one was over before dinner.

That first night has the best thing in the book. He can’t sleep, he’s counting his heartbeats, and “He found a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was tossing and rustling in his bed, too.” James never comes back to it. When the bed does finally sit up, on the second night, the narrator lets slip something about himself: “I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same thing happen”. If that narrator is James, born in 1862, he was about twelve.

The title comes from Burns, written in 1787 and expanded in 1793, and it’s a girl telling a lover how to reach her unseen: “Syne up the back-style, and let naebody see, / And come, as ye were na coming to me”. James has hung those instructions on something that runs down a beach for most of a mile without arriving, then climbs out of a spare bed and feels over a bachelor’s pillows “in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible”. Jonathan Miller built his 1968 BBC film on that: “one’s emotions, feelings and impulses, which one denies and represses, lie in wait and can sometimes ambush one”, he said, quoted by Nicholas Ray, and it’s a fine reading of Michael Hordern. The prose has something else going as well.

On the links Colonel Wilson calls Parkins “little better than a Sadducee”. Parkins nearly answers that they’re the most sensible people he’s read of in the Old Testament, then wonders whether they’re in it, and they aren’t. They’re in the New, as the people who “say that there is no resurrection”. In the same round the Colonel is fuming that the Vicar has announced a service for Friday, the Feast of St Thomas the Apostle. A ritualist Vicar could have annoyed him with any saint in the calendar, and James picked the doubter, as a post at Graham Crackers has noticed. St Thomas’s Day is 21 December, which puts all this golf at the shortest day of the year, under a “very bright frosty moon”. James knew that coast in midwinter: Burnstow is Felixstowe, where he often spent New Year at Felix Cobbold’s house, and another guest at those gatherings, J. K. Stephen, had the head injury thought to have worsened his mental illness. There was a suggestion, the actor Robert Lloyd Parry told the BBC, that his horse was frightened “by a whistle or by a gust of wind”.

I’d take the Thomas idea a step further, and I’m not sure I’m right. John 20 is his chapter: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” The same chapter opens in an empty tomb, where Peter “seeth the linen clothes lie”. Parkins throws himself at the window because he “could not have borne” to touch the thing, then “the linen face was thrust close into his own”, and when the Colonel gets through the door there’s “a tumbled heap of bed-clothes” on the floor, linen where a body was. Patrick Murphy and Fred Porcheddu, as Sam Wiseman reports, think that round Templar church is based on the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge, which takes its name from the same tomb. James doesn’t wink once.

The Colonel is the comic turn, a man who hears of a weekday service and suspects a Jesuit, and he’s the only person at the Globe who knows what he’s looking at. He says “You know where I am if you want me during the night”, and afterwards he “asked no questions”. Only in the last paragraphs do we learn he “remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India”, and I’d have swapped a couple of the later collections for that story. His verdict is that “if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little”, since there was nothing to it but “the bedclothes of which it had made itself a body”. Parkins had been offered the test Thomas asked for, and he went for the window.

The Colonel also sends the whistle “as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it”, and everyone takes that as the end of the matter, though it’s the sea that “has encroached tremendously” on this coast. The Royal Commission on Coast Erosion, as Justin Sausman reports, had 518 acres of Suffolk going between 1879 and 1904. Parkins comes away unable to see “a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved”, which is white linen, and as much Canterbury’s as Rome’s whatever the Colonel thinks. And the second bed does get used in the end. Once Parkins is back in his own, the Colonel, “wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed, for the rest of the night”. He needed the rug, the bed’s own clothes being in a heap on the floor.

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