That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

  Praise for Without the Moon

  “Few people can match her extraordinary capacity to capture the atmosphere of louche, bygone London and the mood of its people. In Without the Moon she tackles the blitzed city of 1942 with the same unerring touch” Marcel Berlins, The Times (Crime Book of the Month)

  “A classic noir novel in every way” The Lady

  “What a fabulous piece of work this is. It practically out-Hamilton’s Patrick Hamilton in its sense of menace and place, conducting a kind of séance with that bombed-out but brassy London of the war-torn ’40s; on each page you can practically smell the cheap scent, powder, Brilliantine and black-market whisky” Travis Elborough

  “Brilliant and brave, Without the Moon blends murder and magic to create a vision of London as a spiritual maze. Prostitutes, psychopaths, detectives, villains and psychics move through corridors, glimpsing heaven and hell in an atmosphere that is so charged it can almost be touched. Fact and fiction link as justice is demanded. The best work yet from a genuine, original talent” John King, author of The Football Factory and Human Punk

  Praise for Weirdo

  “A serious talent … An unusually gifted writer of heartfelt noir … she has brilliantly captured that desperate sense of teenage boredom, isolation, danger and mayhem” Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror

  “An absorbing mystery, an extraordinarily powerful evocation of time and place and a cast of characters whose every breath feels real – Unsworth gets better with every book” Laura Wilson, Guardian

  “The whole package works beautifully: memory traces, bad magic, sounds, smells … a great, page-turning read” Iain Sinclair

  “Masterful … brilliant evocation of time and place, Unsworth adds astonishing and disturbing insight into the minds of disaffected youth who cannot find love and acceptance” Marcel Berlins, The Times

  Praise for Bad Penny Blues

  “The author has been compared to cult noirist Derek Raymond, but here she enters a pantheon of writers exploring London lowlife that extends from Patrick Hamilton and Colin MacInnes” Christopher Fowler, Financial Times

  “There’s something about the textured layers of Cathi Unsworth’s third novel that effortlessly draws the reader into the dark and disturbing environment she creates … Unsworth lives up to her growing reputation as one of the UK’s stars of noir crime fiction, combining hardboiled prose with vivid characters and a lucid sense of place” Yasmin Sulaiman, The List

  Praise for The Singer

  “A cracking page-turner that feels authentic, authoritative and evocative. And it’s beautifully written. This is a bloody good book” Val McDermid

  “Brilliantly paced, plotted and stylish crime novel from the hugely talented and highly original Cathi Unsworth” Daily Mirror

  Praise for The Not Knowing

  “Brilliantly executed with haunting religious imagery, interesting minor characters, great rock ’n’ roll references and a spectacular ending. The Not Knowing is a cool and clever debut. Sleep on it at your peril” Diva

  “Hugely entertaining debut from a future star of gritty urban crime literature” Mirror

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Cathi Unsworth

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author

  A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 78283 295 9

  For Ann Scanlon

  If you go down in the woods today,

  You’d better not go alone.

  It’s lovely down in the woods today,

  But safer to stay at home…

  Henry Hall, “Teddy Bear’s Picnic”

  Prologue

  Tuesday, 14 January 1941

  London lay ghostly white beneath a fresh fall of snow, glowing in the thrall of a full moon. Despite the blackout, as Hannen Swaffer stepped from his cab, his view of the Holland Park thoroughfare, its stuccoed mansions and tall trees, was as clear as day. Humming to himself, he rattled across to 3 Lansdowne Road. Fine night for a séance, he thought.

  Both as a reporter for the Daily Herald and a keen practitioner of spiritualism, Swaffer was delighted by the prospect of the night’s gathering. A small circle had been invited by Miss Winifred Moyes, herself a former Fleet Street journalist, who now ran the Christian Spiritualist Greater World Association from this address. Since the onslaught of the Blitz, her mission had turned from spreading enlightenment to more practical matters, finding shelters and relief for the bombed-out women and children of the capital, and occasions such as this had become rare. Tonight was a special exception for the woman in the grey moiré gown who opened the door to Swaffer, and everyone else she had privileged with an invite. Tonight they would be sitting for one of the greatest mediums in the world.

  “Miss Moyes,” Swaffer doffed his stovepipe hat in greeting, unleashing a torrent of hair as white as his snowy surroundings.

  “Mr Swaffer,” she replied, a smile lighting up her rather mannish face. “Here you are. Please do give Mr Hillyard your coat and come through.” With a sideways step, she revealed the short, stocky caretaker beside her, his blue boiler suit replacing the traditional butler’s livery. With a few words of greeting, Swaffer divested himself of his outer layers and stepped into the room beyond, reporter’s antennae bristling.

  Chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle around a cabinet at the centre of the floor. Milling around it, sipping glasses of sherry and murmuring to each other, were four ladies in late middle age, dressed in their best costumes and fur capes. Swaffer’s eyes strayed past their coiffured heads for the guest of honour and alighted on a couple, huddled together on a chaise longue behind the cabinet, in the furthest, darkest corner of the room.

  Most of the space on the seat was taken up by a woman dressed entirely in black, with thick bobbed hair of the same raven hue. Her face was the image of the full moon against her dim surroundings, wreathes of smoke from her cigarette standing in for clouds. Her companion, a man in a dark suit, bit at the stem of a rosewood pipe, eyes darting around the room with an expression pitched somewhere between hostility and nervousness.

  “Dear Mr Swaffer!” one of the ladies distracted him. Two companions fluttered after her, cooing greetings. The fourth, whose platinum curls, ostrich boa and diamond jewellery signified a greater wealth than all the others put together, stood exactly where she was. Self-made millionairess Olive Brace-well fixed Swaffer with a look of disdain.

  “Care for a sherry, Mr Swaffer?” Mr Hillyard offered a tray of thimble-sized glasses.

  “Most kind.” Swaffer took a bracing sip as Miss Moyes approached.

  “Are we all ready?” she asked. “Our guest is rather shy, as you may have gathered.” She flicked her gaze towards the chaise longue and back. “To help her reach through the veil, she has requested that we say The Lord’s Prayer and then sing for her the 23rd Psalm. Mr Hillyard, would you do the honours, if everybody else would take their seats…”

  The sitters fanned out around the sem
i-circle as the caretaker dimmed the lights, so that only a single red bulb, placed on a standard lamp behind the cabinet, remained to illuminate the room. Swaffer was aware of the long shadows that unfurled themselves into the absence of light; the ponderous ticking of the grandfather clock; the breathing of other sitters; and the shuffling of the caretaker’s feet as he travelled across the carpeted floor to sit beside him.

  “Now that we are all assembled,” said Miss Moyes, “please welcome Mrs Helen Duncan and her husband, Henry, to the circle. They have come a long way to be with us.” She began to clap, provoking an enthusiastic response from the others. In the twilight glow of the lamp, Swaffer found the Duncans’ expressions even more unreadable.

  He had first met this woman a decade ago, when he had written of her feats for the Psychic Times, a journal to which he frequently contributed. She hailed from Callander, a village in the Highlands, and had been blessed with the gifts of Prophecy and The Sight since childhood. As an adult, her copious manifestations had aroused both passionate devotion and virulent scepticism. Swaffer’s first assignment with her had required him to put those powers to the strictest of tests devised and observed by magicians and medical men. She had passed each one with ease.

  “Thank ye,” the Scotswoman said. “I hope I’ll no’ disappoint you tonight.” Nodding to her husband, she turned towards the cabinet and, with his assistance, lowered herself into the tall-backed chair inside it. Once she had settled, Henry murmured something to Miss Moyes and she turned back to her circle.

  “Are we all ready?” she asked. At the nods of affirmation, she took her seat at the centre of the semi-circle. As the assembled began to intone the words of prayer, Mr Duncan drew the curtains around his wife. Swaffer caught a last glimpse of her head lolling onto her chest, her eyes closed. By the time they had said “Amen”, the medium’s breathing had grown heavier, and, in the brief pause before the beginning of the hymn, became the loudest sound in the room. Then the ladies began trilling “The Lord is My Shepherd”, the reedy voices of the sopranos floating tremulously before the more forceful male baritones and Miss Bracewell’s equally gusty alto.

  Swaffer began to see a flickering of something pale beneath the curtains. Was this the ectoplasm that signalled the arrival of Mrs Duncan’s spirit guides? His nostrils caught a faint aroma of brine, a sign that this was indeed the substance that linked the two planes of existence.

  “Goodness and mercy all my life, Shall surely follow me,” he sang, teetering on the edge of his chair, straining his eyes as the thin line became more a substantial billowing, “and in God’s house for ever more, My dwelling place shall be.”

  Henry Duncan drew back the curtains. With a collective intake of breath, Miss Moyes’ circle witnessed the vision of his wife sitting fully erect with ectoplasm streaming from each nostril, down onto the front of her dress and out into the room before them. Her eyes snapped open, two glittering black buttons that stared straight through the assembled as if seeing far beyond the confines of the room. Her laboured breathing stopped sharply. Swaffer felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck and his heart quicken.

  “Oh, I say!” the lady to Swaffer’s left gasped.

  The spectre of a young woman rose from the cloudy mass surrounding the medium to float in the air in front of them. An enchanted creature, her head turned to one side, showing an aquiline profile surrounded by waves of hair that seemed to shimmer on the air, despite the absence of a breeze. She softly murmured a tune without any discernible words. For minutes, the seated watched in awed silence as she twisted languorously from left to right, performing a phantasmagoric fandango to the childlike melody she was fashioning, something between a nursery rhyme and the fragments of a dream.

  “Spirit,” Swaffer said, “what is your name?”

  Slowly, the spectral head turned towards the mortal countenance of the journalist. The singing stopped and a different voice issued from the cabinet.

  “You know what my name is, dearest.”

  It was a woman’s voice, but not Helen’s Highland brogue. She spoke clearly and precisely, like an actress projecting from a stage.

  “And you were right, it was a fine night for it,” she went on. She had a slight Midlands dialect, only she couldn’t quite pronounce her ‘w’s. “Perfect, with this moon and the snow. You are clever. And this… Oh my… This…”

  The vision undulated again, the features of the woman becoming less discernible, as if she was beginning to fade. Then a sob and the voice returned. “What is this? Why have you brought me here? This isn’t what we agreed!”

  The ladies looked around at each other in consternation. Mr Hillyard grunted.

  “My dear, you are quite safe here,” said Swaffer, “we only invite those to our circle who wish to be heard. Are you not known to anyone present?”

  “No!” There was a sudden, abrupt choking sound and the vision fell sharply away, the ectoplasm seeming to collapse and vanish, so that afterwards, Swaffer was never sure if the expression of terror he witnessed had been upon the visage of the manifestation just before she disappeared, or was that of the woman who had brought the spirit forth.

  “Noo!” Mrs Duncan’s cry brought his eyes back to the cabinet. She was pulling at the neckline of her dress. “Help!” she gasped a wheezing rattle. “Help me!”

  In two bounds he was beside her, shouting: “Put the lights on, Mr Hillyard! She’s choking!”

  Swaffer had received his medical training many years before, in a field hospital on the Western Front. Inside the cabinet was a heady reminder; a tight space so full of sweat and panic that he could barely fit himself in beside the heaving medium. His feet blundered on the fabric of her dress, but he managed to get his hands around her shoulders and propel her forward.

  “Cough, Mrs Duncan!” he shouted. “Cough, if you can!” He gave a hefty thump to the centre of her back. Her wheezing worsened but she did as he said. A cough snapped across the room like thunder. Swaffer dealt a second blow and this time she spluttered something up, the vomiting noise she made was followed by a shuddering intake of breath. The floor moved under Swaffer’s feet as she lurched, yanking the hem of her skirt away from under him. He caught hold of the back of the chair to stop himself from falling and, as he did so, the lights came on.

  Henry Duncan knelt in front of his stricken wife, murmuring: “It’s all right, hen, you’re safe now.” Mrs Duncan’s shoulders rose and fell dramatically, but thankfully Swaffer could hear her breath come in thick sobs. Beyond them, the ashen faces of Miss Moyes and her companions rose from their chairs, staring aghast.

  “Don’t panic,” Swaffer advised, manoeuvring himself out of the cabinet, feeling more than a little disorientated. “We got to the problem in time, didn’t we, Mr Duncan?”

  Henry mopped his wife’s face with his handkerchief. “Aye,” he said, not moving his gaze from hers. “I think ye did, Mr Swaffer, I think ye did. Thank the Lord for that.”

  “How are you feeling now, Mrs Duncan?” Swaffer asked.

  Her face was bright red and the fear still gleamed in her dilated pupils. She nodded, made a gesture to her throat with her left hand and coughed painfully.

  “Of course, you shouldn’t speak,” he reprimanded himself. “Let me fetch you a glass of water. And a brandy, perhaps?”

  “Should I call for an ambulance?” Miss Moyes’ voice behind them strained with anxiety.

  “No, no,” Henry turned to speak to his hostess. “There’s no need, Helen will be right enough in a minute. Eh, but the brandy’s a good idea.”

  “Well, if you’re sure,” Miss Moyes looked doubtful. Mr Hillyard, meanwhile, had seized the initiative and pulled out an armchair for their guest to recline on. Each taking an arm, he and Henry helped guide her to it, while Swaffer returned with a glass of water in one hand and brandy in the other. Kneeling down to offer them to the medium, he felt a wave of light-headedness. He could still hear the spirit’s lullaby-lament echoing through his mind.


  “Take the water first,” he said, steadying himself against the arm of the chair. “Sip it slowly.” She did as she was told, dabbing at the side of her mouth with Henry’s handkerchief after each drop. The redness gradually faded from her cheeks.

  “Mr Swaffer,” she wheezed, “ah owe you.” She put her hand on his arm and he noticed the delicacy of the white skin, her tapered fingers, the crescent moons on her neatly manicured nails.

  “My dear lady,” said Swaffer, “your good health is all that concerns me.”

  Helen shook her head slowly, her gaze becoming more intense. She pulled at his sleeve so that he had to lean in closer. “The lassie was being murdered.”

  Swaffer’s eyes widened.

  “Nearly took me with her, aye,” Helen rasped on. “Tha’s how she was gooin’,” she put a hand back to her throat. “Chokin’” The movement caused her to start coughing again. “Please,” Swaffer held out the tumbler she had emptied, “could somebody fetch some more water?” Another hand, belonging to Miss Moyes, took the glass from his.

  Mrs Duncan’s grip on Swaffer’s arm tightened.

  “She’s lost out there, away in the woods, in the snow,” she told him, black eyes seeing straight through him, to the other world she had witnessed from the inside of the cabinet.

  “Clara,” she said. “Her name is Clara.”

  PART ONE

  THE SHADOW WALTZ

  January – August 1941

  1

  NO MOON AT ALL

  Friday, 31 January – Saturday, 1 February 1941

  Karl Kohl had a bad feeling about his mission, long before he left Schiphol Airport on the moonless last night of January 1941. It had stolen up on him gradually, this sense of unease, this conviction that their carefully crafted scheme was going to end in disaster. At first, he had been exhilarated by the idea. His sudden selection from the backrooms of the meteorological division by the Abwehr, subsequent training in the arts of subterfuge and the daring nature of what he had been entrusted with, were all a confirmation of the powers he had been promised. Most of all, it meant he would be reunited with the owner of the face on the photograph he kept hidden, stitched inside the lining of his suit, the one who had made those vows to him.