That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

  He looked at his friend with renewed respect. “You know, Maurice, you might have something there…”

  “Harry Price,” said the Chief, lifting the cover of the booklet. “A name to conjure with?”

  “Quite literally.” Spooner watched the expression on the other man’s face as he studied the photographs taken in 1931. He had saved what he thought was the best bit of his report for last. “An initiate of the Magic Circle, President of the Ghost Club and founder of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research. He’s been carrying out experiments on mediums for decades. My editor roundly despises him.”

  It wasn’t Ernest Oaten’s copy of the first NLPR Bulletin that turned beneath his boss’s fingers. That would have been far too much of a risk to remove from the Two Worlds’ office. But Spooner’s father had managed to track one down for him, as well as a wealth of other information on this man who was Triple-U and Three-M all rolled into one.

  “These are quite extraordinary,” the Chief said, looking back up.

  “If there was to be a prosecution of Mrs Duncan, then I think he’s the guy the Crown would want on the case. But there’s another reason I’m keen to meet up with him.”

  Spooner rolled his glass of whisky around in his hand. After he had telephoned from Guildford, the Chief had invited Spooner back to the flat in Dolphin Square to talk over his findings, even offering him a bed for the night. Spooner was grateful for this thoughtfulness; he had been expecting to have to find another cheap hotel.

  “I asked my dad what he knew about him,” he went on, “and it turns out to be quite a lot. Price is a big collector of rare magical texts, some of which are connected to giant figures of literature. And I don’t know if he’s fallen on hard times, but word is he’s prepared to make some of them available, if the price is right.”

  “Now you do interest me,” the Chief said. “Tell me more.”

  “Well, for a start, he claims to have the copy of Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft that Shakespeare consulted to write Macbeth. But there’s another thing that’s even more interesting – to us, anyway. Back in the thirties, Price acquired a transcript of a fifteenth-century grimoire known as The High German Black Book. He tried out one of the spells in the summer of 1932, up in the Harz Mountains, a region he says is the most pagan in all Germany. He was supposed to turn a goat into ‘a youth of surpassing beauty’, though, needless to say, it didn’t work.”

  “Fond of Germany, is he?” the Chief tapped out his pipe and reached for fresh tobacco. “Under what auspices did he carry out this ceremony?”

  “It was Goethe’s centenary,” said Spooner, “and Price says this was the text he consulted when he wrote the Walpurgisnacht scene in Faust. Those literary allusions, you see. He was invited over as part of the celebrations hosted by the local newspaper and he wrote it all up in another book Dad sent me, Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, from 1936.”

  “How much is this grimoire worth?” the Chief pressed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

  “It’s one of those things that, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” said Spooner. “We know someone who could.” His mind’s eye caught a flash of russet-coloured stone, a temple hidden within Hagley Woods. “Word among the collectors goes that Himmler was seeking to buy it.”

  “Ah,” the Chief’s eyes sparked in the flame of his lighter. “Now you’re getting to it. With help from a certain Mr De Vere, you think?”

  “That’s what I’d like to try and find out,” said Spooner. “Though, I’m sure I’ll have to be slightly more circumspect than just asking him outright.”

  The Chief puffed hard on his pipe. “And how are you going to run the idea of interviewing him past your editor, if he’s so against the man?” he enquired.

  “I’m not,” Spooner said. “I’m running it past you. I think Price will be amused enough by the idea of a Two Worlds’ journalist asking to grant me an interview, he’s not exactly publicity-shy. Then, when I let him know my connections in the book trade, I might get to find out more about subjects other than Helen Duncan. If you’re happy for me to try, then I’ll write to him. I just wasn’t sure…”

  “Don’t let me stop you,” said the Chief. “Where is this lab of his, anyway?”

  “Roland Gardens,” said Spooner, “in South Kensington. Just off Old Brompton Road.”

  “Roland Gardens!” The Chief put down his pipe. “Extraordinary!” Before he could explain why, the telephone began to ring and his expression changed abruptly. “Excuse me, Ross,” he said. “I’ll need to take this.”

  Spooner nodded and moved away from the desk, wandering over to the fireplace at the furthest end of the room so that he couldn’t overhear. Though the electric fire was on, the Chief’s bulldog was not lying in front of it today, making him wonder if this was actually his boss’s home, or perhaps a flat provided by his job. He began to scan the bookshelves. The subject of angling dominated, suggesting he was right, and his mind soon drifted back to Wychbury Hill. This possible connection between Price and the one link to Clara who would be interested and rich enough to afford a copy of The High German Black Book had sparked fresh hope that he might yet pick up the loose ends of his previous case, a situation that never stopped gnawing at him.

  Spooner had taken out subscriptions to all of the Birmingham papers, which he scoured daily for stories that might indicate Houlston had at last caught up with Anna and her Dutchman, so far, to no avail. He revisited his talent scout persona in the music halls and pubs of Manchester, attending any bill that looked like it might feature either or both of them. But, while he had seen a lot of good acts to tip Norrie about, he had not caught so much as a whiff of a fairy tune nor a high-wire act.

  Neither had Anna contacted the Paramount office in search of her songbook, which remained Spooner’s sole consolation, the one link he felt sure would bring her back – if she was still alive, of course. He felt in his pocket, touching the bill for The Two Magicians, making sure it was still there and not just a dream masquerading as memory.

  The Chief put down the phone and stood up.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you,” he said. “Do, please, make yourself at home here and help yourself to anything you want. I’ll leave the keys on the desk, just post them back through the letterbox when you leave.”

  “OK, Chief,” said Spooner. “Is it anything I can ask you about?”

  The Chief began gathering up his belongings. “I’m sure you’ll hear all about it if you turn the wireless on later – the Japanese have just bombed America into the war.”

  17

  WHAT A LITTLE MOONLIGHT CAN DO

  Friday, 19–Saturday, 20 December 1941

  “That cheesecloth,” said Harry Price, “was eight feet long and thirty inches wide and it reeked of ripe Gorgonzola. Have you ever smelled such a thing, Mr Spooner?”

  Two weeks and a flurry of correspondence later, Spooner had at last entered the lair of the Ghost Hunter. Though the man who greeted Spooner at the door of 13d Roland Gardens was not quite as he had imagined. Price looked older, stouter than he had in the photographs that accompanied his book of adventures in the Harz Mountains the previous decade; and the onset of angina meant that he now walked with the aid of a cane.

  He still dressed like a film director’s idea of how a Ghost Hunter should – in a thick grey worsted suit, double-fronted watch chain and starched collar, which perfectly offset the craggy contours of his face, receding hairline and black eyebrows that frowned across the bridge of his nose like two angry caterpillars. A pair of saucer-shaped eyes the colour of his suit stared from underneath in an only slightly less startling manner.

  Spooner had chosen his words carefully in his letter of introduction, hinting, as he had done with Lexy, that he was not following his editor’s line on Helen Duncan, but that a recent spate of complaining letters compelled him to begin making his own enquiries about the medium. He added that he was impressed by the methods Price had employed to
ascertain whether the mediums he had tested in his laboratory were fraudulent or not. There were a couple of them whom Price believed to have been genuine: a young nurse he had met on a train in the 1920s known as Stella C; and the Irishwoman Eileen Garrett, whom he had engaged to attempt to make contact with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle upon his death in 1930. Garrett had instead brought through the pilot of an airship that had crashed in France two days before, describing the terrain and descent of that final flight in precise detail, when Price checked it with the RAF.

  In contrast, his experiences with Helen Duncan still filled him with an icy rage.

  Upon his arrival, Spooner was shown to the laboratory and given an account of the photographic equipment developed for the sittings with mediums and a run-through of each technique deployed with Helen. Then he was taken to the séance room, with its curtained-off cabinet, and matching blood-red velvet sofa and armchair, where Helen had been pictured, bound and blindfolded, releasing her ectoplasmic emissions. Panelled with bookshelves, it would have made the perfect stage set for a tale of the supernatural. There he had been shown a sample of the material Price had found on Helen – an inch square of it, preserved under glass, which made it impossible to assess any lingering aromas.

  In the study where they retired to conduct the interview, photographs from the Duncan sittings joined those of other charlatans unmasked by Price. These were arranged over the fireplace and, at the centre of them all, a portrait of the legendary magician and debunker of psychics Harry Houdini frowned accusingly down.

  Under the forbidding double gaze of these two men, Spooner had to admit to Price that he had never come across a ripe Gorgonzola himself. “But,” he said, “some of these reports about Mrs Duncan have mentioned a curious odour at her sittings.”

  Price allowed himself a smile. “What do you think that could have been?” he asked.

  “Gastric acid?” Spooner suggested. He knew from the NLPR Bulletin that Price had conducted four sittings with Helen, in which he had whittled down the possibilities of where she could have concealed lengths of cheesecloth about her person. Every orifice having been medically explored – and more rigorously than the desultory examination he had witnessed Councillor Roberts performing on Violet Adams back in Portsmouth – Price had come to the conclusion that Helen stored her ectoplasm in her stomach and regurgitated it when called upon to produce phenomena.

  “Not a common trick, but not unheard of,” he opined. “A talent more likely to be deployed in the freak shows of America than the parlours of Kensington or Hampstead. That’s what I think makes it so hard for her supporters to – swallow.”

  Price leaned back in his chair, assessing Spooner. This young man was a familiar sort of presence to those who routinely sought him out at the Ghost Club: an ardent pursuer of esoteric knowledge, with one brogue-shod foot entrenched in the study of the arcane and the other striding determinedly towards new worlds. But he wasn’t the usual type to have come from the spiritualist press. He was much more attentive to the detail of Price’s experiments, jotting it all down in his notebook and asking for clarification on anything he didn’t grasp. Much less inclined to argue than the old man who employed him. Price was more than aware of the regard in which Ernest Oaten held him.

  The Two Worlds editor had been present in the Edinburgh courtroom where Helen had been successfully prosecuted for fraud in 1933, and afterwards in print had described Price’s pivotal appearance for the prosecution as “sinister”. Vitriolic correspondence had flowed between the pair over the years which left him in no doubt that Oaten would not have sanctioned this interview. He flicked his glance from his guest to Houdini on the wall and back again.

  “That was my contention,” he said, “but as you know, Mrs Duncan refused to be x-rayed. Instead, she had a fit of hysterics, punched her husband in the face and ran out into the street, still wearing that outfit you see her pictured in up there,” he nodded towards a framed depiction of the medium in her black pyjamas, “screaming blue murder. Mrs Duncan is not a temperate woman, Mr Spooner. Can you imagine the scene she caused? It wasn’t long before the police arrived. Thankfully, they believed me rather than the mob that had begun forming on my doorstep. And,” he tapped his finger on the table, “lest anyone forget, the Duncans had the temerity to charge the NLPR fifty pounds, payable in cash up front, for the privilege of working with her.”

  Spooner shook his head. “Each time?” He whistled, “that’s expensive.”

  Price nodded. “That’s the hazard of not being recognised as a legitimate scientist, you see. Everything you see here was built from hard toil and dedication. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a magic spell that achieves the same effect without the effort.”

  Spooner put down his pen. “It’s quite a responsibility you have, Mr Price, keeping all of this going.”

  Price’s eyebrows twitched. “It’s a vocation,” he said, his expression grave. “One I don’t imagine myself ever retiring from. Whatever it might take out of me.”

  “Of course not,” said Spooner, “how could you ever let a subject like this go?”

  Price’s gaze became more intense. “Mr Spooner, do I detect some ulterior motive to your visit?” Spooner’s stomach jolted at the man’s perception. He tried to hide it with a bashful smile.

  “You’re not about to start offering me your services, are you?” Price went on. “I can see what a keen student you are, and how you must have impressed your editor, despite his own judgements about Mrs Duncan.”

  “No, no,” Spooner shook his head, feeling his cheeks colour. It was from relief, but to Price, it made him look more innocent. “I wouldn’t dare to presume any such thing. It’s just that…” Deciding now was the time, he reached inside his jacket for his father’s card, “as a collector yourself, you might have heard of my father.”

  Spooner’s Rare and Antiquarian Book Shop, Price read, 84 Belmont Street, Aberdeen.

  “When I told him you’d granted me an interview, he got a wee bit excited. He’d heard rumours that you were thinking of selling some of your collection. Of course, I’m sure rumours are probably all they are, so I hope I’ll no’ offend you passing on a message. He wanted me to let you know that, if it’s true, he would be very interested in talking to you.”

  Price turned the card over in his fingers. “Ah,” he said, “now it becomes clear.” He looked back up at the picture of Houdini, where his gaze remained. “Does he mean the entire collection, or any specific folios?”

  Spooner couldn’t judge whether Price was about to kick him out or show him treasure.

  “Well,” he said, “he’s interested in anything that you would have here. A lot of his business is in rare esoteric works and he’s the only bookseller in the region who deals in such things, so he’s a long list of collectors always after the unobtainable.”

  Price’s eyes returned to Spooner’s and he nodded, lacing his fingers together. “I see,” he said. “And you have learned much from your father’s professional interests yourself.”

  “Aye,” Spooner gauged that remark meant he was safe, so pressed on. “Though, there’s one edition he’s had more enquiries about than any other – The High German Black Book.”

  “Now that is interesting,” said Price, his eyes becoming a shade greyer. “Well, Mr Spooner, thank you for bringing it to my attention and let your father know I will give it due consideration. But for now, I’m afraid, the time I have put by to talk to you has just about run out. Will you allow me to see you to the door?”

  “Of course,” Spooner hurriedly gathered his belongings. “It was good of you to see me.”

  “This way,” Price showed him back through the séance room, where he stopped before one of the bookshelves. “I thought I caught you staring at these earlier. Now I understand.” He smiled and slipped a volume off the shelf. “Here. Why don’t you give this a try? It might look simple, but it’s where I began my work. You’ll never be able to catch a fraud until you learn all of their litt
le tricks.”

  He passed Spooner a dog-eared copy of a children’s book, Magic for Beginners.

  “Gosh,” said Spooner, turning it over in his hands, still unsure if he was being mocked or encouraged. Lexy’s words about amateur magic echoed in his mind. “Thanks, Mr Price.”

  Price smiled fully, showing pointed teeth.

  At the doorstep, the Ghost Hunter reached over to Spooner’s top pocket. With a magician’s flourish, he extracted the bookshop’s card Spooner had given him earlier, turning it round to show it to his departing guest. “I think I’ll take this after all,” he said. “And you, keep up your studies. Next time I see you, I’ll expect you to be able to do the same to me.”

  Spooner had again been offered the flat in Dolphin Square, although his boss met him there only briefly to hear his report before he was wanted elsewhere. Spooner thought that Price’s swift, dismissive reaction to his enquiry about The High German Black Book indicated that their theories about De Vere could be right. He assessed that he had managed to convince Price he was angling for a job within the NLPR and that the passing on of his book on stage magic had been a challenge: Spooner’s homework, to be tested on the next time they met. The fact that the old man had kept the bookshop’s card indicated that Spooner would be hearing from the Ghost Hunter again.

  The Chief was pleased; all of this was what he wanted to hear. After firing off a volley of further questions about the Ghost Club, he left Spooner with a bottle of malt whisky he declared as a Christmas present, and one further seasonal offering. “Before you leave tomorrow, nip in and see Norrie. He’s got something for you too.”

  While Spooner settled down for the night with his new book and festive lubrication, across the blacked-out city in Archer Street, Hannen Swaffer was leaving a club called the Entre Nous in good humour. He had managed to track down DCI Ted Greenaway, recently transferred to the Murder Squad. Though unable to furnish Swaffer with more details than that they had once worked in the same department, he had confirmed that there had been a detective called Ross Spooner at Scotland Yard and furthermore, he was one of those transferred to work for MI5 in Wormwood Scrubs in 1939.