“Some have travelled far to be here, seeking answers to their woes.” He caught some inflection in the way the last word had been spoken – a “w” pronounced as a “v”. He broke out in a cold sweat. Of course she’s speaking carefully, a voice in his head told him, she’s trying to hide the fact that she’s German.
As he had the thought, something tapped him hard on the knee. He jumped and heard laughter – from the Duchess to his right and from the thing hovering in front of him. For one instant, he clearly saw the form of Clara there, her body swathed in flowing silks and her hair a mass of curls, eyes staring straight into him. “You are on the right path,” she spoke directly to him. “And you will have your answer, soon enough.”
A hacking cough barked out from the cabinet. At this, the vision trembled and, like a picture turning to snow on a television screen, slipped away before Spooner’s eyes. To his left, Miss Moyes got to her feet, hoping that history was not about to repeat itself with the medium choking again. She was just about to call for Mr Hillyard when the coughing ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
The ectoplasm rose up from the floor and once more began to undulate. Gradually, the pale outline of a child could be discerned and a soft crooning replaced the voice that had spoken to Spooner. It sounded like a little girl, singing the first verse of “Loch Lomond”. Knowing this was Peggy, one of Helen’s principal spirit guides, a relieved Miss Moyes sat back down.
But it was all Spooner could do to stay put in his chair. The spot where he had been touched still felt icy cold and the hairs all down his spine were standing as upright as those on his head, as if he had just suffered an electric shock.
When the spirit had spoken to him, he tried to reason, he must have mentally replaced its absent head with the face of Clara he knew so well from the photograph he kept, so that for one terrifying instant, it had seemed it was she who was talking to him. Like everybody else in the room, it was his subconscious desperation to hear from a soul departed that had brought him here and, therefore, his mind was playing tricks on him. That part of him which was susceptible to such things had taken a willing role in this game of illusion, on which it was so easy to project one’s needs and desires…
But the spirit’s mocking laughter still rang in his ears. His heart was beating so quickly he felt it might burst – nothing like this had ever happened to him at a séance before. He downed the remainder of his sherry, wishing it was something stronger. In an attempt to pull himself together, he bowed his head and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, the ectoplasm had moved away, across to the other side of the room, and Helen was addressing the old man in the bath chair, saying that she had his sister with her, who had recently passed away. The old man was nodding, acknowledging the indistinct form before him as if he recognised it. Spooner took off his spectacles, breathed on them and gave them a polish with his handkerchief. Replacing them, he stared hard at the phantom. It looked altogether more like a man in a cheesecloth shroud. Could he have fallen asleep once the lights had dimmed and dreamt the entire Clara episode?
Beside him, the Duchess was wafting her fan. The motion distracted him and he looked over. Her eyes were bright and she was biting her bottom lip, trying to stop herself from laughing – perhaps it was only her outpouring of mirth that he had heard? She noticed him and put her fan on her lap, reaching down to fetch something from her handbag. “Here,” she hissed, “have some of this.”
It was a silver hipflask, full of brandy. He took a deep slug then passed it back gratefully, returning to his senses as if he really was waking up from a dream. Around him was laughter; Mr Hillyard had said something that had amused the rest of the room.
The séance was drawing towards its conclusion and, if it had started with drama, it ended in farce. The last spirits to emerge were departed pets – a parrot, a cat and a rabbit. They all appeared as oblong blobs and while the parrot managed to squawk a quick “Pretty Polly!” its companion spirits kept silent. There was, however, a worsening wheezing noise coming from within the cabinet. Then, in a flurry of swirling skirts and scuffling heels, Helen came lurching out of her confinement.
“Henry!” she gasped, crashing into the arms of her husband.
Within moments, the lights were on and the stricken medium was surrounded by people, first among them Miss Moyes and Mr Hillyard, who had been preparing themselves for such a situation all night. Dazed by the sudden brightening of the scene, Spooner got to his feet at the same time as his companions. Daphne put a restraining hand on his arm.
“There’s been this trouble with Mrs Duncan before apparently,” she whispered. “As I was about to tell you, the last time she was here she nearly choked to death.”
A great babble of noise broke out around them as, blinking in the intrusion of the light, people began to move in their seats, standing up and asking what was happening. Miss Moyes’ schoolmarm’s tones cut through the hubbub.
“It’s all right, everybody,” she said. “Mrs Duncan is quite safe, she just exerted herself a little too much and needs a bit of air and some quiet to recover. If you could make your way to the back of the room where there are still plenty of drinks…”
Keeping a smile on her face, she turned back to where Helen was sprawled on a chair, sucking hard on a cigarette. It was nicotine, it seemed, that she really needed to aid her recovery.
“I reckon you could do with a stiff one,” the Duchess took Spooner’s arm, looking up at him with those shrewd, green eyes. “You saw something, didn’t you?”
Spooner avoided the question and her gaze, taking out his fob watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulting that instead. It threw up yet another surprise. “Is that really the time?” he said. “Nine o’clock? It can’t be.”
“It is,” said Daphne. “She’s been at it for a good hour. No wonder she exhausted herself.”
“But…” Spooner was about to say that was impossible, it had only seemed like ten minutes to him, but bit the words back. The two women both gave him a concerned look.
“Come on. Let’s get that drink,” said the Duchess firmly.
20
SERENADE IN THE NIGHT
Saturday, 21 February 1942
Spooner was dreaming of deep, dark woods that moved around him as he trod a path illuminated by a shaft of moonlight. Gnarled branches cast grotesque shapes, brushing at his face with bony twigs of fingers and extending their roots to trip him – as if they were no longer trees but a coven of witches, a wood of hags, squatting over a steep hillside on the borders of Worcestershire.
Before him stood a Doric temple, pinpoints of light flickering between the six columns of the portico. A soft breeze brought the smell of burning herbs to his nostrils and he stopped, hairs rising on the back of his neck. He became aware of every sound around him: the scurrying of midnight’s creatures through the fallen leaves, the crack and thump of a pine cone dropping from a branch, the distant hoot of an owl. He knew he had to stay silent, otherwise whoever was in the temple would hear him and stop him from getting to the open hillside, to catch the Queen of the Witches gliding down from the sky, using the full moon and the obelisk as her guide.
Taking a deep breath, he put one foot forward – and felt something snap around his leg with an iron grip. A silent scream welled up in his throat as he looked down and saw it – not a mantrap set by the gamekeeper, but a hand reaching out of the brambles and the leaves, white in the moonlight, fingers clamped around his ankle…
He jerked upright, breaking through the surface of the dream and into a Paddington guesthouse bedroom, the scream still halfway up his throat. Heart hammering, Spooner fell back on the single bed, listening to the loud ticking of the clock by his right ear and looking at the edge of the frayed blackout, allowing the first milky light of the new day to steal into the room. Desperate to expunge the lingering tendrils of his nightmare, he sifted his memories of the night before.
When the lights had gone up, the former Duchess o
f Dover Street had led him over to the drinks tray and plied him with several more thimbles of sherry. Standing apart from the other guests, he listened as she and Daphne dissected the evening’s events, his sense of dread growing with each new revelation. It seemed that, from the moment the spirit of Clara – or whatever mental aberration that had really been – had departed, he had blanked out every manifestation the women were discussing, only coming back into full consciousness for the final croak of Helen’s spirit parrot.
The joke he could vaguely recall Mr Hillyard making was apparently a communication between him and his brother Geoffrey in spirit. Geoffrey, a Yorkshireman, opined that he didn’t think much of the medium; she was too fat. Mr Hillyard said that proved it was his brother who was “always mithering”.
“Good job he thought so,” was the Duchess’s opinion. “Didn’t think much of the accent myself.” She winked at Spooner as she said it. He managed to smile, but there was worse to come.
“And what about poor Miriam?” said Daphne, nodding towards a woman in a dark blue suit who, surrounded by a group of concerned friends, was dabbing her eyes with a hanky. “Do you think it could be true? I mean, I know her boy was sent to Singapore and he was with the Eighteenth…”
“Well,” said the Duchess, waving her fan in such a way that no one could have read her lips, “it’s not likely to be good news, is it? Chances are he’s either been captured or killed. Even if she’s got it wrong, how long will it be before Miriam hears otherwise? That one,” she shot a cynical glance towards the back of the room, “will be long gone.”
“I never met Miriam’s son, did you?” Daphne followed her friend’s gaze. Staggering along together, with Miss Moyes at their side, the Duncans were beating a retreat to where the adjoining kitchen door would allow them to make an exit unnoticed by the rest of the room.
“No, can’t say I have,” her friend admitted. “Still, I’m willing to bet, being as he’s London born and bred, he might have sounded slightly less Scottish than his spirit did.”
A smile twitched on Daphne’s lips, but she managed to suppress it. “Strange, isn’t it,” she said instead, “that Swaff was so keen on her? I can’t quite see…”
“Here,” the Duchess nudged her. “Don’t put our friend off. I think Mr Spooner might have seen things differently to us.”
Spooner raised his empty glass. “I think I might have had too much to drink,” was all he could find to say. It certainly provoked amusement, allowing him to make his excuses and return to the room he had booked for the night without shattering the illusion he had been hoping to cast of himself as a bumbling eccentric. Nothing like the dour detective Hannen Swaffer might have thought he remembered, were they to drop his name in conversation with the journalist.
But, sleep-deprived and with a headache gnawing, he was no longer certain he had convinced anyone, least of all himself. He reached over to pick up the alarm clock, but his hand fell on a small square of card. On it was Daphne Maitland’s telephone number.
“Have you ever been reunited with a loved one at a séance?” asked Spooner.
Daphne looked up from where she had been arranging sorts and slugs on her composing stick, down in the basement of 3 Lansdowne Road. It was a moment before she answered.
She had offered to give him a tour of her small print shop as he was leaving the night before, another memory that had evaded him until his hand landed on her card. He rang after breakfast, hoping that he hadn’t done anything else he couldn’t remember that might have since made her want to retract the offer.
“Oh, I am so glad you called,” she had said, the warmth in her voice taking him by surprise. “I thought we might have put you off entirely last night.” Without directly mentioning her copper-haired companion, she went on to assure him that, apart from the usual staff, volunteers and women in need, there would be no one to bother them today.
They met at ten o’clock outside Holland Park tube station. Spooner parked on a backstreet half an hour earlier and spent the time reading Hannen Swaffer’s paper, the Daily Herald, soon finding out what had detained the journalist the night before. Swaffer had been sent to Brixton prison, from where a woman named Olive Bracewell, leader of the Campaign against Capital Punishment, was orchestrating an attempt to save the recently captured Blackout Ripper from the death penalty. Trainee RAF officer Gordon Cummins had attacked six women, murdering four, over the space of the previous week, in a nightmarish frenzy that had only just been brought to a halt by Spooner’s former boss, DCI Greenaway, now head of the Murder Squad.
Despite the terrible things Cummins had done to his victims – strangling them with their underwear and carving them up with knives – Mrs Bracewell was moved to defend his life with a hired orchestra and as many people as she could pay in beer and chips to parade up and down outside the prison walls, according to Swaffer’s copy.
Spooner shook his head as he took it in. It was the sort of thing that had made him volunteer for filing cabinet duty in the first place. Still, there was plenty there to keep Swaffer occupied for the present; Mrs Bracewell planned to continue her protest today.
Daphne appeared at the dot of ten, seemingly delighted to see him and to show him around her small set-up. She had an old platen jobbing press acquired by Miss Moyes the previous decade from her former employers at the Telegraph and kept in perfect order. They managed to skirt around the events of the night before while Daphne filled Spooner in on her work and how Mr Hillyard lost his arm in the Battle of the Somme. When there was a pause in the conversation he found himself asking her that question.
Daphne eyed him sadly. “Not yet,” she said. “Though, to be perfectly honest, that was the reason I sought Swaff out in the first place. That friend of mine we talked about last night, she was murdered and by that awful man they have up at Brixton prison now. I’m sure you read about it in the papers this morning.”
“Oh, God,” said Spooner. “I’m so sorry. I never would have asked if I thought…”
“No, don’t be. I’m sure it’s much the same reason everyone finds themselves in a place like this, isn’t it?” She smiled, her eyes becoming more luminous. “Wasn’t it something similar that led you along this path in the first place?”
“Aye, of course. My mother died when I was just a bairn. I don’t have one memory of her; all I know is from photographs and what the rest of the family have told me. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great upbringing,” he considered, “but I’ve always felt her absence. I started going to the table tappers as soon as I knew that they existed.”
“And have you ever…?”
He shook his head. “Not from her, no,” he said, seeing the hope that was still so evident in his new friend’s face. “But that’s not to say I haven’t experienced some powerful things in these places.”
“Like last night?” Daphne said. “I must admit, I was hoping that Mrs Duncan might bring a message through for me. Swaff was so adamant about how good she was.”
“That’s right,” Spooner recalled, “you were telling me something happened the last time she was here. Did you say she nearly choked to death?”
Daphne nodded. “Swaff saved her life, he managed to dislodge something that had got stuck in her throat.”
Spooner thought of Harry Price’s cheesecloth. “What was it, do you know?”
“This spirit she had brought through,” Daphne said, “a woman who was out walking in the woods somewhere and got strangled. Swaff said Mrs Duncan must have gone into her trance exactly as it happened – she was feeling the same sensations as this poor woman.”
Daphne raised her hand to her throat. Her friend had been killed in much the same way.
“Awful to think about it, isn’t it? I had no idea it could be so dangerous. Luckily, Swaff knew what to do and she recovered all right. But I know it’s troubled him ever since. He’s yet to find a news report that matches the circumstances. We thought perhaps those woods she was in were so isolated she hasn’t yet been fou
nd.”
Her fingers continued to circle her neck. Spooner tried to quell his unease as he watched.
“Mrs Duncan did tell him her name. What was it? Claire? Clair de Lune…” She began to hum the melody as she tried to catch the evasive memory. Then she snapped her fingers.
“No, not Claire – Clara. That’s it. She said her name was Clara.”
Spooner was early for their meeting, but the Chief was already waiting on Hammersmith Bridge. Spooner could still recall the exhilaration he had felt the last time they had met on this spot, how proud he had been to be chosen to search for Clara. It was almost a year to the day, yet it seemed an aeon ago. Today the Chief looked as haunted as Spooner felt.
“How went the séance?” The Chief turned towards Spooner with a frown. Dorothy, the bulldog, scrabbled to her feet with a disgruntled whine.
“Not what I expected,” Spooner admitted. He had decided that honesty had to be the only policy. The Chief could send him back to Blenheim if he thought he had outlived his purpose and, at that moment, he wondered if he wouldn’t be glad of it.
“Shall we walk?”
Inside the avenue of trees along the Mortlake side of the Thames, Spooner told the Chief about Clara and Helen, the Duchess and Daphne, and Hannen Swaffer’s part in the tale.
“I’m not sure he would have recognised me if he had been there last night,” he concluded. “But I wouldn’t underestimate the chances.”
The Chief, who had made no comment all the time Spooner had been talking, came to a halt beside an old stump and tapped his pipe out on the side of it.
That Old Black Magic Page 19
