That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

  A huge cheer rose up. The Two Magicians turned to take more bows to the audience.

  “Now that,” said Bertie Adams, “is what I call magic.”

  Spooner wiped his handkerchief across his brow. “You can say that again,” he agreed.

  Both men rose with the crowd and put their hands together in appreciation. It was one thing knowing technically how it was done – and the Hippodrome’s manager had attended rehearsals this morning in order to ascertain their uses of wires, grips and ropes – but another to see it performed, with all the elements of skill, timing, costume and music coming together to create the grand illusion.

  “I doubt the Great Blondin his self could surpass that wire work,” Bertie said. “I ain’t seen it done quite like that before and you know I seen ’em all.”

  “Aye, well, for me it was the music that did it,” said Spooner. The tune the ringmaster had played to make his funambulist dance was called “Death and the Lady”, recorded as having being written by J. Deacon in 1700 in Anna’s songbook. The one that had brought her down to earth, “My Lodging is in the Cold Ground”, was by Matthew Locke, 1666.

  Spooner had finally been able to return to Birmingham the previous night, eight days before Helen Duncan was due to stand trial at the Old Bailey under the new charge of Witchcraft. The legislation came from a section of a 1735 Act, originally passed by King James I over a century earlier, which defined the charge as: ‘the more effectual preventing and punishing any pretences to such arts or powers whereby ignorant persons are frequently deluded and defrauded’. The Chief’s idea to use it was a masterstroke.

  Though the evidence against her was as flimsy as the fabric at the centre of Helen’s workings – which had itself never been recovered from the Master Temple – there seemed little chance she would be able to evade such deathly wording. Her husband had managed to escape all charges, but both Shadwells would be joining her in the dock for what was shaping up to be a legal Variety bill of the prosecution’s own making.

  The DPP had appointed John Gonne KC as Prosecuting Counsel. As well as having a distinguished career, including a stint as Treasury Counsel, he was the son of a famous actor, which would no doubt lend him a helpful perspective. The DPP himself was to be represented by J.E. Robey, son of Britain’s best-loved comedian, George, ‘The Prime Minister of Mirth’. All that remained to be proved was that the accused had pretended to conjure the spirits of the dead in a manner much more crude than the spectacle Spooner had just witnessed. The testimony of the RNVR officer who had summoned DI Fraser to the Temple could be all it took to secure a conviction.

  “Should we go and offer our congratulations?” asked Bertie.

  Spooner was glad of the whisky that had flowed as generously as it had the first time he was here before tonight’s performance. He didn’t think he had ever felt so nervous as he was now, following the barrelling figure in the blue dogtooth suit around the corridors of the Hippodrome towards the backstage area, moving quickly to avoid the crowds that would soon come spilling out of the auditorium. They went through a door marked STAFF ONLY and into a corridor where men and women hurried by, pushing rails of costumes, lengths of wire, hammers and scenery from the stage to the props department and along the rows of dressing rooms.

  Bertie stopped outside one of those rooms and knocked on the door. “Management,” he called. “Might I be permitted to offer my congratulations?”

  Spooner held his breath as he heard the handle turn and the door swung open.

  It was the funambulist who stood there, her glittering dress now covered by an equally exotic black silk kimono, decorated with swirls of gold and orange carp. Her gleaming tresses had been swept up into a black silk headscarf in readiness for her to remove her stage make-up. Her pale blue eyes regarded her visitors from under thick false eyelashes with apparent good humour.

  “Ah, hello, Mr Adams.” She had the husky voice of a heavy smoker but pronounced her words with care. Her eyes widened as they travelled down to the bottle of champagne that the manager proffered. “Do, please, come in.”

  She took a step backwards, revealing to Spooner the room behind: a mirrored wall with dressing tables, a clothes rail and a small round table beside which, sitting on a stool and smoking a cigarette, the ringmaster, sans top hat, looked up from a magazine and stared back at him through sea-green eyes.

  Her transformation was every bit as artful as the magic she had just performed. Her hair was black now, dyed and cut into a short crop. The shading of her make-up, including the moustache and sideburns, was sufficient to disguise an already urchin-like face from any traces of being female. Dressed in trousers, braces and dress shirt, with the bow tie undone around her neck, she sat with her legs apart, cupping her cigarette inside her palm. At a glance, there was nothing to suggest anything other than a slight young man, just out of adolescence. It was only the colour and shape of her eyes that gave her away.

  That, and the way she had played her fiddle.

  Something passed across her face as they saw each other; her irises widened with recognition and her mouth fell open for a fraction of a second. He thought it was relief he could see there, but then her co-performer turned towards her with Bertie’s offering, cooing delight and obscuring his view at the same time, so he couldn’t be sure.

  “What a wonderful act, Miss Anderson,” Bertie went on. That was the name the tightrope walker had given when he had booked The Two Magicians. It was she who had done all the talking, both on the telephone and at the theatre. He had yet to hear her colleague, introduced to him simply as Mr Hart, speak at all.

  “Where ever did you learn such skills?” he went on. “No,” he put up an index finger, “I know I shouldn’t arsk, we all have our secrets, don’t we? Might I introduce my colleague, Ross Spooner, from the Paramount Agency in London? I think he’d like to make you an offer.”

  “Is that so?” Miss Anderson spun around. She put the bottle down on the table and lifted from the ashtray a cigarette in a slim ebony holder, taking a lengthy drag as she ran her eyes up and down Spooner. Her expression became a touch more sardonic as she blew out a long plume of smoke and finally extended her hand. “Well, hello, Mr Spooner,” she said. Her fingers were as long as his, her grip reminding Spooner of the disembodied hand closing around his leg in his dreadful nightmare of Clara.

  “Hello, Miss Anderson.” Despite the urge to wince, Spooner smiled. “And,” he looked at the figure at the table, “who else do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  Sea-green eyes flashed a split-second warning. “Oh, don’t mind Mr Hart.” The hand that had felt like a mantrap being sprung now flapped crimson fingernails in Spooner’s face. “He doesn’t speak to strangers. I’ll do all the talking, if you don’t mind.”

  Of course, thought Spooner, it would be much harder for Anna to disguise her voice than anything else about herself. “As you like,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his business card and smiling back as he studied the face in front of him more closely. From behind those pan-sticked features, the ringmaster tipped him a wink.

  For the next twenty minutes, making small talk and drinking champagne with a man who had once put him in hospital, Spooner felt as if he was balancing on a high wire himself – if he judged any aspect of this situation wrongly, it would be him falling from a dizzy height. But he had to let go of fear and submit to trust, that the knowledge he had accrued since he was coshed to the Edgbaston pavement would render him more skilful than even such a master illusionist as the female alter ego of Nils Anders that stood before him.

  “I have an idea,” she said, after Spooner had described the kind of gigs he could get for them in London. “We are fully booked until the last day of April, when we are due to perform a very—” a smile twitched at the corner of her red lips, “special show for a private client. A performance that would enable us to demonstrate more of our talents than those you have seen this evening. Our employer that night is a generous man, I am sure he woul
dn’t mind us bringing a guest.” She looked over her shoulder. “Would he, Mr Hart?”

  The ringmaster shook his head.

  Spooner’s mind stared down the drop. The thirtieth of April was Walpurgisnacht, the night of the Witches’ Sabbat referred to by Goethe in the grimoire once owned by Harry Price. Apart from Samhain, when Nicholas Ralphe had faced the ritual laid out in that work and been driven insane, it was the most powerful night in the Black magic calendar.

  “Naturally,” the magician went on, “there’s plenty of room up at the Hall.”

  “The Hall?” said Spooner, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

  “Oh, of course, you’re not based in Birmingham are you? Perhaps it would not be so convenient for you to join us,” she pouted, a motion that squared her jawline, made her look altogether more masculine. “What a shame.”

  “No, no,” countered Spooner. “It’s part of my job to travel. Just give me the address and I’ll be there.” He opened the battered appointments book he had been supplied with for his first visit to Birmingham and began to make a note of the date.

  “Take a train from here to Stourbridge on the evening of the thirtieth, one that will get you in at about ten o’clock – it is normally a regular service. We will pick you up from there. I hope you won’t mind a late night.”

  “Sounds intriguing.” Spooner wrote his instructions down.

  “I can promise you,” Miss Anderson said, “a night of revelation.”

  Spooner hadn’t been able to borrow the same car that had brought him here the last time, but he’d been supplied with a very similar Rover 16. The next part of his act was to wait beside it, ostensibly smoking a cigarette but drawing attention to himself by shining a pen torch into his address book that he pretended to examine on the vehicle’s roof. Bertie told him where to park. Next to the maroon Austin that The Two Magicians had arrived in.

  He had not waited for long before he heard the scuffle of footsteps running towards him and a voice, like the silvery chime of a bell, said, “Mr Spooner, is that you?”

  He turned, shining his torch into her face. The moustache was gone now, sponged off with the rest of her professional visage.

  “Anna,” he said. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  She squinted in the torch beam, turned her head sideways. “Can we go somewhere?” She sounded panicked. “Quickly, before I’m missed. There are so many things I need to explain but,” she glanced backwards over her shoulder, “we must speak alone.”

  “Of course,” said Spooner. “Get in.” He opened the passenger door and she slipped inside.

  As he started up the engine, she turned to him and smiled. “I knew you would get my messages,” she said.

  Spooner put his foot on the accelerator. “Where d’you want me to go just now?”

  “Anywhere,” she said, “away from here.” She turned to look back out of the window as they bumped out of the car park.

  “All right,” said Spooner. “So, go on. What do you have to tell me?”

  “I know what happened to Clara.”

  Spooner kept his eyes on the unlit road. “Oh,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “She was murdered,” said Anna. “Then he chopped off her hand and buried it and stuffed the rest of her into a tree. Worse than any ballad in that book I used to have.” He could feel her staring at him, willing him to turn and read the meaning in her eyes. “Four little boys found her there last spring. What was left of her.”

  “And d’you know who it was that did this?” he asked.

  “The officer,” said Anna. “Ralph Nicholson, or whatever his name was. After he married her and found out she had been seeing someone else behind his back. That Professor De Vere I told you about. She was his all along. That’s why she was hidden in the grounds of his estate, and that’s why I left you all those messages. I knew you would realise…”

  Spooner raised his left hand. “Slow down, hen. I cannae take this all in at once. Forget about Clara for a minute. What I really want to know is, what happened to you after I was left for dead on the pavement back there? It’s been three years.” This time he did look at her and she dropped her head, shaking it sadly.

  “Of course. I’m sorry, Mr Spooner, it was dreadful what happened that day. It’s the reason I didn’t dare try to contact you directly.” She looked back up at him. “It was Nils who did that to you. Or Miss Anderson, as you saw him tonight. He didn’t realise what was going on, that I was coming with you to London. He thought you were a policeman and panicked. But he didn’t mean to do you any lasting harm. I had no idea what he had got himself into, but he explained it all to me. It’s shocking. Worse than you could imagine.”

  “D’you think we’re far enough away from him now that I can pull over?” asked Spooner. “I’m not sure how much more revelation I can take without driving us into a brick wall.”

  “Oh!” She gave a nervous giggle and looked back over her shoulder again. “Of course.”

  Spooner braked at the kerb on the corner of John Bright Street, just a few feet away from the Victoria public house, stopped the engine and turned towards her. “Go on, hen,” he said. “Now you can tell me.”

  “Clara was a spy,” said Anna. “I think I realised that from the moment I saw her trunk in the back of the officer’s car. I just didn’t want to believe it.”

  “A spy?” Spooner repeated.

  Anna nodded, her eyes huge in the dim light. “A German spy called Agent Belladonna. It’s her fault the BSA factory got blown up that night… and a lot of other things…”

  “That’s incredible,” said Spooner. “How do you know for sure?”

  “This is the hard part.” She looked down again, “Nils was helping her. But,” her head came up, her gaze beseeching, “only because he had to. She was blackmailing him, Mr Spooner. She had met him before, long ago, and she knew a secret that I didn’t. Something that’s not his fault but could have got him deported or even killed. Nils passed himself off as Dutch, but Clara knew he really was German. And he didn’t have a passport.” Anna shook her head. “She had a friend who was a counterfeiter, so she fixed him up with a Dutch passport that looked as good as the real thing. But after that, he had to help her get rid of more of them and that’s what the bogeys were after him for. It was a stupid thing to do – he knew it and I do too. But that’s why I invented The Two Magicians, both of us pretending to be what we’re not. I thought we had more of a chance of keeping him safe that way. Oh, I don’t expect you to understand it at all, but Nils was my friend.” She put her hand on Spooner’s arm. “At times, he was my only friend in the world.”

  Spooner bit back the question as to why she had been hiding from him when they first met. He didn’t want to interrupt the flow of her story, confession – whatever it was.

  “Anyway, he didn’t feel the same way. He left me in the lurch after a show in Catford on the Christmas of 1941. I thought that the bogeys had caught up with him and they might come for me next, so I kept moving on, taking any job I could get, so long as I didn’t have to stay in one place too long. Then he turned up again…” she paused, staring at Spooner as if trying to convey something she dared not say aloud, “… soon after they found Clara. Persuaded me to pick things up where we’d left off. The only reason I did it was to try and find you. You’re the only person who can help me.”

  “Did he tell you what happened? Where he’d been all that time?” Spooner asked.

  She shook her head. “You don’t want to know. All I can tell you is that Professor De Vere has been in Germany, working for the SS – and he’s coming back on the thirtieth of April. That’s who we’re doing the show for and—” her voice wobbled as a single tear ran down her cheek, “I am certain he means to kill us too, once he gets us to that place. Now,” she pressed her fingers into Spooner’s arm. “I can’t go to the police, but you can. Find the spycatcher in Birmingham and tell him if he wants to know who put Bella in the Wych Elm he’s to follow yo
u from Stourbridge that night. You’ll be picked up in that car I saw Clara go into and taken to her last resting place – maybe mine too.”

  “But Anna,” Spooner said, “you don’t have to do this. Don’t you see? Just don’t go. Come with me to London. I’ve kept your songbook safe. What more do you need?”

  Emotion had got the better of him, he was offering her things he had no right to promise. But however hard he tried to put up a mask, Anna had a hold on his heart.

  “But I can’t,” a second tear emerged from the other eye and joined the first in a race down her cheeks, “none of it will work unless I go like a lamb to the slaughter. You don’t understand what I’m up against and I can’t tell you now…” Her hand moved to the door and she opened it with one deft movement. “I don’t think you’ll believe me until you see it with your own eyes. But just, please, come.”

  Spooner lunged towards her but she slipped through his grasp like a shadow. Her footsteps echoed up the cobbles of John Bright Street, disappearing into the night.

  27

  IN THE DARK

  Wednesday, 29 March 1944

  “I first had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Duncan in the autumn of 1932.”

  Swaffer looked out from the witness stand across the floor of the Old Bailey. Five days into the witch trial and nothing so far had gone as planned.

  Though he had amassed plenty of notable witnesses for her defence, Helen’s KC, Charles Loseby, seemed lost from the start. His opposite number, John Gonne, was a handsome, erudite man whose smooth baritone conveyed a plausibility that the older man’s vocal cords, strained by the effects of a gas attack in the last war, failed to match.

  The prosecution’s opening evidence, from RNVR Lieutenant Stanley Worthington, went down far better than the SNU had anticipated. He amused the court with his imitation of Gladys, telling him that Helen was a “marvellous materialisation medium” complete with rolling Rhondda “r”s. Loseby’s attempts to wrestle back advantage were as doomed as his witness’s struggle with the material he had found on Helen’s lap – another part of Stanley’s testimony greeted with snorts of enthusiasm from the press bench.