The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist & the Psychic Thief
Page 8
“She walked out of her life because she had an angelic visitation? But then where did she go? It is not so easy to get to heaven.” Mr. Jesperson sighed thoughtfully and leaned back in his chair, tilting it on to its back legs. “I think you are right, there is no evidence of abduction. Not in any violent manner. Yet someone may have helped her on her way. And surely someone in this big, wicked city knows where she is now.”
He returned his feet and the chair’s front legs to the floor. “Our Frenchman also appears to have gone away of his own accord.” He told me what he had learned.
Monsieur Ribaud had been staying at the Albemarle Hotel. Early in the evening of October fifth he had walked out of the hotel and had not been seen by anyone since. The chambermaid could attest that his bed had not been slept in when she entered the room the following morning. His luggage and clothes were all there, everything except the clothes he had been wearing and whatever he carried in his pockets.
His friends became concerned when he failed to attend a dinner party on the sixth, and a report to the police was made on the seventh; however, as there was no evidence of foul play, the police were not inclined to expend any effort looking for an adult French citizen who’d simply left without paying his hotel bill. The fact that he’d left without his luggage and abandoned a theatrical venture described as a “surefire moneymaker” cut no ice with them: Maybe he’d had an attack of stage fright, or common sense, and decided to cut and run before he could be unmasked as the fraud he undoubtedly was.
“Materialists all, those police detectives,” said Mr. Jesperson with a whimsical smile. “By all accounts, Ribaud was anticipating a thorough conquest of London. He had letters of introduction to Lord Bennington, who invited him to a little soiree in Belgrave Square. It was there, on the first of October, that Ribaud was introduced to the Misses De Beauvoir and many of the big names in London’s spiritualist community—and I hear that all were quite dazzled by the psychic talents he displayed.”
“The first of October?” I took him up on the date, remembering Gabrielle’s mention of a social gathering in early October. “I wonder if that was the only meeting between him and the young ladies. If he went missing on the fifth…
He looked at once more alert, like a dog catching a scent. “We must ask Miss Fox.”
“She doesn’t know,” I snapped. “Miss Fox is rarely precise about details—‘early October,’ she says, and then it was ‘about a week’ later that the girls went missing. It is a weakness in her. She forgets or confuses names, too,” I added, recalling how she’d mistaken the name of the servant for that of the lady of the house.
Mr. Jesperson gave me a mischievous look. “But she didn’t forget your name, did she, Miss Lane? You must have been quite close, to have shared the deep, dark secret of your Christian name with her. Although it’s not quite right to call it a Christian name, is it? Not pagan, but classical. I don’t know why you are not proud of it, and even your old friend abbreviates it to a single, dusty syllable. Don’t you miss hearing it said in full—”
“No.” I wished I could take his chaffing lightly. But this was my weakness: The name my father the classical scholar had chosen to bestow remained a sore point with me.
“ ‘Foam-born.’ A lovely name.”
“But utterly inappropriate.”
“I don’t agree. Although Athene perhaps would be better.”
“Athene is the name of my sister, who is neither gray-eyed nor wise.” I stared down at my notes. “Shall we get back to business? As Miss Fox is unable to supply any accurate details about when the two young ladies went missing, we must approach the family. Whether they know it or not, they need our help.”
A brief discussion followed about how best to win them over. If they were unwilling to inform the police, why would they talk to us? Lies could get us into trouble. But what was the truth?
“We’ll make it up as we go along,” said Mr. Jesperson. Leaping up from his chair, he added, “I think better on my feet, don’t you? Come along, get your coat; we should be able to fit in a bit more investigating before I must resume my duties guarding a non-somnambulating somnambulist.”
—
The De Beauvoir family resided in St. John’s Wood, in a handsome, Italianate villa. The maid who answered the door stared with frank curiosity before announcing, “Madam is not receiving.”
“Perhaps you would tell your master—”
She refused to take Mr. Jesperson’s card, putting her hands behind her back and shaking her head. “If it’s Mr. De Beauvoir you want, you’ll find him at his club.”
“And that would be—?”
But, clearly, anyone who had to ask was not to be trusted. Without another word, she took a step backward and shut the door on us.
Mr. Jesperson and I exchanged a look. He seized the shiny brass knocker and gave several hard raps.
The same young woman opened it, scowling. “Clear off, or I’ll—”
“See here, you had better run along and tell someone in the household that we are friends of Lord Bennington. And we have news.”
She still frowned, but the name of Lord Bennington had touched a chord. “What’s it about, then? The young ladies?”
“Yes.”
“Wait here.”
We stood a good five minutes in the chilly air—at least it felt cleaner on this suburban avenue than it did in the closer streets of the city—before the door opened again to reveal a rather haughty-looking young man of nineteen or twenty years.
“Who are you? Why have you come bothering my mother? What’s this about?”
“Mr. De Beauvoir, I presume? Allow me to introduce myself. I am Jasper Jesperson, and this is my partner, Miss Lane. We are private investigators.”
A look of alarm flickered across his features. “What! Who hired you?”
“If you’ll let me explain…perhaps inside?”
“And have you ‘investigate’ our house? I think not!”
“We’ve been hired by the friends of Monsieur Ribaud, who has not been seen since he left his hotel in Piccadilly on the fifth of October.”
“I have never met anyone by that name, I promise you.” I thought he was being careful not to say he’d never heard of him.
Mr. Jesperson dipped his head slightly. “I understand your sisters attended a gathering in the home of Lord Bennington at which—”
Nostrils flaring, the young man burst out, “What do you mean? Can’t girls go to a party? It was highly respectable. What are you trying to imply?”
“Four days after that party, Ribaud disappeared. His friends fear he was kidnapped. Some little while afterward, your sisters, too, went missing.”
The young Mr. De Beauvoir threw his head back and glared, so that he looked, with his flared nostrils, like a frightened horse. “No! That’s a damned lie! Take it back, you contemptible—”
“Do you mean to say the Misses De Beauvoir are not missing?”
“They did not run off with that little frog!”
“I never meant to suggest they did. But his friends are concerned about Monsieur Ribaud’s disappearance, and when we heard two others who had been at the same gathering were also missing—”
“Well, they’re not.” He settled down, still glaring, but in a sulky, smoldering way.
“We were misinformed?”
“You were.”
“Delighted to hear it. It makes our task easier.” Mr. Jesperson smiled. “Perhaps they will be able to shed some light on events, as witnesses. They may have noticed something at the party. If we might have a word with one or both of the young ladies now…?”
“They’re not here.”
“But…”
“They’re in Somerset. Went to visit our old aunt. Nursing her. Poorly. Her, our aunt, not the girls, of course. May not be back ’til Christmas. Or New Year. Sorry, can’t help.” Less smoothly but more finally than the maid, the young man backed into his house and swung the door shut in our baffled faces.
“This was a wasted journey,” I grumbled, as we turned and walked back the way we had come. “We still don’t know the date they went missing, or even their names.”
“Wait.” Taking off his hat, Mr. Jesperson handed it to me, then dug into his coat pocket for what looked like an old rag. After he had shaken and stretched it and popped it on top of his head, it was revealed as a shabby flat cap. “You’d better look after my coat as well—far too nice for a butcher’s boy.”
“What are you doing?”
“Off to sweet-talk the cook. I hope she likes to gossip. You can’t stand around freezing on a streetcorner, but I noticed a tearoom by the station…here.” He gave me a coin. “You’ve got your return ticket. If I’m delayed, go home without me.”
“But your coat!”
“Oh, don’t worry about me; I’ve my own internal combustion engine, keeps me warm when I’m on the scent. And you may see me sooner than you think, sent off with a flea in my ear.” He grinned, and I could see he did not believe for an instant that he might fail.
I envied his self-confidence, and wondered, as I trudged off on my own, what it would be like to have such utter confidence in your own ability to charm perfect strangers that you expected other people to like you; what it would feel like to believe that whatever good things befell you, they were no more than you deserved.
Yet I had been loved, once upon a time; long ago, when I was a child, before I was Miss Lane. It had been out of love, not a reflection of grandiose expectations, that my father had named us Athene and Aphrodite. She was always Athene—“Theeny” from my childish lips—but no one ever called me Aphrodite, or anything like it—except sometimes, in a temper, my mother. When I was a baby, my sister called me the Lamb or Lambie. Then I was Lamb Pie, soon shortened to Pie—and Pie is how I was known to all, until I was nearly eleven years old. Until, with my father’s death, everything changed.
Afterward, only my sister called me Pie. I became Aphrodite—a bad joke of a name, to be sneered and snickered at, and mispronounced. I was grateful when I could be, simply, “Miss Lane.”
It had been Gabrielle’s notion to call me Di. Di was so close to Pie, I liked it; I felt known again.
—
The tearoom Mr. Jesperson had noticed turned out to be part of the A.B.C. chain, so it was clean and welcoming, and the girls who worked there would not object if I lingered over my one cup of tea for hours. The smell of fresh bread was so tempting that I had a struggle not to order a bun, but I was determined to be economical. I would suffer pangs of guilt far worse than hunger if I indulged myself.
People came and went. An old lady at a table near to mine ordered a plate of eggs with ham, and the smell, accompanied by her obvious pleasure in the meal, added to my feelings of martyrdom.
A man dashed in. He was dressed in a striking blue coat with a wide black fur collar, but a floppy gray hat—the sort of thing an artist might wear for shade when painting in the open air—made it impossible to see his face. From his movements, I thought him young rather than old. He did not sit down at a table, nor did he make any attempt to attract the attention of a waitress, but went swiftly to the glazed wooden cabinet in the far corner of the room and shut himself in to make a telephone call.
Not for nothing do they call them “silence cabinets”—not a sound reached me. His back was turned to me, so I was unable to practice lipreading (another skill my partner was eager to teach me), but still I continued to gaze at the cabinet as I swirled the last dregs of tea in my cup and tried to think if there was anyone I could call on the telephone, apart from our landlord and Arthur Creevey. By the time—about two minutes later—that the caller emerged (giving me a good look at a bearded, handsome, yet rather dissolute and heavily tanned face), I had not been able to add another name to that short list. I could only imagine using the telephone in an emergency—and I could not think of any emergency in which my first instinct should be to run to the nearest A.B.C.
Nevertheless, I was just thinking about stepping inside the cabinet and pretending to use the telephone—it might put off the need to return alone to Gower Street by another five minutes—when, at last, I caught sight of my partner’s tall, lanky figure, the red-gold of his hair glowing like fire beneath the streetlamps in the thickening dusk. I made haste to pay for my tea and met him at the door.
Waiting on the platform for our train, once more wrapped in his coat, curls crushed under the brim of his hat, Mr. Jesperson told me what he had learned.
“The young ladies answer to the names of Amelia and Bedelia. Bedelia is the bold one; Amelia does what her sister commands. They were still in the bosom of their family for the evening meal on Friday the thirteenth of October. Friday the thirteenth,” he repeated in dramatic, hollow tones. “The servants are all sufficiently superstitious that there can be no mistake about it. It was either the night of Friday the thirteenth or the morning of Saturday the fourteenth that the girls left the house, unnoticed. They did not appear for breakfast on Saturday morning, but no one thought anything of it. It was only after midday, the maid unable to get into their locked bedroom, that anyone was alarmed.”
“Another locked door. Was the key missing?”
“The key was in the lock—on the inside. Their bedroom is at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. A set of French doors opens on to a balcony, and it would be an easy matter for any reasonably athletic person to climb up or down. Perhaps it was the thought of the balcony scene in Shakespeare’s play about star-crossed lovers that led to the idea of an elopement. Yet neither of the girls had an acknowledged lover, and until very recently they had led such sheltered lives that it was hard to imagine any contenders for the part. Yet they had met Monsieur Ribaud…and he was no longer around to protest his innocence.”
Our train pulled into the station amid much noise and a gritty swirl of smoke, and as it arrived, I made the connection that had been hovering at the edges of my thoughts.
“The dates,” I said urgently. “Not the fifth, but the thirteenth and the twenty-ninth.”
He was already there. “Nights when Arthur Creevey went sleepwalking.”
But although we discussed it for the rest of our journey, we could make no more sense of it. Could these events be connected? But if they were, then why was it only two out of the three dates? Had any other medium gone missing on the twenty-fifth of October, the one other night when Mr. Creevey walked in his sleep? Or was it all meaningless coincidence?
Chapter 9
Magnetic Demonstration in a Methodist Hall
A Methodist mission hall might seem an unlikely venue for a demonstration of spiritualism and psychic powers, but Methodism had from its beginnings a strong affinity with ghosts—John Wesley’s own family had lived in a haunted house.
Or so Miss Fox, herself a member of the Methodist community, had told me.
Other members of the congregation might object to the use of their hall for a demonstration that had more to do with entertainment than with salvation, but if she’d been able to get it at a reduced rate, or free, Gabrielle would have thought it worth the risk. Like Jasper Jesperson, my old friend had a great deal of faith in her ability to talk herself out of trouble and win supporters by sheer force of personality.
My partner and I took the omnibus most of the way, as it was not a pleasant evening for a stroll. A greasy, choking, brown fog had been gathering all day, and now came swirling round corners, sneaking out of alleyways to briefly blind the unwary pedestrian, stinging the eyes, catching at the throat, confusing and disorienting, following and clinging like an evil, reeking ghost.
I hoped Gabrielle had sold most of her tickets in advance, for I did not think there would be much demand at the door from people attracted by a hand-lettered poster drooping limply from a lamppost. Anyone comfortable by his or her own fireside would take one look at
the smoky pall of the street and decide to stay home, no matter how interesting the “magnetic” talents of Signora Fiorella Gallo promised to be.
We arrived neither early nor late and presented our tickets to the dragon guarding the door, an elderly lady in rusty black and an antique bonnet. I recognized her—or at least the bonnet—from similar situations in the past, but when I wished her good evening she stared past me quite deliberately. In her day, I think they called it “the cut direct,” and it was both unexpected and painful. I wondered what she had heard about me, what rumors had spread since I’d last had any formal connection with the SPR. It was even more painful to think that my onetime friend and companion might have been the source of some falsehood about me.
The thought was still in my mind when Gabrielle herself appeared before us, in a dress I had not seen before: a full-skirted swirl of lustrous, dark green silk. Her eye patch matched her skirt, and her thick black hair had been confined in a net of ribbons studded with tiny bits of mirror-glass that flashed and winked as they caught the light.
“My friends!” she cried, with as much emotion as if months had passed since our last meeting. “I’m so glad you came! I wish I could stop and talk with you, but—”
“You have too many other things on your mind,” I said, as Mr. Jesperson murmured, “Of course.”
“Sit anywhere. I’m sorry they’re not more comfortable, and the surroundings more elegant, but…needs must.” She nodded at the rows of hard wooden chairs and benches facing a raised platform at the far end of the big, bare, and rather chilly hall. “It seemed important to launch La Fiorella as soon as possible. When people have seen what she can do, her fame will quickly spread; we’ll fill the finest theatres in the West End.” She seized my hand. “A favor?”
As I looked, she unpinned a small brooch from the high collar of her dress. It was a black Egyptian scarab in a gold setting. I did not think it an attractive ornament, but knew it had an occult significance and was one of her most treasured possessions. So I was unprepared when she asked me to wear it.