There was Septimus Sheridan, for example. He was not toiling away in the cathedral library this morning. Rather, he had been so wearied by dear Julia’s harping on the subject of Eustace Flask that he decided to get some fresh air before burying himself in his ever-open books. He loved Miss Howlett with an undeclared love but even he could take only so much of her agitation over the wretched medium who had disappeared the previous evening at the Assembly Rooms. Good riddance to him! But from Julia there was a stream of questions and queries. What should they do about poor Mr Flask? Should they go to the police, for instance?
Septimus Sheridan noticed that the nice young couple felt the same way. Helen had become almost impatient with her aunt while her lawyer husband had quit the breakfast table as soon as possible to do some work. Eventually Septimus could stand it no longer. He left the house in South Bailey and rather than go the few hundred yards to the cathedral precincts he walked several times that distance, crossing the Elvet Bridge and turning south towards Church Street.
As he sometimes did when he felt weary or dispirited he went to St Oswald’s Church which lay on a wooded bluff overlooking the river. It was not the church where Septimus had served as a curate during his time in Durham many years before but he liked St Oswald’s for its extreme antiquity and its slightly forlorn air. He did not always go inside the church but contented himself with wandering off the flagstone paths and into the quiet of the graveyard. This was an overgrown place especially towards its western, river-facing fringe and Sheridan felt the long grass brush his trousers as he ducked under tree boughs and skirted the graves which poked lopsidedly through the soil. There was a ragged line of palings marking the church boundary and an unlocked gate on to a steep path which led to the riverside walk.
Septimus paused here and breathed deeply. The smells and noises of the town were drowned by the sound of birdsong and the scent of blossom. Dominating the tree-line on the far bank was the great eastern tower of the cathedral but from this aspect it was softened and framed by foliage and Septimus imagined that the scene could not have changed very greatly in almost a thousand years.
All those centuries ago an individual like Eustace Flask, with his cheap tricks and his claims to be in touch with the dead, would have been regarded as a witch. A warlock. A heretic. Flask would have been tried, convicted and summarily burnt at the stake. Septimus was not a violent man. He knew that he lived in a kinder, more enlightened age and he was thankful for it. But there was something to be said for those ancient forms of justice.
Septimus attempted to push such thoughts and imaginings out of his head. He distracted himself by listening to the birds. But the place was not so peaceful after all. From the wooded slope below came a crashing sound as of some animal forcing its way through the undergrowth. Septimus thought it must be a deer but a flash of bright, artificial colour — someone’s jacket perhaps — showed that it was a person. The colour immediately stirred an unwelcome recollection in Septimus Sheridan and he waited to see the route taken by the intruder in the woods. After a time curiosity got the better of him and he pushed open the gate in the dilapidated fence and started to tread carefully on the downhill path.
Any observer in St Oswald’s churchyard about a quarter of an hour later would have seen a rather stout man making his way at quite a lick through the long grass. More than once the man stumbled over a low-lying grave before he reached the flagged path which led to Church Street. An observer would also have heard a woman’s screams coming from the river area and rising above the birdsong. If the stout man was aware of them he did not stop, let alone turn back and investigate. Instead he walked as rapidly as decorum and his aching lungs would allow back in the direction of Elvet Bridge.
Another wanderer in the area was Ambrose Barker. He had been following Flask and Kitty for over a day now. He had attended the performance at the Assembly Rooms the previous evening and had been greatly cheered when Flask had been shut up inside that cabinet and made to disappear. Pity it was all a trick. Sure enough Flask had turned up again, like a bad penny. Ambrose was aware of this because he had been on the point of returning to the house in Old Elvet earlier that morning to have it out with Kitty once and for all. But as he was about to turn into the street he saw Flask coming out of the door. Ambrose turned away and waited until the figure in the bright green frock-coat had passed. Ambrose changed his mind about seeing Kitty that instant. His feelings, of resentment and anger, were directed once more towards the guv’nor. If he had disappeared once, surely he might be made to disappear again?
Superintendent Frank Harcourt had left his house earlier that morning. For him it was a brisk walk along Hallgarth Street towards the police-house in Court Lane. As he was approaching New Elvet he was dismayed to see Eustace Flask on the other side of the street, although the medium seemed to have lost something of his usual swagger. Flask was apparently heading for the old part of town. Harcourt would have identified him anywhere by that frock-coat. The Superintendent took advantage of a convenient tree and watched as Flask passed. When the medium had gone a hundred yards or so, Harcourt wondered whether to follow him and see what he was up to.
So the body in the woods was soon identified as that of Eustace Flask. Just as the woman standing over his corpse would soon be identified as Mrs Helen Ansell.
Durham Gaol
‘Why has she been brought here? Tell me. I demand to know.’
Tom was beside himself. The sweat was standing out on his forehead and he could not stay still for an instant. He wanted to lash out at something or someone. But the police superintendent standing on the opposite side of the desk kept a stolid calm.
‘It is for her own safety, sir. Will you sit down?’
‘Safety! In a gaol!’
‘You might be surprised, Mr Ansell, but this place behind us is quite salubrious compared to the police-house in Court Lane. We are not adapted for accommodating people of, er, quality in the station-house. And we would have drawn more attention taking your wife there than we did by bringing her here. She is quite comfortable. She will not have to mix with any of the other inmates, yet. I can recognize a lady when I see one. I ask again, sir, will you sit down?’
‘Why should I sit down?’
‘Then I can sit too.’
‘All right,’ said Tom, aware that he was only harming his — or rather Helen’s — cause by his confusion and anger. ‘I must apologize, Superintendent…?’
‘Harcourt, sir, Frank Harcourt.’
Tom and Superintendent Harcourt were standing in a plainly furnished office in the Crown Courts behind which stood Durham Gaol. Tom had a view of the prison through a grimy window. There was a vase of wilted flowers on the window ledge. The building beyond was bulky and formidable and somewhere inside it, only a hundred yards distant, his wife was confined. It was almost impossible to believe. Tom took a deep breath and sat on a hard chair. His heart was beating hard, as it had been ever since the message had arrived at Miss Howlett’s house in South Bailey that a Mrs Ansell was in the custody of the police. Luckily, the servant had brought the message straight to Tom.
Without telling Aunt Julia or anyone else, without putting on his coat, he ran to the police-house in Court Lane, only to be informed that he should apply to the County Court instead. He gathered no more than that Helen had been apprehended near a dead body which had been discovered in the woods below the cathedral. Tom arrived at the County Court, sweating and furious and fearful. Dashing into the spacious hallway and spotting a superintendent’s uniform he had buttonholed the man. By chance he had encountered the very one who could tell him what was happening.
Now Frank Harcourt was settling himself on the far side of the desk and toying with an empty pen holder and a blotter. He picked up a paperweight and looked at it curiously.
‘Not my office,’ he explained. He eventually found a notepad and a pencil in a drawer. ‘A few preliminaries, if you don’t mind. You are Mr Thomas Ansell?’
Tom nodded.
‘And your profession, sir?’
‘I am a solicitor, with a London firm. Scott, Lye amp; Mackenzie of Furnival Street.’
‘Is that L–I-E?’
‘With a Y.’
Harcourt bent over the notepad and laboriously wrote all this down, pressing hard on the paper. He stuck out his tongue as he wrote and his face turned more ruddy. The pencil point broke and a couple of minutes passed while Harcourt rummaged in his clothing. He produced a little clasp knife which he snapped open with a grunt of satisfaction. He shaved the tip of the pencil until a decent length of lead was showing. He gave his whole attention to the job. To avoid gazing out of the window and seeing the prison beyond, Tom stared round the room. The walls were bare apart from a framed sampler that bore the embroidered legend: ‘Blessed Are They That Hunger And Thirst After Righteousness.’
‘And your wife, Mr Ansell?’ continued Harcourt, his sharpened pencil poised again. ‘She is called Helen?’
‘Yes. But she must have told you so already.’
‘She did. You are visiting Durham on legal business?’
‘Helen’s aunt lives here. We are staying with her for a few days. That is, with Miss Julia Howlett in the South Bailey.’
If the name meant anything to Superintendent Harcourt he didn’t show it. He said, ‘I gather your wife knew the deceased.’
‘This may sound absurd, Superintendent, but then the whole thing is absurd. I do not even know who is dead.’
‘You don’t know who is dead, Mr Ansell? Well, well. The deceased is a gentleman who has caused a certain stir in this town… his name is… or was, I should say… Eustace Flask.’
‘Oh God! How did he die?’
‘He was murdered. Stabbed, it seems. A vicious blow to the neck with a sharp knife. May I take it from your response that you were also familiar with Mr Flask?’
‘Plenty of people knew him, I imagine,’ said Tom, cautiously.
‘As a matter of fact, I knew him myself,’ said Harcourt. ‘A glancing acquaintance only, mind.’
‘But he disappeared last night.’
‘Last night? Ah, you are referring to the performance at the Assembly Rooms when Mr Flask was invited to enter the magician’s booth.’
‘If you were there then you must have seen him vanish too.’
‘That was a trick, Mr Ansell.’
‘But Flask never reappeared.’
‘All part of the act, I suppose,’ said Harcourt.
‘Shouldn’t you be talking to the performers on stage, talking to Major Marmont for example, to find out exactly what happened afterwards? Flask could have died last night.’
‘The body was still warm, the blood was still flowing, when your wife found him this morning. He had only just been killed.’
Tom noted that the policeman was not implying that it was Helen who had killed Flask.
‘So he disappeared temporarily and then popped up again. Someone must have seen him in the in-between.’
‘No doubt,’ said Harcourt. ‘We will talk to the magician and others but in our own good time, Mr Ansell. We must talk to your wife first and find out what she was doing with the deceased.’
‘She wasn’t doing anything with him. She had the bad luck to find his body, that is all. You have as much as said so.’
‘Possibly, sir, possibly. But caution is the watchword in these affairs. You are lucky because I was actually on the scene of the murder.’
‘You saw it?’ said Tom, not understanding.
‘I mean that I arrived shortly afterwards, happening to be in the neighbourhood by chance. Fortunately, several of my men were also in the area. Tell me, Mr Ansell, did your wife ever express an opinion of Mr Eustace Flask?’
Helen had said several things about Flask, all of them unfavourable, so Tom cast around for a neutral way to answer. He certainly wanted to avoid any hint that she had come to Durham with the specific intention of persuading her aunt Howlett away from her infatuation with the medium. He saw Frank Harcourt looking at him, tapping the end of the pencil against his mouth. There was a shrewdness in the policeman’s eyes but also something else there which Tom couldn’t quite place.
‘Neither of us has much time for mediums and seances and that sort of thing,’ said Tom eventually. ‘We had, both of us, met Mr Flask once — at her aunt’s house as it happens.’
There was a double tap on the door and Harcourt went to answer it. A police constable stood outside. Without any preamble, he launched into an urgent explanation. The man’s accent was so broad that Tom had difficulty following him but, as far as he could gather, something had occurred which required the Superintendent’s immediate attention, something to do with the delivery of a parcel.
Harcourt came back. He said, ‘You may see your wife if you wish, Mr Ansell. There has been a development in the case.’
‘What is it?’
‘I am not at liberty to say. But if you come with me now I shall direct a warder to take you to Mrs Ansell.’
The Crown Court and the prison occupied the same site. Superintendent Harcourt led Tom down some stairs and along increasingly drab passageways until they emerged into a small high-walled yard. He rapped on an iron-barred door on the far side and, when a wooden panel slid back, grunted a few words to the whiskered face on the other side. There was the clank of keys from within.
‘I’ll leave you with Perkins, Mr Ansell. You are in good hands.’
Tom was thinking not of himself but of poor Helen as the warder escorted him across a chilly vestibule occupied only by a desk, chair and filing cabinet. Half a dozen flat blue caps were hanging from a row of pegs. Perkins took a key from the great bunch which dangled at his belt and, without looking to check whether he had the right one, unlocked another reinforced door. Beyond this was a barred gate which led directly to one of the prison wings. There was same instinctive procedure with the keys. Without saying a word, the warder beckoned Tom to follow him up a spiral metal staircase to the left of the gate and they climbed to the second tier of the building. A row of doors opened off a narrow walkway, echoed by a similar arrangement on the other side.
It was curiously silent, with no sound apart from the thud of the men’s feet. There was an acrid smell, a mixture of food and carbolic and human waste. Perkins halted at the seventh or eight door. This time the warder had to search for a specific key. When he found it, he used it to tap on the door to alert the occupant, before turning the key and swinging open the door in a single smooth action.
Helen was sitting on a bench against the far wall. Her head was bent in concentration and she was scribbling in a notebook. She looked up, blinking.
‘Tom! It’s you.’
‘Helen. You’re all right?’
‘Of course I am all right.’
‘What are you doing?’ said Tom. It was a stupid question but other words failed him. He was standing just inside the cell door.
‘’Fraid I’ll have to lock you in, sir,’ said Perkins, making a show of drawing a pocket-watch from his uniform jacket and consulting it. ‘I will wait outside on the landing. I can give you ten minutes.’
‘I am sure you can give us longer than that,’ said Helen. She glanced at Tom and surreptitiously rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.
Tom gave the man half a sovereign. The coin disappeared like magic.
‘Half an hour, sir, no longer,’ said Perkins. He shut the door and turned the key.
Helen said, ‘Well, Tom, in answer to your question I am writing down the details of my surroundings. An author never knows when these things will come in useful. I might send one of my characters to gaol at some point and, when I do, I will need to know what the inside of a cell looks like.’
Helen spoke more rapidly than usual. Tom noticed that there was some blood on her dress. She snapped the notebook shut — it was her diary, he saw — and placed it neatly beside her. She got up from the bench, came to him and he put his arms around her.
‘I don�
�t know how you do it,’ he said at last. ‘You are so calm, so brave. Oh Helen!’
‘Now, Tom. Do not be foolish. This is all a silly mistake. I shall be out of here very soon. After all, you have been in the same plight yourself.’
It was true. The previous year Tom had spent an unhappy night in a cell in the county gaol in Salisbury when he too had fallen under suspicion for a crime he did not commit. Helen had visited him in that place, just as he was now visiting her in this one. Tom wondered if there was some malign or mischievous fate subjecting each of them to a parallel experience of prison.
Tom released his wife and took his first careful look at the cell. With its curved ceiling, it was like a vault or the interior of a compartment in a train carriage. The flaking walls were whitewashed. A few feet above the bed there was an unglazed and barred window which allowed in small quantities of light and air. At the moment a stray draught was bringing in the ghost of summer to the cell. In the winter it would be bitterly cold. Apart from the bed, the only covering for which was a coarse blanket, there was a wooden chair and a three-legged stand for a washbasin, a ewer of water and a thick glass tumbler. A bucket was lodged under the bed.
Helen had gone back to sit on the bed. She saw Tom looking round.
‘As you can see, there is not much to note down. Not much to distract the mind or lift the spirits. Thank goodness I had my diary tucked away. They didn’t have a searcher to hand and so they did not discover my diary.’
‘A searcher?’ said Tom.
‘A woman who is employed to search female suspects. I already have a grasp of the police jargon, you see. I must say I will be glad to get out of here. I need to change my clothes.’
She glanced at the bloodstains on her dress. She looked at her hands. She shuddered.
‘I must have touched him. I got too close to the… to the body. I have washed my hands several times over but I have not been able to get my clothes laundered in this place.’
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