The Mechanical Devil

by Kate Ellis

  He arrived home early. Since the traumatic events of a couple of weeks before the household had returned to normal – normal apart from the fact that Pam had insisted on Della staying with them to recuperate. Wesley hadn’t argued. He’d been the one who unwittingly brought Belinda Crillow into their lives so he couldn’t help feeling responsible in some way.

  Over the past week or so he’d met up with Neil several times during the evenings so as to give Pam and her mother some space. He’d also met Gerry for a drink at the Tradmouth Arms next door to his waterfront home. It turned out that Gerry had two pieces of news. First of all his long-lost daughter Alison was coming for Christmas, although he hadn’t yet broken the news to his other daughter, Rosie, who could be relied on to react badly – it was a problem he’d have to consider carefully. Also, and perhaps more importantly, he’d asked Joyce to make an honest man of him, as he put it, although as yet they hadn’t thought about a date.

  ‘It’s Rachel’s wedding in a couple of weeks. St Margaret’s. I’ve threatened to sing in the choir but she says it won’t be necessary,’ he told Wesley with a wicked grin.

  Wesley was happy for Gerry but when he walked home that night he had a feeling that something still wasn’t right.

  Then first thing the next day Rachel received a call from Phoebe Jakes’s mother asking her to call at the house. Phoebe was prepared to identify her attacker.

  Rachel went to see her. Just the two of them in private – woman to woman. Expecting Phoebe to name Xander Southwark, Rachel did her best to hide her surprise when she finally revealed the identity of the man who’d assaulted her.

  Phoebe had recognised the man who’d cornered her in an empty cabin from the TV and when she’d watched him sitting beside Inspector Peterson appealing for information about his missing daughter, she’d felt physically sick. But now she was willing to make a statement.

  When Jeremy Ovorard was brought in for questioning, Rachel almost felt the victory was personal.

  44

  At least when you’re on remand you can wear your own clothes, Xander Southwark thought. And his were expensive because he’d always liked the best: that’s why he’d risked so much. He was a gambler by nature and most of the time he’d won. Now it looked as though he was on a losing streak but he’d get over it just as he had before. He reckoned he could wriggle out of the new charges, no problem. After all, it was his word against Sarah Shaw’s. She’d had a crush on him as a teenager when she’d worked at Jellicoe and Travers and when they’d met again years later she’d rekindled their relationship to relieve the boredom of her rural existence. She’d flung herself at him and then had second thoughts so her word was hardly reliable. A good barrister would destroy her in the witness box.

  He had plans for when he got out. Perhaps the Well-being Centre had run its course but those tapes he’d made during the counselling sessions might come in useful one day – once sufficient time had elapsed. It was surprising what secrets people would reveal to perfect strangers, given the right encouragement.

  He’d managed to get hold of a mobile. He knew the ins and outs of prison life and he knew what he had to do to get what he wanted. He knew Sarah’s number too and he keyed it in, a small smile on his lips. At least he’d have something waiting for him when he got out – and he would get out.

  ‘Sarah. It’s Xander.’

  There was silence on the other end of the line but he thought he could sense her fear.

  ‘I understand you’ve been talking to the police. You do realise that lying to them is a crime and you can go to prison. Perverting the course of justice they call it.’

  ‘I didn’t lie. ’

  She sounded scared. This was perfect. He left a brief silence before his next attack. ‘Does your husband know about us?’

  ‘No… I…’

  ‘I’ve got friends who’d be only too happy to tell him, and I used to be a keen photographer back in the day.’ He let the implication sink in. ‘So why don’t you tell the police you made a mistake about seeing my car near Manor Field back in nineteen ninety-five. And as for telling me that you’d seen Ian Evans in the village… well, we all get a bit forgetful, don’t we? If you don’t want your kids to see evidence of your… exciting past, maybe you can make a little donation to my coming-out fund – say five grand for starters. I know your husband’s worth a bob or two.’

  The phone was slammed down but Xander was confident his message had got through. She wasn’t to know he’d lied about the existence of photographs and as he returned to his cell he felt pleased with himself. Without Sarah’s testimony, any charges were unlikely to stick.

  A couple of hours later he was told that his solicitor wanted to see him. There’d been a development. His stride towards the spartan room where they were to meet was jaunty. He could smell triumph.A gambler always can.

  The solicitor’s face was solemn but then she was a miserable cow at the best of times.

  ‘Sit down, Xander, I’ve got some news.’

  ‘One of the witnesses has withdrawn her statement. The charges are being dropped.’

  It came as a shock when she shook her head. ‘No statements have been withdrawn. And the police have new forensic evidence. The pillow used to smother Mary Tilson was found in an exhibits store and it’s been examined for DNA – they have new techniques nowadays that can detect the minutest trace.’ She paused. ‘According to the police your DNA was found on it. We’ll do our best, Xander, but it’s not looking good.’

  Xander Southwark buried his head in his hands. Every gambler loses eventually.

  He stood in his glass case – the little wooden man with the benign face, an enlarged photograph of his metal innards displayed behind him. His hand was raised as if to bless the onlookers who now came to gape at him, just as they’d done when he’d been created in 1531. Back then his people had been needy – now they were merely curious.

  Pam bent to speak to her mother, who was sitting in her wheelchair, uncharacteristically quiet. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It gives me the creeps. I hate machines… always have.’

  Wesley had been concentrating on pushing his mother-in-law’s wheelchair but now he broke his silence. ‘Machines are only as good or bad as the person who controls them.’

  ‘Take me home,’ Della ordered with an imperious wave of her arm.

  As Wesley pushed the chair down the museum’s ramp he felt the pressure of Pam’s hand on his sleeve.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said softly.

  He smiled. ‘Yeah. Of course it is.’

  Author note

  One of the most common things I’m asked is: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ Sometimes it’s not an easy question to answer but in the case of The Mechanical Devil an award-winning book provided my initial inspiration. Voices of Morbath by Professor Eamon Duffy of Cambridge University is a detailed account of life in a remote Dartmoor village in the sixteenth century written by the village’s garrulous parish priest, Sir Christopher Trychay. Sir Christopher arrived in his parish in 1520 and his writings cover the upheavals caused by the religious reforms of Henry VIII (and later his son, Edward VI) which resulted in the destruction of a centuries-old way of parish life. In The Mechanical Devil I have concentrated on the early 1530s, just before the Reformation began, when something like Sir Matthew’s ‘little monk’ would have been a highly desirable addition to the religious armoury of any parish church. However, the character of Peter the Steward who visits London where he encounters the ‘new learning’ (influenced by the teachings of Martin Luther) is a symbol of things to come.

  The notion of creating an automaton as an aid to prayer is not as far-fetched as it might appear to the modern mind. In the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC there is a fifteen-inch-high figure made of poplar wood and iron in the form of a friar. It was made in the sixteenth century by the Spanish clockmaker Juanelo Turriano to please God and to provide instant prayer and supplication at the turn o
f a key. It was commissioned by King Philip II of Spain (of Armada fame) who promised God a miracle if his son, Don Carlos, recovered after a life-threatening fall. Once wound up, a spring propels the friar forward, moving its lips as if praying and beating its breast. Its left arm raises and lowers a cross and rosary and from time to time it kisses the cross, its eyes following the movement. Don Carlos did recover from his fall, saying he’d seen a vision of a Franciscan friar carrying a small wooden cross, but the effect of the little ‘miracle worker’ wasn’t to last: Don Carlos was mentally unstable and was imprisoned by his father in 1568, eventually dying in solitary confinement. These events are depicted in Verdi’s opera bearing his name.

  King Philip’s little friar was by no means the earliest example of an intricate mechanical figure. The history of automata stretches back to the time of the Ancient Greeks, who were seemingly obsessed by the idea of creating mechanical beings, something reflected by references in Greek mythology to gods creating moving statues. The Greeks had advanced engineering skills and very probably made partially animated statues for use in ceremonies (worked by levers and possibly also steam and water). The Ancient Egyptians too were reputed to have harnessed the power of pneumatics to make moving and musical figures.

  Some illuminated medieval manuscripts depict mechanical figures guarding tombs and in 1470 an artificial eagle made by Johannes Muller was said to have flown to greet the Emperor Maximilian when he entered Nuremberg. Leonardo da Vinci made a mechanical lion for Louis XII of France which approached the king and opened its chest to reveal a fleur-de-lis emblem. In the eighteenth century Jacques de Vaucanson produced elaborate automata including a realistic flute player five feet ten inches tall which had (with the help of a current of air and a complex mechanism) a repertoire of twelve tunes.

  Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries automata became ever more popular and sophisticated but one in particular caught my attention when I was researching The Mechanical Devil. The Turk was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian author and inventor, in 1769 and presented to the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. It was a life-sized chess player with beard and turban which sat behind a desk and won games against all comers (including Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin). The Turk became an international source of fascination and toured many countries, including America, before eventually being exposed as an elaborate hoax (with a chess master concealed inside the machine).

  In 1836 Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay called ‘Maelzel’s Chess Player’, exposing the Turk as a fraud. Poe went on to write The Murders in the Rue Morgue, one of the earliest detective stories, and perhaps he was inspired to write mysteries by the case of the Turk’s deception. Who knows?

  On a personal note, I couldn’t resist including a mention of an R G Owen rifle as recently I’ve discovered that the famous gunsmith, Robert Griffith Owen (originally from Anglesey but later of Ohio, USA) was my great-uncle, my grandmother’s older brother. It’s amazing what you find when you explore the family tree.