The Ghost Hunters

by Neil Spring

  ‘Who?’ I asked numbly.

  ‘A gentleman by the name of Joseph Radley.’

  ‘Radley – I remember him! I met him on the night of the Laboratory’s opening, with my mother.’ And I remembered, too, asking Price some months later about Radley’s whereabouts and the evasive way in which he had responded. ‘What happened to him?’

  Wall’s expression was dark. ‘We don’t know what happened to him, Sarah. That’s just it. My enquiries with the Society for Psychical Research have led to nothing. As far as I can ascertain, he disappeared. No one saw him again after the night the Laboratory opened. He vanished.’

  The church clock tower commenced striking nine, the clanging bell startling us both.

  ‘I ought to be getting back,’ Wall said. He cast his eyes with admiration over the magnificent Waldegrave monument. ‘It’s a wonderful specimen, no doubt,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid it’s the red herring in all of this. You’re wasting your time. The real enigma is Harry. Always has been.’

  I sat staring uncomprehendingly at the dossier of evidence he had given me. I needed to make sense of the anger I could feel burning within me. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

  ‘Do as you wish. But my advice is to confront the old crook, discover redemption in the truth. Tell him what you know and insist that he gives up on his second book and apologises to all those he has betrayed. Lionel Foyster should be top of his list; it was that poor man’s Diary of Occurrences he bastardised for this book. He’s left in poverty now, bedridden and lonely.’

  ‘Wait!’ I cried with the briefest hope. ‘There’s one thing you haven’t told me. The sexton said you knew something about the remains we discovered at the Rectory; he said you claimed they weren’t a woman’s remains.’

  I heard his firm, decisive reply. ‘That’s right. They most certainly were not. They weren’t even human.’

  ‘But the remains were examined by experts; they confirmed they included the jawbone of a young woman.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Miss Grey? Harry switched the bone fragments you found on the day of the excavation with human remains he brought with him from London. He used a conjurer’s sleight of hand. One of the men who observed the dig saw him do it – Johnnie Palmer says he made the switch as he took the remains from Jackson and passed them to Mr Bailey. Very convenient, wasn’t it, that he just happened to have a pathologist on the scene to identify the remains, and a barrister to act as a witness to the find?’

  ‘Then what … did we find in the earth beneath the cellar?’

  ‘The bones you discovered beneath the Rectory, your so-called proof, Sarah, were nothing more than the remains of a pig.’

  I stared, contemplating the prospect with a pang of fear and relief, then dropped the file he had given me at my feet. ‘He. Couldn’t. Have.’

  Wall walked down the church to the south nave, turned and looked back at me. ‘How did we ever come to this?’ he asked sadly. And then his lean face softened and I caught a semblance of the man who had caught me, sixteen years ago, on the rotten staircase descending into the basement of Borley Rectory – a man who might have rescued me from myself, saved me from the encroaching darkness, saved me from the enigmatic Midnight Inquirer. ‘Find me, if you need to, Sarah. When this is over. Come back to me.’

  I managed to give him a weak smile as he placed his brown trilby on his head and slipped out of the church. The urge to go after him was almost irresistible.

  But something stopped me: the sharp sound of a pebble clipping the floor.

  It had landed at my feet. Who had thrown it and from which direction was impossible to tell, but its abrupt appearance set my pulse racing and quickened my resolve. Was it a sign?

  Conflicting thoughts pulsed through my head: the hateful visions of evil and bitterness that came to me in nightmares, my mother’s deteriorating mental health and the insidious disturbances in our house. If the Borley saga really was bogus, then how was I to interpret these events? As mere products of my imagination? Symptoms of insanity?

  I had to know.

  Now there was only one person I needed to find, and it wasn’t Vernon Wall. Somewhere in the night, beyond Borley, in the safety of his compartmentalised private domain, Harry Price would be waiting.

  And I had a job to do.

  * * *

  Notes

  1 Mrs Smith appears to be alluding here to the sightseers who were then pestering the current incumbent, Revd Henning, at Liston Rectory.

  2 Daily Mail, 26 May 1949.

  3 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, pp. 435–436.

  4 This quotation was due to be broadcast by the BBC on 4 September 1956, but the programme never aired due to fears that Marianne Foyster might sue the broadcaster.

  – 36 –

  GETHSEMANE

  It must have been a little over two hours before I reached London. I recall very clearly that my hands were trembling as I climbed into the taxi that took me from Borley to the station, and I remember, upon arriving in Liverpool Street, that they were still trembling and my head was throbbing. But of the journey itself I recall very little. The shock of what I had learned from Vernon Wall had blurred my thoughts.

  As a taxi took me the remaining distance to Queensberry Place, I was sure of one thing: Price was coming for me. By now, my absence at Liston would have been noticed. Reverend Henning would doubtless have asked the sexton where I had gone. He would have made enquiries with the nearest taxi company. He would have discovered my route. He would have passed that information to Price; and Price, knowing I had returned to London, knowing how uncharacteristic it was for me to just take off like that, would have become suspicious. He would have got into his Rolls-Royce at once and returned to the city.

  I glanced at my watch, fretting at the wasted minutes, and wound down the window of the car. The evening’s earlier warm breeze had whipped itself into a strong, blustery wind and the sky was black with leaden clouds. Nature itself seemed to have fallen sick. I felt a speck of rain on my cheek. Or was it a tear? The answer hardly seemed to matter, but the changing weather heightened my unease. As we pulled into Queensberry Place I felt physically sick with an anxiety which pulled at the pit of my stomach. ‘Leave me here,’ I said to the driver, getting out of the car.

  I stood for a moment to collect myself. I thought of the first time I had walked down this road as Price’s employee, of my alarming confrontation on that first morning with the medium who had appeared before me like a monster, regurgitating cheesecloth, and an awful thought occurred to me. If Wall’s accusations were correct – if Price had fabricated evidence, switched animal remains for human remains1 – then that made him far worse than any of the mediums he had exposed and vilified. Wall’s accusations painted my former employer, the man I had loved, as an abominable creature.

  I wondered whether Price even realised how far he had gone, the true extent of his deceptions. I doubted it, but I had to know.

  The street ahead of me was deserted. I checked my watch and saw that the time was fast approaching midnight. I would need to be quick; I had little more than an hour, perhaps less. As I hurried down the street the sky cracked and rain pelted down around me. I ran as fast as I could until I reached the entrance to number 16, the Laboratory, his hall of mirrors.

  No lights were on, no sound came from within, and from behind the windowpanes there was no sign of any movement. Stepping into the wide, pillared porch, glad of the shelter, I stared at the heavy black door behind which we had worked so hard and for so long. All that counted for nothing now.

  I stepped forward and tried the main door, expecting it to be locked, but to my surprise it opened immediately. Inside, the gloomy hallway reached ahead towards the wide staircase. I took the route slowly, fumbling in the dark, tripping over objects invisible in the gloom, until I reached the top floor and the outer office. The door here was locked, but only until I threw my weight against it and the force of the attack granted me acces
s. Stumbling into the outer office, the door swinging shut behind me, I turned on the spot and looked around.

  There, on an old desk, was an electric torch. I reached for it, clicked it into life and illuminated the abandoned Laboratory.

  Among the dust and shifting shadows I saw only the remains of what had been: files of paper strewn around the tables and the floors, boxes packed and placed in corners ready to be taken away. This was no longer a functioning establishment. Price was moving on, clearing up. He had been warned, perhaps, of the danger looming, the attacks that were destined to rain down on him.

  There, at the corner desk, I had sat, sometimes for hours at a time, waiting for him to return to me from his endless appointments, worrying about the state of his health, wondering how on earth I could ever tell him what had happened to me during the period he was away unwell. Over there we had examined together the mysterious locked box that had allegedly belonged to Joanna Southcott; and there, at the threshold of the door that led into the main corridor, Price had stood and announced that we would discover the mysteries of the universe together.

  As I entered the network of corridors and rooms I had first seen with Mother almost twenty years before, the memories came rushing back. I saw the jostling crowds, heard the clamour of journalists shouting Price’s name, the flashbulbs on their cameras making his eyes wide with delight and suspicion. The contrast with my present surroundings was stark. The place seemed in every way to have lost its colour. Its shelves, once crowded with rare books, were empty now, layered thick with years of dust. Old furniture lay hidden beneath dirty sheets. The Laboratory corridor, once adorned with prints, was bare now, its pictures packed away, I imagined, in some of the many tea chests that stood around my feet.2 Why was everything packed up? Where was he sending it all?

  I waded deeper into the Laboratory, drawn by an intuitive certainty that somewhere among this debris of the past were the answers I sought.

  Now coming up on my right was the seance room, where I had witnessed many an episode of unmasked fraud. It too had changed beyond recognition. The seance cabinets that had held our innumerable test subjects had been dismantled and lay discarded in the corners, and the room’s windows were dark no longer, their shutters rolled back and admitting the deathly glow of the moon. But the worst feature remained. The seance chair dominated the room. I remembered Rudi Schneider sitting in it the night he had promised to reunite me with my father; I remembered the kindness of his tone as he whispered to me, ‘You have your father’s eyes.’ I remembered the shock of realising that he, too, had lied to me.

  The painful memory sent me across the corridor to Price’s office. I found the door unlocked, and as I stepped into the room I was struck by the thick scent of pipe tobacco and then a new, more alarming thought: what if he’s already here? In the building with me, now?

  I went quickly to the filing cabinet where I remembered he kept his most extensive photographic collections and heaved the heavy drawer open. The sight of the files inside, crammed full of papers and photographs, took me back to an age long since passed, when working at the side of London’s foremost psychic investigator was thrilling and exhilarating. How I wished I had recognised the danger sooner.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ I whispered. It had to be here: something that would substantiate Wall’s accusations. I did not have to search long. At the back of the drawer, behind the many thick files packed with spirit photography, was a folder slimmer than the others, conspicuous by the fact that it carried no label. With mounting trepidation I opened it.

  The first photographs – of buildings I recognised from Berlin and Cologne – were harmless enough. But clipped behind these were the damning images that confirmed what Wall had told me, images of Germany’s symbolic power: the Kongresshalle in the Luitpoldhain in Nuremberg, the Köningsplatz and the Brown House, the National Socialist Party’s headquarters building in Munich, a flag bearing the swastika.

  I threw the file down in disgust. I wanted to tear myself away from these rooms, to never again to see the man who occupied them or to contemplate the fact that I had associated myself with the place. But I had yet more to discover, for I knew that if Wall was correct then proof of Price’s deceptions in the Borley Rectory affair would be here somewhere.

  I turned to leave, to explore the workshop, when the corner of an object protruding from beneath Price’s desk caught my eye. I had never known him to keep anything under his desk, so it struck me as odd. Intrigued, I went over, crouched down and shone my torch on it. It was a wooden trunk. It was too heavy to pull out, but I managed to prise open the lid to make a gap sufficiently big to peek through. The light of my torch revealed the evidence I had dreaded, but somehow known I would find.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’

  I leapt to my feet, away from the trunk.

  I could see a figure outlined against the doorway at the far end of the room, and then he switched the light on, revealing himself.

  ‘Harry, I, I—’

  ‘Don’t speak, Sarah. Don’t say anything.’

  He came towards me.

  Price stopped a few steps away, the desk between us, dividing us, protecting me from him, for I now believed he was capable of anything. Did he know? Had he seen me looking in the trunk? His gaze moved down to the floor. From where he was standing I doubted very much he could see it.

  He stared back at me appraisingly. He seemed to be deciding what he should do.

  Finally, after a long silence, I said, ‘Harry, tell me it’s not true.’

  ‘Tell you what’s not true?’

  ‘That you were planning to relocate this Laboratory to Bonn in Germany; that you’ve been courting the Nazi Party; that you asked Hitler if you could attend Nuremburg; that you’re not really a scientist at all; that you’ve no qualifications to speak of; that you lied to me, to everyone, about who you really are; that you lied about your family background, your secret paper bag business.’

  Price said nothing but his eyes were frosty, glinting with the possibility of malice.

  Suddenly I was no longer afraid. I reached down to the wooden trunk and opened it to reveal its horrifying contents. Bones. Human bones. Where they had come from, I had no idea. But now I was as certain as I could be that Wall was right: that Price had collected these, taken one of them to the dig and switched it with the animal remains he was confident we would find in the ground.3

  I took out something that looked like a finger bone and brandished it at him, raising my voice, ‘Tell me, tell me it’s not true!’

  He stepped back, his face uncertain.

  ‘You lied to me about Borley from the very beginning. You invented phenomena at that house, fabricating evidence. You leased the building with the express intention of capitalising on its haunted reputation. Captain Gregson bought it for the same reason and torched it as an insurance fraud. It was you drawing on the walls. And you deliberately made us think that we had found human remains in the excavation. That’s why we never found the rest of the skeleton. There was no skeleton!’

  He seemed dazed by my accusations. ‘Where on earth did you hear these things?’

  ‘From Vernon Wall. It’s over, Harry.’

  I expected he might say something then to defend himself. But instead he moved slowly away from the desk and went over to the window, all the time keeping his back to me. He moved like an old man, unsure of himself, as if at any moment the floor might vanish beneath him. He coughed, a wrenching, painful sound. He stopped before the cabinet filled with the contraptions of fraud he had confiscated from so many mediums throughout his career. Then he said in a thin voice, ‘Sarah, do you suppose there really is a world awaiting us after this one?’

  ‘I used to think so,’ I replied, ‘if the phenomena at Borley were anything to go by.’

  He turned and regarded me. ‘Yes, well … in that case, perhaps we are all in trouble.’

  ‘Harry?’

  He crossed to the window and stared out into the h
owling night. ‘It’s all very clear to me now, Sarah. We’ve been wandering in the dark, going the wrong way, you and I, for so very long.’ He faced me. ‘Because it’s the bunk they actually want, not the debunk.’

  His statement made me go numb. I hesitated. Seeing the confusion in my face, Price filled the silence between us.

  ‘Don’t you understand? The hopes of these wretched people cry out for it – to hold the hand of their dead brother, to hear again the voice of their father. They remember because they must. And mediums rescue them from their pit of sorrow.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  He gave a slight shrug. ‘Supply and demand, that’s all it is. They provide a service. And who was I to take away their business? If it’s answers people demand then answers they will have!’

  ‘So you fabricated evidence?’ I demanded.

  He nodded reluctantly. ‘Do you remember the photograph of the flying brick?’

  I cast my mind back. A few years earlier an article had appeared in Life magazine with a photograph of the Rectory ruins, half demolished. It appeared to show a single brick, suspended in mid-air. Price, who was present when the image was captured, later wrote: ‘if this was a genuine paranormal phenomenon, then we have the first photograph of a poltergeist projectile in flight.’4

  ‘It was thrown,’ he confessed, ‘by a workman just out of the frame.’

  Even as he spoke, I had a sense that this was only the tip of the iceberg. How much more had he embroidered and embellished?

  ‘Harry, I want to believe that you are better than this.’

  ‘The phenomena at Borley met the public’s insatiable demand for mystery,’ he continued, warming to this wretched attempt to justify himself. ‘Let’s not fool ourselves now, Sarah; all who lived in that house, every one, twisted the truth to suit their own ends. Reverend Smith and his wife, so sincere, so polite, so concerned that their house be inspected for spooks, but only because they thought there was profit to be had. Mrs Smith wanted to write a book on the whole thing. And as for the Foysters, where do I start? Each as deranged as the other.’