Breaking the Circle, page 9
‘Such as?’
‘Well, it’s taken him a couple of weeks, but after the failure of the Woman’s Suffrage Bill, an MP has come out with – and it was so looking for trouble, I can remember it verbatim – “Men and women differ in mental equipment with women having little sense of proportion”.’
Crawford laughed. ‘I hope my wife hasn’t seen that,’ he said.
‘You can be sure Dr Murray has,’ Reid nodded. ‘At least from her, the most the suicidal MP can expect is a curt letter. Oh, it’ll be withering and if I received it, I’d hang myself, but at least she’s not likely to brain him with a brick in her handbag. Which is more than I can say for some of the suffrage sisterhood.’
‘What was the other little thing?’ Crawford asked.
‘A new organization,’ Reid told him. ‘The Automobile Association. Among other things, they’ll be warning motorists about the speed traps you boys are setting up. No more lurking in the shrubbery for you, my lad.’ He winked.
‘Twenty miles an hour is fast enough for anybody,’ Crawford commented.
Reid roared with laughter. ‘You old fuddy-duddy,’ he said. ‘That should be me talking, not you. But,’ he took the decanter and freshened both their glasses, ‘to the larger picture. What’s Inspector Kane’s take on the murders?’
Crawford shrugged. ‘He’s keeping an open mind,’ he said. ‘You never worked with him, did you?’
‘After my time,’ Reid said.
‘Well, he keeps things close to his chest, does my guv’nor. For instance, it was six months before I realized he doesn’t drink.’
Reid’s face darkened. ‘Oh, that’s bad,’ he said. ‘You can’t do a job like his stone-cold sober.’
The two men sat in silence for a while, staring into the pile of elegant logs that filled the fireplace now that spring was officially here. Then, Reid said, ‘Picking my brains might not be all that useful, Andrew. A Division was always cutting edge and you boys have all this new technology at your … excuse the pun … fingertips.’
‘Even so,’ Crawford nodded. ‘Policing is policing. Your generation hunted the Ripper.’
‘Yes,’ Reid sighed. ‘And we couldn’t catch him, could we? However,’ he took a deep draw on the cigar, ‘it’s funny you should mention that.’
‘Why?’
‘Back in 1888 to ’89, we must have had well over two hundred letters, all anonymous, addressed either to the Yard, cop-shops various or the gentlemen of the press, purporting to come from the Whitechapel murderer.’
‘Yes,’ Crawford said. ‘I’ve read some of them in the Police Museum.’
‘The second one is the one everybody remembers,’ Reid said, leaning forward, ‘the Dear Boss letter.’
‘The one that gave the “Jack” monicker?’
‘That’s right. Now, you and I know that they were all hoaxes, more than one written by journalists anxious to make hay with the story. But there’s one line in “Dear Boss” that’s always stuck in my mind – “I am down on whores and shan’t quit ripping ’til I do get buckled.”’
‘That’s right.’ Crawford remembered it too.
‘Well, the writer may not have been Jack, but the motive was right. So it is here – Fazakerley and Principal – sound like a firm of quantity surveyors, don’t they? Two mediums – or should that be media? – murdered within a week or so of each other. I’ll wager you John Kane doesn’t believe in coincidences, however little he tells you about his methodology.’
‘So we should be looking for somebody who has a hatred of sensitives.’ Crawford underlined it. ‘But why?’
Reid sighed and from nowhere produced a pack of cards which he passed to Crawford. ‘Shuffle,’ he said.
A little nonplussed, the sergeant did.
‘Pick a card,’ Reid said. ‘Any card.’
Crawford did.
‘Now, without letting me see it, stick it on my forehead.’
The sergeant looked around, wondering how the other couple of guests would take this bizarre experiment.
‘All right,’ Reid said. ‘Now, again without letting me see it, put it back in the pack.’
Crawford did as he was told.
‘Shuffle again,’ Reid told him.
The sergeant obliged.
‘Right.’ Reid leaned back. ‘Now, find me the card in question. It’s the three of spades, by the way.’
Crawford stared at him, open-mouthed, and began to lay the cards down. It took a moment or two, but the sergeant eventually had to say, ‘It isn’t here.’
‘No,’ Reid smiled. ‘It’s here.’ And he peeled it off Crawford’s forehead, holding it up for the man to see.
‘No,’ Crawford muttered. ‘No, that’s not possible. How …?’
Reid laughed. ‘Tricks of the trade, dear boy,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a million. Care to put some money on it and try again?’
‘No.’ The sergeant was adamant. ‘Not on your life.’
‘No.’ Reid was grimly serious. ‘Just on the lives of Muriel Fazakerley and Evadne Principal. The point I’m making, Andrew, is that mediums, sensitives, call them what you will, are conjurors. I hesitate to call them charlatans because I’ve made a bob or two out of card tricks myself. But mediums are like vampires; they prey on the newly dead, the recently departed. I lost my wife recently.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Crawford said.
‘These things happen.’ Reid had come to terms with it. ‘But I’d have been less than pleased to find some ghoul hovering at my elbow claiming to be able to talk to her in the Great Beyond. And charging me a hefty fee into the bargain. Would you like to see a photo of my wife?’
‘Er … yes,’ Crawford said. He would much rather not go down a sad memory lane with this man, however much he admired him, but the sergeant was a kind man and didn’t want to upset the old boy. ‘Yes, of course.’
Reid ferreted in his wallet and pulled out a crumpled photograph. ‘There she is, sitting on the left. What else do you see?’
‘Er …’
‘Come on, man.’ Reid seemed to be enjoying this. ‘You’re a detective, trained to observe.’
‘Umm … Mrs Reid. That’s you, in the centre with the teapot. A third person, on the right.’
‘The Reverend Philpot,’ Reid confirmed. ‘That’s his garden. We’re all having tea. I was mother that day. What else?’
‘Er … table, cloth, china … are they cakes?’
‘Look to the right, behind the vicar.’
Crawford did. ‘Er … oh, it’s a dog. It’s … no, wait a minute. It’s … disappearing.’
Reid laughed. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘The ghost dog of Micheldever. Except that it’s not.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Reid took the photograph back. ‘If I were a medium, specializing in that sort of thing, I’d claim that that is a spirit photograph, a phantasm manifesting itself before our very eyes and caught on camera – the one witness that never lies.’ He dropped the echoing, stage voice. ‘In reality, it’s Nanky Poo, the vicar’s shih-tzu, relieving himself. The reason he’s disappeared is all down to slow exposure time on camera.’
‘Good God.’
‘Which is why all the photographs of Uncle Ebenezer, Great Aunt Matilda and Catherine the Great floating in the ozone are just so much fakery. Did I ever tell you about Miss Goodrich-Freer?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Reid reached across and poured them both another stiff one. ‘I don’t know, Andrew, if you are of a nervous disposition, but you might want to fortify yourself for what you are about to hear.’
Crawford smiled. He had been brought up on Varney the Vampire; nothing that went bump in the night held any terrors for him.
‘Miss Goodrich-Freer was a medium – perhaps still is, for all I know. She was called in to a haunted house. I know because I was there already, as a young copper investigating the disappearance of a little girl, Eliza Mumler, eight years old. She had last been seen in the orchard of her parents’ house on the edge of Hampstead Heath one November morning … this would have been 1878. The parents called the police and we combed the place from top to bottom. We quizzed the family and the servants. We went house to house. We searched the Heath – and, believe me, it’s bigger than you think. Nothing. But the girl’s father was a member of a Spiritualist Circle and he called in Goodrich-Freer. She was an oddity and no mistake; one of her eyes didn’t work properly, sort of drooped. Her very presence frightened the bejesus out of the Mumler’s tweenie. Anyway, long story cut short, Goodrich-Freer said she heard knockings in little Eliza’s nursery and felt cold spots along the landing. She organised a séance in the nursery itself. I sat in on that, although she wasn’t very keen on the idea and I must admit, it was impressive.’
‘What happened?’
‘When we were all sitting comfortably, we heard a noise, a shuffling of feet, then a sob. Then we heard a little girl’s voice, “Mama, Mama. It’s dark. I’m cold. Where are you? Papa? Where are you?”’
‘God!’
‘It was Goodrich-Freer, of course, but the girl was talking through her and it was obvious she was dead.’
‘An actual manifestation?’ Crawford was indeed sipping his brandy.
‘The next night, we all tried again, because Goodrich-Freer said she felt that poor Eliza was so close and that she wanted to come to us, to see her mama and papa again, because where she was, all was water, all was ice.’
‘And?’
Reid leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes for a moment. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Goodrich-Freer made contact with Eliza and, as we watched, sitting there, fingertip to fingertip in that pitch-black room, a dead girl appeared, shimmering in a green light, her eyes rolling white in her head, her long dark hair plastered to her forehead and dripping on to her shift. Her breasts—’
Crawford interrupted. ‘Breasts?’ he repeated. ‘I thought you said she was only eight.’
Reid raised his head and the frozen look of horror on his face broadened to a grin. ‘Ah, well spotted, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a detective of you yet. I turned on the gaslight there and then because it occurred to me that the recently departed Eliza had aged at least eight years. There stood the phantasm, a dripping wet girl of sixteen who had been hired by Goodrich-Freer for the occasion. Turned out that the girl doubled for any female corpse from poor Eliza to Boadicea.’
‘That’s appalling,’ Crawford said.
‘That’s a fraudulent medium,’ Reid shrugged. ‘I spent the rest of the evening trying to stop Mr and Mrs Mumler from strangling Goodrich-Freer and her stooge. I arrested the pair of them – the mediums, not the Mumlers – but they were only done for fraud and false pretences. I’d have thrown the book at them.’
‘And Eliza herself?’
Reid shook his head. ‘We never found her body.’ He downed his drink. ‘And that doesn’t sit well with me, Andrew; not well at all. So, to get back to Fazakerley and Principal, that’s what we’re looking at, somebody like the Mumlers, who has reason to detest mediums. Somebody with the will and the ability to do something about it. Somebody who was not stopped by a nosy policeman in time.’
The two men looked at each other as the clock chimed the hour on the mantelpiece.
‘Well, you’re a nosy policeman, Andrew,’ Reid said. ‘Time you did something about it.’
‘Thomas?’
There was a serious look on Margaret Murray’s face. And to the proprietor of the Jeremy Bentham, a beckoning finger always provoked a response; it usually meant trouble.
‘Anything amiss, Prof?’ When you are the purveyor of delicacies to the great and good of Bloomsbury, it could be anything. Thomas had had to clear the dining room on the Wednesday of the previous week when a reader in Pure Mathematics and a professor in the new department of Quantum Physics had had a knock-down, drag-out fight over whether the sugar cube was or was not the perfect way to sweeten tea. So as he approached Margaret Murray’s table, he had an open mind as to what might come next.
‘No, no,’ she assured him. ‘But … have you a moment?’
Thomas looked around. The Girls Who Did were beavering away and the Linguistics Faculty from the college seemed immersed in whatever mumbo-jumbo only they understood, so he sat down.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘that I occasionally get myself involved in what, for want of a better word, the world at large might call skulduggery?’ It was not so much a question as a statement of fact.
‘Hmm,’ he said, non-committally.
‘Well, you will also have noticed that I am barely five feet tall and my name is rarely mentioned in circles where self-defence is called for.’
‘Hmm.’ Thomas was still playing things carefully.
‘I needs must talk to some people tonight, not far from here.’
‘You want some company, Prof?’ He was beginning to catch the archaeologist’s drift.
‘Not per se, no,’ she said. ‘Fond of you as I assuredly am. I wondered … can you be my shadow? Sort of hover, when I have left my rendezvous? I have a feeling that I am going to meet a murderer, if not tonight, then soon, and I would rather that didn’t happen in a dark corner of Bermondsey.’
‘Blimey, Prof,’ Thomas frowned. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t go …’
‘Probably not,’ Margaret said. ‘But the alternative is to send Sergeant Crawford and I’m not sure a full-blown police enquiry will yield the kind of information I’m after.’
‘Well, then, Prof,’ Thomas smiled. ‘Shadow it is.’
Olivia Bentwood was as waspish as ever. She didn’t see why, she told the others at the Circle, that now that dear Muriel had joined the choir invisible, that she, Olivia, should not assume her mantle. Ojigkwanong was metaphorically champing at his rawhide bit to deliver snippets from the Great Beyond, not to mention Olivia’s mother, a force to be reckoned with, if the rumours still whispered around Bermondsey were even half true. Olivia Bentwood drew herself up and her stays creaked a warning.
‘After all,’ she said, finishing the argument as far as she was concerned, ‘I have a certain rapport with the Other Side.’ She let her eyelids quiver briefly as her pupils rolled up into her head. ‘And my dear mother, of course, is often in touch.’
‘With respect, Olivia,’ Agatha Dunwoody said, ‘we need a professional. A known clairvoyant would lift all our spirits, if I may be light-hearted for a moment.’
‘Agatha’s right, Olivia,’ Mortimer chimed in. ‘Someone with a proven record. Someone on the world stage.’
‘They’re all dead,’ George Boothby grunted. ‘Or exposed as frauds, or both.’
‘Those wretched people in the Society for Psychical Research,’ Olivia fumed. ‘Killjoys all.’
There were murmurs all round. It wasn’t often that the Bermondsey Spiritualist Circle were in agreement, but this was one of those times.
‘Christina.’ Olivia rounded on the little woman. ‘You’re very quiet tonight. Have you no views?’
‘I …’
‘No, I thought not.’
‘We mustn’t be discouraged, everybody,’ Robert Grimes chipped in. ‘What happened to Muriel is unfortunate, but life and death have to go on.’
‘What about Eusapia Palladino?’ the crimson-faced colonel suggested.
‘An Italian peasant?’ Olivia bridled. ‘I hardly think so.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a snob, Olivia,’ Grimes chided.
‘Eusapia Palladino is the last woman standing,’ Mortimer pointed out. ‘No one has ever caught her out in trickery. And, who knows, she may be able to shed some light on what happened to poor Muriel.’
‘She drowned, Mortimer,’ Olivia snapped. ‘It could happen to any one of us.’
‘Not in our mulligatawny soup, though, surely?’ The colonel had been a stickler on the square and was a stickler still.
‘Perhaps not in your imperialist circles,’ Olivia came back at him. ‘But this is Bermondsey, not some ghastly hill station in India. Anything is possible. All of us in this Circle should appreciate that. And anyway, you know how Muriel was, all that eye-rolling and holding her breath. She could have drowned in a cup of tea if she was taken like that at the wrong time.’
‘I’ve known some delightful hill stations,’ Margaret said, speaking for the first time, and Robert Grimes stifled a guffaw. ‘But on a more serious note, I have it on good authority that Muriel was murdered.’
She looked around the room at the wide eyes and gaping mouths.
‘What “good authority”?’ General Boothby was the first to speak.
‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly divulge.’
‘Henrietta,’ Mortimer said quietly, ‘you can’t possibly drop a bombshell like that and then say nothing.’
‘Let’s just say,’ Margaret said, ‘that I am talking about Scotland Yard.’
‘You clearly have hidden depths, Miss Plinlimmon,’ Olivia Bentwood bridled. After that, the silence in the room was deafening.
‘Tell me, Henrietta,’ Boothby leaned closer to her. ‘Do your good authorities have a name? What do the police say? Someone in the frame?’
Margaret kept them all guessing, the ticking of the grandmother sounding like the Approach of Menace. ‘As a matter of fact, they do,’ she said, smiling at them all.
Olivia was about to savage the little archaeologist, when Agatha Dunwoody suddenly changed the subject altogether. ‘We need to stick to the purpose of our Circle. We owe it to poor Muriel, however she left this vale of tears. We should have a vote. This Circle proposes that we contact Miss Palladino and invite her to attend a séance at her earliest convenience.’
‘Seconded,’ Mortimer chimed in.
‘May I make a second proposal?’ Margaret asked. ‘Since I do happen to know both Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle, might I write to Miss Palladino?’
‘Seconded,’ Mortimer said.
‘You can’t “second” more than once in one evening, Mortimer!’ Olivia snapped.
‘I think that would be excellent, Henrietta,’ Agatha smiled. ‘Thank you so much.’
When all votes were taken, all hands except Olivia’s reached skywards.
