Trick of the Light (11 page)

Hannah now knew why Jean had looked like a cow stuck in a dank bog. She reluctantly raised a hand about four inches above her own stature of five feet to indicate height.

‘According to Lily,’ she muttered.

McLevy turned the page round so that Jean might share in the pictorial exhibition.

‘Recognise this sconeface?’ he asked.

‘No.’

Hannah thought to offer something but caught a glint in Jean’s eye and sniffed loudly instead.

‘Ugly bugger, eh?’ she said.

‘I don’t know him either,’ McLevy remarked. ‘So his ill favour is not of the parish. But I’ll find him if he stays above ground.’

Simone let out a small awakening groan from the bed and McLevy suddenly shot back to her side and stuck the picture before her dilated eyes.

‘D’ye recognise this malefactor?’ he asked loudly.

She squinted, and then shook her head slowly.

‘Not a visiting randie-boy to the Countess?’

‘They’re all creaking bones,’ said Jean disdainfully.

Simone shook her head once more, then her eyelids drooped and she slid back into the dream that offered a velvet cushion against inflicted agony.

The inspector gave up, shoved the paper into his coat pocket and walked back to the door where he paused for a moment like an actor about to deliver the curtain line.

‘I don’t want any dead bodies of this description found on the streets or floating in the docks.’

He pointed to yet another nursery character that had caught his attention. Fat and egg-shaped.

‘You leave Humpty Dumpty tae me.’

The door closed and he was out of sight.

In the silence, the black outline of a bird flew past the window outside and cast a shadow on the veiled curtains.

‘I’m sorry, mistress,’ Hannah muttered. ‘I didnae know and I didnae see ahent the door. The man’s a bloody menace.’

Jean’s face was thoughtful. She was beginning to map out the lines of strategy.

‘Get Lily to make another drawing,’ she said finally. ‘In fact, if we make use of carbon paper and keep her at it, we may have enough and to spare.’

‘For what?’

‘Handing out to my people. I wish to find this dirty wee gutterblood.’

Hannah nodded. Jean fixed her with a glance.

‘Earlier. You had something to say?’

‘No’ certain sure mind, but…in the teashop. At one of the tables. It might have been him.’

‘And I didn’t notice,’ Jean stated with an edge of annoyance. ‘Because I was too fixed upon the Countess.’

‘She’s a tricky customer.’

‘So is James McLevy,’ said Jean, while a fluted snore from the bed sounded as if in agreement.

Indeed, the man himself was walking through the gardens of the Just Land with much on his deceptive mind.

Despite his warning to the contrary the inspector was convinced that Jean Brash and the Countess would fight tooth and nail until one or other had the last word at the graveside of her rival.

Either woman could kill two roosters in the one second.

For a moment an image from his dream, the cloaked red figure, sprang into his senses and he glanced around swiftly lest the spectre be lurking in the shrubbery, but nothing was manifest. Yet why was his waking thought being harassed by a nightly vision?

He could not answer that, so returned to contemplation.

So be it. Then while they fought like Oberon and Titania over the changeling, he might take them both.

If they broke the law, and there was no doubt they had in the past and would in the future, a habit exacerbated by the coming conflict, if they did, he would get his chance.

A curious melancholy came upon him. For the Countess he did not give a damn but Jean Brash was a different matter.

Where would he find another decent cup of coffee?

He covered a multitude of feeling with that sentence and stopped to look into the big fishpond that Jean had recently caused to be gouged out of the harmless earth.

Women were aye
making
something. Never content.

Great wodges of thick, dark green ornamental leaves moved gently on the surface of the water, with some large lily pads of an uneasy yellow coloration spreading their empire like Victoria Regina.

Beneath all that vegetation lurked some – to his eyes – bloated exotic fish that had never done a hand’s turn in their life.

Sluggish, pale gold, bilious green, scarlet fins like blood in water, they cruised and nudged below the leaves.

The inspector frowned. It would be his advice to put a net of sorts over the pond to guard against the advent of a marauding heron. These fat layabouts were an easy mark.

But good advice is seldom heeded.

Why had the Countess made such a provocative move?

Who was Humpty Dumpty?

A harsh cry overhead came from a passing crow, warning anyone below:
Get ready tae dree yer weird.

Suffer your fate. Complaint gets you nowhere.

McLevy moved off towards the iron gates of the Just Land and disappeared into the evening mist like a wisp of the imagination.

Now you see him, now you don’t.

11

Behold I shew you a mystery;

We shall not all sleep
but we shall all be changed.

T
HE
B
IBLE
, Corinthians

In the silence of the darkened room a distant grandfather clock chimed seven times. Possibly in another venue at the modest quarters of the Edinburgh Spiritualist Society, a ghost or two had gathered to witness the whirr of a mechanical universe and the striking result of chronological certainty but in the main salon there was so far only corporeal presence and a hushed silence.

The gas burners had been dimmed to a peep so that a pale sickly light caught the occasional white shirt front or brightly pleated dress collar of the latest fashion, but the rest was subdued garmentation, gloomy and overcast as the sky had been all day.

Lieutenant Roach sat bleakly beside his rapt, attentive wife and regretted for the hundredth time that he had partaken so heartily of onions at supper. He had a weakness for fried liver, bacon and the pungent bulb of the lily family; Mrs Roach had instructed the cook accordingly because she wished to flatter his stomach into accepting what his mind would most certainly reject.

A visit to an otherworld where unseen influence held sway and ethereal spirits did not indulge themselves in offshoots of the
Allium cepa
.

Now he was reaping a digestive whirlwind in the form of repetitive gaseous eruptions that insisted on bursting from whichever conduit might yield to pressure.

The audience, of which he was an unwilling and uncomfortable participant, was seated in rows with a centre aisle facing onto a small stage where a single figure sat in a chair, illuminated from each side by a large honey-coloured candle on a simple holder.

The silence stretched.

The figure did not move.

The lieutenant smothered an inconvenient upsurge and blinked his eyes.

Surely the woman would have some kind of visitation shortly? Not that Roach would believe it for a moment but at least it would get the ball rolling towards the hole.

Three places to the rear, in fact the back row, where his massive frame would incommode no watcher behind, Conan Doyle sat between his mother Mary and Muriel Grierson. The young man was conscious of a certain emanation from Muriel’s direction that seemed somewhat odorously provocative.

A perfume most certainly but not a clean sharp cologne to bring a chap to his senses, more of a musky offering like a delicate crooked finger from a shadowed doorway.

He took a deep breath but kept his eyes fixed on Sophia Adler, whose ash-blonde hair shone behind the white veil in the candlelight like a signal to the spirits.

Magnus Bannerman had spoken first and spoken well of the
gravitatio universalis
, the universal fluid that linked all creatures of the cosmos and flowed through the human body, an unseen magnetic force that might connect us to these unknown worlds.

He painted a picture of a parallel existence where the departed spirits floated in suspension, desperately waiting to be conjoined with those left behind. Waiting for a call, a hand to be stretched across the great divide.

The American even found a modicum of humour. He, Magnus, was not that hand. He held his own up in the air and waggled the fingers. There was a sharp burst of laughter but Sophia, who at that moment was sitting at the side, bowed her head and Magnus quickly returned to serious mode.

Only belief could sustain contact. The credence of those watching and the intense divination of the sensitive.

From us to them. The natural. A sublime interpreter.

Doyle was impressed, but not overly so, by the spiel. He had read deeply of the spiritual world with its phenomenal possibilities and this man reminded a little of a fairground huckster. Yet he could not dismiss the fellow because he sensed that under the delivery, and it did not escape his notice that Magnus’s magnetic power might have part source in his handsome features and flashing eyes – for the women, of course, men are not so easily swayed – under the smooth hypnotic flow of words, there seemed a core of true belief.

Almost in spite of the man himself, as if Magnus was being called to witness a more powerful force than his own being; he a mere mouthpiece who might only express itself in this somewhat florid fashion.

Or was the fellow merely a skilful actor hinting at a reality that did not exist, as actors are wont to do?

Make-believe.

Or indeed was Doyle, jealous of the man’s ability, projecting all this ambivalence upon a screen of shadows?

Because there was no doubt that Bannerman transfixed the audience when he abandoned the eloquent modulations to speak simply at the end of his address.

‘I do not ask you to give your credence lightly,’ he announced in a soft drawl. ‘There are compulsions beyond us. Beyond our mortal understanding. If we abuse them, they may take vengeance upon us.’

Here he had stopped abruptly and looked over at the quietly seated Sophia.

Conan Doyle at that moment understood where Bannerman received his ballast and belief. It was from the woman.

Everything comes from the woman. Good or bad.

Or is it all an act?

‘If we honour them,’ Bannerman ended his thought, ‘we may be blessed.’

With that he extended his hand towards Sophia and assisted her to mount the stage.

Magnus then took her place at the side, while she sat without fuss and arranged her pale blue dress, a simple cotton affair, accentuating her appearance of innocence and vulnerability.

Her arms were bare and the veil was held in place by a circlet of silver. She looked like something from a fairy tale. A princess waiting for a gallant knight.

All this had happened in the past.

Now, in the present, it seemed there was only Sophia Adler and Arthur Conan Doyle.

He felt a pull from inside as if some force was moving him towards the fragile being on the stage.

As if the complex inner being sheltered behind his massive frame had found harmony of response.

His mother Mary glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She knew her son and his passionate search for a meaning to life. They had both renounced the Catholic faith, the faith of a morbid alcoholic husband and father who now resided in an institution for such lost souls.

But it left an empty space.

And nature abhors a vacuum.

Mrs Roach, meanwhile, laid her dainty cat’s paw upon the dry saurian skin of her husband’s hand and murmured.

‘Robert. Do you not feel the spirits around us?’

Roach closed his eyes as if sensing the afterlife but in reality he was trying to control a knot of oniony wind that had gathered in his lower depths and was whipping about inside like a fireball looking for an exit.

Luckily at that moment Sophia began to utter softly and the attention of all became fixed upon her while Roach gave thanks to whatever spirit had answered his pressing need.

Many of the audience were ready to believe or already converted and some had even experienced séance phenomena.

Ghostly shapes flitting in the dark, raps on the table, musical instruments sounding in their ears, though never a trombone, raising of ponderable bodies, objects falling from the ceiling including lumps of ice, fresh flowers and fruit, which might indicate that the spirits were somewhat eclectic in their shopping; all these events dubious in origin and dependent upon the eyes being distracted or deceived.

Sophia Adler was none of these things.

For a start there were no manifestations; nothing appeared, not even ectoplasm, no oozing smoke from an obliging orifice that writhed into deceitful shapes while the female medium slumped erotically, limbs splayed.

No. That was not on show.

It was merely voices.

Sounds from her throat, soft at first, disjointed, rising and falling in pitch, not even words decipherable, as if filtered through a mesh of static interference.

They tumbled from her mouth and distorted the surface of the veil as if struggling to get free.

At one point she almost toppled from the chair, slowly lurching to the side like a newly felled tree but Bannerman leapt nimbly upon the stage and gently brought her to an upright position where she remained in better balance.

Now words began to form. Phrases. Random, questing, plaintive messages, some of which began to strike home amongst certain of the watching conscious throng.

A child searched for her mother. A wailing lost soul that had died of the fever. A woman called out in pain from the audience. It was her daughter. She named the wraith and there was an agonised exchange of sorts. Tears streamed down the woman’s face. This was not an act. Not for her.

The child vanished, others took her place; some found no recognition in the watchers and were elbowed aside by clamouring rivals; behind the veil Sophia’s face contorted further and it seemed to Conan Doyle as if these sounds were being wrenched out of her, as if she was giving birth.