by David Hatton
She stood up and wrung her hands like Pontius Pilate. The grief-stricken widower on the couch regained focus and peered up at the woman who made remarkable claims.
‘Yeah you’ve told me what you believe and I’m going to tell you what I think! I think it’s despicable what you do. You come round here to a grieving man who’s lost his wife and tell him she’s at the bottom of a canal and that some spirit has told you so. You’re a fraud and a liar. Your work is based on guesswork and you’re just opening a can of worms which I’m trying to keep shut and get over. Now I don’t know how you know what you know, or whether it’s even true, but unless you can give me a damn good reason to not throw you out, I’d like you to leave.’
Michael walked up to the front door and opened it.
‘Wait!’ Jackie called. ‘I know about Jason…’
Despite the open patio doors allowing a light breeze to flow through the lounge, the apartment had never felt so warm. The heating was switched off in April as temperatures soared in a usually drizzly Manchester. Sweat poured down the forehead of the grieving husband. For several minutes, all movements, sounds and life outside of his apartment had frozen as his visitor unfolded the tragedies which had overtaken his life in the previous two years.
‘Excuse me?’ Michael turned back towards the medium.
‘I knew your wife. She came to see me once at one of my shows,’ Jackie’s revelations continued. Intrigued, Michael closed the door and returned to the living room where his visitor waited in anticipation. ‘Jason came in spirit and left you both a message.’
‘She never told me about this… when was it?’
‘It was a few months ago. Before Christmas. It was at the Sleep Tight Hotel where I was tonight.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘Very little. She was very reserved, she didn’t want to give anything away. She was sceptical, a little like you. But she left convinced once I passed on the message from Jason.’
‘If this is some kind of game you’re playing to extort money from me, Ms Wallace, you can leave now.’
‘I’m not here for money, Michael. I’m here because I knew your wife and I know where she is now. I’m here because I’d like a peaceful night’s sleep at last… something you probably could do with too, otherwise you’ll have a heart attack just like your grandmother.’
‘What? Michael gasped.
‘Grace Walker? She died of a heart attack eleven years ago. You’ll end up going like her if you don’t get the answers to the puzzles which have tortured you for the past six months.’
Unlike his wife’s disappearance and his son’s death, Grace Walker’s demise had barely made more than the local obituaries over a decade before. The cause of death hadn’t been reported but Jackie’s revelations were correct. She had an aneurism in her heart which ruptured at her eightieth birthday dinner party.
‘How do you know these things?’ Michael quizzed.
‘I’m a medium, Michael. It’s my job,’ Jackie said. ‘You came to my show tonight to find your wife and here I am telling you where she is.’
‘I need to sit down.’ He slumped down on the couch, causing a thud as he hit the leather. Placing his head in his hands, he attempted to assemble his suddenly muddled belief system. Jackie followed and found a seat next to him, placing a supportive arm around the bereaved man.
‘Michael, I can help you. Let’s go to the police. Let’s get through this together. I will support you any way I can. I won’t charge you a penny. But we need to get to the bottom of this.
With tears streaming down his red cheeks, he placed a hand on Jackie, grasping for the support he had desperately thirsted for. Family and friends had all teased him with the possibility that Suzanne could have run away and would be home any day now. Instead, Jackie Wallace had burst his bubble and handed him a lashing of reality.
‘Why do we need to go to the police? You’ve told me she’s dead, why can’t we just leave it at that?’
Jackie sighed and rubbed his arm.
‘Because I believe Suzanne was murdered…’
Dawn broke over Castlefield. A lone bird hovered over the edge of the balcony, singing its morning call. The medium’s tonsils rattled through her yawn. Having talked for hours, the pair had exhausted all stories of Suzanne and Jason and the circumstances surrounding his arrival at the Sleep Tight Hotel only hours before.
‘You can understand why I’m sceptical, can’t you?’ Michael said. ‘You see, throughout my entire life, I’ve believed in science and science alone.’
From a young age, Michael had grown sceptical of an afterlife. As soon as he discovered that Father Christmas was a myth, he began to question other elements in his life which had been sold to him. His parents sent him to a local church school; the teachers of St Gregory’s despaired of the seven-year-old schoolboy who ridiculed the RE teacher every week and refused to sing hymns in assembly. The head teacher invited his parents in and threatened to expel the rebel if he didn’t conform, which only spurred him on to combat the dictatorship.
While he was allowed to continue in the religious school, he spent most of his time in detention. He missed out on valuable education because he couldn’t accept another person’s beliefs. Now he faced losing his wife forever if he couldn’t accept Jackie’s.
‘Oh, Michael, surely even with an adoration for science you have to also believe in other possibilities? We discover new theories every day; other solar systems and universes. We’re learning more all the time. We used to think the earth was flat. Even some of our most famous scientists have expressed their beliefs in something far greater or beyond what we mere mortals can see. Stephen Hawking wrote about God in his earlier research and Alan Turing visited fortune tellers.’
‘Why can’t science and the idea of spirituality go hand in hand?’ Jackie continued. ‘They don’t need to be separate. Dr John Dee believed that astrology, science and a belief in angels intertwined. The entire idea of an afterlife could be proven through numbers. Great minds, Michael, who have come away from their focus simply on science and managed to embrace the idea that there is much more out there than we can simply see, and I’m here to prove this to you.’
A second yawn overpowered Jackie and she rubbed her eyes before glancing at the time.
‘I’d better go,’ Jackie announced. ‘It’s almost five.’
‘Yeah I’d better go to bed, I have a big day ahead.’
‘Do you want me to come with you to the station?’
‘I’ll be fine. I just need to go to the police and inform them that a medium has told me that my missing wife is below the Rochdale Canal. That would’ve sounded mad a few hours ago.’
‘Are you going to be OK?’
‘Yeah, don’t get me wrong, it hit me like a ton of bricks when you said she’d been murdered. I thought maybe she’d killed herself or fallen somewhere, or maybe even run away and left me. But murder? I just don’t understand who could’ve done this. She was a sweet person. Nobody who knew her could’ve done this.’
‘We’ll get to the bottom of it.’
‘I’m sure we will. That’s my focus, but first things first, sleep!’
They parted ways and a sleepy Michael made his way to bed but paused. The flashing green light of a monitor indicated that he had left his computer on after browsing directions to the Sleep Tight Hotel earlier in the evening. He walked over to shut the device down but became distracted by a book by Richard Dawkins resting next to the keyboard. The realisation of how far his belief system had stretched within a few hours startled him. Struggling to come to terms with Jackie's claims, he sat down and typed into an internet search engine ‘psychic medium tricks’.
The results of his search reflected his psychology teacher’s claims of cold reading, using vague claims based on the characteristics of the client. However another article caught his eye by the stage magician James Randi, who had moved away from his own illusions to expose people who claimed to hold supernatural powers.
Randi’s article suggested psychic mediums placed spies in the audience of their live shows to capture information which was later fed back to the performer on stage through an earpiece, as well as using stooges. While Michael had discussed his wife and son with Louise, they talked about his loved ones on the walk over from the Beetham Tower, far away from any eavesdroppers.
The information which Jackie held on Michael, did not qualify as cold reading; he had provided little information to the medium. Nor had he been in range of a secret squirrel who could have captured details regarding his life. And he was certainly no stooge. With little left to explain how she’d captured the information she held on him, he switched off his computer, confident in Jackie’s abilities.
A buzzer woke an exhausted Michael four hours later. Startled, he rose up and looked out of his balcony to see who his intruder was. His brother’s Mercedes sat below.
Running around the apartment, he cleared the empty bottles of beer he’d consumed the night before off his balcony. Whilst he’d cut back considerably, his brother would have still shot him his usual serving of judgemental pie.
Robert entered the apartment, appearing as startled as his brother as he witnessed the tidy apartment. Where empty pizza boxes lay before, a choice of car magazines were spread across a glass coffee table. A cinnamon-scented candle filled the air instead of smoke.
‘What are you doing here?’ Michael asked.
‘Charming. If you must know, I was worried,’ Robert replied, before grabbing himself a tumbler and filling it up with water. ‘I hadn’t heard from you in a few days. I called your mobile last night but there was no answer. I was half expecting to find a body when I arrived.’
‘I’m sorry, I had a visitor.’
‘Oh aye?’ Robert sat down, folded his legs and placed his chin on his hand. A sly wink escaped his eye. ‘Get lucky, did you? Come on then, who was the lucky lady?’
‘Jackie Wallace.’
The ticking of the kitchen clock echoed around the room as Robert quietly tried to connect the name. His eyes widened as the penny dropped.
‘The clairvoyant?’
‘She came over last night after I went to see her show.’
‘You went to see her show?’ Robert barked, placing his tumbler down on the table with a light slam. ‘What is this? What have you become?’
‘A believer… apparently.’
‘I don’t understand….’ Robert scratched his head.
‘She knows where Suzanne is.’ He spoke with such certainty.
‘What do you mean? Where is she supposed to be?’
‘In the canal.’ Michael shrugged. ‘I’m going to the police shortly to open up the investigation.’
‘Are you mad? Only a few days ago, you said it was all bollocks.’
‘This was all your idea!’
‘I told you to open your mind, not change your whole belief system.’
‘Robert, she knew things. She knew more than just where Suzanne is. She knew about Jason, about the hit and run. She even knew about Granny Grace’s heart attack. And now I’m inclined to believe her when she says that she knows where my wife is. I’ve got to take this chance as I’ve got nothing else to follow.’
‘Listen, I know they’re really clever. They appear amazing. I’ve been fooled myself when that Psychic Paul’s been on TV. However you need to remember these people are professionals. A million articles about Jason are available online if you do a quick search.’
‘But what about Granny?’
‘They have their ways, I’ve heard they hire private investigators to find data on their prey.’
Robert’s description of the medium’s methods depicted a spy thriller. But Jackie Wallace was nothing like Tinker or Tailor. She was a working class Scottish bird who made just enough to play at a cheap conference room in a decaying hotel.
‘Robert, it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. I don’t think it even matters if I believe it. It’s a lead. Part of my job is scoping out new business. And believe me, my instincts tell me I should always follow a lead, no matter how farfetched or beyond my reach. She’s giving me more than the police have over the last six months. Who knows where it might lead to, no matter how small? It might lead me to what happened to my wife the day she went missing. And even if it’s all rubbish, is it so terrible if I find some comfort at the end of it all?’
An exasperated Robert collected his tumbler, threw the leftover contents of the glass down the drain and slammed it down on the sideboard. He walked up to his brother and rubbed his arms.
‘I worry about you.’
‘Don’t. Listen this is my choice. I’m not asking you to believe me, just that you empathise and accept that I’m following this through. Who knows? If she can find Suzanne, maybe she can find Jason’s killer too?’
‘I think you’re walking on dangerous ground. Who knows what this woman wants? She might fleece you for all you’ve got.’
‘I don’t have anything to take. What have I really got to lose?’
‘Your sanity?’
‘Any sanity I had left the day Suzanne did. Look at me, I’m a mess.’
Robert took a long deep breath and exhaled. He hugged his brother and walked towards the door. Before he left, he turned around.
‘Just look after yourself, OK?’
‘I will.’
They smiled at each other and Robert departed the building. As he returned to his car, he took out his phone and began to research the work of this so-called medium, Jackie Wallace.
9.
“Death is not the end, it’s the beginning of a journey.”
- Sally Morgan (2011)
The murky waters beside him had never seemed so deep. A lone goose sailing peacefully past suddenly became an intruder on his wife’s tomb. He spent hours beside the canal, desperate to glimpse into the bottom of the waterway, avoiding the agreed actions he’d discussed with Jackie the previous evening.
He considered jumping in to save his wife. However having spent six months under water, Suzanne was beyond saving. Instead she would now be considered a metaphorical door of unanswered questions. For that, he could leave her resurrection to the authorities who were appropriately equipped to extract her without endangering or corrupting himself.
Drizzle overtook Manchester. Circles formed where the rain drops met the canal, expanding before disappearing. A cold dribble trickled down the back of his neck forcing the widower to move on.
Parallel to the path he walked across, the television production crew continued to film the dramatic scenes he’d witnessed only hours earlier. Beside them, a diver kitted out with an oxygen tank jumped into the water and brought the body-doubles of the actors back to safety. Sensing an opportunity, Michael ran over, crossed the viaduct and approached the team.
A bearded man sporting a black cap and sunglasses slouched in a chair with the title of Director printed on the back of it. He smoked a cigar, staring at the small screen before him, shouting at the cast as they failed to reproduce his vision. Beside him, an assistant held an umbrella over him. The crew were all dressed in black as they buried themselves away from the action taking place in front of the camera.
‘Excuse me.’ The crew looked up, startled by the intruder who had the nerve to approach the director without invitation. Anticipating a fan, the cast collated their pre-signed photos and pens.
‘Can I help you? Can’t you see we’re in the middle of a scene here?’ The director spoke with an American twang.
‘I was just wondering if you could help me. You see, I believe my wife’s body could be in the bottom of that canal. I can see you have some divers and I wondered if you could have a look around and see if you can find her?’
The director lifted up his sunglasses and looked Michael up and down. He scratched his grey beard.
‘Are you serious? Even if I believed you, this canal is over thirty miles long and we pay the divers by the hour. Get outta here.’
‘But please, I
need your help!’
Before Michael could continue his pleas, two security officers dragged him away.
‘You better stay away,’ a beefed-up bouncer of six feet said. Dressed in a black leather jacket and sunglasses, the skinhead had enough muscle to crush Michael with one light squeeze. The ruffled recruiter accepted his warning and rushed away from the daunting security staff.
On the walk into town, he called his manager to inform him that he wouldn’t be in work, blaming a stomach bug which kept him up all night. His excuse did not sit well with Craig, who grumbled that he’d only been back in the business a couple of weeks. Nor did it impress Louise, who sent a text message asking if he was avoiding her. He didn’t reply; he didn’t have the energy, or the words, which would gain Louise’s forgiveness.
It took him just fifteen minutes to arrive at the Central Manchester Police Station. The red-bricked fortress sat on the backroad of Bootle Street, a quiet boulevard by day with only a public house for company. An archway formed the entrance; a steel blue gateway opened to allow an emergency vehicle to escape the secure enclosure. Michael slipped through the arch behind a flashing Transit and stepped into the building.
A small reception made up the visitors’ room. White tiles lined the floor and posters encouraging residents to report crimes filled the walls. To his left, three benches provided a seating area for those waiting. The turquois leather coverings had torn, and foam poured out of the bench-tops.
Resting on the benches were two blokes; the first coated in tattoos snaking up to his bald head, a long ginger beard sprouted from his chin and metal hoops looped through his nose and ears. The second visitor appeared pale and weak; his skinny arms bore blood-blotched holes. The addict laid his head down on the side and only his expanding bony rib-cage, ripping through his white tank top, provided any signs of life. The tattooed guy to his right stared up towards a flat-screen television, hanging in the corner of the room. On the screen, a chat show dealing with drug abuse, cheating wives and absent parents made up the morning’s entertainment, while the host yelled at his guests following a revealing paternity test.