The Durham Deception

by Philip Gooden

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began in a style that was smooth as oil, ‘I customarily ask for a volunteer at this point to search my person and ascertain that I am not wearing any concealed devices. We live in such a suspicious age that all of us are forced to show ourselves beyond reproach, even Eustace Flask. I look around and I am delighted to see some familiar faces but it would be best if someone who was not known to me came forward for this personal examination. I might of course ask a lady here who is not known to me . . .’

  His eyes lingered on Helen. Tom felt her shift on the chair next to him. But Flask was saying this only to tease for his glance then moved to Tom.

  ‘. . . but perhaps it would be more appropriate if an unknown gentleman volunteered. After all, we shall have no imputations of indelicacy here!’

  Tom got up and walked the few paces to where Flask was standing in his waistcoat, shirt and trousers. Close to, Tom noticed a sheen of sweat on Flask’s pale face. He spoke quietly, hardly above a whisper.

  ‘Place your hands where you like, Mr . . ?’

  ‘Ansell.’

  ‘We have not been introduced before?’ said Eustace Flask speaking loudly enough for the whole room to hear.

  ‘No, we have not been introduced,’ said Tom. The man was quick, no doubt about it. They had met on the train but they hadn’t been introduced.

  ‘Place your hands where you like, sir, within the bounds of propriety.’

  Flask looked out at the audience over Tom’s shoulder with a roguish twinkle in his eye. The voice was more brown and syrupy than ever. Tom put out his hands as if he were being invited to catch a ball. He felt uncomfortable and self-conscious, which was probably Flask’s intention. No doubt the medium counted on not being examined or searched thoroughly. God knows what he had concealed behind his waistcoat or inside his trousers.

  Tom, suddenly provoked, decided that he would not be embarrassed. He would give this man as thorough a going-over as a criminal would receive in the police-house. So he ran his hands along the other’s extended shirtsleeves and over his sleek chest, he felt about his waist and up and down the trouser legs. To his slight disappointment, he felt nothing, not even a purse or a pocket-watch. Flask’s clothes were snug and well-fitting. They were also expensive. A fine stickpin topped by a pearl fastened his burgundy cravat. The thought crossed Tom’s mind that one of Aunt Julia’s cheques might have paid for the brocade waistcoat and, although it was really nothing to do with him, the idea irritated him.

  He turned to face the people in the room. He shook his head and said,

  ‘As far as I can tell, Mr Flask is . . . clean.’

  There were one or two titters from the audience, whether out of genuine amusement or from nervousness because Tom had shown a touch of disrespect towards Eustace Flask.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Ansell,’ said Flask from behind and then more quietly he spoke directly into Tom’s ear, ‘Your hands have such an expert touch that I thought you might be a tailor.’

  Tom could have jabbed his elbow into the other’s gut at the little insult but he restrained himself and went back to sit beside Helen. Aunt Julia was beaming, gratified that Flask was acquitting himself so well. She was sitting beside Septimus Sheridan, who looked generally uncomfortable at the course of events.

  Now Flask turned his back on the audience, his open hands stretched behind him. Ambrose produced a little bag from which he poured what appeared to be flour into Flask’s hands. The medium grasped the flour. Then Ambrose wound a coil of thin rope several times around Flask’s wrists. He made a show of knotting the cord tight and beckoned to a gentleman in the front of the audience to test the knots. This was quickly done and then Flask moved towards the wardrobe, where Kitty was standing by the open doors.

  The interior was empty apart from a ledge or bench which ran along the back. Flask sat on this, rather awkwardly because of the position of his hands behind him. There were holes in the bench through which the ends of the rope were passed before being secured round Flask’s ankles by Ambrose. The same man from the front row was asked to test the new knots, which he did willingly. Now Flask was trussed up inside the wardrobe.

  With a flourish, Kitty closed the double doors. She made sure that the windows were covered by the muslin curtains which hung on the inside. Within a few moments there was a stir from inside and an arm was thrust through the material. There was a collective noise from the people in the room, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh. The arm was bare and, for sure, it did not belong to any grown man. Judging by the thinness and pallor of it, the arm was a girl’s, even a child’s. Tom’s eyes automatically flicked sideways to see where Kitty had been standing but he could not immediately spot her. Now a second arm was thrust through the curtain covering the other hole in the other door. The two limbs were the same size but seemed to belong to two different bodies. In fact, they must do because the gap between the two holes was too wide even for a grown man to extend his arms any distance beyond the openings. The arms waggled their hands and the hands flexed their fingers, and the whole effect was unnerving.

  All at once Kitty was in front of the cabinet again and the arms had scarcely time to disappear before she was unlatching the double doors and flinging them open to reveal – ah ha! – Eustace Flask sitting on his bench, the rope apparently securing his hands and feet, and with no sign of any bare arms floating about. But this was not the most extraordinary part of the manifestation. It was rather that Flask sat there quite still and calm, a seraphic smile on his face. There were noises of muted approval from the audience.

  Helen whispered to Tom, ‘I’m impressed but I don’t see the point of it. What’s he trying to prove?’

  ‘That he is in touch with the spirit world, I expect,’ said Tom, wishing that he felt as calm as Flask looked.

  The next part of the evening session followed when the various musical instruments – guitar, tambourine, violin and trumpet – were hung by Kitty upon hooks on the inner walls of the cabinet. All this while Flask had remained tied up, smiling benignly out at the room. The same man from the front row of chairs once more checked the knots and this time it was Ambrose who closed the doors to the cabinet. A few seconds passed before a terrible din emerged from within, the sounds of thumping and rattling, tooting and screeching. It was as if a pack of monkeys had got hold of the instruments and were doing their best to play them, or to destroy them. At one point the tambourine was thrown through one of the holes and almost struck a member of the audience in the face.

  Ambrose now did duty by unfastening the doors as the cacophony faded away. Again Eustace Flask was revealed on the inside, securely trussed up on his bench, with the instruments hanging limply on their hooks. Ambrose untied him and the medium stood up, flexing his arms in front of him. He opened his hands so that a little shower of flour tumbled down from each of them. That proved – beyond a doubt, surely? – that his hands had been fully occupied grasping the flour all the time. Then he rubbed his chafed wrists and acknowledged the crowd in the room with little bows to left and right. He stood while Ambrose helped him back into his green frock-coat.

  This concluded the second part of the evening. The trio of Flask, Kitty and Ambrose left the room whilst the medium paused to exchange a few words with Julia Howlett who was still beaming with pleasure at the success of it all. Tom observed that Septimus Sheridan, standing near her, looked less enthusiastic.

  There was a gap like the interval in a play. Candles were relit and the gaslights turned up higher. Tea was brought in by a couple of housemaids and the visitors stood around chatting in small groups. Mr Sheridan came towards them. He said to Helen, ‘I understand, Mrs Ansell, that it is many years since you last saw your aunt.’

  ‘Yes. It was when I was a child, quite a small child.’

  ‘Whatever you may think of events this evening, she is a good woman, you know, a very good woman.’

  ‘I was too young to know it then but I see it now.’

  ‘We are of one
mind then,’ said Septimus Sheridan with satisfaction.

  Tom had half his attention on this exchange but he was also looking at the behaviour of the gentleman in the front row, the one who’d been asked to test the knots in the ropes securing Eustace Flask. He was a short, spruce-looking figure with a fine moustache. He was peering into the interior of the cabinet to scrutinize the musical instruments on the hooks as well as the ropes which had been left coiled on the shelf and the flour smeared on the floor. He was squatting and looking at the raised underside of the cabinet before walking round it to examine the back. Tom, his curiosity stirred, joined him.

  ‘Everything is in order?’ he said.

  The man tugged at his moustaches and gave Tom the same careful study he had given Flask’s cabinet. ‘Oh yes, it is in good order. I wouldn’t expect anything else. This cabinet would not have been left so carelessly open for inspection had it been otherwise.’

  ‘You’re not a . . . believer in all this?’ said Tom, indicating the cabinet.

  ‘I am no believer.’

  ‘But you were the one who checked the ropes and knots securing Mr Flask and you seemed to be satisfied.’

  ‘Just as you were satisfied when you searched him, sir. He wouldn’t offer himself for inspection if he wasn’t confident of getting away with it. You are not from this city or this county?’

  ‘From London. My wife and I are visitors here. From your voice, you are not local either.’

  It was easy to detect those who hadn’t been born or brought up in Durham. Although neither Julia Howlett nor Septimus Sheridan had acquired the local accent, Tom had been hearing the distinctive flattened vowels in undercurrents of conversation about the room. But Tom and the inquisitive gentleman could talk no further for Eustace Flask and his little entourage now returned to the morning room for the other half of the evening’s manifestation. The lights were lowered once more. Tom thought it was dimmer than it had been for the cabinet show. This time the medium sat at a small table. Aunt Julia was invited to sit on one side of him and Helen on the other. Four more of the guests joined them, but not the individual who’d been examining the cabinet even though he was hovering about as if he wanted an invitation to sit down. The other dozen or more guests stood around the group at the table.

  The elfin-faced Kitty brought a hinged slate and a stick of white chalk to the table. Flask lodged the slate on his lap so that the edge of it was resting against the table. He propped both his hands on the table and invited Helen and Julia to rest one of their own hands on the tops of his. After a few moments Flask jerked violently and Tom heard a whisper from one of the group, ‘That is his control.’ Questions were asked for by Kitty. Almost everyone in the room seemed familiar with the form. Someone said, ‘What is twenty times thirty?’ and someone else said, ‘Who is your control?’

  Each time there was a pause then a scraping sound like chalk being dragged across slate. Tom, straining to see through the gloom, thought that Flask’s hands stayed without movement on the rim of the table with the slate between them. Oddly, the whole thing was more unnerving than the cabinet display, perhaps because he was only a couple of yards away from Flask or perhaps because the scraping noises set his teeth on edge. More questions were invited by the medium, who spoke now with a queer trembling unlike his usual oily tone.

  ‘Have you a message for me?’

  This was Helen. Tom was amazed that she should have asked something and faintly alarmed when her question was followed by more scratching. Then Aunt Julia asked, ‘Whom should I trust?’ Further scraping sounds.

  Flask began to wobble his head violently as if an invisible person had seized him by the back of the neck. The slate clattered to the floor. Someone – Ambrose or Kitty? – turned up the gas, signalling the end of the session. By the better light, Flask looked paler than ever, as if he had just woken from a deep and unpleasant sleep. He seemed to come to himself. He picked the slate up from the floor. He displayed both sides of it to the room. They were blank. Tom was relieved – and a fraction disappointed. The man was a charlatan after all and an incompetent one at that.

  But then Eustace Flask unhinged the slate to reveal some writing on the inside. He nodded as he scanned the words before handing the slate round the people in the room who were pressing closer. They treated it reverently, passing it from group to group. When the slate got close to Tom he saw the following answers, written in capital letters and on separate lines.

  The number: ‘600’

  A scrawl that looked like: ‘RUNNING BOOK’ or possibly ‘BROOK’.

  The sentence: ‘BELIEVE HELEN.’

  The words: ‘LIKE A SON’.

  Apart from the first answer to the arithmetic question, none of these made much sense but it gave Tom a jolt to see Helen’s name scrawled on the tablet for everyone to read. Now Kitty took the slate and, for the benefit of those who hadn’t yet seen it or did not understand the responses, explained that ‘Running Brook’ was the name of an Indian maid who was Flask’s ‘control’. Indeed, the maid had already manifested herself that evening. Yes, it was Running Brook’s white limbs that had appeared through the cabinet doors. Kitty, with a voice straining to be genteel, said she believed that Helen was the lady sitting next to her uncle and that the message to her was plain. She must place her trust in the reality of the spirit world. She should ‘BELIEVE’. As for the final answer – the cryptic ‘LIKE A SON’ – Kitty was not sure of the application of these words but no doubt all would become clear in the fullness of time.

  ‘I know what it means,’ said Julia Howlett. ‘It was I who asked the question ‘Whom should I trust?’ and the answer has come from Running Brook. I should trust my dear Mr Flask here. I should treat him like a son.’

  Flask put his hand on his shirt-front as if to say, ‘Who? Me?’ But his surprise, and everyone else’s, was greater when the spruce, moustached gentleman stepped forward and snatched the slate from Kitty.

  ‘Wait a moment, Mr Flask. I think you should explain first of all how the writing on the slate is in blue chalk when there is plainly a white piece on the table.’

  All eyes swivelled from the blue lettering on the tablet to the stick of white chalk on the table top. It was strange, thought Tom, that he hadn’t noticed the inconsistency in colour.

  ‘The spirit moves in mysterious ways, sir,’ said the medium, perfectly self-possessed. ‘What matters is the message not the colour of it.’

  ‘You might also explain, Mr Flask, how you have left blue marks on your shirt . . .’

  Flask gazed down at where he’d just patted his chest in his ‘Who? Me?’ gesture. There were smears of blue on his starched front. Automatically he glanced at his fingertips and there too were traces of blue chalk. For a moment he looked baffled. Then he looked angry as he saw the other man holding up a stick of blue chalk.

  ‘I was standing near the table just before you started your folderol and your fiddle-faddle, Mr Flask, and I switched the white chalk for the blue. Then at the end of your performance, I switched them back again.’

  ‘And what follows from that, sir?’ said Eustace Flask.

  It was fairly obvious what followed. Flask had written the words himself. By now Helen had come back from the table to stand next to Tom and they turned to look at each other. The same thought was in both their minds: was this another police exposure as in Tullis Street? Yet although the moustached man had an odd air of authority he did not seem to be a policeman. What he did next made it even less likely that he was one. He dived for Flask’s ankles – the medium had not risen from his chair – and tugged at the bottom of the man’s trousers like an angry dog. A shower of flour rained on to Julia Howlett’s carpet.

  ‘There we are,’ said the man, standing up and gazing round the room, his own hands now white and floury. The guests looked bemused and shocked. ‘I ask you why a man should need to keep flour in little secret bags at the bottom of his trousers. There is no sane explanation unless it is to replace the flour th
at the same man has let drop while he is fiddling with his knots and jangling his instruments.’

  When they discussed it afterwards, Tom and Helen both confessed to a touch of admiration at the way Flask responded, even if it was only admiration at his impudence. In their eyes, he’d been caught red-handed, or rather caught with a piece of blue chalk and with piles of concealed flour.

  Instead of shrivelling up or admitting defeat, as Ernest Smight had done, Flask rose from the table. Ambrose shouldered his way towards him but the medium lifted a ringed hand, the tips of his fingers still tinged with blue chalk. It was like the benediction of a bishop. The gesture said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Flask paced slowly towards the gentleman with the fine moustaches, who did not shift one inch. He halted when he was within striking distance. When he spoke next it was not to his opponent but to the rest of the company.

  ‘Our Lord tells us that when our enemies assail us, we should turn the other cheek. I do not know what your reasons are for coming here tonight, sir, but you have fallen among people who seek no quarrel with you and rather wish the scales to fall from your eyes.’

  There were nodded heads at this and whispers of agreement. Tom realized that, whatever the exposer’s motives, he had badly misjudged the occasion. Apart from the Ansells and possibly Mr Sheridan, Julia Howlett’s guests were true believers. It would take more to convince them than the uncovering of a trick or two. They blamed the accuser and not the accused, who was adopting the role of injured innocent. The man with the moustache understood this. He smiled. He bowed in a way that was slightly stagey. His departing remark too had a melodramatic ring. ‘Next time, Mr Flask, we shall do battle on a ground of my choosing.’

  He turned smartly on his heel and strode from the morning room. There was a pause and then a woman began to clap and soon Eustace Flask had earned a round of applause for the way he stood up to the outsider. Aunt Julia clasped him by the arm and other women gathered round him with praise and reassurance. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the business of the blue chalk and the surplus flour, even though there were little mounds of the stuff on the floor by Flask’s seat. There was some talk about the identity of the impertinent fellow who’d tried to ruin their evening but no one seemed to have an idea of who he was. Yet, equally, Tom and Helen had the impression that, in the spiritualist community, such hostility and persecution were routine matters. These things were to be expected and, in a perverse way, they fortified the true believer.