The Durham Deception

by Philip Gooden

  Other smaller loans had followed, two pounds here, a pound there. Having accepted one, Frank Harcourt found himself almost helpless not to accept more. These loans were never called in. Frank decided that he would prefer to be in the hands of the most grasping usurer rather than in Eustace Flask’s. For it was evident that the medium expected not cash but favours, he expected the superintendent to protect him from the law or, indeed, any unwelcome attention from the authorities. As Harcourt had described it, there were plenty of important people in Durham – several but not all of them in the church – who objected to the presence of Flask in the city. They were particularly concerned about the spinster Julia Howlett, a wealthy and respected member of the community.

  The Chief Constable, old Huggins, had personally demanded to know what they were going to do about this ‘fraud’ Flask. Was it true that Harcourt knew him? said Huggins in that gruff no-nonsense manner of his. Some whispers had reached his ears. It didn’t look good, you know, for one of the senior members of the Constabulary to go round consorting with such a dubious creature. Frank protested that he was merely trying to gather evidence so that he could bring charges against the medium. ‘Well, be quick about it, Harcourt,’ barked Huggins. ‘I’d like nothing better than to see him behind bars.’

  This conversation had occurred a couple of days before Harcourt’s meeting with Flask in the cathedral. What Huggins would say when and if he heard that there had been a scene involving Eustace Flask at Miss Howlett’s house, Harcourt dreaded to think. It might be enough for the Chief Constable to demand Flask’s immediate arrest even though, in this case, it seemed that the medium had been the victim and not the assailant.

  The superintendent might have been relieved by Flask’s saying that he was planning to leave Durham in a few days but he wasn’t. He did not trust the medium, not an inch. And there was the threat that the man had made today, the first time he had uttered it, the threat to let slip the story of the gifts to Rhoda and the household loans. He could deny them, of course, but he wasn’t certain that his wife would keep quiet and there was the evidence in Flask’s little black book. Besides, it was already known to Alfred Huggins that he had dealings with Flask.

  No, if this ever got out, Superintendent Frank Harcourt could see disgrace stretching in front of him. Stripped of his rank and discharged from the force without a penny. Worse, banged up in the gaol alongside some of the very felons he had had the pleasure of putting there.

  No less hot and angry, he stalked out of the Galilee Chapel and emerged into the sunlight on the north side of the cathedral. He wiped his sweating brow. He walked over to the parapet-like wall which gave a view over the thickly wooded slope leading down to the river. He wasn’t aware of it but Tom and Helen Ansell were strolling down below him at that very moment. In fact, Harcourt was aware of nothing except his anger at Eustace Flask. Far from growing calmer, he was growing more desperate. If that fraud did not quit Durham very soon, there was no telling what might happen.

  Meanwhile, the object of his fear and hatred was sailing into the cathedral library, which lay off the south side of the cloisters close to the old monks’ quarters. Eustace Flask had no strong desire to enter the library but neither did he wish to accompany Superintendent Harcourt back through the cathedral precincts. He preferred to make a slightly stagey exit and he also wanted to leave the man stewing in his own juices, so he strode off with that nonchalant wave and climbed the stairs to what had once been a refectory.

  Altogether, he was satisfied at the way the encounter with Harcourt had gone. The man was literally in his debt – those little presents to his wife, those small contributions to the household economy – but it was extraordinary how ungrateful some people could be. So the occasional reminder was necessary. He wondered whether it had been wise to threaten to tell certain things to the Chief Constable because Harcourt grew even more red-faced and anxious. But it was better that the man was absolutely clear about how things stood.

  Flask was convinced that he was only a couple of days away from persuading Miss Howlett to make him an allowance for his ‘researches’ and for ‘spreading the word’. He had higher ambitions than an allowance of course. An allowance, even a regular one, would cease when the old maid got some fresh bee in her bonnet and it would stop absolutely with her death, whereas a legacy would be something really worth striving for. Perhaps he should chalk a spirit message to that effect.

  Flask was particularly pleased that he had succeeded in slipping the communication LIKE A SON on to the slate yesterday evening. He congratulated himself on his subtlety. He had left it to the old maid to jump to the right conclusion, namely that he, Eustace Flask, was the one who should be treated LIKE A SON. People were much more ready to believe if they did their own work in convincing themselves rather than sitting there, waiting to be convinced.

  As for the message BELIEVE HELEN, that had come to him in a moment of inspiration. It established a further link between himself (or more strictly his control, Running Brook) and Miss Howlett’s family. He rather thought that the old maid’s niece and her new husband would need quite a bit of convincing. Nice-looking woman, the niece, Helen, someone with a bit of class quite unlike Kitty Partout. She had been especially attentive to him recently, perhaps because she saw him as a challenge, perhaps because she regarded him as a more secure source of income than Ambrose Barker.

  Anyway, once his allowance had been signed and sealed he would set off to York, or elsewhere, secure in the knowledge that he had a guaranteed income for a time. He’d have to pop back to Durham every now and then to reassure the spinster and spin her a story or two, but essentially he was quids in. His investment in Frank Harcourt was paying off, and a nice irony was that the sums of money he had given to the policeman came indirectly from Miss Howlett, just as the gifts he had presented to Rhoda Harcourt were also from her or other ladies. (Not all of them were gifts freely made to Flask for the medium was light-fingered. It was one of his several talents.)

  He poked his head round the door of the cathedral library. An individual in clerical vestments looked up from a desk by the entrance. Flask nodded and smiled at him. He walked confidently into the great book-lined chamber, knowing that if one acted with enough assurance one was rarely challenged.

  There were a handful of men, mostly elderly, in the library, scribbling away or slowly turning the pages of single volumes or doing God-knows-what behind great barricades of books. Motes of dust hovered in the sunlight slanting through the high windows. Once inside, Eustace Flask found a secluded alcove among the banks of shelves. He took a letter from his pocket. He had already read the letter more than once but its contents baffled him. Or, more precisely, they raised his suspicions.

  The letter, strangely affable in tone, was from the person who had done his best to disrupt the séance at Miss Howlett’s the previous evening. It made only a passing reference to their ‘unfortunate encounter’ and, by way of compensation, invited the medium to attend a forthcoming event at which he would be ‘enlightened, entertained and edified’. The letter-writer had given a time and a venue. These details and the signature at the end confirmed Flask’s intuition about the identity of the séance-spoiler. Well, that was no great surprise. There was a long-standing hostility between individuals like himself who sought to pierce the veil separating the mortal from the eternal and those who followed this particular gentleman’s . . . profession? . . . no, he would not call it a profession, but a trade. Or an activity. A cheap, crowd-pleasing activity.

  There were several puzzling or worrying aspects to the letter. It had been delivered that morning to the dwelling in Old Elvet, and Flask wondered how the writer had found out the address of the house which he was renting. But that was a minor matter compared to this man’s motives. Why did he wish the medium to be ‘enlightened’ and all the rest of it? Was he holding out an olive branch with one hand and hiding a knife behind his back with the other? Or if not a knife then a piece of blue chalk. Flask’s
instinct was to keep his distance, to have nothing to do with this individual. Yet at the same time his curiosity was piqued. There could be no harm, surely, in his taking up the other’s invitation? The old saying about ‘knowing your enemy’ crossed his mind.

  He moved out from the shelter of the alcove and started to walk back towards the entrance to the library. On the way he was conscious of someone staring at him from behind a mound of books. There was a peculiar intensity to the stare. All he was able to see was a pair of dark eyes surmounted by wild white hair. It was not a friendly gaze. Flask did what he usually did when faced by hostility. He turned the other cheek. He dipped his head in slight acknowledgement and gave a half-smile. But the man kept on staring, if anything with greater intensity and dislike. As he passed, Flask recognized him. The straggling hair and dark eyes belonged to Septimus Sheridan, the permanent guest at Miss Howlett’s house in the South Bailey.

  Eustace Flask was already aware that Sheridan was no friend to him. Stray comments and quizzical glances during his visits to Colt House suggested that Sheridan was a sceptic about spiritualism. Fortunately, Sheridan was so indebted to Miss Howlett, so ready to follow her lead, that he would never dare to contradict her openly. If he was yet another enemy, he was an enemy too feeble to influence the old maid. Flask walked on, pale head held aloft like a high candle, deigning to give Septimus Sheridan one more tiny nod.

  Flask would have been surprised, even shocked, had he been able to read the other man’s thoughts. Septimus hadn’t noticed the medium’s arrival in the cathedral library. He was too wrapped up in his work (a study of the patristic fathers). It was only as Flask was leaving that he happened to glance up and see the familiar figure swaying towards him. All at once, and from nowhere it seemed, a great contempt and loathing for Eustace Flask welled up. What was that man doing here in a place devoted to study, to contemplation and religious history?

  Although Septimus Sheridan had largely lost his faith, he had never lost his respect, even love, for the institutions which enshrined that faith. Hence his return to Durham and a life of undisturbed scholarship. He was glad to be allowed to live in Julia Howlett’s house under almost any terms, and he understood how much he owed to her. Understood how foolish he had been to reject her as a wife when they were both comparatively young and she had come up to the north searching for him – a typically independent action on her part.

  He could hardly recall the reasons for his rejection of her now. He was sorry for it almost at once. He had moved away from the city and spent years in obscure parishes in grimy suburbs or even bleaker countryside until that terrible day, the worst day of his life, when he had written to his bishop explaining that he could no longer remain in the church with a clear conscience.

  Ever since going to live at Colt House he had grown fonder than ever of Miss Howlett. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like if they were sitting round the breakfast table not as householder and lodger but as man and wife. If he were able to call her not ‘Miss Howlett’ but ‘Julia’. How would the intervening years have been different if they had married? Septimus Sheridan could not know, but different – and better – they would have been.

  He was fiercely protective of Miss Howlett while realizing that she was well able to protect herself. She had resources and good sense. Except when it came to spiritualism and to Eustace Flask in particular. Septimus had not trusted Flask from the start, and the distrust had deepened to an instinctive rejection of everything that Flask said or did.

  Septimus would have done almost anything to wrest Miss Howlett away from the medium. But what could he do? Perhaps it was because he was so helpless that these feelings of contempt and loathing surfaced so abruptly in the hushed surroundings of the cathedral library.

  The Military Magician

  A meeting had been arranged between Major Sebastian Marmont and Tom by letter for noon of that day. The Major was staying at the County Hotel just the other side of the river. Tom was told that the Major had a suite of rooms on the first floor of the hotel, reputedly the best in the city. As he climbed the stairs he reflected that there must be money to be made through magic. But then the Major and his Hindoos were a big attraction. Tom and Helen had already glimpsed several posters advertising the ‘Wonders of the Orient’ show at the Assembly Rooms. See the Miraculous Talking Head. Marvel at the Fabulous Perseus Cabinet. All of this illustrated with a picture of a wise-looking cove wearing a suit and a solar topi together with a couple of youths clad in loincloths. In the background disembodied heads floated through the ether.

  Tom knocked on the door of the room where he had been directed. A voice that he recognized told him to enter and he was not surprised to see, sitting cross-legged in a sunny window seat and smoking a cigarette, the troublesome guest from Colt House. An inkling that the man he’d appointed to meet and the man who’d stirred things up the previous evening at Aunt Julia’s were one and the same had occurred to him while walking on the riverbank. Standing in the door he gave his name.

  ‘Ah, Mr Ansell,’ said Major Sebastian Marmont, untangling himself and coming forward to give Tom a firm handshake. He was formally dressed although he had removed his suit jacket. ‘I saw you arrive at the front entrance downstairs and I wondered if you were my midday visitor from Scott, Lye & Mackenzie. But of course we have already met, in a manner of speaking, even if I didn’t know who you were yesterday evening.’

  ‘It is strange that no one at Miss Howlett’s house recognized you either, sir, since your face is on bills all over town.’

  ‘If you look carefully, Mr Ansell, you’ll see it’s not a very good likeness on the bills. No doubt some of the people there last night have seen me on stage at the Assembly Rooms but it’s extraordinary how different one looks in front of the stage-lights and wearing a bit of slap.’

  ‘Slap, Major Marmont?’

  ‘Face-paint, my dear chap. I darken my phizog so that audiences imagine I’ve come straight from tropical climes. And Mr Eustace Flask knows who I am, or at least he does now. I have invited him to one of my shows. I thought it only fair to give him the chance to see a real magician. Please sit down, sir. Cigarette?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘They help me concentrate, I find, when I am mulling over my tricks. Only this brand, mind,’ said the Major taking another one from the packet. ‘The Luxor, made by the Alexandria Company in Artilley Lane.’

  Tom settled in an armchair while Major Marmont returned to the window seat, where he again perched cross-legged and wreathed himself in cigarette smoke, tapping the ash into a bowl of Benares brass next to him. He might have been the Buddha sitting amid clouds of incense; Buddha with an incongruous moustache. Tom glanced round the spacious sitting room which had a fine view of the cathedral beyond Sebastian Marmont’s shoulders. It was well furnished with armchairs and an ottoman, a desk and tables including one laid for dining. An internal door led to what must be Marmont’s bedroom.

  The soldier-magician asked after David Mackenzie in fond terms and enquired how long Tom had been with the law firm. He had discovered somehow that Tom was married to the daughter of Mr Scott, whom he had known. Tom found himself taking a liking to the Major. It was partly on account of the way he had shown up Eustace Flask but there was also an appealing straightforwardness to the other’s manner. Yet he was a professional magician. How straightforward could he be?

  ‘Why did you visit Miss Howlett’s yesterday evening, Major Marmont? You must have known that the other guests would not be, ah, sympathetic to what you were doing.’

  ‘Perhaps I went too far. I did not plan it. But there is something very provoking about that Flask. He’s an egregious character. I have been tracking his progress round the north-east like a hunter following a spoor. When I discovered that Miss Howlett was keeping open house for him, as it were, I could not resist the temptation to go and beard the fellow. Using a little of my own sleight of hand and the substituted chalk, I was able to show that he must have written
the tablet answers himself.’

  ‘But my wife and her aunt were touching his hands all the time.’

  ‘Oh they are very clever, these people. I have known a foot covered with a dummy hand to be thrust up through a hole in a table. But that wasn’t what happened in this case. Did you observe how Flask gave a start when he was taken over by his ‘control’, the Indian maid?’

  Tom nodded, fascinated but also surprised at the undercurrent of bitterness in Marmont’s words. It was plain that he despised the spiritualists or at any rate despised Eustace Flask.

  ‘I would wager a whole evening’s takings that both your wife and her aunt lost contact with Flask’s hands for an instant when he pretended to go into his trance. When they felt him again he was actually offering both of them the same hand. So all that time the other hand was free to scribble his nonsense on the slate.’

  ‘It is easy to see when you explain, sir. And I suppose the arms of the Indian maid were actually that woman’s, Kitty’s.’

  ‘Undoubtedly they were. But I could tell from your own attitude last night that you already had your suspicions about the medium.’

  ‘My wife and I both. Her Aunt Julia has no suspicions, she believes in Flask absolutely.’

  ‘A pity. Flask is very adept in his dealings with older women. Individuals like him bring honest, decent magicianship into disrepute. You should ask yourself why mediums need the paraphernalia of conjurers, why they require dim lighting and locked cabinets and rattling tambourines when they are trying to reach the departed. Isn’t it rather undignified of the dead to choose such ridiculous means to get in touch? We magicians own up to our tricks – or rather we own up that they are tricks. We might fear the discovery of our secrets but we don’t fear the exposure of our very selves as the mediums do. But I am running on, Mr Ansell.’