That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Used to be the Variety circuit, before the war,” said Lexy. “Now all the beaches are full of mines and barbed wire. The people who’re left there aren’t having a good time any more. Vulnerable to Jerry attack from the sea and where the Luftwaffe get rid of all their unused bombs on their way home. Easy prey for spook racketeers.”

  “What about the rest of those sort of music hall people?” Spooner’s mind returned to Birmingham. “Do you have much in the way of entertainment here these days?”

  “You mean, do we have anywhere for them to perform after Jerry’s finished?” said Lexy. “There’s not much of the city centre left, you know. There’s a few tea dances and bingo at some of the church halls, a handful of picture houses. But that’s another thing that makes the Master Temple so appealing to bored, lonely, frightened people. Gives them something to do and something to talk about on these long winter’s nights.”

  Spooner finished note-taking. “Thanks,” he said, putting his pad and pen back into his pocket. “So, what about you? Are you aiming to cover any of this for your paper?”

  Lexy reached for his notebook, exhaling a large smoke ring that wobbled up towards the ceiling. “Like I said, Councillor Roberts led me to the Shadwells. He’s the big fish I’m pursuing; they’re just the small, yet fascinatingly ugly fry he brought up in his wake. I don’t want the councillor to be alerted to my presence in his world at this stage of the game. Because he never actually attends any of these séances he certifies he has yet to clock my presence at the Master Temple. I need to keep it that way for the time being.”

  Spooner frowned. “So what’s he doing it for?”

  Lexy tapped his finger on the side of his nose. “That’s confidential information, old chap,” he said and winked. “Now, I should also mention that there’s someone else been keeping tabs on the Shadwells – Detective Inspector Freddie Fraser. He was at the Duncan séance too. Looked a bit red in the face afterwards. Don’t think he was best pleased.”

  “Detective Inspector?” said Spooner. “So he’s quite high up, then? My editor might be right in thinking that powerful forces are amassing against Mrs Duncan.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” said Lexy. “But he’s not a particularly pleasant chap. I doubt you’d enjoy actually having a conversation with him.”

  Spooner wondered whether this was a veiled threat – whether he was being told to keep his nose out or being given sound advice. He pushed his spectacles back up his nose, hoping to convey a lack of ambition for fighting. “I’ll bear that in mind, Mr Lexy.”

  “It’s Dick, remember?” The journalist grinned. “Well,” he checked his wristwatch, “I’d better push off. Will you be all right finding your way back to the hotel?”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Spooner, getting to his feet to offer his hand. “Thanks for everything, erm, Dick. You’ve been a great help. If it puts your mind at rest, I’m pretty sure I can persuade my editor what’s the wisest thing to do.”

  “Good man,” said Lexy. His palm was noticeably warmer than when they had first met at the bar. “And thanks for the drink. I’m glad to discover it isn’t true what they say about mean Scotsmen.” He winked, blew another smoke ring and disappeared behind it.

  16

  WHILE A CIGARETTE WAS BURNING

  Saturday, 6 December 1941

  “Who’s there?” Spooner jerked upright in bed. He didn’t know if it was the creak of a floorboard that had woken him or the tickling sensation against his cheek, as if someone had been leaning over him, trailing hair in his face – but someone had got into his hotel room. He could feel another presence in the unfamiliar darkness, smell the aroma that came with it: an incongruous stench of wet animal. He lurched towards the bedside table, groping for his glasses. Clumsy fingers instead sent the things that had been resting there spilling to the floor – his spectacles in their case, his bedside reading matter and the alarm clock.

  Spooner swore, trying to kick his way out of the sheets that had wound around his lower limbs. Starting to panic, he reached out, aiming for the light switch. This time his fingers closed over their target and he pushed it down. But no illumination was forthcoming. He pressed it up and down again, three times in succession. The room remained in darkness.

  A low, guttural chuckle beside him brought his flailing to a halt. It sounded barely human. The animal smell grew more pungent and he felt the tingling sensation again on his cheek, forming in his mind the horrible idea that a great, greasy goat was standing at his bedside, tickling him with its whiskery chin.

  At the same time, from somewhere else in the darkness of the room, a radiogram switched itself on. There was a crackle and hiss, the sound of jazz music fading into the clipped tones of an upper class voice: “Germany calling, this is Germany calling…”

  Icy terror surged through Spooner’s veins and he lashed out, breaking through the surface of the dream and sending a second wave of objects sliding down the counterpane to land on the floorboards with a thud.

  This time he was really awake. He threw back the bedclothes, shot out of bed and made for the light switch, which was, he now remembered, by the side of the door and not above his head. A click and a pool of yellow light banished the shades of his imagination back to the darkness that had spawned them. Before him stood only the rumpled bed, the table with his glasses case and alarm clock still on it, an armchair on which he’d placed his briefcase, and a wardrobe. The air was chill with the damp of early morning but the musky smell of Capricorn had vanished along with the nightmare.

  Spooner thought of Nicholas Ralphe and the rosary beads he had worn around his neck.

  “Is this what they did to you?” Spooner wondered aloud. “Had you dreaming of goats?”

  His eyes dropped to the floor. What had actually woken him were the volumes he had been consulting before he’d fallen asleep. One of them was Anna’s songbook, the other was Professor Margot Melvin’s second treatise on The Old Ways, entitled The God of Witches. On its cover was a painting of a coven in full flight, dancing around their Horned God – a gigantic goat, rearing up on his hind legs.

  He stooped to pick them up, shaking his head with a nervous chuckle. “Ach, you can only blame yourself,” he decided, moving towards his briefcase to put them back in. All the same, he took an instinctive look behind him before he opened it. The feeling of being watched hadn’t quite evaporated.

  Once there was enough daylight to drive by, Spooner was ready to leave. He wanted to make a call first, but the telephone booth in the hotel reception was occupied. Spooner lingered there a while, the tremors of his dream still prickling through his blood as he perused the noticeboard to the side of it. Another bill for the same act he had seen at the Shadwells’ was pinned up there. It was only when he saw it that his mind flashed back to his bedside reading and the revelation that had lain within it – there was a song in Anna’s book that was also called “The Two Magicians”.

  He caught his breath as he surreptitiously removed the drawing pin and took it down for a closer look. This had come off the press better than the one in the chemist’s and he could see the duo of a man and a woman, whose show he had missed by a week. An icy-looking blonde and a man in a top hat with a curly black moustache. Although he had no idea what her funambulist friend looked like, the woman didn’t resemble Anna in the slightest. Perhaps it was just coincidence, made to seem more like by the links he’d made between the Shadwells and the old Variety circuit. Still, it would be worth asking Norrie if he knew anything about the pair.

  He folded the bill and put it in his pocket as a man came out of the telephone booth. He was middle-aged, thickset, with the florid complexion of the habitual drinker. Though he held the door open for Spooner, there was something about his sardonic expression, coupled with the gabardine mac folded over his arm and battered trilby in his free hand, that brought to mind Lexy’s words about DI Fraser. Spooner smiled as they passed. He stayed in the booth until he heard the front door close behind it
s former incumbent. Then he replaced the receiver in its cradle and went on his way. It would be better, he decided, to call London after he’d put a distance between himself and the naval city.

  It was a decision he felt more sure of with each passing mile. Spooner was glad to see Portsmouth in his rear-view mirror and the weather appeared to agree with him. Once he had left the city, still swathed in the chill Channel fog, and taken the road up into the South Downs, the sun made a rare appearance to illuminate his journey over the ancient chalk landscape. In the skies above his head, the Battle of Britain had taken place over the summer of the previous year. But today Spooner had the rolling hills between Portsmouth and Guild-ford to himself, but for a couple of skittering partridges that broke from a hedgerow to run wildly across the road in front of him, and a kestrel, hovering above. As he drove, Spooner mulled over the events of his short stay in Portsmouth.

  While he suspected Lexy might have been laying it on a bit thick about his local detective, it was also possible that DI Fraser was in touch with other agencies interested in the activities of Helen Duncan, who would keep a contact on the local force. The reporter didn’t know that Spooner had no intention of writing a word about the medium that could ever be published. Not that he hadn’t carried out the interviews he had promised Oaten.

  Before meeting with Lexy, he had lingered at the Master Temple after the last hymn had been sung and prayer said, chatting to the regulars. He had found them just as Lexy would go on to describe – lonely old folk, frightened out of their wits by the blitzing of their city and without anyone able to offer them an alternative to staying there, coming together to seek some form of comfort. He had been particularly touched by the elderly Mr Markham, bent up with arthritis, the elegant Miss Foxley, who smelled of the same lavender perfume Janet had worn and had kept herself just as fastidiously, so that she resembled the twilight-faded ghost of a young woman waiting for her fiancé to return from Ypres.

  To see Mr Markham’s rheumy eyes light up when he received his message and Miss Foxley’s papery hand reach up to touch the locket that contained a photograph of her beloved Harry, as she was told she looked beautiful and he couldn’t wait for them to be reunited, was to witness the only happiness they might have known throughout a dark, uncertain week. For the service the medium was providing, Spooner could see no harm – other than the unnecessarily greedy demands the Shadwells made on their pensions.

  It was the matronly Mrs Dowson, she with the spirit budgerigar, who had provided the most interesting information. She had brought her friend Mrs Walker to the séance at which her Davey came through. Though she wasn’t able to describe what she had witnessed with very much clarity, she told Spooner there had been no doubt in her friend’s mind that she had seen her son that night. As they were leaving, Mrs Dowson slipped into his hand the telephone number of Mrs Walker’s sister in Dorset. She knew it was a long way for Spooner to go, but in case he wanted to, she didn’t think her friend would mind talking about her experience. In fact, she felt sure that she would like to.

  The congregation of the Master Temple last night had not been anywhere near as large as that which had turned out for Helen. The handful of people he had met there were not thrill seekers, just normal, everyday folk. Spooner didn’t consider them to be stupid. He had, after all, once been one of them himself.

  When Spooner was a teenager, he had started finding his way into the homes of people in Aberdeen who held their own séances. These included a couple of friends from school whose parents dabbled with Ouija boards and the more serious students of the occult he started talking to at the shop. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who were brought up strict Calvinists, his family had little fear he would come to any harm in these places, and indeed he hadn’t. Instead, he had witnessed many strange and wondrous things.

  Rooms lit by Aladdin lamps where white, spectral shapes floated across the room, always emerging from and then retreating back into the curtains of various homemade cabinets. Trumpets and tambourines dancing in thin air by flickering fire- and candlelight. Victorian coins materialising onto the tops of tables while the sitters all held hands. Spirit guides from different continents and centuries, speaking in Greek, Arabic and Hindustani. He was often told he had a gift for contacting the spirits, so many of them made a bee-line for him at sittings. But never once had he ever had confirmation of the one thing he had entered this shadow realm to seek – an apparition of, or a message from, his own departed mother.

  As he had confessed to Lexy the night before, he did not consider what he had seen at the Master Temple to be genuine psychic phenomena. Spooner was unsurprised by neither the reporter’s cynicism nor the Shadwells’ apparent opportunism. But this did not mean he entirely ceased to believe such things were possible, nor that some of these spectacles he had been privy to, in the darkened parlours of Aberdeen and at other places since, could always be explained away as conjurers’ tricks.

  Helen Duncan seemed to inhabit a murky world somewhere between his Triple-Us and the Three-M’s of Norrie’s world: magicians, mesmerists and memory men. If Lexy was right and the Shadwells were using theatrical trickery to extract money from the vulnerable then it actually put Helen in the clear of the theory that she might be an agent. It was local gossip they were using to weave an illusion, not information received from Germany, though Spooner now had a number for someone who would testify differently again, should the matter ever get that far.

  The person he really wanted to talk to next was the man who had spent a lifetime pursuing the paranormal, including taking those photographs of Helen that Oaten had shown him. What he had begun to learn about Harry Price was interesting indeed.

  Spooner had reached the highest point of the Downs now, the road leading into a densely wooded valley below. His map told him that Guildford would soon be in sight. At least there was one thing he could be pleased about. He had covered a lot of miles in the past few days and he had obviously chosen a good car to make the journey. The black Ford Anglia he’d bought secondhand before he moved to Manchester had yet to let him down.

  *

  Hannen Swaffer emerged from the front door of his house on St Martin’s Place. It was a clear, crisp morning and Mrs Swaffer had furnished him with an excellent breakfast while he perused the morning papers. With a freshly lit cigarette dangling from his lips, he strode down onto the Strand with a sense of purpose.

  Maurice Barbanell had summoned him to a rendezvous late the previous night. Swaffer knew it was going to concern Helen Duncan by the way his friend behaved, as if he had started taking lessons from that man at MI5 who had struck such fear into him – talking in vague allusions on the telephone, arranging to meet in the open air, preferably by the river, so they could say what they really wanted without fear of being overheard.

  Thus he found himself slipping down the steps to Villiers Street and into Embankment Gardens which, on such an unexpectedly delightful morning, was already full of people strolling, sitting and turning their faces to the winter sun with expressions of happiness. He found his friend standing underneath the statue of John Stuart Mill. As usual, Barbanell wasn’t smiling. He greeted Swaffer by raising one eyebrow and stalking off in the direction of the Thames. “Have you ever heard,” he said, “of anyone by the name of Ross Spooner?”

  Swaffer tried to summon a face that went with this name. “I’m not sure,” was the best he could do. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was speaking to Oaten again last night,” said Barbanell. “He said he’s just sent his assistant editor down to Portsmouth. I was quite alarmed – I did warn him what happened to me, but apparently he was convinced to do so by this chap, Spooner.”

  “Oh?” said Swaffer, feeling the stirrings of a memory tapping somewhere at the back of his mind. “And where did he appear from?”

  “Aberdeen,” said Barbanell. “His father runs a rare and occult bookshop there. I know of it myself; it has a sound reputation. According to Oaten, he’s a very personable
and knowledgeable chap – so personable that he’s been giving Ernest his services for free while still managing to be able to afford digs in Manchester.”

  “Is that so strange?” Swaffer asked. “Perhaps his father’s giving him an allowance. He probably considers it good background for taking over the business…” Another possibility crossed his mind. “Or is he a draft dodger, do you think?”

  “He told Ernest he’d failed the medical. Flat feet and bad eyesight, I shouldn’t wonder.” Barbanell snorted.

  “Well,” Swaffer said, “good for Ernest if he’s got someone young and keen to help him.”

  “I would have agreed with you,” said Barbanell, “if it wasn’t for the way he explained Spooner’s reason for going to Portsmouth. He said that it would be in Helen’s interests to get some eye-witness testimony in case she is ever taken to court.”

  The editor came to a sudden stop and wheeled to face Swaffer. “Now, excuse me if I’m wildly off the mark,” he said, “but doesn’t that sound like a policeman talking? It’s been gnawing away at me all night, Swaff. Weren’t some of the Heavy Mob seconded to that bunch over the river at the start of the war? And aren’t they all exempt from the call up?”

  That tapping in Swaffer’s mind became the knocking on a door which now began to open. It was three years ago, before the war, and at the office of his firmest friend in the Flying Squad, DCI Edward Greenaway. The detective had just raided a brothel on Dover Street run by a remarkable Jamaican dominatrix and reputed to have some interesting clients. Greenaway had been courteous enough to carry out his search during daylight hours and Swaffer had been trying to chivvy some finer details to little avail, when the knocking came. It was no more than a brief interlude – another detective coming in with some paperwork Greenaway had requested, a pale looking chap with plastered down hair and glasses, the sort of face that slid evasively from recall – but Swaffer thought the DCI had said: “Cheers, Spooner,” to the man.