That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

“Neither would I,” he agreed. “Just as well this Blackout Ripper business has given him something else to think about.” His eyes swept in a circle around them. It was a raw February afternoon from which the last dregs of light would soon begin to drain. The threat of snow lay so heavily on the air that no other walkers had been tempted to wander the path, only blackbirds rustling as they picked through the undergrowth of dried brambles for snails. “It would seem we have come to an impasse, Ross.”

  Spooner’s gaze fell towards the river, the onward rush of the grey-green waters so indifferent to their cares. Dorothy’s panting became the loudest noise as the Chief refilled his pipe and lit his tobacco. “As you know, I have my own chief to answer to,” he said, “and rather frustratingly, in view of what you’ve just told me, he has decided to lay the hounds off Hellish Nell. He feels, quite understandably, that if we were to make a move now, it might legitimise what happened in Portsmouth and turn her into a martyr for people like Swaffer and your editor. So he wants me to sit on my hands and do nothing more, for now.”

  “Ah,” Spooner’s gaze followed a piece of driftwood carried by the tide, powerless to control where the stronger forces that encircled it would whirl it to next. “So…”

  “So I suggest you return to Manchester and give her the glowing report your editor wants. Base it on what those women told you about the soldier in Singapore and the caretaker’s commendable brother – I’m sure you can embellish – and omit your personal experience entirely. Then put your head down and continue to be as helpful as you have always been without taking any assignments that might bring you into contact with that tricky old man from Fleet Street. With his heroine out of danger, his anxieties will fade and no doubt there’ll be other matters to concern him before he thinks of you again. Besides, if you were to disappear now, then it might justify any suspicions he has.”

  Spooner looked back at his companion. The relief he felt on hearing these words brought all his convictions back into focus. How could he have considered walking away?

  “I know it’s frustrating,” the Chief went on, “but such is the manner of the game we are embarked on. And, while we appear to have gone up one blind alley, another avenue has opened – and all down to you. You were right about the Ghost Hunter, Ross. Come on.”

  The Chief put a toe under Dorothy’s hindquarters. While they had been talking, she had gradually slumped back into a sitting position. “There’s a reason your father won’t have heard from him since your meeting,” he said, as they resumed their walk. “He no longer has that grimoire to sell. De Vere bought it from him in June 1940. I think he used it for the ritual they performed on Nicholas Ralphe.”

  Spooner’s eyes widened. “How d’you find out?”

  “I drew another lead,” the Chief said, “independent of Price. It was Ralphe himself who left testimony of his visit to the Ghost Club, where the deal that sealed his fate was brokered by a woman who should, by rights, have already been in jail. Another one of my failures.”

  Spooner looked across sharply. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “Not you, Ross,” the Chief shook his head. “De Vere. There is something more about him I need to tell you, although it will do me no credit and it might change your mind about carrying on with this work. Before the war, De Vere was one of my agents.”

  This was enough to bring Spooner to a halt. “No,” he said, feeling his stomach drop.

  The Chief scowled, his own gaze now drawn towards the river. The tide was high, the river a ferment of angry grey. Dorothy pushed her nose against his leg. “I met him at a party, years ago,” he said, reaching down to stroke her. “I found him charismatic and unusual, a high intellectual capacity driven by the impulse to rebel. Perhaps a more sober evaluation would be that of a psychopath. But when Hitler took power, I saw him as a perfect plant – so many in the Reich harbour a soft spot for the aristocracy, not least the former Ambassador, von Ribbentrop, with whom he was already acquainted. I imagined he would be able to put devastating information my way.”

  The Chief straightened up. “I lost contact with him in October 1940. Nicholas Ralphe had been shadowing him independently, both of them believing the other to be an enemy agent, but filed no further reports than the middle of December with his CO… and you know what happened to him then. So when Karl Kohl landed in the fens with his tales about Belladonna, I felt this could be the missing link… or should I say, the link to the missing.”

  “And you sent me to Birmingham to prove it?” Spooner’s face reflected his shock.

  “You were the only person with enough knowledge of their esoteric pursuits to work it all out,” the Chief said, “and work it out you did. De Vere’s passage to Germany was paid for by Price’s grimoire and Ralphe’s life. Belladonna got him there and, after what you witnessed last night, you may have reason to believe Ralphe had a good point when he warned you off any further entanglements with her and her kind.”

  The Chief’s blue eyes bored into Spooner.

  “Do you think she’s come back for your soul too?”

  PART THREE

  SATAN TAKES A HOLIDAY

  April 1943–April 1944

  21

  IT STARTED ALL OVER AGAIN

  Sunday, 18 April 1943

  It was such a lovely day for it to have to happen, that’s what Terry Jenkins couldn’t get over. A warm spring evening, the sunlight slanting through the trees onto swathes of bluebells, the air alive with birdsong and promise, as the four friends foraged their way through Hagley Woods, on the lookout for nests to raid and rabbits that might have been snared before the gamekeeper made his rounds at dusk.

  They shouldn’t have been on the De Vere estate in the first place, but that was all part of the adventure. Danny Shepherd was the oldest of the group of four boys, fourteen years old and wise to routes into the lands that fringed Wollescote, the village where they lived, on the outskirts of Stourbridge. It was he who had lured them from a neighbourly game of football on the rec to a poaching mission, saying that he had found a way in and promising them that untold delights lay beyond that perimeter.

  Terry, although tall for his age, was, at twelve, the youngest of the group, happy to go along with Danny and the two older lads, Bob Hodder and Frank Osbourne. Terry loved being out, exploring tracks through the Clent Hills, though he had never before strayed onto land that he knew was private. Like the others, he had confidence that Danny knew what he was doing. And so it seemed that he did, confidently leading them from the village up the path that wound its way beside the fields and into the undergrowth, through a gap in the hedge easy enough to crawl through, and into the Arcadia beyond.

  Danny showed them where he had found animal traps and snares on his previous reconnaissance, although it seemed the gamekeeper might already have made his rounds that day. His friend might not have been right about rabbit stew for dinner, but as far as Terry was concerned, it was bliss enough to be out in the sun and the wilds that day.

  Until they came to the tree.

  It was the tree that had him waking up screaming later that night, which brought his parents running into his room and provoked the tearful confession that led to the police being called. Sitting with his pa by the fire with a cup of strictly rationed cocoa in his hands, Terry could not stop shaking as he stumblingly related his story to the kindly looking Detective Inspector Woodhead, who kept reassuring him he would not be imprisoned for trespassing by passing his story on.

  It was like something from a nightmare itself, that tree. A monster of an elm, so heavily coppiced that its myriad branches protruded in a spiral like some vast crown of thorns around a thickset bole smothered in ivy. His first sighting of it had been enough to make Terry take a few steps backwards. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That’s the scariest tree I’ve ever seen,” Bob, who had also stopped in his tracks, seemed to agree with him.

  But Danny had clearly seen something different in it. “Look!” he proclaimed, pointing
a finger to a hollow just visible in the trunk. “There’s a nest up there!”

  Quick as you like, he had ferreted his way up through the ivy, his light frame and deft sense of balance aiding what would have been, for the others, a more daunting task. But as he drew level with the flash of white he had perceived in the hollow, even Danny’s confident smile inverted to a puzzled frown.

  “What’s that?” he unconsciously echoed the words of Terry down below.

  The tree smelled dank and earthy as it held him in its verdant embrace. In contrast, the white bone gleamed in the rays of the setting sun, stark against the forest green of the ivy. He thought at first it could be an animal skull, a small collection of which he kept in his pa’s potting shed. He reached out for it before his brain caught up with the notion that he had never seen anything this size before, not even a badger’s head was that big, and that, with its two hollow eye sockets and protruding teeth, it looked just like…

  “What you got there, our Dan?” Frank’s shrill voice keened up from below. Terry and Bob exchanged glances, neither wanting to move any further forward.

  Danny’s fingers curled around the object and he pulled it clear of the ivy. As he did so, his stomach tilted. There was still hair and skin stuck to the side of what really was a human skull, and a little white maggot reared up from the tangled mass in a writhing dance of annoyance as Danny interrupted it from its labours.

  “Ugh!” With an involuntary shriek, he dropped it, screwing his eyes shut and clinging to the tree as a tremor of nauseating fear passed through him, slicking his palms with cold sweat. The smell of death crept up to rest inside his nostrils.

  Frank ran forward to where Danny’s bounty had landed on the thick grass below him, then skidded to a halt. Cautiously, he knelt down beside it, prodding it tentatively with a stick as he gradually took in what it was he was seeing.

  “Bloody ’ell!” was the summation of his findings. Terry and Bob edged towards him, holding their breath. Frank looked up at Danny. “It’s real, isn’t it?” he said.

  Danny forced his eyes open. “Looks like it,” he admitted.

  “What’s real?” Bob was brave enough to venture.

  “It’s a skull,” Frank’s voice, which was on the verge of breaking, veered up a few octaves. “A human skull. Still got some hair stuck to it and everything…”

  “Shurrup, our Frank!” looking down at the three faces, eyes round and mouths in perfect O’s, Danny pulled himself together. It was up to him to be leader in a crisis.

  “But worra we gonna do with it?” Frank wanted to know. “It can’t be right, finding it up a tree like that. Shouldn’t we tell the police?”

  “We can’t do that!” Danny warned. “We’re trespassing as it is. If the gamekeeper finds us he’ll shoot us, or take us to the earl and have us skinned alive. No,” he shook his head, “we’re gonna put it back in the tree and then we’re gonna get out of here as fast as we bloody well can.”

  Frank’s jaw sagged. “Put it back?” he repeated.

  “That’s right.” Danny checked his footholds. “You pass it back to me, our Frank, and I’ll put it back where I found it. C’mon,” he encouraged, “don’t be a baby.”

  Frank cleared his throat. “Orlright,” he said, colour spreading across his cheeks. He didn’t want to touch the thing, and at first attempted to lift it up with the end of his stick.

  “Don’t!” Danny shouted. “You’ll break it if you do that.” He could feel his heart hammering but he had to try to stay calm, push away the thought that the skull might just have belonged to the last kid to go birds’ nesting without permission on Earl De Vere’s estate. “Just pick it up and give it here.”

  Frank reached in his pockets for his handkerchief. It wouldn’t be so bad, perhaps, if he didn’t actually touch it…

  With the cloth wrapped around his fingers, Frank lifted the skull, being careful not to take hold of the part that still had a hideous clump of matted hair attached to it. Terry and Bob merely watched, horror having rendered the pair of them mute. Bob looked away, into the trees, back to the path they had been following, trying to get his mind back to that earlier place. But Terry found himself unable to stop staring at the grotesque object as Danny lifted it from Frank’s wobbling grip and put it back into the hollow of the tree.

  It seemed to Terry afterwards that, as the exchange was made, all the birdsong stopped and the sun, so bright only moments before, dipped behind the hills, taking all its warmth with it. When Danny dropped back down from the elm, it was suddenly twilight, their way back through the woods darkening fast. The lads followed their leader without a word, their hearts in their throats, for every snapping twig, every scurrying of an animal or beating of birds’ wings, was perhaps the sound of a vengeful gamekeeper creeping up on them with both barrels raised… Or worse still – the phantom that inhabited that terrible tree seeking out those who dared disturb its remains…

  Once they were safely out of the woods and back onto the lane, Danny pulled them all into a huddle, looking at them through huge, serious eyes, pale-faced in the gloaming.

  “We don’t tell anyone, right?” he demanded. “This is our secret and it’s gotta stay that way, OK? Otherwise…” He made a cutting motion across his neck.

  The other three nodded their assent.

  “Good.” Danny nodded. Then, with the fear of the devil inside them, all four ran full pelt back home.

  With the help of the De Veres’ gamekeeper, DI Woodhead found his way to the coppiced elm directly after he had left the Jenkins’ residence. He stood guard beside it while as many officers as the local force could muster cordoned off the rest of the estate. While he kept his ominous watch, the weather took a turn from the long, mild spring they had been enjoying since March. A spiteful north-easterly wind blew up, bringing stinging flecks of rain. Standing in this gloom before a crime scene that could have come straight from the pens of the Brothers Grimm, DI Woodhead knew why his young witness was so terrified.

  There was something about this place, with its little follies scattered around the wooded valley, that had always seemed forbidding to those who had grown up near it, as DI Wood-head himself had. He was not surprised that someone could have committed a murder in such surroundings. Nor that, if not for Terry Jenkins and his friends, the body might have remained there undiscovered, until the day the tree rotted and fell.

  Spooner was pottering in his Manchester lodging room, making himself a cocoa on his one-ring stove. It had taken him a few moves from various digs around the city centre before he had finally settled into a place where the landlady didn’t mind him paying for a private phone line to put into his room and, so long as he continued to cough up his rent punctually each Friday, left him pretty much to his own devices.

  The room was at the top of the house and looked out over the canal, which, along with the attendant chimneys and cooling towers of the district, reminded him of Birmingham. Most of the space within it had been taken up with a gradually encroaching library of books on subjects he had been studying, and stacks of box files containing articles he had written and research he was undertaking, all colour-coded for easy reference. Apart from the bed and kitchenette – a sink with a cupboard underneath that served as a pantry and a rack over the draining board, placed next to the one-ring stove – it more closely resembled his former office in Wormwood Scrubs than a cosy bedsitter.

  Filing had taken over his world again. In the Two Worlds office, this had made him very popular with Miss Josser, who returned the favour in tins of cake, eked from her ration. He, in turn, had learned everything there was to putting out a magazine, from an editor who had begun to look upon Spooner as if he were his own son. There were times, within the cocoon of the office and this little room, when it was easy to forget he wasn’t just what they thought him to be.

  As the Chief had suspected, his employer’s worries about Helen Duncan had abated. Over the past eleven months, there had been no further sightings of men in
blue suits in Copnor Road, nor similar visitations to Maurice Barbanell’s office. The report Spooner filed on the Holland Park séance, a work that had called upon all the literary skills of fiction he didn’t realise he possessed, seemed to have shored up his standing with his editor, as well as serving to allay any doubts that Barbanell may have whispered into Oaten’s ear. It went down well with the readers, too – up to a point.

  The national mood was altering. Despite the arrival of the Americans, the German surrender in Stalingrad and the headway made by British forces in North Africa, there still seemed no end in sight to the war and, the longer hostilities raged, so the comfort civilians had once derived from a visit to the spiritualists was ebbing. It wasn’t just cynical Fleet Street and the shadowy figures of the Intelligence agencies pointing the finger of doubt any longer. Public opinion, according to the letters Spooner kept seeing, was turning against mediums seen to be taking advantage of the bereaved, including Helen and the Shadwells, who were virtually her sole patrons these days.

  This catalogue of misgivings he duly copied and sent to the Chief, who had him follow up certain characters when they passed through the city, reporting on spiritualist gatherings the way he had spent the early part of the war at fascist meetings, to assess for infiltrators. Though the DPP might have advised his boss against its use, other magistrates had started to charge fraudulent mediums under the Vagrancy Act. There had been three successful prosecutions this year, in Cardiff, Birmingham and Great Yarmouth.

  Other trails remained cold. Norrie had yet to trace The Two Magicians, and if the Chief had made any use of the information that Nils Anders had first landed in Britain as part of a German circus, he was keeping it to himself. Spooner still read the Birmingham papers and made the odd foray into pubs in search of elusive entertainment, but when he had nothing more substantial to work on, he spent his evenings studying his magic books.