That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

  De Vere could not remember precisely where he had first encountered the man who called himself Nils Anders, only that it was in Birmingham and, if not at a theatre or music hall, then a pub or club favoured by the city’s bohemians. He found both Anders’ striking looks and sophisticated patter alluring, particularly when the tightrope walker claimed to be a high-ranking Black magician. Delighted at the opportunity to sniff out a miscreant for the Chief, he began to cultivate this strange foreign creature passing himself off as a Dutchman, whom he suspected was more likely a German spy.

  Anders told De Vere that he had jumped a train at the age of twenty-one and crossed the border to the Weimar Berlin of 1933, which tallied with the date and age at which Otto Dieterling had been released from jail. In the decadent quarters of the German capital, he was initiated into a sect that worshipped Baphomet, the God of the Templars, by an adept who was also in showbusiness and helped him develop his skills both as a circus performer and as a student of the Left Hand Path. Anders believed he was part of an elite who would come to rule over the world once chaos had been unleashed from the abyss – an event that had, when the two men first met, in the October of 1939, just been set into motion.

  Throughout the months of the phoney war, Anders spent a lot of time at Hagley Hall, tutoring his host in magical practices and revelling in the atmosphere of the park. De Vere reported to him the goings-on of the societies he belonged to in London, hoping to find a definitive connection. He had been attending gatherings of Mosley’s Blackshirts and extolled their charismatic leader, but Anders was more interested in Captain Archibald Ramsay of the Right Club, who was telling his members to prepare for imminent invasion. De Vere duly got himself an introduction and there met a man called Ralph Nicholson, a guest of the glittering Lady Wynter, who had no idea that the handsome flight lieutenant had been sent to infiltrate the society. Neither apparently did De Vere who, reading him as a potential traitor and finding that he was stationed near to his family home, invited Nicholson up to Hagley and introduced him to Anders, who considered him suitable material for initiation.

  When both men managed to avoid being scooped up in the Chief’s raid on the Right Club and the subsequent prosecutions, Anders assured them that their fortune was due to the protection of Baphomet, although perhaps to test how far that luck extended, he set them a new task. He had heard there was a man in London who owned the most important grimoire in German history, a book once owned by Goethe. Knowing how well connected De Vere was, he expected it would not be beyond their powers to find it. With the help of Lady Wynter, they purchased Harry Price’s folio in June 1940. Invited to the Hall to receive his prize, Anders brought with him an old friend from his circus days, who was herself now working in Birmingham, an alluring redhead called Clara Brown.

  It was at this point that things started to go awry.

  De Vere realised Nicholson was being set up with Clara and was alarmed at the speed with which she worked her charms – partly because she stirred up something previously dormant within him too. He had always found it easy to attract admirers of both sexes, but until then, had preferred the attentions of men. Clara awoke a desire in him that clearly still simmered. He put this down to the rituals they began practising, each one more physically and emotionally challenging than the last.

  The Birmingham blitz began on the thirteenth of August, on information that, Spooner now realised, could have come from De Vere as equally as it could have from Ralphe. As he had suspected, Anders became as jealous of Clara as Anna had been of her lover, but was equally powerless to stop events from taking their course. Belladonna was doing too brilliant a job of relaying the right information back to the Abwehr.

  So he turned instead to his spellbook, performing a ritual from The High German Black Book on Samhain six days after the last Luftwaffe raid on Birmingham. De Vere was frightened by what might occur, and so obtained a quantity of opium to dose himself with before the ceremony began. His recall of events was blurred, though his description of seeing a purple ball of light chimed with Spooner’s experience. At the end of it, Anders and Clara carried Nicholson from the temple and he never saw the RAF man again.

  For the next month, Clara paid frequent visits to Hagley Hall alone. She told De Vere that their Magus was making plans to receive them into his new headquarters, a castle on the Rhine. Before Christmas they took a train to London, where they spent two days in a hotel in South Kensington awaiting instructions. Early in the evening of the second day, a man called for them and drove them down to the coast. The journey took around three hours and ended at a desolate inlet, deep in the marshes, where a smack waited to take them across the Channel. The night was thick with fog, conditions they had been waiting for, and the journey made him too sick to recall much detail about either their chauffeur or the fisherman who steered their course away from the patrol vessels, except to say that Clara talked to all of them in German. Spooner wondered if Anders had used the same escape route when he disappeared from London in December of the following year.

  De Vere and Clara were met by another car on the French side of the Channel and driven to Calais, from where their journey continued by air to Berlin and then finally to the Rhine Valley, where De Vere met the Magus, Heinrich Himmler, in the SS Headquarters Castle Wewelsburg. Clara stayed a couple of days longer; she was going to Amsterdam to prepare another agent for a mission. She told De Vere she had been ordered to find a mysterious cave used by the Knights Templar, that lay beneath the crossroads of two Roman roads in a town on the outskirts of Cambridge. It featured a circular recessed altar where they had carried out rites to Baphomet and also acted as a repository for their treasures, perhaps even the Grail itself. It was the cave in Royston that Anders asked Professor Melvin about. De Vere never heard from Clara again.

  He was left in the very place that the Chief had hoped he would end up, the inner sanctum of the enemy, trusted with highly sensitive intelligence on the operations of Hitler’s elite. Himmler decided the best use for De Vere’s brand of Black Arts was in propaganda, and duly dispatched him to Berlin, where he began his broadcasts. When the German capital came under heavy Allied bombardment in 1944, he was transferred to Luxembourg and then finally Apen, near Hamburg.

  De Vere denied having anything more to do with Anders once he was inside Germany. He couldn’t account for the orders he had sent to open the Hall to him in the April of 1944, and why his gamekeeper had accepted them as genuine. Nor could he explain how Anders appeared to know who Spooner was really working for. The only genuine part of this conversation was the relief he showed when he learned Anders was no longer in any position to trouble him again.

  Himmler ordered Wewelsburg to be destroyed on 30 March 1945. De Vere and his “wife” Gudrun – another adept within the Obergruppenführer’s organisation – were issued with counterfeit British passports and turned loose. While the pair travelled, at her suggestion, towards Belgium and their eventual capture, Himmler was found hiding in a grain mill in the countryside between Hamburg and Bremen. He was taken to Security Force Headquarters in Lüneburg, whereupon the Magus escaped beyond all earthly jurisdiction, biting the suicide pill that was hidden in the back of his jaw.

  The extent of the propaganda work De Vere did for him would be for another agent to ascertain, once he was recovered enough to be flown back to London. Spooner’s job was to interrogate him on the subject of Belladonna, reporting to the Chief alone. Before he took his leave of the prisoner, he was shown what it was that De Vere had hidden in that abandoned house that was of such importance to him he had risked being shot.

  Spooner carried it in his briefcase now, as he stood in the winter sunlight that had just started to burn through the earlier mist, illuminating the imposing Portland stone exterior of Senate House in shafts of pale yellow. Rather like himself, this building had been requisitioned for the duration of the war, housing the Ministry of Information’s department of subterfuge and propaganda. It had withstood five bomb raids duri
ng the Blitz of 1940 without a soul being harmed. Now, with the peace, it had returned to its original purpose of education. The University Colleges of London had all come back, and along with them, a new department had found a home.

  It was situated at the top of the tower, commanding an epic view over the capital while all around the wind shrieked and whistled like the souls of the unquiet dead – a suitable setting for Harry Price’s National Laboratory of Psychical Research.

  Spooner found the Ghost Hunter at his desk, surrounded by the shelves that housed his archive of magic books, bequeathed to Senate House Library for perpetuity in return for the space to run his organisation rent-free. Although their appointment had been arranged beforehand, when Spooner stepped into his domain, he still looked startled, the angry caterpillar eyebrows rearing as his grey eyes lifted from his paperwork.

  “Yes?” he uttered gruffly. Then a more contemplative look stole across his features.

  “Spooner,” he rose to his feet with a smile. “It’s you, is it?”

  His civilian clothes were not so different from the outfit he had been wearing the last time they had met, though Spooner had treated himself to a new suit similar to the one that had sustained him through the war. But, seeing the older man’s eyes travel upwards, he put a hand up to his hair, which now had a streak of white through the front of it.

  “Aye,” he confirmed. “It’s me all right.”

  “Well,” Price waved at the nearest chair. “Pull that up to the desk, then. I’m not so light on my feet as I used to be.”

  “But at least you’ve found yourself a good home now?”

  “A safe haven,” Price agreed. “If a little…” he wrinkled his nose, “clinical.”

  “Look, I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you,” Spooner began. “Only I didn’t want to come until I knew I had something of value to show you.”

  “Oh, and what could that be? Has it taken you this long to learn the secrets of that book I gave you?”

  Spooner opened his briefcase. “Aye,” he said, “and I’ve brought it back in case you want to pass it on to someone else who might need it. You may be surprised to know that I hold this partly responsible for my still being alive, so I’m very grateful to you, Mr Price.”

  He passed Magic for Beginners, a little more dog-eared now, across the desk to its rightful owner, whose eyebrows twitched speculatively as he received it.

  “Is that so? Are you going to tell me why?” He flicked through the pages, satisfying himself that this was the same tome he had lent out. “I gather you stopped working for Ernest Oaten some time ago. What have you been doing with yourself since?”

  Spooner reached back into the bag. “I also found this for you,” he said. “Sad to say, it has been cared for even less well, but I hope it means your collection is once more complete.”

  He had wrapped it in several layers of brown paper to protect it, and though its hand-tooled leather cover was battered, the pages within curled where they had travelled across the battlefields of Europe next to its carrier’s ribs, it was still intact. He watched the Ghost Hunter unwrap it, his expression turning from curiosity to complete astonishment.

  “The High German Black Book,” he said, his voice rising an octave. “I never thought I’d see this again. Well, I never. Well, I never did…” his voice trailed off as he thumbed through the folio, shaking his head. Spooner watched him with satisfaction. He felt he had acquitted himself with a magician’s flourish.

  “I won’t ask you,” Price looked up, his voice becoming louder. “Indeed, I can’t ask you. As a member of the Magic Circle that would be unprofessional. But I am very grateful to you, Spooner, this is quite beyond what I ever expected. Though,” his eyes returned to the streak in his visitor’s hair, “I did think there was something interesting about you the first time we met. Now I’m certain of it.”

  “Oh yes?” said Spooner. He had adjusted well enough to civilian life, finding digs in London while he mulled over what to do next. Though he’d seen enough action with the Secret Service, at the same time, he wanted to find something to do that would help keep texts such as this safe from De Vere’s widow, or any other of Clara’s doppelgängers. He would never forget Nicholas Ralphe’s warning: “There are always going to be more of them, using their tricks and devilry the way they used me.”

  Underneath the table, Spooner kept his fingers crossed. “What’s that, then?” he said.

  Harry Price smiled, showing pointed teeth. “When do you want to start?” he said.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It was Dr Mike Dash, my erstwhile publisher at Bizarre magazine, who first pointed me to the story of the Hagley Woods Mystery and suggested that, if I was writing about the 1940s, I should incorporate it into my novel. For this direction, and the archive material that he shared with me, I cannot thank him enough.

  This is, of course, a work of fiction, my own imaginings woven around the skeleton of a woman found by schoolboys in a tree in Hagley Woods, Worcestershire, on 18 April 1943, who has still never been formally identified. From various sources, including Brian Haughton’s excellent website brianhaughton.com, the National Archives, contemporaneous police records and articles, I extrapolated on the theory that she was a German agent, an actress and singer named Clara, who was helping to orchestrate the Birmingham blitz for the Luftwaffe, as the spy Josef Jakobs claimed when he was interrogated by MI5 after being captured in farmland near Ramsey in Huntingdonshire on 1 February 1941. The spate of letters received by the Wolverhampton Express and Star in 1953 by the mysterious “Anna” of Claverly also claimed inside knowledge of Clara being part of a spy ring, whose number included a Dutch circus performer and a British officer who died insane in a military institution in 1942. Files relating to this latter person have still never been opened, but these strange characters, along with the hauntingly gothic settings of Hagley Park and Wychbury Hill all suggested something from the pen of Dennis Wheatley. Wheatley himself worked for the Secret Service in World War II and was a good friend of the spymaster, Maxwell Knight, whose wartime brief was to infiltrate fascist groups, many of which had occult leanings – and who first met his later recruit, William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw, at a party thrown by Wheatley. I am indebted to Paul Willetts for allowing me to use research on Knight gleaned from his own superb true-life account, Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms (Constable, 2015), in fashioning the character of the Chief. Phil Baker’s exemplary biography of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil is a Gentleman (Dedalus, 2009), was also very useful, as were the Black magic works of Wheat-ley himself, whom I feel has been an avuncular spirit guide throughout the writing of this book.

  The suggestion that Clara was killed as part of a Black magic ritual called the Hand of Glory was first proposed by Professor Margaret Murray, the real Egyptologist and author of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches. The identities of the first and many subsequent authors of the WHO PUT BELLA DOWN THE WYCH ELM? graffiti remain a mystery, but there are fresh cases of it seemingly every week – the base of the obelisk on Wychbury Hill was adorned with it and placards hung around signposts and trees in Hagley Woods when I visited in September 2016. Many thanks to Suzanne Knipe for being such a brilliant local tour guide on that occasion. Suggestive though they are, I didn’t make up any of the names of these locations.

  I always intended to write about the case of Helen Duncan, the last British woman to be found guilty of practising witchcraft in a controversial trial at the Old Bailey in March 1944. Malcolm Gaskill’s Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (4th Estate, 2001) provided an insightful and unprejudiced account of a case that continues to divide opinion and beg questions. It was in this book that I first came across the wonderful characters Hannen Swaffer, aka the Pope of Fleet Street, who defended Mrs Duncan at her trial, and Harry Price, the Ghost Hunter, who had by then spent over a decade pursuing her as a fraud. I found further press reports on the trial in the archives o
f the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express and my thanks to Max Décharné for hipping me to those, as well as the many other kindnesses he and Katja Klier have extended to me. I am further indebted to Harry Price’s former cataloguer Christopher Josiffe for letting me run by him my theories on how Harry could perhaps connect to Clara. I would also like to thank Alan Murdie of the Ghost Club and Charles Harrowell at Senate House Library for their help and assistance, and should like to point readers towards the wonderful resource, www.harrypricewebsite.co.uk, where you can find the pictures of Mrs Duncan and her ectoplasm, as well as stunning scenes of goat-based sorcery in the Harz Mountains.

  Again, the link between Price and those organisations being monitored by Maxwell Knight is purely of my own invention, though inspired by the fact that the former suffragette-turned-fascist Christabel Nicholson, who had an interest in the supernatural, also frequented the Russian Tearooms used by Nazi spies on Roland Gardens in South Kensington, which was on the same road as Harry Price’s National Laboratory of Psychical Research. She was also a member of the Right Club and was tried and acquitted of being part of a Nazi spy ring in a case instigated by Knight in the summer of 1940.

  I had no idea when I started writing that this story would incorporate things that happened to my own family during the war. Thanks to my granddad, Peter Unsworth, who was the spycatcher for Peterborough during the war, I did actually meet his opposite number for Huntingdonshire, DS Thomas Mills, who apprehended Josef Jakobs in the fens, though sadly I was too young when it happened to remember it now. Meanwhile, my other granddad, Horace Lawley, was working in the Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich that was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 13 August 1941, thankfully surviving the experience and going home the same day to continue his duties as an ARP warden. So my love and thanks to my family on both sides of the Veil: my parents Phil and Brenda, who helped so much in the research of this book with their own memories of the fens and the Midlands during the war and a constant supply of inspiring reading; my grandmas Joan and Evelyn, who kept everyone safe during those dark days; my brother Matthew, sister-in-law Yvette and the next generation, Tommy, Will and Sophie-Rose. For further familial support and wartime memories, my love and thanks go to Danny Meekin, Cath Meekin, Francis Meekin, Eva Snee, Danny and Elaine Snee and Mick and Maureen Snee.