Black Light

by Bedford, K. A.

  So how did he do it?

  How could I ask Julia to make some inquiries for me?

  I needed to find out how the priest had made contact. I could not simply wait for Julia to send me notes like this.

  Then, quite apart from all this, there was the hard question: How on Earth could I get the police and the courts to believe all this?

  Obviously, I could not. The testimony of what would amount to a ghost would hardly be admissible.

  I needed Gordon’s expertise. Somehow I needed to find a way to show that the fingerprints the police forensics men had found were not mine. My alibi for that night was already useless — “It couldn’t have been me, guv, on account of how me and me mate Gordon were sneaking around enchanted ruins and working magic, and that … ” Yes, I could see how that would sound. And now Gordon was no longer speaking to me. I had no notion of what he might say if questioned by the police about his movements that night. Would he tell the police exactly what we had done, or would he not? And if he told them everything about that night, did that mean they would soon find out about our raid on the Hawkins property?

  My head boomed with pain. It would not stop. Tired all over again, I went downstairs to see if I could find where Sally kept those salts.

  Murray sat at a counter in the kitchen reading the newspaper, and if I had not been in so much pain, and my world so much in turmoil, I might have paused a moment to think that it was very odd indeed for a newspaper that was lucky to come out once or twice a week to have a fresh edition out on a Sunday morning, something it had never previously done. But I felt like a walking corpse, wracked with pain, so I did not stop to consider all this. Outside, I could hear Young Ryan chopping wood for the range. The sound, the rhythmic chopping, added to my headache. Murray looked shocked to see me up at this early hour, and guiltily pushed the newspaper away and stood. “‘Morning, ma’am!” she said.

  I stared at her. “Good God, woman, do I terrify you that much?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am!” she said.

  Perhaps she was worried I might come at her with a letter-opener.

  Then I saw what she was reading: a special issue of the Pelican River Record.

  “Oh … ” I said. “Would you mind passing that over? Murray?”

  She looked like I might eat her if she didn’t, and shoved the paper down the counter.

  The Record was a newspaper in which someone catching a fat mulloway would get a banner headline. Today it had a better headline:

  LOCAL PRIEST BRUTALLY SLAIN!

  HOMICIDE POLICE QUESTION FOREIGN AUTHOR

  30

  Later that morning I sat alone at the dining table, my breakfast ignored and going cold. Even my coffee stood untouched. I kept seeing that damning headline before my eyes. “FOREIGN AUTHOR”. I had never in my life felt so unwelcome, so much an intruder in this land. The cold, wretched feeling in my gut was starting to make me feel ill, to say nothing of my pounding headache. If it kept up like this for much longer, I would need to retire to bed in hopes of sleeping it off. Murray had given me the salts bottle, but in the same way she had given me the newspaper — as if her life depended on it. No amount of persuasion had helped. She had said, “Father William was a wonderful man! He was such a help when my Ern was killed in the War. Sorry, ma’am. It’s just … He was such a fine man!” At that point she had dissolved into tears and fled out the back door.

  Mr Campbell telephoned on the dot of nine o’clock. The clock on the mantel was still chiming. The telephone’s jarring ring made me jump.

  “Mr Campbell,” I said, when the operator put his call through to me. “I’m very pleased to hear from you.”

  “Good morning. I am sorry I could not attend to your business sooner than this.”

  I explained the circumstances to him, and the police’s interest.

  “But they have yet to formally charge you, is that correct?”

  “I should have given them a statement yesterday, but I … ”

  “Wait for me. I’ll pop down around one-ish, we’ll discuss what you’ll say, and then we’ll both go and have a quiet word with the constabulary. How does that sound?”

  He made it sound like a bit of a spiffing wheeze, actually. Like a trifle. Like we’d go and have a chat with the coppers and then head off for celebratory cocktails at the Commercial Hotel. I explained that they probably had forensic evidence placing me at the scene.

  “Well, we’ll get that tossed out, for openers. Not to worry, Mrs Black, I deal with this kind of thing all the time.”

  Mr Geoffrey Campbell rolled into Pelican River and pulled up at my home at twenty-five minutes past one that afternoon. Never had a day taken so long in passing. Between speaking to him that morning and his ultimate arrival, it had been only about four hours. It had felt like four months. The headache, the awful sick feeling, the icy tension, had not helped matters. Now that he was here, looking dapper and confident in a charcoal-grey three-piece pinstripe suit with fob-chain and expensive shoes and greying hair swept back from his keen face with fragrant oil, I should have felt profound relief. He could not, after all, have looked more the part of the leading man come to save the day. To me, however, his arrival meant only that the time when I would have to front up to the police to make my statement was too close for comfort. I could not sit still. I had consumed nearly the whole bottle of salts, with little result. Sally, when she saw how much I had taken, told me I would probably be ill this evening. I didn’t care. I had tried four different — identical — outfits before settling on one. It had been the ties that flummoxed me. Everything about how I dress is the same, but I do try to vary the tie. Today, however, the choice of tie was paralysing. Rutherford ultimately came to the rescue, recommending my old school tie from Newnham College. It looked dignified and conservative, and went well with my college brooch, worn on my coat lapel. Then I had trouble tying the damned thing, and Rutherford had been forced to take over the operation for me, even as I fidgeted and bounced on my toes and muttered to myself about the weather.

  Anything to keep myself from seeing that headline again in my mind. “FOREIGN AUTHOR … ” Foreign? I had been here twelve years, I said to myself. No, I was not yet a naturalised citizen of Australia. I maintained my British citizenship because it was useful; it opened doors, particularly in Europe, when I travelled there on research trips. I had had no idea, after all this time living here, that there was such apparent resentment, which is how it felt. The article described me as wealthy, reclusive, eccentric, opinionated, peculiar and, worst, “superior”.

  I had said to Rutherford, “Do I appear to believe I am somehow ‘superior’ to ordinary people, Rutherford?”

  “Not at all, ma’am,” he said, with a straight face, as he adjusted my tie.

  I told him he would have to polish up his lying skills.

  “Right you are, ma’am.”

  Mr Campbell and I spoke in the drawing room. Rutherford served afternoon tea. Mr Campbell enjoyed Murray’s scones to the point of asking for the recipe. I told him he would sooner acquire God’s personal telephone number than get Murray to give out one of her recipes. I found myself laughing a lot, but in a way that in no way conveyed any sense of genuine mirth or happiness. It was nervous, brittle laughter. Mr Campbell, I suspected, was only too used to this sort of thing. Actually, as I sat there, sipping sweet tea and pulling scones to bits, I found myself wishing for one of the cigars that I used to smoke, before giving them up years before. A good smoke would settle me, I kept thinking.

  Mr Campbell eased me through the situation. I told him about the notes, and their ominous questions regarding my husband and father’s relationship, and told him of the faint and mysterious odour. I wondered if I should tell him the whole story, or just those parts of it the criminal justice system of this country would understand. At first I hesitated, and kept to the “facts”. It was easy to imagine that he had heard worse stories than mine. Then I went into the business with first my letter of apology, then
what I called the “bribe letter”, and finally the bizarre surprise of finding the letters switched. He kept saying, “My word … ” As we went along, I began to suspect that, privately at least, Mr Campbell was somehow amused by all this. This did not help me to feel that I could entirely rely on the fellow.

  Soon we had the facts laid out — minus the occult business.

  Mr Campbell ran through it all quickly, to make sure his notes were correct, and to make sure he comprehended the matter fully. As he went, a minute frown deepened. By the time he was done, he said to me, “Now, Mrs Black, you can tell me the rest.”

  “The rest, Mr Campbell?” I said, doing my best to look calm and detached.

  He allowed himself a wry toothless smile. He said, “I have no interest in whether or not you actually killed this poor man. Indeed, I do not wish to know. It’s beside the point. But it is obvious to me that there is more to this story that so far you have omitted. What were you and Mr Duncombe doing that night, by yourselves, while Father William was getting himself killed?”

  I hesitated. Mr Campbell looked to be in his late thirties, perhaps, prematurely grey, and he had once been athletic in some way. Perhaps he had been a quality batsman for his university cricket team. He had the gaze for it, I thought, to see how a rapidly moving ball was spinning, so that he might effectively defend his wicket. He did not look, in fact, like a man who would brook nonsense, nor did he look like he would suffer fools gladly. So I started in once again, treading carefully around the more supernatural elements of the matter.

  “Ah,” he said, nodding and making further notes, and drawing meaningful arrows between circled elements of his existing notes. “I rather thought as much,” he said, when I was done.

  This time I simply stared. “You thought as much, Mr Campbell?”

  He helped himself to another scone, applying a dab of fresh whipped cream and some strawberry jam. “Oh yes,” he said, pausing whilst he chewed. He smacked his lips. “My word! These scones are quite deadly!”

  I drew him back to the matter.

  He said, “I read an interesting monograph some time back, which drew a connection between, on the one hand, great scientific revolutions and advances, and, on the other, increased interest and activity in matters of the occult. The more things seem to go in one direction, there appears to be an opposite and more or less equal thrust, if you will, in the other direction. Intriguing theory, I’ve often thought.”

  We talked about all this for a while longer, which mostly consisted of Mr Campbell telling me about his background reading in “this and that, you know”, and chums he had known at university who had regularly dabbled that way. But then, somewhere around half past two in the afternoon, Mr Campbell, scones demolished, turned to me and wanted me to tell him all about that long night.

  So I told him. Starting with the ominous telegram from Julia, and all her misfortunes, through the business with the notes, the search for the cellar, our raid on the two properties — Mr Campbell shook his finger, “naughty naughty”, as I covered that part of it — and everything that had occurred deep in the ruins of the Cahill property, the business with Gordon and the elven shaman — “indeed? My word!” he said — and my encounter with Mr Ukresh Nor, also known as Variel. And then, once we returned to the house, learning that Julia had been strangled, and that Father William had been stabbed.

  “This is more like it,” he said, reading back through his pages of notes, nodding to himself, satisfied that now the picture made more sense. He drew more urgent arrows between circled and underlined phrases, and conveyed an air of someone planning an elaborate painting.

  “I say,” he said at last, “it’s got rather a bit of everything, hasn’t it?” He smiled, apparently trying to set me at ease, but instead making me feel worse.

  I explained my theory about Father William wanting to hurt me so badly that he would resort to an elaborate plot like this, rather than, for example, simply killing me outright.

  “The police won’t like this at all,” he said, reading through his notes again.

  “What should I tell them?”

  “For one thing, only answer the questions they ask, Mrs Black. And wait for me to provide permission before answering anything. They will absolutely hate being spoonfed information like that, but it’s what you must do. Then there is the matter of the forensic evidence. You surmise that Father William will have arranged through his unorthodox methods to have planted your fingerprints in suggestive places at the scene of the crime — correct?”

  “I would bet my life on it, all things considered.”

  “Well,” he said, shifting in his chair, making himself more comfortable, “I shouldn’t worry too much about that.”

  “I shouldn’t?”

  “I know people, Mrs Black.”

  Frowning, I looked at him, wondering what on Earth to make of that. “Do tell, Mr Campbell.”

  “Suffice to say, try not to worry overly much about the fingerprints. One way or another, I should be able to get all of that thrown out.”

  “Pardon me for putting this quite so bluntly, sir, but I’m afraid I do not share your confidence in this matter.”

  “I am sure you do not. That is entirely all right. From my initial sniffing about prior to popping down here this afternoon, I think I can safely report to you that there is a bit more to this case than some funny fingerprints and a very cross old clergyman.”

  “Would you care to unburden yourself of this information, at least for the sake of easing my own nervous agitation?”

  He smiled. “We shall see what moves the other side plays first.”

  “Moves, Mr Campbell?” I had not meant to raise my voice.

  He flinched.

  “Please excuse me,” I said, getting up and pacing in front of the fireplace. “I am not having an easy time of it.”

  “That’s quite all right. I do understand.”

  “It’s just that, as things stand right now, I could find it rather difficult to remain in this town. The local newspaper this morning … ” I could not finish. I covered my face and tried to hold back my tears.

  He remained seated. “It will be all right. I promise.”

  I wanted to laugh, but it came out as a terrible coughing fit.

  Once I regained my composure, he said, “We have arcane tricks of our own, we lawyers.”

  Later that afternoon saw Mr Campbell and me sitting in the cramped interview room at the local police station. The stink — of stale tobacco and nervous sweat — was appalling. Behind us, up near the low ceiling, a small rectangular window let in a bit of the gloomy afternoon light. A naked insect-spotted electric light bulb hung from the ceiling, emitting a useless glow of its own. We had been waiting here more than fifteen minutes when Inspector Carmody lumbered in, with Sergeant Sills trailing behind. Neither looked like they had slept much. Carmody, seeing Mr Campbell, muttered something under his breath that seemed to amuse Campbell. I gathered that the two had some sort of history. Carmody, sitting, said to me, “You’ve done well, then, haven’t you?”

  Before I could respond, a third man slipped into the room. He was old, perhaps in his seventies, and dressed at least as well as Campbell; he walked without visible difficulty, and stood straight. He eased into a folding metal chair in the back of the room, behind the policemen, crossed his legs, and adjusted the cuffs of his expensive trousers. He produced a gold cigarette case, from which he took a long, black cigarette. Sergeant Sills lit it for him. Soon the room was full of an exotic stench I did not like. It smelled like something from the far east of Europe. The newcomer held his cigarette in the Continental manner, between thumb and middle finger, pointing up when at rest, to minimise waste.

  I leaned across to Mr Campbell, who had also noted the arrival of the third man. “Who’s that?”

  “An interested third party, from what I’ve heard,” was all Campbell would tell me.

  Carmody, sitting at the table, glared at me and opened a cardboard fil
e containing a sheaf of typed documents and large black and white photographs taken in harsh light — which showed an old man’s twisted body, dressed in pyjamas, drenched in what looked like black blood, sprawled face-down across a cluttered desk. It did not look like Father William. There was none of his sanctimony, or his barely concealed bitterness.

  Campbell said, “My client is here to make her statement, Inspector.”

  “And you’re here to make sure she doesn’t actually tell us anything — right, mate?”

  Campbell said nothing, but looked confident.

  The old man in the back of the room watched the end of his cigarette burn.

  31

  Sergeant Sills produced a court order, signed by a magistrate in Perth, bearing the Governor’s seal, permitting the policemen to take specimens of my fingerprints. Mr Campbell had no objections, but he did insist on giving the document a close reading before allowing the sergeant to produce the fingerprinting equipment. The procedure was filthy but quick; I shall remember the ink’s oily reek for the rest of my life, the pain of humiliation. When Sills was finished with my fingers, he did not offer the use of a bathroom where I might wash myself. Mr Campbell reminded him of his obligations. Sills escorted me out of the room, down a short passageway, from which I could hear a group of local policemen sitting around talking about a planned fishing trip later that evening. The bathroom was tiny and dirty and smelled of mould, mildew, and something else on which I did not dwell too long. Sills dragged me out before I was finished and deposited me back in the interview room. He said nothing throughout the entire encounter, and succeeded in making me feel like a criminal.

  The interview resumed.