Séance on a Wet Afternoon

by Mark McShane

  Bill came into the hall and closed the living-room door softly behind him, and, after pausing to button up the jacket of his baggy clerical grey suit, went quietly up the stairs. His hair had been washed, and dried by the fire, and was now its usual shape, waving loose and high on his head. As he reached the landing he belched, and patted his mouth and murmured, ‘Par’ me.’

  He stopped outside the door of the back bedroom and put his head close to it to listen. He could hear nothing. Moving to the side he went into the séance room, to the centre of the row of chairs, stepping lightly on the bare boards. He rested his knee on a chair and reached up to the picture and pushed it gently to the side. It slid round, flat against the wall, till it was upside down, and stayed there of its own accord. In the middle of the unfaded square of green distemper was a clean-cut hole, an inch across, through which came a glimmer of light. He closed with the hole and put his eye right on it.

  The ceiling fixture in the bedroom had an unusually low-watt bulb and the peep-hole didn’t allow a wall-to-wall view; he was able to see only the dim lower half of a lump on the bed; but the lump was perfectly still, and that was all he wanted to know. He nodded, and slid the picture back into place.

  When he went back into the living-room his wife looked around from her seat by the fire. ‘Still asleep?’

  ‘Yes. Quiet as a mouse.’ He was about to cross to the hearth when he heard a whistled tune from the street.

  Myra said, ‘paper boy?’

  Bill looked out of the window and saw a figure sweep by in the darkening light. ‘Yes, that’s him.’ He turned and went back to the hall.

  The front door was made of nine-inch-square panes of frosted glass, except for a foot of wood along the bottom that held the letter slot. The whistling grew louder and a mottled shape appeared on the door. A moment later a rolled newspaper shot with a bang half-way through the slot. Bill pulled it out and quickly opened it to scan the front page.

  Myra called, ‘Anything?’

  He returned to the lounge, looking at the paper and shaking his head. ‘No, doesn’t seem to be. Can’t really expect it yet.’ He flipped through to the back page. ‘It was only a couple of hours ago after all.’

  Myra came across, closed the door, switched on the light, took the paper from him and began to go through it. She said, ‘It is getting dark. I think we had better have the curtains drawn.’ Her voice was low and pleasant, and her diction, formed unconsciously from years of having to be heard and understood clearly the first time round, precise and perfect; she never, ever, contracted words. With her unplaceable, accentless accent and too perfect use of English she sounded like one to whom the language is not native.

  Bill knelt on the couch and drew across the flimsy green curtains, pulling them tight and keeping them together in the middle by skewering the cloth with a black-knobbed hatpin. The curtains dragged back from the fastening, leaving a thin shaft of window above and below it.

  Myra dropped the paper on the table and returned to her seat on the left of the hearth. Bill took the other armchair, and they both leaned forward, forearms on knees, staring into the glowing fire.

  After a while Myra said, ‘They will know by now, of course.’

  ‘Oh yes. Probably five minutes after I’d gone. I told you about those bells I heard. In fact, I’ll bet we find out later that the police threw road-blocks all around Barnet within ten minutes of me leaving the school.’

  ‘It will be in the paper tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Sure to be.’

  They fell silent again. Myra tapped at the fire with a partly chromed poker and broke up the neat mound of coals, causing Bill to frown slightly. The blue-faced clock on the mantel ticked loudly, and every now and then gave a dull click.

  Myra hung the poker on its rack and turned to look at her husband. ‘Well. Now we start on part two.’

  He said, ‘I’ll get the letter,’ and rose and moved through the narrow space between the armchairs and circled the table.

  On one side of the hall door was a well-crammed bookcase; on the window side a small bureau. He pulled down the flap of the bureau and brought out a writing tablet, its face page already covered with pencilled long-hand. He also brought out a sheet of brown paper, a bottle of glue and a pair of scissors, and these he set on the table. Back in his chair he put the tablet on the wide arm and took a pencil from his pocket. ‘Right.’

  Myra said, ‘Read it to me. See how it sounds.’

  Bill cleared his throat, and began to read: ‘Dear Sir, this …’

  ‘That,’ interrupted Myra, ‘seems a bit silly.’

  ‘Yes, it does a bit. Too formal.’ He struck out the first two words and began again: ‘This is to notify you that your little girl is in our possession. She is quite safe, and if you follow instructions properly she will remain safe. When you have read this letter, destroy it. By this time you will have informed the police of your daughter’s disappearance. That was to be expected. But do not tell them about this letter. We are professional criminals and we mean business. You will find enclosed a lock of your daughter’s hair, to prove that she really is in our possession. Your instructions are as follows. One. You will put an advert in the personal column of Tuesday’s evening Chronicle, to the effect that you are willing to oblige, and sign it with your Christian name. This advert you will address to Longfellow. Two. You will get a blue overnight bag, bearing the initials of the British Overseas Airways Corporation, and into this bag you will put twenty-five thousand pounds. This sum …’ He stopped, and looked at his wife. ‘We still don’t know if all that money’ll go in one of those little bags.’

  She frowned at the fire. ‘Oh, I think it would.’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better make some of them fivers, instead of all ones.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Say, ten thousand in fivers.’

  ‘Very well.’

  He altered the script, and read, ‘This sum is to be made up of fifteen thousand in one-pound notes and ten thousand in five-pound notes. You will be informed later, by telephone, where and when you are to deliver the money. After delivery your daughter will be returned to you. But if these instructions are not followed perfectly, or if there is any attempt to detain the man to whom you will give the money, you will never see your daughter alive again. We mean what we say. Signed, Longfellow.’

  Myra said, ‘Today is Monday. Will he he able to get an advert in tomorrow’s paper?’

  ‘Well, he should get this letter in the morning, or noon at the latest. He’ll have time.’

  ‘But we do not want to give him anything to worry about. Better to say Tuesday or Wednesday evening.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  ‘And I think you had better change lock of hair. Her hair, you said, was straight. Lock, I think, denotes a curl. Better to say piece.’

  ‘Or some?’

  ‘Piece.’

  ‘Yes, piece.’ He made the changes, and said, ‘Well, that’s that then.’

  ‘There is not something we have left out?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  They frowned thoughtfully at one another, each searching the other’s face. Bill said, ‘No, that’s it. You’re sure about it being the Chronicle?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s the paper we take. Don’t you think it’d be better to have it put in another paper.’

  ‘No. That is carrying caution too far. A million people take the Chronicle.’

  ‘Right. I’ll get to work then.’ He rose and went to the table, and his wife followed. He picked up the scissors and held them out. ‘You get the hair, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’ She took the scissors and went out of the room.

  Bill sat at the table. He opened out the newspaper, laid the tablet beside it, and with his pencil began picking out and marking words in the paper to match those in the letter draught.

  Myra clicked on the landing light and went briskly up the stairs, her breath coming out in faint clouds of vapo
ur. Outside the bedroom door she stopped for a moment to listen, then quietly turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The light was depressingly dim, making the room feel colder than it was, and she shivered as she crossed to the bed.

  Bending down she gently eased the blankets away from the girl’s face. This was her first look at the Clayton child. When Bill had come home from Barnet he’d carried the girl in completely hidden inside a blanket, and had taken her straight upstairs and put her to bed himself, he having the experience that Myra lacked, being the eldest of a large family and she an only child, and childless.

  Now she saw with surprise, and a faint tinge of pleasure, that the little girl was plain. The nose was large, the mouth wide and the forehead shallow. Hardly, Myra thought, twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth. But there was something about the face that was distinctive; it had a certain determination, and individuality.

  Myra lifted a string-thick strand of hair and snipped it off close to the scalp, and made a knot in its centre to hold the hairs together. She went out of the room and carefully locked the door behind her.

  Bill had found nearly all the words he wanted. Some he’d had to make up by joining words and part-words. There were two daughters in the paper, and he’d made the other two he needed from laughter, which he found several times in the political column. Many of the words were of different-sized type, but he felt this was unimportant, as was the haphazard apostrophizing.

  His wife came in and silently handed him the scissors, and stood at his side and watched, folding her arms and frowning.

  He set to work with the scissors and glue. He cut out the words one at a time and fixed them on the piece of brown paper, which had been lining a drawer for several years. He worked slowly, neatly and carefully, and enjoyed the task, and was a little sorry when he’d finished.

  Myra nodded her approval when he held up the letter, and went to the writing-desk and fetched a stamped envelope, home-made out of more brown paper.

  With the exception of street, every name of the address had to be constructed from part-words, and the finished envelope, to Bill’s eye, had an uncomfortable look about it.

  The letter was wiped free of possible fingerprints and folded with the snippet of hair inside, then put into the envelope, which was sealed, wiped and placed in a large piece of newsprint.

  Bill leaned back, and said, ‘There.’

  Myra went to the door. ‘I will get my coat.’ She left the room, and when she returned a minute later was wearing an old-fashioned black coat, waisted and square-shouldered, and under her arm were several folded blankets and a pair of green pyjamas. She said, ‘I brought your bedding,’ and moved to the couch and dropped her load.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  She took the letter from him and put it in her pocket, then buttoned up the coat to the neck, lifting back her head. ‘It is cold tonight.’

  He said, ‘I’d go myself. But just after washing my hair … you know.’

  She smiled slightly. ‘It is quite all right. I do not mind.’

  ‘Which way are you going?’

  ‘As was arranged. Bus to the first tube station, then tube to the West End.’

  ‘It’d be just the same if you posted it in Leyton, say, without going all the way in.’

  ‘I think we had better stick to the original idea.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  They went together into the hall, and Bill switched on the light and opened the front door. It was fully dark out now, and the stream of light from the doorway penetrated no farther than the waist-high wall three feet from the front step.

  Myra said, ‘Burn the newspaper.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It will probably be late when I get back, so you had better not wait up for me.’

  ‘All right. I am a bit tired.’

  ‘See you in the morning then.’

  ‘Yes. Good night.’

  Bill kept the door open long enough for his wife to see her way to the pavement, then he closed it and returned to the lounge. After he’d put away the glue and scissors, and burned the shredded newspaper, he began to arrange the blankets on the couch.

  He often slept in the living-room in winter; sometimes his asthma was so bad that he found it an ordeal to climb the stairs, and couldn’t lie flat in a bed anyway. He spent the nights in his armchair, dozing and keeping the fire alive. He was quite well at the moment, but there was no room for him upstairs; the box-room had only a single bed, and his wife was a restless sleeper, needing space to thresh in.

  He stuffed a cushion under the bottom blanket, to serve as a pillow, and he was finished. Crossing to the bookcase he pulled out one of the many Sherlock Holmeses, which he was fond of examining—more than reading—to see if he could come across instances of the author’s philosophy. He sat in his chair, spent a moment shaping the fire into a tidy mound, and leaned back with a little sigh of comfort and opened the book.

  Ten minutes later he closed the book with a snap and tossed it on to the other chair. He wasn’t able to concentrate. He hadn’t been able to concentrate, on anything, since the conception of the Plan. There was always a little worry nagging at the back of his mind. It wasn’t the implementation itself; he’d done the first of the two major jobs scheduled, and was so pleased with the way he’d succeeded that the fear of doing the second had been reduced; the rest was up to his wife. It wasn’t the rights and wrongs of the scheme, now; although he had never in his life knowingly done a wrong thing, he condoned the illegal act because Myra said it was a means to an end that would benefit mankind, and he believed what Myra said; she also said it was only technically illegal, since they had no intentions of keeping the money and the child would be returned safely; she conceded that it was in a way morally wrong to abduct a child, but it was only for three or four days, and there was no question of ill-treatment; it was almost like a little holiday. The thing that worried him was that no one would believe, should they be found out, that they were not real kidnappers, real criminals. It would be assumed, as he himself would assume were he not involved, that the object was gain. The true motive would be scoffed at, as were all things connected with spiritualism.

  But, he thought consolingly, the details had been so carefully thought out there was little chance of anything going wrong, and afterwards, after the police had found the child and the money in the disused builder’s hut already selected—sent there by Myra, supposedly having seen the place in a vision—there would be little or nothing for the authorities to go on. The girl would be able to describe only a room and, vaguely, a motor-bike and two people. Meanwhile the room would have been returned to its normal state and the cheap white paint removed from the furniture, and the two people would have shed their small but sufficing disguises; the bike was unimportant, being like ten thousand others. And anyway, since the child and money had been recovered, surely the police would slacken off their investigation. And then again, there was the dream.

  Myra had had a dream in which she saw herself sitting on a stool in the centre of a ring of men, all old and wearing black wigs, who were shaking their heads in bewilderment and repeating, ‘Only you know the truth.’ She had translated the dream as meaning the authorities would never know what had happened, unless she or her husband told them.

  Which, thought Bill, wasn’t very likely. He reached for the book, and settled down again to The Speckled Band.

  Two

  The box-room was small, and impossibly crowded. The wardrobe and dressing-table from the back bedroom had been moved in and were cramped at the side and foot of the bed. Since there was no space to open the doors of the wardrobe, all the clothes expected to be needed had been taken out of it and were hanging from its top and scattered round the room from the picture rail.

  Myra was asleep, on her side, her legs doubled up, but she suddenly opened her eyes and jerked her legs out straight as the sound of a child crying brought her awake. She yawned and moved over on to her back, snuggling
into the blankets, and lay still, listening. She was reluctant to leave the bed; it was a cold morning, and she wasn’t thoroughly rested; it had been late when she’d returned from posting the letter in Oxford Circus, and she wasn’t used to late nights.

  She frowned as the crying continued. But after another moment it stopped, and there were several dull thuds as doors were banged. She supposed her husband was tending to the child, and sighed and relaxed.

  She thought that so far everything had gone well. She had never for a minute doubted it would go otherwise, but it had made her nervous for her husband to be alone in Barnet, away from her steadying hand; she knew he was not of strong fibre, and apt to wilt under strain. But he had done very well. The worst part was over, and the rest would be easy.

  The door knob squeakily turned, and swung toward her. Bill came in, pressing himself between the door and the wardrobe. He smiled, and whispered, ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning. You are dressed.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been up for an hour. I didn’t sleep very much last night.’ He winced. ‘That rheumatism …’

  She nodded brusquely and sat up. She didn’t want to hear about his rheumatism. She was sorry about it and was fond of her husband, but she found it impossible to live in the constant state of sympathy his incessant complaints demanded. She asked, ‘What happened with the child?’

  Frowning at the loudness of her voice he whispered, ‘I heard her crying, and came upstairs. She just wanted to go to the bathroom, so I let her.’

  ‘Did she get a good look at you?’

  ‘No. She was still half asleep.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Well, she was only sort of mumbling. I just understood when she asked where her nanny was.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I didn’t answer.’

  ‘Good.’ She thought for a moment, before saying, ‘I think you can start the breakfast. Scrambled eggs, as arranged. I will take it in and get the meeting over with.’