Séance on a Wet Afternoon

by Mark McShane

  Myra said, ‘Children die every day, in all manner of horrible ways. And you must remember, she is far happier now than she has ever been, or ever would be in this life. I envy her.’

  He made no sign to acknowledge what she had said. She went on, ‘I know this sounds awful, but really you know, we are a lot safer now that she will be unable to talk about her abduction. I did not mention it before, but it occurred to me that she would be sure to mention the white furniture, and since it has already been seen by that detective it would not help us at all if we removed the paint. But apart from anything like that, if the police were suspicious that we were involved, they need only bring the girl back here and she would recognize me. There are many reasons for our being better off by this development.’

  Seeing there was still no reaction to her words, she gave up the attempt to console and became brisk. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘now we must needs make a change or two in the plans. You are listening to me, are you not?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said softly, his hand just leaving his mouth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Early in the morning you will take the child away. Not to the hut you had selected, but somewhere else. I think Epping Forest. You will leave her near some sort of landmark, and when you come home I will go and telephone the Claytons and the police and the newspapers, and describe the place where you have left the child. The next day you can take the money and leave it at the hut, and I will do some more phoning. You understand? You agree?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Good.’ She rose and moved between the chairs. ‘We must turn in now and get some sleep. It will be a busy morning.’ She left the room, and reappeared a minute later with her arms full of blankets. She made up the bed on the couch, quickly and roughly, and returned to the hearth. Bending down she touched her husband’s hand, shuddering at the coldness of it, and said, ‘Please try to sleep. This is an awful thing that has happened, but do not blame yourself. Try and be logical about it. Good night.’ She patted the hand, and turned and left the room.

  Bill hardly noticed her leaving, had hardly noticed her presence, and had only vaguely been aware of her speaking. His state of mind had not changed even slightly since the child’s death. He was still stunned with grief, a grief felt as deeply for the death itself as it was for his causing it. Far from being logical or doing any ratiocinating, his mind had not moved away from the act of dying, not even to consider the magnitude of it, as crime; he felt only moral guilt.

  So stunned was he that he didn’t know his head ached or his limp arm throbbed with rheumatic pain or that his breathing was difficult. He gazed at the smoke-curtained black back of the fireplace and saw, and saw over and over, the scene in the bedroom, and suffered torments. Occasionally he broke the pattern by thinking dully of what might have been had he not done such and such a thing or if the child had not tried to do so and so; but these breaks were fleeting, since the ifs and buts proved more agonizing than the facts.

  He lost all sense of time. He didn’t see the fire fade, flicker and die, or feel the cold air come cuddling close.

  But it was, finally, the cold and his pains and the squeaking effort of breathing that roused him. He sat forward, looked dazedly at the ugly grey ruin in the grate, shivered, and rose and moved across to his bed.

  After undressing mechanically, and just as mechanically folding his clothes with his usual neatness, he walked slowly around the table a dozen times, bending over his tightly clenched hands. He stopped by the sideboard and pulled open a drawer, and looked for the child’s clothes. When he didn’t find them he closed the drawer carefully and went into the kitchen. He was shivering so hard that the carrier bag rattled as he brought it from the cupboard and carried it to the table. He took out the oranges, setting them on their tops so they wouldn’t roll, and his cap and macintosh, and lifted out the blue bag. The white package was tied on, and without haste he unfastened each of the many knots. Unfolding the wrappings, he found inside a thick wad of banknotes and a piece of paper. Written in pencil on the paper was, It would not all go in the bag. Please don’t hurt my baby.

  His throat constricted, and convulsively he clapped the paper to his eyes and cried into it.

  Four

  The daylight had reached its full strength, which was a dull greyness that gave a firm promise of rain. The lounge curtains were still pulled to, but they were so flimsy and skimped that the room was very little darker than it would have been were they drawn back.

  Bill was standing by the table. He was dressed, and wearing his coat, helmet, goggles and gloves, and Myra was tucking the scarf in around his neck. She gave it a final pat, stood back and said, ‘There you are. All right?’

  His head dipped forward gently in a nod; the rest of his body remained motionless.

  ‘Right. Now you just sit down for a minute. I will see to everything.’ She turned and left the room, stepped out of the house briefly to open the screening half of the garage door, came back in and took the stairs rapidly in short chopping steps. There was no time to be wasted, she thought; it was already eight-thirty and there was a lot to do; things that should have been done and finished with for an hour or more, and would have been had she not slept in.

  She entered the back bedroom and switched on the light. The sheet-covered form was just as she had last seen it the night before, and looking at it as she approached she reflected on how much death belied the truth; it denoted end and decay, when it was actually a vivid beginning. She stood at the side of the bed, leaned over and tilted the body toward her, tucking the sheet behind it, then did the same at the near side and at the head and feet. Noticing the flash of something black on a corner of the sheet as it was flicked through the air, she caught at it and saw that it was stamped with a laundry mark. She hurriedly fetched a pair of nail-scissors from her room and cut away the smudgy black letters.

  She lifted the body, surprised that it stayed so neat and straight, and left the room with it held across her breast. Going outside the back way she walked briskly round to the garage. The side-car was open and ready. She slid the long white bundle inside, then secured the cover.

  Back in the lounge, panting a little from her haste, she said, ‘Now, you know what you have to do?’

  Bill was still standing where she’d left him. He said, ‘Yes.’

  She thought that since she had just spent fifteen minutes going over everything she’d said the night before, he would have to be very far gone with grief and worry not to know what he had to do. She said, ‘Right. Just make sure it is a place that can be recognized from a description. An unusual rock formation or clump of flowers for instance. Or a particularly large tree. And of course in a fairly pin-pointable section of the forest. Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. Come along.’ She led the way outside and stood by the garage door as he went in. She watched him start the engine, and took a step back from the noise.

  A hand touched her shoulder.

  She gasped, and shuddered round quickly. The delivery boy was standing there, holding out the newspaper and smiling. She drew a deep breath and glared the smile off his face, and took the paper abruptly. He backed away, blinking, and turned suddenly, grabbed his gatepost-leant bicycle and pushed off. She cursed him under her breath.

  As Bill drove out of the garage she hid the newspaper behind her, hoping he wouldn’t see it; she didn’t want any delay in his leaving. But he didn’t appear to see even her. He went by without turning his head, eased down on to the road and set off up the street.

  Myra watched him, frowning. She wasn’t happy about the state of his mind. She knew he had gone to pieces because of the girl’s death, but wasn’t sure to what extent he’d let himself go. She shook her head, and hoped he would keep his wits about him.

  Going into the house she stood in the hall to look at the newspaper. The headline blared WHERE IS LITTLE ADRIANA? Myra quickly skimmed through the story. Essentially it was the same as the evening before, except for the new angle of th
e parents waiting for the ransomed child. There was a picture of Charles Clayton, grim-faced, walking through his gateway, but the other pictures were the same, and the chauffeur was still assisting the police.

  Myra felt a slight disappointment. She had expected, for no particular reason, to find something along the lines of, Last night Mrs. Clayton drove to north-east London to attend a séance at the home of Mrs. Myra Savage, a well-known medium, and was told … She sighed and threw the paper on the hat-stand shelf.

  About to move away, she stopped and frowned, then raised her eyebrows and smiled quietly. She had remembered her words at the séance; remembered that she had said the child would be found today, and that was all, with no mention of whether she’d be alive or dead. She would be found today. The prediction was still good, and the others at the séance would remember it, and possibly—and Myra’s smile widened—remember and connect the word Dead with the prediction.

  The smile went as her lower jaw dropped. She had suddenly realized, for the first time, that what had made her pronounce the word was a clear case of precognition, that the attack, which had cost her hours of sleepless worry, was in fact the moment of dying, experienced simultaneously with the child. It was the most powerful and immediate of all the phenomena she had ever produced.

  A thrill ran through her, and she stood quite still for five minutes, relishing her achievement.

  Rubbing her hands together she went along the hall and into the kitchen, and quickly set to work. The bag of money and the half-wrapped wad of notes were put in the pantry, and the oranges were carried into the lounge and laid in the table’s fruit-bowl. She looked around, thinking she would do the other jobs in rotation of importance: sift the ashes, light the fire to burn the plastic macintosh, carrier bag and blue cap, remove the boards from the upstairs windows, empty the rest of the chloroform down the toilet and break the bottle in the field behind the back garden, and wipe everything within a child’s reach in the bedroom and bathroom.

  From Josephine Avenue to Epping Forest was but a fifteen-minute journey, and Bill was driving at a steady unhurried pace, a pace that belied his feelings and mental processes. Unlike the dull one-track sorrow it was weighted with the night before, his mind was now as confused and full of flitting thought as a fever dream. Mixed surrealistically with the thoughts—themselves almost spoken words, running through his head as if on ticker-tape—were vivid and frighteningly true pictures; pictures of himself being brutally questioned by police, being thrown in dark cells, standing pleading in a hostile courtroom, and repeatedly being hanged. The scene of the child’s death came and went frequently; but whereas before the words accompanying it revolved around Tragedy, now they revolved around Murder. He knew there was no doubt as to what the death would be considered: a smothering: a murder; and in the picture of himself in the prisoner’s box, the explanation he gave of how it had happened was so feeble that it would have been hilarious were it not for the hanging scene that followed close upon it. His pity was felt now more for himself than for the child, and he knew he would have to stop at nothing in preventing his connexion with the death being discovered. There was no question of right or wrong, moral or legal; there was only the all-consuming concern for self.

  He suddenly braked, recognizing a street on his immediate left as the one he wanted to take, and was just able to turn into it, albeit on the wrong side of the road. As he steered across to the correct side he saw a policeman ahead, walking slowly and pushing a bicycle, and he got a strong urge to stop by him, kneel at his feet and confess everything. The urge was so powerful that he clenched his teeth and trembled, afraid of what he might do. But he passed the policeman safely.

  The houses on the street changed from fairly large to small to well-spaced cottages. With the cottages the road became gravel, and after a few hundred yards it narrowed into a cinder lane and began to curve and wind.

  He had been on this semi-unknown route to the forest several times, for Sunday picnics, and was quite familiar with it, but due to his present mental state it was five minutes before he realized he had passed the cut-off he should have taken. The lane was barely wide enough for the machine to turn in, but he managed it without reversing.

  He drove back and turned off through a gateway, on to a track that had a belt of high grass running down the centre. On one side, beyond a small fragile hedgerow, was a rubbish dump that covered several acres, an ugly mess of old tyres, oil drums, odd-shaped chunks of metal and sodden cartons lying about among piles of smaller garbage. Standing near a pyramid of paint cans was a man, leaning on a shovel and looking down at a fire that smouldered at his feet. At the sound of the motor-cycle he turned his head, stared for a moment, and looked away.

  The track rose and fell and twisted, and finally came to an end in a small paddock surrounded on three sides by tall dense hedges profusely covered with bramble. On the fourth side was a barbed wire fence, and a yard behind it the trees of Epping Forest.

  Bill drove around the paddock and came to a stop beside the wire and with his machine facing the exit. He switched off the ignition and sat for a moment listening. It was quiet, with only faint and scattered bird-calls. He got to the ground and quickly opened the side-car cover, keeping his face averted. With his eyes fixed on the hedge he felt down and grasped the sheeted body. The first contact of his hands made him shudder, but he forced himself to go on, and lifting out the long bundle he held it across his waist.

  He had no trouble with the fence. There were only two strands of wire, and he trod on the bottom one and slid under the top. He went forward into the trees, walking in as close to a straight line as he could; he didn’t want to get confused and be unable to find his way back.

  Almost at once the body began weighing heavily on his arms. The load would have been eased considerably were he to lift it close to his chest, but he preferred to keep it at a full-arm distance, and even tried to ignore the fact that he had it.

  When he’d penetrated so far that on glancing back he was unable to see the light at the edge of the forest, he began looking for a suitable place to leave the body; looking carelessly, not intending to waste too much time seeking perfection.

  A peculiarly shaped bush caught his eye, and he stopped and looked at it; but he soon saw with regret that it wasn’t peculiar enough—there was another identical with it a little way ahead, and another beyond that.

  He was about to move on when he heard a faint crackle coming from somewhere on the right. He froze, leaning forward, and listened intently. There was silence, then, clearly, a voice. It cried, ‘Reg! This way!’

  He moved quickly, heading to the left, heading away from the caller, whom he judged to be about fifty feet away. The trees had become close set, making for better cover, but making speed difficult—he had to turn with practically every stride.

  A fallen tree lay across his path. He was lifting his leg over it when he realized it would make the perfect landmark. He turned right and walked along beside the trunk, which got thicker by degrees and rose till it was shoulder high and ended in a massive spread of red roots that he had to detour two yards to circle.

  The base of the tree was at the edge of a small clearing, and he moved into the centre of it and looked all round before turning back to the jagged crater the tree had left behind.

  ‘Hey, Reg!’

  Bill jumped. The caller seemed right at his back. The bundle fell from his arms as he whirled around, and a bare leg flopped out of the sheet.

  There was no one in sight, but sounds of passage were very close. He turned and ran to the edge of the clearing. Another shout came from behind; he didn’t catch the words but it spurred him on.

  He reached the trees and had to reduce his run to a striding walk, and began to twist and turn, weaving between the trunks as quickly as possible, yet not quickly enough to keep up to the speed of his heart.

  Suddenly the trees were widely spaced and he was able to run again, and he ran as hard as he could. The goggles started to
bounce on his nose, and he held them in place with one hand. There were more shouts from behind, but he wasn’t sure how far behind, and he wasn’t going to stop and listen and find out.

  He saw a wide stream on his left, and moved to its bank and ran along beside it. A moment later he saw another stream on his right, running parallel to the first one and drawing in towards it up ahead. Before he had realized the strangeness of this he was brought to a halt.

  The streams met in front of him and became a large body of water, and he saw immediately that it was not two streams, or one, but a crescent-shaped pond, and that he was at the point of the peninsula. He would have to go back.

  He turned, took one step, and stopped. Three boys were coming in a half run towards him. They had dirty faces, were aged about twelve, and wore untidy Scout uniforms. One shouted, ‘Hey, mister!’

  Bill was so frightened that for a moment he couldn’t move. Then he did move, in the only way open to him: in the boys’ direction. He veered to the right, keeping close to the edge of the water, and tried to run, but could get his legs to perform merely a jerky walk.

  The boys clustered together and stopped in his path. Their faces were vacant with excitement. One spread his arms and said, ‘Hey, mister.’

  Bill tried to skirt round them, but they moved in a body to front him again. He said, ‘Go ’way.’

  They all began speaking at once, their voices high and breathless: ‘Mister, come quick. We’ve found a dead corpse.’ ‘It’s true, mister. Honest.’ ‘I saw it first.’

  He pushed through them roughly, treading on a toe. ‘Go ’way.’

  One grabbed his sleeve. ‘It’s over ’ere by a big tree. It’s a dead corpse.’

  ‘No, no!’ Bill gasped, shaking off the hand. ‘Please’

  Another ran ahead and stood in his path, and jerked a thumb to the side. ‘You’re goin’ the wrong way, mister. Come on. It’s in a sheet. I saw it first.’