by Helen Smith
“There were women on the moon before Neil Armstrong?”
“Not literally. Not physically. The women were down here helping him. We can fly to the moon or visit the pyramids when we open our minds to the spirit world. My new book, Psychic Techniques for Future Positivity, can give you all the information you need. I’ll have some copies with me in Torquay.”
“And you want me to use these techniques to try and stop Edmund Zenon getting killed?”
“No, dear! We’d never give an assignment like that to an amateur.”
“What, then?”
Gerald pointed across the room to a portrait of a pale woman with an oblong face, her eyelids half-closed and unfocussed, as if she was trying to see beyond what was immediately in front of her, to connect with a more spiritual dimension. Or perhaps, thought Emily, she had been brought here straight from work at dinnertime, and she was close to fainting because she was so desperately hungry?
“Lady Lacey Carmichael, president of this society from 1935 to 1939,” said Gerald. “Her husband and brothers were killed in the First World War. She was a woman of great sadness…and great wealth. After the First World War, she became a pacifist and a vegetarian, with an interest in spiritualism. In the events leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, she stepped down from the office of president to campaign for world peace. She vowed to continue her campaign even after she died, declaring that if she heard news of an impending tragedy, she would try to communicate with the society to warn us about it from the other side. She left a password that she would use, if she ever got through—no one knows it except the president of the society. It’s passed on as part of the inauguration ceremony.”
Emily gawped a bit at this. “You think Lady Lacey’s been communicating with Peg about World War Three?”
“Well, no.”
“But she’s transmitted the password?”
“No, dear,” said Peg.
“Lady Lacey has never succeeded in contacting anyone, unfortunately,” Gerald admitted. “But she left some funding as part of a legacy, you see, so that we could investigate fully if a message should get through to us from the other side, no matter who it’s from. As Peg is working with the society to advise us on the conference, I believe her premonition qualifies as being worthy of investigation. Anyway, I’ve checked with our lawyers and they’ve allowed access to the funds. So we’d like you to investigate and write a report about the premonition and its outcome.”
Emily appealed to Dr. Muriel. “Couldn’t one of your students do it?”
It was Gerald who responded. “No, it has to be someone…sensitive. Lady Lacey was quite particular about that. Muriel told us about your connection to your dog, Jessie. It makes you a suitable candidate.”
Dr. Muriel beamed.
“But I don’t…I don’t connect with Jessie. I just think about her now and again. I felt very sad when she died, but I’m over it now. She’s not my spirit guide!”
“You haven’t developed your sensitivities yet, dear,” said Peg. “But you’ve got the right aura.” She turned to Gerald. “She’ll pass.”
“Even if I don’t believe in it?” Emily was incredulous.
“It’s your observational skills I’m interested in,” said Gerald, “rather than your aura.”
“We’ll see if we can get you involved in some nurturing circles, Emily,” said Peg generously. “I must give you my card. If you’re interested, I can help you develop your skills when we get back from Torquay next week. I do one-to-one or group sessions, depending on your spiritual needs and your financial situation.”
Gerald pressed on. “Muriel said you’re a vegetarian? That was something else Lady Lacey was quite keen on.”
“She is.” Dr. Muriel smiled proudly.
Gerald had saved the best for last. “And are you on Twitter?”
Emily shook her head. Twitter?
“Well, never mind.” Gerald looked disappointed. “Lady Lacey didn’t include any stipulations about that—it’s something I’m keen on myself. We’re leaving for Torquay tomorrow. I take it you’re not working as it’s Good Friday? I’d be delighted if you would join us for Belief and Beyond.”
“I was going to spend the weekend in my garden.”
Gerald leaned forward and spoke persuasively. He taught part-time at a university and he was used to dealing with impoverished young people who dined too often on baked potato.
“We will, of course, pay your accommodation, meals and modest expenses. What do you say? Shall I book you a ticket for the train to Torquay with Muriel tomorrow?”
“A weekend by the seaside,” said Dr. Muriel. “Fresh air and palm trees. A couple of nights in a fancy hotel.”
“You want me to investigate a suspicious death that hasn’t happened yet, using a legacy from a long-dead member of the British aristocracy—and the main reason you’ve decided to hire me is because I have a dead dog and I’m vegetarian?”
“And because you carry a notebook.” Dr. Muriel grinned at Emily. “That’ll come in very useful for gathering material for the report.”
“We’ll pay you four hundred pounds,” said Gerald.
“Five hundred,” said Dr. Muriel. “Plus expenses.”
Gerald only paused for a moment. “Five hundred, then. What do you say, Emily?”
It was a more appealing way to earn money than spending her days in a dingy basement in an office in London, typing up lies. “All right, then. I’ll go to Torquay with you tomorrow. The forecast isn’t very good for the weekend. I can start work on my garden next Saturday.”
Gerald stood and leaned over the table to shake Emily’s hand. “We could get you set up on Twitter.”
“I’m quite a private person.”
“We have a hashtag, you see.” Gerald switched the poster round again so it faced Emily, and he pointed to the string of letters underneath the picture: #BELIEFANDBEYOND.
“Hashtag,” Dr. Muriel said appreciatively, as she unhooked the silver-topped cane she always carried from the back of her chair. “Sounds like something you’d have deep-fried and served with chili sauce on a road trip in America.”
Gerald spoke earnestly. “A hashtag is an Internet search term, Muriel. It will help people to find us online and get updates on the conference. What are we thinking at any given moment of the day? Hmm? If we wish to modernize, we need to let people know! Transparency, that’s the key to success in business these days. And the society, despite its royal charter and long, eminent history, is a business like any other. We need sponsorship if we’re to survive. And the best way for sponsors to find us is through social media. If we can get you set up, you can Tweet your thoughts from Torquay, Emily. It’s instantaneous; spontaneous. Very exciting.”
“I’m not spontaneous. I like to think things over,” said Emily apologetically. “That’s why I carry a notebook.”
“Oh my days!” Peg remained in her seat, arms folded, as Emily and Dr. Muriel made their way toward the door. But she looked pleased. “She knows her own mind, this one. See you tomorrow, Emily.”
Emily and Dr. Muriel planned to travel back to Brixton together. As they reached the Mall, Dr. Muriel stepped off the pavement, waving her cane. Then she put thumb and forefinger in her mouth and whistled at an advancing black taxi. The taxi had already started to slow down so the whistle was unnecessary, but its ferocity impressed Emily and made her giggle. Dr. Muriel gave the driver the name of the street where they lived in Brixton, then she stepped aboard, cane tucked under her arm, like a general about to be driven to the front to inspect her troops.
Emily pulled the door shut behind her and settled into the backseat next to her friend. The taxi turned and doubled back up the Mall, passed Buckingham Palace, then headed south across the Thames into the chilly late-winter darkness toward Brixton.
Crossing the Thames at night, with the bridges all lit up, was one of Emily’s private joys. London seemed alive then, a glittering dragon whose protection could be
claimed by whoever gazed on it and admired it, though it would never be tamed by anyone.
She wondered if Dr. Muriel was thinking the same. But her friend was thinking about Twitter. “There’s very little attraction in it for academics. One becomes an academic in order to grandstand. One wants to publish papers that are twenty thousand words long. One wants to hold the attention of enraptured students and fellow professionals for hours at a time. Think of an idea as taking the shape of a coconut. You’re visualizing something like a hard, little hairy head. Yes?”
Emily nodded.
“It’s the job of someone like me who thinks for a living to get inside at the precious sweet meat of it and hand it about so people can feast on it. Think of me, Emily, as the person at the fairground with three balls in her hand, trying to knock that coconut off its stand and claim my prize.”
Emily did as she was bid, though she had to make an effort not to giggle.
“Twitter acts a sort of grater, you see, shaving the edges off the delicious sweet meat and sprinkling a few dry wisps of it online. What sort of a feast is that? Being enigmatic is fine. But if I wanted to write haiku, I’d have become a poet, not a philosopher.”
“I’m not on Twitter, so I haven’t really got an opinion on it.”
Now Dr. Muriel tried to hide her amusement. “If we restricted our opinions to matters of which we have direct experience, the world would soon be a dull place.”
But things were never dull when Emily was with Dr. Muriel. It was one of the reasons she had agreed to go to Torquay. That and the five hundred pounds.
When they reached Brixton, Dr. Muriel and Emily were deposited in the quiet street where they lived opposite each other. There, in their separate residences—Emily in her ground-floor garden flat, Dr. Muriel in her larger red-brick house—they had the last night of untroubled sleep they would enjoy for a while.
CHAPTER TWO
GONE
Sarah and Tim Taylor were in their sitting room in Northampton with Joseph Seppardi, talking about the future. This was slightly unusual for Joseph. Generally his clients wanted to talk about the past.
“We have to stand up for what we believe,” said Sarah. She was a sturdy woman with graying blonde hair that looked as if someone had hacked at it with a pair of shears. She was a keen gardener, and not vain about her appearance, so it was possible that one day last week, or the week before that, she had pruned a rambling rose or the branches of an apple tree with a pair of shears and then turned the instrument on herself. When she was younger she’d had an English rose appearance, with pale skin and a soft blush to her cheeks. Now the capillaries under the skin on her cheeks were broken and red, the clusters of delicate colorful lines resembling some other plant in her garden—a geranium, perhaps.
Tim, her husband, had managed to hold on to a few things in his life. His hair was one of them. Sarah was another, of course. Till death do us part. His job, his house, his friends at the golf club; everything else seemed lost. He had realized his sense of fair play was gone not long after Liam had gone. Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. That horrible, mournful, wicked word that sounded like the clang of a funeral bell and meant he had been left behind and had to get on with it. And then along came Joe. The Restoration Man, Tim called him, because of what he had restored to them. Being English, you had to make a joke of it, even death. Even your son’s death.
Tim was still English. He ought to remember to add it to the list of things that hadn’t gone, when he enumerated them, as he sometimes did. He’d only had one son—one child—now he had none. He had been a father and couldn’t un-be a father. But it was difficult to hold on to what it meant now that his son was gone. Gone. So he played up to the other roles that had been assigned him in life, to help to hold onto those. Husband, employee, friend, Englishman.
You get past forty and—Tim was pretty certain of this because he had watched his father and other men go past this age—you’re not meant to learn new things. It’s all you can do to try not to forget. Where did I put my socks, my glasses, my keys? My son. Where did I put my son? I put him in a coffin and then he was gone.
Now Tim had a new role. He was a believer. He wasn’t sure, if he was going to be absolutely honest (and he had no intention of being absolutely honest with Sarah), that he did believe in it. Still, he had been cast in the role of believer by his wife. Seeing her survive each day had been what had saved him, rather than the messages from Liam. The messages had been trivial to the point of being annoying. But they comforted Sarah. Joseph Seppardi had restored Liam to them. And that meant that when Tim woke up and remembered and looked at his wife, she was still here, even though at the beginning she had said she couldn’t bear to be.
Tim and Sarah were nice. That’s how people described them. They were decent people who had survived the loss of their son. No one should have to bury a child; it was a common sentiment, often expressed. Actually Liam had been cremated and his ashes had been scattered in a favorite place. But that was hardly the point.
“You did right,” Liam had said afterward. “You did what I would have wanted. You did the right thing.” He had been a typical monosyllabic teenager, preoccupied with teenage boy things, too old to climb onto Sarah’s lap and give her a cuddle. She had missed that, with him growing up. Liam had been a sweet child, then a mischievous toddler, then a sporty boy, then a tall, awkward, slightly secretive teenager. His father was tall. Like his father, no doubt Liam would have grown out of the awkward stage and grown up to be a nice man. Would have. Should have.
Sarah now sometimes thought how lovely it would have been to keep hold of Liam if he had survived, however badly incapacitated and uncommunicative. The one-sided chats and cuddles. The never growing up and leaving you. Sitting at his bedside, holding his hand, confiding in him. Talking about his father, maybe, about things she might not even have told a woman friend. She thought sometimes that it would be nice to have Liam here, even with his back broken and half his head hewn off. That’s because she didn’t know what it was like to tend a severely injured young man. She only knew what it was like to tend his spirit.
She was preoccupied with something else now: she had been provoked and she would have her fight. This man called Joseph Seppardi had given comfort to her, had spent hours and hours helping her through her grief. Now he and others like him needed her help. She would go with him to the seaside town of Torquay—and Tim would go with her, of course—and when she got there she was going to do whatever it took to help Joseph. She would be as tireless and tenacious as Joseph had been when getting the answers Tim and Sarah had wanted in their grief.
Sometimes Sarah thought she’d relish a real fight rather than what people called a fight these days, which was little more than an argument. A fight to the death, and if her life should be taken, so much the better. She’d be reunited with Liam, he’d be whole again, according to Joseph Seppardi, and she in her prime, around thirty years old, both of them closer in age than they had ever been, and closer emotionally. And if, during the course of such a fight, she ended up taking a life rather than giving hers? That would be OK. Sarah would gladly take one life to save many others if needs be. It would be an easy decision to make.
“We have to stand up for what we believe,” Sarah said now. “That magician wants to make a mockery of people like us. If he had his way, people like Joseph would never be able to help the bereaved. We have to do something.”
Sarah was one of those ordinary women who can be formidable fighters when provoked into doing the right thing. She wouldn’t fight for herself but she’d fight for others. She hadn’t been able to fight to keep Liam alive. He was dead or dying when they got to him. They had said—Liam always said—he felt no pain, that it was instant. (Tim wasn’t so sure. Even the dead must sometimes deceive. Even a dead boy might lie if it meant doing a kindness for his mother.)
But now Sarah was going to fight and so Tim was going to stand up for, well, for what Joseph and Sarah believed. He w
as going to stand by Joseph. At the beginning, when he’d heard what had happened to Liam, Tim had just wanted to lie down and die. Standing was better. Standing up, standing by: any kind of standing, for whomever and for whatever reason.
“Let us prepare,” said Joseph.
It was something like praying, though the three of them remained sitting on the pale green sofa (Sarah and Joseph) and the pale green armchair (Tim) in Tim and Sarah’s sitting room. In that respect, at least, it was better than going to a church where you had to kneel. But since childhood Tim had gone to church for the hymns, not the prayers, and he rather missed the singing. Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways. It was a shame to have a religious meeting without the hymns. This was just one of the new ways of living that Tim was having to explore, now that he was a believer.
Joseph was a tall, thin man. Taller than Tim. He had dark hair and dark skin. In the adventure books Tim had read as a child, these would have been described as saturnine looks and it would have meant he was the baddie. But Joseph had only ever done them good. Hadn’t he? Joseph’s hands were dry as leaves on a bonfire, his fingers long and thin. He took Tim’s hand and looked directly into his eyes. It was like being seduced. Tim had always thought of seduction as being about a promise of sex between two people—a man and a woman, in his personal experience, though he had seen enough of the world (or read about it in the newspapers, at least) to know that two women might be involved, or two men. But this kind of seduction was not about sex. It promised something else. Tim held Joseph’s gaze and, in spite of his misgivings, he gave in to it.
He sat on the armchair and leaned forward awkwardly to hold hands with his wife and this odd, compelling man who he didn’t quite trust.
“There’s someone here with us,” said Joseph.
“What does he say?” asked Sarah. She was thirsty for it. She’d heard it before but she wanted more of it. She was like an addict. She was like a vampire feeding on her dead son. Tim was suddenly disgusted. He had a vision of himself standing up and running away; a dying, drug-befuddled man in hospital who has a moment of lucidity, pulls the catheters and cannulas from his body and escapes, to die free, with dignity. And then he was sorry. They were all dying. Why not die this way, slowly, leaking life, his wife beside him? They didn’t have dignity or certainty. They weren’t free. But at least they had each other.