by Helen Smith
“It’s here somewhere, I know it is,” said Peg, rummaging through her handbag. “What a bother, all this security. It’s a wonder you didn’t ask for a full-body scanner at the door, Gerald. And pity the poor people who haven’t got delegates’ passes. Do they sleep on the streets?”
“They show their room keys,” Emily said, holding up hers.
Gerald ignored Peg and spoke to the night porter. “I wonder if you’d do me a favor and keep an eye out for a local fortune-teller. She may try to gain access to the hotel.”
“What does she look like, sir?”
Gerald didn’t know. He turned to Emily, standing just behind him.
“Dark glasses. Mohair coat.”
The night porter pointed into the silvery night behind them. “Like that?”
Fragile but determined, as hairy, in her mohair coat in the light of the full moon, as a woman just beginning to turn into a werecreature, there was Madame Nova coming up the path toward them. And yes, she had her dark glasses on.
“Oh my days!” said Peg.
“Quick!” said Gerald. Still at the door, he gestured for his companions to pass him and make for the safety of the hotel bar. “Go! Go! Go!”
“I think we ought to see what she wants,” said Dr. Muriel, staying put.
“She looks harmless enough, poor dear,” said Peg. “If she’s a local psychic, perhaps she wants to talk to me about something?”
Gerald’s traffic-cop gestures and staccato shouting had attracted the attention of some of the people at the bar, including Edmund Zenon. “Stay back, Edmund!” said Gerald, noticing his interest. “I’ll handle this.”
So of course Edmund walked out of the bar and came toward them to see what was going on, followed by Chris, who was followed by the Colonel, who was followed by Hilary and Trina. Tim followed the Colonel. Joseph Seppardi followed Tim. Sarah followed Joseph.
“You!” said Madame Nova as she approached the marble steps leading up to the hotel. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Stay away from me!”
Who did she mean? Emily looked around at the people beside her on the steps outside the hotel, and at the faces inside the hotel, pressed close to the glass doors to see what was going on. It was like walking through customs in an airport, when you know you’re not carrying anything illegal, but you still feel guilty. Almost all of them had been in Torquay earlier on, and any one of them might have walked past Madame Nova and given her a fright. Or was there some more sinister, persistent annoyance that she’d had to put up with from one of the guests at the hotel?
“Who do you mean?” Emily asked her. “Has someone been bothering you?”
Madame Nova stood at the bottom of the steps and ignored her. “There’s someone here with me. A little girl.”
No there wasn’t. She was on her own. There was a bit of murmuring to this effect from onlookers.
“She’s never far from me. Can you hear her say your name?”
“Oh my God!” someone whispered. “Is it a ghost?”
“You can’t hear her, can you? And I’m not sure that I hear her, either,” said Madame Nova. “I don’t think I remember anymore what her voice was like. I only remember the memories.” She looked out across the bay, back in the direction she had come—back at something no one standing here could see. “Traces…impressions…ephemeral as moonlight silvering the sea in the night.”
It was all very theatrical. Emily would have laughed if it hadn’t seemed so sad.
Chris edged past the night porter and came to stand on the steps. Edmund came with him. Chris was wrapped up in two thick sweaters after being in the sea. But Edmund was in his shirtsleeves. He shivered.
Chris said to Madame Nova, “Are you all right? Come inside. Come and sit down for a minute.”
Madame Nova’s gaze was unfocused. She might have been drunk. She pointed into the crowd. “You know what I’m talking about.” It wasn’t clear who she was addressing. “Her name should be written on your heart.” She tottered unsteadily up the steps.
“Come on,” said Chris. He and Edmund stepped forward, to take hold of her.
“Leave me alone!” Madame Nova jerked her head back, dark glasses still in place. She lashed out, then stumbled.
Hilary came running from inside the hotel, shoving at Edmund and Chris as they caught hold of Madame Nova. “You heard what she said. Stay away from her!”
There was a tussle as all three of them tried to grab hold of Madame Nova, with Chris and Edmund also trying to avoid manhandling either of the women. Hilary squished Chris’s face with the flat of one hand as she tried to push Madame Nova free with the other. Edmund caught hold of Madame Nova in the bosom area with an inadvertent honking gesture and quickly dropped his hand. Madame Nova caught hold of Edmund’s breast pocket and fell back, ripping the material and revealing a bare patch of skin on Edmund’s chest as she tumbled down the steps.
The murmur went up from the crowd.
“His heart!”
“What is it?”
“I can’t see! Is it a tattoo?”
“I think it’s a tattoo.”
“What’s it say? What’s written on his heart?”
“There’s something written on his heart?”
“What is it? Tell me!”
But there was nothing written there.
Madame Nova lay motionless on the ground at the bottom of the marble steps, Edmund’s shirt pocket in her hand. Though it wouldn’t suit the myth-making from the chorus on the steps above them, Emily thought Madame Nova had torn the shirt by accident.
“Oh my days!” said Peg. “She’s not…?”
“She’s alive,” said Chris.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” said Emily.
“No.” Madame Nova pushed herself to a sitting position and opened her eyes slowly. Her head hung down awkwardly. “No. I’ll just stay here a moment.”
“Let’s not involve the authorities,” said Gerald. He blushed guiltily when he saw Emily looking at him, clearly wondering if the good name of the conference was more important to him than the safety of this vulnerable woman. “If she’s uninjured, we should respect her wishes.”
“You were in touch with someone, were you?” Peg asked Madame Nova. “A little girl?” Peg crouched down and took her hand. “It’s dangerous to make the connection if you’re not strong enough mentally.”
There were now dozens of people standing awkwardly outside the hotel, either at the top of the steps, or in a semicircle at the bottom of them. Ranald, Marta, Ian, Miriam…psychics, skeptics and philosophers, all of them with their names on delegate passes in clear plastic pouches hanging from lanyards around their necks, as if they couldn’t be trusted to remember their own names without them.
Sarah also came forward and knelt by Madame Nova, taking her other hand. “We need to get you inside. Do you think you could stand?”
Madame Nova tried to heave herself up. Then she allowed herself to fall back down again, helpless.
“I could give you some healing,” Peg offered.
“Would you? That’s very kind. It’s my leg.”
Peg crouched close to Madame Nova and held her hands palm out above her patient’s right leg, then she brought her hands together and rubbed them quickly, then she held her palms out again as if warming herself at a brazier. Though it was fascinating to watch, there was nothing about this procedure that indicated to Emily that it would help Madame Nova regain the use of her leg any time soon.
“We need to get her inside,” said Gerald. “Before someone calls the police.”
“No!” said Madame Nova. “I’ll be all right. I’ll go home.”
“You can’t go home,” said Peg. “The state of you!”
“I’ll fetch the wheelchair,” said the night porter. When he had got Madame Nova into it with Chris’s help, he wheeled her up the gently sloping ramp at the side of the steps and parked her by the reception desk. Her head hung down. Emily removed her sunglasses gently. Madame Nova’s ey
es flickered woozily and she exhaled a vapor of Merlot.
The bystanders from outside came back into the hotel, most going upstairs to bed—it was the start of the conference the next day, after all—and a few diehards going back to the bar to keep drinking.
“What if she’s got a concussion?” said Peg. “She should stop here tonight.”
“We’re fully booked,” said the porter. “They gave the last two rooms to that family that nearly drowned in the sea.”
“She could stay with me,” said Sarah. “I’ve got a spare nightdress. Tim can sleep on the floor.”
“If she’s like me, she’ll be more comfortable in her own bed,” said Gerald. “We should order her a taxi.”
But the women were in charge of the situation. They weren’t going to let Madame Nova go home tonight. “She could stay with me and Trina,” said Hilary. “Room ten. We’ve got a twin room. Trina could sleep in the campervan.”
Madame Nova moaned.
Emily said to Madame Nova, “Let’s go to the bar and get you some coffee.”
“Coffee!” Madame Nova seemed to revive just thinking about it.
Sarah took the handles of Madame Nova’s wheelchair and wheeled her toward the bar.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A WOMAN IN DANGER
Gerald, Peg, Emily and Dr. Muriel settled in their favorite corner of the bar—“corner” being a notional concept delineated by sofas and chairs in the open-plan arrangement of the ground floor of the hotel. Sarah found herself a chair and parked Madame Nova’s wheelchair next to it so she could take care of her.
“Don’t you need to be close to your patient, Peg?” Dr. Muriel enquired mischievously.
Peg’s response was good humored. “Good thing about this particular style of healing, Muriel, is I can do it medium range. Rum and Coke in one hand, very effective cure for damaged limbs beaming straight to the patient from the other. Now, you don’t get that on the National Health Service.”
Chris and Tim were sitting with the Colonel at a table nearby, drinking hot toddies. They had collected cardboard beermats from the bar and were collaborating on the construction of a low, box-shaped building on the small table between them, stopping occasionally to debate the dimensions, then add on new rooms and, eventually, an upper floor, also made of beermats. Hilary and Trina sat next to them, watching but not taking part.
“I think next year I might introduce a quiz night on the Friday,” said Gerald to Dr. Muriel. “Start building a campus feel from the get-go.” He took a picture of his cappuccino and read out the caption he would use for it on Twitter as he tapped it out on his phone: Hope it won’t keep me up all night! Long day ahead tomorrow. #BeliefandBeyond
Emily was writing up her notes about the evening in her notebook, smiling at Gerald’s earnestly dull social media updates.
The atmosphere was mellow.
Around them, some of the conference delegates were debating important points they planned to address the following day about the nature of belief; others were just chatting. Bobby Blue Suit was having a nightcap while his dogs slept under a table next to him. A man in a pink polo shirt, with a round face with blue veins in it like Stilton cheese—the conference delegate’s pass on the lanyard around his neck identified him as Ian—was trying over and over again to find a coin concealed under one of three leather cups as they were switched around on a low table in front of him by a long-haired man wearing a neckerchief—Romeo, according to the pass around his neck. Romeo had black, collar-length, curly hair. He was wearing a pair of baggy black jeans and a pale green shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just under his elbows, a red handkerchief round his neck and a dark yellow waistcoat on top of the shirt. When he noticed Emily watching him, he winked.
Ian was betting with pennies, the pile of them slowly going lower on his side of the table as they got higher on Romeo’s. Ian lost consistently, but on the one occasion he won, he celebrated noisily, tugging at his polo shirt and declaring it his “lucky shirt.”
“Astronomer,” said Dr. Muriel of Ian in response to the silent question posed by Emily’s raised eyebrows.
During the course of the next hour in the bar, people drifted away to bed, or drifted away and came back in again. Miriam Starling, the elegant woman who’d lost her shoe at the last conference, and the German professors, Marta and Birgitte—the delegate passes came in useful for recalling their names—hopped when they passed Dr. Muriel to sit at a table nearby. They laughed as though it was as funny as the first time they did it. Birgitte shook something from a plastic bag with “A Little of What You Fancy” written on it. A rat! Its coat was made of gray fun fur. The paws had pink felt underpads. Its whiskers were stiff, transparent plastic wire. Its tail was very long. Its plastic eyes were wary.
“The professor from Hamelin,” said Dr. Muriel. “You probably guessed when you saw the rat? She’s doing something about self-fulfilling prophecies at the conference tomorrow, but it’s a running joke that whatever she talks about, she’ll try to shoehorn in a Pied Piper reference. Some of them do like to use props and running jokes to keep the audience engaged.” She waved her silver-topped cane. “I find the threat of a poke in the ribs from this is enough to keep people from falling asleep.”
A conference delegate—Philip, so his pass said—approached Dr. Muriel when he saw the cane. “Can I borrow that?” Then he pointed to Edmund’s top hat and cloak in a bag on the floor. “And the top hat? I want to do my Fred Astaire.”
Dr. Muriel and Edmund handed over the props. “No idea who he is,” confided Dr. Muriel to Emily. “Might be a vicar? But if he can dance like Fred Astaire, he’ll have won my heart by the morning.”
Philip, Ian, Ranald, Marta, Milli, Miriam, Romeo…Emily, noting down the names, began to feel like a rookie travel agent giving a muddled-up booking reference over the phone: Romeo, Foxtrot, Hotel, Lima, Miriam…There were so many people dipping in and out of her consciousness as part of this conference, and not enough time to get a proper impression of any of them before they drifted off again.
Peg overheard her talking about it with Dr. Muriel. “Well, times that by a hundred and do it with your eyes closed; that’s what it’s like being a psychic.”
Emily had finished writing up Edmund’s trick: his disappearance and reappearance, his clever way of using his top hat and cloak as a disguise by removing them, and his immersive theater techniques, putting up posters all over town. Maybe it didn’t matter if most of the conference delegates were just names and faces to her. Emily still believed that Madame Nova was at the heart of this somehow, whatever “this” was. It was time to confront her about it.
“Why’ve you been making predictions about drowning?” Emily asked.
“It was a bit of fun. Just trying to drum up business.”
Gerald had been listening. “Funny way to go about it—going around town frightening everyone. Was it you who called the society and suggested we cancel the conference?”
“No,” said Madame Nova.
“There was a phone call?” Peg had also been listening. “You know, if you had mentioned it at the time, Gerald, Scotland Yard might not have laughed down the phone at me when I reported my prediction.”
Gerald blushed. “I do apologize. I thought it was a crank call.”
“You didn’t know who it was?” Emily asked him.
Gerald shook his head. “Woman with a low voice.”
Madame Nova had a low voice. She kept her mouth shut.
“Never mind, it’s over now,” said Gerald. “And come Monday we’ll have a very interesting report to present to the society. Eh, Emily?”
“A report,” said Hilary, eyes on Emily’s notebook and pen. “I wondered what you were doing.”
“She’s writing up the success of my Psychic Techniques for Future Positivity,” said Peg. She delved into her handbag and brought out a copy of the book, holding it face out to the group in the bar, fingertips curled in so as not to obscure the title, like a presenter on
a TV shopping channel.
“Nice work if you can get it, Emily,” said Edmund, raising a glass in her direction. “That’ll be a very short report.”
“It saved your hide,” snapped Peg.
“Edmund was the one who was supposed to drown,” said Sarah. “Isn’t that what you told me when we first got here, Emily?”
“Not just drown,” said Peg. “Murdered. Choked to death and pulled under the water. My positivity circle deflected the threat.”
“What if the murderer’s still out there?” Sarah said. “What if he tries to hurt someone else? We need to do something. Joseph, you could find out.”
“No, Sarah,” Joseph said quietly.
But Sarah wasn’t going to drop the idea. She put her hand on Madame Nova’s arm. “Maybe that’s what your little girl was trying to warn you about just now?”
“I’m a fortune-teller, not a spiritualist, Sarah. The things I do are parlor games. I haven’t heard my daughter’s voice in years.”
“Not everyone has the kind of skill required to connect to the mind of a murderer,” agreed Peg.
Edmund stretched out his legs and smiled a languid smile. “There’s not anyone who has that kind of skill, in my experience, but perhaps someone will change my mind tomorrow.”
“Would you be eligible for Edmund’s fifty thousand pounds if you could get through tonight?” Sarah asked Peg.
From out in the lobby came the sound of the piano playing. Philip was putting on his top hat. He was tying up his white tie. He was brushing off his tails.
It was Edmund who answered Sarah’s question. “No, she wouldn’t. We’re doing those tests under very strict conditions tomorrow in the Ballroom.”
“I shouldn’t want it,” said Peg, with dignity.
“You wouldn’t need it,” said Edmund pleasantly. “You’d be famous. You’d be back on TV.”
Out in the lobby, Philip was polishing his nails.
By now, most of the conference delegates had gone to bed. Cheese-faced Ian wandered over, looking for entertainment.
“What if nobody wins tomorrow?” said Hilary. “What will you do with the money then?”