Strange Sight

by Syd Moore

  I looked at my notebook and read the date that MT had seen the apparition in the toilets. There was no way it was a coincidence. It was the following evening. The fourth.

  ‘Jesus.’ I said, and got to my feet. ‘It’s her! Got to be. She’s fabricated the whole thing!’

  I slipped my notebook into my bag and said hurried goodbyes to Denise.

  ‘He won’t be long now, Ms Strange, I’m sure,’ she bleated apologetically.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘He’s been more than helpful. Please say goodbye from me.’

  Outside on the steps I took out my phone. It began to ring in my hand as I held it to my ear.

  ‘Hello?’ It was Sam. ‘Rosie, can you meet me at La Fleur in thirty minutes. I’ve got some important news.’

  ‘Yes, on my way, but, oh god, Sam. I’ve just made a discovery – I think I know who killed Seth,’ I jabbed down the phone.

  ‘Me too,’ he gabbled. Then before he hung up, he added, ‘A real turn up though. I would never have suspected him.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I sat in La Fleur drumming my fingers on the table and stared at MT preening in the mirror behind the bar. She couldn’t see me where I was, in the shadows of the circular staircase. There was a glitzy standard lamp plugged into the wall but I hadn’t turned it on, purely so I could stay here unobserved.

  She flicked back her hair and bent her neck to the mirror, tilting her face to the light to check something on her cheek. Unmistakably though superficially attractive, I was trying to work out why she’d go to all this tremendous trouble. What was her motive? What did she want to achieve?

  The glass door to the restaurant caught the light as it opened and Sam bustled in. His face was tight and he was biting his lip. I stood up and waved at him from the shadows.

  As he got closer I was unable to contain myself and the words ‘Oh my god oh my god oh my god’ tumbled out of my mouth.

  ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

  I darted a glance at the bar and noted that MT was watching both of us. But then Agatha came in with a bunch of clean glasses and said something and she turned round to speak to her.

  Sam took my arm and bundled me back into the shadows. ‘It’s astonishing,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to talk here. It’s not safe. Let’s go to the pub down the road.’

  I gathered up my stuff and within fifteen minutes we were ensconced in a snug in the Leicester where we had first talked to Joel.

  I leant back against the wood panelling and took a long slug of the cider Sam had bought me at the bar. I was thirsty and the drink took some of the nervous fizz out of me and calmed me down. A fire was roaring in the hearth. The place was cosy, dark, full of Victoriana, like something out of a Dickens novel. Someone had helped that impression along by lighting candles on each table. It felt like the right place for a secret powwow.

  ‘Okay,’ said Sam. He had bought a half of real ale so I knew he must be excited too. ‘I went back to the archives today and checked out that book I told you about. And guess what?’

  ‘La Fleur is built on a murder house.’ The candle on our table flickered appropriately.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, and cracked a little half-smile. ‘It was the site of a notorious and vicious murder committed by an intensely unpopular woman.’

  ‘Elizabeth Brownrigg,’ I finished.

  ‘Oh.’ That floored him. ‘How did you …?’ His mouth hung open a second longer.

  ‘Go on, go on. I’ll tell you in a minute. What was the crime? What happened there?’

  ‘Brownrigg was a nasty piece of work. She was a practising midwife and therefore held a certain status in the community. Orphans from the Foundling Hospital up the road were sent to her, ostensibly as servants, housemaids, to be apprentices and trained up. But Brownrigg was a sadist. She punished them for the slightest thing, then at some point, she discovered she got a kick out of inflicting the punishments and it spilt over into torture. Things came to a head when she tortured a Mary Mitchell, a Mary Jones, then a Mary Clifford.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, genuinely surprised. ‘Three Marys. That’s come up before, hasn’t it?

  ‘There’s three Marys at La Fleur now.’

  Some green wood in the fireplace hissed and popped. Sam and I and a man who was seated at the table opposite, looked over. A small coal fell out of the grate.

  ‘Is it relevant?’ I turned back to Sam. ‘Coincidence?’

  Sam drew away from the fireplace. His eyes were thoughtful. ‘There is a possibility it may well have sown seeds for future events to flourish.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him. ‘How can the incidence of three women with the same name affect anything at all? Other than create ridiculously shortened nicknames that sound American but aren’t.’

  ‘Precisely,’ he said, and smoothed his fingers over the notebook he had taken out and laid next to his glass. ‘It’s an aside, however, worth stopping for a moment to consider – this alignment may have created the right conditions for something to stir, something that had lain dormant for a very long time perhaps. A theory exists that the numerous articulations of correct names can be used to invoke not only the dead but also demons.’ He caught my gaze and shrugged. ‘Not that I’ve had any direct experience myself.’

  There was a jumble of words tumbling over themselves in my head, trying to sort themselves into some kind of order. Eventually I managed it, ‘Are you suggesting demons have been at work at La Fleur?’

  ‘I’m just throwing it into the ring.’ He frowned over the rim of his glass.

  Oh dear. Just when I thought we were doing so well.

  ‘Yes, you might well look like that, Rosie,’ he said, his tone reproachful, ‘but I’ll have you know your grandfather met several men and women on his travels who asserted they had witnessed demonic evocations.’

  The man in the suit across the room looked over his newspaper and checked Sam out.

  ‘Shh,’ I said, and moved closer in. ‘You’re talking too loudly; people can hear. Anyway, we now know that medicine can explain any number of conditions. I’m thinking Charles Bonnet syndrome, I’m thinking epilepsy, I’m thinking that we are no longer living in the Dark Ages.’

  Sam took that with good grace and bent to my ear. ‘Septimus told me he once met a very interesting Icelandic shaman who summoned spirits by repeating their true name. In fact he also reported seeing a manifestation himself. Yes, your granddad, with his own eyes,’ he asserted with triumph. ‘Although he did remark the said shaman had first required him to partake of a peace pipe which contained something ritualistic that may or may not have been of the whacky baccy variety.’

  I just sat there and stared at him for a moment. My granddad had smoked weed? Possibly? And knew Icelandic shamans. I should have known him better. What a guy.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sam said, reading something in my face. ‘That aside, Mary and MT saw something. Whatever its origins. The uncanny woman they described was similar and specific.’ Underneath the notebook he had an A4 plastic wallet, which he slid out. Presently, he removed a sheet of paper, which bore a line drawing of a woman sitting in a cell. She was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, a striped corset top, full skirt and a shawl. ‘In terms of description,’ Sam pointed at the bodice, ‘the clothes certainly are remarkably similar to what both women attested to seeing.’

  ‘Elizabeth Brownrigg,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, loud again. ‘I’m keen to know how you discovered this?’

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘What exactly did she do?’

  Little narrow lines appeared above his eyebrows, bunching them together to make longer deeper ones. ‘She subjected her charges to countless awful treatments: whipping, punching, kickings. She’d dip their heads into pails of water and laugh. But Mary Clifford,’ he continued, ‘gradually became the primary focus for Brownrigg’s sadistic urges. She was young, only fourteen, and was frequently tied up to a hook in the kitchen ceiling, stripped naked and be
aten with a hearth broom, a horsewhip or a cane till she was unconscious.’ He looked at me and repeated, ‘Tied to a hook and whipped.’

  ‘Fuck.’ I didn’t need him to draw parallels between Seth’s murder and this ancient atrocity. I’d seen it depicted on Warren’s PA’s wall.

  ‘Right here, in the cellar of La Fleur, I presume?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sam shuddered and breathed out so heavily the candle flame almost went out.

  ‘People were cruel,’ I stated simplistically. ‘Still are. So what happened? In the end?’

  ‘I printed it out for you,’ he said, and passed an A4 sheet over the table.

  The text was narrow but legible. It was clear this was a section from a larger document. Sam had drawn a square round the relevant part. I read it:

  In the course of this most inhuman treatment a jack-chain was fixed round her neck, the end of which was fastened to the yard door, and then it was pulled as tight as possible without strangling her. A day being passed in the practice of these savage barbarities, the girl was remanded to the coal-hole at night, her hands being tied behind her, and the chain still remaining about her neck.

  The elder son one day directed Mary Clifford to put up a half-tester bedstead, but the poor girl was unable to do it; on which he beat her till she could no longer support his severity. Mrs Brownrigg would sometimes seize the poor girl by the cheeks and, forcing the skin down violently with her fingers, cause the blood to gush from her eyes.

  The last clause was underlined several times. I read it out loud to Sam. ‘Shit that’s what it said on the wall right?’

  His expression was grave. ‘More or less the same words.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I’ve really got to tell you what I found out at Henry Warren’s. Just let me finish this.’ I kept my mouth shut and read the next lines.

  Mary Clifford, unable to bear these repeated severities, complained of her hard treatment to a French lady who lodged in the house; and she having represented the impropriety of such behaviour to Mrs Brownrigg, the inhuman monster flew at the girl and cut her tongue in two places with a pair of scissors.

  Which meant, I thought as a cold chill broke through my pores, that she couldn’t speak properly. Just like the girl in the yard. No, that wasn’t possible though. This was a set-up. Had to be. I read on.

  On the morning of the 13th of July this barbarous woman went into the kitchen and, after obliging Mary Clifford to strip to the skin, drew her up to the staple; and though her body was an entire sore, from former bruises, yet this wretch renewed her cruelties with her accustomed severity.

  After whipping her till the blood streamed down her body she let her down, and made her wash herself in a tub of cold water, Mary Mitchell, the other poor girl, being present during this transaction. While Clifford was washing herself Mrs Brownrigg struck her on the shoulders, already sore with former bruises, with the butt-end of a whip; and she treated the child in this manner five times in the same day.

  I threw it down unable to read any more. ‘Five times a day. That poor child, those poor children.’ They were stories lost in time. Now found again. ‘I hope they got her? Brownrigg?’ I asked Sam, not really sure if I wanted to know the answer.

  ‘Eventually she was discovered,’ Sam said. ‘Mary Clifford’s stepmother came to see her. After some kerfuffle she and the neighbours were able to search the house. They found her stepdaughter in a very sorry state hidden in a cupboard and did rescue her but it was too late – she died from her multiple injuries. Brownrigg was tried and then hanged at Tyburn. She was absolutely reviled and became rather a bogeyman in later years.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘What a nasty piece of work. Those poor girls. Treated like trash. Like slaves.’ Then I thought of Gloria and Ruby and, again, the girl in the yard who had pointed me to them. The thought, the parallel, was greatly troubling.

  ‘You’re right, Rosie: cruelty doesn’t age,’ Sam voiced my thoughts, though a little more fluently. ‘It still flourishes where it can. A strange dirty nick in the human character, unchanged by either evolution or prosperity. One can only wonder why that is. But such questions we may put aside for now. We have a case to hand, to which this is of great and pressing relevance.’ He tapped the table to get my attention back. ‘I wanted to ensure I had as much detail as possible. I felt it imperative I didn’t miss anything vital. So I returned to the enquiry desk and asked the young woman there, Anna, if she knew where I could find more information on this Elizabeth Brownrigg.’

  I thought about asking him how he had got on first-name terms with the archivist but then decided not to give in to sulkiness and buttoned my mouth again.

  ‘Now, as it turned out,’ he said, voice low in storytelling mode. ‘Anna hadn’t been in yesterday. She had the day off for a doctor’s appointment and the hair salon.’

  ‘Is that relevant?’ I asked, irritated. I would like to think I had been soured by thoughts of human brutality, but I knew myself too well, and it was more likely my motives were less noble. And hypocritical.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Sam said softly although with emphasis. ‘Because Anna hadn’t been there when I asked about Brownrigg yesterday. Do you want to guess what she said when I asked about the murderess?’

  ‘No. Tell me. Tell me now.’ I was trying to suppress my pouty face.

  Sam’s eyes glittered. ‘She said, “Oh, wow, she’s popular.”’

  ‘Huh!’ I said, and snorted. ‘What a way to refer to such a vicious bitch.’ That was slightly more emotive than intended.

  ‘I made the same comment myself with less colourful language,’ he tried to chuckle. ‘Anna apologised, of course, but explained that no one had looked into Brownrigg for years until recently another young man had been asking about her. He was distinctive, she said, quite charming with curly black hair and very blue eyes. She looked up his name for me. It was Tom Limbert.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I cried, genuinely shocked and then absurdly moved. Not Tom. Dear god, I could just imagine poor Mary’s distress when she learnt of the betrayal. Hadn’t she been through enough already?

  ‘I have to admit,’ said Sam. ‘I was quite surprised. It’s not going to go down well, is it?’

  I shook my head and thought of something. ‘Didn’t Tom say he knew MT before the restaurant?’ It was starting to fit together.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sam. ‘They were at university together. I checked them out. He read History and got a low 2.2. She took Business, 2.1.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said thinking it over. ‘It must be a bit of a blow to have ended up in the City, a glorified waitress.’

  ‘Possibly, why?’

  ‘She struck me as materialistic when I met her. Those heels, that coat. And,’ I broke off a bit of candlewax and rolled it in my finger, ‘MT is a social climber. She’s been dating Henry Warren.’

  ‘Ah yes, the customer who allegedly told MT or Seth that La Fleur was haunted. Not Tom then? She’s not been dating him, at least?’ Sam appeared as concerned for Mary as I felt. ‘Where does this fit?’

  ‘Okay.’ My turn to spill. ‘Henry never admitted to knowing about the ghost. But, while I was waiting for him to finish a phone call, I was in his secretary’s room. There was a picture of Elizabeth Brownrigg’s skeleton hanging in Surgeon’s Hall and another of her beating her apprentice. She’s described as the murderess of Fleur de Lis Court. Warren’s secretary told me MT had seen it. But way back in February.’

  ‘I see.’ Sam rubbed his chin, the cogs behind his eyes gearing up and beginning to whirr. ‘So what do we gather from this? Had Mary told her about her visions of the ghost at that point?’

  I nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. And the day after MT had been in Warren’s office she then “saw” the “ghost” herself.’

  ‘You doubt her veracity?’ He went on before I could answer. ‘And I hazard the description she gave was not only like Mary’s but also very similar to that of Elizabeth Brownrigg. She was trying to anchor the apparition, to link it to the history o
f the house.’

  ‘Which,’ I picked up the thread of his conversation, ‘she had also discovered was where La Fleur was situated. And that hook in the cellar, well, it could easily be the same one Brownrigg had used to string up the apprentices.’

  Sam stifled a spasm of repulsion. ‘So she would have been hoping someone would start researching into the history, to bring up the murder, no?’

  ‘I’m guessing that was the plan. She may have even suggested it to Ray. I suppose she must have also roped Tom in at some point. Dispatched him to the archives to find out more details to point the way to Brownrigg. As a history graduate he’d know his way round the system. Such a shame though. What were they hoping might happen? What did they want to get out of it?’

  ‘That we may never know,’ said Sam and smoothed down the portrait of the grim murderess. He was giving the impression that he’d summed up and drawn a line under the business.

  ‘And why did they kill Seth? And how?’ There were lots of questions still bugging me.

  ‘Ours not to reason why.’ He touched his hand to his chest. ‘Though actually the quote is “theirs”. I assumed you wouldn’t be familiar with the original Tennyson,’ he added by way of opaque apology.

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Next steps,’ he explained, evidently moving on. ‘It’s not our place to question them about motive. Our way forward is clear. We type this into a report and send it to Ray and the police.’

  ‘Don’t be a spanner,’ I said impatiently. ‘That is a massive cop-out.’

  ‘If I might comment at this point that it is commonly you, Ms Strange, who is the reluctant partner, unwilling to become involved in nonsense at any great depth.’ He looked very smug indeed.

  I refused to take the bait. ‘Well, Sam, I’m surprised that you want to give up on the investigation so easily. To surrender your findings to the strong arm of the law, as fine a representative of such as Detective Edwards is.’