by Neil Spring
‘Over the years you were apart he made numerous visits to the Rhine and held many meetings there with the relevant authorities. In November 1938, while the synagogues were being raided, Jewish shops destroyed and Jewish people murdered, he was off enjoying himself at concerts in Bad Godesberg, taking dinner in Bonn and tea in Cologne with the people he thought were going to help him. He even wrote to Hitler asking to attend – in comfort, I might add – the Nuremberg Rally in August.’ He shrugged. ‘It came to nothing when war began.’
I found myself able to speak again and asked Wall how he could possibly know all this. The answer was reasonable enough.
‘Price told William Salter, the prominent psychical investigator, and Salter, in turn, told me.’
Salter. I remembered. He had been there at the beginning, all those years ago, at the grand opening of the Laboratory. Plotting to bring Price down.
‘But why?’ I asked, caught in bewilderment at how the past and present were meeting like this. ‘What on earth is your interest in this – in him – after all this time?’
He pursed his lips, then, looking at the folder in his hand, said, ‘I mean to bring him down. I mean to bring both of you down, unless you give me what I want.’
‘Which is … ?’
‘Closure,’ he said quickly. ‘Harry is collecting information for a second Borley book, isn’t he?’
I nodded.
‘I intend to stop him, and I want you to help me.’
‘What? But why, why would you ask that of me?’
‘You work in the film business, don’t you? You can help me get this out.’ He grinned. ‘Come to think of it, the whole story would make a suitable film.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ I managed to say.
‘Sarah, it’s my story!’ His shout rebounded around the cold, musty church. ‘It was always my story! Even at the beginning, before the two of you ever came to Borley. And he – you – cheated me out of it.’
‘No, that isn’t fair!’ I cried. ‘I had nothing to do with it!’
‘You were complicit! You can’t expect me to believe you never knew.’
‘I went to him because I needed someone.’
‘And look what he did to you,’ he said numbly. ‘You must help me. We must be rid of Harry Price.’
My mind was racing now as I scrambled for explanations. ‘After we left Borley, Harry took little interest in the case. His mind was on other things – securing the Laboratory against the Spiritualists, testing Rudi Schneider. He wasn’t involved with the Borley case for years.’
‘But clearly he was involved,’ said Wall, glaring at me. ‘He’s been collecting information on the case all the time, squirrelling it away for publication. He just never told you.’
‘No,’ I argued, ‘that’s not possible, I would have known, I—’
And then I remembered Price’s odd behaviour after we had left Borley for the first time and returned to London. The long disappearances without explanation. The phone calls that came when I was left alone at the Laboratory, taunting me, just before he suffered his heart attack. Ask him – ask him where he goes. Ask him about the props.
I looked up and saw that Wall was looking at me, and in his expression I registered sadness mixed with anger, frustration and betrayal. ‘You?’ I could hear my own disbelief. ‘You made those calls to me. You were the one I heard him shouting at down the phone in his office!’
He nodded slowly, sadly, and as he did so, the words he had spoken during our first visit to the Rectory drifted back: ‘The telephone bell is a rather simple device, but it still rings with vital messages.’
‘Oh, but why? Vernon, the stress brought on his heart attack! Why did you do that? Why? What did you mean, “ask him about the props”?’
Wall took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Sarah, but Harry …’ He hesitated.
I stared at him, wishing he would just tell me and be done with it.
‘Do you remember the first time we went to the Rectory? The candlestick that hurtled down the stairs, the pebbles rolling about in the hall? All that happened after the seance, even during the seance.’
I remembered all of this vividly and told him so.
‘And in the saloon, on the journey we made from London, his coat pockets were filled to the brim with odds and ends?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Props,’ he said quietly, ‘that’s all they were, like the curious items he keeps in that cabinet of his at the Laboratory – props for a clever magician’s conjuring act. Harry brought them with him, and when our backs were turned he threw them all about that house, down the stairs, along the corridors, wherever phenomena were observed.’
‘What? No, that’s not true. He would never do that. He couldn’t have done it, not all of it. How could he? He wasn’t standing in the right place to have done those things without our noticing.’
‘There is much he could have done. His pockets were stuffed full. You said so yourself. Remember he is a trained member of the Magic Circle. Even the Smiths agreed that when Price arrived in the Rectory the phenomena became worse.’
I couldn’t accept this. ‘Harry is a man of ability. His training with the Circle was impeccable. If all he could do to fool us was throw a few stones around, he wasn’t a very good magician, was he?’
Wall shook his head, his expression somewhere between frustration and pity. ‘Think back, Sarah! The blue lights which appeared during the seance? The Smiths said it themselves: such things had never happened before! Don’t you find that an intriguing coincidence? Today, poor Mrs Smith thinks tricks were being played all around her, on all of us, and she was in no mental state at that time to be rational. Put yourself in her situation: in coming to Borley, succeeding the Bull family, hearing of Miss Ethel’s family feud, she and her husband had walked straight into a psychological drama. At every turn the locals were telling her and her husband to beware and not to stay at the house. Psychological, Sarah, not supernatural.’
‘We found a medallion. It appeared from nowhere. An apport.’
He shrugged. ‘Harry Price is an avid coin collector. Did you know that? He probably has hundreds of the things at his home.’
‘But what about the bells that rang, the cake of soap we saw hurled across the room, the brick that crashed through the verandah roof right above your head? Vernon, the haunted mirror? We all heard it tapping at us.’
‘Nothing but hocus-pocus,’ Wall insisted, gripping my arm, his voice urgent now. ‘The heat and moisture from our lamp could have caused the wood in that mirror to expand, thus creating what Price led us all to think were spirit raps. He turned that lamp on and off repeatedly, remember? That alone would have induced a constant change in the air’s humidity.’
‘I’ll hear no more of this!’ I exclaimed.
‘Listen to me,’ he demanded scornfully. ‘I saw him do it, as clear as I see you now. I saw him throwing pebbles when we ran upstairs together. His pockets were full of them. I am so sorry, I really am, but you must allow yourself to believe it. Harry Price had a mundane existence with a wife he kept hidden at home and a paper bag business of which he was ashamed. He wasn’t scientist or an academic. He was a fantasist, Sarah! A fraud, a humbug, a psychological liar.’
I could not, would not accept it.
But Wall, clearly, already had. ‘Take this,’ he said, handing me the file of documents.
‘What is it?’
‘All the evidence we’ll ever need to prove it, to bring him down.’
This was just ridiculous. The idea that Price, who had dedicated his life to the exposure of fraudulent mediums, had himself turned deceiver was alien to every understanding I had of the man. I said to Wall, ‘Harry went to Borley at your request, not to prove it was genuine but to debunk it. And now you’re saying …’
‘That the man has been playing a long and cruel game with you, laying clues from day one so he could finally solve the case for publication and financia
l gain. His team of untrained observers gave him everything he needed. He prepared them for what might happen there: his briefings, his Blue Book of activities. His observers saw things, heard things, because they were told that they would see things. All he had to do was write them up in the appropriate way. Which is precisely what he has done.’
I was shaking my head, but Wall continued. ‘It’s understandable that you should resist it, after everything you’ve done for him, but you’re holding the evidence right there in your hands. Take my word for it, his best-selling book is nothing but an impressive blend of legends, fantasy and lies twisted around some facts. A stone was thrown and the ripples have spread.’
His words were slaying me. But were they the truth? I had good reason to doubt it. Why hadn’t he tried to warn me or get in touch? ‘Not one letter, Vernon! And why didn’t you say anything at the time? If you saw him hoaxing phenomena, if you knew, why didn’t you warn me?’
‘I wrote, many times. To the Laboratory and to your home address. I tried to warn you, Sarah! And I wanted to go public. I threatened Harry that I would – just before his heart attack – but my editor forbade it. Said you and Price would fight it in the courts, two to one against us. So he made me suppress what I knew.’
There had been no letters to the house from him. None that I had seen.
‘I wake and find myself downstairs … doing things I can’t remember … collecting the mail …’
Mother, always up before me …
The realisation hit me with a thud.
She collected the post.
‘I know how that sounds, but it’s as though something is taking me over, taking control.’
These thoughts slashed through my mind, cutting away any clinging doubts. I wanted to pause and reflect, make sense of all of this. But the moment was overtaken as a single newspaper clipping dropped out of Wall’s file and landed at my feet. ‘What’s this?’ I asked.
As Wall retrieved the cutting he told me it was a letter recently published in the Daily Mail written by Mabel Smith, whom we had met on our first visit to the Rectory.
I took the article from this hand and read:
A SPOOK IN THE WHEEL OF SUPERSTITION
On May 23rd the Daily Mail published a story ‘Whiff of Evil at Borley Rectory’ describing Borley Rectory as ‘the most haunted house in England’.
As the wife of a previous rector of Borley, I would like to state that we lived in the rectory for over [sic] three years and did not think it was haunted (except by rats). It was an old house, and very creaky and broken-down. The ‘wall of perfume’ can well be explained as pigsties were adjacent.
It is because of local superstition that we called the Psychical Research Society in, hoping to show the people that there was nothing supernatural and, to our lasting regret, the place was made a centre for sightseers.
Surely now that fire has demolished the place, all this absurdity should be dropped and could it not be stressed that the supposed haunted house was not the rectory but an exchanged residence?1
Please help to clear the reputation of Borley, Essex, for it is a sweet little country place.
I have no reason at all to think Borley was haunted. Of course, our minds were turned towards the subject, owing to so much gossip; but in spite of this, nothing occurred which I consider could not be explained.2
‘“Absurdity”, “nothing supernatural” – how can she write that?’ I exclaimed.
‘She has written it because it is true,’ said Wall. ‘I interviewed her again recently to be sure. The footsteps her husband heard were attributable to rats. His hockey stick never whistled through the air, he simply used it to frighten away the vermin. She states emphatically that she saw enormous rats in the place, and is certain these were responsible for bell-ringing and many noises attributed to the supernatural. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Rats would scratch the boards. The house had been empty for such a long time it’s easy to see how vermin could have taken up their abode in kitchens and cupboards.’
‘No,’ I insisted, ‘that isn’t right. Reverend Smith told us rats were not the cause. What about the bell-ringing that night? You remember that happening, don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Wall, ‘they most certainly did ring, but not because of ghosts. They rang because the rats made them ring, and perhaps with a little intervention from Price.’
The comment ignited a memory which made me start: Price, two years later, just after confronting Marianne Foyster, standing in the servants’ passage holding a thread leading out through the window. Could it be? Was it possible? If so, then everything I had known – or thought I had known – about the man had been a lie; he had perpetrated the most cunning and elaborate deception imaginable; he had known all along about the others’ deceptions – the Smiths’, the Foysters’, even Miss Ethel Bull’s – and manipulated them towards his own ends, fabricating evidence when he saw the case’s commercial appeal. And if he had interfered with the evidence, I couldn’t help but wonder: what else had he tampered with? The idea was just too awful to contemplate.
Now Wall was removing from the file a letter which he passed to me. This one was dated 19 October 1935. The note was addressed to Sir Arnold Lunn. Referring to Marianne Foyster and the events at Borley, it read: ‘I think she wanted to drive her husband away from the rectory, which is a very quiet and lonely spot. But I cannot print this explanation. I daren’t even hint at it, so that part of the doings of the most haunted house must remain.’
The signature underneath was clear: Harry Price. It was an extraordinary confession from a man who had previously announced to the world, in a blaze of publicity, that he was ‘engaged in investigating one of the most extraordinary cases of poltergeist disturbance and alleged haunting … for years’.3
‘Everything has a natural explanation, Sarah,’ said Wall. And now he was producing from inside his jacket pocket another sheet of paper, which he handed to me.
No more, please, no more.
‘I have here a statement from one of Price’s official observers, Major Henry Douglas-Home.’
With the greatest apprehension, I unfolded the note. It read as follows:
After dark we toured each room, every hour, my friend leading, and Price bringing up the rear. The first few hours we found a number of extraordinary squiggles on the walls which we all swore had been unmarked on our previous hour’s visit.
‘But this happened,’ I insisted, remembering my own experience on the night of my confrontation with Marianne. ‘I saw it myself, unexplained writing on the wall that appeared from nowhere—’
‘Finish the letter,’ Wall instructed.
We each carried a torch and I was so intent on examining each new mark that I failed, at first, to realise how they were being made. The last man (Price) had a pencil up his sleeve and as he swept his torch over the wall ahead, he made new squiggles in the darkness, which would be found on the next inspection.4
‘Of course you understand I will have to make this public,’ said Wall.
‘But you said yourself at the time that you believed it! You began it all, with those articles of yours. You singlehandedly put Borley on the map with your media circus. You stayed there. You were frightened; you saw the unexplained light shining in the window of the empty room. Mr Wall, you saw the nun!’
He stared at me.
‘You’re telling me that none of it was true?’ My chin tilted up in defiance.
‘None of it.’ He paused and then smiled. ‘Well, perhaps some of it.’
‘Mr Wall!’
‘I exaggerated! I’m sure that whatever I saw was probably just a moving shadow, a trick of the light, nothing more. Listen to me. I was young, just starting out, and it was a great story, Sarah. Tricks of the light don’t sell newspapers but ghosts do. And I think Harry has come to understand that very well indeed.’
‘But you’re forgetting something,’ I said. ‘The Rectory did burn down. The prophecy was fulfilled.’
&
nbsp; ‘There was nothing mysterious about that fire,’ said Wall. ‘Captain Gregson was stacking books in the hall. He left a few damp volumes near an oil lamp which toppled over and set them alight. Minutes later the place was ablaze. All very convenient for him too.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ I asked tightly.
‘Hasn’t Harry told you? Captain Gregson filed an insurance claim, a total of £7,356, I believe. It was rejected on the suspicion that he torched the place deliberately.’
‘He wouldn’t do that,’ I said, my voice heavy with revulsion. ‘The captain seems to me a fine, upstanding citizen.’
‘So you didn’t know that he was until just recently an area organiser for the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts?’
‘What? No, I—’
‘Or that since the Rectory burned down he has been charging psychic investigators for access to the site? Or that just two months ago he accepted the sum of three guineas for the radio broadcast he and Price did together on the case?’
‘No … but that doesn’t mean—’
‘Sarah, they’re in on it together. The pair of them. And when Price’s book is published, their combined profits will soar.’ He handed me the dossier. ‘It’s all there, everything you need to know. I have provided a copy of this work to the Society for Psychical Research. Perhaps, being aware of Harry’s fading health, they will wait until after he is gone before publishing what they know. But I should tell you now that they plan to re-examine the whole affair. There is so much to question.’ He stood up. ‘I’m quite sure their investigation will confirm what I already know: that Price is no better than the charlatans he’s spent his career exposing – a trickster, an old humbug.’
I was aware now of the worst emotions pressing down on me, crushing my hopes. ‘But if all you say is true then surely somebody must have known,’ I protested. ‘Someone would have worked it out.’
‘I believe that someone did suspect what he was up to, yes, even in the early days, before the Borley case ever came our way.’