The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  She’d run it before, more than once. It worked especially well, she’d found, on the very wealthy, who ran as a cohort more superstitious than the average - very likely, she considered, because they had so much to lose, and so much as a consequence to worry about losing.

  The first time, she’d gone all out, draping herself in bandanas, gold jewellery and flowing skirts - a caricature of a fairground gypsy. She’d quickly realised, though, that many of the props were unnecessary; that the subtle aesthetic suggestion of Eastern mysticism was more effective, a better convincer for the white, middle-aged power brokers of Europe than a crystal ball and a deck of Tarot cards. Thereafter, she’d kept things simpler: a sari here, a hint of henna there, an occasional bindi on her forehead to complement the Delhi sing-song she’d allow into her voice.

  Since, as she’d learned, Mrs Marchant was not only an astute businesswoman but a sucker for the esoteric and the uncanny, and a much-seen presence around the occult bookshops of Charing Cross and Fitzrovia - and since Sita’s web of connections spanned the length and breadth of the city, up to and including its more arcane corners - it was comparatively little effort to contrive a first meeting. Favours were called in, palms were greased, and in a matter of a fortnight, two booksellers, a clairvoyant and a specialist in astral projection had dropped into their conversations with Mrs Marchant the news that a rare and exceptional talent in the art of divination had settled in the capital: a Madam Raksha Chandravali, late of Gurgaon. One of the booksellers, after no small amount of persuasion on Mrs Marchant’s part, had offered up a phone number for Madam Chandravali - and thus Sita’s work began.

  The first reading took place on a dull Tuesday afternoon in the Marchant family home, at Madam Chandravali’s insistence. To accurately predict the fortunes of her clients, as she told Mrs Marchant during their initial telephone exchange, it was necessary to regard them in their natural habitat - to get a sense of the physical objects and more nebulous energies that surrounded them in daily life.

  The house had been very much what Sita had expected: a mansion at the nicer end of Elgin Crescent, wide and white-washed on the outside and high-ceilinged and badly insulated within. There were no obvious charms or magical trinkets on display in the hallway or the small library Mrs Marchant settled them into - but perhaps, she’d thought, Mr Marchant was less keen than his spouse on the mystical side of life, and his wife felt compelled as a consequence to conceal the evidence of her enthusiasm from view.

  The library, in any event, had everything she needed for the reading - a pair of comfortable chairs, a solid teak table to gaze meaningfully across, and little enough natural light that long shadows seem to peer out at them from every corner - and the session progressed without a hitch, if uninspiringly, Sita peppering Madam Chandravali’s generic, Eastern-accented pronouncements on the state of Mrs Marchant’s health and marriage with more specific facts gleaned from a cold read of her face and body. Mrs Marchant was beside herself - drinking all of it in with a childlike wonder that belied her age and social status.

  ———

  “I didn’t do a great deal that first time,” Sita said. “It was very much an exercise in scene-setting - in piquing her interest, building her trust. You know how it is, with the Fortune Teller.”

  In fact, El didn’t. She’d never liked the Fortune Teller; had always found it faintly distasteful, avoiding it wherever she could, even where she knew, rationally, that it would be the best tool for the job.

  “She called that evening to invite me back for a second reading at her house, for the following morning,” said Sita.

  “Paid over the odds for it, and all,” added Ruby. “She was that keen.”

  ———

  The second session, held again in the library, progressed much as the first had, with Mrs Marchant as delighted as she’d been the day before by Madam Chandravali’s pearls of prophetic wisdom. This time, however, Madam Chandravali made a request of her host: that she be allowed to view the whole house, or those parts of it into which visitors were usually allowed, in order that she might commune more directly with its psychic life force - and give, in turn, a more accurate and comprehensive reading.

  “Oh, gosh, of course you may!” Mrs Marchant replied, seemingly horrified that the thought hadn’t occurred to her first.

  They toured the ground floor first: the austere Georgian interiors of the drawing room, the dining room, the breakfast room, Sita’s eyes peeled for any trace of the Boulle commode. Then the first floor: the predictably floral bedrooms of the Marchants and any guests that might come upon them, the felt-lined playrooms of their two young sons, the nursery of their baby daughter.

  And then, the study.

  She saw the commode immediately - a vision of alloy on ebony, calling out to her from beside an entirely forgettable Edwardian loveseat.

  She swooned, only partially for her host’s benefit; leaned into cushions of the loveseat for support.

  “Are you quite alright?” Mrs Marchant asked, looking anxiously down at her.

  Madam Chandravali pressed a palm to her heart; inhaled deeply, as if to compose herself.

  “That chest,” she said fearfully, pointing to the commode. “It is yours?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs Marchant, puzzled. “We bought it last week at auction. My cousin Judith saw it in the catalogue. She thought it might go nicely with the sofa.”

  Your cousin Judith, Sita thought, is a groundling, an utter philistine, and if there were any justice would be barred from every auction house in England.

  “The energy,” she said, her breath coming in shallow, erratic bursts. “It is… wrong, you know? Dark. Very dark.”

  “Its… energy?” said Mrs Marchant.

  “The vibrations. They are, how do you call it? On a negative frequency. All around it, there is darkness - deep, terrible darkness. Painful darkness. I’m sorry, I cannot…”

  She straightened up, pushing down on the loveseat and jettisoning her body away from the commode, feet propelling her backwards until she was very nearly in the doorframe.

  “I cannot be here,” she said. “I cannot be in this place with a thing so dark as this. I must leave, now.”

  She swooned again - and allowed her body, this time, to fall all the way to the floor.

  ———

  “A Cursed Object scam?” said El, incredulously. “Really?”

  “People were less clued up in them days,” said Ruby, El thought a little wistfully. “You’d tell ‘em their mattress had an evil spirit living in it, and they’d pay you to get rid of it.”

  “And send you flowers afterwards,” said Sita.

  ———

  Mrs Marchant helped her up from the ground and walked her, gingerly, to the guest bedroom.

  She rallied.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said, settling down on the end of the bed and cradling her temples in her hands. “My head…”

  Mrs Marchant knelt down in front of her, between her legs, and placed her own hands over Sita’s.

  “The chest,” she said. “You said… you said there was something wrong with it?”

  Take it gently, Sita told herself. Slow and steady wins the race.

  “In my country,” she said, “we call them bhoots. Ghosts, you know? The spirits of the dead. Angry spirits, vengeful spirits, full of evil and hatred. They walk this world, but they become sometimes… tangled in material things. Trapped in them. Like a genie in a lamp.”

  “Spirits?” said Mrs Marchant, looking as haunted as the commode.

  “No-one knows how it happens, how it is that a bhoot comes to be made. Some say it is when there is violence at the moment of death - a spirit cannot pass on, because of the strength of his anger at the wrong that has been done to him. Often he will rage and scream and rattle his chains, like the poor sad things that linger in your cemeteries and your haunted houses. But other times, they say, he will bind himself, his very essence, to the object that is nearest to him as his life ebbs
away - a weapon, an item of clothing, an ornament. A piece of furniture.”

  Mrs Marchant squeezed Sita’s hands with an urgency that was more panic than comfort.

  “And you believe,” she asked quietly, “that my cabinet is one of these objects? That it’s… possessed, somehow?”

  Sita squeezed back, in a show of solidarity.

  “There is no believe about it,” she said. “A bhoot has made his home in it - and a bad one, very bad, one that wishes all of us great harm. The only question I am asking now is how we must evict him.”

  ———

  “I knew I had her,” Sita said, sighing. “From the moment she asked about the commode, I knew that she’d want to be rid of it, any way she could be. I wonder sometimes why I didn’t wrap things up there and then - why I didn’t just offer to take it off her hands and walk away.”

  “But you know this one,” Ruby told El, gesturing to Sita. “Never knows when to call it a day, that's her trouble. Especially not when she’s got a mark on the hook in a million pound house out west.”

  “17 million these days,” said Sita. “I saw it listed recently. And unfortunately,” she added for El’s benefit, “your Auntie Ruby is right. I never do know when to stop. And I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t wondered more than once at the time whether there were any more treasures like the Boulle hiding up there in plain sight…”

  ———

  “Before we speak more,” Madam Chandravali said, “may I trouble you for a glass of water? And perhaps a headache tablet?”

  Mrs Marchant scrambled to her feet. There were, Sita knew, at least three staff below stairs, a nanny, a cook and a maid, the latter of whom would typically perform the task of bringing drinks and analgesics to the Marchants and their guests - but equally, she suspected that, in this moment, the lady of the house would likely seize any opportunity to flee the room and catch her breath.

  She only hoped it would take her a while to find the glass.

  “I’ll get it,” Mrs Marchant said, backing out of the room but leaving the door wide, and tantalisingly, open.

  When the sound of her host’s footsteps grew fainter and further away, Sita sprung from the bed, stepped out of her shoes and crept from the room, quiet as a mouse.

  She took the carpeted steps to the second floor two at a time, on tiptoe. The floor plan she’d managed to source from a contact at the council before Madam Chandravali made her entrance had indicated that it comprised three rooms, each of a similar size. Could one of them, she wondered, be a strong-room? A holding place for the Marchants’s other acquisitions?

  The first room held nothing but musical instruments: a spruce and maple cello, a pedal harp - late 19th century, she thought - and a baby grand piano, a pitch-black Bechstein that might in other circumstances have captured her attention.

  The second was evidently intended for use by the children. Here, unlike elsewhere in the house, there was a small television set and a wireless; a stack of dog-eared Beezer, Topper and Dandy comic books piled haphazardly onto an end table.

  The third was more interesting.

  From outside, she could see perhaps half the space inside: the leg of an armchair, the thick tassels of a Persian rug, the back end of a writing desk that could have been a Mackintosh. What she could see, however, was less curious than what she could hear: an Englishman’s voice, hard-edged and irritated, reciting a string of numbers, and then - after a brief pause - the word axiom into what she assumed to be a telephone receiver.

  She listened.

  ———

  “A line of digits and a code word down the phone,” said Ruby. “Know what that means, don’t you? 9 times out of 10 anyway.”

  “Swiss bank account?” El replied.

  Sita nodded.

  ———

  She craned her neck towards the door, straining to hear more, not least the password that could be used, in the absence of other identifying information, to gain access to the account remotely – by, for example, a third party with a good memory for numbers, a conversational fluency in French and Italian and a working knowledge of Swiss privacy laws and banking conventions.

  But the man behind the door - and it was Mr Marchant, it had to be - gave her nothing, and eventually, conscious of the imminent return of Mrs Marchant from the bowels of the kitchen, she gave up, retreating downstairs to the guest room whence she came.

  ———

  “Suffice to say, that weren’t the end of it,” said Ruby.

  “But that it had been,” said Sita. “The thing is, you see, that numbered account… it lit rather a fire under me. Because if our Mr Marchant had a numbered account - or more than one - then he almost certainly also had something to hide. Something to hide, and a great deal of money he hadn’t been declaring.”

  “The top two things she looks for in a bloke,” Ruby added.

  “In a mark, certainly,” said Sita.

  “So you switched targets?” El asked. “From Liz Marchant to her husband?”

  “Essentially, yes,” Sita said. “Though I don’t mind telling you, it took the effort of the gods to sacrifice the commode…”

  “Still - greater good, eh?” said Ruby.

  “Sacrifice?” said El.

  ———

  “It must be destroyed,” she told Mrs Marchant, as the lady of the house handed her the water.

  “Destroyed?” Mrs Marchant replied, aghast.

  “Destroyed,” she repeated. “Immolated, if such a thing is possible. It is the fire, you know? Only the fire can burn away the spirit within.”

  ———

  “You’ve got to hand it to her,” said Ruby. “It was a hell of a convincer. She could have took it away and told her she was doing some sort of private exorcism on it behind closed doors, but no - she stood there with her in the garden, shoulder to shoulder while it burned, saying her incantations and what have you.”

  “I lit the first bloody match,” said Sita ruefully. “And dear God, the smell of it when the ebony started to smoulder! It almost bought me to tears.”

  “Worked though, didn’t it?” said Ruby.

  “I suppose it did,” Sita conceded.

  “Tell you what,” said Ruby, leaning conspiratorially towards El. “If she trusted Madam Chandravali here before she rid her house of evil spirits, then afterwards… well, she started looking at her like she’d hung the moon.”

  “Which was fortunate, really,” Sita added. “Given how anxious I was to get to know her. And her family.”

  ———

  Madam Chandravali was a frequent visitor to the Marchant home thereafter, sharing tea and confidences with Mrs Marchant and delivering, where necessary, a psychic reading of such depth and sagacity that it quickly became impossible for Mrs Marchant to imagine how she’d navigate the world without her guidance.

  The older Marchant children warmed to her, fascinated first by her exoticism and then, when its appeal threatened to wane, by the boiled sweets she’d hand them as they mobbed her at the door. Saul Bellman was similarly charmed - by her slender neck and the curve of her hips as much as by her knowing good humour.

  ———

  “You’ve got to remember,” Ruby said, casting an appraising look Sita’s way, “she was a proper looker in her day. Could hardly nip down the shops for someone handing her chocolates or asking her out for dinner. I’d probably have tried it on with her myself, if I were that way inclined.”

  “I’m sorry?” said Sita, arching an eyebrow back at her. “Was a looker?”

  ———

  Only Mr Marchant remained chilly - avoiding her wherever he could, and refusing point-blank his wife’s every invitation to join the two of them in the library.

  It was obvious from the first that he disliked her - and moreover, that he resented her presence in his house, and the extent to which she monopolised his wife’s attention and affections.

  ———

  “What was he going to do about it, though?
” Ruby said. “Couldn’t afford to piss Liz off, could he? Not while old Saul was alive and holding the purse-strings, insisting Liz stay on the board and had a say in all the company decisions. He had to keep his mouth shut.”

  ———

  A month of furtive but unprofitable rifling through ledger books and notepads later - her every muscle primed to spring up like a jack in the box and race to Marchant’s office whenever his wife left the library to go to the toilet or attend to the children - and Sita was no closer to finding any passwords, or any hint of where such passwords might be.

  Surely, she reasoned, he’d written them down somewhere - no man would be so foolish as to rely exclusively on his own recollection when the stakes were so high, particularly not if there were multiple accounts at play. But where?

  She was confident by then that she’d explored every inch of the house in which exploration was possible, had peered down every nook and cranny and cracked open every cheaply-made safe inexpertly hidden behind a Renoir print - which forced her to conclude, grudgingly, that he was keeping the records elsewhere, somewhere away from his primary residence.

  Probably not at his office, she thought. Old Saul still had a finger in every pie of his business - and were she in Marchant’s position, she certainly wouldn’t risk an inquisitive father-in-law happening upon sensitive, possibly incriminating documents the next time he popped by. She’d put money, in fact, on no other member of the Marchant household having any inkling that the Swiss account - or accounts - existed; was reasonably certain moreover, from the rumours she’d heard circulating about his less than savoury commercial reputation and apparent absence of professional scruples, that at least some of the deposits Marchant would have made into the account would have been siphoned, somehow, from the private funds of either Elizabeth or Saul himself.