A Glimpse of Heaven

by Olivier Bosman

  I saw ghosts when I was a child. They were all around me. On the street, walking past the window as I lay in bed, or sometimes even inside the house. I’d walk into a room and there’d be one sitting at the table, staring at me. They came and went. Sometimes they’d appear for just a few seconds. Sometimes they lingered all day. I thought everyone saw them. But as everyone ignored them, so did I.

  It wasn’t until I was about five or six years old that I found out it wasn’t normal. I remember the moment very well. I was sitting at the table, helping my grandmother wind yarn into a ball, when an old man suddenly appeared behind her. He kept staring at me. There was something so intense about his stare. So desperate, so pathetic. So, I asked my grandmother, “Who’s that man standing behind you? He’s scaring me.”

  I’ll never forget her reaction. She grabbed my arm and yanked me towards her. Then she looked right into my eyes, and in that stern Irish accent of hers she said, “Don’t you ever talk about them to no one! Do you hear, child? Don’t mention them again! Pay them no mind and they’ll go away.”

  I felt terrible. I thought I’d done something wrong. And knowing that I shouldn’t be seeing ghosts, I promptly lost the ability to do so. I never saw another ghost again. My innocence was gone, and with it my gift.

  It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I began to remember what I was once capable of. I started working for Madame Cabret, a Frenchwoman who’d set up a bistro in London. She read Tarot cards for her customers. She’d join them at their table, lay the cards for them and read their fortune. And sometimes, after closing time, she’d even hold séances in her back room.

  But Madame Cabret wasn’t a real clairvoyant. She was a fraud, albeit a crafty one. I learned a lot from her. This was back in the 1850s, when women still wore crinolines. She’d conceal a whole array of artifacts under her skirts. Apples dangling on a string, for instance, which she’d bounce on the floorboards when a ghost supposedly entered the room. And she had a fake arm with a wax hand. As she dimmed the gaslight, she’d pull her real arm in and stick the fake one through her sleeve. That way she could fool her clients into thinking that she had both hands on the séance table while putting the willies up them by secretly poking their knees and sides with a stick. They were useful things, those crinolines.

  Madame Cabret was a fake, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any ghosts. There were. She called them and they came. She couldn’t hear them, but I did. Although hearing is not the right word. Spirits don’t use language, you see. They use pictures. They summon pictures in the clairvoyant’s mind, and that is how they communicate. It took me a while to realize that the visions I saw in my head during the séances were actually the spirits’ answers to the questions which Madame Cabret was posing. Madame Cabret was completely oblivious to the spirits’ presence. She just made up the answers to her own questions. But I heard the real answers. That’s when I remembered that I’d once had this gift as a child. One which I’d inherited from my grandmother. She was too scared to make use of it, but I wasn’t. So, I struck out on my own.

  Spirits don’t always come when you want them to. I cannot summon them. They come and go as they please, which is very inconvenient when you’ve got paying clients waiting to speak to them. So, when the spirits were absent, I used the tricks that Madame Cabret taught me. I kept that handy crinoline long after it had gone out of fashion. I became known for it. And in the 1880s, I changed my name to Madam Bovlatska. It was a cheap trick, I know, giving myself a name so similar to that of the famous Russian spiritualist. But Madame Blavatsky was very popular at the time, and it opened many doors for me. I was even employed by Scotland Yard several times to help them with an investigation. But then I suppose you know that already.

  It didn’t make me rich, but it kept me alive for many years. And I was happy, until... well, until that old feminine vice I talked to you about reared its ugly head again. Curiosity. I wanted to know where those spirits lived. Why did they linger among the living? Why was I able to see them as a child when nobody else could? Was there a portal which linked their realm with ours? And if they could step through into my realm, could I not visit them in theirs?

  As I searched for the answers to these questions, I met a lot of interesting people. But one person is of particular relevance to my story. This person was Mr Phineas de Martos. I met him in the library. We were both studying Theosophy – the religion of the woman whose name I borrowed. The library only had one copy of Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, and we shared it. We sat side by side at the table and went through the book together. I am not a clever woman, Detective Sergeant. I’ve had very little education, and I wouldn’t have understood anything of the book if Phineas hadn’t explained every single page to me.

  Phineas was a very knowledgeable man. His family was in the sugar trade, although he himself did not work. He’d acquired a mysterious disease after spending a stint in a sugar plantation in Barbados as a young man, and he couldn’t work. So, he filled his time with studying. He was very patient with me. Explaining everything about Hinduism and Buddhism and how all world religions share the same core beliefs. He taught me all about Kabbalah, a Jewish philosophy which explains the relationship between God and his creation.

  Phineas was of the Jewish faith. His family originally came from Moorish Spain. One of his ancestors was Aharon Ben Yohai, later known as Aron de Martos, a prominent rabbi and kabbalist in Cordoba. He wrote about the magic which was hidden in the Talmud. There is a lot of magic in the old scriptures, you know. Oh, the common man won’t be able to see it. You need to have studied the scriptures for many years, and you need to have a good grasp of the Hebrew language. But when you do, you will see that there is magic in the scriptures. Hidden information which describes the appearance of God and what the afterlife looks like. The very thing that all religious scholars long to have: a glimpse of heaven.

  Hebrew is a magical language. It says so in the bible. Yes, it does. You’ve read it, Detective Sergeant. I’m sure. It’s in the very first phrase. In the beginning was the word, and the word was God. Before anything else, before light and dark, before the moon and the stars, before the ocean and the land, all that existed was the word. And it was by uttering the word that God created the world. Let there be light, he said, and there was light. Hebrew is a powerful language, and if you study it well, you can perform magic. Aharon Ben Yohai wrote a manuscript called the Codex of Solomon– a key to understanding and using the magic contained within the Hebrew texts.

  Well, to cut a long story short, I fell in love with Phineas. He was twenty years my senior, but we loved each other, and we got married. His family objected to me, of course. Well, who can blame them? I’m just a poor spiritualist to them. A charlatan, a gypsy. And I’m a gentile. They thought I was after his money, so they cut him off. He was not to inherit anything so long as he stayed married to me. But he didn’t care. We weren’t interested in money. We were interested in knowledge.

  He took me to Spain for our honeymoon. He wanted to visit Cordoba, his ancestral home, and purchase his ancestor’s original manuscript from a local antiquities dealer.

  But unfortunately, that was the last trip he ever made. He died there. It was the heat that did it. His body couldn’t handle it, and his heart gave way. We’d only been married for two months.

  His family paid for his body to be shipped back to London, and they buried him at the West Ham Jewish Cemetery. They allowed me to visit his grave on the condition that I renounced his surname. De Martos is an unusual name in London – a proud Sephardic name which they did not want soiled by the likes of me. So, I reverted to using my own name.

  I got nothing after he died. His family saw to that. I was evicted from the London home I shared with him. All that I had left was his battered old leather attaché case, which he used to carry around with him wherever he went. It contained all his documents, his study notes, his pamphlets, his papers. But it also contained one very important thing – something I’m su
re his family were ignorant of. The manuscript. The very thing which has put my own life in danger.

  It is a precious treasure which I have in my possession; I know it is. Esoteric societies all over the world are willing to pay good money for it. But it is wasted on me. I can’t make head nor tail of it. So, I sought the help of someone who could.

  I met Frater Sapienti at the cemetery. I was visiting my husband’s grave and saw him standing by the gate. I took him for a rabbi at first. I wanted to ask him if he could teach me Hebrew. But as I approached him, before I even got the chance to say anything, he looked into my eyes with that piercing stare of his and said: “Woofie.”

  “Woofie,” he called me. That was my nickname when I was a child. I couldn’t pronounce Ruthie, so I called myself Woofie. I was dumbstruck. I hadn’t heard that name for years. He said he could read people by looking into their eyes, and he could teach me how to do the same. That’s how I ended up becoming a Daughter of Lilith. Frater Sapienti helped me with the manuscript. He wasn’t as knowledgeable as my husband, but he was more knowledgeable than me, and I was beginning to make progress. Until his son learned of what we were doing.

  Do not be fooled by Mr Doucet, Detective Sergeant. He may tell you that he wants nothing to do with his father’s blasphemous practices, but it’s not true. Mr Doucet is very much a part of the Sons of Cain. He’s in charge of the society’s finances. He is well aware of the amount of money his father is worth. But he cares nothing about religion and magic and philosophy. He is just using his father as a milch cow. Doucet wants to get hold of my manuscript. He wants to sell it to a wealthy Rosicrucian society in Germany. He and that foul-smelling associate of his, that manuscript hunter with the ridiculous-sounding German name. That’s who I’m hiding from. They will do anything to get hold of my manuscript.

  Doucet persuaded his father to make me surrender the manuscript. He said I had to hand it over to him if I wanted to continue being part of the society. Well, I will never surrender my manuscript. It is the only memento I have of my dear departed husband. So, I left Frater Sapienti and his Sons of Cain and set out to find somebody else who could help me decipher the manuscript.

  But Doucet would not let go. He began threatening me. He sent two of his cronies to my apartment (he and his father have a whole army of high-ranking disciples to call upon). They gained access to my rooms by pretending to inquire about a séance, and as soon as they were in, they roughed me up. They pinned me to the wall and hit me repeatedly, demanding to know where I kept the manuscript. Then they turned my room upside down looking for it. But they didn’t find it. I have better sense than to hide the manuscript in my own home.

  That same night, a parcel containing a cracked pocket mirror was left outside my door. I knew what that meant. They send these to all those who fall out with the society. It meant that they wanted me dead.

  Well, I was beside myself with fear. I didn’t know what to do. In my panic, I went to Mr Billings. I’d heard through a charwoman who works for his former landlady that he’d opened a private detective office in Spitalfields. I’d worked with him before. I knew that he was kind-hearted and trustworthy, and I was willing to pay him for his services. But he couldn’t help me. So, I came here.

  Mrs Moorhouse and I have known each other for years. I helped her communicate with her deceased husband. We both share an interest in the otherworldly. It was I who suggested she join the Daughters of Lilith. I thought it would be useful to have someone on the inside, keeping an eye out. Of course, that was before all of this happened. She’s left them now, haven’t you, Mabel Anne? She’s just as scared of them as I am after what happened to poor Rachel.

  I have no idea why they picked on Rachel. She had nothing to do with the society. She was Mrs Moorhouse’s cousin. Such a sweet and charming young woman. Came to visit every day after work with a bunch of flowers. She didn’t know I was hiding. She thought I was just a friendly neighbour. We kept everything from her, didn’t we, Mabel Anne? Didn’t want to get her involved. Such a shame how she ended up. Cutting off her ears. Mutilating that pretty face of hers. Such cruel people.

  But we mustn’t talk about it any more. You can see that we’re upsetting Mrs Moorhouse.

  “WE HAVE TO GO BACK to Doucet,” Billings said as they walked out of the house.

  Clarkson shook his head. “I don’t know, Billings. We already have Doucet’s statement. We can’t bother the man again unless we have something more substantial.”

  “But we have something substantial. Mrs Grenfell said he was part of the society.”

  “That’s just her word against his. He’ll deny it.”

  “We’ll check his accounts. We’ll get him to hand over his books.”

  “We need a warrant for that, and we won’t get one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not enough proof. All we have are Mrs Grenfell’s accusations, and her words don’t count for much. She’s a self-confessed charlatan. No magistrate is going to sign a warrant based on her statement.”

  “But Doucet is hiding something from us. I know he is.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He lied to me. The day he came into my office. I asked how he found me. He said he’d seen an ad in the paper. I haven’t placed any ads.”

  Clarkson shrugged. “Maybe he just didn’t remember.”

  “Of course he remembered. He’s lying, Clarkson. He plays a part in all of this.”

  “Plays a part in what, Billings? What exactly are you accusing him of? He didn’t kill Rachel Bunton. He has a cast-iron alibi for that night. He was at his club.”

  “But he’s a member of the Sons of Cain, and the Sons of Cain killed Rachel Bunton.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do I know?” Billings raised his bandaged hand and waved it angrily in front of Clarkson. “They cut off my finger! They cut off her ears! It’s the same people. It’s the Sons of Cain, and Doucet is in charge of them.”

  “But how do you know it’s the same people? How do you know it was the Sons of Cain?”

  “Because of the cracked pocket mirror. The masks. Who else could it have been?”

  “I want to show you something.” Clarkson opened up his briefcase and pulled out two masks: an ox and a lion.

  Billings stared at them, open mouthed. “Where did you get those?”

  “Spitalfields market. Just round the corner from where you live. There’s a woman selling them at a stall. Makes them herself. She’s been selling loads of them. For masked balls, fancy dress parties, even wall decorations. Anyone can get hold of these.”

  “So, what are you saying? That two random drunks stopped at her stall to buy a mask and then barged into my apartment to cut off my finger!”

  “Don’t be like that, Billings. I’m just saying that we need proof. Tangible proof that Doucet is involved.”

  “Well, we’re not going to get tangible proof unless we talk to him. Come on.” Billings grabbed his companion’s arm and dragged him back in the direction they came from. “We’re going there now.”

  “Oh, Billings!” Clarkson made a half-hearted attempt at pulling back. “We can’t bother Mr Doucet again. He’ll raise a complaint.”

  “He’s lying, Clarkson. I know he is. If we talk to him, I’ll catch him out.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But I will.”

  DOUCET FROWNED WHEN he saw Clarkson and Billings standing in his doorway. He pointed at Billings. “What is he doing here?”

  “John Billings is helping me with my investigation,” Clarkson explained.

  “He sent me fake reports! I hope you’re going to pay back the money I gave you.”

  Billings frowned. “I only faked the last one,” he mumbled.

  “We’d like to speak to you, Mr Doucet,” Clarkson said. “Some new information has come to light, and we’d like to hear your thoughts on it.”

  “New information? What new information?”

  “May
we come in?”

  Doucet thought about this. He looked at Billings, then back at Clarkson. “I’ll speak to you, Detective Sergeant, but I won’t allow this man to enter my house.”

  “You don’t call the shots,” Billings mumbled, and pushed past him into the house.

  Doucet’s face went red with indignation.

  Clarkson smiled and shrugged. “May I come in?”

  The gentleman nodded his begrudging consent and led the two detectives towards his study.

  “So, what is this new thing which has come to light?” he asked as he sat at his desk.

  Clarkson and Billings took a seat opposite him.

  “We spoke to Mrs Ruth Grenfell,” Clarkson said. “Do you know her?”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “She was a disciple of your father’s. She claims that you were in charge of the Sons of Cain’s bookkeeping.”

  “Ridiculous!”

  “You deny it, then?”

  “Of course I deny it. I have nothing to do with my father’s society. I told you that already.” There was a short pause. “So, is this it, then? Is this the new information that has come to light?”

  “Well...um...” Unsure of what to say, Clarkson turned towards his colleague.

  “How did you find my office?” Billings asked.

  Doucet frowned. “I told you, Detective Sergeant. I will not talk to that man!”

  “Just answer him.”

  Doucet leaned back in his chair, folded his arms and sulked. “I don’t remember.”

  “You told me you saw an advertisement in The Times,” Billings said.

  “Well, I guess that’s how I found it, then.”

  “I didn’t place an advertisement in The Times.”

  “Well, then it must’ve been another paper.”

  “I didn’t place any advertisements.”

  Doucet frowned. “What the devil does it matter how I found your blessed office!”

  “Mrs Grenfell visited me the night before you came. Perhaps you found me by having her followed.”