by David Field
Carlyle nodded again and Matthew noted with grim satisfaction how the medium was, as Carlyle had demonstrated to him during one of their earlier meetings, tentatively seeking information that she could then feed back to Carlyle as some sort of confirmation of the presence of a returning soul.
‘Would this lady have been your wife?’ she asked kindly and Carlyle nodded again, allowing himself a suppressed choke of emotion that promised a successful career on the stage should he ever tire of practising medicine. Sarah Gibbons faked a slight shudder, then looked up at Carlyle with a radiant smile. ‘I have the name “Kathleen”. Can you take that, dear?’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle croaked. ‘God bless you, dear lady, that was my wife’s name.’
‘I thought so, dear, since she’s telling me how much she loved you and how she’s with you every day. There is a child by that marriage, is there not?’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle confirmed, ‘a daughter.’
‘And Kathleen is telling me that she is proud that every day you look into your daughter’s eyes and never cease to wonder how much she looks like her mother.’
‘And the other child?’ Carlyle asked innocently.
The light of spiritual grace faded slightly from the medium’s face. ‘Kathleen does not mention any other child. Was she perhaps estranged from her at the time of her passing?’
‘No,’ Carlyle asserted with a slightly raised tone of suspicion. ‘I am surprised that she does not remember our younger child, since they were very close.’
‘Forgive me,’ Sarah Gibbons replied, ‘but it is not always possible to obtain a clear message through the veil of tears and wonderment. There is much spiritual noise surrounding us and many poor souls seeking to come through. Perhaps we can communicate with them by seeking their messages through the table.’
‘The table?’ Carlyle demanded in apparent disbelief.
Sarah nodded enthusiastically. ‘Indeed, since it is constructed from cedar imported from the Holy Land and is an ideal vehicle for the receipt of messages from the Great Beyond.’ She then began coughing loudly and her husband rushed to her side, blocking Carlyle’s view of her.
‘What ails you, my dear?’ he asked solicitously.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing of concern, sweetest. Just a dry throat from all this sudden and almost overpowering clamour from Spirit. Perhaps a glass of water?’
A carafe of water, along with a glass, appeared swiftly from a side table and Sarah took a sip before asking all those present to place their hands on the table in front of them. Carlyle was alert to the fact that the medium now had both hands free and watched her closely.
‘My dear friends in Spirit,’ Sarah began, ‘I call upon you to step forward and give us your loving communication from the Blessed Hereafter. If you would convey your responses by lifting this table once, however slightly, if your reply is “yes”, but twice in quick succession if it is “no”. And so let us begin.’
There then followed what to Matthew seemed like a farcical performance in which questions were posed by everyone around the table, receiving appropriate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to their questions by means of the table lifting gently at one end, once — or twice — in response. All three men took part and even Matthew noticed that just before the table moved on each such occasion, Sarah Gibbons was overcome by another cough that caused her body to jerk slightly. His suspicions were further confirmed by the inaccuracy of the answers he was receiving to his questions and had just had it confirmed that the mother who had served his breakfast that morning had passed into spirit the previous year when Carlyle leapt to his feet, yelled ‘Enough of this nonsense!’ and made a grab for Sarah Gibbons, who jumped off her chair and moved a few paces down the carpet with a look of alarm.
Carlyle turned to Jennings. ‘Inspector Jennings, please investigate under this lady’s scarf, where you will find some sort of hook device that was being employed to move the table. Mr West, perhaps you might ensure that Mr Gibbons here does nothing to prevent that happening.’
Both men did as instructed and while Mathew held Arthur Gibbons by the upper arm in a firm grip made all the more determined by the blasphemy that he had witnessed, John Jennings pulled the loosely wrapped scarf from around the throat of the loudly protesting female half of this fraudulent partnership.
A stiff wooden collar of some sort fell to the carpet and Jennings picked it up and handed it to Carlyle at his request. Carlyle examined it closely, then demonstrated for the benefit of the other two how it was hinged in such a way that it could be concealed flat underneath the scarf.
‘Then, when blocked from our view while her accomplice pretended to solicit her welfare, in full knowledge that she was about to embark on what I believe is called “table turning”, she was able to extend the collar in such a way that it was firmly lodged under the rim of the table. Then you cannot fail to have noticed how each alleged response from “Spirit”, by means of the raising of the table, was preceded by a convenient coughing spasm on the part of the lady. A nice conjuring trick for a cheap music hall, perhaps, but a clear fraud when performed for the benefit of the gullible sitting around a table and paying handsomely for the privilege of having their grief exploited.
‘Inspector, you may rely on me to keep this lady closely guarded while you summon your colleagues with a paddy wagon, although I do not guarantee not to strangle the life out of her if she offers me any resistance. The look on Mr West’s face is such that I have no doubt that he would welcome the opportunity to inflict serious violence on her male accomplice, given the slightest provocation, so let’s not waste any more time in having these two taken down the road to Leman Street.’
6
‘Shall I go to Hell?’ Sarah Gibbons asked fearfully.
Matthew shook his head. ‘That is not a question that I shall be required to answer in due course, madam,’ he replied coldly.
‘But you are a clergyman, are you not?’ she queried.
Matthew nodded. ‘I am indeed, but not of your chosen branch of it, to judge by your fear of Hellfire. You were raised as a Catholic?’
Sarah nodded and burst into tears. ‘I’m so ashamed. So humiliated! I asked to see you because I was told that you are a man of the cloth and I had hoped to confess my guilt and begin all over in a new life. Perhaps the life I was destined to lead, before I fell among thieves.’
‘Literally, in your case,’ Matthew replied, contemptuous of what he believed to be another of her subterfuges under the pretence of religious dedication.
Sarah looked up at him through bleary eyes across the table in the room that had been allocated to them on the ground floor in Leman Street Police Office. ‘I wasn’t always like this, you know — lying and cheating for a living.’
‘Really?’ Matthew replied with cold indifference, but it seemed that nothing was going to stop the flood of self-pity.
‘Really. I was brought up to fear God and educated by nuns in a good school out in Hertfordshire. Then I obtained employment as a governess in a fine house in Mayfair, where I was once well regarded, but where I stooped to thieving in order to pay my crippling debts.’
‘Drink?’ Matthew speculated.
Sarah shook her head. ‘No, the horses. I was always interested in horses — even had my own pony in the field behind the family home when I was a small girl. Anyway, I was taken to the racecourse to accompany the children of the family I worked for and while there I took the opportunity to place a small bet on a horse that I liked the look of. I won on that occasion and that ignited my interest in betting on horse races. Before I knew where I was, I owed a certain bookmaker more than I earned in a year and was too ashamed to agree to the disgusting terms upon which he offered to cancel the debt.’
‘So you stole from your employers?’
‘Yes, to my eternal shame. I was of course dismissed on the spot once my sin was discovered, but the man to whom I’d sold the stolen jewellery suggested that there might be other ways of earning a living. I
became his mistress in due course and we would pull the usual “husband comes home unexpectedly” routine in a hotel close to Windsor racecourse. You know the ploy I’m referring to?’
‘Do I look as if I do?’ Matthew asked starchily.
Sarah obliged. ‘The oldest dodge in the book. An attractive lady — and I was, once — gains the attention of a suitably wealthy gentleman on the racecourse and they adjourn to a local hotel when the lady assures the gentleman that her husband will remain on the racecourse, frittering away his money, for the rest of the day. Once inside the hotel room, the lady disrobes to a compromising degree, then gives some sort of signal through the window, or however. Then the accomplice comes in, pretends to have caught his wife in a compromising situation and demands satisfaction. My accomplice was quite formidable looking in his younger years and the “mark” was easily persuaded to part with money rather than incur a thrashing. We worked that one for several years, until I began to lose out in favour of younger hussies and their mashers playing the same trick.’
‘The man you mentioned — he’s the same one who was playing the part of your loving husband this evening?’
‘Yes. We never did marry, but we may as well have done, given the hold that he has over me. We’ve lived by our dishonesty for almost twenty years now, one way or the other, and if I were to leave him he’d have so much to peach to the bobbies about me that I’d never see daylight again.’
‘Could that not work both ways?’ Matthew asked. ‘I’m no lawyer, but could you not peach on him so as to get him sent away for a long time? Time in which you could move well away from London and start a new life?’
‘Believe me, that’s something I sometimes dream about,’ Sarah replied as her face crumpled with renewed tears of regret. ‘But to do so, would I not be admitting my own part in all these criminal schemes and get a lengthy sentence myself?’
‘Again, I’m no lawyer,’ Matthew reminded her, ‘but part of my ministry takes me, from time to time, to Newgate Gaol, where I’ve heard of men — and sometimes women — getting vastly reduced sentences in exchange for peaching on their fellow criminals.’
‘I’m also fearful that if I did that, Bart would come after me and cut my face to shreds, like he often threatens to do if I don’t do what he says.’
‘Bart?’ Matthew queried.
Sarah made a clucking sound. ‘Sorry, that’s his real name. The man who pretended to be Arthur Gibbons, my husband? His real name’s Bartholomew Slater — “Bart” for short. And my real name is Sarah, but it’s Sarah Barlowe.’
‘Assuming that this man Bart goes away for a long time, but you get away with a lesser sentence, is there somewhere you could go, far away from London, where he’d never find you?’ Matthew asked.
The tears subsided as Sarah’s face assumed a dreamy look of longing. ‘Sometimes I fantasise about sailing for Australia. I’ve heard tell that there are many successful men out there, farmers in the main, and that acceptable, homely women such as me are in great demand as wives. Perhaps I could find the means to take ship for there in due course, by selling all that I own, which isn’t much.’
‘It’s a pity that they stopped sending people out free of charge, as convicts,’ Matthew observed coldly, ‘since you’d qualify for that without too much detailed enquiry.’
‘You’re a very stern man when you want to be,’ Sarah observed, ‘but I sense an inherent softness deep down inside you and with the right woman — one who’ll be coming into your life very soon — you’ll lose that coldness that comes from the aching of the heart for a loving companion.’
Matthew rose swiftly to his feet and looked down at her with anger in his eyes. ‘You still seek to play the part of a psychic, even after being caught out in cheap parlour tricks? I’m wasting no more time on you.’
He’d reached the door and was about to knock in order to be allowed back into the corridor, when she called out to him.
‘There was once a girl who broke your heart and you turned your back on the love of a woman. But Samuel says that you’re to keep your heart open, because the right one has already come into your life. “Grasp this opportunity”, he says.’
Matthew stopped dead and turned back to look at her.
She smiled apologetically. ‘I’m sorry. It just comes out sometimes, particularly when I’m feeling anxious. I’m not entirely a fraud, you see.’
‘Convince me,’ Matthew replied coldly as he resumed his seat.
Sarah closed her eyes and gave a deep sigh. Not a melodramatic jerk of her entire body, but a long sigh, accompanied by a seraphic smile. ‘Samuel tells me that he’s your grandfather. Not “was”, but “is”. “You can’t deny your breeding”, he’s telling me and he’s waving a forefinger, the way he always used to do when you were a boy and he taught you how to catch rabbits when you went walking in the fields with him near your grandparents’ home in Elstree.’
Matthew sat rooted to the spot. No amount of investigation of his background could have revealed his grandfather’s favourite expression, or his habit of finger-wagging. Particularly since, so far as was aware, Sarah had not known who he really was until her arrest.
‘If you can indeed conjure up the dead, why did you stoop to low trickery?’ he asked suspiciously.
Sarah shrugged. ‘My so-called “gift” is very limited and when Bart and I decided to make a living from it, we had to improvise. It reached the stage at which I seemed to lose all my natural power and what happened just now was the first genuine visit I’ve received for some years. They say that if you abuse the gift it will be taken away from you, but Spirit clearly just made an exception, probably for your benefit more than mine.’
‘So you took to raising tables with the aid of a piece of wood?’
‘That was the least of our tricks, believe me,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘It was always much easier in a large hall, where I pretended to bring back loved ones for two pence a head. We always began with a couple of “plants”, as Bart called them — accomplices who, for a shilling, would join the audience and pretend that they had received marvellous messages from “beyond” and by that stage the rest of the dupes were so eager for me to come to them that they’d virtually told me their entire life stories. When you’re confronted with a middle-aged lady, there’s a good chance that she has a father or mother in “Spirit”, so you start off with “You have someone dear to you who departed this life some time ago now, but who was kind to you in your childhood years?” The gullible idiot will then tell you that it’s their grandmother, or whoever and then you follow that up with a few generalities about “how much they miss you, how proud they are of you” and so on.’
‘But with what you might call “private” consultations, you did a little background research?’
‘Yes, that was Bart’s job. As soon as we knew to expect Dr Carlyle, Bart headed off down the hospital and posed as a journalist seeking information about “the personal lives of these great medical pioneers” and in no time at all had discovered that Carlyle had a deceased wife and a daughter in her twenties. But we missed the second child, didn’t we?’
‘There isn’t one, so far as I’m aware,’ Matthew said, ‘but you must realise by now that we’d come to catch you out.’
‘Why would a man of God, a respected surgeon and a police inspector waste their time on a couple of cheap fraudsters like us?’ Sarah asked. ‘Is it all the trouble we caused over that business about plague victims returning from the dead to exact a terrible revenge?’
‘What do you think?’ Matthew replied with heavy sarcasm. ‘There have been several deaths as the result of your cruel deception. You must have been well paid for that by somebody — would you care to reveal who it was?’
‘If I knew I’d tell you, believe me I would,’ Sarah sighed. ‘It’s been on my conscience, although I don’t expect you to believe me when I say that. Bart was approached by someone he knew from his former days as a seller of drugs off the ships in the Port of London an
d offered fifty pounds if I’d go on stage and pretend that the dead were about to come up from the Aldgate Underground. That’s all I ever knew, I swear. Perhaps Bart will be prepared to tell you.’
‘Somehow I doubt it,’ Matthew replied. ‘But your reference to drugs has tweaked my interest. Was Bart still involved in that trade?’
Sarah thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘He may have been, but that was only in connection with the plague pit business.’
‘Go on,’ Matthew urged her, ‘because this may well be your ticket to Australia. Or at least, the freedom to acquire the means to finance it.’
‘Well,’ she recalled. ‘It was around the time when he’d been approached by someone — and I really don’t know who, honestly — to stage this pretence about plague victims coming up from the Underground. He told me that the man in question was still buying drugs off the ships and selling them in the pubs and wherever. He was mixed up with some new drug that made people see things that weren’t there, if you get my meaning, and once we’d done the pretence about the returning dead, the drug would take care of the rest. It seems that this associate of Bart’s was being paid big money to make it all happen and we were just part of it. But fifty quid’s fifty quid, so Bart didn’t ask any questions.’
‘And you have no idea what this drug’s called?’
‘Not really. I heard it mentioned one time, when Bart brought this bloke back to our house and I was making them tea. It had some foreign kind of name, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. I only wish I could, then perhaps I could get away with a shorter sentence.’
‘You’ve told us all you know,’ Matthew reassured her, ‘and that’s all we can ask. I’ll make sure that your co-operation reaches the right ears and who knows? Marriage to an Australian horse breeder within a year?’