Slade House (14 page)

This is all sounding a bit
Da Vinci Code
for me. “What's your source for all of this, Mr. Pink? Lady Albertina's book?”

“No. Léon Cantillon wrote his memoir too, see.
The Great Unveiling.
My own copy's one of just ten known survivors, and it's this account what cross-corroborates Lady Albertina's story, so to speak.” He turns away to cough a smoker's cough into the crook of his elbow. It lasts a good while. “So. Dr. Cantillon met Lord Chetwynd-Pitt in early summer of 1915 at the house of mutual friends in London. After a few schooners of port, His Lordship began telling the soldier-doctor about Lady Albertina's ‘chronic hysteria.' The poor woman was in a terrible state by this point. In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned
in the very same week
at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally. Her husband hoped that Léon Cantillon, as a sympathetic spiritualist and a man of medicine, might be the man to help where everyone else'd failed, like. To bring her back from the brink.”

Fred Pink's framed by the window. Dusk's falling. “So the Chetwynd-Pitts had been dabbling in spiritualism since the ‘telegram incident,' had they?”

“They had, Miss Timms, they had. The craze for séances was in full swing, see, and the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle no less was saying it was founded in science. To be sure, there was no shortage of shysters all too happy to milk the craze, but thanks to Norah and Jonah, the Chetwynd-Pitts knew that
some
psychic phenomena, at least, was genuine. As a matter of fact, Lord Chetwynd-Pitt'd brought several mediums up to Ely to channel the spirits of their dead boys, but none of them proved themselves to be the real McCoy, and with each dashed hope Lady Albertina's sanity took a fresh battering.”

I bring the tomato juice to my lips, but it still looks like a specimen jar in a blood bank. “And could Dr. Cantillon help?”

Fred Pink rubs his wiry bristles. “Well, after a fashion, yes—though he never claimed to be a medium. After examining Lady Albertina, Cantillon said that her grief'd ‘severed her ethereal cord to her spirit guide.' He performed a healing ritual he'd learned off of a shaman in the mountains of Rif and prescribed an ‘elixir.' In her book, Lady Albertina wrote that the elixir gave her a vision of ‘an angel rolling away a stone from her entombment' and she saw her three sons happy on a higher plane. In
his
book, Cantillon mentions that his elixir contained a new wonder drug called cocaine, so make of that what you will. I'd add to the mix the benefits of the talking cure as well. The chance for an Edwardian lady to spill her guts in private and vent her spleen at God, king and country must've been therapeutic, to say the least. Like grief counselling, nowadays. Certainly at this stage in the proceedings, Dr. Cantillon seems to've been a very welcome guest indeed.”

My phone buzzes in my bag. Avril texting me back, I expect, but I ignore it. “Where are the Grayer twins in all this?”

“Right: Jonah was an apprentice clerk in the Swaffham Manor estate office. Short-sightedness and a dicky ticker'd saved him from the trenches, though as these conditions never troubled him in later life, I can't help but wonder how real they were. Norah was a weekly boarder at a school for ladies in Cambridge, to up her marriage prospects. Léon Cantillon'd heard about their ‘telegrams' from the Chetwynd-Pitts, of course, so the first chance he had, he asked for a demo. It took place on the doctor's first weekend at Swaffham. He was impressed. He was
very
impressed. ‘An annunciation of the New Age of Man,' he later called it. A fortnight later, Cantillon put a proposal to his hosts. If they ‘lent' him Norah and Jonah, and if the twins was willing, he'd ‘provide a psychic education consummate with their gifts.' The doctor said he knew an occultic teacher who'd train the twins in spirit channeling. Once Norah and Jonah'd mastered that skill, he said, Lady Albertina'd be able to freely speak with her sons from their higher plane, without fear of being gulled by swindlers.”

I sniff a swindler. “How for real was Dr. Cantillon?”

The old man rubs a watery blue, red-rimmed eye and growls thoughtfully. “Well, the Chetwynd-Pitts believed him, which is what matters to our backstory. They agreed to his proposal to educate Norah and Jonah, but here's where the doctor's version of events and Lady Albertina's begin to part ways. She wrote that Léon Cantillon'd promised the twins'd be away no more than a few months. Cantillon's claim is that the Chetwynd-Pitts gave him guardianship of the Grayers with no small print about expiry dates, time or distance. Who's telling the truth? That I can't tell you. Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don't you find? What we do know is that Léon Cantillon took the twins first to Dover, crossed over to Calais, passed through wartime Paris, carried on south to Marseille, then sailed by steamship to Algiers. Lady Albertina calls this journey ‘an abduction, no more, no less,' but by the time she and her husband found out about it, the horse'd bolted. Repatriation of minors is tricky enough now. Back then, when sixteen-year-olds were adults in most senses, and with the Great War in top gear, so to speak, and inside French colonial jurisprudence—forget it. The Grayer twins were gone.”

I'm not clear: “Were they taken against their will?”

Fred Pink's face says
Hardly likely.
“Which would you choose? Life as an orphaned pleb in the Tory Fens in wartime England, or life as a student of the occult under the Algerian stars?”

“It would depend on whether I believed in the occult.”

“They believed.” Fred Pink sips his bitter. “Sally did too.”

And if she hadn't,
I think,
she wouldn't have been playing Ghostbusters in unfamiliar backstreets at night; and whatever happened to her wouldn't have happened
. Either I bite my tongue or I kill the interview. “The Grayers stayed in Algeria, then.”

“They did, yes. Norah and Jonah already knew telepathy. What other powers might they acquire, in the right hands? Léon Cantillon was a sly operator, there's no doubt, but a sly operator can still be the right man for the job.” He looks at Léon Cantillon's photo again. “He took the twins to the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif. I mentioned him before. The Sayyid followed an occult branch called la Voie Ombragée, or the Shaded Way, and lived in a ‘dwelling of many rooms' by a fast-flowing stream at a ‘high neck of a secret valley' a day's ride from Algiers; and that's about all the info Cantillon gives us. The Sayyid accepted the odd foreign twins—who couldn't speak a word of Arabic at this point, remember—as disciples in his house, so he must've seen potential in them. Cantillon returned to his duties at the Foreign Legion hospital in Algiers, though he made the journey to the Sayyid's once a fortnight to check up on his young charges' progress.”

Outside the pub, a woman hollers, “You're s'posed to indicate, moron!” and a car roars off. “Mr. Pink,” I say. “If I can be frank, this story feels a long way away from my sister's disappearance.”

Fred Pink nods, and frowns at the clock on the wall: 8:14. “Give me till nine o'clock. If I haven't connected all of this with your Sally and my Alan by then, I'll call you a taxi. On my honor.”

While I don't have Fred Pink marked down as a liar, I do have him marked down as a dreamer-upper of alternative histories. On the other hand, after all these years my own inquiries into Sally's disappearance have led exactly nowhere. Maybe Fred Pink's tracking me down is a hint that I need to look for leads in less obvious places. Starting now. “Okay: nine o'clock. Was channeling dead spirits on the Sayyid's syllabus, as Cantillon had promised Lady Albertina?”

“You've got a knack of asking the right question, Miss Timms.” Fred Pink gets out a box of spearmint Tic Tacs, shakes out three, offers me one—I refuse—and puts all three in his mouth. “No. Léon Cantillon had lied to the Chetwynd-Pitts about séances. I think he knew perfectly well that séances are almost always fraud. When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days, but there's no Wi-Fi there, so to speak, so no messages can be sent. Either way. Mediums might convince themselves they're hearing voices from the dead, but the boring reality is, it's impossible.”

Well, that's wacko. “That's very exact. Forty-nine days?”

Fred Pink shrugs. “The speed of sound's very exact. So's pi. So are chemical formulas.” He crunches his Tic Tacs. “Ever been to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, Miss Timms?” I shake my head. “I have, believe it or not, just a few years back. Thanks to three thousand quid I won on a scratch-card. Goes a bloomin' long way in Algeria, does three thousand pounds, if you watch out for the pickpockets and rip-off merchants. Those buckled-up mountains, the dry sky, the hot wind, the…oh, the whole massive…otherness of it, so to speak. I'll never forget it. Rewires your head, if you stay there too long. Little wonder all the hippies and that lot made a beeline for places like Marrakesh in the sixties. Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn't recognize us. Day by day, the twins' Englishness ebbed away. They picked up Arabic from the Sayyid's other disciples; they ate flatbread, hummus and figs; Jonah let his beard grow; Norah wore a veil, like a good Muslim girl; and sandals and dishdashas made more sense in that climate than shoes and cuff links and petticoats and what have you. The calendar lost its meaning for the twins, Cantillon writes. One, two, three years passed. They learned occult arts and obscure sciences that there aren't even words for in English, things that not one mind in a hundred thousand learns, or
could
learn, even if the chance came along. The Grayers' only link with the outside world was Dr. Cantillon, but when he brought them up to speed with that world—the slaughter in Flanders, the fallout from Gallipoli, the killings in Mesopotamia; the politics in Westminster, in Berlin, in Paris, in Washington—to Norah and Jonah it all sounded like stuff going on in places they'd read about years ago. Not real. For the twins, home was their Sayyid's valley. Their fatherland and motherland was the Shaded Way.” Fred Pink scratches his itchy neck—he appears to suffer from mild psoriasis—and stares through my head, all the way to a moonlit dwelling in the Atlas Mountains.

The cracked clock says 8:18. “How long were they there?”

“Until April 1919. It ended as suddenly as it'd begun, like. Cantillon visited the Sayyid one day and the master told him he'd taught the twins all the knowledge he could impart. The time'd come for the great globe itself to be their master, he said. Which meant what, exactly? And where? England held no great attraction for any of them. There'd be no fond welcome home from the Chetwynd-Pitts at Swaffham Manor, that was for sure. Ireland was having birth pangs and gearing up for a vicious civil war. France was on its knees, along with most of Europe, Algiers's boom years as a war port were over, and Léon Cantillon, who was always better at spending money than earning it, now found himself with a pair of oddball semi-Arabized English twins in tow. How to convert the Grayers' occultic knowledge into a well-padded lifestyle, that was the doctor's dilemma, wasn't it? And the answer? The good old US of A, that was the answer. The three of them sailed for New York in July, second class, with Cantillon posing as the twins' Uncle Léon. Norah and Jonah were hungry to see the world, like gap-year kids nowadays. They took a townhouse on Klinker Street in Greenwich Village.”

“I know it well,” I say. “
Spyglass
's New York office is on Klinker Street.”

“Is that a fact?” Fred Pink sips his bitter and suppresses a belch. “ 'Scuse me. Small world.”

“What did they do to earn a living in the States?”

Fred Pink gives me a knowing look. “They held séances.”

“But séances are fraudulent, you just said.”

“I did. They are. And I'm not here to defend Cantillon or the twins, Miss Timms, but they weren't hucksters in the usual manner. See, Norah and Jonah could read minds, or ‘overhear' the thoughts of most people they came across.
That
bit wasn't a trick. It was just an extra sense they had, like extremely sensitive hearing. They could rummage through their clients' minds and discover things no one knew, not even the people whose minds they were in. The twins knew what their grief-stricken clients most needed to hear, and what words'd best heal them—and those were the words they said. The only fiction was the claim that these words came from the dear departed. Now you might say that's worse, not better, and maybe you'd be right. But is it so far away from what your shrinks and counselors and psychowhatnots try to do nowadays? There was a lot, and I do mean a
lot
, of unhappy and despairing and downright suicidal New Yorkers who left that little house on Klinker Street certain, quite certain, that their loved ones were in a better place and looking out for them and that one day they'd be reunited. I mean, that's what religion does, doesn't it? Are you going to condemn every priest and imam and rabbi on earth for doing the very same thing? No, the Grayer twins' séances weren't real; but yes, the hope they gave was. Isn't the yes better than the no?”

Fraud's fraud,
I think, but I perform an ambiguous nod. “So the New York gigs went well.”

“Very. Cantillon was a canny manager. Once the Grayers got a bit of a name for themselves, he switched tack: discreet appointments at wealthy clients' homes. No props, no smoke, no mirrors, no ectoplasm, no Ouija, no daft voices. No public performances, nothing vulgar or theatrical. Just quiet, calm, sane grief relief, so to speak. ‘Your son says this' and ‘Your sister says that.' If Cantillon felt a possible client was only a thrill seeker, he turned them down. Or so he claimed, anyway.”