The Durham Deception (11 page)

‘Everything is in order?' he said.

The man tugged at his moustaches and gave Tom the same careful study he had given Flask's cabinet. ‘Oh yes, it is in good order. I wouldn't expect anything else. This cabinet would not have been left so carelessly open for inspection had it been otherwise.'

‘You're not a . . . believer in all this?' said Tom, indicating the cabinet.

‘I am no believer.'

‘But you were the one who checked the ropes and knots securing Mr Flask and you seemed to be satisfied.'

‘Just as you were satisfied when you searched him, sir. He wouldn't offer himself for inspection if he wasn't confident of getting away with it. You are not from this city or this county?'

‘From London. My wife and I are visitors here. From your voice, you are not local either.'

It was easy to detect those who hadn't been born or brought up in Durham. Although neither Julia Howlett nor Septimus Sheridan had acquired the local accent, Tom had been hearing the distinctive flattened vowels in undercurrents of conversation about the room. But Tom and the inquisitive gentleman could talk no further for Eustace Flask and his little entourage now returned to the morning room for the other half of the evening's manifestation. The lights were lowered once more. Tom thought it was dimmer than it had been for the cabinet show. This time the medium sat at a small table. Aunt Julia was invited to sit on one side of him and Helen on the other. Four more of the guests joined them, but not the individual who'd been examining the cabinet even though he was hovering about as if he wanted an invitation to sit down. The other dozen or more guests stood around the group at the table.

The elfin-faced Kitty brought a hinged slate and a stick of white chalk to the table. Flask lodged the slate on his lap so that the edge of it was resting against the table. He propped both his hands on the table and invited Helen and Julia to rest one of their own hands on the tops of his. After a few moments Flask jerked violently and Tom heard a whisper from one of the group, ‘That is his control.' Questions were asked for by Kitty. Almost everyone in the room seemed familiar with the form. Someone said, ‘What is twenty times thirty?' and someone else said, ‘Who is your control?'

Each time there was a pause then a scraping sound like chalk being dragged across slate. Tom, straining to see through the gloom, thought that Flask's hands stayed without movement on the rim of the table with the slate between them. Oddly, the whole thing was more unnerving than the cabinet display, perhaps because he was only a couple of yards away from Flask or perhaps because the scraping noises set his teeth on edge. More questions were invited by the medium, who spoke now with a queer trembling unlike his usual oily tone.

‘Have you a message for me?'

This was Helen. Tom was amazed that she should have asked something and faintly alarmed when her question was followed by more scratching. Then Aunt Julia asked, ‘Whom should I trust?' Further scraping sounds.

Flask began to wobble his head violently as if an invisible person had seized him by the back of the neck. The slate clattered to the floor. Someone – Ambrose or Kitty? – turned up the gas, signalling the end of the session. By the better light, Flask looked paler than ever, as if he had just woken from a deep and unpleasant sleep. He seemed to come to himself. He picked the slate up from the floor. He displayed both sides of it to the room. They were blank. Tom was relieved – and a fraction disappointed. The man was a charlatan after all and an incompetent one at that.

But then Eustace Flask unhinged the slate to reveal some writing on the inside. He nodded as he scanned the words before handing the slate round the people in the room who were pressing closer. They treated it reverently, passing it from group to group. When the slate got close to Tom he saw the following answers, written in capital letters and on separate lines.

The number: ‘600'

A scrawl that looked like: ‘RUNNING BOOK' or possibly ‘BROOK'.

The sentence: ‘BELIEVE HELEN.'

The words: ‘LIKE A SON'.

Apart from the first answer to the arithmetic question, none of these made much sense but it gave Tom a jolt to see Helen's name scrawled on the tablet for everyone to read. Now Kitty took the slate and, for the benefit of those who hadn't yet seen it or did not understand the responses, explained that ‘Running Brook' was the name of an Indian maid who was Flask's ‘control'. Indeed, the maid had already manifested herself that evening. Yes, it was Running Brook's white limbs that had appeared through the cabinet doors. Kitty, with a voice straining to be genteel, said she believed that Helen was the lady sitting next to her uncle and that the message to her was plain. She must place her trust in the reality of the spirit world. She should ‘BELIEVE'. As for the final answer – the cryptic ‘LIKE A SON' – Kitty was not sure of the application of these words but no doubt all would become clear in the fullness of time.

‘I know what it means,' said Julia Howlett. ‘It was I who asked the question ‘Whom should I trust?' and the answer has come from Running Brook. I should trust my dear Mr Flask here. I should treat him
like a son
.'

Flask put his hand on his shirt-front as if to say, ‘Who? Me?' But his surprise, and everyone else's, was greater when the spruce, moustached gentleman stepped forward and snatched the slate from Kitty.

‘Wait a moment, Mr Flask. I think you should explain first of all how the writing on the slate is in blue chalk when there is plainly a white piece on the table.'

All eyes swivelled from the blue lettering on the tablet to the stick of white chalk on the table top. It was strange, thought Tom, that he hadn't noticed the inconsistency in colour.

‘The spirit moves in mysterious ways, sir,' said the medium, perfectly self-possessed. ‘What matters is the message not the colour of it.'

‘You might also explain, Mr Flask, how you have left blue marks on your shirt . . .'

Flask gazed down at where he'd just patted his chest in his ‘Who? Me?' gesture. There were smears of blue on his starched front. Automatically he glanced at his fingertips and there too were traces of blue chalk. For a moment he looked baffled. Then he looked angry as he saw the other man holding up a stick of blue chalk.

‘I was standing near the table just before you started your folderol and your fiddle-faddle, Mr Flask, and I switched the white chalk for the blue. Then at the end of your performance, I switched them back again.'

‘And what follows from that,
sir
?' said Eustace Flask.

It was fairly obvious what followed. Flask had written the words himself. By now Helen had come back from the table to stand next to Tom and they turned to look at each other. The same thought was in both their minds: was this another police exposure as in Tullis Street? Yet although the moustached man had an odd air of authority he did not seem to be a policeman. What he did next made it even less likely that he was one. He dived for Flask's ankles – the medium had not risen from his chair – and tugged at the bottom of the man's trousers like an angry dog. A shower of flour rained on to Julia Howlett's carpet.

‘There we are,' said the man, standing up and gazing round the room, his own hands now white and floury. The guests looked bemused and shocked. ‘I ask you why a man should need to keep flour in little secret bags at the bottom of his trousers. There is no sane explanation unless it is to replace the flour that the same man has let drop while he is fiddling with his knots and jangling his instruments.'

When they discussed it afterwards, Tom and Helen both confessed to a touch of admiration at the way Flask responded, even if it was only admiration at his impudence. In their eyes, he'd been caught red-handed, or rather caught with a piece of blue chalk and with piles of concealed flour.

Instead of shrivelling up or admitting defeat, as Ernest Smight had done, Flask rose from the table. Ambrose shouldered his way towards him but the medium lifted a ringed hand, the tips of his fingers still tinged with blue chalk. It was like the benediction of a bishop. The gesture said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.' Flask paced slowly towards the gentleman with the fine moustaches, who did not shift one inch. He halted when he was within striking distance. When he spoke next it was not to his opponent but to the rest of the company.

‘Our Lord tells us that when our enemies assail us, we should turn the other cheek. I do not know what your reasons are for coming here tonight, sir, but you have fallen among people who seek no quarrel with you and rather wish the scales to fall from your eyes.'

There were nodded heads at this and whispers of agreement. Tom realized that, whatever the exposer's motives, he had badly misjudged the occasion. Apart from the Ansells and possibly Mr Sheridan, Julia Howlett's guests were true believers. It would take more to convince them than the uncovering of a trick or two. They blamed the accuser and not the accused, who was adopting the role of injured innocent. The man with the moustache understood this. He smiled. He bowed in a way that was slightly stagey. His departing remark too had a melodramatic ring. ‘Next time, Mr Flask, we shall do battle on a ground of my choosing.'

He turned smartly on his heel and strode from the morning room. There was a pause and then a woman began to clap and soon Eustace Flask had earned a round of applause for the way he stood up to the outsider. Aunt Julia clasped him by the arm and other women gathered round him with praise and reassurance. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the business of the blue chalk and the surplus flour, even though there were little mounds of the stuff on the floor by Flask's seat. There was some talk about the identity of the impertinent fellow who'd tried to ruin their evening but no one seemed to have an idea of who he was. Yet, equally, Tom and Helen had the impression that, in the spiritualist community, such hostility and persecution were routine matters. These things were to be expected and, in a perverse way, they fortified the true believer.

Ambrose started to dismantle the cabinet and Kitty to pack away the curtains and muslin. Aunt Julia was sitting and writing at a roll-top desk in the corner of the room and Flask was standing over her like a shield. She handed a slip of paper to the medium who promptly tucked it away. Tom would have bet a month of his own salary that the medium was receiving his reward for the evening. The task which Helen's mother had entrusted to her, that of weaning the aunt away from her devotion to the medium, seemed more impossible than ever.

Flask's Family

Eustace Flask and Ambrose Barker and Kitty were renting a tiny end-of-terrace house outside the city walls in the old borough of Elvet. The medium and his companions were better dressed and kept odder hours than most other inhabitants of the borough, which lay to the north-east across the River Wear. If anyone asked, the trio was a family of sorts, with Flask as the uncle, Kitty his niece and Ambrose some kind of cousin. But no one did ask because in this area of back-to-back terraces, boarding houses, small shops and drinking places on the fringe of a colliery, there was little neighbourly curiosity. Besides, Ambrose had a faintly threatening air to him that discouraged questions.

If the old part of the city was dominated by the cathedral and castle, this more recently built quarter was the location for the new court and police-house and an imposing prison. Ambrose might have seen more than one prison from the inside – he looked the type – but if it disturbed him to glimpse the high walls of Durham Gaol first thing in the morning and last thing at night he did not show it.

Now he finished stowing away the handcart containing the dismantled cabinet which he had wheeled down from the old maid's place in the South Bailey. The terrace house was backed by a tiny yard, convenient for storing the equipment required by the guv'nor. The guv'nor! Ambrose was able to maintain a sober face while Flask was pulling his tricks but the moment the show was done with and they were away from the spiritualist mob and their trusting sheep's eyes he could hardly keep himself from sneering and cackling at the stupidity of humankind.

This attitude did not extend to Eustace Flask himself for, although Ambrose was often nettled by the airs and graces of the medium, he recognized that the man had a real talent for deception and moneymaking. He called him Eustace but also the guv'nor sometimes and it was not altogether ironic. It was his appreciation of Flask's skills that made him bite his tongue as he watched the medium and his ‘niece' Kitty walking ahead while he trundled the cart behind them over the cobbles, feeling a bit like some beast of burden. He knew that if they were to be stopped by one of the town police – which had happened more than once – Mr Flask would soon knock any suspicions on the head. He'd talk in that superior way of his and refer in a familiar style to the Chief Constable and his superintendents and other town worthies as if he dined with them every day. Nevertheless, it hurt Ambrose in the heart to see Kitty next to Flask and touching his arm so constantly with her little paws as they walked so close, to see her whispering and giggling all confidential in his ear, and altogether behaving like a silly chit.

Ambrose had always taken Flask for a molly, a Mary Anne. The guv'nor slipped into the manner easy enough and he was relaxed in the company of women, especially older ones, which could be a sign of molly-hood. But perhaps the truth was that he was something in between, or a nothing in between, neither fish nor fowl. Yet it disturbed Ambrose to see Eustace and Kitty so cosy. He'd have words with Miss Kitty Partout later on, he would.

He pronounced her name Par-tout, putting the stress on the second part and rhyming it with ‘out', which she said was wrong because it was French and she should be pronounced Par-too. Kitty claimed to be French originally, a generation or two back. In that case, said Ambrose, what's
Par-too
mean? Does it have a meaning? Dunno, said Kitty. My mum never said and my dad wasn't around to ask. But Ambrose did believe that Kitty might have Frog blood in her. She had a saucy air sometimes and a way of looking up from under her lowered lashes that was, well,
foreign
as far as he was concerned.