The Ghost Hunters (39 page)

I couldn’t speak: I had still to reveal the full story. And my part in it.

Mother was studying me; and I recognised at that instant, beneath her faded elegance, all the reason and wisdom that had been so evident when I was younger that had distinguished her as sensible, that had inspired me to become like her: smart and confident.

‘Tell me this,’ she asked, watching me carefully. ‘Do
you
trust him?’

I remembered the warnings from my anonymous telephone caller:
Ask him where he goes
.

‘He’s a loner, Mother. Sometimes I feel as if I am in the way. Sometimes I feel as if I am the centre of his world.’

‘But has he ever let you down, Sarah?’

Still I remained silent, unable to tell her what I held in my heart. There was no telling what the truth would do to her.

‘Sarah, if someone as sceptical as Mr Price believes in this man, truly believes in him, so that he is willing to stake his own good word on the matter … well now, that surely has to count for
something
does it not?’

‘I suppose so.’

She gave my hand a gentle squeeze. ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart? You look pale.’

When I told her about the planned experiment with Schneider, Mother seemed to melt before me. She let out a sharp gasp as her hand shot to her mouth.

A long moment passed until finally, dropping her voice, Mother said ‘Harry
made
you agree to this?’

‘He didn’t make me. I agreed to the idea.’

I reached over, wrapped my arms around her, feeling her shoulders tremble beneath her woollen cardigan. When at last her sobbing subsided I summoned the courage to look at her again in the eye.

‘I want to be there,’ she said, firmly. ‘If you father is … if he has something to say to us, if he is ready to answer my questions, then I am coming. Do you understand? You mustn’t try to stop me. I’ve waited too long.’

‘Mother, no … it’s too risky.’ But the expression of hardened determination on her face and the hope that had burgeoned in her watery eyes signalled to me that there was no sense in arguing now. The matter was decided.

‘There is something else,’ she added after a prolonged pause. ‘Something I must tell you before this experiment can go ahead.’

‘What – what is it? Mother?’

Her right hand was turning the rings on her left with nervous agitation. ‘You know that I loved your father, in spite of the difficulties …’

‘Of course.’

She lowered her head. ‘He suffered badly, very badly with his nerves. We had a dinner party at the house once. He made every guest wash their hands. Twice.’ Her eye caught mine and I felt myself look away. She had set my heart fluttering with unrest. ‘At the end of the meal he said he had an announcement – a surprise. Kept us all guessing’ – she smiled – ‘he was good at that. I thought he was probably joking.
Hoped
he was joking. But then he led us all to the front door and showed us it parked right outside: a brand new Rolls Royce.’ She blinked away a glistening tear. ‘Oh, I smiled and laughed and pretended I knew. But of course, I didn’t have a clue. And that was the way it was,
when his obsessions became very bad: he made decisions, frittered away the money, and I was always the last to know.’ She nodded to herself, staring past me over the other tables. ‘I
still
don’t know.’

‘Go on,’ I prompted her. We had come to it at last: the edge of the thing, the source of her enduring sadness.

‘Sarah, his obsessions, made him do things … worse things … I only learned the truth, how bad it was, years afterwards, on the night….’ As she hesitated, choking back her tears, I resolved to broach the subject that was bothering me the most, to see if there was a connection here.

‘I hear you at night sometimes, late, sorting through your wardrobe …’

She didn’t deny it, but she was leaning away from me, looking down.

‘It started the night that man came to the front door. Who was he?’

‘Professor McDougall.’

McDougall. I recognised the name. ‘He’s a member of Harry’s Laboratory.’

She nodded sharply. ‘He was there on the opening night, singing Mr Price’s praises. He invited me. His guilty attempt at reconciliation, no doubt.’

I thought back to that night. Mother in her sleek fitted jacket and matching skirt. The way she had conjured up in my mind the impression of a lost child. McDougall. She had mentioned the name. ‘You sounded upset, insisted we leave – why?’

‘It was Professor McDougall who treated your father, Sarah, before he went to war. Your father’s condition … I kept it from you for as long as I could, but sometimes it was so dreadful …
He rose like a corpse some mornings, sitting unresponsive at the end of his bed, just staring. He had ceased to see the world in colour. He had ceased to see us at all.’

Of course I remembered. Not well, but enough.

‘The Army would have called him mad,’ she said, ‘if they had known – they would have called him mad and sent him home from the war.’

I nodded, remembering Price’s similar state of melancholy. ‘Perhaps they’ll have a proper word for it one day,’ I suggested. ‘Something other than madness. They’ll understand it better. But he was brave to the end – remember that. At least we know he died a hero, and he did that for us.’

Mother’s eyes flickered. I had no wish to heighten her distress, but my urge to know why McDougall had come to the house so many years after my father died, was too powerful to prevent me from asking the question. ‘What did he say that upset you, ignited in you such a fervent belief in Spiritualism, made you hide Father’s photographs?’

She inhaled deeply, stiffening her back, and said, ‘I can’t tell you the whole of it, but I will tell you some. Your father had a mistress. The man at the doorstep …’ she inhaled sharply … ‘Professor McDougall was her husband.’

Suddenly I felt so cold, felt my fingers turning to icicles.

Now Mother was looking back at me with pleading, sorrowful eyes.

‘That can’t be right,’ I said. ‘It just can’t be.’

But Mother was nodding, and I was remembering. I couldn’t stop. It was as if a curtain in my mind was thrown back, ripped down, revealing the horrible thing behind: there I was in the doorway to Mother’s room, staring down at my father as he crouched on the floor, sobbing, clutching letters beside an open trunk.

‘When Professor McDougall explained how long the affair had gone on, I refused to believe him. Until that night, when he came to the house and told me there was proof.’

‘How could there be proof?’ I breathed, already suspecting that somewhere, deep inside, I knew the answer. My hands had clenched into fists at the alarming idea that my father hadn’t been the man I always thought he was. ‘What sort of proof?’

Mother continued slowly, crying now. ‘He told me there was a trunk, upstairs in our bedroom. That it would tell me everything I needed to know. Proof.’

Letters.

‘I thought the old thing was full of junk. It was locked. When I broke into it….’ She stumbled over her words. ‘Oh, Sarah, so many letters. So many years. So many mistresses.’

None of this was easy to hear. I had always remembered my father as a loyal and generous man. But now I knew.

‘Those letters were his trophies.’ Mother shook her head, as if to deny it. ‘McDougall’s wife told him everything. Your father wasn’t the man you thought he was.’

‘Why on earth did he keep them?’ I wanted to know.

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps they gave his life some order as his mind deteriorated. And now you can understand why I put his photographs away. I love him, of course, even though he wasn’t the man you like to remember. You can see now, I hope, why I have been looking for so long, visiting mediums. If there’s the slightest chance that your father can see us in the world beyond, if he can come through and explain to me why he did what he did,’ she covered her heart with one hand, ‘then maybe I can move on. The love that we shared, your father and me, is worth forgiving for.’

Then quite suddenly her expression changed again, her
anguish and sorrow replaced with a sort of hope and renewed confidence I hadn’t seen since before she turned to Spiritualism. ‘Tell me: when does this great medium arrive in London? We must be ready.’

The only words I could manage in reply were ‘Soon, very soon.’

Mother stroked my hair, nodding with a smile that was proud and protective. ‘My beautiful little girl. You used to say you were going to be an adventurer, see the world, meet a man who would change your perceptions. How right you were ….’

I was silent. What sort of daughter was I to have allowed this to happen?

‘You realise what this means?’ Mother whispered, taking my hand. ‘He’s returning to us, Sarah, just as he promised he would.

‘At last your father is coming home.’

Note

1
Letter from Harry Price to Dr D.F. Frazer-Harris, 1931.

We waited, Price and I, side by side on the platform at Liverpool Street station on a bitterly cold morning in April. Few words passed between us. His face was flushed, his hands raw as he fumbled in the pockets of his overcoat for his pipe.

‘You’re awfully quiet, Sarah.’

I listened to the wind and the way it seemed to whisper to me, and thought of the Rectory at Borley standing in the lonely Essex fields – a place where things were so utterly, despairingly different. I thought of the grim warning Marianne had issued to me and of the figure of the nun, the spectre of darkness, that in recent weeks had been a recurring and dreadful feature of my dreams. Then the problems at home: Mother’s increasing fragility, the tapping, scuffling, scratching in the walls that occasionally kept me awake at night.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I believe I have reason to be.’

As the last chime of the platform clock struck eleven our guest’s train pulled into the station.

Rudi Schneider was exactly as I remembered him: an enthusiastic and cheery young man whose gracious and polite manner would, in other circumstances, have made me feel instantly at
ease. His dark, handsome features meant he presented well for the cameras and he clearly enjoyed the great attention lavished upon him.

The two men clasped hands in eager appreciation of each other. ‘Mr Price, how good it is to see you again.’

Price was smiling broadly. ‘The whole of London is glad you have come, Mr Schneider. You have quite a following. But now you must rest. We will take you to your hotel. Miss Grey has reserved for you one of the finest rooms at the Splendide on Piccadilly where, in a few nights’ time, we shall hold a dinner in your honour.’

*

After a brief presentation to journalists on the following morning, we took Schneider up to Price’s study where we discussed a series of rigorous sittings that the young man had run the previous year, in Paris, at the Institut Metapsychique. The two men settled in high-backed chairs facing each other over Price’s desk. I had pulled up a stool to one side of the desk and sat, notepad and pen in hand.

‘I want to begin with a brief discussion of experiments undertaken in Paris,’ said Price. His manner had undergone a transformation since the day before, from warm to merely cordial. ‘I have heard that there, under the watchful scrutiny of the psychical researcher Doctor Eugene Osty, you consented to allow your purported telekinetic abilities to be tested with the aid of sensitive, automatic camera
and
infrared technology.’

‘Correct,’ said Schneider. ‘I had only to move an inch and the camera would fire, then my physical influence would be caught on film.’

History records that the results of these experiments were indeed remarkable; movement
was
detected and the cameras
had indeed fired, but it wasn’t Schneider’s hand that had moved, nor any other part of his body that had caused the mechanical set-up to activate. Instead, the developed photographs showed a sticky white substance – which Schneider claimed was ectoplasm – leaking out of his body and passing through any objects that were put in its way.

‘What does it feel like?’ Price asked suddenly. ‘The act of expelling ectoplasm. I can’t imagine it’s a pleasant experience.’

Schneider sighed deeply, his eyes misting over. ‘Most of the time I have no idea what it feels like. The Rudi Schneider you see before you now ceases to exist; some very substantial part of me is replaced by whatever – whoever – wishes to communicate. It takes over, takes control.’

‘You’re happy for me to repeat the French experiments, I assume?’

Rudi nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, but of course; I have put myself entirely at your own and Miss Grey’s disposal.’

‘You do understand,’ Price continued, ‘that I will need to make some changes to the methodology of our own experiments?’

Schneider squinted, though his smile never wavered. ‘Changes?’

‘This time your body will be more effectively immobilised. There will be a greater number of cameras too.’

‘All right, yes, that will be fine.’

Price rose. ‘Very good, then it is settled. Miss Grey and I will begin preparing the seance room without delay.’ He crossed to the door. ‘There are some journalists too, who will need to receive personal, handwritten invitations from me. Sarah, fetch me the full list of our closest friends at the national newspapers.’

As I left the room I heard Schneider say, ‘There is just one thing I ought to tell you, Mr Price …’ I thought nothing more
of the remark and set about my task. However, I had not been gone two minutes before a loud, frustrated cry drew me back into the study. I entered to see Price standing over the seated Schneider, his hands raised in disbelief.

‘I am startled that you would agree to this,’ Price remarked. ‘Your contractual agreement is with
me
, not the Society for Psychical Research.’

‘Harry, what’s the matter?’ I asked. He looked absolutely furious.

‘I’ll tell you what the matter is, Sarah! Mr Schneider here has consented to be tested by our rivals!’ He turned to Schneider, his face flushing. ‘You are selling yourself to the highest bidder, sir, is that it?’

‘No, no,’ Schneider replied, ‘but—’