The Ghost Hunters (53 page)

‘“Absurdity”, “nothing supernatural” – how can she write that?’ I exclaimed.

‘She has written it because it is true,’ said Wall. ‘I interviewed her again recently to be sure. The footsteps her husband heard were attributable to rats. His hockey stick never whistled through the air, he simply used it to frighten away the vermin. She states emphatically that she saw enormous rats in the place, and is certain these were responsible for bell-ringing and many noises attributed to the supernatural. It makes sense, doesn’t
it? Rats would scratch the boards. The house had been empty for such a long time it’s easy to see how vermin could have taken up their abode in kitchens and cupboards.’

‘No,’ I insisted, ‘that isn’t right. Reverend Smith told us rats were
not
the cause. What about the bell-ringing that night? You remember
that
happening, don’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Wall, ‘they most certainly
did
ring, but not because of ghosts. They rang because the rats made them ring, and perhaps with a little intervention from Price.’

The comment ignited a memory which made me start: Price, two years later, just after confronting Marianne Foyster, standing in the servants’ passage holding a thread leading out through the window. Could it be? Was it possible? If so, then everything I had known – or thought I had known – about the man had been a lie; he had perpetrated the most cunning and elaborate deception imaginable; he had known all along about the others’ deceptions – the Smiths’, the Foysters’, even Miss Ethel Bull’s – and manipulated them towards his own ends, fabricating evidence when he saw the case’s commercial appeal. And if he had interfered with the evidence, I couldn’t help but wonder: what else had he tampered with? The idea was just too awful to contemplate.

Now Wall was removing from the file a letter which he passed to me. This one was dated 19 October 1935. The note was addressed to Sir Arnold Lunn. Referring to Marianne Foyster and the events at Borley, it read:
‘I think she wanted to drive her husband away from the rectory, which is a very quiet and lonely spot. But I cannot print this explanation. I daren’t even hint at it, so that part of the doings of the most haunted house must remain.’

The signature underneath was clear: Harry Price. It was an extraordinary confession from a man who had previously
announced to the world, in a blaze of publicity, that he was ‘engaged in investigating one of the most extraordinary cases of poltergeist disturbance and alleged haunting … for years’.
³

‘Everything has a natural explanation, Sarah,’ said Wall. And now he was producing from inside his jacket pocket another sheet of paper, which he handed to me.

No more, please, no more.

‘I have here a statement from one of Price’s official observers, Major Henry Douglas-Home.’

With the greatest apprehension, I unfolded the note. It read as follows:

‘But this happened,’ I insisted, remembering my own experience on the night of my confrontation with Marianne. ‘I saw it myself, unexplained writing on the wall that appeared from nowhere—’

‘Finish the letter,’ Wall instructed.

‘Of course you understand I will have to make this public,’ said Wall.

‘But you said yourself at the time that you believed it! You began it all, with those articles of yours. You singlehandedly put Borley on the map with your media circus. You stayed there. You were frightened; you saw the unexplained light shining in the window of the empty room. Mr Wall, you saw the nun!’

He stared at me.

‘You’re telling me that none of it was true?’ My chin tilted up in defiance.

‘None of it.’ He paused and then smiled. ‘Well, perhaps some of it.’

‘Mr Wall!’

‘I exaggerated! I’m sure that whatever I saw was probably just a moving shadow, a trick of the light, nothing more. Listen to me. I was young, just starting out, and it was a great story, Sarah. Tricks of the light don’t sell newspapers but ghosts do. And I think Harry has come to understand that very well indeed.’

‘But you’re forgetting something,’ I said. ‘The Rectory
did
burn down. The prophecy was fulfilled.’

‘There was nothing mysterious about that fire,’ said Wall. ‘Captain Gregson was stacking books in the hall. He left a few damp volumes near an oil lamp which toppled over and set them alight. Minutes later the place was ablaze. All very convenient for him too.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’ I asked tightly.

‘Hasn’t Harry told you? Captain Gregson filed an insurance claim, a total of £7,356, I believe. It was rejected on the suspicion that he torched the place deliberately.’

‘He wouldn’t do that,’ I said, my voice heavy with revulsion. ‘The captain seems to me a fine, upstanding citizen.’

‘So you didn’t know that he was until just recently an area organiser for the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts?’

‘What? No, I—’

‘Or that since the Rectory burned down he has been charging psychic investigators for access to the site? Or that just two months ago he accepted the sum of three guineas for the radio broadcast he and Price did together on the case?’

‘No … but that doesn’t mean—’

‘Sarah, they’re in on it together. The pair of them. And when Price’s book is published, their combined profits will soar.’ He handed me the dossier. ‘It’s all there, everything you need to know. I have provided a copy of this work to the Society for Psychical Research. Perhaps, being aware of Harry’s fading health, they will wait until after he is gone before publishing what they know. But I should tell you now that they plan to re-examine the whole affair. There is so much to question.’ He stood up. ‘I’m quite sure their investigation will confirm what I already know: that Price is no better than the charlatans he’s spent his career exposing – a trickster, an old humbug.’

I was aware now of the worst emotions pressing down on me, crushing my hopes. ‘But if all you say is true then surely somebody must have known,’ I protested. ‘Someone would have worked it out.’

‘I believe that someone
did
suspect what he was up to, yes, even in the early days, before the Borley case ever came our way.’

‘Who?’ I asked numbly.

‘A gentleman by the name of Joseph Radley.’

‘Radley – I remember him! I met him on the night of the Laboratory’s opening, with my mother.’ And I remembered, too, asking Price some months later about Radley’s whereabouts and
the evasive way in which he had responded. ‘What happened to him?’

Wall’s expression was dark. ‘We don’t know what happened to him, Sarah. That’s just it. My enquiries with the Society for Psychical Research have led to nothing. As far as I can ascertain, he disappeared. No one saw him again after the night the Laboratory opened. He vanished.’

The church clock tower commenced striking nine, the clanging bell startling us both.

‘I ought to be getting back,’ Wall said. He cast his eyes with admiration over the magnificent Waldegrave monument. ‘It’s a wonderful specimen, no doubt,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid it’s the red herring in all of this. You’re wasting your time. The real enigma is Harry. Always has been.’

I sat staring uncomprehendingly at the dossier of evidence he had given me. I needed to make sense of the anger I could feel burning within me. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘Do as you wish. But my advice is to confront the old crook, discover redemption in the truth. Tell him what you know and insist that he gives up on his second book and apologises to all those he has betrayed. Lionel Foyster should be top of his list; it was that poor man’s
Diary of Occurrences
he bastardised for this book. He’s left in poverty now, bedridden and lonely.’

‘Wait!’ I cried with the briefest hope. ‘There’s one thing you haven’t told me. The sexton said you knew something about the remains we discovered at the Rectory; he said you claimed they weren’t a woman’s remains.’

I heard his firm, decisive reply. ‘That’s right. They most certainly were not. They weren’t even human.’

‘But the remains were examined by experts; they confirmed they included the jawbone of a young woman.’

‘Don’t you see, Miss Grey? Harry switched the bone fragments you found on the day of the excavation with human remains he brought with him from London. He used a conjurer’s sleight of hand. One of the men who observed the dig
saw
him do it – Johnnie Palmer says he made the switch as he took the remains from Jackson and passed them to Mr Bailey. Very convenient, wasn’t it, that he just happened to have a pathologist on the scene to identify the remains,
and
a barrister to act as a witness to the find?’

‘Then what … did we find in the earth beneath the cellar?’

‘The bones you discovered beneath the Rectory, your so-called proof, Sarah, were nothing more than the remains of a pig.’

I stared, contemplating the prospect with a pang of fear and relief, then dropped the file he had given me at my feet. ‘He. Couldn’t. Have.’

Wall walked down the church to the south nave, turned and looked back at me. ‘How did we ever come to this?’ he asked sadly. And then his lean face softened and I caught a semblance of the man who had caught me, sixteen years ago, on the rotten staircase descending into the basement of Borley Rectory – a man who might have rescued me from myself, saved me from the encroaching darkness, saved me from the enigmatic Midnight Inquirer. ‘Find me, if you need to, Sarah. When this is over. Come back to me.’

I managed to give him a weak smile as he placed his brown trilby on his head and slipped out of the church. The urge to go after him was almost irresistible.

But something stopped me: the sharp sound of a pebble clipping the floor.

It had landed at my feet. Who had thrown it and from which
direction was impossible to tell, but its abrupt appearance set my pulse racing and quickened my resolve. Was it a sign?

Conflicting thoughts pulsed through my head: the hateful visions of evil and bitterness that came to me in nightmares, my mother’s deteriorating mental health and the insidious disturbances in our house. If the Borley saga really was bogus, then how was I to interpret these events? As mere products of my imagination? Symptoms of insanity?

I had to know.

Now there was only one person I needed to find, and it wasn’t Vernon Wall. Somewhere in the night, beyond Borley, in the safety of his compartmentalised private domain, Harry Price would be waiting.

And I had a job to do.

Notes

1
Mrs Smith appears to be alluding here to the sightseers who were then pestering the current incumbent, Revd Henning, at Liston Rectory.

2
Daily Mail,
26 May 1949.

3
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,
pp. 435–436.

4
This quotation was due to be broadcast by the BBC on 4 September 1956, but the programme never aired due to fears that Marianne Foyster might sue the broadcaster.

It must have been a little over two hours before I reached London. I recall very clearly that my hands were trembling as I climbed into the taxi that took me from Borley to the station, and I remember, upon arriving in Liverpool Street, that they were still trembling and my head was throbbing. But of the journey itself I recall very little. The shock of what I had learned from Vernon Wall had blurred my thoughts.

As a taxi took me the remaining distance to Queensberry Place, I was sure of one thing: Price was coming for me. By now, my absence at Liston would have been noticed. Reverend Henning would doubtless have asked the sexton where I had gone. He would have made enquiries with the nearest taxi company. He would have discovered my route. He would have passed that information to Price; and Price, knowing I had returned to London, knowing how uncharacteristic it was for me to just take off like that, would have become suspicious. He would have got into his Rolls-Royce at once and returned to the city.

I glanced at my watch, fretting at the wasted minutes, and wound down the window of the car. The evening’s earlier warm
breeze had whipped itself into a strong, blustery wind and the sky was black with leaden clouds. Nature itself seemed to have fallen sick. I felt a speck of rain on my cheek. Or was it a tear? The answer hardly seemed to matter, but the changing weather heightened my unease. As we pulled into Queensberry Place I felt physically sick with an anxiety which pulled at the pit of my stomach. ‘Leave me here,’ I said to the driver, getting out of the car.

I stood for a moment to collect myself. I thought of the first time I had walked down this road as Price’s employee, of my alarming confrontation on that first morning with the medium who had appeared before me like a monster, regurgitating cheesecloth, and an awful thought occurred to me. If Wall’s accusations were correct – if Price had fabricated evidence, switched animal remains for human remains
¹
 – then that made him far worse than any of the mediums he had exposed and vilified. Wall’s accusations painted my former employer, the man I had loved, as an abominable creature.

I wondered whether Price even realised how far he had gone, the true extent of his deceptions. I doubted it, but I had to know.

The street ahead of me was deserted. I checked my watch and saw that the time was fast approaching midnight. I would need to be quick; I had little more than an hour, perhaps less. As I hurried down the street the sky cracked and rain pelted down around me. I ran as fast as I could until I reached the entrance to number 16, the Laboratory, his hall of mirrors.