Peter Lovesey - A Case of Spirits

‘Mr Strathmore.’

‘The scientist?’

‘He is a dangerous man, Sergeant. Papa should never have associated with him. One looks for a degree of detachment in a scientist, a commitment to proceed by the scientific method of hypothesis, investigation and proof. When Mr Strathmore came to the house on Wednesday to prepare the experiment, he revealed himself as anything but detached. His sole object was to set traps and snares, in the conviction that the medium would fall victim to them and show himself to be fraudulent. If Papa had not been firm with him he would have smeared the handles of the chair with carbon so that anything the medium touched would be marked, and he had brought cotton thread with him to weave a giant cat’s cradle around the room, if you please, in the belief that it would snap and prove that the medium had left the chair. Imagine the impression such stratagems would have made on a medium of Mr Brand’s standing!’

‘It might have led to an ugly scene, miss.’

‘Exactly. He was totally fanatical in his determination to prove Mr Brand a charlatan. It was odious to see the way he calculated the position of the chair to the nth degree, just as if he was Sweeney Todd, the infamous barber. It had to be so far back from the curtain so that he couldn’t lean forward and touch it, and the transformer had to out of arm’s reach, and the handles screwed in with screws an inch and a half in length. It makes me shudder to think of it now. He should be a public executioner, not a man of medicine.’

‘That may be so, miss, but I can’t arrest him for that. What you’ve told me doesn’t endear Mr Strathmore to me, but none of it’s against the law.’

‘Don’t you see, Sergeant? He and Papa were the only ones who knew what the chair looked like before Saturday. Between Wednesday and Saturday he must have thought of something else, some horrible appendage to the experiment that turned the chair into an execution chair the moment poor Mr Brand moved his arm or shuffled his foot.’

‘What sort of appendage exactly, miss?’

‘I’m not certain, but then I’m-’

‘Not a policeman, miss? That’s not such a bad thing, if I might say so. Mr Strathmore and your father weren’t the only ones who had a chance to see that chair before Saturday. From what you tell me, I’m bound to suppose that you saw it yourself. And if your mother agrees with you about Mr Strathmore, it’s reasonable to presume that she saw it on Wednesday too. Now I gather also that Mr Nye is a frequent visitor to the house. Would it be too presumptuous to suppose. .’

She smiled. ‘All right, Sergeant. William saw it too, on Friday, when Mr Brand came-’ She stopped, the colour rising in her cheeks.

They stood still by a pillar-box, only a few yards short of the chestnut stall, the fumes of burning nut-shell and coke wafting towards them. ‘Mr Brand, miss?’ said Cribb. ‘That’s a funny thing. I rather supposed that he must have had a look at the apparatus, but your father didn’t seem to remember the occasion. It was Friday, then.’

‘Friday,’ she confirmed in a low voice. ‘He came to make arrangements about the seance.’

‘That’s understandable, miss.’

‘Please don’t let Papa know I told you. I really don’t know why he was so unwilling to tell you about it.’

‘It’s our secret, miss. Hello, here’s Thackeray. Miss Probert wants to buy you a bag of chestnuts, Thackeray.’

‘That’s very generous, miss.’

The chestnut man touched his cap as Alice approached him. She proffered twopence and said, ‘I believe these gentlemen could catch a bus from here to Charing Cross, is that right?’

It was as neat a way as she could have contrived to terminate the interview.

‘That’s right, miss. Cost ’em a bob each.’ He shovelled a large helping of chestnuts into a bag. Cribb stepped forward to take them, since Thackeray was still holding the basket and they were clearly too hot for a young lady to handle. He passed them to Thackeray in such a way that his back was towards Alice as he deliberately tore the side of the paper bag and dropped the still smoking nuts among the oranges in the basket.

‘Moses, Sarge!’ said Thackeray in bewilderment.

‘Another bag, if you please,’ called Cribb to the salesman.

It was the work of a few seconds to retrieve the hot nuts, and no visible damage was done to the fruit or the basket. To Thackeray it was a wholly mysterious incident, but he contained his curiosity until Miss Probert had set off again along Hill Street on her errand. ‘Why did you do it, Sarge?’ he asked, biting with relish into a chestnut.

‘I wanted to see what was under that layer of oranges. Didn’t you notice?’

‘Yes, Sarge. A lady’s hairbrush and comb. There’s nothing extraordinary in that, is there?’

‘That’s a matter I want you to investigate, Constable. Follow Miss Probert and find out where she goes. You’d better leave the nuts with me, or she’ll smell you coming a mile off.’

Cribb had secured an inside seat between a large woman muffled in furs and a small boy occupied in scooping straw off the floor, shredding it and depositing pieces on the other passengers’ clothes. It was not the best position on the bus, but it was preferable to the knifeboard upstairs. Common courtesy threatened to deprive him of his seat before long; there was sure to be some shopgirl late for work waving the driver down in Kew or Turnham Green. But he had privately resolved to see the small boy sitting on his mother’s lap first. With that satisfying thought, he started on Thackeray’s bag of chestnuts.

He considered what he had learnt from Alice Probert. In some particulars she was not to be relied upon-notably her experiences with invisible hands-but this morning’s revelation that Brand had visited the house on Friday had escaped her lips before she realised its significance. Her consequent embarrassment had been genuine, no doubt of that. What she had said stamped Dr Probert as a liar. He had firmly stated that Brand did not visit the house to examine the chair before Saturday.

The difficulty in dealing with Probert was that he was so easy to dislike. Cribb had handled him with kid gloves so far not because he was a friend of Inspector Jowett, but because antagonism towards a witness could lead to errors of judgement. It wanted guarding against. Probert was a liar, but that did not necessarily make him a murderer.

But why should he have lied at all about Brand’s visit to the house? On the face of it, there was nothing sinister in a medium taking a preview of the place where he was to conduct a seance, particularly when the conditions were so unusual. It was questionable whether anyone would consent to being part of an electrical circuit without inspecting the apparatus first. People like Strathmore, dedicated to eliminating every possibility of fraud, might argue that seeing the apparatus in advance gave the medium the opportunity of devising some means of cheating science, but Cribb was not Strathmore; he was investigating a possible murder, not a manifestation. There were more important things at issue now than the validity of an experiment.

Obviously there was a reason why Probert did not wish it to be known that Brand had come to the house. The visit showed Probert-or someone he wished to protect-in an unfavourable light. It could well be connected with something Cribb had turned over in his mind repeatedly since the post mortem. There was reason to suspect that Dr Probert, like Miss Crush, had knowingly assisted Peter Brand in his deceptions.