Philip Gooden - The Durham Deception

‘Yes. It was when I was a child, quite a small child.’

‘Whatever you may think of events this evening, she is a good woman, you know, a very good woman.’

‘I was too young to know it then but I see it now.’

‘We are of one mind then,’ said Septimus Sheridan with satisfaction.

Tom had half his attention on this exchange but he was also looking at the behaviour of the gentleman in the front row, the one who’d been asked to test the knots in the ropes securing Eustace Flask. He was a short, spruce-looking figure with a fine moustache. He was peering into the interior of the cabinet to scrutinize the musical instruments on the hooks as well as the ropes which had been left coiled on the shelf and the flour smeared on the floor. He was squatting and looking at the raised underside of the cabinet before walking round it to examine the back. Tom, his curiosity stirred, joined him.

‘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.