Philip Gooden - The Durham Deception

Other smaller loans had followed, two pounds here, a pound there. Having accepted one, Frank Harcourt found himself almost helpless not to accept more. These loans were never called in. Frank decided that he would prefer to be in the hands of the most grasping usurer rather than in Eustace Flask’s. For it was evident that the medium expected not cash but favours, he expected the superintendent to protect him from the law or, indeed, any unwelcome attention from the authorities. As Harcourt had described it, there were plenty of important people in Durham — several but not all of them in the church — who objected to the presence of Flask in the city. They were particularly concerned about the spinster Julia Howlett, a wealthy and respected member of the community.

The Chief Constable, old Huggins, had personally demanded to know what they were going to do about this ‘fraud’ Flask. Was it true that Harcourt knew him? said Huggins in that gruff no-nonsense manner of his. Some whispers had reached his ears. It didn’t look good, you know, for one of the senior members of the Constabulary to go round consorting with such a dubious creature. Frank protested that he was merely trying to gather evidence so that he could bring charges against the medium. ‘Well, be quick about it, Harcourt,’ barked Huggins. ‘I’d like nothing better than to see him behind bars.’

This conversation had occurred a couple of days before Harcourt’s meeting with Flask in the cathedral. What Huggins would say when and if he heard that there had been a scene involving Eustace Flask at Miss Howlett’s house, Harcourt dreaded to think. It might be enough for the Chief Constable to demand Flask’s immediate arrest even though, in this case, it seemed that the medium had been the victim and not the assailant.

The superintendent might have been relieved by Flask’s saying that he was planning to leave Durham in a few days but he wasn’t. He did not trust the medium, not an inch. And there was the threat that the man had made today, the first time he had uttered it, the threat to let slip the story of the gifts to Rhoda and the household loans. He could deny them, of course, but he wasn’t certain that his wife would keep quiet and there was the evidence in Flask’s little black book. Besides, it was already known to Alfred Huggins that he had dealings with Flask.

No, if this ever got out, Superintendent Frank Harcourt could see disgrace stretching in front of him. Stripped of his rank and discharged from the force without a penny. Worse, banged up in the gaol alongside some of the very felons he had had the pleasure of putting there.

No less hot and angry, he stalked out of the Galilee Chapel and emerged into the sunlight on the north side of the cathedral. He wiped his sweating brow. He walked over to the parapet-like wall which gave a view over the thickly wooded slope leading down to the river. He wasn’t aware of it but Tom and Helen Ansell were strolling down below him at that very moment. In fact, Harcourt was aware of nothing except his anger at Eustace Flask. Far from growing calmer, he was growing more desperate. If that fraud did not quit Durham very soon, there was no telling what might happen.

Meanwhile, the object of his fear and hatred was sailing into the cathedral library, which lay off the south side of the cloisters close to the old monks’ quarters. Eustace Flask had no strong desire to enter the library but neither did he wish to accompany Superintendent Harcourt back through the cathedral precincts. He preferred to make a slightly stagey exit and he also wanted to leave the man stewing in his own juices, so he strode off with that nonchalant wave and climbed the stairs to what had once been a refectory.

Altogether, he was satisfied at the way the encounter with Harcourt had gone. The man was literally in his debt — those little presents to his wife, those small contributions to the household economy — but it was extraordinary how ungrateful some people could be. So the occasional reminder was necessary. He wondered whether it had been wise to threaten to tell certain things to the Chief Constable because Harcourt grew even more red-faced and anxious. But it was better that the man was absolutely clear about how things stood.

Flask was convinced that he was only a couple of days away from persuading Miss Howlett to make him an allowance for his ‘researches’ and for ‘spreading the word’. He had higher ambitions than an allowance of course. An allowance, even a regular one, would cease when the old maid got some fresh bee in her bonnet and it would stop absolutely with her death, whereas a legacy would be something really worth striving for. Perhaps he should chalk a spirit message to that effect.

Flask was particularly pleased that he had succeeded in slipping the communication LIKE A SON on to the slate yesterday evening. He congratulated himself on his subtlety. He had left it to the old maid to jump to the right conclusion, namely that he, Eustace Flask, was the one who should be treated LIKE A SON. People were much more ready to believe if they did their own work in convincing themselves rather than sitting there, waiting to be convinced.

As for the message BELIEVE HELEN, that had come to him in a moment of inspiration. It established a further link between himself (or more strictly his control, Running Brook) and Miss Howlett’s family. He rather thought that the old maid’s niece and her new husband would need quite a bit of convincing. Nice-looking woman, the niece, Helen, someone with a bit of class quite unlike Kitty Partout. She had been especially attentive to him recently, perhaps because she saw him as a challenge, perhaps because she regarded him as a more secure source of income than Ambrose Barker.

Anyway, once his allowance had been signed and sealed he would set off to York, or elsewhere, secure in the knowledge that he had a guaranteed income for a time. He’d have to pop back to Durham every now and then to reassure the spinster and spin her a story or two, but essentially he was quids in. His investment in Frank Harcourt was paying off, and a nice irony was that the sums of money he had given to the policeman came indirectly from Miss Howlett, just as the gifts he had presented to Rhoda Harcourt were also from her or other ladies. (Not all of them were gifts freely made to Flask for the medium was light-fingered. It was one of his several talents.)

He poked his head round the door of the cathedral library. An individual in clerical vestments looked up from a desk by the entrance. Flask nodded and smiled at him. He walked confidently into the great book-lined chamber, knowing that if one acted with enough assurance one was rarely challenged.

There were a handful of men, mostly elderly, in the library, scribbling away or slowly turning the pages of single volumes or doing God-knows-what behind great barricades of books. Motes of dust hovered in the sunlight slanting through the high windows. Once inside, Eustace Flask found a secluded alcove among the banks of shelves. He took a letter from his pocket. He had already read the letter more than once but its contents baffled him. Or, more precisely, they raised his suspicions.

The letter, strangely affable in tone, was from the person who had done his best to disrupt the seance at Miss Howlett’s the previous evening. It made only a passing reference to their ‘unfortunate encounter’ and, by way of compensation, invited the medium to attend a forthcoming event at which he would be ‘enlightened, entertained and edified’. The letter-writer had given a time and a venue. These details and the signature at the end confirmed Flask’s intuition about the identity of the seance-spoiler. Well, that was no great surprise. There was a long-standing hostility between individuals like himself who sought to pierce the veil separating the mortal from the eternal and those who followed this particular gentleman’s… profession?… no, he would not call it a profession, but a trade. Or an activity. A cheap, crowd-pleasing activity.