Philip Gooden - The Durham Deception

Superintendent Frank Harcourt had left his house earlier that morning. For him it was a brisk walk along Hallgarth Street towards the police-house in Court Lane. As he was approaching New Elvet he was dismayed to see Eustace Flask on the other side of the street, although the medium seemed to have lost something of his usual swagger. Flask was apparently heading for the old part of town. Harcourt would have identified him anywhere by that frock-coat. The Superintendent took advantage of a convenient tree and watched as Flask passed. When the medium had gone a hundred yards or so, Harcourt wondered whether to follow him and see what he was up to.

So the body in the woods was soon identified as that of Eustace Flask. Just as the woman standing over his corpse would soon be identified as Mrs Helen Ansell.

‘Why has she been brought here? Tell me. I demand to know.’

Tom was beside himself. The sweat was standing out on his forehead and he could not stay still for an instant. He wanted to lash out at something or someone. But the police superintendent standing on the opposite side of the desk kept a stolid calm.

‘It is for her own safety, sir. Will you sit down?’

‘Safety! In a gaol!’

‘You might be surprised, Mr Ansell, but this place behind us is quite salubrious compared to the police-house in Court Lane. We are not adapted for accommodating people of, er, quality in the station-house. And we would have drawn more attention taking your wife there than we did by bringing her here. She is quite comfortable. She will not have to mix with any of the other inmates, yet. I can recognize a lady when I see one. I ask again, sir, will you sit down?’

‘Why should I sit down?’

‘Then I can sit too.’

‘All right,’ said Tom, aware that he was only harming his — or rather Helen’s — cause by his confusion and anger. ‘I must apologize, Superintendent…?’

‘Harcourt, sir, Frank Harcourt.’

Tom and Superintendent Harcourt were standing in a plainly furnished office in the Crown Courts behind which stood Durham Gaol. Tom had a view of the prison through a grimy window. There was a vase of wilted flowers on the window ledge. The building beyond was bulky and formidable and somewhere inside it, only a hundred yards distant, his wife was confined. It was almost impossible to believe. Tom took a deep breath and sat on a hard chair. His heart was beating hard, as it had been ever since the message had arrived at Miss Howlett’s house in South Bailey that a Mrs Ansell was in the custody of the police. Luckily, the servant had brought the message straight to Tom.

Without telling Aunt Julia or anyone else, without putting on his coat, he ran to the police-house in Court Lane, only to be informed that he should apply to the County Court instead. He gathered no more than that Helen had been apprehended near a dead body which had been discovered in the woods below the cathedral. Tom arrived at the County Court, sweating and furious and fearful. Dashing into the spacious hallway and spotting a superintendent’s uniform he had buttonholed the man. By chance he had encountered the very one who could tell him what was happening.

Now Frank Harcourt was settling himself on the far side of the desk and toying with an empty pen holder and a blotter. He picked up a paperweight and looked at it curiously.

‘Not my office,’ he explained. He eventually found a notepad and a pencil in a drawer. ‘A few preliminaries, if you don’t mind. You are Mr Thomas Ansell?’

Tom nodded.

‘And your profession, sir?’

‘I am a solicitor, with a London firm. Scott, Lye amp; Mackenzie of Furnival Street.’

‘Is that L–I-E?’

‘With a Y.’

Harcourt bent over the notepad and laboriously wrote all this down, pressing hard on the paper. He stuck out his tongue as he wrote and his face turned more ruddy. The pencil point broke and a couple of minutes passed while Harcourt rummaged in his clothing. He produced a little clasp knife which he snapped open with a grunt of satisfaction. He shaved the tip of the pencil until a decent length of lead was showing. He gave his whole attention to the job. To avoid gazing out of the window and seeing the prison beyond, Tom stared round the room. The walls were bare apart from a framed sampler that bore the embroidered legend: ‘Blessed Are They That Hunger And Thirst After Righteousness.’

‘And your wife, Mr Ansell?’ continued Harcourt, his sharpened pencil poised again. ‘She is called Helen?’

‘Yes. But she must have told you so already.’

‘She did. You are visiting Durham on legal business?’

‘Helen’s aunt lives here. We are staying with her for a few days. That is, with Miss Julia Howlett in the South Bailey.’

If the name meant anything to Superintendent Harcourt he didn’t show it. He said, ‘I gather your wife knew the deceased.’

‘This may sound absurd, Superintendent, but then the whole thing is absurd. I do not even know who is dead.’

‘You don’t know who is dead, Mr Ansell? Well, well. The deceased is a gentleman who has caused a certain stir in this town… his name is… or was, I should say… Eustace Flask.’

‘Oh God! How did he die?’

‘He was murdered. Stabbed, it seems. A vicious blow to the neck with a sharp knife. May I take it from your response that you were also familiar with Mr Flask?’

‘Plenty of people knew him, I imagine,’ said Tom, cautiously.

‘As a matter of fact, I knew him myself,’ said Harcourt. ‘A glancing acquaintance only, mind.’

‘But he disappeared last night.’

‘Last night? Ah, you are referring to the performance at the Assembly Rooms when Mr Flask was invited to enter the magician’s booth.’

‘If you were there then you must have seen him vanish too.’

‘That was a trick, Mr Ansell.’

‘But Flask never reappeared.’

‘All part of the act, I suppose,’ said Harcourt.

‘Shouldn’t you be talking to the performers on stage, talking to Major Marmont for example, to find out exactly what happened afterwards? Flask could have died last night.’

‘The body was still warm, the blood was still flowing, when your wife found him this morning. He had only just been killed.’

Tom noted that the policeman was not implying that it was Helen who had killed Flask.

‘So he disappeared temporarily and then popped up again. Someone must have seen him in the in-between.’

‘No doubt,’ said Harcourt. ‘We will talk to the magician and others but in our own good time, Mr Ansell. We must talk to your wife first and find out what she was doing with the deceased.’

‘She wasn’t doing anything with him. She had the bad luck to find his body, that is all. You have as much as said so.’

‘Possibly, sir, possibly. But caution is the watchword in these affairs. You are lucky because I was actually on the scene of the murder.’

‘You saw it?’ said Tom, not understanding.

‘I mean that I arrived shortly afterwards, happening to be in the neighbourhood by chance. Fortunately, several of my men were also in the area. Tell me, Mr Ansell, did your wife ever express an opinion of Mr Eustace Flask?’

Helen had said several things about Flask, all of them unfavourable, so Tom cast around for a neutral way to answer. He certainly wanted to avoid any hint that she had come to Durham with the specific intention of persuading her aunt Howlett away from her infatuation with the medium. He saw Frank Harcourt looking at him, tapping the end of the pencil against his mouth. There was a shrewdness in the policeman’s eyes but also something else there which Tom couldn’t quite place.

‘Neither of us has much time for mediums and seances and that sort of thing,’ said Tom eventually. ‘We had, both of us, met Mr Flask once — at her aunt’s house as it happens.’