David Mitchell - Slade House

The cracked clock says 8:18. “How long were they there?”

“Until April 1919. It ended as suddenly as it’d begun, like. Cantillon visited the Sayyid one day and the master told him he’d taught the twins all the knowledge he could impart. The time’d come for the great globe itself to be their master, he said. Which meant what, exactly? And where? England held no great attraction for any of them. There’d be no fond welcome home from the Chetwynd-Pitts at Swaffham Manor, that was for sure. Ireland was having birth-pangs and gearing up for a vicious civil war. France was on its knees, along with most of Europe, Algeria’s boom years as a war port were over, and Léon Cantillon, who was better at spending money than earning it, now found himself with a pair of oddball semi-Arabized English twins in tow. How to convert the Grayers’ occultic knowledge into a well-padded lifestyle, that was the doctor’s dilemma, wasn’t it? And the answer? The good old US of A, that was the answer. The three of them sailed for New York in July, second class, with Cantillon posing as the twins’ Uncle Léon. Norah and Jonah were hungry to see the world, like gap-year kids nowadays. They took a town-house in Klinker Street in Greenwich Village.”

“I know it well,” I say. “ Spyglass ’s New York office is on Klinker Street.”

“Is that a fact?” Fred Pink sips his bitter and suppresses a belch. “ ‘Scuse me. Small world.”

“What did they do to earn a living in the States?”

Fred Pink gives me a knowing look. “They held séances.”

“But séances are fraudulent, you just said.”

“I did. They are. And I’m not here to defend Cantillon or the twins, Miss Timms, but they weren’t hucksters in the usual manner. See, Norah and Jonah could read minds, or ‘overhear’ the thoughts of most of the folk they came across. That bit wasn’t a trick. It was just an extra sense they had. Like extremely sensitive hearing. They could rummage through their clients’ minds and see things the clients barely knew themselves. The twins knew what the grief-stricken most needed to hear, and what words’d best heal them — and those were the words they said. The only fiction was the claim that these words came from the dear departed. Now you might say that’s worse, not better, and maybe you’d be right. But is it so far away from what your shrinks and counsellors and psychowhatnots try to do nowadays? There was a lot, and I do mean a lot , of unhappy despairing if not suicidal New Yorkers who left that little house in Klinker Street certain, quite certain, that their loved ones were in a better place and looking out for them and that one day they’d be reunited. I mean, that’s what religion does, doesn”t it? Are you going to condemn every priest and imam and rabbi on Earth for doing the very same thing? No, the Grayer Twins’ séances weren’t real; but yes, the hope they gave, was. Isn’t the Yes better than the No?”

Fraud’s fraud, I think, but I just reply a possible nod. “So the New York gigs went well.”

Fred Pink nods. “Cantillon was a canny manager. Once the Grayers got a bit of a name for themselves, he switched tack: discreet appointments at wealthy clients’ homes. No props, no smoke, no mirrors, no ectoplasm, no ouija, no daft voices. No public performances, nothing vulgar or theatrical. Just quiet, calm, sane grief-relief, so to speak. ‘Your son says this’ and ‘Your sister says that.’ If Cantillon felt a possible client was only a thrill seeker, he turned them down. Or so he claimed, anyway.”

A football chant from the TV below wafts upstairs. It’s choppy, lulling and otherworldly. “If the Grayers had an array of genuine psychic powers, why content themselves with telling consoling fibs to rich Americans?”

Fred Pink shrugs like a comedy Frenchman: palms raised, shoulders high and head low. “Cantillon’s motives I’ll guess at — money — but Norah and Jonah left no written account, so who’s to say? Maybe they saw themselves as students of humanity, and séances let them study people better. They had a serious case of wanderlust, too, and their ‘séance service,’ let’s call it, was a passport valid in all territories. Personal recommendations went a long way, and Uncle Léon and his niece and nephew never traveled second class again. In spring of 1920 they moved to Boston, in autumn it was Charleston, then New Orleans, then San Francisco. Why stop there? They took a liner to Hawaii, to Yokohama and a spell in Japan, then on to Beijing, Manchuria, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Ceylon. The best hotels and the houses of the grateful rich were their homes in that period. Bombay, New Delhi. A year or two in the British Raj, why not? A summer up in the hill stations. Then Aden, Suez, Cairo, Cyprus, Constantinople, Athens. A winter in Rome, a spring in Vienna, a summer in Berlin, Christmas in Paris. In his book, Cantillon describes how the twins honed their arts as they traveled, seeing the sights, and ‘settled for a brief sojourn like exotic birds in whatever local Society they found themselves in’—Norah rejected no less than six proposals of marriage and no doubt Jonah enjoyed his share of liaisons and conquests — but always they carried on westwards ‘til one drizzly day in May 1925, the Dover train trundled into Victoria Station, and the Grayers and their guardian took a cab to a house in Queen’s Gardens, a swish and leafy street in Bayswater.”

“They financed five years of luxury globe-trotting with séances?”

“They diversified, a bit, once they left the States. Disciples of the Shaded Way learn the Art of Suasion. A tackier name is ‘Mind Control.’ Maybe you can guess, Miss Timms, how a talent like that might be turned into a few bob …”

I play along: “If ‘suasioning’ were real, you could enlist a nearby millionaire to make you out a humungous bank draft.”

Fred Pink’s face says I guessed correctly. “And after, you use another Shaded Way skill — redaction — to erase your generous benefactor’s memory of ever writing the check. Some’d call it the perfect crime; others’d call it survival; a socialist’d call it the redistribution of wealth.” Fred Pink stands up. “Might I just pop to the gents, Miss Timms? The beer was a mistake: my prostate’s not what it was …”

I indicate the doorway. “I’m not going anywhere.” Yet .

“Aren’t you drinking your tomato juice, Miss Timms?”

I look at it. “I, uh, just don’t really fancy it, after all.”

“I’ll bring you something else up. Listening’s thirsty work.”

I wave him away. “No need, really.”

Fred Pink makes a mock-glum face. “Ah, but I insist.”

“A bit later.”

When he’s gone, I turn off my digital recorder. It’s all saved — not that I think I’ll ever listen to it again. Only an all-out conspiracy theorist or the mentally ill could ever connect this Norfolk-Dublin-Algerian-American-Trans-Pacific-Mysterious-Orient tale with six vanished students in 1997. God, it’s tempting just to slip away now, while there are still lots of trains back to London. Really, what would Fred Pink do if I did a runner now? Send me a pissed-off email? I’m a journalist: I get twenty pissed-off emails per hour. Fred Pink’s spent nine years of his life in a coma, more years locked away in a secure ward beyond Slough’s outer reaches, and he’s an obvious believer in the Dark Arts. The man’s brain is scrambled. But no. I gave him my word to stay until nine o’clock, so I’ll stay. It’s now 8:27. The last text was from Avril, as I thought.

O de glamour! Bt seriously hope Mr. P isnt waste of time.

Text me if u need urgent emrgncy 2 escape 2.

I reply:

Jury still out re Mr. P but will probly get train about 930