Breaking the Circle

ONE

The sounds of the city seldom found their way into this little room, chosen deliberately because it was at the back of the slightly run-down house. Sometimes, a shrill call of a coster would impinge, but today, not even commerce could break the suffocating silence. Two people sat at the table, opposite each other, one, dressed in a light coat leaning back casually, the other, in a flowered housedress, leaning forward, her head cradled in her arms, apparently asleep.

‘Have you ever thought,’ the lounging one said, ‘whether if a tree falling in a forest with no one there makes a sound?’

There was no reply.

‘Nothing to say? Well, of course, the correct answer is that God would hear, but I don’t know whether you are of that opinion, are you?’

The visitor made a rueful face – it was always so rude when people didn’t answer a civil question. The silence was briefly broken by the squeal of a chair being pushed back on worn linoleum.

‘Well, I must be off. It has been, as always, an absolute pleasure. But you’ll excuse me, I know, if next time I visit one of your colleagues. We just don’t seem to be getting anywhere, do we?’

There was a sniff as sensitive nostrils snuffed the air.

‘And I have never been able to abide the smell of mulligatawny.’

With a small sigh, the door opened and closed, leaving Muriel Fazakerley to settle down just a little further into her bowl of soup, cooling and congealing in the quiet, airless little room. Outside the blossom might be bravely shaking its petals in the spring breeze, the air singing with the joy of the reborn sun. But Muriel Fazakerley had passed beyond the veil, and would never smell a London May day again.

Early May in Bloomsbury. The fogs of winter had long gone and the trees around Gower and Malet Streets were heavy with blossom. Not that Margaret Murray had time for such irrelevance. Most ladies of her social class would be rising with the aid of a maid or three, taking breakfast in bed and considering the wardrobe for the day. In Margaret’s case, she had already battled her way on the omnibus, wedged between a gentleman with shoulders like tallboys and a woman who was clearly a martyr to catarrh.

Margaret had an important meeting that morning, a confrontation, she feared, with Mr Bernard Quaritch of Bernard Quaritch, Publishers of that Ilk, regarding her new book, Elementary Egyptian Grammar. It had all gone very well at first. Mr Quaritch – ‘Dear lady, do, I beg of you, call me Bernard’ – had been most complimentary and had spun worlds of fame and fortune in the air. Then, it had started to go a little pear-shaped, and from being ‘dear lady’, she had become ‘par hempt’ as the ancient Egyptians would have it, as in ‘Keep par hempt away from me, she is driving me insane!’ All she wanted was for the artist to rein himself in. The eagles, dogs, vultures and flies of the hieroglyphs did not, she had told him numerous times, need to have small, appealing faces. If she had wanted flights of fancy, she would have asked Ernest Shepard, who she happened to know was always on the lookout for work. In vain had she told Mr Quaritch that all that was needed was a simple line. The page proofs kept coming back looking like a galley for Punch.

Today was make or break. She would tell Bernard Quaritch, and brook no argument, that the world of academe was waiting with bated breath for the volume. Flinders Petrie himself had given her his seal of approval. Professor Virchov had written from Berlin to say how impressed he was – perhaps not unsurprisingly, as she had given him a shameless plug on the first page. But of course, from fellow archaeologist Arthur Evans, there was not a word. But first, she needed to have a word with Mrs Plinlimmon and have someone make her a cup of tea.

She flashed her dimples at Kirby, the man at the door who carried the keys of the dead and, hauling up her skirts, bounded up the stairs to her inner sanctum. Jack Brooks was there already, of course, except that his face was invisible behind the Telegraph. Margaret flicked the paper with a practised finger and thumb and the young man nearly fell off his chair.

‘Sorry, Professor,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Clearly not.’ Margaret unpinned her hat. She was not actually a professor, but a quiet inner vanity stopped her from correcting the boy. ‘At least it’s the Telegraph, so I don’t have to do that tiresome joke about you being behind the times.’

There was no fear of that. Jack Brooks was one of the Brooks of Hertfordshire, a family that had stood staunchly behind every Tory prime minister since the elder Pitt. There was absolutely no chance that Jack would be seen dead reading The Times.

‘Tea, Professor?’ He folded the paper carefully.

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ and she sorted her papers as he clattered the crockery. ‘What was so riveting in the Telegraph?’

‘Well,’ Brooks set about warming the pot, ‘it’s quite intriguing, really. Something that might interest you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Lights,’ he said, reaching for the paper and sitting down again. ‘Strange lights seen in Wales.’

Margaret sat down too. ‘Say on.’

Brooks found the relevant article. ‘Merthyr Tydfil,’ he read. ‘Last Thursday. A clergyman – or at least, a Unitarian minister – was making his way home from a friend’s house when he saw three or four circles of light in the night sky. There was no street lighting where he was and the lights were in the form of orbs that moved independently.’

‘Was this near water?’ she asked.

Brooks glanced quickly through the article – it was no use being inaccurate when it came to conversations with Dr Murray. ‘Doesn’t say,’ he confirmed. ‘Why?’

‘Marsh gas,’ she said, ‘or something of that sort. Some ponds glow with an eerie light.’

‘Yes, but marsh gas doesn’t bob about all over the place, does it? Independently, I mean?’

‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘How large were these lights?’

‘About the size of tennis balls.’

Margaret was as mystified as Brooks. ‘If the reverend had been an Anglican,’ she said, ‘or a Roman Catholic, I would have suspected the old vino sacro, but I don’t think the Unitarians partake, do they? Still, who’s to say how much he may have consumed at the friend’s house?’

‘That’s probably it,’ Brooks said as the gas hissed under the kettle.

‘It probably is,’ she smiled, ‘and, if I may say so, those hallucinations pale into insignificance alongside the edicts of Amenhotep. How are your translations coming along?’

‘I’ll get right on to it, Professor,’ Brooks smiled, folding away his newspaper. ‘As soon as I have made the tea.’

Detective Sergeant Andrew Crawford had already read it twice. And he was still grinning from ear to ear when he hurtled down Whitehall and took a sharp left into Clarence Place. The Yard loomed above him, as it had for the last ten years now, never the opera house it had been intended to be but the most famous police headquarters in the world. France had the Quai d’Orsay; Germany, Wilhelmstrasse; America more precincts than Ancient Rome. But there was only one Scotland Yard and Andrew Crawford was crossing its threshold once again.

He called cheerily to the desk man. ‘Any joy on the lift, Nacker?’

The desk man shook his head. ‘Week Thursday,’ he said. ‘Apparently – and I quote – There has been an unprecedented upsurge in the demand for elevating machinery. And we’re twenty-eighth on the list.’

Crawford grunted and made for the stairs.

‘Our business is important to them, though, they assured me of that,’ Nacker called after him and Crawford didn’t doubt it for a moment.

The Yard’s staircase didn’t faze a man like Andrew Crawford. Older coppers knew it as the treadmill, but he was still the right side of thirty and fit as a flea. He burst in to the offices on the second floor, A Division, detectives for the use of. His boss was already there.

‘Good of you to call, Detective Sergeant,’ John Kane said, looking over his rimless spectacles at the lad. Kane didn’t usually do sarcasm, but there were limits.

‘Sorry I’m late, guv,’ Crawford chirped. ‘Horse down in the Aldwych.’

‘Always,’ Kane sighed. ‘And the Tube?’

‘Leaves on the line round Ealing Broadway.’

‘In May?’

Crawford smiled. ‘No one said how long they had been there.’

Kane tutted. Then he caught sight of the folded paper under the arm of his number two. ‘Are you reading what I’m reading?’ he asked.

Crawford grabbed a chair. ‘The Telegraph, God bless ’em. The Stratton brothers! The Mask Murders. We did it!’

‘That we did, lad.’ Inspector Kane knew that neither of them had been involved in that case, but he knew what Crawford meant and they shook hands. The first felons to be sentenced to death based on the evidence of their fingerprints. It was a milestone and both men knew it. ‘More work for the Billingtons, I suppose,’ he shrugged, ‘on a chilly morning in Wandsworth.’

‘Forgive me, guv.’ Crawford sensed his boss’s mood. ‘You don’t sound as chipper about all this as I had expected.’

‘Read the small print, son.’ Kane stabbed the newspaper with his finger. ‘That overpaid shit Curtis Bennett, for the defence, did his best to undermine the march of science. Luckily, the jury didn’t fall for it, but that old fart Mr Justice Channel – why they named a stretch of water after him, I can’t imagine – said he didn’t think the jury should convict on fingerprint evidence alone. The assistant commissioner’s having kittens.’

‘Still, job done, eh?’ Crawford held his ground. ‘And two more murderous bastards will be walking the walk at Wandsworth any day now.’

‘Indeed they will,’ Kane nodded. ‘Indeed they will.’

Edmund Reid looked out of his study window over the beach and the glittering sea. How long, he wondered, would this view survive? Kent, he had warned everybody since he had moved to Hampton-on-Sea, was falling into the water, inch by inch, foot by foot.

Where was he before he was distracted by the view? Ah, yes. He dipped his pen into the inkwell again and continued his sentence, the second-most-vitriolic in his latest missive to the Council – ‘Hampton has no roads, paths, lights, sewer, water or dust collector, nor any residents receiving parish relief despite an annual payment of £40 in rates.’

How should he sign it? Ex-Detective Inspector, Scotland Yard? The man who hunted Jack the Ripper? The inspiration for the Inspector Dier series of novels? Balloonist? Conjuror? Tenor? No. He would just sign it ‘Reid’ and the Council could add any adjective they liked.

He put the pen away and stretched and yawned. He reached for the Telegraph lying untidily across his desk. The Stratton brothers – that was good; at last, an edge for the rule of law. That nonsense about weird lights in the sky – it could only happen in Wales. Then, his eyes fell for the first time on a little piece he’d missed. He read it aloud, as if to remind the gulls, screaming and wheeling outside his home, that they did not rule the air alone.

‘Famous Sensitive Found Dead. Police Baffled.’

The whole thing sounded archaic. Nobody had called a medium a sensitive for years. And as for ‘Police Baffled’ – that sounded like one of the better lines of the ever-predictable Arthur Conan Doyle, whose ludicrous detective creation Sherlock Holmes was advertised as about to make a comeback. Joy! People like the violin-playing cocaine addict of Baker Street gave real private detectives like Reid a bad name. And as for the dead medium, old habits died hard and ex-Inspector Reid found himself drawn to the scanty details as if he was looking down at a body in a mortuary.

The Famous Sensitive looked neither famous nor sensitive, laid out on a slab in the mortuary of Vine Street Police Station. She had not been a beauty in life and the police mortuary attendant was not a mortician, but he had felt sorry for the poor soul, found face down in her soup at her solitary table, so he had done his best with her, washing her face and getting the worst of the mulligatawny out of her hair. Her sister, standing now looking down at her, her handkerchief a sodden ball clutched in her hand, appreciated it, he could tell.

‘Mrs Whitehouse, is this your sister, Muriel Fazakerley?’ the police constable in attendance asked. ‘I know it’s upsetting, but we need a positive identification, if you don’t mind.’

The woman looked up at him, her eyes dark pools of tears and nodded, clamping her lips together. ‘Only … she didn’t go by Muriel, not these days,’ she said.

The police constable narrowed his eyes and thought of the pile of paperwork he had amassed on the dead woman. ‘Had she changed her name by deed poll?’ he asked, tersely.

‘Oh, no, dear.’ The dead sensitive’s sister couldn’t help calling the constable ‘dear’. He looked just like her youngest, only just out of short trousers. She gave another sniff; it was true what they said, about policemen looking younger the older you got. ‘She just used her other name for business, you know. She said to me, Maudie, she said, Nobody’s going to come to Muriel Fazakerley to get told whether Auntie is happy in the Beyond and what’s going to win the 12.50 at Plumpton.’

The constable drew himself up. The woman may be dead, but he was still on the lookout for any misdemeanours. ‘She claimed to tell the future?’ he rapped out. ‘That’s illegal, that is.’

Maud Whitehouse was a patient woman, made so by the brood of children she had given birth to and waved from her door with varying degrees of pleasure or regret. It was just her and Alf, her husband, now, and young Alfred, off on an apprenticeship soon, or her name wasn’t Maud Whitehouse. But she had had enough of this wet-behind-the-ears lad and his stupid questions. She took one final, enormous sniff and stowed her handkerchief up her sleeve. ‘Illegal, is it?’ she snapped. ‘Illegal? Oh, goodness, we’ll have to wake her up and arrest her. Are you going to do it, or shall I? She’s sometimes a little hard to rouse in the mornings.’ And to the horror of the mortuary attendant and the constable, she took her sister by the shoulders and shook her, hard. ‘Come on, Muriel,’ she shouted into the dead face. ‘Wake up.’

Rigor mortis had long passed and the woman’s head lolled back and forth, the jaw becoming slack as the binding cloth tucked under her chin slipped free. Maud Whitehouse let go the shoulders and stepped back, her hand to her mouth. A black feather emerged between the pale lips and lay, moist and bedraggled, on the mortuary sheet.

Maud Whitehouse and the constable slid gracefully to the floor in a simultaneous dead faint.

Andrew Crawford, being a happily married man and, moreover, a man happily married to a very rich wife, had a packed lunch which some others would give their eye teeth for. The delicate egg mayonnaise sandwiches, made freshly that morning by the cook, were cut into elegant triangles, the crusts removed and the cut edges garnished with finely chopped cress, grown for the purpose on a square of flannel on the kitchen windowsill. The package was wrapped in oiled paper and tied with a narrow length of raffia. The dessert was a slice of pie, filled to the brim with peaches grown last summer on the south-facing wall of his parents-in-laws’ country home in Kent and bottled lovingly for Miss Angela’s husband by her nanny, kept on long after she was needed simply because no one knew how to ask her to leave. A small glass jar accompanied it, filled with brandied cream. Crawford rarely ate in the office – he loved his job but needed the smell of the river, the bustle of the Embankment, at least once a day, to remind him why he still worked when he could be a gentleman of leisure. If any of his colleagues ever found out how much money his wife had, his life as he knew it would be over.

So he left the Yard going at a fair old lick on that lovely spring day. Almost unbelievably, there was a hint of the smell of blossom in the air, the plane trees were giving off their little puffs of golden dust which reduced so many to puffy-eyed automata but made not one jot of difference to Andrew Crawford’s sense of bonhomie. He dropped the pack of sandwiches into the hand of a beggar on one corner, the pie was laid at the feet of another. Andrew Crawford and his packed snap was legend among the shiftless and homeless who hunkered down under Westminster Bridge, and he tried to spread his largesse evenly among them. The jar of cream he kept; cook would have his hide if he didn’t return her cream jar.

Soon, he was in the damp fug of the coffee shop on the corner, crushed shoulder to enormous shoulder with Constable Freeman, of Vine Street Police Station down the road.

Freeman was a storyteller par excellence. His friends often told him he should write a book and he would duck his head, blushing. The truth was, he had tried, but always came to a dead stop after ‘It was a dark and stormy night …’ But today, he held his audience rapt as always, with the tale of Mrs Whitehouse and the constable, entwined on the mortuary floor, to all intents and purposes dead to the world.

‘So, old Joe, the mortuary chap, he don’t know quite what to do, see. Because Constable Bentinck, the daft young fool, he’s fallen across Mrs Whitehouse’s legs, y’see, and so he can’t lift her up first, like he should, being a real gent and as nice a chap as breathed. But he don’t want to move Bentinck, because it would mean, well, he’d have to touch the woman’s legs and he didn’t want her to wake up and find him with his hand on her fol-de-rols, as you might say.’

Crawford, his mouth full of bacon sandwich, the grease running down his chin, just nodded in agreement.

The girl behind the counter was agog. She didn’t know the mortuary attendant, but the big lad with the greasy chin could put his hand on her fol-de-rols whenever he liked. She wiped the same patch of zinc over and over again with a none-too-clean cloth. ‘What happened next?’ she breathed.

‘Well,’ Freeman said, wiping round his plate with a hunk of bread and popping it into his mouth, ‘luckily for all concerned, Bentinck woke up first and was up and trying to look as if nothing had happened as quick as winking. Poor Mrs Whitehouse wasn’t far behind him, but she wasn’t too chipper. We had to take her into the inspector’s office for a lie-down. It was the feather what finished her off, I reckon.’

‘Feather?’ Crawford asked. ‘I don’t think you mentioned the feather.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Freeman said. ‘A feather, a blackbird’s wing feather old Cartwright on the desk reckons, him being a bit of a birdwatcher in his spare time. It was in her mouth. Fell out with the shaking.’

‘A fevver?’ The girl-behind-the-counter’s level of agogness rose exponentially. ‘What did she have a fevver in her mouth for?’

‘Blessed if I know,’ Freeman said, draining his tea. ‘She died when she was eating her bit of supper, and there wasn’t no poultry. Just soup and some bread.’

Crawford couldn’t help it, he always needed to get to the bottom of any story. ‘But … even if there had been poultry,’ he said, ‘surely, a feather wouldn’t go into her mouth like that, not whole?’

‘It’s a bit of a mystery,’ Freeman conceded.

‘What does your inspector think?’ Crawford asked.

Freeman shrugged and reached behind him for his coat. It was time he was back in the station. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘The inquest’s tomorrow. I think it’s accidental death, from what I remember.’

‘Accidental death?’ Crawford was staggered. ‘A woman of not too advanced years, found dead at the table, no marks of violence, no illnesses we know of, and it’s accidental death?’

‘Well,’ Freeman said, on his way to the door, ‘these sensitives, they take a risk, don’t they? Meddling with the Other Side and everything. Must take a toll.’ And with that, he was gone.

‘Take a toll?’ Crawford looked at the girl, still cleaning the same bit of counter. ‘What does he mean?’

‘Ooh, well,’ the girl leaned forward, ‘they speak to dead people and that, don’t they? My old gran, she comes back to my auntie sometimes and auntie has to have a lie-down and some gin after.’

Crawford smothered a smile. ‘So, it’s hard work, is it, speaking to dead people?’

‘Ooh, yes,’ the girl said. ‘And Madame Ankhara – that’s the dead lady he was talking about, she lived down our street – Madame Ankhara, she worked all hours, helping people talk to their departed. It’s a dying trade, you know.’ She looked at Crawford portentously. ‘A dying trade.’

‘So it appears,’ Crawford said, fishing some money out of his pocket and wiping his mouth with a spotless handkerchief. ‘How much?’

‘Five bob.’

‘How much?’ Crawford might have a rich wife, but he wasn’t stupid.

The girl looked at the door, significantly. ‘That includes Constable Freeman’s.’

Crawford sighed and pushed three florins across the zinc. Why, along with Madame Ankhara, had he not seen that one coming?

‘Keep the change,’ he said.

Edmund Reid was a busy man. Not as busy as he had been back at the Yard, of course, but he kept himself occupied. It had not taken long in a town the size of Hampton-on-Sea, for news to get around that he was a conjuror of some skill, and he had as many children’s parties and Ladies’ Groups to attend as he could wish for – the fact that he took no fee was not the only reason he was so popular, but it certainly had a bearing. But this lovely May day, he was at a loose end. No toddler needed to be entertained as it turned three. Ladies’ Groups were taken up with flower arranging again now that spring had definitely sprung. His housekeeper was turning all the mattresses and airing the rugs out in the garden, savagely beating them with a yard broom. Wherever he went, there seemed to be clouds of dust or billows of feather beds. He found his mind wandering to ‘Sensitive Found Dead. Police Baffled’.

He was in two minds about mediums. That they were fraudulent, he was in no doubt. But they brought comfort to many, in exchange for hard cash though that may be. When his wife had died, his friends had encouraged him to visit various women they knew, who would put him in touch with the ‘dear departed’. He didn’t need women in seedy back rooms to put him in touch with his wife. She was in every breath he took, every step he made on the path he was now treading alone. If her face was now less clear in his mind’s eye, that was not a sadness to him. He knew he had aged, as she would not, so he just let her image fade, in lieu of wrinkles.

But – Sensitive Found Dead? Was it just a bored journalist who chose that headline or was the fact of her mediumship that had caused her death? Edmund Reid sat behind his desk, looking out over the sea and tapped his teeth with a pencil, a habit which had driven colleagues in