Woman Who Spoke to Spirits Read online

  With queenly grace she looks down on the assembled mass and, as if a queen had indeed spoken, they part for her and she strolls with an elegant, upright carriage towards the young man with the embarrassingly huge bunch of flowers. Now scarlet to the roots of his soft, wavy hair, he shoves them at her. ‘I bought these for you,’ he manages.

  Her dark, carefully drawn eyebrows, as symmetrical as a pair of circumflexes, go up in a parody of amazement. ‘Oh, but how sweet! For me?’

  ‘No, they’re for the cabbie’s ’orse!’ calls a wag in the crowd, to a gale of laughter.

  But Violetta da Rosa knows how to deal with barracking. Thanking Julian prettily – good grief, thinks Felix, she’s even managed to conjure up a girlish blush – she precedes him up into the cab, he hurriedly follows, tripping as he does so and all but falling, and then he too is inside and the cabbie is whipping up his horse.

  Thoughtfully, Felix sets off for his lodgings. There is little point in trying to follow the cab, for without doubt Violetta and her youthful suitor are bound for some private love-nest where heavily built men with scarred faces and bent noses guard the door.

  Felix believes he understands what she’s up to. He knows quite a lot about women of Violetta da Rosa’s type, although the example of the breed with whom he lived in close proximity for several very enjoyable years was far too honest to play such games.

  As he walks home – walking costs nothing, and he tells himself that all this exercise keeps him trim – he is already composing in his mind what he will write in his report for his employer.

  ‘And so I’ll go along to the Tom tonight and see what she gets up to,’ he says in conclusion to Lily Raynor the following morning, having handed over the report and then made it largely redundant by telling her most of what’s in it.

  ‘The Tom?’

  ‘Sorry, there’s no reason why you’d know. The Peeping Tom?’ Still she looks blank. ‘It’s a music hall, or so it calls itself, in the Old Kent Road.’

  ‘You know it?’ He hears amusement in her voice but she keeps a straight face.

  ‘Yes.’ It is not the time to enlighten her about his experiences in the more rackety side of London life. ‘It’s not exactly high-class, which is why I find it quite interesting that Violetta da Rosa is going there. Moreover that she, presumably in the company of the dark man, is such an habitué of the place that he can call it by its colloquial name and she knows what he means.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Lily murmurs. Then: ‘Well done. You seem to have made progress towards finding out about this relationship that so worries the young man’s father, and so quickly.’

  Felix hesitates. Then he thinks, why not tell her what’s on my mind? He says, ‘I believe I know everything there is to know already, if you’ll forgive what sounds like an arrogant boast.’

  ‘Go on,’ she says.

  ‘She’s amusing herself with him – with young Julian – and, once she’s tired of the gifts and the luxuries, she’ll throw him over.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. Just that: yes.

  All at once, and much to his surprise, he’s tempted to tell her about Solange Devaux-Moncontour, about the fun they had, about how they were never anything but honest with each other, about how they understood each other so well, about how they were able to part, with not one single regret on either side, when the time was right. None of which, he knows in his bones, applies to this liaison between the hard-nosed fading actress and the gullible, painfully naive boy …

  But before he can begin, he realizes Lily is speaking to him. He comes out of his reverie. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

  ‘I was asking you to go and have a few words with the Reverend Mr Jellicote,’ she repeats.

  ‘Of St Cyprian’s Church, on the corner of St Cyprian’s Road and Parkside Road,’ he says brightly. He has looked it up on a street map.

  ‘Precisely,’ she agrees. ‘Apart from the fact that it would be interesting to learn his view of Mr and Mrs Stibbins and this threat to Albertina – if, indeed, he knows of it – I feel it would be to our advantage if word reached Ernest Stibbins that L. G. Raynor – by which of course I mean you – has begun his investigation.’

  With a surge of excited pleasure, Felix gets to his feet.

  But Lily holds up a detaining hand. ‘I would do it myself were it not for the fact that we do not want my identity known,’ she says sternly. She stares at him, her eyes narrowed, as if assessing whether or not he is capable of carrying out the interview in the right way. ‘You must be cautious, and watch carefully to gauge Mr Jellicote’s reaction, and stop immediately if you feel he is taking offence.’ She frowns at him.

  ‘I will be careful,’ he assures her. ‘Really, I will.’ He waits, but she doesn’t speak. She is still frowning, however.

  He decides to get out before she countermands her orders. ‘I’ll set out straight away,’ he says as he strides towards the door.

  He finds the vicar of St Cyprian’s standing in the aisle of his large, chilly and ugly church, frowning in dismay at some pathetic and already drooping posies of flowers tied rather too tightly to the ends of the front few pews. James Jellicote is a man in early middle age, strongly built and a little above average height, with light brown hair cut neatly, worn but well-brushed jacket and trousers and brilliantly shining black shoes. Half-turning at the sound of Felix’s footsteps, he says, ‘I really don’t know, Mrs Spencer, if they will survive until two o’clock, for the leaves are half-dead and most of the petals already on the floor— oh, I do beg your pardon! I thought you were this afternoon’s bride’s mother!’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Felix replies. He holds out one of the Bureau’s cards, which the vicar takes and reads. Leaning closer, although it seems that the church is otherwise empty, Felix adds softly, ‘The Bureau has been engaged to look into the matter of Mrs Stibbins.’

  Straight away he understands that not only does the vicar know about the matter, but is deeply sympathetic and not a little anxious. His kindly face has creased in concern, and the heavy brows have descended above the mild brown eyes. Taking Felix’s arm, he murmurs, ‘Oh, how relieved I am that somebody is doing something! Please, come into the vestry.’

  Once inside this small and somewhat depressing room – it smells of damp and just a little of sweat, and everything in it, from paintwork to prayerbooks, appears to be brown – the vicar can no longer hold himself back.

  ‘Poor Albertina must be quite beside herself with dread!’ he exclaims. ‘I knew her when she was a girl, you know, for I was curate at St Albans, and she and her father sang in the choir. The Goodchilds were a most hospitable family, and fellow choir members, among whom I myself numbered, were often invited to their house after Sunday service for sherry and madeira cake. I felt so concerned for her when her elderly great-aunt died and left her all alone, and it was with great delight that I welcomed her here to St Cyprian’s. When Ernest Stibbins took her under his wing and eventually made her his wife, I couldn’t have been happier!’ He beams in delighted recollection, and Felix tells himself he must have imagined the tiny shadow that briefly crossed the smiling face. Leaning closer, his face straightening, the vicar adds, ‘The city of London is no place for an innocent young woman on her own, Mr Raynor.’ He nods knowingly. ‘I cannot bring myself to speak of the shameful, sinful perils of the streets, but I am sure that you, as a man of the world, will know what I mean.’ Felix murmurs his agreement. ‘Vice is all around us,’ James Jellicote goes on, ‘and life is cheap. Young girls are seduced into a manner of living whose existence they can scarcely have imagined, and before you know it, they face such troubles, such shame, that sometimes the terrible solution of taking their own lives appears the only road open to them.’ He shakes his head sadly. ‘Why, even here in our own parish, where many are blessed with relative comfort and security, poverty, desperation and destitution lurk just around the corner, and we have had girls and young women go missing; victims, one must surely conclude, of such a frightful fa
te.’

  ‘But thankfully Albertina found her saviour,’ Felix says brightly, ‘and is not of their number.’

  ‘Thankfully indeed!’ the vicar says, his smile returning. ‘Despite the disparity in their ages, the marriage appears very happy, and Albertina is proving to be an excellent homemaker, encouraging her somewhat conservative husband, if I may so call him, to consider some improvements to the house. But I digress,’ he reproves himself. ‘Now, Mr Raynor, you have announced your intention of helping in this alarming matter, so please, ask whatever questions you will, and I shall do my best to answer them!’

  Felix takes his notebook and pencil out of his pocket and begins.

  His second mission of the day could hardly be more of a contrast.

  Felix has few illusions about the Peeping Tom Hall of Varieties, which is as rowdy, as lively, as entertaining, as filthy, as sordid and, in a strange way, as captivating as he expected. He is there in very good time, and finds a place from which he can watch new arrivals going through the door that leads to the boxes, which are set in a wide horseshoe around the open area where admittance costs half the price. Violetta da Rosa, he is sure, will settle for nothing less than a box, and he has paid for the more expensive ticket in the hope that he will be able to slip into one next to her. (He makes a careful note of the cost, for Lily has explained to him about how to claim for his expenses.) Few of the boxes are so far occupied.

  To pass the time before the performance – he has an idea that his quarry won’t arrive until just before it starts – he lets his eyes run around the auditorium, although that is really too grand a name for a space that doesn’t look as if it’s had a good clean since the Queen, or possibly even her late uncle, King William, ascended the throne. There are a few rows of seats, set on a gently sloping incline, as well as some large open spaces in which are set out small tables and chairs for three or four people. Along the back row, just below the boxes and partially shadowed by them, there are some double seats. In one of these quite close to where Felix stands, a woman in a crimson bonnet is sitting with her legs spread over the man next to her. Her wide skirts cover their two lower bodies and her right hand is thrust down between them, deep into the man’s lap. There is rhythmic movement going on, its pace inexorably increasing, and the man’s demeanour – his head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth half-open – indicates the nature of it. He moans softly – ‘Hush, can’t yer?’ the woman scolds – and her hand moves faster. He moans again, and she emits a very fake-sounding cough in an attempt to cover it up. Then it’s all over, she is withdrawing her hand and, after wiping it none too surreptitiously on her skirt, holding it out discreetly. Felix hears the chink of coins. She hauls herself up and off him, straightens her skirts and her bonnet, wishes him a cheerful ‘Ta-ta, then,’ and strolls away.

  The theatre is filling up. There is a smell of beer, and once or twice a crash as a bottle or a glass is dropped. Some people have brought food. The temperature rises from the presence of so many people, and the stench of old sweat intensifies. This is the people’s entertainment, Felix reflects. It’s the release they need from hard lives with little to laugh about in them. Good for them, he says to himself, I hope they enjoy the performance.

  There’s a shoving and a rustling from just beneath the small stage, part of which projects in a narrow tongue out into the audience, and the band settles itself. They tune up, to loud and derisive comments from the audience. ‘Gimme an A, Fred! Oh, fuck it, that’s near enough!’ Someone throws half a stale bread roll, which hits the man with the baton on the back of the head. He picks it up and hurls it back, to a round of applause.

  Then there’s a drum roll, a sudden dazzle as lights blaze out, and the master of ceremonies strides across the stage and into his little railed stand at the far side of it. He is a tall, elegant man in full evening dress, pale of cheek, luxuriant of moustache and smooth of hair. ‘Here I am, the preacher in the pulpit!’ he shouts, to a gale of laughter; it’s clearly an old and beloved joke.

  Felix has almost forgotten to watch out for Violetta da Rosa. He spins round, trying to look everywhere at once, and just in time he sees her. The swarthy man who muttered to her outside the Glass Slipper is holding her arm. They slip into a box immediately to the left of the master of ceremonies, who looks up and gives her a formal and courteous bow. Felix slips away, sprints along the corridor out of which the boxes open and goes into the one next to the last on the left, which, like at least two-thirds of them, is vacant. There are six red-upholstered gilt chairs inside the box, and he puts one of them right to the front, from where he could, if he wished, peer round and look straight into Violetta’s box. But he doesn’t. He is here to listen, not to watch.

  But for now he can’t hear anything except for howls of delight, stamping and thunderous applause, for the master of ceremonies – the Chairman, as he has just introduced himself – has announced the first act, and Sweet Sukie Smith, the Songbird of Stepney, dressed in her usual elegant male evening wear, has taken the stage. The band breaks into the introduction to ‘Champagne Charlie’, and the evening’s programme has begun.

  Felix sits with varying degrees of enjoyment, appreciation and occasionally, broad-minded though he is, mild revulsion, through eleven more acts, and then it is the interval. He leans closer to the next box, waiting to see what the occupants will do.

  ‘I’m not going out there, Billy,’ Violetta says. ‘I don’t want the crowds demanding pieces of me tonight. I’m off duty, aren’t I?’

  ‘You are,’ Billy agrees. ‘I’ll go and get some champagne. Wait there, love.’

  There is the sound of the door to the box opening and closing again. Felix risks a swift glance around the partition between the boxes. Violetta is gazing down at the empty stage, a mild, reminiscent smile on her flushed face. She is fanning herself with a huge feather fan. Felix, very aware of her gusty laughter at some of the cruder acts, is quite sure she’s enjoying herself.

  Soon the door is opened and closed again, and there is the sound of a cork popping, and of champagne fizzing into glasses.

  ‘Cheers,’ says Violetta. There is a pause, then she emits a loud, resonating burp. ‘Oh, God, Billy, you don’t know how good it feels to be able to do that.’

  ‘Little Jack Horner would piss his pants, I imagine, if you did it in front of him.’

  ‘Piss and shit them,’ she replies.

  There is a silence, broken only by the sound of the glasses being refilled. Then Billy says, ‘You going to go ahead with it?’

  ‘I am.’

  Another pause. ‘You’ll never be able to burp again.’

  ‘Yes I will, Billy old dear. He’s going to inherit one of Papa’s many properties next year, and it’s got about a million rooms, so I can have my own burping suite and he’ll never have to know.’

  ‘I suppose I don’t have to ask you why,’ Billy says. His tone, Felix thinks, is sad.

  ‘You don’t,’ Violetta says shortly. There’s another, longer pause. Then she says in quite a different voice, ‘But you know what I just said about that million-room house.’

  ‘You saying what I think you are, girl?’

  There are some different sounds now, and Felix, almost sure that he has correctly identified them and that they will be preoccupying the pair in the next-door box to the exclusion of everything else, risks another quick look.

  Having pushed a couple of chairs right to the rear of the box, Violetta da Rosa is wrapped in the swarthy man’s arms and they are kissing as if they’re trying to eat each other.

  A little while later, the second half begins. Felix, at least half his mind busy on what he has observed of the goings-on in the next box, sits through a knife-throwing act, a strange sort of dance where small and very supple women bend themselves into extraordinary shapes and are juggled, for want of a better word, by a quartet of burly, muscular men; a couple of animal acts; a trick cycling act, performed by five girls in extremely small costumes; a very blue comedian; a
male singer who specializes in putting filthy words to hymn tunes; two women billed as sisters who box each other, once again in skimpy costumes; several more singers and some dancers; an indifferent escapologist, and then, as the penultimate act, a very short man in unbelievably tight trousers who performs a long, word-perfect patter of innuendoes so eye-wateringly crude that Felix can hardly believe what he’s hearing. But the intent is made perfectly clear by the midget’s lewd body movements, consisting of sharp thrusts with his hips and gestures towards his groin. Felix is all but sure he has pushed a stuffed sock down the front of those skin-tight trousers. No man, surely, is that well-endowed at the hands of nature alone.

  The Chairman stands up as the small man takes the last of his many bows, waits for the tumultuous applause, the whistles, the whoops of approval and the stamping feet to die down, then announces that the night will finish with a selection of popular songs in which the audience, many of whom are on the verge of falling-down drunk by now, are invited to join in. ‘And you all know the very special Peeping Tom words, don’t you?’ cries the Chairman.

  ‘YES!’ thunders the audience, to more yelling and stamping.

  As the singers shuffle onstage and the band begins to play ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’, two hundred or more voices start on the salacious first line, which, by the dropping of a single letter from the third word, straight away announces itself as a ditty as different from that written by the songwriter as it’s possible to be.

  Felix makes a quiet and unobtrusive exit.

  FIVE

  It is Sunday afternoon, and Lily has found a spot from which to observe the Stibbins house where she can stand unseen unless somebody is specifically looking out for her, which seems unlikely.

  It is a very ordinary-looking suburban dwelling, double-fronted, the front door and the window frames painted an unappealing but practical chocolate brown. It stands in a long row of very similar houses, facing a virtually identical row on the opposite side of the street. Many of the occupants have selected the same chocolate brown as Ernest Stibbins for their paintwork, but here and there one or two braver and more adventurous souls have branched out with dark red and forest green. Two houses further along on this opposite side of the street, a little path dives down between two rows of houses and leads to a pleasant little park, and the entrance to the passage is sheltered by a mature lilac tree. It is beneath its branches that Lily has concealed herself.