Woman Who Spoke to Spirits Page 9

  Maurice nods. ‘No harm in that,’ he remarks. He gives Felix a man-of-the-world look. ‘Some of them got a bit sticky, I’d guess.’

  ‘Yes, but not the ones I was planning to sell,’ Felix flashes back.

  Maurice Isaacs grins. ‘Shame you didn’t come and find me back then,’ he remarks. ‘I might have offered you a job.’

  There is quite a long and rather unnerving silence, during which it seems to Felix that Maurice’s dark eyes are trying to bore into his head to see what he really wants. He does his best to empty his mind of everything but the most innocent thoughts. Eventually Maurice opens a drawer down to his right and extracts a thick, bulging file which, as he opens it, is revealed to contain playbills. ‘You can have a browse through these if you like,’ he says laconically. He nods towards the door that leads to the outer office. ‘Out there.’

  This is clearly the best Felix is going to get but, since it’s a great deal more than he was hoping for and will save him the labour of looking up the details of Violetta’s past performances in dozens if not hundreds of old publications, he is extremely grateful. Thanking Maurice Isaacs profusely – he even finds himself bowing – he backs out and finds himself a quiet corner in the outer office.

  An hour later, some dozen pages of his notebook are covered with his neat handwriting and he has the full story of Violetta’s performances – and hence her whereabouts when working, which seems to be the majority of the time – for the past fifteen years. Most of the time she seems to have been in or close to London, but there was a brief season in Brighton – perhaps the play was not a hit – and another in Guildford, and several periods in Tunbridge Wells, the most recent of which was earlier this year.

  Felix knows what he must do next.

  Lily is frustrated, for she must wait for almost a week before presenting herself before Albertina Stibbins for her first seance. Her frustration is increased by constantly having to observe Felix, who is not only working very diligently at the task of exploring Violetta da Rosa’s background but apparently absorbed and utterly fascinated by it. When they pause to eat their lunchtime bread, cheese and pickles on Wednesday, he brings her up to date on his progress. He announces that since the actress appears to be a frequent visitor to the Kent town of Tunbridge Wells, he plans to go there, if Lily agrees, to see what he can unearth. ‘It almost seems,’ he adds persuasively, ‘that she looks for excuses to go down there, since she’s even appeared in one or two amateur efforts that surely weren’t worthy of an actress of her quality.’

  ‘Perhaps she takes the waters,’ Lily remarks. Felix looks blank, so she explains. ‘Tunbridge Wells is a spa town. People drink the water from a spring there, and it is said to be beneficial for the health.’

  ‘Oh.’ For a moment he looks crestfallen. Then, brightening, he says, ‘Even if that was what took her to the town originally, it may not entirely explain why she keeps going back.’

  Lily nods. ‘I suppose not,’ she allows.

  He is flipping through his notebook. ‘Seven plays in fifteen years, the first nearly a decade ago and the most recent at the start of the year,’ he says eagerly.

  Lily smiles. ‘I think it’s well worth investigating,’ she says.

  With Felix heading out of the office the next day and into the bright spring day, Lily decides she must do likewise and she sets off down the river to Wapping. She was right, and it is indeed where the river police have their headquarters. She finds a bored-looking officer only too pleased to pass half an hour by chatting to a pretty woman.

  ‘There’s the five of us plus me on my regular shift,’ he tells her, ‘and we call ourselves the Disciples.’ He has an anticipatory smile hovering around his mouth.

  ‘Fishers of men,’ Lily says unthinkingly.

  His face falls. She realizes her mistake, for she should have played dumb and let him explain; should have let him have his moment.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he says huffily. ‘The stiffs often end up here, see – well, they’re not so much stiff as bloated if they’ve been in the water any length of time – and we hook them out.’

  Belatedly she adopts the demeanour of horrified member of the weaker sex on the point of fainting. ‘How frightful!’ she breathes.

  ‘Sit down, miss, there, that’s better,’ he says solicitously, pulling out a chair for her. They are in a very small, cramped office crowded with far too many objects in it, and the river is slapping repetitively and persistently against the wooden pilings supporting the platform on which it sits. ‘Yeah, well, you have to have nerve in this business,’ he goes on. ‘Me and the Disciples, we can take it, see, we can handle anything.’

  ‘And you have to suffer the poor relatives coming to identify the dead!’ she exclaims.

  ‘Yeah, that’s quite right, miss, and it’s not pretty, but what me and the Disciples say is that it’s a comfort, see, because once people know, once they’ve seen their dead with their own eyes, they start to accept.’

  She nods. ‘Yes, I do see,’ she says. After a respectful pause she asks, ‘Do many people fall in and drown?’

  He laughs shortly. ‘Well, everyone what falls in drowns, miss, there’s no escaping your fate once you’re in the water. And it’s not always whole bodies as ends up here, what with the battering they get, even assuming they were whole when they went in.’ He looks at her. ‘Good place to discard a body, whole or in bits, is the Thames,’ he mutters darkly.

  ‘I see.’ The tremor in her voice is by no means entirely fake.

  ‘Trouble is,’ he goes on, resuming his cheerful tone, ‘it’s no longer just people missing their footing on bridges and falling in, not any more, because we’re seeing different sorts of mishaps now, what with so many people taking to the river in pleasure craft and that and not knowing what they’re about on the water. And there’s suicides too, don’t forget that. As to numbers –’ he pauses, drawing in breath over clenched teeth to make a whistling noise – ‘ooh, we’re talking a good hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty or even more, per annum. That’s per year,’ he adds helpfully.

  One of whom, Lily thinks, was the first Mrs Stibbins. Saddened, and guilty all over again because she’s about to trespass into two people’s private tragedy when it’s really none of her business – except that of course it is her business – she forces herself to go on.

  ‘Would a body that fell from Chelsea Bridge end up here?’

  He shoots her a glance. ‘Why d’you want to know?’

  She has prepared for this. ‘Somebody I know lost his wife,’ she replies. ‘She drowned, having slipped and gone in the water under Chelsea Bridge, and he had to identify her body. I do not wish my ignorance of such matters to inadvertently cause offence.’

  He frowns as he tries to work out exactly what she means, and she adopts a prim and slightly disapproving expression, as if it is he who is being insensitive. Taken in, he flushes slightly and says, ‘Right, miss, yes, I see,’ although she is quite sure he doesn’t. ‘Yeah, well, she’d have ended up with us, likely as not, so the poor bugg— the poor man would probably have come here to view the body.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says quietly.

  They chat for a while longer, although no longer about drowned bodies, and Lily discovers that her new friend’s name is Alf Wilson. He seems to have forgiven her for spoiling his little joke and even provides a cup of amazingly strong tea, and, after managing to drink it without wincing, Lily takes her leave.

  In the late afternoon Lily goes to observe the people who attend the Thursday seance at the Stibbins house. But it is poorly attended, and Leonard Carter, just as he had said, isn’t there. She recognizes a couple of faces from the Sunday seance: the older man who came with his soldier son, and the old woman, Mrs Sullivan, who on Sunday had some sort of message from poor Rodney, whoever he is. Was, she corrects herself. There are two more women, black-clad, one with a cloud of gauze obscuring her face. They are elderly; too old to still be in employment and thus free to seek o
ut other activities on a weekday afternoon. Including, thinks Lily as she watches Mrs Sullivan totter away, going to a modest and very ordinary-looking suburban house and trying to get in touch with the dead.

  She waits a little longer, giving them a chance to get away before she sets off. The sky is overcast and darkness is already falling. She looks across at the Stibbins house and sees a figure at a ground-floor window. It is a woman – Albertina, no doubt – and she is reaching up to draw the curtains.

  Just for an instant it seems to Lily that a heavy black veil descends between the two of them, and it is as if she is viewing Albertina through something dark and thick. The air has suddenly turned very cold.

  It is a horrible sensation, full of ancient menace and foreboding.

  Lily shrugs it off.

  She sets off briskly down the road, her heels ringing on the pavement. It was nothing but an illusion, she tells herself, brought about by the late afternoon gloom and her own fatigue.

  Nevertheless, the chill and the foreboding seem to walk beside her for quite a long way before they eventually dissipate.

  In the morning there is a telegram from Felix.

  Request approval to stay in TW until Sunday night stop.

  That is all, and it poses far more questions than it answers. It doesn’t answer any questions at all, in fact, except that Felix appears to have discovered something worth pursuing.

  The telegraph boy is waiting for her reply. Lily stands in the doorway, thinking.

  She will have to pay the additional expense of two more nights’ accommodation, which will not be cheap because of the sort of town that Tunbridge Wells is. But if Felix really has found a lead, then surely she must give him his head and allow him to follow it?

  It comes down to how much she is willing to trust his judgement.

  And, after the briefest of pauses, she reaches in her purse for a coin and tells the boy, ‘Just send back Approved.’

  Lily is ready far too early on Sunday. The morning has had its fill of frustrations, however, and she makes up her mind to get out of the house and be on her way.

  It’s all because of the Little Ballerina, of course.

  She is at present in a production of Coppélia, and, although still only a member of the chorus, it seems she has advanced by a row or two into a position of greater prominence, and this has been sufficient to elevate her sense of her own importance by a factor of ten. She managed to annoy Mrs Clapper to boiling point on Friday morning by airily informing her that she expected her personal laundry to be rinsed out and put out on the line now that more time spent at rehearsals meant there was less available for seeing to her own washing. Mrs Clapper’s reply left the Little Ballerina in no doubt that this was unlikely to happen. This morning, Lily’s own request was that the dancer, coming home so late after evening performances, might try to make a little less noise.

  The Little Ballerina had drawn herself up to her full height, which seemed more than it was because she held herself so well. ‘I am artiste,’ she said in a scandalized gasp. ‘I perform, I give all of myself, then afterwards there is still so much excitement, and this cannot go away quick!’

  There was a lot more in this vein, and eventually Lily had had enough. ‘Yes, I understand,’ she said curtly, interrupting the Little Ballerina in mid-sentence. ‘Just stop slamming the doors, please, and try to be a little lighter on your feet as you go upstairs.’

  The Little Ballerina, shocked at this slur on her professional qualities, called Lily something in Russian that Lily was quite sure was no compliment.

  Now it is a little before one o’clock and Lily, clad in black, is striding across Battersea Bridge, deliberately putting thoughts of temperamental ballet dancers right out of her mind and thinking ahead to her own performance, which will start in just over an hour when she meets Leonard Carter at the cafe. Reaching the south side of the river, she walks along to the park and finds a bench, where she sits down and watches a family entertain their four children with a picnic. Then at a quarter to two, she sets off for the cafe.

  Leonard Carter is waiting for her outside, and he looks as nervous as she feels. But I need not disguise my anxiety, she thinks, for what is more natural when setting off for one’s first seance?

  Leonard greets her courteously, and he turns to lead the way to the Stibbins house on Parkside Road. She remembers just in time that she’s not meant to know where it is, and lets him walk slightly ahead. He makes one or two remarks about the weather, to which she struggles to respond. Then, mercifully, he lapses into an understanding silence. Lily, repeating to herself Maud Garrett, I’m Maud Garrett, follows him right up to the chocolate-brown front door.

  Impressions crowd in on her swiftly and relentlessly. A modest little house, clean and tidy, the rooms reasonably sized and filled with slightly too much furniture. A door to a rear room – the kitchen? – quickly closed by Ernest Stibbins, as if he, like his guests, has suddenly noticed the smell of cabbage and gravy. A room to the right of the narrow, dark hall, its curtains drawn and lit by a couple of oil lamps on the big round table, and six chairs set around it. Ernest Stibbins counts heads and hurries away to fetch a seventh. The chair beneath the window is left vacant, and Ernest settles the six people in the remainder.

  ‘May I introduce Miss Maud Garrett?’ Leonard says once they are all seated. ‘She is a friend of mine, and would very much like to sit in Circle with us today.’

  There are some polite murmurs of acquiescence. Ernest Stibbins comes to stand beside Lily’s chair and says, ‘Welcome, Miss Garrett, to our house and to our Circle. I hope you will find that which you seek.’ He gives a kindly and encouraging little smile, as if this is really a foregone conclusion. Lily is just framing a reply when there is a movement in the shadowy doorway as a young woman walks into the room and quietly takes the last seat.

  Leonard Carter, seated to Lily’s right, draws in his breath. Lily risks a swift glance at him and sees his face alive with devotion and admiration. Ah, she thinks.

  Under cover of the dim light, Lily stares at Albertina Stibbins. She is young; perhaps as much as eighteen or twenty years younger than her husband. No, seventeen, she corrects herself, recalling that it was in Felix’s notes. Albertina is quite short, with a curvaceous figure dressed sombrely in a dark shade, with white at the collar and cuffs. Her hair is reddish-fair and dressed decorously, parted in the centre and swept down over her ears and into a bun at the nape. Her neck is long, and curves gracefully into sloping shoulders.

  Her face is quite lovely. Her eyes are wide and light-coloured, fringed with thick lashes. Her nose tips up at the end, her skin is creamy, with a slight flush to the plump cheeks. Her deep-lipped mouth curves up in a smile as she looks at the people around the table. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Sullivan, Mr Haverford, Mr Sutherland and Robert, how nice to see you all today.’ After a quick glance at Leonard, seated on her immediate left, her eyes have gone widdershins round the table and now they rest on Lily. ‘And welcome to our new friend!’ she says, her smile widening.

  And then, before Lily has a chance to prepare herself – even had she known what to do – one lamp is extinguished and the other turned down to the dimmest of lights and removed to a sideboard in the corner of the room, and her first seance begins.

  She has no idea what to expect.

  She realizes, as Albertina Stibbins gets into her stride and speaks with gentleness, with affection, sometimes with love, to people around the table, that she hadn’t expected it to be like this.

  For, to begin with at least, it seems to be all about kindness.

  ‘Oh, of course poor dear Rodney didn’t suffer, Mrs Sullivan!’ she says, holding the tearful old woman’s hand. ‘He says to remind you that you were there with him right to the end, that you witnessed how peaceful he was, that you saw the lines of pain ease from his face as death took him.’ Mrs Sullivan nods, and a weak little smile tweaks at her thin lips. ‘He loved you very much, and he doesn’t want you to torment yo
urself like this, for he can see that it is not good for you, and he wants you to try to eat a little more if you can.’

  Poor dear Rodney is right, Lily thinks, for the lines of suffering on Mrs Sullivan’s face are clear to see, and, to judge by the loose jowls under her chin, it does indeed look as if she has lost weight recently.

  After some more words of comfort and encouragement, Albertina’s attention is suddenly jerked away and she is looking straight at the soldierly man’s father, sitting on the far side of his son, who is to Lily’s left. ‘George, George,’ she says in a voice that’s not quite her own, ‘now you know what happened on Thursday, don’t you?’ George Sutherland mutters something inaudible. Lily senses his son stiffen slightly, as if wondering if to leap to his father’s defence. ‘It is not a matter for you to be so worried about, and you must really try to allow time to do its work.’

  And then there is something else in the room with them.

  Lily, uneasy, has a surreptitious look around. The light of the single lamp in the corner makes deep shadows, and Lily thinks she sees movement … But it’s all right, it’s only Ernest, who is standing just inside the door, quietly watching his wife with an expression of tenderness.