8

I SPENT MOST OF the following day in my room. This was of necessity, as I didn’t have any dry clothes to wear. Peregrine, eager to show his contrition, had taken my salt-marked suit to the laundry for me.

We had spoken only briefly the previous evening, after I’d been forced to wake him up by throwing shingle and snails up at his window.

I was unfooled by his brimming eyes, especially when he described himself as an ass-head and a coxcomb, insults I was sure I recalled from his play. But of course, I forgave him. If he hadn’t betrayed my trust, I would never have had the chance to swim in the sea with Alice.

‘Explain again how you got wet last night,’ he said.

I wrapped myself closely into the dressing gown he had lent me.

‘I fell by the water’s edge. I was drunk.’

He raised a disbelieving eyebrow but chose not to start an argument so soon after our reconciliation.

I wasn’t sure why I told the lie. I had done nothing wrong. In reality I’d been a perfect gentleman. In reality. In my imagination, however, that was not entirely the case. That night, I had lain awake for more than an hour, dwelling upon the vision of Alice leaving the water with her underclothes stuck to her skin so tightly, and so transparently, she might as well have been naked. More than that, at her door, I vividly pictured the softness of her gaze and the amused dimples in her cheeks. What if I had accepted her invitation to go inside? What would have happened then?

But that wasn’t the only thing that had kept me awake. What truly stopped my eyes from closing was a simple question: why did I decline? My marriage was a fake, a matter of expedience, designed to protect Rosie from suitors and me from scrutiny. We slept separately. Why shouldn’t I have gone into Alice’s house?

I wasn’t under any illusions. I knew that women didn’t swoon over men like me: slim of build, light of voice, overly serious and oddly secretive. Alice was only the second woman I’d ever met who found me attractive and knew what I was, under these clothes, under my binding. Was I expected to remain celibate for the rest of my life?

Mrs Mackay brought us a late lunch on a tray. She was, once again, dressed in a riding blazer, jodhpurs and black boots. Her hair was short and severe, but her face was kindly.

‘Chicken-of-the-woods and onions,’ she announced. ‘Would you like some tea as well?’

Peregrine and I replied at the same time, with equal fervour but opposite answers.

‘I would,’ I said, at exactly the moment he said: ‘No, we won’t.’

She looked at each of us in turn and let out a loud ‘tut’. ‘I’ll bring one cup, shall I?’

‘Yes, please.’

Mrs Mackay blessed me with a smile and glowered in Peregrine’s direction. ‘Your young friend is a good deal politer than you, my Thrush. You should listen to him. You might learn something.’

We tucked into the chicken-of-the-woods, which was a touch dry and chewy.

‘She’s not the finest cook,’ Peregrine admitted, toiling through his mouthful. ‘Especially compared with what you’re used to.’

‘Personally, I think she’s magnificent in every way. Why did she call you “my Thrush”?’

He swallowed and spent several seconds dabbing his mouth with a napkin. ‘A pet name. Like the song, you know. Thou mellow angel of the air, Sing on, dear Thrush, amid the limes.’

‘I’m not familiar with it.’

‘We’ve already established that you lack a basic knowledge of music.’

My mother had favoured the classics and it was Jane, my older sister, who was considered the musical one. She had learned to play many of the works of Mozart and Chopin with great accuracy, if little feeling, before the age of fifteen. My brother, Oliver, was the sportsman of the family and, as sportsmen often do, he entered the army to inflict his shooting skills upon the natives of Peshawar. I wasn’t considered to be anything. I was loved and cherished by my mother, befriended by my sister and tolerated by my brother, but none of them had the slightest idea what to do with me. Perhaps, without being able to name it, they sensed my dislocation.

When Mrs Mackay returned with the pot of tea, she brought with her a telegram addressed to me.

‘From Jacob,’ I told Peregrine as I read it. ‘It’s a chess move. Knight to king’s bishop six.’ I pictured the board in my mind. ‘He’s threatening my pawn.’

Mrs Mackay widened her eyes. ‘Well, aren’t you clever, a game like that, and in your head as well.’ She gestured at Peregrine with her long, cultured fingers. ‘He used to play a bit, didn’t you, my Thrush?’

He mumbled something unintelligible, though I thought I made out the words ‘idiotic pastime’.

I bestowed upon Mrs Mackay my broadest smile, the one Rosie said reminded her of a Labrador who’d eaten too much custard.

‘When did you first meet Mr Black?’

Before she could reply, Peregrine leapt from his chair. ‘Now, now, we can’t sit here idly. You should go, Mrs Mackay. We have things to get on with.’

She gave him a look and bustled away, trailing a waft of bergamot oil behind her.

In the early evening, I set off on foot for Southsea. Viola and Bill lived on Waverley Road, which was a stone-throw from the sea and consisted of matronly houses set behind prim walls, each with a herringbone path up to the porch.

Rosie answered the door and pulled me into the parlour.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Make this visit as quick as possible. And try to avoid conversations about … anything.’

I was getting tired of people telling me I couldn’t talk to other people.

A fellow drifted in and introduced himself as Mr Hapsworth, the Broadmans’ lodger, shaking my hand with all the firmness of an empty glove. Truly, he seemed so mild that a breath of wind would blow him off his feet.

‘I admire Mrs Broadman greatly,’ he told me. ‘She has a remarkable gift.’

He appeared to think I would know what he was talking about, but Rosie shooed him out before he could explain further.

‘Did you learn anything more about the opium trade?’ she asked. ‘The Blood Flower?’

‘The Blood Flower isn’t opium.’

‘What is it then?’

Again, I pictured Alice on her doorstep, her blue eyes meeting mine: beauty and parlous magic.

‘I don’t know.’

Rosie frowned at me. ‘Then how do you know it isn’t opium?’

‘I just do. Must I explain everything? Would you like a detailed account of all my movements and conversations?’

She stood up with an expression on her face I hadn’t seen before. It was, in part, shock, but also something else; something more akin to recognition.

‘As you wish,’ she said.

What had come over me? I knew the answer, of course. I was shot through with guilt at having thought only of Alice for the past several hours. But instead of punishing myself, I had punished Rosie, my wife. And though, for us, that term had only the loosest definition, she was, without any qualification, my friend. She didn’t deserve to be snapped at.

‘I’m sorry, Rosie. I haven’t been myself since we got here.’

She gave the tiniest of shrugs. ‘Very well.’

I found the point where my binding met my armpit, where the skin was chafed as raw as minced meat, and dug in my fingernails.

At the corner of my eye, I became aware of a new presence in the room, a white ball hurtling across the rug towards my leg. It moved at such speed that at first I thought it was a rat, but when it buried its teeth into the soft flesh at the back of my ankle, I realised it was a very small dog. I leapt out of my seat, but the blasted creature hung on, growling and setting back its stunted ears as I danced on the spot, squeaking with alarm. I had finally managed to kick the thing off when Viola rushed into the room and swept it up into her arms.

‘Don’t hurt him. What did you do?’

‘The little bastard bit me.’

She clutched the fiend to her bosom, kissing the top of its runtish head. ‘You must’ve scared him.’

I examined the damage, gingerly peeling down my sock. The midget demon’s incisors had pierced the skin on either side of my Achilles tendon.

Rosie scowled at her sister. ‘Do you have any iodine?’

Viola appeared surprised to be asked. ‘You know I don’t believe in that sort of thing. We’ll call upon the spirits to heal you.’

Perhaps the pain had addled my senses. ‘Pardon?’

‘You should chain up that animal,’ said Rosie, who was usually quite fond of dogs and had been known to accompany young Constance on her walks around Hyde Park with Huffam, who had been my late father’s dog and then briefly mine, until Constance grew tired of my well-intentioned ineptitude and took over.

‘Jack would never hurt anyone,’ Viola insisted. ‘Not unless provoked.’

‘Jack?’

Rosie pressed her lips together so hard I wondered she didn’t break a blood vessel. Her first husband had been called Jack. That her sister had given her vicious rat-beast the same name must have been galling, though not entirely inappropriate.

Rosie fetched a clean cloth and dabbed my ankle with water while Viola responded to my request for a pot of tea. By the time she returned with it, sans my attacker, I was lying on the sofa with my foot elevated on a cushion, one of Rosie’s handkerchiefs tied tightly around my ankle.

‘There must be something wrong,’ announced Viola. ‘This would never have happened otherwise.’

‘Something is definitely wrong,’ I agreed, with a degree of heat.

For some reason, I felt she was blaming me, though I was the one leaking blood while my persecutor was, from what I could hear being fed crumbs of cheese in the back room by the traitor Lillian.

‘I meant,’ said Viola, lifting her chin, ‘that there’s something wrong in the spiritual world. They’re trying to communicate with us.’

‘Through the medium of a dog?’

In all the fuss and conflict, I had neglected to examine the ornamentation in the parlour. I now realised that the open shelves were crowded with candles, coloured stones, collections of feathers, a pack of cards the size of a bread loaf, a metal compass with a rune inscribed on its face and a wooden board with the letters of the alphabet written around its edge. On the small table was a volume entitled The History of the Supernatural.

Oh, good Lord, I thought. I’m in the home of lunatics.

‘Jack can always tell when there’s an imbalance,’ announced Viola. ‘He’s very sensitive to it. A lot of animals are. They haven’t strayed from the natural path, as we humans have.’

‘I suppose keeping him on a leash is the answer to that.’

I knew I was being facetious, but if she seriously believed Jack was in touch with a world beyond our knowing, she must have been smoking Quinton’s opium.

Rosie clapped her hands together. ‘Let’s talk about something else, shall we?’

But Viola refused to be distracted. ‘There are energies flowing around us that we don’t understand. You must agree it’s true. We can do unimaginable things, like send telegrams across the country, make a locomotive travel faster than any horse can gallop and send balloons up into the sky with the birds. We can make a lamp light up without burning anything, using electricity.’ Her eyes were shining, and I could tell she’d made this speech several times before. ‘It’s all mystical, isn’t it? Why should we assume there’s nothing more to life and death than what we can see and touch?’

I sighed deeply. ‘Mrs Broadman, I was an assistant to a surgeon for many years, and I’ve sewn up more dead bodies than I can count. They are … puppets with the strings cut, nothing more. There’s no coming and going between the living and the dead. It’s a one-way journey.’

‘I’ll pour, shall I?’ offered Rosie.

A look of triumph crossed Viola’s face that was the image of my wife’s, but for the manic twitching of her lips. ‘The body isn’t the person though, Leo. It’s the spirit that makes us who we are. And you can’t dissect a spirit.’

I opened my mouth to reply, but suddenly found myself flummoxed. Didn’t my entire existence rest on exactly that premise?

Bill had come into the room in his shirtsleeves, and he perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘You see? She has a talent, my Viola. I’m from near Harlech, you know. Deepest Wales. They don’t hold with such stuff round there. But she showed me.’ He squeezed his wife’s shoulder. ‘She truly does speak to the dead.’

Well, I thought, I speak to the dead too. The difference is, I don’t expect them to answer.

I rubbed my temples, trying to clear my head. There was a distinction between accepting that the body is separate from the spirit and believing that, after death, our loved ones’ spirits remain forever teetering on the edge of our consciousness, waiting to offer us instruction. I didn’t get the chance to make this point, however, because Viola chose to press home her advantage.

‘You were brought up in a religious home, Roisin told me. Your father was in the clergy.’ Her features settled into a serene slackness not unlike some of the opium smokers in Papaver. ‘I can see it, actually. There! It’s as clear as if it were happening in front of me. A large dining room with a mirror and windows facing the garden. There are trees and a bed of flowers. Hyacinths and roses. It must be summer. And you’re there too, Leo. You’re a young boy with scraped knees and unruly hair, still quite bookish. I’d know you anywhere. Your father’s talking to you. I can hear him speaking. How hard it must be for you to suffer that voice, day after day, telling you what you ought to believe. The dusty old church and the coffins in the graveyard. How could a young boy like you be expected to keep an open mind?’ She blessed me with a benign smile. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? It’s written on your face.’

I honestly had no answer, which she took as affirmation.

‘It’s being with child that’s done it.’ She clutched her belly as if she were testing a melon for ripeness. ‘The creation of a life within one’s womb is a spiritual act. Pregnancy changes a person. You must agree, Roisin?’

Rosie appeared to give the matter some thought. ‘It certainly changes a person. I have to use the privy twice as often these days.’

Silence descended as the cups of tea were handed round. I’d rarely felt more in need of one, though it smelled slightly of coffee.

Bill, who had been simmering lightly, now bubbled over. ‘I understand your doubts, mate, really I do. But we can prove we’re right.’ He clenched both fists. ‘I’ll bet you anything you want that we can solve this murder.’

Viola beamed. ‘Yes, of course! A person who dies through violence doesn’t settle easily into the afterlife. They remain fractured. Their spirit cries out, if you have the means to hear it. The victims themselves will tell us who did the killing.’

Bill turned to face me, his eyes burning with conviction. ‘And then you’ll have to believe us, won’t you?’

It turned out that contacting the dead required a fair amount of preparation and would be best attempted after dinner, which seemed to me at odds with the spirits’ ethereal nature. But still, it meant that Bill, the limp Mr Hapsworth and I were chivvied out for a drink while Rosie put the children to bed and Viola cooked a mutton stew. By the time we reached the pub, my bitten ankle was sending spasms up my calf and I was more than ready for an ale.

Bill knew the establishment well, addressing the barman as ‘Ira’ and being served in a pewter tankard labelled with his name.

‘She really will do it, you know,’ he assured me. ‘She’ll find the killer. She’s quite remarkable. A fortnight ago – no, less, ten days – she had a lady whose husband’s been dead these fifteen years, and my Viola found him in an instant. She was able to tell the lady her husband’s pet name for her, and assure her that, though he’d passed to the other side, he was content. The widow left a handsome gratuity, I can tell you.’

‘You make an income from this?’

‘Oh yes. More than I make from night soil. People come from all over Portsmouth.’ He took a sup, eyeing me over the rim of his tankard. ‘When we solve this murder and identify the killer, I suppose that would be noteworthy, wouldn’t it? The kind of thing a fellow like you would put in his newspaper.’

‘Perhaps.’

I was picturing what Mr Whitford would say to me if I reported that my sister-in-law had solved the case through clairvoyancy. And me, the science reporter.

‘Well, I’d hope you would. A bit of fame, a bit of notoriety, is exactly what’s needed in this game. Like that bloke who spoke for the dear departed Prince Albert to the Queen. He’s probably in high demand now, that bloke. Charges a guinea an hour, I shouldn’t wonder.’

The conversation continued along these lines for a further two pints each. At one point, Bill demanded that I should promise to include Viola’s spiritual gift in my article, and that if I declined, he would withdraw the offer of a séance. I drained my drink and responded that I didn’t especially care one way or the other, and he immediately retracted the threat, saying that I was too earnest and didn’t know how to take a joke.

Afterwards, we headed back to the house on good enough terms. On the way, he took a long and voluminous piss against a wall, indicating that Mr Hapsworth and I should do the same while urine pooled around his shoes. I replied that I wouldn’t want to delay us, and he grinned. ‘Bigger the pipe, faster the flow.’

I agreed that he was correct in theory, if not in practice.

On our return, Bill took me through to the back room, which was divided by curtains into three parts. One contained the kitchen, a small dining table and a mattress for Rosie and the children, while Bill and Viola’s bedroom took up most of the remainder. Mr Hapsworth had the smallest part, his coffin bed occupying the cupboard under the stairs.

Dinner was a civil affair, the conversation restricted to Viola’s plans for a crib and Bill’s worries about the dilapidated state of the local cesspools. Viola was no match for Rosie as a cook, but I was feeling quite relaxed, not to say curious, about what was to come. I’d never been to a séance before and was interested to know what one might consist of.

Rosie declined to attend, saying she was tired and had no wish to commune with the dead.

The rest of us went through to the parlour and took our seats around the little table, upon which the alphabet board had been placed. As Viola doused the lights, Bill lit a single candle, which he placed on the mantelpiece. A draught from the chimney unsettled the flame and it wobbled and hissed as if constantly about to go out. In this flickering half-darkness, we sat and waited for the spirits to talk to us.

There was a tiny part of me that wondered if they would. Perhaps the veil between this life and the next was truly so thin that a voice could come through. I pictured Natalia La Blanche as I had seen her on the stones, crumpled and heedless, one arm reaching out and her throat open and raw. If her spirit could find its way here and tell us who had ended her short life, would it croak and wheeze in sympathy with her butchered body or would she be renewed as a whole young woman?

If I were given the chance, I would choose to communicate with my mother. I’d spoken to her only once as my true self, on the very day I left the house, and I never saw her again. I should have written to her, but I did not. If she were able to find her way across the heavenly divide to this small house near the Southsea beach, I would tell her I was sorry.

‘Can you talk to anyone?’ I asked. ‘People who died far from here and years ago?’

Viola answered, her voice barely above a whisper and flat in tone, as though her consciousness was already dissolving into the ether. ‘If the connection’s strong enough. It’s a question of the bond, you see. It’s love they miss most, I think.’ A beatific smile crossed her face. ‘Though I must admit that it’s men I’m best able to talk to. They come more willingly than the ladies. I think it’s a sign I have a boy growing inside me.’

That ruled out my mother, I supposed, and I certainly didn’t want to hear from my father, cataloguing my failings from the afterlife. I already knew them perfectly well.

‘Put your hands on the table,’ Viola instructed us. ‘Both hands, but lightly. Don’t push down. The name of the murderer will be spelled out for us.’

‘None of us knew the victims,’ I said. ‘Let alone loved them.’

‘Ah, but they’re recently gone, and they’ll want to be heard, I’m sure.’

She closed her eyes and began to hum and sway. With her back to the candle, her shadow formed a ghostly shade on the board, dancing as the flame wavered and spat. Her voice lowered in tone, becoming a growl like a dog playing tug-o-war, and then a grunt. Without warning, she threw back her head, eyes blinking rapidly, and let out a single long groan.

‘Spirits,’ she implored. ‘Spirits, we beg you, speak to us. Give us your wisdom. We seek … ’ She opened one eye and looked at me.

‘Micky and Natalia,’ I said.

She closed her eye again. ‘Micky and Natalia, two young people whose lives were ended unnaturally. If you’re there, speak to us now. Tell us who committed these terrible acts.’

For a few seconds, all was silent. And then, as clearly as anything I’d ever heard, a tapping noise came from the table. It was slow and steady, not like a knuckle on a door, but lighter in tone, more metallic, almost a ringing.

My hands, flat on the table, were starting to tremble.

‘Good, good, good,’ sang Viola, in time with the tapping and matching its note. ‘Now, tell us who killed you.’

Under my fingers, the table jerked and began to lift.