Experimental investigation of table moving, by M. Faraday, I read, sitting on the garden bench, perusing the yellowed copy of The Athenaeum which Arthur had managed to locate and borrow for me.

‘He did this in 1853!’ I remarked. ‘And yet people still continue with spiritualism, so his reasoning doesn’t seem to have convinced the public.’

‘I suppose not,’ smiled Arthur.

‘What fun it must be to be a physicist,’ I said. ‘I wish I could simply tell Mrs Thorne that I should like to make some experiments to verify her statements. But I could hardly ask her that, and even if I did, I admit I can’t see what experiments to make.’

‘Well, there were two physicists there already, according to what you told me,’ he answered. ‘Perhaps they are investigating the phenomenon.’

‘Ernest and Professor Lodge? They were there, certainly. But they don’t seem to be investigating much. I mean, Professor Lodge certainly thinks he is investigating, but he believes so completely in the phenomenon of communication with the dead that it doesn’t occur to him to question it. So it’s not the same kind of investigation.’ I turned over the page of The Athenaeum and began to read Mr Faraday’s report.

I obtained the cooperation of participants whom I knew to be very honourable, and who were also successful table-movers. I found that the table would move in the expected direction, even when just one subject was seated at the table. I first looked into the possibility that the movements were due to known forces such as electricity or magnetism. I showed that sandpaper, millboard, glue, glass, moist clay, tinfoil, cardboard, vulcanized rubber, and wood did not interfere with the table’s movements. From these initial tests, I concluded that: No form of experiment or mode of observation that I could devise gave me the slightest indication of any peculiar force. No attraction, or repulsion could be observed, nor anything which could be referred to other than mere mechanical pressure exerted inadvertently by the turner. I began to suspect that the sitters were unconsciously pushing the table in the desired direction. However, they firmly maintained that they were not the source of the table movements. Therefore, I devised an arrangement to pin down the cause of the movement. I placed four or five pieces of slippery cardboard, one on top of the other, upon the table. The sheets were attached to one another by little pellets of a soft cement. The bottommost sheet was attached to a piece of sandpaper that rested against the table top. This stack of cardboard sheets was approximately the size of the table top with the topmost layer being slightly larger than the table top. The edge of each layer in this cardboard sandwich slightly overlapped the one below. To mark their original positions, I drew a pencil line across these exposed concentric borders of the cardboard sheets, on their under surface. The stack of cardboard sheets was secured to the table top by large rubber bands which insured that when the table moved, the sheets would move with it. However, the bands allowed sufficient play to permit the individual sheets of cardboard to move somewhat independently of one another. The sitters then placed their hands upon the surface of the top cardboard layer and waited for the table to move in the direction previously agreed upon. I reasoned that if the table moved to the left, and the source of the movement was the table and not the sitter, the table would move first and drag the successive layers of cardboard along with it, sequentially, from bottom to top, but with a slight lag. If this were the case, the displaced pencil marks would reveal a staggered line sloping outwards from the left to the right. On the other hand, if the sitter was unwittingly moving the table, then his hands would push the top cardboard to the left and the remaining cardboards and the table would be dragged along successively, from top to bottom. This would result in displacement of the pencil marks in a staggered line sloping from right to left. It was then easy to see, by displacement of the parts of the line, that the hand had moved further from the table, and that the latter had lagged behind – that the hand, in fact, had pushed the upper card to the left and that the under cards and the table had followed and been dragged by it.

‘That seems to be that,’ I said after having read this paragraph aloud.

‘He doesn’t say it’s fraud, you notice,’ said Arthur. ‘He absolutely believes in the good faith of the table-turners. They were actually all friends of his. It’s just that he attributes all the strange phenomena rather to their own unconscious movements, whether psychological or muscular, than to transmission through the magnetic field.’

‘Which means in particular that messages purporting to come from spirits of dead people might just as well emanate from deep within the mind of the medium,’ I said. ‘Yet the things that Mrs Thorne said were strange and eerie, and the voice was so far away – all the voices which spoke through her were so completely different from each other in tone and accent. I wonder if the words she said had any real significance. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’

I jumped up from my seat, pushing the papers off my lap.

‘What I really need,’ I said, ‘is to stop thinking about this, and visit a bookshop to obtain serious information about serious matters. And I must see Inspector Doherty.’

I went up to the nursery and peered into the two little beds where the children were taking their afternoon nap. They were sleeping deeply, their soft, regular breathing making two little rhythms on either side of me. The room was dim, but not completely dark; the soft glow of sunshine gleamed through the drawn curtains, printed with elephants and giraffes, giving a fuzzy outline to the furniture and the toys scattered about: the wooden rocking horse, the Lilliputian table and chairs, the doll’s bed with its bonneted occupant.

Cedric’s long eyelashes fluttered, and he opened his large dark eyes and looked up at me.

‘Are you finished sleeping?’ I asked him softly. He nodded seriously.

‘Do you want to come to the shop with Mamma?’ I suggested. In a single movement, his compact little body was standing upright in the bed, his arms raised to be lifted. I scooped him up, removed his little nightgown and took up the sailor suit that was hanging neatly over a chair.

‘Come,’ I said, ‘we’ll get dressed in Mamma’s room, and then we’ll go out.’

Several boot buttons and a glass of water later, we were on our way, hand in hand down the summery street. We took an omnibus into town, a great adventure for an active little boy both fascinated by and a little frightened of horses, and alighted in the centre, where we began by looking in at the police station to ask if Inspector Doherty was in.

‘He’s out,’ said the young man at the desk. ‘He left word that he would be back in an hour, though.’

I left a note, and wended my way with Cedric to my favourite bookshop, a dusty hole containing hundreds of ancient books and magazines piled upon shelves, upon chairs, and upon each other, kept by Mr Whitstone, an equally ancient person with a wrinkled face, sparse white hair and twinkling eyes which appear to know everything. Mr Whitstone has been of invaluable help to me for at least ten years, since I first began teaching in Cambridge.

I found him alone, sitting on a stool behind his grubby, much-marked wooden counter, and reading. He looked up as I came in, carrying Cedric in my arms in order to preclude his causing any untoward accidents with the rather precarious piles of books which left little room to navigate.

‘Ah, Mrs Weatherburn,’ he said, nodding. ‘A pleasure. What can I do for you today?’

I hemmed and hawed for a moment. But Mr Whitstone is a man of experience, and there was no use in beating about the bush.

‘I need to learn about prostitution,’ I said, more firmly than necessary in order to compensate for my extreme embarrassment, not at the thing itself, but simply at the speaking of it aloud. Our culture acts more strongly upon us than we could wish, at times. And interestingly, my own predicament reminded me of Ernest’s words, when he had said that the speaking of his acts aloud had brought home to him a feeling of loss of honour more strongly than the acts themselves. I seemed to recall that I had been rather sententious with him.

‘You want novels? Or serious works?’ asked Mr Whitstone, not batting an eyelash at my request.

‘Serious works, if such things exist,’ I replied at once.

‘You want to understand the sociology of the phenomenon?’

‘Yes – I think so,’ I said.

‘Parent-Duchâtelet’s study of prostitution in Paris is the definitive scholarly work on the subject,’ he informed me. ‘If that is the kind of thing you want. Statistical information, you know, about the social origins of the women and so on. I don’t have it – you would need to order it from a French bookshop. Let me see now, I seem to remember…why, yes, I might have something else useful for you, however.’

He puttered about in a corner. I peered over his shoulder.

‘What about that?’ I said, pointing to a book interestingly entitled Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

‘No, no, no,’ he said, hastily taking that book and pushing it behind a pile of others. ‘That is not what you think. It is not memoirs. It is a novel from the last century. Not right for you at all. No, no, no.’

He inserted his body between me and the titles he was examining, and appeared to become somewhat anxious, so I stepped back and let him finger over his books by himself. After a moment he turned back to me, holding a pile of sensible tomes called A Social History of Women in Rural England, The Woman Question, a Collection of Pamphlets Advocating Suffrage, and Fabian Essays.

‘You do read French?’ he asked, holding out a book by Alexandre Dumas.

‘Yes, reasonably well,’ I replied, surprised. Surely if an English novel was deemed unfit for my eyes, a French novel could hardly be better!

‘You know Dumas, of course,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘But you very probably do not know of this book,’ and he took out and handed to me a leather-bound little volume with its binding partially falling away.

‘Filles, Lorettes et Courtisanes,’ I read.

‘It is a brief and somewhat more literary summary of Parent-Duchâtelet’s work,’ he said. ‘Dumas was not only a very prolific writer, but he wrote about much more varied subjects than most people realise. The French littérateurs are more fascinated by the subject than our English writers,’ he added. ‘You might – ah, you might want to look into Balzac. And for what has been written by our British authors…’ He ceased speaking momentarily and glanced suspiciously around the perfectly empty shop, then continued in a hushed voice. ‘You may remember the Stead affair of 1885?’

Although I was seventeen years old and no longer a child in 1885, I knew nothing of the affair he referred to, having lived a sheltered life. I raised my eyebrows questioningly and allowed him to continue without interruption.

‘No greater indictment of the evils of British…ah, prostitution, has ever been written,’ he told me. ‘Stead discovered, Stead published, Stead offended and was punished for making known what was not meant to be known. I cannot tell you more. You would have to manage to locate an old copy of the Pall Mall Gazette.’

‘I will search for one,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, I will take the Dumas.’

I purchased it and carried it out of the shop, leading Cedric by the hand.

The sun was bright after the dark interior of the shop. I found myself walking towards Petty Cury. I wanted to go to Heffers, partly to examine their English translations of Balzac, and partly just to see the younger Mr Archer. Not that merely seeing him could provide me with any information of any kind, but I felt that as he had very probably been acquainted with Ivy Elliott, any contact with him might bring me, however infinitesimally, closer to her, and thus to the truth. I entered the shop and looked for him, but he was not to be seen either at the counter or in the little glass-windowed office behind it. I led Cedric among the many shelves, reading over their labels until I located the French literature. I stopped, and Cedric immediately sat down on the floor and pulled three books out of the lowest shelf.

‘No, no,’ I whispered quickly, trying to remove his little fingers and replace the books without becoming too noticeable or obnoxious to the many customers frequenting the large, quiet shop. He let out a kind of screech and prepared to follow it up with several more. Hastily, I scooped him up and plumped him into a large, well-used leather armchair placed among the shelves for the convenience of the browsers.

‘Stay here and watch Mamma,’ I told him firmly. ‘If you’re very good, we’ll go and have a bun after the shop. All right?’

Always willing to eat, he assented and sat down. Less than ten seconds later, however, he was standing on the seat and performing gymnastics over the back of the armchair. It stood solidly and showed no sign of tilting and spilling him to the ground, so I allowed myself to look away for a moment and read over the titles of Balzac’s novels. Having discovered and taken up Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans, I glanced back at Cedric, who was now sitting on the seat, engaged in thrusting his hands deep into all the cracks between the seat cushions and the arms and back.

‘Look, Mamma,’ he said proudly. I hurried over, and removed a small, dusty but originally green sweet from his fingers. He looked about to rebel, but contented himself with fingering the rest of his treasure trove: three dustballs, a key, a crumpled ball of paper, a not-very clean handkerchief, a cheap tie-pin and the disgusting remains of another sweet. He sat contentedly, his legs straight out in front of him, his boots only just at the edge of the seat, this collection of delights spread out upon his lap. I swept up the little pile and glanced around, but there was nowhere to deposit it, and it didn’t feel right to push it all back into the chair, so I gave up and to his great satisfaction, tucked everything back into his chubby hands.

‘These things are dirty,’ I told him. ‘When Mamma is finished here, we’ll go outside and throw them away.’

But when the moment came to separate him from them, he proved stubborn.

‘Me keep this,’ he said, clutching the half-sucked sweet which filth had fortunately rendered no longer sticky.

‘No, Cedric,’ I said firmly.

‘Well, me keep this,’ he said, attaching himself to the crumple of paper.

‘All right, you keep that,’ I said with relief, brushing everything else into the gutter.

‘It’s got witing on it,’ he told me, showing it to me.

The merest glance, and my heart gave a jolt of surprise. A crumple of scribbled paper lost in a bookshop armchair – if I had thought at all, I would have expected a reference or a list of titles, brought in for some useful purpose and discarded. Instead, what Cedric displayed to my astonished eyes was a letter – and, looking more closely, a love letter.

Ivy?? Ivy? Ivy! Was it possible?

Ivy is a fairly common name.

And yet, there was a connection between Ivy Elliott and Heffers bookshop. Mr Archer himself constituted a connection. Mr Archer’s son constituted a connection. Was I mistaken, or did he not live just upstairs, over the shop? I will see you in a moment…

Of course, the letter might not have been written in Heffers – might not have been written moments before her death at the hands of her murderer. Yet as I stared down at the simple words, I felt that it must have been. For clearly, tomorrow and its truth had never come. And whatever that truth might have been, was it not also the cause and reason of her murder? Could Julian Archer have promised to marry her, and have murdered her instead?

I felt an anxious tugging at my skirt, and looked down. Cedric was waiting for the return of his treasure, his eyes anxious, his hand outstretched.

‘Mamma needs to keep this,’ I told him, bending down to speak to him face to face. ‘You’re a good boy to have found this wonderful thing. Will you give it to Mamma as a present?’

He looked up at me, his generous little heart already willing, though still slightly suspicious.

‘Can I still have a bun?’ he asked timidly but hopefully. ‘With raisins in it?’

‘Raisins in it, and sugar on top!’ I promised, tucking the letter away. ‘Let’s go and get it this very minute.’

A three-and-a-half-year-old man is still a man, and we have all been told a thousand times that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

‘Inspector Doherty,’ I said, seated across from him half an hour later, holding a somewhat grubby and rather tired small boy on my lap. ‘I hope you don’t object to my coming to see you about the Ivy Elliott case. There are a few things that I feel I simply must ask you about.’

‘Well, Mrs Weatherburn,’ replied the inspector, ‘I’m ready to hear whatever you have to say.’

‘First of all, I want to ask you – this has been troubling me for some time now – if it is not possible that Ivy Elliott never really left Chippendale House after all. I mean, she was seen to go walking down the path, but could she not have simply returned to the house a few minutes later on, and waited for Mr Archer somewhere within?’

He smiled.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘But Mr Archer has an alibi.’

‘He was at the party in his own house,’ I argued. ‘He could easily have left it to go upstairs for just a few minutes – that’s all it would have taken him.’

‘But he didn’t leave. Didn’t you read what the witnesses stated?’ he reminded me.

‘I did read over them quickly,’ I said, ‘I know they said he remained at the party, but…’

Taking out the same folder of statements that he had already shown me, he extracted one and put it in front of my eyes. I read it; the words seemed familiar.

‘And you believe this absolutely?’ I insisted.

‘Several others say the same,’ he replied. ‘Yes, we believe it. Apart from his alibi, he doesn’t appear to have any motive. Of course we considered him as a major possibility from the start. We thought the girl might have been threatening to make some kind of a scandal about the child she was expecting. But we soon learnt that there was and could be no possible proof that Mr Archer was the child’s father. Given what we discovered about Miss Elliott’s life, she could not have made any statement on the subject that would have carried the slightest weight. Mr Archer had neither opportunity nor motive.’

‘Perhaps he hated prostitutes, like Jack the Ripper,’ I suggested meekly.

He looked at me sharply. He had almost certainly thought me unaware of the details of Ivy’s life. However, he shrugged, and answered,

‘By all accounts, far from hating them, he liked them very much. Very frankly, Mrs Weatherburn, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. I suggest you leave Mr Archer aside as a suspect. Have you no other ideas?’

The image of Kathleen flashed in front of my mind, but I put it aside resolutely.

‘Even if Mr Archer has an alibi,’ I persisted stubbornly, ‘could he not have hired a killer to wait outside the house for Ivy to leave?’

‘Too dangerous, because of the risk of blackmail, for what seems a weak motive. And extremely expensive as well,’ he replied.

‘How expensive?’ I asked, wondering at the insanity of such a question, and passing my hand half-consciously over little Cedric’s ears, although he could certainly not understand what was meant by the term ‘hired killer’.

‘A small fortune,’ he replied. ‘It’s not enough to purchase the act itself. One must purchase the silence of the murderer. And that silence is never really certain. But in any case, we know that the girl did not return to the manor, nor was she murdered directly on leaving it. We did a large-scale search for anyone who was in the streets between midnight and two o’clock on the night of her death. There are not many people out and about at that time of night, but we did find a few. And we have two statements describing a woman we think must have been Ivy Elliott. Listen to this.’

He shuffled them out of his desk drawer and read them to me aloud.

‘That’s the first one,’ said the inspector. ‘The other is even clearer.’

‘Market Square,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Where could she have been going?’

‘That is exactly what we would like to know.’

There was a short silence, then I asked,

‘Have you any other suspects?’

‘Other than Mr Archer, you mean? My dear Mrs Weatherburn, I really think you are going to have to relinquish that idea once and for all. At this time, we are giving particular consideration to the angle of Miss Elliott’s friends, and in particular, the ‘‘friend” she mentioned at the party as being the one she was staying with. Surely she was on her way to this friend when she crossed the Market Square. We have advertised for the friend, but as yet nothing has been forthcoming, and that is suspicious in itself. In the meantime, the police in London are investigating her life there. How about you?’

‘Well,’ I said, a little reluctantly, but struck by a sense of duty, ‘I have an idea about the ‘‘friend” that Ivy was going to see. I think she might have been referring to Mr Archer’s son, Mr Julian Archer. He lives in Petty Cury, over Heffers bookshop – Ivy could very well have been going there, couldn’t she?’

‘Petty Cury? Yes, from what the witness describes, of course she could have. But that is not a sufficient reason to suppose that Mr Julian Archer had anything to do with her murder. Decidedly, Mrs Weatherburn…’ I quickly interrupted what resembled the beginnings of a lecture, and taking out the letter, I handed it to him directly.

‘I found this stuffed down in the armchair at Heffers,’ I told him.

‘I found it, Mamma!’ Cedric corrected me loudly. The inspector cast him a glance which quelled him instantly, then read the letter quickly through.

‘Now this is interesting,’ he said, ‘and also, perhaps, important. You really found it in the bookshop? When did this happen?’

‘Not an hour ago,’ I told him. ‘I was looking for a book, and Cedric was playing in the armchair. Of course, we don’t know that it is the same Ivy. I don’t have any examples of her handwriting. But I feel that it must be.’

‘I’ll be able to have that verified soon enough,’ he replied. ‘My London colleagues must have access to some handwriting samples of hers. Now, just proceeding for a moment on the assumption that the letter really was written by Miss Elliott, what does it mean? Who was it written to, and when?’

‘It isn’t easy to guess,’ I said. ‘But the letter must have been written after midnight, given that she says ‘‘tomorrow is already today”. And since she clearly refers to something very important happening ‘‘tomorrow”, and this thing, whatever it was – it sounds like a public declaration of betrothal, or something of the kind – does not seem to have happened, I infer that it was written on the very night that she died.’

‘Hardly,’ he objected. ‘The thing, whatever it was, could have been meant to happen weeks or months ago, and may not have come off for any number of possible reasons.’

‘Indeed. But if so, one can imagine that the letter was sent and received, in which case I can’t imagine how it could possibly have ended up in the armchair.’

‘I am wondering how it came there in any case.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well, now that I have learnt from you, or rather, from your witnesses, that she was seen in the vicinity of the bookshop after leaving Mr Archer’s house, it is not difficult to imagine an explanation.’

‘Such as?’ he said.

‘Well, for example, let us imagine that Ivy Elliott and Mr Julian Archer were in love, and that he had given her a key to the bookshop, perhaps even some time ago, to facilitate their meetings. Suppose, though, that she insisted on marrying him, and that he had let himself be trapped into a promise he had no desire to keep. He may have told her to come to the bookshop after the party at his father’s house and wait for him there, then come down and killed her.’

‘It doesn’t hold water,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I asked indignantly.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘first of all, you say he told her to come to the bookshop, and she says in the letter that he doesn’t know she’s there.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘All right, she came without telling him, as a surprise. Or else, he told her to come, but imagined that she would arrive much later, towards two o’clock, so he could have no idea that she was already there when she wrote those words.’

‘And you think she wrote this letter while waiting to see him?’

‘It could be.’

‘Doesn’t that seem odd to you?’ he continued. ‘Why write to him at all, if she was about to see him? And how could she be sure of seeing him in a moment, if he was expecting her an hour or two later?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly, ‘but she does clearly say that she is writing to him although she will see him in a moment. People in love do odd things. I know – perhaps what she meant to do was to write the letter, then carry it upstairs to his rooms! That would explain it. Although I admit that I can’t quite see why she should not speak the words rather than writing them – and why she should secretly slip the letter into his hand. Perhaps he was not alone, and she knew it?’

‘Well, that makes sense,’ he admitted. ‘Mr Archer doesn’t live alone up there.’

‘Well, then!’ I exclaimed triumphantly.

‘Well what?’ he challenged. ‘How do you see what followed? If she did go up, then what did she do with the letter?’

I reflected for a moment. ‘She can’t have gone up,’ I said, ‘otherwise she would have given it to him. Maybe she went up and he was not in…but no, even then she would have kept or destroyed the letter, or left it for him. She can’t have gone up. Mr Archer must have come down and killed her.’

‘That’s all very well,’ he said, ‘but we just agreed that he didn’t know she was there.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well…maybe he was looking out of the window, and happened to see her coming down the street?’

‘So he hopped down and killed her? Just like that? On an impulse?’

I cast about desperately.

‘Well, maybe he had premeditated that she would come at two o’clock and he would kill her then,’ I said, ‘and when he spotted her earlier, he just did what he had planned to do anyway.’

‘But if he had planned to meet her at two o’clock,’ he argued, ‘why would it have been in the bookshop at all? Why, if there was any plan to meet, couldn’t she simply come upstairs directly? Don’t tell me that he didn’t want to see her in his rooms, or that she wasn’t supposed to come there. Because if that were true, she wouldn’t have meant to go upstairs after writing her letter.’

‘Er,’ I said.

‘And for that matter,’ he went on inexorably, ‘if he did come down and surprise her, how did the letter end up in the armchair?’

‘Maybe,’ I scrabbled, ‘maybe before she could give it to him, he told her that he didn’t want to marry her after all. Then, if she had been sitting in the armchair, reading it over, say, she might have crumpled up the letter in a fury and thrust it away.’

‘She’d have been more likely to tear it up and throw the pieces in his face, don’t you think?’ he said.

I did think so.

‘And in any case,’ he continued firmly, ‘I still don’t see any real motive.’

‘Well,’ I mumbled timidly, ‘because maybe he had promised to marry her and no longer wanted to…’

‘My dear Mrs Weatherburn, do you see any reason why he should not simply have told her that he had changed his mind?’

‘Breach of promise…?’

‘Mr Archer’s word against a woman like hers, in a court of law?’ he said, and laughed outright.

‘Maybe she was blackmailing him,’ I ventured, in a last, desperate attempt.

‘What for? Julian Archer doesn’t possess the kind of social status for which an affair with a prostitute can destroy him. And for that matter, blackmail hardly seems compatible with such a letter.’

It was hopeless. My idea made no sense, no sense at all. And yet – she must have been in the bookshop – she must have written the letter there – and given the time of her death, she may well have been killed there…

I looked at the inspector. He was staring thoughtfully at me.

‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘I will question Mr Julian Archer. We might as well see what he has in the way of an alibi.’