Authors: Neil Spring
The question dogged me until ceremony gave way to celebration. The table plan surprised me. We weren’t seated at the back of the room, but neither were we at the front.
‘You should think about finding your own husband,’ I heard Mother say. Irritation displaced guilt for an instant, but even that was washed away by flowing champagne and rising jubilation. Until Amy targeted me with a precisely calibrated smile all the way from the top table, skewering my conscience. I could only smile falteringly back, painfully aware of my dereliction of friendly duty.
Throughout the meal, beneath the laughter and tinkling cutlery, unspoken questions bubbled through my mind: how
much had this lavish affair cost? Where had she planned the honeymoon?
My ignorance of these details underlined the distance between us. Was this what I had become – an interloper at my best friend’s wedding?
‘Sarah!’
Halfway through dessert Amy approached, laying a gentle hand upon my shoulder.
‘And Mrs Grey! How wonderful of you to come.’
I studied my friend’s smile for insincerity, then stood quickly, folded her in a hug and kissed her cheek. She looked more beautiful than I could have imagined, and I told her so.
‘How’s the new job?’
‘It’s good, it’s good,’ I said quietly, cautious of being overheard. I was deeply reluctant to talk spooks in front of a crowd of new acquaintances.
It wasn’t just my odd reticence that marked the change between us. I saw now the fault-lines in her expression, the puzzled scrutiny that glimmered through her hostess smile.
I thought about this as she led me to a table nearer the front of the room and introduced me to some people I didn’t recognise. New friends – all smiles and shrill voices, feathers and rhinestones. After long introductions, we settled into a private moment near the fireplace.
‘Where have you been hiding?’ Amy demanded.
I gave a bright smile. ‘Oh, you know, it’s been a nightmare really. We have this case at the moment – a locked casket. Harry’s kept me tremendously busy preparing for the public opening next week. So much to do!’
Amy nodded awkwardly and said finally, ‘Planning a wedding takes time too.’
At once I felt both defensive and ashamed for not having helped with the preparations. Then I tried diversion: ‘You’ve done such a wonderful job! The cake is simply perfect. Is it for eating or just for show?’
I groaned inwardly at my clumsiness.
Amy looked surprised; clearly she suspected sarcasm. Did she think I was jealous? ‘Amy, please, I never meant to neglect our friendship,’ I hurried to assure her. ‘I’ve just been so frightfully busy.’
At last my friend dropped the pretence and spoke in a sharper tone. ‘I don’t understand! Why say you’ll do something, and then disappear completely? It wasn’t just the wedding invitations, Sarah – I haven’t seen anything of you! What’s been so important to have kept you away?’
My gaze faltered and I felt my cheeks colour. There was no excuse I could offer. She was right, yet I was lost for words. How could I explain that for sixteen months I had been driven to distraction with locked caskets and people who communed with the dead?
‘I am sorry, Amy. And I’m so, so proud of you.’
She nodded and smiled, seeing clearly now my sincere contrition. ‘Are you finding it interesting?’ A brief pause. ‘Is
he
interesting?’
Recollections of the past sixteen months at Price’s side flicked through my mind, a montage of uncanny memories: the sun glaring on us at the Colosseum in Rome; damp, frigid mornings on the banks of Loch Ness; the teenage girl we encountered in Berlin who made knives and forks stick to her flesh as magnets grip metal. I doubted anyone in London had experienced a more thrilling, more adventurous or more peculiar year. There was no one more mysterious than Harry Price.
I nodded slowly, not wanting to appear too eager. ‘He’s taking me to Vienna next year, to a conference. And he’s teaching me to drive. Sometimes he even lets me bring the saloon home.’
She took my hand and squeezed it gently. ‘Is he worth it, Harry Price?’
Before I could answer, laughter erupted at the next table as another champagne cork popped.
‘Don’t be a stranger, Sarah.’
I wondered: was my life so empty before Price that it had come to this – hunting the dead when I should have been caring for the living?
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
And I meant it too. But by the following week, I was already wondering if this was a promise Price would allow me to keep.
*
Seven days later, some of Britain’s greatest scientists and historians and a crowd of eager newspaper reporters arrived at Church House, Westminster. On all their lips was the same question: what was inside the locked box? Nothing, not even the violent thunderstorm that evening, could keep them away.
Mother and I took our places in the stalls to the left. Glancing to my right, I caught sight of Velma Crawshaw at the end of the opposite aisle. Her hair had been restyled for the occasion, cut closer to her face in a more modern fashion, and she was wearing a long-sleeved pale grey dress so surprisingly elegant that I wondered cynically where she had found the money to pay for it.
At the top of the room, in the centre of a wide stage, was the mysterious locked casket, picked out by a bright spotlight from above.
‘What do you suppose is inside it?’ Mother asked with a thrill
in her voice. ‘They say it contains the salvation for any nation in crisis.’
‘That is what they say,’ I replied doubtfully, glancing over at Velma again.
And then Price was marching down the centre aisle, his black frock coat flapping behind him. From the front of the stage he looked out with severity, his eyes steady, set firm ahead. He didn’t look once at Velma. He didn’t even look at me.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ his voice boomed in the crowded hall, ‘we are gathered here tonight for a momentous occasion.’ He proudly took up his place next to the locked box as a wave of excitement rippled through the sea of onlookers. ‘Many of you will be wondering why I decided to conduct this investigation in public. You will have heard that I intend to solve the myth surrounding the contents of this box, which once belonged to a great seeress. Let me tell you now that I am here tonight not to verify this myth but to explode it!’
There came from the audience a hurried exchange of whispers.
‘In the last few days I took the liberty of asking one of this country’s most talented mediums, who is here among us this evening, to tell me by psychic means what this curious chest contains.’
Surely, I thought, he isn’t going to tell them all now, here, like this? What if Velma were mistaken? She would be ruined. I didn’t care for the woman, but the idea that I was about to witness her public humiliation made me feel extremely uncomfortable.
From his jacket pocket Price produced a slip of paper and held it aloft. ‘I can now reveal what was predicted.’
Velma looked totally dejected. And when Price had completed reading aloud the poor woman’s vague list of predictions he
raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Well then, we shall see, shan’t we, how accurate the means of the modern psychic really are?’
The great moment had arrived.
Picking up a pair of heavy metal shears from the table, he cut the seals that had secured the box before prising the lid open. From somewhere at the back of the room someone – probably a follower from one of the Southcott societies – cried, ‘Sacrilege!’
But of course that didn’t stop him.
As he reached inside the casket, his fingers trembling, you could have heard a pin drop. Each curious item was produced slowly, carefully, with wonderful drama for the benefit of the cameras: a horse pistol, some coins, a pair of earrings, two religious pamphlets and a booklet entitled
The Remarkable Prophecies and Predictions for the Year 1796
. Just a curious assortment of worthless bric-a-brac that was clearly never going to be of any use to anyone whatsoever, let alone a nation in a crisis!
‘Well then,’ said Price, his sarcasm obvious, ‘imagine that!’
The affair was a well-staged sensation. It was not, however, a performance to be relished by Velma Crawshaw, whose face, I could see, was flushed with embarrassment. She must have cared for him dearly to have trusted him so. And now she had been vilified.
When the audience finally saw the objects inside the box they burst into hysterical laughter, enthusiastically thanking Price for arranging such an entertaining evening, many of them grateful for the opportunity he had given them to witness close up the results of his method of applying precautionary scepticism to psychic matters.
But not everyone was as satisfied with the night’s proceedings. Mother never returned to the Laboratory after that. For her, and hundreds of other ardent spiritualists, it was just too
much. ‘He has no respect,’ she complained to me afterwards, ‘no class or nobility. You would do well to get away from him, Sarah.’
In the end, of course, she was right; mothers usually are.
*
‘It’s about last night,’ I said flatly, eyeing his desk, which was covered with newspaper cuttings.
‘Yes, it went well very well, didn’t it?’ Price said cheerfully. ‘The public has always been fascinated by mysterious boxes. Pandora’s box, the Ark of the Covenant – one has only to possess a box with history and one immediately becomes a headliner. But a locked box! That’s much more exciting. Thank you so much for your wonderful efforts, Sarah.’ He glanced down at his newspaper cuttings. ‘Really, there’s hardly a journalist in London who isn’t talking about our little show!’
The way he was revelling in this attention made me feel somewhat nauseous.
‘Sarah, what’s the matter? You seem displeased.’
‘You didn’t seem surprised,’ I remarked, remembering his reaction to the objects he had drawn out of the casket. ‘It was as if you already knew.’
‘
Was
it?’
‘Yes,’ I said sternly. ‘It was.’
Price held my gaze with a steady concentration, as though he were expecting me to look away. I didn’t.
‘Well,
did
you already know?’
‘Of course I knew,’ he snapped. ‘I had to know! Did you really imagine I wouldn’t have taken the precaution of checking in advance?’
‘But why?
How?
’
‘By applying the weapons of secular science, of course.’ He grinned. ‘The X-ray.’
‘Then you
wanted
to humiliate her?’ I asked.
‘You call it humiliation; I call it making a point. By X-raying the box I was taking no chances.’
‘But I thought that you and she …’
Price’s face was blank. ‘You thought … ?’
‘I thought you were friends.’
‘It was vital that I control the proceedings in the manner which people have come to expect from me.’
‘Yes, but—’
Price stood up and moved to the front of his desk. ‘Sarah, you know your work means the world to me, but I am in charge. I decide what we investigate and what we don’t, like that house you told me about – that rectory.’ He shook his head. ‘I decide. That is the way it has to be. Always. All right?’ He left an expectant pause, searching my face carefully. Perhaps he could see that I wasn’t convinced, that I was about to challenge him still further, because he continued: ‘So, why are you really here?’
‘I … I don’t understand.’
‘Oh? I think you understand very well.’ His tone stung, and it took me a few seconds to realise, with some surprise, that the expression on his face wasn’t anger or even dissatisfaction but distrust. ‘I’m beginning to think that perhaps you have not been entirely honest with me, perhaps not even honest with yourself.’
‘Not this again!’ I said quickly, recalling his initial doubts about me. ‘I’m not a spy!’
‘Is it true that your father was killed in the last war and that your mother is an avid believer in the Spiritualist cause?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘
Is it true?
’
‘Yes …’
‘Then would you care to enlighten me as to how these facts are connected with your presence here?’
A hazy memory flickered: me next to Father at home in front of his piano. That was the night he told me that very soon he would be gone. ‘Where?’ I had asked, and his answer had haunted me:
‘There is a war coming, my darling. But I will come back, I promise, and you will see me again.’
I felt my despondency rising in my throat.
‘Do you imagine, Sarah, that your being here with me is – in some small way – a means of coping with your loss?’
Was that it? I blinked away an unexpected tear. Working here at the Laboratory, on the outer limits of everyday experience, constantly probing the question of an afterlife, did not dispel my feelings of my loss, but it helped me to understand them better, to see with greater clarity why Mother had enveloped herself in these mysteries. It helped me to understand that she was mistaken and my father would never be coming back and to put right what the mediums had made wrong. Lastly – if only in a small way – it allowed me to tease myself with the very same mysteries and possibilities of hope.
Price was waiting for my answer.
‘I think you may be right,’ I said quietly. ‘I loved him so much.’
‘The memory of love is as immutable and as radiant as fire, Sarah, and it burns just as fiercely.’ They were touchingly warm words from a man whose fits of depression could leave him so cold.
He sat down again and leaned back, resting his fingertips on the edge of his desk. ‘You know, I sensed a secret within you, and secrets are always revealed eventually; like worms, they tunnel and twist their way to the surface. No matter! I feel, at least, that now I know you a little better.’
Our conversation seemed to be at an end, so I rose, but before I could leave a question occurred to me. ‘What about you, Harry?’
His expression flickered. ‘What about me?’
I had wanted to ask him many times why the need for approval burned within him so ferociously and why he had chosen the paranormal as his subject of study. I had a sense that his work in this building was fired by something deep within his troubled soul. But every time he detected signs of curiosity on my part he would either deflect my questions or change the subject. He gave nothing away.