‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I was present at one, if one wants to be precise about it, but only because it was held in my night nursery while I was sleeping there. My mother sacked the nurses, as you can well imagine.’
‘I can’t believe Nanny Whats-her-name would put up with such a thing,’ said Alec.
‘Palmer,’ I said. ‘She was at her sister’s in Norwich for a confinement. I slept through the whole thing – not least because the nurses put rum in my milk at bedtime. Ssh!’
Very faintly in the distance we could hear the rustling of leaves and a sound like far-off bees humming. It was the same murmuring as before, only this time there were more of them; the tramp of feet sounded like an army battalion and the bees were an angry swarm long before we saw the first of the torches. They were proper flaming torches, soaked rags wound round long sticks, and my heart flipped and leapt like a fish at the sight of them. For flaming torches turn a crowd into a mob, and I was astonished to see what a crowd of mediums there was now. There had to be twenty of them, young and old, male and female, all walking in step and murmuring in time. And at the head of them was Grant in her grey dress and white neckpiece, her face a mask of pure terror in the light of the burning torch she carried wavering in her hands.
‘Oh Alec,’ I breathed. ‘She’s petrified. Let’s just go and stop this nonsense right now.’
‘She’s acting, Dan,’ said Alec. ‘Look at her now.’
Grant had surged ahead of the rest of the procession so that none of the mediums could see her face, which had split into a grin. With the torch held under her chin it was quite the scariest thing I had ever seen. It was, however, swiftly outrun by what was to follow.
16
My detecting career has put me in the way of several experiences – scenes witnessed, persons met, tasks undertaken – which my parents, Nanny Palmer, Mademoiselle Toulemonde, and the staff of my finishing school never foresaw and for which they failed to equip me. None of it, not the bodies plummeting from heights with firm hands at their backs, not the circus midgets in their caravans, not the digging of graves in the moonlight, rattled me as thoroughly, sent as many goose pimples marching over my flesh like an army of ants and left me as waxen and trembling as the night of the Big Seance.
It started quietly enough. The mediums stood in a circle all around the edge of the clearing, muttering their endless chant. Between the bodies of the two standing closest to Alec and me I could see that Grant was in the middle, with Loveday Merrick at her side. He thumped his cane on the ground and the muttering stopped.
‘Extinguish the torches,’ he commanded in that booming voice of his and the mediums clustered around a fire bucket someone must have brought up the hill. One by one they dipped the torches, setting off a sizzling loud enough in the quiet night to sound like the devil’s own firebrand, and sending a cloud of smoke up into the air. When the dowsed torches emerged from the water, however, they were still alight and within moments were burning as bright as ever again.
‘They’ve used sulphur and lime instead of tar,’ Alec whispered. ‘They’ll never get them out that way.’
There was silence in the clearing except for sounds of blowing as some of the mediums tried and failed to puff out the flaming rags as one would a birthday candle. I could feel a surge of laughter bubbling up inside me and I concentrated on containing it. After an awkward moment, one of the mediums piped up.
‘How do we do it, Loveday?’ Alec’s shoulders were shaking now too.
‘Roll them on the ground,’ he said. ‘And stamp on them.’
The few men in the crowd did just that but most of the women dabbed uselessly at the grass with theirs and made little darting movements with their feet, and all in all it took a full five minutes before every last one of the torches was out. Even at that there was some ominous glowing and when a gust of wind swept across the clearing several of them reignited for a second time and had to be rolled and stamped on again.
At last, though, there was darkness and silence and, with a few deep breaths, we quenched our threatened giggles. I could just about make out the white gleam of Grant’s neckpiece although my eyes watered and ached from the strain of looking. There came a muffled sound which I took to be Loveday’s cane again and then some movement I could not clearly see.
‘We are gathered here,’ said Merrick, sounding exactly like a minister at the start of a wedding, ‘on this twenty-sixth night of October in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-nine, one hundred years to the night since the black devil himself, William Hare, was sent to his eternal punishment. We come to honour the souls of his victims who became his avengers, to seek intercourse with them, to be the bearers of their messages from the world beyond to the world of the living. Most humbly we offer ourselves in service to them.’
It was all I could do not to whisper ‘Amen’.
Nothing happened for perhaps a minute. An owl hooted. Down in the town a door slammed, but up here on the hill all was quiet and still until the cane thumped again.
‘Be not afraid, gentle spirits,’ said Loveday’s voice. ‘We call upon you in peace and friendship to make yourselves known. We offer you this channel, pure and clean, and we beg you to come to us. Come down through the higher planes to our lowly sphere.’ He paused. ‘Speak!’ I am sure I was not the only one who jumped at the sudden bellow. ‘Speak, Jamie! We shall not mock you here. Speak, Mary! Your sins are forgiven here! Speak, thou poor blind child! You will be given an audience here with us tonight.’
‘What a load of complete tommyrot,’ Alec breathed in my ear.
There was a low moaning out in the clearing.
‘I feel them, Loveday,’ said a voice. It was perhaps Mrs Molyneaux’s, but it was set so sepulchrally low and was so bursting with portent it was hard to say. ‘They are close, but they are frightened to appear.’
‘He’s here!’ The voice was a pure peal of sound, pitched as high as the cry of a newborn. It was Grant. There was a ripple of interest all around the ring of mediums then Grant spoke again in her everyday voice. ‘They’re scared, Mr Merrick, because the bad man’s here.’
‘William?’ said Merrick.
‘Aye, that’s me,’ said Grant, low and guttural now and completely terrifying.
‘Evil, evil, evil creature,’ said a female’s voice from somewhere to our left. ‘I can feel him. My skin’s crawling, my stomach’s heaving.’ She made a few half-hearted sick-noises but she did not have Grant’s talent for it and sounded more as though she were trying to keep from swallowing a fly.
‘Get away fro-’ said a voice which had not spoken before.
‘No!’ said Merrick. ‘William, if you can hear me. What is your full name?’
Grant rumbled and groaned a bit and then spoke in the low voice again. This time we could all hear the rather chewed-up vowels of a strong Irish brogue about the words.
‘I am the ghost of William Burke, wrongly judged and wrongly hanged, I come to wreak revenge on them as left me.’
Whispers of ‘Burke!’, ‘It’s Burke!’ went around the ring. Even Alec leaned in close to me and whispered: ‘Why did she go for Burke?’ I shrugged and shushed him. Grant was speaking again.
‘Twas him, twas all him and yet I hanged and not he. And her with her nagging and goading me on and I hanged and not she. And so I shall be with him always and I’ll haunt him and harry his soul to the end of days.’
‘William!’ said Merrick. His voice was set for a parade ground, a bark of sound. ‘William, you were wronged. Four of you did the deed and one of you paid the price. You were wronged. But the others…’
‘Give not thy soul unto a woman,’ said Burke’s voice. ‘Faithless and treacherous creatures, tricking us and blinding us to goodness with their wiles.’