Slade House

  “I’ve got regrets about Sally too,” I assure him. “But I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

  Fred Pink dabs his eyes with an old tissue and sips his bitter. He stares at the Guinness-drinking leprechaun.

  “In your email you mentioned a backstory, Mr. Pink,” I prompt.

  “I did. The backstory’s why I asked to meet you here this evening. If we did this on the phone, you’d hang up. Even face-to-face, in places you’ll think, ‘Ruddy Nora, the mad old wreck’s lost the plot.’ But hear me out. It leads to Sally.”

  “I’m a journalist. I know reality’s complex.” I remember Avril using those very words—a “mad old wreck”—when she read Fred Pink’s first email a couple of weeks ago. But I tell the old man, “I’m listening.”

  “We’ll kick off over a century ago then, near Ely in Norfolk, at a stately home called Swaffham Manor. Nowadays a Saudi Arabian pal of Prince Charles owns the place, but back then it was the ancestral seat of a family called the Chetwynd-Pitts, who you’ll find in the Domesday Book, if you please. In 1899, twins was born at Swaffham, a girl and a boy. Not in the big house, mind, but in the gamekeeper’s cottage on the edge of the estate. The father was Gabriel Grayer, the mother was his wife, Nellie Grayer, and the twins was named Norah and Jonah. They never got to know their father that well, ’cause Gabriel Grayer got shot three years later by a toff who mistook his peasants for his pheasants, so to speak. Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt felt guilty about the accident, so they let Nellie Grayer and the children stay on in the gamekeeper’s cottage. More than that, they took care of Norah and Jonah’s schooling, and when Nellie Grayer died of rheumatic fever in 1910, the twin orphans moved into Swaffham Manor proper.”

  “You’ve done a lot of research,” I tell Fred Pink.

  “It’s my hobby, like. Well, my life, really. You should see my flat. It’s all papers and files, everywhere. Now: You’ll have heard stories about the empathy between twins, I’m guessing. Y’know, where one twin gets hit by a bus in Istanbul, say, and the other falls over in London at the exact same moment. But did you know that twins’ll sometimes speak a language that only they understand, specially when they’re still learning to talk?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. When I lived in Manhattan I used to babysit for toddler triplets who talked in their own private dialect. It was amazing to hear.”

  “Well, events took place at Swaffham Manor what suggested Norah and Jonah Grayer combined these two skills. To call a spade a spade: telepathy.” Fred Pink gives me a probing look. “Do we have a problem with telepathy, Miss Timms?”

  My nutter-detector glows amber. “I am rather a fan of proof, Mr. Pink.”

  “So am I. So am I. Albertina Chetwynd-Pitt—Her Ladyship—published a memoir in 1925 called Rivers Old and Lost. It’s all about what I’m telling you now: the twins, their upbringing, and everything. In it, she says how one January evening in 1910, she, her daughters and Norah Grayer were all playing cribbage in the drawing room at Swaffham. All of a sudden, Norah cried out, dropped her cards, and said that Arthur, the eldest Chetwynd-Pitt boy, had fallen off his horse at Poole’s Brook—over a mile away from the manor—and couldn’t move. He needed a stretcher and the doctor right away. Lady Albertina was shocked that Norah’d tell such a baseless fib. But Norah begged her to send help, ’cause, and I quote, ‘Jonah is with him and Jonah is telling me.’ By now the Chetwynd-Pitt daughters were properly spooked too, so against her better judgment, Lady Albertina sent a servant running off—who found the scene as Norah’d described it, in every detail.”

  I reach for my tomato juice but it still looks like roadkill and I change my mind. “It’s a tasty anecdote, but how is it ‘proof’?”

  Fred Pink takes out his Benson & Hedges, remembers the smoking ban and puts the cigarettes back, tetchily. “The day after, the twins were interviewed by Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt with their friend Dean Grimond of Ely Cathedral. Dean Grimond was a no-nonsense hardboiled Scot who’d been an army chaplain in the Crimea and had none of the airy-fairy about him. He ordered the twins to tell him how Norah’d known about Arthur coming off his horse at Poole’s Brook. So the twins confessed they’d been able to ‘telegram’ thoughts for years, but kept it a secret ’cause they’d noticed it scared people and drew attention to them. Like you, Miss Timms, Lord Chetwynd-Pitt wanted proof, so he devised this experiment. He gave Norah a pencil and paper, led Jonah to the billiards room in Swaffham Manor, and read out a random line from The Jungle Book. His Lordship then asked Jonah to ‘telegram’ the line to Norah, back in the library. Jonah shut his eyes for a few seconds, then said the job was done. They both went back to the library to find that Norah had written down the very same line from Kipling.” Fred Pink looks at me as if the matter is now beyond dispute.

  I say, “Remarkable,” but think, If all this actually took place.

  “Next, Dean Grimond got Norah to ‘telegram’ a verse from Saint John’s Gospel.” Fred Pink shuts his eyes: “ ‘He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.’ Back in the billiards room Jonah wrote it down, word-perfect. Lastly, Lady Albertina wanted a turn. She had Jonah ‘telegram’ a verse from a nursery rhyme in German. Norah wrote it word-perfect, though with a few spelling mistakes. Neither of the twins knew a word of German, see.” Fred Pink slurps his bitter and dabs his cracked lips with the frayed sleeve of his jacket. “The upshot? Dean Grimond told the twins that some of God’s gifts are better left unexamined, and that they shouldn’t refer to their ‘telegrams’ in public, ‘lest excitable persons be tempted down wrong paths.’ Norah and Jonah promised to obey. Dean Grimond gave them both a humbug and went back to his cathedral. Nice work if you can get it.”

  A TV roar of disappointment wafts up the stairs. Checking my Sony’s still working, I ask, “How do you know Lady Albertina is a trustworthy source?”

  Fred Pink rubs his scalp and dandruff falls. “Same way you judge your sources, I imagine, Miss Timms. By developing a nose for a lie, an ear for a fib, and an eye for a tell. Right? Lady Chetwynd-Pitt’s book is detailed where a fraud would gloss over stuff, and rough where a liar would polish it better. Anyway, where’s her motive for lying? Not money—she was loaded. Not attention—she only had a hundred copies of her book printed, and by the time it was published she was a virtual recluse, like.”

  I swivel my gold ring from Avril round my finger. “In journalism, we try to cross-corroborate an informant’s more contentious claims.”

  “ ‘Cross-corroborate.’ Good word. I’ll store that away. It’s time you met Dr. Léon Cantillon.” Fred Pink unfastens his satchel, takes out a dog-eared folder and produces a laser-scanned copy of an old hand-tinted photograph of a man of about forty. He’s wearing a French Foreign Legion uniform, a raffish smile, a couple of medals and, round his neck, a stethoscope. The caption underneath reads Le docteur L. Cantillon, Légion étrangère, Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, Croix de guerre. “Léon Cantillon. Colorful figure, you might say. Born in 1874 in Dublin in an old French Huguenot family; grew up speaking French; studied medicine at Trinity College, but he had a hotheaded streak and had to leave Ireland after shooting the son of a member of Parliament in a duel, no less. Bang. Straight between the eyes, dead before he hit the deck. Cantillon joined the French Foreign Legion a few months later—we’re up to 1895 now—and served as a medic in the Mandingo War on the Ivory Coast, and later in the South-Oranese campaign. Dirty little wars in the carve-up of Africa, these—even the French’ve forgotten ’em nowadays. Cantillon had a knack for languages, too. When he wasn’t doctoring and soldiering he was learning Arabic, and claims he spoke it fluently by 1905, when he got himself a plum job at the legion’s hospital in Algiers. It was in Algiers that his interest in the occult took root, by his own account. He mingled with Prussian theosophists, Armenian spiritualists, Ibadi Muslim shamans, Hasidic Kabbalists, and one mystic in particular who lived south of Algiers in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. He
’s known as the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif, and by and by he’d be playing a major role in the Grayers’ lives.”

  This is all sounding a bit Da Vinci Code for me. “What’s your source for all of this, Mr. Pink? Lady Albertina’s book?”

  “No. Léon Cantillon wrote his memoir too, see. The Great Unveiling. My own copy’s one of just ten known survivors, and it’s this account what cross-corroborates Lady Albertina’s story, so to speak.” He turns away to cough a smoker’s cough into the crook of his elbow. It lasts a good while. “So. Dr. Cantillon met Lord Chetwynd-Pitt in early summer of 1915 at the house of mutual friends in London. After a few schooners of port, His Lordship began telling the soldier-doctor about Lady Albertina’s ‘chronic hysteria.’ The poor woman was in a terrible state by this point. In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt’s sons’d been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you’ve got three sons, by Friday you’ve got none. Lady Albertina had just, y’know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally. Her husband hoped that Léon Cantillon, as a sympathetic spiritualist and a man of medicine, might be the man to help where everyone else’d failed, like. To bring her back from the brink.”

  Fred Pink’s framed by the window. Dusk’s falling. “So the Chetwynd-Pitts had been dabbling in spiritualism since the ‘telegram incident,’ had they?”

  “They had, Miss Timms, they had. The craze for séances was in full swing, see, and the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle no less was saying it was founded in science. To be sure, there was no shortage of shysters all too happy to milk the craze, but thanks to Norah and Jonah, the Chetwynd-Pitts knew that some psychic phenomena, at least, was genuine. As a matter of fact, Lord Chetwynd-Pitt’d brought several mediums up to Ely to channel the spirits of their dead boys, but none of them proved themselves to be the real McCoy, and with each dashed hope Lady Albertina’s sanity took a fresh battering.”

  I bring the tomato juice to my lips, but it still looks like a specimen jar in a blood bank. “And could Dr. Cantillon help?”

  Fred Pink rubs his wiry bristles. “Well, after a fashion, yes—though he never claimed to be a medium. After examining Lady Albertina, Cantillon said that her grief’d ‘severed her ethereal cord to her spirit guide.’ He performed a healing ritual he’d learned off of a shaman in the mountains of Rif and prescribed an ‘elixir.’ In her book, Lady Albertina wrote that the elixir gave her a vision of ‘an angel rolling away a stone from her entombment’ and she saw her three sons happy on a higher plane. In his book, Cantillon mentions that his elixir contained a new wonder drug called cocaine, so make of that what you will. I’d add to the mix the benefits of the talking cure as well. The chance for an Edwardian lady to spill her guts in private and vent her spleen at God, king and country must’ve been therapeutic, to say the least. Like grief counselling, nowadays. Certainly at this stage in the proceedings, Dr. Cantillon seems to’ve been a very welcome guest indeed.”

  My phone buzzes in my bag. Avril texting me back, I expect, but I ignore it. “Where are the Grayer twins in all this?”

  “Right: Jonah was an apprentice clerk in the Swaffham Manor estate office. Short-sightedness and a dicky ticker’d saved him from the trenches, though as these conditions never troubled him in later life, I can’t help but wonder how real they were. Norah was a weekly boarder at a school for ladies in Cambridge, to up her marriage prospects. Léon Cantillon’d heard about their ‘telegrams’ from the Chetwynd-Pitts, of course, so the first chance he had, he asked for a demo. It took place on the doctor’s first weekend at Swaffham. He was impressed. He was very impressed. ‘An annunciation of the New Age of Man,’ he later called it. A fortnight later, Cantillon put a proposal to his hosts. If they ‘lent’ him Norah and Jonah, and if the twins was willing, he’d ‘provide a psychic education consummate with their gifts.’ The doctor said he knew an occultic teacher who’d train the twins in spirit channeling. Once Norah and Jonah’d mastered that skill, he said, Lady Albertina’d be able to freely speak with her sons from their higher plane, without fear of being gulled by swindlers.”

  I sniff a swindler. “How for real was Dr. Cantillon?”

  The old man rubs a watery blue, red-rimmed eye and growls thoughtfully. “Well, the Chetwynd-Pitts believed him, which is what matters to our backstory. They agreed to his proposal to educate Norah and Jonah, but here’s where the doctor’s version of events and Lady Albertina’s begin to part ways. She wrote that Léon Cantillon’d promised the twins’d be away no more than a few months. Cantillon’s claim is that the Chetwynd-Pitts gave him guardianship of the Grayers with no small print about expiry dates, time or distance. Who’s telling the truth? That I can’t tell you. Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don’t you find? What we do know is that Léon Cantillon took the twins first to Dover, crossed over to Calais, passed through wartime Paris, carried on south to Marseille, then sailed by steamship to Algiers. Lady Albertina calls this journey ‘an abduction, no more, no less,’ but by the time she and her husband found out about it, the horse’d bolted. Repatriation of minors is tricky enough now. Back then, when sixteen-year-olds were adults in most senses, and with the Great War in top gear, so to speak, and inside French colonial jurisprudence—forget it. The Grayer twins were gone.”

  I’m not clear: “Were they taken against their will?”

  Fred Pink’s face says Hardly likely. “Which would you choose? Life as an orphaned pleb in the Tory Fens in wartime England, or life as a student of the occult under the Algerian stars?”

  “It would depend on whether I believed in the occult.”

  “They believed.” Fred Pink sips his bitter. “Sally did too.”

  And if she hadn’t, I think, she wouldn’t have been playing Ghostbusters in unfamiliar backstreets at night; and whatever happened to her wouldn’t have happened. Either I bite my tongue or I kill the interview. “The Grayers stayed in Algeria, then.”

  “They did, yes. Norah and Jonah already knew telepathy. What other powers might they acquire, in the right hands? Léon Cantillon was a sly operator, there’s no doubt, but a sly operator can still be the right man for the job.” He looks at Léon Cantillon’s photo again. “He took the twins to the Albino Sayyid of Aït Arif. I mentioned him before. The Sayyid followed an occult branch called la Voie Ombragée, or the Shaded Way, and lived in a ‘dwelling of many rooms’ by a fast-flowing stream at a ‘high neck of a secret valley’ a day’s ride from Algiers; and that’s about all the info Cantillon gives us. The Sayyid accepted the odd foreign twins—who couldn’t speak a word of Arabic at this point, remember—as disciples in his house, so he must’ve seen potential in them. Cantillon returned to his duties at the Foreign Legion hospital in Algiers, though he made the journey to the Sayyid’s once a fortnight to check up on his young charges’ progress.”

  Outside the pub, a woman hollers, “You’re s’posed to indicate, moron!” and a car roars off. “Mr. Pink,” I say. “If I can be frank, this story feels a long way away from my sister’s disappearance.”

  Fred Pink nods, and frowns at the clock on the wall: 8:14. “Give me till nine o’clock. If I haven’t connected all of this with your Sally and my Alan by then, I’ll call you a taxi. On my honor.”

  While I don’t have Fred Pink marked down as a liar, I do have him marked down as a dreamer-upper of alternative histories. On the other hand, after all these years my own inquiries into Sally’s disappearance have led exactly nowhere. Maybe Fred Pink’s tracking me down is a hint that I need to look for leads in less obvious places. Starting now. “Okay: nine o’clock. Was channeling dead spirits on the Sayyid’s syllabus, as Cantillon had promised Lady Albertina?”

  “You’ve got a knack of asking the right question, Miss Timms.” Fred Pink gets out a box of spearmint Tic Tacs, shakes out three, offers me one—I refuse—and puts all three in his mouth. “No. Léon Cantillon had lied to the Chetwynd-Pitts about sé
ances. I think he knew perfectly well that séances are almost always fraud. When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days, but there’s no Wi-Fi there, so to speak, so no messages can be sent. Either way. Mediums might convince themselves they’re hearing voices from the dead, but the boring reality is, it’s impossible.”

  Well, that’s wacko. “That’s very exact. Forty-nine days?”

  Fred Pink shrugs. “The speed of sound’s very exact. So’s pi. So are chemical formulas.” He crunches his Tic Tacs. “Ever been to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, Miss Timms?” I shake my head. “I have, believe it or not, just a few years back. Thanks to three thousand quid I won on a scratch-card. Goes a bloomin’ long way in Algeria, does three thousand pounds, if you watch out for the pickpockets and rip-off merchants. Those buckled-up mountains, the dry sky, the hot wind, the…oh, the whole massive…otherness of it, so to speak. I’ll never forget it. Rewires your head, if you stay there too long. Little wonder all the hippies and that lot made a beeline for places like Marrakesh in the sixties. Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us. Day by day, the twins’ Englishness ebbed away. They picked up Arabic from the Sayyid’s other disciples; they ate flatbread, hummus and figs; Jonah let his beard grow; Norah wore a veil, like a good Muslim girl; and sandals and dishdashas made more sense in that climate than shoes and cuff links and petticoats and what have you. The calendar lost its meaning for the twins, Cantillon writes. One, two, three years passed. They learned occult arts and obscure sciences that there aren’t even words for in English, things that not one mind in a hundred thousand learns, or could learn, even if the chance came along. The Grayers’ only link with the outside world was Dr. Cantillon, but when he brought them up to speed with that world—the slaughter in Flanders, the fallout from Gallipoli, the killings in Mesopotamia; the politics in Westminster, in Berlin, in Paris, in Washington—to Norah and Jonah it all sounded like stuff going on in places they’d read about years ago. Not real. For the twins, home was their Sayyid’s valley. Their fatherland and motherland was the Shaded Way.” Fred Pink scratches his itchy neck—he appears to suffer from mild psoriasis—and stares through my head, all the way to a moonlit dwelling in the Atlas Mountains.