Slade House

  The cracked clock says 8:18. “How long were they there?”

  “Until April 1919. It ended as suddenly as it’d begun, like. Cantillon visited the Sayyid one day and the master told him he’d taught the twins all the knowledge he could impart. The time’d come for the great globe itself to be their master, he said. Which meant what, exactly? And where? England held no great attraction for any of them. There’d be no fond welcome home from the Chetwynd-Pitts at Swaffham Manor, that was for sure. Ireland was having birth pangs and gearing up for a vicious civil war. France was on its knees, along with most of Europe, Algiers’s boom years as a war port were over, and Léon Cantillon, who was always better at spending money than earning it, now found himself with a pair of oddball semi-Arabized English twins in tow. How to convert the Grayers’ occultic knowledge into a well-padded lifestyle, that was the doctor’s dilemma, wasn’t it? And the answer? The good old US of A, that was the answer. The three of them sailed for New York in July, second class, with Cantillon posing as the twins’ Uncle Léon. Norah and Jonah were hungry to see the world, like gap-year kids nowadays. They took a townhouse on Klinker Street in Greenwich Village.”

  “I know it well,” I say. “Spyglass’s New York office is on Klinker Street.”

  “Is that a fact?” Fred Pink sips his bitter and suppresses a belch. “ ’Scuse me. Small world.”

  “What did they do to earn a living in the States?”

  Fred Pink gives me a knowing look. “They held séances.”

  “But séances are fraudulent, you just said.”

  “I did. They are. And I’m not here to defend Cantillon or the twins, Miss Timms, but they weren’t hucksters in the usual manner. See, Norah and Jonah could read minds, or ‘overhear’ the thoughts of most people they came across. That bit wasn’t a trick. It was just an extra sense they had, like extremely sensitive hearing. They could rummage through their clients’ minds and discover things no one knew, not even the people whose minds they were in. The twins knew what their grief-stricken clients most needed to hear, and what words’d best heal them—and those were the words they said. The only fiction was the claim that these words came from the dear departed. Now you might say that’s worse, not better, and maybe you’d be right. But is it so far away from what your shrinks and counselors and psychowhatnots try to do nowadays? There was a lot, and I do mean a lot, of unhappy and despairing and downright suicidal New Yorkers who left that little house on Klinker Street certain, quite certain, that their loved ones were in a better place and looking out for them and that one day they’d be reunited. I mean, that’s what religion does, doesn’t it? Are you going to condemn every priest and imam and rabbi on earth for doing the very same thing? No, the Grayer twins’ séances weren’t real; but yes, the hope they gave was. Isn’t the yes better than the no?”

  Fraud’s fraud, I think, but I perform an ambiguous nod. “So the New York gigs went well.”

  “Very. Cantillon was a canny manager. Once the Grayers got a bit of a name for themselves, he switched tack: discreet appointments at wealthy clients’ homes. No props, no smoke, no mirrors, no ectoplasm, no Ouija, no daft voices. No public performances, nothing vulgar or theatrical. Just quiet, calm, sane grief relief, so to speak. ‘Your son says this’ and ‘Your sister says that.’ If Cantillon felt a possible client was only a thrill seeker, he turned them down. Or so he claimed, anyway.”

  A football chant from the TV below wafts upstairs. It’s a choppy, lulling and otherworldly sound. “If the Grayers had an array of genuine psychic powers, why content themselves with telling consoling fibs to rich Americans?”

  Fred Pink shrugs like a comedy Frenchman: palms raised, shoulders high and head low. “Cantillon’s motives I’ll guess at—money—but Norah and Jonah left no written account, so who’s to say? Maybe they saw themselves as students of humanity and séances let them study people better. They had a serious case of wanderlust, too, and their séance service, let’s call it, was a passport valid in all territories. Personal recommendations smoothed their way, and Uncle Léon and his niece and nephew never traveled second-class again. In the spring of 1920 they moved to Boston, in autumn it was Charleston, then New Orleans, then San Francisco. Why stop there? They took a liner to Hawaii, then to Yokohama. After a spell in Japan, they traveled on to Peking, Manchuria, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Ceylon. The best hotels and the houses of the grateful rich were their homes in that period. Bombay, New Delhi. A year or two in the British Raj, why not? A summer up in the hill stations. Then Aden, Suez, Cairo, Cyprus, Constantinople, Athens. A winter in Rome, a spring in Vienna, a summer in Berlin, Christmas in Paris. In his book, Cantillon describes how the twins honed their arts as they traveled, seeing the sights, and ‘settled for a brief sojourn like exotic birds in whatever Society they found themselves in’—Norah rejected no less than six proposals of marriage and no doubt Jonah enjoyed his share of liaisons and conquests—but always they carried on westwards till one drizzly day in May 1925 the Dover train trundled into Victoria Station, and the Grayers and their guardian took a cab to a house in Queen’s Gardens, a swish and leafy street in Bayswater.”

  “They financed five years of luxury globetrotting with séances?”

  “They diversified a bit once they left the States. Disciples of the Shaded Way learn the art of suasion. A tackier name is ‘mind control.’ Maybe you can guess, Miss Timms, how a talent like that might be turned into a few bob…”

  I play along: “If ‘suasioning’ were real, you could enlist a nearby millionaire to make you out a humongous bank draft.”

  Fred Pink’s face suggests I guessed correctly. “And after, you use another Shaded Way skill—redaction—to erase your generous benefactor’s memory of ever writing the check. Some’d call it the perfect crime; others’d call it survival; a socialist’d call it the redistribution of wealth.” Fred Pink stands up. “Might I just pop to the gents, Miss Timms? The beer was a mistake; my prostate’s not what it was…”

  I indicate the doorway. “I’m not going anywhere.” Yet.

  “Aren’t you drinking your tomato juice, Miss Timms?”

  I look at it. “I, uh, just don’t really fancy it, after all.”

  “I’ll bring you something else up. Listening’s thirsty work.”

  I wave him away. “No need, really.”

  Fred Pink makes a mock-glum face. “Ah, but I insist.”

  “A bit later.”

  When he’s gone, I turn off my digital recorder. It’s all saved—not that I’ll ever listen to it again. Only an all-out conspiracy theorist or the mentally ill would connect this Norfolk-Dublin-Algeria-America-Trans-Pacific-Mysterious-Orient tale with six students who went missing in 1997. It’s tempting just to slip away now, while there are still lots of trains back to London. Really, what could Fred Pink do if I did a runner now? Send me a pissed-off email? I’m a journalist: I get twenty pissed-off emails per hour. Fred Pink’s spent nine years of his life in a coma, more years locked away in a secure ward beyond Slough’s outer reaches, and he’s an obvious believer in the dark arts. The man’s brain is scrambled. But no. I gave him my word to stay until nine o’clock, so I’ll stay. It’s now 8:27. The last text was from Avril, as I thought.

  O de glamour! Bt seriously hope Mr. P isnt waste of time.

  Text me if u need urgent emrgncy 2 escape 2.

  I reply:

  Jury still out re Mr. P but will probly get train about 930

  back to Padders 10 home by 11 i hope xxxF

  SEND. I don’t remember eating dinner so I suppose I must have missed it. I go downstairs to the bar to see if there’s anything to eat. The place looks like a stage set, and rather a cash-strapped one at that. With the departure of the blind chap and his dog, the population of The Fox and Hounds has dwindled to four. Up on the plasma screen a red team are playing a blue team, but I don’t know who is who. Avril knows that MUN means Manchester United and ARS stands for Arsenal, but I can never work the names out. It’s a corner,
and the landlady waits a few seconds to watch the outcome—no goal—before dragging herself over to my end of the bar. I ask if she sells snacks and she lets a long pause elapse to illustrate her contempt for metropolitan media dykes. “Cheese and onion crisps or ready-salted; dry-roasted peanuts, or honey-glazed cashews. That’s it.”

  Wow, an embarrassment of riches. “Two bags of cashews and a diet tonic water, with lemon. Please.”

  “We only sell real tonic water. Not diet.”

  “Looks like I’ll have a real tonic water, then. Thank you so much.”

  The landlady plucks the nuts from a rack, takes the tonic water from a shelf below, flips off the cap, retrieves a glass, drops in a limp segment of lemon, and pecks at the till with her bony index finger. “Three pounds forty-five.” I hand over the right money. She asks, “What paper d’you write for, then?”

  “Spyglass. It’s a magazine.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s bigger in the States than it is here.”

  “Like Private Eye, is it? One o’ those sarcastic papers?”

  “No, not really,” I say. “It’s less satirical.”

  “So why do Americans give two hoots about six students who disappeared in a small English city nine years ago?”

  “I’m not sure if they do. My editor will decide that. But I’m curious.” I consider telling the landlady about Sally, but I don’t. “Being curious is my job.”

  “It’s ancient history, all that stuff is.” She glances at the gents, and leans close enough for me to see the evidence of an exhausting life beneath her coating of makeup. “You’re not doing Fred any favors by egging him on. He blames himself for Alan’s vanishing, which really is mental. He spent six years at Dawkins Hospital, locked up with the Teletubbies—you do know that, yeah?”

  “Mr. Pink’s been open about his medical history, yes.”

  The landlady’s jaw chews phantom gum. “Meanwhile he fancies himself as this Inspector Morse who’ll solve the big mystery and maybe find Alan and the X-Files Six alive somewhere, which is double-mental. ‘X-Files Six’: as if it’s all some stupid TV show! But it’s not. It’s serious. It’s pain. It’s best left buried. Fred’s wife left him, in the end. A saint of a woman was Jackie, but when Fred buggered off to Algeria even she couldn’t take it anymore and moved back to the Isle of Man. Now all Fred ever thinks about are his theories about his Illuminati, the Holy Grail, Atlantis and whateverthebollocks it is this week. And you,” she folds her meaty arms as Fred Pink emerges from the gents in the corner, “you, you’re feeding all that. Pouring fuel on the flames. Hey, Fred.” She straightens up and smiles at Fred Pink like nothing’s wrong. “Your new best friend here was telling me how low some media scum-suckers’ll stoop just to get a story. Throw ’em to the bloody piranhas, I say. Let like eat like. Fancy a brandy this time, eh?”

  · · ·

  “Sorry about Maggs,” says Fred Pink, back in the upstairs room. “I shouldn’t’ve told her you’re a journalist. The locals’d rather forget the X-Files Six. Too Amityville Horror, too Bermuda Triangle. Bad for house prices.”

  I munch a handful of honey-glazed cashews. God, they’re good. “ ‘Scum-sucker’ is one of the sweeter names I’ve been called, believe me. So, Mr. Pink: We left Dr. Cantillon and the Grayer twins in Bayswater after their years of travel in foreign parts.”

  Fred Pink sloshes his brandy around the glass. “Yes, it’s now 1925. Norah and Jonah are twenty-six, and Uncle Léon is fifty. For ten years he’s been their fixer, guardian, PR man, accountant. Now he wants to be their biographer, or more—their John the Baptist. You see, he’d decided the time’d come to go public and persuade the world that spiritualism and science could be respectably married. Money and a comfortable life wasn’t enough, you see. His new ambition was to establish a new discipline—psychosoterica—with none other than Dr. Léon Cantillon as its Darwin, its Freud, its Newton. Which put him at serious odds with Norah and Jonah. See, they’d drunk their fill of the big bad world by this stage. What they wanted was to hide away and see which dead ends down the Shaded Way might not be dead ends after all. So they told Cantillon no, there’d be no biography, no great unveiling, and no more public engagements. Obedient Uncle Léon told the twins, ‘I hear and obey.’ But Obedient Uncle Léon was lying through his teeth. He spent most of the next two years writing his big masterpiece, The Great Unveiling. It wasn’t the usual rehash of Europe’s Top Ten Witches and Wizards, like most books about the occult were in those days. Léon Cantillon’s book had three sections. Part One was the first-ever written history of the Shaded Way, from its fifth-century beginnings to the twentieth. Part Two was a biography of the Grayer twins from their Swaffham Manor days to their return to England. Part Three was a manifesto for an International Psychosoterica Society to be set up in London, with Dr. Guess Who as its lifetime president.”

  My phone buzzes in my bag. Avril’s reply to my reply, I bet. It’s 8:45, it’ll wait. “Why did Cantillon go against the twins’ wishes?”

  “Can’t be sure. I suspect he reckoned that once the cat was out of the bag, once Uncle Tom Cobley and all were clamoring for the Age of Psychosoterica to begin, the Grayers’d see how right he was after all and sign up. If that was Cantillon’s thinking,” Fred Pink ruffles more dandruff out of his hair, “he was mistaken. Tragically mistaken. On March twenty-ninth, 1927, the printers delivered ten boxes of The Great Unveiling. On March thirtieth, the good doctor mailed about six dozen copies to various theosophists, philosophers, occultists and patrons, in England and overseas. My copy of the book, which I keep in a safety deposit box in a place I tell nobody, is one of those six dozen. In the early hours of the next morning—March thirty-first—a conveniently positioned bobby was walking down Queen’s Gardens. He saw Léon Cantillon lift his fifth-floor sash window and perch on the sill, naked as a baby, and shout out these words: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’—John Milton, if you’re curious. Then he jumped. He might’ve survived, but he landed on a row of pointy railings. You can picture the scene. Quite the nine-day wonder it was. The coroner recorded a verdict of death by insanity and the Westminster Gazette covered the funeral. Jonah read the eulogy, while Norah, ‘the very model of demure grief in an ankle-length dress of black crêpe’—yes, I memorized it—sobbed for her guardian. Jonah told the reporter how he prayed that Dr. Cantillon’s ‘bizarre delusions’ would show how dangerous it can be to meddle in the black arts. Dean Grimond would’ve been proud. Weeks passed, the tragedy of the ex–Foreign Legion doctor became old news, and, copy by copy, the large stock of unposted Great Unveilings burned in the Grayers’ fireplace in Queen’s Gardens.”

  I’m bothered by a phrase: “ ‘A conveniently positioned bobby’?”

  Fred Pink sips his brandy. “Never cross a qualified suasioner.”

  To follow Fred Pink’s trail of breadcrumbs you have to blindfold your own sanity. “Meaning, a suasioner can also make a man jump to his death?”

  “ ’Xactly so, Miss Timms.”

  “But Cantillon, in your narrative, had been a loyal friend and protector.”

  “ ‘Had been,’ yes; but then he became a threat. A kind of apostate, too: the occult’s like any religious order—or any bunch of extremists, come to that. It’s all beer and sunshine and ‘We are your family’ as long as you obey orders, but once you get your own ideas or start talking out of school, the knives come out. Whether Cantillon was pushed or whether Cantillon jumped, the Grayers’ trail grows faint after the Westminster Gazette, and stays faint for four years. They left the Bayswater house in May 1927—I date their departure from their launderers’ accounts—but then it’s a big blank. I’ve found a possible sighting of the twins at Sainte-Agnès in the Maritime Alps in 1928, a reference to mind-reading English twins in Rhodesia in 1929, and a ‘Miss Norah’ with a twin brother in a love letter sent from Fiji in 1930, but nothing’s—what’s the word?—cross-corroborated.” Fred
Pink drums his fingers on his bulging satchel. “You’ve already been patient, so I’ll hurry us on to your sister’s role before the clock strikes nine.”

  “I will need to get going then, Mr. Pink.”

  “In August 1931, according to the local land register, Mr. Jonah Grayer and his sister, Miss Norah Grayer, bought Slade House, a property located not two hundred yards from this very pub. It’d been an eighteenth-century rectory attached to the parish of Saint Brianna. Once upon a time it was surrounded by woods and fields, though by the time the Grayers moved in, Slade House was a walled fortress in a sea of brick houses, in a factory town more passed through than stopped at, so to speak. The neighborhood was full of factory workers, full of big families, full of Irish and itinerants, full of folk coming and going and doing midnight flits. Which suited the Grayers’ purposes down to a T.”

  “What purposes were these, Mr. Pink?”

  “They needed laboratory rats, see.”

  What I see is the wackometer needle climbing. “Laboratory rats for…what kind of experiments?”