The Death Collector (15 page)

‘Is that the end?' Mr Paterson demanded. ‘Show over, is it? Can we go home now?'

George was about to say that he thought they probably could. But then, the table levitated. He was not actually aware of it happening until Liz gave a startled gasp. ‘The table,' she cried out. ‘It's moving. Can't you feel it?'

Her eyes were wide and pale in the gloom as she looked round at them. ‘There it goes again. Oh, my goodness – it's rising up. You must be able to feel it.'

George could indeed. And by the ashen expressions on the dimly lit faces of everyone else so could they.

‘You can tell it's moving, can't you, Mr Smith, dear,' Liz said to George. He nodded dumbly, really nervous for the first time since they had sat down. But despite her apparent anxiety, she winked at George. ‘Oh my goodness,' she said as she did so. ‘Here it goes again.'

The new delivery boy was charming, if rather scruffy, Mrs White decided. She was surprised he had been sent out so late, but the lad insisted that this was his last delivery of the day and he would be off home soon. But could he beg a quick cup of tea before he went – just to keep out the cold of the night?

Mrs White was the cook, not a maid, so she wasn't
in the habit of making tea for delivery boys. But he seemed so cold and exhausted that she made an exception. And after all, he had come out late in the night to her kitchen. He was a chatty boy. Well, he didn't talk an awful lot, but he was interested.

He told Mrs White that he had heard that the house was used for séances and the like. ‘Are you a believer in the afterlife and all that?' he asked her.

So she told him. Yes, she thought there was probably something in it. So many people thought so, after all. Not that you would want to come here to find proof, she told him.

‘Oh?' He seemed surprised.

Mrs White shook her head. ‘Madame Sophia, she calls herself. Sophie Southgate's her real name, but she never uses that. No, nothing's real here.'

‘What do you mean?'

But Mrs White refused to be drawn. ‘It's not my place to say, young man. More than my job's worth.'

‘That's all right,' the boy assured her. He finished his drink. ‘Thanks for the tea.'

The boy handed her his cup, and Mrs White took it over to the sink. When she turned back, the boy was gone. Funny, she thought – she had not heard the outside door. He was a strange one, working all hours, demanding tea, then just slipping away like that. Still, it was kind of him to bring the …

Mrs White frowned. What was it the boy had
delivered? For the life of her she could not remember. She blew out a long breath. It had been a tiring day. She locked the outside door before making her way up to the servants quarters, and bed.

Liz was having fun. She had realised almost at once, just as she assumed George had, that it was all a fake. At first she had considered going along with it, appearing to be impressed, then making as early an escape as possible. But soon she decided that if she was wasting her time she might as well enjoy herself while she did it.

Husband Gerald was sitting next to her, and Liz could see his leg jerk every time the bell rang. It did not require much imagination to work out that there was – literally – a connection. The face painted on the door had provoked a quick frisson. But again, she knew all about luminous paint from the theatre.

Confusing and misleading Madame Sophia was almost too easy, so Liz tried to think what else she could do to liven up the proceedings. It was a challenge, to see if she could beat Madame Sophia and Husband Gerald at their own game – could convince them that they were experiencing genuine spiritual moments through the simplest of tricks. Throwing her handkerchief across the room with the same movement as pointing had worked well. The lacy material seemed almost to hang in the air before landing on the
dresser and – with a stroke of good fortune – knocking the bell. But Husband Gerald had glared at her, evidently not convinced.

So she turned her attention to the table. It was not really levitating. She nudged and jiggled the heavy wooden table with her knees, just enough for the séance participants all to feel some slight movement. In the darkened room, their minds attuned to the possibility of mysterious happenings, Liz's insistence that the table was levitating might be enough for their imaginations to do the rest.

It worked better than she had hoped. Even Husband Gerald gasped in surprise, and seemed to be trying to push the table back down – into the floor. George too seemed taken in, bless him. His eyes were wide with amazement. Mrs Paterson was shrieking with a mixture of delight and fear. Mr Paterson was grumbling as if bored with the whole thing, but Madame Sophia herself was rocking backwards and forwards and keening like a child at Christmas.

After a while they seemed to decide that the table had stopped moving and some semblance of order was restored. Husband Gerald suggested in a strained voice that perhaps they might try something else. He excused himself from the table for a moment, and turned up the lights. Liz guessed this was as much for his own peace of mind as anything.

Madame Sophia was also in something of a state,
but in her case it was closer to euphoria. The notion that the spirits actually
had
visited her séance seemed almost too much for her, turning her into a bundle of nervous excitement and bubbling enthusiasm.

‘The glass, Gerald dear, the glass. And the cards. I shall do the cards.'

Gerald soon gave up trying to persuade her that perhaps they had entertained enough spirits for one night, and fetched a glass tumbler. This was placed upside-down in the middle of the table. Then Gerald, with help from everyone else, arranged a set of cards – a letter printed on each – in alphabetical order clockwise round the table.

‘Now,' Madame Sophia said in a stage whisper, ‘who shall we contact?'

Liz glanced at George. This was obviously a complete waste of time, but George was watching with interest and enthusiasm. There was no way to tell him that she, Liz, had orchestrated much of what had happened while the rest was simple stage trickery.

‘Albert Wilkes,' George said. ‘We want to make contact with a gentleman who recently departed this life named Albert Wilkes.'

Madame Sophia smiled confidently. ‘And so we shall,' she said. ‘Do you have any small thing, some personal possession or other that I may use to focus my communications.'

Liz sighed. Probably she wanted it to glean any
clues about the dead person. Perhaps, since George had nothing that had belonged to Wilkes, this would soon be over.

But to Liz's surprise and horror, George had taken out his wallet. He passed the scrap of paper from Glick's diary carefully across the table to Madame Sophia. She inspected it somewhat dismissively.

‘It's worth a try,' George mouthed to Liz. She sighed.

‘I suppose this will have to do,' she decided, and set it down on the table in front of her, next to the letter ‘A'. ‘Fingers on the glass,' she instructed. She kept one of her hands pressed down on the fragment of paper. Her eyelids fluttered.

‘Don't be disappointed if we fail to make contact,' Gerald warned.

‘We won't,' Liz assured him.

But her words were drowned out by Madame Sophia's sudden shriek. ‘He is here,' she exclaimed in surprise and delight. ‘Albert Wilkes. His spirit is still in the land of the living. He is with us now!'

In the laboratory at the back of a large house, Albert Wilkes sat up. His movement was stiff, his eyes were unseeing pearl-like marbles.

‘The vocal cords have atrophied,' the man standing beside the workbench said. ‘But he should still be able to write.'

‘We got no sense out of him last time, sir,' Blade observed. ‘That was why we sent him off to the Museum for the diaries. Except he ignored us and went home instead.'

The other man was nodding. ‘I am aware of the problems. But despite Sir William's meddling, I am optimistic. Now that we have a little more time, the bones have been properly replaced, and while they are not actually his own they will more than suffice. The brain has been subjected to an improved form of electrical stimulation which I hope will this time have shocked it into some semblance at least of sense as well as life. I need sentience as well as instinct.'

‘Speak to us,' Madame Sophia intoned. ‘You are troubled, I can sense that. Do you have a message for anyone here? For Mr Smith perhaps? Anything?'

Beneath her fingers, Liz felt the glass tumbler tremble. She looked round at the others seated at the table. They all seemed equally surprised. Then the glass began to move.

‘A pen, sir?' Blade offered. He was unable to take his eyes off the dead man.

‘If you please. Of course,' his master went on as Blade took a pen from the desk and dipped it in an inkwell, ‘despite my best efforts, the brain may be damaged beyond the point of repair.'

‘He has been dead rather a long time, sir.'

The lifeless fingers closed coldly on the pen, and Blade
suppressed a shudder. He placed a sheet of paper on the workbench under the poised, dead hand.

Liz was as sure as she could be that it was not movement caused deliberately by anyone there. The glass quivered and shook like a struck tuning fork. It circled slowly, as if trying to make up its mind which letter it wanted.

‘Yes?' Madame Sophia hissed excitedly. ‘Yes? Tell us, please. What is your message, you poor tortured soul?'

‘Now, Mr Wilkes,' the man said gently, ‘you are quite aware of what I want to know. Be so good as to write it down would you?'

Nothing. No flicker of understanding or tremor of movement from the corpse.

‘Write it down!' the man shouted with a ferocity that made the windows rattle. ‘Or would you rather Blade returned you to the ground?'

Slowly, deliberately, the pen stroked at the paper.

The glass paused, then trembled again. It moved directly across the table towards George, stopping by the card imprinted with the letter ‘O'. It hesitated only a moment, then it moved again. Not far, just a few letters clockwise round the table: ‘R'.

Wilkes's fragile hand continued to move slowly over the
paper. His dead eyes did not look down. Another letter was slowly inked on the page.

Next was ‘I'. Liz could almost feel the tension in the room. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath.

‘O R I,' Gerald said quietly. ‘What can it mean … Origin?'

‘Hush,' Madame Sophia said, surprisingly gently. The glass trembled again.

‘Thank you.' The man's breath misted the cold night air. It didn't do to mix warmth with death.

Blade waited for Wilkes to finish. Then he took the sheet of paper. He swallowed dryly when he saw what was on it. He handed it to his employer without comment.

Next was ‘M'. Liz's throat was dry. It was just a trick, she kept telling herself. But both Gerald and Madame Sophia seemed as caught up in it as anyone. Just a trick – surely it was just a trick.

The glass moved again, heading for another letter.

The man stared at the paper for several moments, breathing deeply as he struggled to keep control. Five uneven characters were scratched into the paper. Ragged and useless:

O R I M O

‘Another O,' George said out loud.

The glass stopped. It wasn't trembling any more. The strange life it had taken on seemed to have deserted it again.

As if to confirm this, Madame Sophia let out a long, deep sigh. ‘He has gone,' she announced. ‘He has left us. The link is broken.' She lifted her hand from the table and carefully passed the scrap of paper back to George. But despite the disappointment of contact being lost, she was smiling.

He crushed the paper into a ball and hurled it across the laboratory. The man was trembling with anger, but when he spoke his voice was cold and controlled.

‘Dead too long, it seems. There is something lingering, but not enough. I think, Mr Blade, we shall have to try a different approach.' He snapped his fingers impatiently. ‘Paper and pen. Quickly, man.'

Blade hurried to oblige. He took the pen from Wilkes, dipped it in the ink again, and returned it to the dead man's grasp.

‘Not for him, you dolt! Give it to me.'

‘I'm sorry, sir. I thought—'

‘You are not paid to think,' Augustus Lorimore said, snatching the sheet of paper that Blade offered him. ‘Now leave me in peace for ten minutes. Then I will have a letter for you to deliver.'