The Ghost Hunters (3 page)

‘An extraordinary man, Price – a most extraordinary man.’
Sir Albion Richardson

‘Yes indeed. Look, no strings, no wires attached.’
Harry Price (April 1944)

November 1955, London

A wise man once told me that for every moment that passes, there is another that might have been – moments we lose through the misfortune of circumstance that slip like sand through our fingers and scatter to the past. Only now, with fear in my heart, do I properly understand what he meant. For now I know what it means to feel the pain of regret, and to wish it gone.

My name is Sarah Grey. For five years I was the confidential secretary to the late Mr Harry Price, honorary chairman of the National Laboratory for Psychical Research, an organisation that ceased to exist, shortly after the Second World War.

My duties, in the main, were common enough, but I like to think that Price relied on me. He was a restless man, impatient and sometimes disorganised. The way his mind jumped about like a skipping record meant that he needed someone to manage his affairs, make appointments and, especially, keep his well-thumbed files in order. He was a prolific writer of letters, articles for journals and no fewer than twenty books. But these books were nothing compared to the vast collection in his private
library – the most rare, valuable and peculiar sorts of volumes that anyone is ever likely to come across. Building that library was a life’s work for Price. He cherished it. And so I tended to it most carefully indeed. I kept it safe.

I kept his secrets too.

In the years after his death I was often asked to divulge all I knew of the man behind the carefully cultivated facade that Price presented in his lectures, writings and broadcasts. But I did not speak. Even after the affair – after the burning of that peculiar old rectory that preoccupied him so and became a personal obsession for me, after the hurtful allegations that followed, I did my duty. I held my silence.

I was twenty-two years old when I entered Harry Price’s employment. He was forty-five, and his reputation was the envy of every fashionable household in London. From the smoky gentlemen’s clubs in Mayfair to the finest upstanding dinner parties of Chelsea, his name could always be relied upon to tempt a smile, raise an eyebrow and ignite an impassioned, even aggressive, debate. None of this was accidental for, as is commonly the way with gentlemen who possess a different point of view, the fact that he wanted to be noticed was a distinguishing characteristic of Price.

Was he powerful? No. Wealthy, even? Not especially. In fact, he did not possess any of the qualities that usually attend the famous and influential. But he was, certainly, a noteworthy man for one very particular reason.

Harry Price was a ghost hunter.

*

As I sit here alone, listening to the wind hiss at my window, I can look back and remember every detail of Harry’s old town house in South Kensington, buried in the London fog. In this
‘ghost factory’ I passed many an hour at the side of the world’s foremost paranormal detective, the two of us plotting thrilling adventures with the uncanny and the macabre: our investigation of the Cottingley Fairy photograph that the world never saw, our excursion to Loch Ness, the eleven-day disappearance of a certain famous British crime writer. Harry Price and his mysteries – volumes could be written about the investigations into the supernatural which were the focus of his immense energy and magpie mind during our five years together.

I remember it all: the case of the wild man with the X-ray eyes, the exorcism at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, the spiritualist whose criminal conviction we helped secure, the mythical wildcat we hunted on Bodmin Moor. Such wild memories! If I find the strength, perhaps I will write about them. An ageing woman who has witnessed such horrors must somehow find a way to bleach the stains they leave behind.

I was reminded of Harry – as if I could ever forget him – by a recent article in
The Times
. It announced that members of the Society for Psychical Research are to reinvestigate his most famous work, a case widely regarded as the most critical inquiry into the supernatural ever conducted. It saddened and alarmed me to read this.

In 1940, when Price published his first conclusions on the matter, Richard King of
Tatler
described the case as ‘one of the most extraordinary stories imaginable’. It was championed by Sir Albion Richardson, KC, CBE – one of the most distinguished jurists of the day – as a case that stood ‘by itself in the literature of psychical research’.

I speak, of course, of Price’s twenty-year investigation into the haunting of Borley Rectory. Some said tribute should be paid to him for the entirely unbiased way in which he
chronicled the happenings. And when his book on the case was published, it was among the events of the year. But was it quite right to describe the Rectory as ‘most haunted’ – or even as haunted at all?

After Price’s death, some years ago, many complained that too much about the way he presented the case was – much like the man himself – vague and inconclusive. His critics attacked him in their droves, branding him ‘spiteful’, ‘deceitful’, ‘possessive’ and ‘self-seeking’.

He was, I confess, all of these things. He was also my friend. I miss him, even now, in spite of the terrible things he did. And sometimes, in the small hours, I fancy I can still hear his deep voice announcing a new day’s work: ‘
Come, Sarah – let’s begin!
’

And now the Society for Psychical Research also has its doubts due to the discovery of yet more inconsistencies in the evidence Price amassed: missing details, ill-substantiated facts and accusations. They are certain their investigation will bring them to the ‘truth’.

Well, let them look, if they dare. They already know that at the moment of his death Price was writing the opening chapters of a third book on the haunted Borley Rectory. What they don’t know is that Price died in very mysterious circumstances and that in the months leading up to his death he was troubled with the worst nightmares imaginable: he thought he was being followed and he received something rather mysterious, rather dangerous, in the post.

The world would be astonished to hear it, but I know that these events – his greatest investigation and his death – were connected.

I know that his pursuers will find me. They will want my story.
They will insist I reveal what I know. But they will never read this document, because the story it contains is for me – and for one other, should he ever find it.

January 1926

It was a blustery Saturday evening, two weeks before my twenty-second birthday, when I first met the man known as the Midnight Inquirer.

‘I’m not coming.’

That was selfish of me, I know, which was silly, because the last thing I wanted to do was hurt my mother’s feelings. From my position before a mirror hanging in the hallway I had a direct view of her as she sat in a deep armchair beside the fire in the drawing room, looking at that day’s edition of the
Morning Post
. And although she had lapsed into crestfallen silence, I knew she would repeat the question.

‘You’re quite sure you don’t want to accompany me, Sarah? Mr Price will be there in person! He is something of a phenomenon himself, a scientist who believes. They say he’s wonderfully eccentric.’

‘I dare say they do,’ I muttered, moving to the drawing-room window to peer out on to the raw evening. An omnibus clattered out of the fog, full of passengers swaddled in scarves, hats and overcoats, and across Westminster Big Ben chimed the hour.

‘But it’s a rough night,’ I said with deliberate misgiving, rubbing my arms as a chill shuddered through me. The house was far too large for just the two of us. We could never get it warm. There were perhaps twenty other town houses on our road in Pimlico, behind Victoria Station, but they were all nicer than ours. Our situation meant we could no longer afford to keep the house looking as we would wish.

‘Well, the newspapers say the laboratory is a marvel.’ I felt Mother’s pleading gaze pressing into my back. ‘Sarah, tonight’s the gala opening. Everyone’s talking about it. There will be tours. Also, it’s not all about the work, you realise – plenty of young men for you to meet, I’m sure of it.’

I turned away from the faded red curtains to face her earnest expression. She was dark and tall with an oval face which was carved with lines that had come too early. The gold bracelet on her wrist reminded me of the woman she had once been: proud and confident, always immaculately presented in flowing dresses and wide feathered hats. Now I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Her elegance had been eroded by the weight of her troubles.

From her armchair she inclined her head and arched her eyebrows, sending me a hopeful look that caught my conscience. I was so proud of her. Even my friends, who knew her simply as Frances, would comment on her gentility and grace. With or without her refined background, she would still have been a lady. In her sleek fitted jacket with matching skirt, she looked as though she were meeting a gentleman friend for supper. Of course, I knew that couldn’t be true.

There had been no one since Father.

We left our house in Pimlico together a little after six o’clock. By that time the winter darkness had drawn in, bringing with it a stale fog which coiled around buildings and street corners. I
pulled my furs tightly around me, sheltering from the cold that snapped at our faces as we walked past the rows of handsome Victorian town houses on Eccleston Square, where the Labour Party kept their offices.

‘Poor souls,’ Mother murmured, and I followed her pitiful glance to a row of ex-servicemen busking for money with a barrel organ, shabby overcoats decorated with war medals. She knew these men deserved better than to stand out here in the biting air selling bootlaces and matches and copies of the
Daily Worker
. During the war, she had belonged to the Voluntary Aid Detachment. ‘Every woman has to do her bit, Sarah,’ I remember her saying when I was at school. Now of course the factories shunned those men who had been so badly injured fighting in Europe to protect the Empire. So many men lost. The ‘roaring twenties’? That phrase still rang hollow to me. The only roaring which seemed significant was the roaring of the guns. Women like my mother went regularly to the memorial in Whitehall, and no amount of jazz or frenetic dancing would banish their loss.

‘I could sign up with the Labour movement,’ I suggested. ‘Work in an office.’

My comment turned her head. ‘That’s quite a departure from your last job!’ She seemed concerned. It was a curious reaction for one who had seen firsthand how brave and essential women were to the world. ‘You’ve been terribly agitated since you returned from Paris. You seem …
changed
somehow.’

Unfulfilled, lost – that’s what she meant. I tried to ignite some passion for the work I had taken as a model in Paris in the summer, but I felt nothing inside. The job was far too shallow for my liking. In truth, I was more interested in the cameras than the photo shoots. The idea of pausing a moment in time and capturing it forever struck me as not only technically brilliant,
but wonderfully romantic. Ironic, I suppose, given that it was romance that had led me to Paris – that and Peter Lewin’s limitless charm. But our flirtation and my taste of the high life proved short-lived, and when I returned to London without the promise of further work it was with the realisation that my medium complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes and slim figure would carry me only so far in life.

‘I need to find employment soon,’ I said, ‘or we will have to account for ourselves to the Poor Law Guardians. Your war pension isn’t enough any more.’

The truth in my remark cut Mother’s forehead into a deep frown and she sighed. ‘You must do whatever makes you happy, dear.’

But that wasn’t what she wanted to say. I could tell by the way her eyes slid away from me. No, what she meant to say, I was sure, was that most young girls looked forward to having a home of their own, a family, a husband. By the time we had reached the underground station at Victoria, I was already wishing I had stayed at home.

At the end of the last tube carriage I spotted three remaining empty seats and we settled down next to each other, Mother holding my arm as our train rattled and wound its way through the darkness. The fingers of her right hand drummed with agitation, and her yearning, absent gaze settled on the last remaining vacant seat opposite. Then I knew: the memory of my father, Harold Robert Grey, was with her once more.

It was nine years since he had been taken from us, eight years since Armistice Day. I was thirteen when it happened. She had knelt for half an hour on the kitchen floor, clutching the dreaded telegram against her heart, sobbing uncontrollably. Although I never read that telegram, in my own small way I
thought I had made peace with the knowledge that he was gone. I thought Mother had too. During the many years we’d had to adjust, I’d watched with pride as she tutored children at home on Father’s old piano. Her social life had improved and she had continued giving many hours each week in voluntary work with the Women’s Institute at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

And then, a year previously, something had changed within her. Without explanation, she had regressed into severe, unnatural grieving. Something had undone all the progress she had made recovering from Father’s death.

Now she sought out spiritualist mediums who claimed to converse with the dead.

*

As we emerged from the underground station at South Kensington, I cursed myself to think that I was adding fuel to Mother’s strange interest. Attending seances was her “hobby”, but that didn’t seem right to me. Hobbies should enrich lives, not replace them, and this interest was fast becoming an obsession.

I wondered what surprises awaited us behind the doors of number 16 Queensberry Place. Spooks, poltergeists, mediums – for me such notions were at best a bit of fun, possibilities to be lightly entertained among friends maybe, but then laughed off and forgotten. But for a whole year Mother had been frozen in an insidious cycle of fraud and disappointment imposed on her by false hopes cooked up by charlatan mediums and served up to her on a plate.