The Ghost Hunters (43 page)

I could at least keep the thing away from me, keep whatever evil I sensed radiating from it at bay. I left the medallion in the top drawer of the cabinet next to my bed, resting on the brown leather jacket of the Holy Book.

It was less easy to deal with the faint sounds that came occasionally from the partition wall that divided Mother’s bedroom from mine.

On a blustery night in December 1932 I was lying in bed when I noticed it again:
tap-tap-scratch; tap-tap, scratch
.

I got out of bed, shivering in my nightdress, and went gingerly to the corner of the room nearest the window, pressing my ear to the wall. No squeaking, rustling or scurrying. And no mouse droppings in the house.

The faint, insistent sounds taunted me:
Tap-tap-scratch; tap-tap, scratch
.

I slapped my hand against the wall. Silence, quickly followed
by the scrape of Mother’s bedroom door on the carpet as she came out on to the landing.

I joined her in the gloom.

‘Did you hear something?’ I asked.

‘Only you,’ she replied. Her face was pale and blank, and unquestionably innocent. ‘Try to get some rest, Sarah, please.’

Oh, but how I longed for rest! How I wished for the cobwebs in my head to blow away. I sat, hour after hour, watching the rain run down my windowpane, contemplating with regret the countless opportunities I had forfeited because of him. All around me old attitudes were changing, class barriers being dismantled, women occupying all manner of professions beyond domestic employment – in factories, on the land and even on the buses. It had been that way for years but I hadn’t really noticed. I had been left behind.

By January 1933, ten months after Price had detected the suspected fraud in the photograph of Rudi Schneider, I was simmering with resentment not only of him, but also of the other ladies my age who were embracing the new egalitarianism of the times, flocking to the dance halls and jazz clubs of London and exchanging weekly invitations to afternoon tea. I wondered how my old friends spoke of me now. How did Amy, who was married with a family of her own, remember the old Sarah, the ambitious, glamorous Sarah who had loved life? I imagined her mocking me with her new friends: ‘the ghost hunter’s assistant’.

And of course I couldn’t help wondering what had become of Vernon Wall. I had heard nothing from him. No phone calls, not even a letter. Nor had I noticed any more of his newspaper articles, and believe me when I say that I scanned all of the newspapers every morning. According to Mother – who had heard as
much from a friend – the young journalist had taken off, deserting London for a woman in Italy. Lake Como. Whether it was true, I had no idea. I hoped it wasn’t.

The preponderance of my negative thoughts was so great that by February I began to feel unwell, waking each morning to a dull ache pulling at the bottom of my spine. I felt bloated and quickly lost my appetite. Something, I was sure, was wrong, yet I did not respond with the urgency I should have done, or would have done had I been in a healthier frame of mind. It was Mother I had to thank for eventually persuading me to see a doctor. I did so reluctantly, little imagining I would soon find myself admitted to the Chelsea Hospital for Women for an operation. A small growth – they called it a subserous fibroid – was growing from the outside wall of my uterus into my pelvis; it was removed and afterwards I spent fourteen days recovering. And as I lay in my bed at night, listening to the sounds of the hospital and the other sick women, for the first time in many months my spirits rose. I was lucky. Unlike some of the women around me, I was going to be all right.

When at last I was released from the hospital I decided that I would heed the doctors’ advice and take myself away from London for a short time to somewhere relaxing, preferably near the sea, where I could properly recuperate and clear my head of its brooding melancholy. Solitude is rarely desirable, and I did not relish the idea of spending such a long time alone, in a part of the country I didn’t know, but I needed to escape. So when Mother drew my attention to an advert in the classified column of the
Sunday Dispatch
, I decided that the ‘remote, peaceful cottage’ in West Wales sounded ideal.

‘How long will you be gone?’ she asked me. We were sitting in
the drawing room at home. My cases were packed and waiting in the hall. ‘Not as long as the last time, I hope?’

I suddenly realised that she might have regretted urging me to get away, and perhaps that she was afraid I wouldn’t be coming back. I stood, went round to her chair and took her hand, squeezing into it some gentle reassurance. ‘No, not nearly as long. You’ll be all right without me?’

‘Yes, of course. You need this.’ The warmth and loyalty in her voice was touchingly sincere. Her face was lined and her hair grey, but she was still a striking woman. My eyes roamed from the faded curtains to the stained carpet and tarnished silver to settle again on Mother’s face. ‘You can tidy the house, perhaps? Brighten the place up a bit?’

‘Yes.’

As I entered the hallway to collect my coat and suitcase a chill air pressed past me, and I wondered if I was making a mistake: if leaving Mother alone was ill advised. It wasn’t just the occasional scratching in the walls that made me hesitate: the house itself was beginning to feel different to me; as if our home was sheltering something hidden just beyond the limits of normal sight.

‘Sarah dear, are you all right?’

She was standing behind me. I turned, and for the briefest moment I fancied I glimpsed something alien in my mother’s gaze, as though a dense cloud was drifting in, covering her thoughts.

I blinked, and saw nothing at all abnormal in her expression. Only the familiar loyalty and unquestioning love I had come to rely upon.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind me leaving you?’ I asked again, and she quickly responded with a decisive nod. ‘Don’t worry
about me. You must get away and enjoy yourself.’

That was comforting, if I overlooked the fact that I had felt something oddly recognisable – I might almost say something menacing – in the chill movement of air that had pressed past me and brought gooseflesh to my arms.

‘No more ghostly nonsense either,’ I instructed her, making her promise to leave seances and books about the paranormal alone.

Then a depressing thought hit me:
Your mother may socialise with Spiritualists, Sarah, but at least she has some friends.

This is what ghosts do
, I thought as I wrapped my mother in my arms. They bleed us of life and potential and hope and happiness. They make us shadows of ourselves.

That afternoon I left London determined to begin again.

*

Overhurst Farm, the cottage that was to be my temporary residence, stood on a wide cliff above an expanse of deserted beach with an uninterrupted view of the sea. I discovered it at the end of a half-mile track that led down from the hamlet of Talbenny, just outside Broad Haven, and on first sight my heart leaped. All around me was the cool fresh air I had come for and I drank it in eagerly, quickly dispelling any misgivings entertained about this trip.

My hostess was an elderly spinster who introduced herself as Miss Golding. She was welcoming and kind and I warmed to her immediately. She was, I think, glad of my company and I was grateful for her support. We sat together each morning at breakfast, looking out over the beautiful bay, discussing our lives and the newspaper reports that interested us. Then, during the afternoons, I would take myself off alone for short
walks along the isolated stretch of beach, watching the birds wheel in the brilliant blue sky above me, before sitting for a while and resting in the long grass at the foot of the hill which rose from the beach to the spot where the cottage stood. Even at night, when the sense of isolation was at its highest and thick mists rolled in off the sea and gathered about the house, I never felt vulnerable; I had spent too long in the company of shadows to find anything in this natural splendour that could upset me.

Nothing had ever felt so perfectly right. Which made what happened on the Sunday of my third week at the cottage especially disappointing.

I arrived at the breakfast table just as the clock over the mantelpiece chimed eight, poured myself a cup of tea and reached for the morning newspaper. The news at that time was full of stories about the escalating troubles in Europe, and with some family on my mother’s side residing in Germany I was keen to learn more about what was happening there since the Reichstag fire the week before. But where was the newspaper? I looked about but couldn’t find it. Then I noticed that Miss Golding was watching me worriedly. When I asked her about it she became evasive, muttering something unconvincing about a late delivery due to the worsening weather. I held her gaze until she flinched and looked away. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. It was only then that she sat me down and reluctantly told me the name she had seen in the paper.

Harry Price.

I felt sick. But when at last she handed me the morning edition of the
Sunday Dispatch
, I realised the situation was even worse than I had imagined.

The headline screamed at me: ‘
Price Detects Fraud – Sensational Exposure of Spiritualist Medium Rudi Schneider’
. And below this was the damning photograph I had first laid eyes on some fifteen months earlier, which showed that Schneider had freed his hand while the phenomena occurred.

‘Let us face facts,’ Price was quoted. ‘Life after death has not been proved. The report has upset a great number of people, including some of our own Council who suggest that Rudi’s free arm had only been a trance movement. That is only a theory and I prefer to believe that the boy deliberately took advantage of the fact that I was ill that night and evaded my control.’
¹

Why had Price kept the fact of Rudi’s fraud a secret for so long? To shelter me from the humiliation of the truth? That hardly seem likely. Only when I cast my mind back to the night of the experiment did I remember the crucial information I had overheard in conversation between Price and Schneider, and the truth became apparent: ‘If it’s war they want then war they shall have.’

My old employer had played a long game, set a trap, spited his enemies, thrown Schneider and me to the wolves. I realised now that he must have suspected from the beginning that Schneider was performing separate seances for his rival researchers, the Society for Psychical Research, whom he loathed and resented; and to an ego the size of his, the idea was intolerable. So he had waited, insidiously courting the Society for Psychical Research in the process, all the time cultivating the necessary information to cause them maximum damage. When he had learned they were convinced of Schneider’s veracity he had waited until they had announced as much to the world’s media. And then, when he was certain he could refute their conclusions and embarrass them beyond measure, he had exacted his revenge.

By the spring of 1933, this was my assessment of his behaviour. And time has shown I was mostly correct. But what I could not have known then was that a deeper, more insidious kind of wickedness was also at work.

Note

1
Sunday Dispatch
, 5 March 1933.

I resume my account at a point six years after the last. If you were to ask me why I chose to skip such a period, I would reply that these were the years of my greatest contentment and the longest time that elapsed without my having any direct association with Harry Price.

I had returned from Wales determined to find new and fulfilling employment among other people of my age, and I soon did so when the Jupiter Film Locos Publishing Company, at 186 Wardour Street, London W1, accepted my application for the permanent position of secretary. I was delighted, and a wonderfully active social life soon followed. Though I knew little about the industry, it was an exciting one in which to work – the public was going wild for the ‘talkies’ and the new modern colour stereoscopic flicks were simply marvellous! By 1934 I had become a sort of general manager with a secretary of my own. The fact that I had not married did not concern me because married women were at that time prevented from enjoying the privilege of work.

My new job brought freedom to enjoy myself. Though I was still living at home, I could now afford to treat Mother to some luxury, whether it was our visit to the seaside that summer
or our many shopping trips in the following year to Dickins and Jones. Although for most of the time she seemed content, there were enough signs in her behaviour to make me suspicious. Like the afternoon in October 1935 when, over tea at Lyons Corner House, I glimpsed a glassiness in her eyes, as though she was listening not to me but to a different voice coming from somewhere else.

I preferred to spend as much time as possible away from our home. Although we had improved the decor, bought new furniture, even bought ourselves a pet – a small black cat we named Charlie – something about our house, particularly the landing outside Mother’s room, no longer felt ‘right’ to me, and all the idiosyncrasies about the place – the faint and intermittent tap, tap, scratching in the walls, the unexplained cold spots and chilly wisps of air – began taunting me. I didn’t want to believe there was anything wrong; I valued my new life too highly to permit the intrusion of such thoughts. Instead I sought comfort in alternative explanations. Perhaps Price was correct when he had hypothesised that houses like Borley Rectory somehow ‘kept’ human memories. Perhaps that was happening to us.

I see now what I was doing: using elaborate hypotheses to keep the past at bay. But for how long? Every so often someone would ask me about the time I had spent with Price all those years ago, and when that happened I would laugh off the question, giving him an excellent character and carefully omitting the juicy bits.

In this way I became very good at ignoring the lingering sense that there was unfinished business from my past. I learnt to resist the dreams of Borley Rectory and its dark nun. For a time the distance I had imposed between the past and myself enabled me to blow them quite easily away.