The Shadow in the North (15 page)

Then there came a clatter of machinery. Sally could see nothing but a tangle of pulleys and chains, but suddenly Mackinnon took fright and dashed away, leaping off the platform and dodging between the hefty wooden pillars that supported the stage.

"Not that way!" called Sally, keeping her voice low.

It worked. He hesitated—and gave her time, in her clumsy enveloping dress, to spring after him and seize him by the arm.

"No! Let me go—"

"Listen, you fool," she hissed. "I'll give you to Bell-mann, I swear I will, if you don't tell me what I want to know."

"All right—but not here—"

He looked this way and that. She didn't let go. There was a sputtering gaslight nearby that cast a lurid glare over them, making him look half-crazed and hysterical.

Suddenly she became angry and shook him.

"Listen," she said. "You mean nothing to me. I'd give you up now, but there's something I want to know. There's fraud, there's shipwreck, there's murder mixed up in this—and you're involved. Now—^why is he chasing you? What does he want?"

He struggled, but she didn't let go; and then he began to cry. Sally was amazed and a little disgusted. She shook him again, harder.

"Tell me!" she said, her voice low with anger.

"All right! All rightl But it's not Bellmann, anyway," he said. "It's my father."

"Your father? Well, who is your father?"

"Lord Wytham," said Mackinnon.

Sally was silent, her mind in a whirl.

"Prove it," she said.

"Ask my mother. She'll tell ye. She's not ashamed."

"Who's she?"

"Her name's Nellie Budd. And I don't know where she lives. I don't know who you are either. I'm just trying to earn my living, trying to perfect my art. I'm innocent, I've done nothing to anyone, I tell ye. I'm an artist, I need peace and calmness—I need tae be left alone, not bullied and tormented and hounded without end. It isnae fair, it isnae right!"

Nellie Budd. . .

"But you still haven't told me why he's after you. And what's it got to do with Bellmann? It's no good telling me that it's nothing to do with him—his secretary was here tonight. A man called Windlesham. Why's he involved?"

But before Mackinnon could answer, a trap door banged open somewhere above them, and Mackinnon twisted out of her hands and vanished into the shadows hke a rat. She took a step after him but stopped; she wouldn't catch him now.

She expected to find confijsion above, with the audience still in an uproar over their disappearance. Instead she found an apologetic stage manager, a stage full of dancers, and the audience in high good humor.

Apparently there should have been a stagehand below to conduct her back to her seat—the trap, the platform, and the red hellfire all being what Mackinnon had devised as a climax to the act. It was the first time they'd played it, and the stage manager was delighted with the effect.

The reason there'd been no one below was that all the available men had been called to deal with a fracas in the wings. Four men had appeared from nowhere, it seemed, and set about each other in fiiry and, after a huge struggle, had been thrown out. It was probably another angry husband, said the stage manager.

"An angry husband?"

"Well, you see, Mr. Mackinnon's got a way with the ladies. I daresay you noticed. They fly to him like moths. Can't see why, but there you are. It wouldn't be the first time there's been a shindig over that kind of thing where he's concerned. He's a devil for the ladies. Now then, miss, let me find a boy to show you back to your seat. You was in the front row, wasn't you?"

"I think I'll go," she said. "I've had enough entertainment for one evening, thank you very much. Which is the way out?"

Once outside the theater, she hurried around to the stage entrance, her heart beating hard, and saw Frederick sitting on the step, swinging his stick gendy while Jim wandered up and down peering at the ground. Apart from them, the alley was deserted.

She ran up and crouched down beside Frederick.

"Are you all right? What happened?"

He looked up, and she saw his cheek was cut, but he was smiling. She touched it tenderly.

"Ow . . . We sent 'em packing. It was a bit cramped in there—the curtain kept getting in the way—but when they threw us out in the alley here and I could swing the stick, we got on a bit better. Nasty pair they were. Still, I shook some dust out of Sackville and Jim spread the other feller's nose over his face, so we didn't do too badly. At least, I didn't. Found it yet?" he said to Jim.

Jim grunted something. Sally got up and turned his

face to the light. His lip was split, and as she saw when he opened his mouth that he'd lost one of his front teeth. She felt a pang: they'd been hurt, and she'd let Mackinnon go.

"Did you find anything out?" said Frederick, getting to his feet.

"Yes, I did. Let's find a cab and get you home—I want to put something on that cut. And Jim's mouth is going to hurt. I hope we've got some brandy."

"Pity they threw us out, really," said Frederick. "I wanted to see Senor Chavez, the Boneless Wonder."

"I seen him before," mumbled Jim. "He's a waste of time. He stands on his hands and sticks his leg in his ear, and that's it. What'd you find out, then, Sal?"

In a four-wheeler a few streets away, Messrs. Harris and Sackville were undergoing a painfiil dressing-down from Mr. Windlesham. But they weren't giving it the attention it deserved; Sackville, having been beaten about the head with Frederick's stick, was even more fiiddled than usual, and Mr. Harris, whose nose had felt the impact of Jim's brass knuckles, was preoccupied with diverting the flow of blood away from his shirt-front and into a sodden handkerchief.

Mr. Windlesham looked at them with distaste and knocked at the roof. The cab slowed down.

"We ain't there yet," said Sackville thickly.

"Most acutely observed," said Mr. Windlesham. "However, it's a nice sharp night. The walk will do you

good. It seems to me that your talents are more suited to terrorizing women than fighting with men. If that is the case, I may have another job for you, and I may not; it depends on how punctual you are in the morning. Seven o'clock in my office, and not a minute later. No blood on the door handle, Mr. Harris, thank you; mop it clean, if you wouldn't mind. No, not with your handkerchief The tail of your coat will do very well. Good night to you."

Grumbling, muttering, groaning, the two heroes disappeared down Drury Lane. Mr. Windlesham told the driver to take him to Hyde Park Gate; his employer, he thought, would be greatly interested by the evening's events.

CTnaniaswis oj ike cJ^ivi

iving

"So, WHAT HAVE WE GOT?" SAID FREDERICK, HELPING himself to marmalade. It was the morning after their visit to the music hall, and he and Jim were breakfasting with Sally at the Tavistock Hotel in Covent Garden. "Mackinnon claims to be Nellie Budd's son by Lord Wytham. Well, that's possible."

"That's the yarn he spun to Miss Meredith, too," Jim pointed out. "At least, he didn't name his father and mother, but the story was the same. But that doesn't explain why Bellmann's chasing him. Unless he doesn't fancy him for a brother-in-law. Don't blame him."

"Inheritance," said Sally. "There was something about that, wasn't there? But the illegitimacy might rule that out. What could he inherit from Wytham?"

"Precious little, at a guess. The man's bankrupt, or on the verge of it," said Frederick. "Everything he's got is mortgaged up to the neck. And now he's been pitched out of the Cabinet as well. ... I don't know. He's a dismal kind of Johnny. I prefer Nellie Budd. No wonder she blinked when I mentioned Mackinnon."

"What about this North Star business?" said Jim.

"North Star Castings," said Sally. "Something to do with iron and steel? It's not listed at the stock exchange. I'll go see this Mrs. Seddon at Muswell Hill tomorrow, but this morning I'm going to see a Mr. Gurney and ask him about psychometry. I've also got a business to run, in the intervals between everything else. ..."

"Well, I'm off to do some snooping around Whitehall," said Frederick. "I want to see what I can find out about Wytham. And then I'll go and pay another call on Nellie Budd. Talking about business, it's about time I earned some money; I haven't made a penny from this case so far. In fact, I'm down one watch."

"It's all right for you, mate," said Jim bitterly, feehng his bruised mouth. "You can buy another one for thirty bob. Teeth ain't so easily come by. And how you have the coldhearted cruelty to taunt a feller with kippers and toast when all he can manage is porridge and scrambled eggs, I shall never know. Still, that geezer's going to have trouble with his conk for a while; that's some comfort."

Sally's Mr. Gurney was a man she'd met at Cambridge. They'd been introduced by a Mr. Sidgwick, a philosopher who'd done a great deal to further women's education but who was also interested in psychic research. Mr. Gurney was conducting some research of his own in that field, and since he lived in Hampstead, not too far away, Sally thought she'd pay a call on him. She found him in the study of his pleasant villa, with

music paper on the table and a violin in an open case. He was an intense, wide-eyed man of thirty or so, with a silky beard.

"I'm sorry to interrupt your music," she said. "But I want to find something out, and I don't know anyone else to ask."

"My music? I shall never be a musician. Miss Lock-hart. This little sonatina is the height of my ambition— and my ability, too, I fear. I'm taking a new course now; medicine is the field for me. But how can I help you?"

He was a wealthy dilettante, who'd tried scholarship and the law as well as music, and she doubted whether he'd stick to medicine any better. But he had considerable intelligence and a wide knowledge of matters on the fringe of psychology and philosophy, and as she explained the background and what had happened at Nellie Budd's seance in Streatham, he sat up and began to sparkle with interest.

"Telepathy," he said. "That's what your Mrs. Budd's undergoing, by the sound of it."

"Tele—that's Greek. Like telegraph. What's it mean:

"It's a name for what happens when one person receives impressions from the mind of another. Perceptions, emotions, sense impressions—nothing so connected as conscious thought. Not yet, anyway."

"But does this faculty really exist? Have we all got it?"

"The phenomenon exists. There are records of

hundreds of cases. But that's not to say there's a faculty for it. We wouldn't use that word for a man who'd been run over several times by hansom cabs; we wouldn't speak of a faculty for being run over. It might be something that happens to us, rather than something we do."

"I see. She might be receiving impressions without being aware of it. But would the sending out be deliberate? Or wouldn't the sender know he was doing it?"

"The agent, we call it. There seems to be little pattern there. Miss Lockhart. The only generalization I can make is that it usually happens between people who are emotionally close."

"I see. . . . Then there's another puzzling thing, Mr. Gurney. It's connected, but I don't know how at the moment." She told him about Mackinnons vision of the duel in the snow and how it had been set off, according to his account, by his touching a cigar case.

"Yes," said Mr. Gurney, "that sort of thing's well attested. What sort of man is your percipient? The one who had the vision?"

"Not at all trustworthy. He's a stage magician, a conjurer—a very good one, too—and whether it's got anything to do with that I don't know, but it seems to be impossible to tell when he's speaking the truth. One more thing: If this phenomenon does happen, does it only take place when the percipient handles something that actually belongs to the other person? Or would anything do if it was distantly connected?"

"What sort of thing?"

"Well, a newspaper report. A cutting from a story that might have had something to do with the vision but that didn't mention anyone's name. Could that trigger off a psychometric perception? Or suppose this: Suppose the percipient had had the vision, and later on he came across a newspaper story that didn't overtly mention it but that had a bearing on it. Could he tell that the two things were connected?"

Mr. Gurney jumped up in excitement and plucked a fat volume of notes and cuttings from the shelf above the table.

"Extraordinary thing!" he said. "You've described exactly what happened in the Blackburn case of 1871. If this is a recurrence, it's great news. Look—here it IS . . .

She read through the clippings, all of them dated and annotated with scientific precision. There was a close similarity, though the subject matter of the Blackburn man's vision was nothing more sensational than the escape of his brother from a railway accident.

"How many cases have you got notes on, Mr. Gurney?" she said.

"Thousands. It would be a life's work to sort them out and analyze them."

"Perhaps you should do it instead of medicine. But there's one thing I ought to tell you: This business, whatever it is, seems to be taking place on the edge of a

criminal conspiraq^. Could you—I know you'll want to write it up—could you please wait to publish it until the dangers passed?"

His eyes opened wide. "A criminal conspiracy?" She explained a little about the background, and he listened in amazement.

"So this is what they're turning out at Cambridge," he said finally. "Female detectives. I don't think that was quite what the pioneers of university education for women had in mind. . . . Yes, of course I'll do what you say. In any case, our reports always use pseudonyms. My word! Fraud . . . murder . . . Perhaps I should stick to music after all."

It wasn't till the afternoon that Frederick made his way to Streatham. He'd found out one or two things by the simplest means of all—^just asking people who were likely to know: office boys, messengers, and the like. The gossip was that while Lord Wytham's political career had passed its zenith, he was all set to flourish in the financial world, having got a seat on the board of an up-and-coming firm called North Something-or-other; and fijr-thermore, he'd been cultivating the new undersecretary at the Foreign O^c^. All in all, it was worth a morning's work and a succession of weak cups of coffee.