The Durham deception

The Cathedral Precincts

At about the same time as Helen and Tom were beginning their stroll along the riverside path below the cathedral, Eustace Flask was taking a walk on Palace Green, in the precincts of the cathedral itself. He reached the north porch where a man was waiting for him. They nodded to each other before entering the building. If they had been interested in such things they might have remarked on the great pillars in the nave which were incised with zigzags or lozenge patterns, or commented on the way the sun poured through the rose window in the east. But the two were not attracted by ecclesiastical architecture or the morning light. Instead, the cathedral served as a convenient meeting place where they might go unnoticed on account of the regular visitors and the coming and going of the masons and carpenters who were presently rebuilding the choir screen.

Flask’s companion was a man of medium height with a florid complexion. His name was Frank Harcourt and he was a police superintendent, one of six holding that rank in the Durham City Constabulary. He was off-duty and so wearing civilian clothes, a three-piece suit which he would not normally have afforded but which his wife Rhoda had encouraged him to buy. Of the two men Harcourt might have been the more easily recognized, perhaps by one of the clerics who were walking purposefully about the building, but he avoided meeting anyone’s eye. By instinct the two kept their perambulations to the secluded or shadowed corners of the cathedral.

They didn’t speak a word until they were standing in the north transept where Eustace Flask said, ‘How are you on this fine summer’s morning, Frank?’

‘I cannot hold them off for much longer,’ said Frank Harcourt who evidently had no time for pleasantries. He was sweating, despite the coolness of the place, and his red face was a contrast to Flask’s pallor. Nearby was the scuffling movement of workmen up and down ladders, the discreet tap of chisel on stone.

‘Hold them off? Whom do you mean?’ said Flask.

‘ Whom do you think I mean?’ said Harcourt, imitating Flask’s oily tone. ‘I mean Alfred Huggins. I mean the Chief Constable.’

‘But you said them, which I took to be more than one person.’

This time Harcourt answered with real irritation. ‘You know the situation, Mr Flask. There are quite a few people who do not care for your activities in this town or even your presence here.’

‘Which people?’

‘Do I need to spell it out? Some of them are probably in these precincts at this very moment. Men of the cloth. Not all of them approve of this spiritualist lark. They call it an offence against religion. Not to put too fine a point on it, they think that you are a fraud.’

‘Spiritualist lark? Lark?’ said Flask, putting his hand on his fine brocade waistcoat in the gesture he’d previously employed in Julia Howlett’s morning room. ‘Well, I suppose that true prophets and seekers of truth have always been mocked and persecuted.’

‘Spare me the indignation, Mr Flask. You do not have to pretend with me. These important people, men of the cloth and the rest of them, are putting pressure on the Chief Constable who in turn is putting pressure on me to do something about it.’

‘Frank, Frank, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am to hear you talk in this unfriendly fashion. For we are friends, you know. Besides I am not breaking any laws.’

‘Maybe not, but if I was to investigate I’m sure I could turn up something. And it’s not only you. There is that Ambrose Barker fellow and the woman, Kitty with the strange surname. I could certainly turn up something on them.’

‘If you were to investigate, perhaps you could. But you are not going to, are you?’

‘Like I said just now, I cannot hold the Chief Constable off forever.’

‘Keep your voice down, we are attracting attention.’

And, indeed, a gaggle of visitors assembled in the crossing place who’d been staring upward at the soaring interior of the tower as well as admiring the new work on the choir screen were now turning to look at Flask and Harcourt. The two men moved away to the south end of the cathedral before walking out to the cloisters. When they were out of earshot of the few other people ambling round the area, Superintendent Harcourt went on the attack once more.

‘I heard there was trouble last night at that old lady’s house in South Bailey. Someone tried to expose you.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I am a policeman, Mr Flask. It is my duty to keep my ear to the ground.’

‘We must not forget you are a policeman, Frank. A pillar of the community. Yes, some troublemaker did try to “expose” me, as you put it. He did not succeed.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Your presence in Durham cannot be tolerated for much longer.’

‘How is your pretty new wife, Frank? How is Rhoda?’

‘She is well,’ said Harcourt, in a subdued voice.

‘Did she like the cameo I sent her? It was a nice piece. I know that she has fine tastes or should I say expensive ones.’

‘She appreciated the cameo, thank you.’

‘I wonder what Mr Alfred Huggins would say if he knew your wife had accepted gifts from a spiritualist. I wonder what he would say about the other little contributions I have made to your household economy?’

This time Harcourt was silent.

‘All I require is a few more days to complete my, ah, work here,’ resumed Flask. ‘Then I shall move to pastures new. Why, only yesterday I took the train down to York to see the lie of the land.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Harcourt. ‘You can go to York or go to the moon for all I care but you must leave Durham very soon. Otherwise I shall have to begin an investigation of your activities. Only a few days, mind.’

‘Good, good,’ said Flask, apparently satisfied. ‘I think I shall have a look at the library here. They say it is one of the finest ecclesiastical libraries in the country. Do you know it? Are you familiar with the cathedral library?’

‘Do as you please,’ said Harcourt but he spoke the words under his breath to the retreating back of Eustace Flask, who, with a nonchalant farewell waggle of his hand, turned into a doorway leading off from the cloister.

The superintendent of police made his way out of the cloisters. He was still sweating inside his new suit, sweating with heat and irritation at the conversation with Flask, and he went into the cool of the Galilee Chapel to recover. Idly, he gazed at the tomb of the Venerable Bede which stood isolated and flanked at each corner by ceremonial stone candleholders. There was an inscription in Latin on the black surface of the tomb. Frank Harcourt wondered at the meaning of the words. No doubt Eustace Flask could have told him. Flask was an educated man. A plausible educated fraud.

Harcourt had encountered Flask a few months ago when the medium had first arrived in Durham and before he had set up with his retinue of Kitty and Ambrose Barker. In a moment of weakness the policeman had asked him if he might make contact with his late wife. Harcourt’s marriage to Rhoda was scarcely a year old but, for all her comparative youth and relative attractions, he found himself missing Florry who had passed away three summers before. Florence Harcourt was like one of the old, comfortable, familiar suits which Rhoda had forced him to discard. He missed the way that Florry had been satisfied with his rank and his pay, or at least the fact that she had never complained about it. It was no mean thing to be a police superintendent, one of only six in the city, and to be bringing home a weekly wage of forty-two shillings. No mean thing for him, who had worked his way up from the ranks, but yet not enough for Rhoda. She made not-so-casual remarks about promotion, she regularly inquired about the age and health of Alfred Huggins, the Chief Constable.

So, after meeting Flask, he attended a seance without telling Rhoda and there he heard from Florry. Yes, she was more than content on the other side – oh, it was a place of such light and ease and wonder. A place where one breakfasted with angels and dined with the spirits of the departed. His first wife was also content that he had found happiness in the arms of another although she – or rather Eustace Flask – didn’t put it exactly in those terms. But Frank Harcourt was no fool. He had spent too much time questioning felons and listening to their denials and evasions to be incapable of smelling a rat. Once the initial delight at hearing from Florry had worn off, he quickly concluded that he had been taken in. He wondered why angels should need to eat breakfast, or why his late wife needed to eat at all for that matter.

But by then it was too late. Flask was no fool either and he speedily realized how useful it would be to have a member of the Durham constabulary looking out for him while he pursued bigger game in the city. From hints dropped carelessly by Frank Harcourt, the medium understood the policeman’s resentment at his new wife’s nagging ambition.

Under the guise of paying his respects to Rhoda, he called at their house in Hallgarth Street when he knew the superintendent was at work. When Harcourt got home that evening and heard that Flask had visited, he was first angry then fearful. He expected Rhoda to give him hell over his secret consultation with the medium, he thought she would as good as accuse him of infidelity by wanting to be put in touch with Florence. But Rhoda Harcourt had been charmed by Flask. ‘A real gentleman, so educated and refined,’ she said. He had even given her a brooch as a token of his regard. It was the first of several gifts. Harcourt wasn’t sure that Rhoda was aware that Flask practised as a medium, since he had introduced himself as someone who had encountered her husband in the course of ‘civic affairs’. Perhaps she assumed that he had no need to earn money for it was well known that gentlemen, especially such educated and refined ones, could be idle all their lives.

But the fatal error that Frank Harcourt committed was to take money for himself. Or for the ‘household economy’ as Flask expressed it. The medium, with his perception of others’ weak points, had seen that the police superintendent was strapped. One glance around the house in Hallgarth Street, with its furniture and curtains which were new but not quite expensive enough, was sufficient to tell him that. He presented the white five-pound note to Harcourt as a favour, one friend to another. To tide him over. Pay it back when you can. Best not to say anything about it to anyone.

The superintendent reached out and felt the white paper. He closed his fingers on it. Even as he did so, he knew that he was lost. But the note amounted to more than two weeks’ wages! And he’d been having a particularly difficult time with Rhoda recently, who was insisting on the need for another housemaid. He tucked the note into his wallet and muttered something about repaying it as soon as possible. Once the money was secure, Flask produced a small black notebook and wrote down the amount and the date of the loan.

‘Why are you doing that?’ said Harcourt. ‘I’ve got a poor memory’, said Flask, ‘I note down everything. Don’t worry, we’re friends, aren’t we?’ Harcourt should have handed the money back there and then, he should have seized the notebook and torn out the offending page, but he did neither of these things. Instead the fiver lodged in his wallet like a lead weight while his hands hung heavy at his sides.

Other smaller loans had followed, two pounds here, a pound there. Having accepted one, Frank Harcourt found himself almost helpless not to accept more. These loans were never called in. Frank decided that he would prefer to be in the hands of the most grasping usurer rather than in Eustace Flask’s. For it was evident that the medium expected not cash but favours, he expected the superintendent to protect him from the law or, indeed, any unwelcome attention from the authorities. As Harcourt had described it, there were plenty of important people in Durham – several but not all of them in the church – who objected to the presence of Flask in the city. They were particularly concerned about the spinster Julia Howlett, a wealthy and respected member of the community.

The Chief Constable, old Huggins, had personally demanded to know what they were going to do about this ‘fraud’ Flask. Was it true that Harcourt knew him? said Huggins in that gruff no-nonsense manner of his. Some whispers had reached his ears. It didn’t look good, you know, for one of the senior members of the Constabulary to go round consorting with such a dubious creature. Frank protested that he was merely trying to gather evidence so that he could bring charges against the medium. ‘Well, be quick about it, Harcourt,’ barked Huggins. ‘I’d like nothing better than to see him behind bars.’

This conversation had occurred a couple of days before Harcourt’s meeting with Flask in the cathedral. What Huggins would say when and if he heard that there had been a scene involving Eustace Flask at Miss Howlett’s house, Harcourt dreaded to think. It might be enough for the Chief Constable to demand Flask’s immediate arrest even though, in this case, it seemed that the medium had been the victim and not the assailant.

The superintendent might have been relieved by Flask’s saying that he was planning to leave Durham in a few days but he wasn’t. He did not trust the medium, not an inch. And there was the threat that the man had made today, the first time he had uttered it, the threat to let slip the story of the gifts to Rhoda and the household loans. He could deny them, of course, but he wasn’t certain that his wife would keep quiet and there was the evidence in Flask’s little black book. Besides, it was already known to Alfred Huggins that he had dealings with Flask.

No, if this ever got out, Superintendent Frank Harcourt could see disgrace stretching in front of him. Stripped of his rank and discharged from the force without a penny. Worse, banged up in the gaol alongside some of the very felons he had had the pleasure of putting there.

No less hot and angry, he stalked out of the Galilee Chapel and emerged into the sunlight on the north side of the cathedral. He wiped his sweating brow. He walked over to the parapet-like wall which gave a view over the thickly wooded slope leading down to the river. He wasn’t aware of it but Tom and Helen Ansell were strolling down below him at that very moment. In fact, Harcourt was aware of nothing except his anger at Eustace Flask. Far from growing calmer, he was growing more desperate. If that fraud did not quit Durham very soon, there was no telling what might happen.

Meanwhile, the object of his fear and hatred was sailing into the cathedral library, which lay off the south side of the cloisters close to the old monks’ quarters. Eustace Flask had no strong desire to enter the library but neither did he wish to accompany Superintendent Harcourt back through the cathedral precincts. He preferred to make a slightly stagey exit and he also wanted to leave the man stewing in his own juices, so he strode off with that nonchalant wave and climbed the stairs to what had once been a refectory.

Altogether, he was satisfied at the way the encounter with Harcourt had gone. The man was literally in his debt – those little presents to his wife, those small contributions to the household economy – but it was extraordinary how ungrateful some people could be. So the occasional reminder was necessary. He wondered whether it had been wise to threaten to tell certain things to the Chief Constable because Harcourt grew even more red-faced and anxious. But it was better that the man was absolutely clear about how things stood.

Flask was convinced that he was only a couple of days away from persuading Miss Howlett to make him an allowance for his ‘researches’ and for ‘spreading the word’. He had higher ambitions than an allowance of course. An allowance, even a regular one, would cease when the old maid got some fresh bee in her bonnet and it would stop absolutely with her death, whereas a legacy would be something really worth striving for. Perhaps he should chalk a spirit message to that effect.

Flask was particularly pleased that he had succeeded in slipping the communication LIKE A SON on to the slate yesterday evening. He congratulated himself on his subtlety. He had left it to the old maid to jump to the right conclusion, namely that he, Eustace Flask, was the one who should be treated LIKE A SON. People were much more ready to believe if they did their own work in convincing themselves rather than sitting there, waiting to be convinced.

As for the message BELIEVE HELEN, that had come to him in a moment of inspiration. It established a further link between himself (or more strictly his control, Running Brook) and Miss Howlett’s family. He rather thought that the old maid’s niece and her new husband would need quite a bit of convincing. Nice-looking woman, the niece, Helen, someone with a bit of class quite unlike Kitty Partout. She had been especially attentive to him recently, perhaps because she saw him as a challenge, perhaps because she regarded him as a more secure source of income than Ambrose Barker.

Anyway, once his allowance had been signed and sealed he would set off to York, or elsewhere, secure in the knowledge that he had a guaranteed income for a time. He’d have to pop back to Durham every now and then to reassure the spinster and spin her a story or two, but essentially he was quids in. His investment in Frank Harcourt was paying off, and a nice irony was that the sums of money he had given to the policeman came indirectly from Miss Howlett, just as the gifts he had presented to Rhoda Harcourt were also from her or other ladies. (Not all of them were gifts freely made to Flask for the medium was light-fingered. It was one of his several talents.)

He poked his head round the door of the cathedral library. An individual in clerical vestments looked up from a desk by the entrance. Flask nodded and smiled at him. He walked confidently into the great book-lined chamber, knowing that if one acted with enough assurance one was rarely challenged.

There were a handful of men, mostly elderly, in the library, scribbling away or slowly turning the pages of single volumes or doing God-knows-what behind great barricades of books. Motes of dust hovered in the sunlight slanting through the high windows. Once inside, Eustace Flask found a secluded alcove among the banks of shelves. He took a letter from his pocket. He had already read the letter more than once but its contents baffled him. Or, more precisely, they raised his suspicions.

The letter, strangely affable in tone, was from the person who had done his best to disrupt the seance at Miss Howlett’s the previous evening. It made only a passing reference to their ‘unfortunate encounter’ and, by way of compensation, invited the medium to attend a forthcoming event at which he would be ‘enlightened, entertained and edified’. The letter-writer had given a time and a venue. These details and the signature at the end confirmed Flask’s intuition about the identity of the seance-spoiler. Well, that was no great surprise. There was a long-standing hostility between individuals like himself who sought to pierce the veil separating the mortal from the eternal and those who followed this particular gentleman’s… profession?… no, he would not call it a profession, but a trade. Or an activity. A cheap, crowd-pleasing activity.

There were several puzzling or worrying aspects to the letter. It had been delivered that morning to the dwelling in Old Elvet, and Flask wondered how the writer had found out the address of the house which he was renting. But that was a minor matter compared to this man’s motives. Why did he wish the medium to be ‘enlightened’ and all the rest of it? Was he holding out an olive branch with one hand and hiding a knife behind his back with the other? Or if not a knife then a piece of blue chalk. Flask’s instinct was to keep his distance, to have nothing to do with this individual. Yet at the same time his curiosity was piqued. There could be no harm, surely, in his taking up the other’s invitation? The old saying about ‘knowing your enemy’ crossed his mind.

He moved out from the shelter of the alcove and started to walk back towards the entrance to the library. On the way he was conscious of someone staring at him from behind a mound of books. There was a peculiar intensity to the stare. All he was able to see was a pair of dark eyes surmounted by wild white hair. It was not a friendly gaze. Flask did what he usually did when faced by hostility. He turned the other cheek. He dipped his head in slight acknowledgement and gave a half-smile. But the man kept on staring, if anything with greater intensity and dislike. As he passed, Flask recognized him. The straggling hair and dark eyes belonged to Septimus Sheridan, the permanent guest at Miss Howlett’s house in the South Bailey.

Eustace Flask was already aware that Sheridan was no friend to him. Stray comments and quizzical glances during his visits to Colt House suggested that Sheridan was a sceptic about spiritualism. Fortunately, Sheridan was so indebted to Miss Howlett, so ready to follow her lead, that he would never dare to contradict her openly. If he was yet another enemy, he was an enemy too feeble to influence the old maid. Flask walked on, pale head held aloft like a high candle, deigning to give Septimus Sheridan one more tiny nod.

Flask would have been surprised, even shocked, had he been able to read the other man’s thoughts. Septimus hadn’t noticed the medium’s arrival in the cathedral library. He was too wrapped up in his work (a study of the patristic fathers). It was only as Flask was leaving that he happened to glance up and see the familiar figure swaying towards him. All at once, and from nowhere it seemed, a great contempt and loathing for Eustace Flask welled up. What was that man doing here in a place devoted to study, to contemplation and religious history?

Although Septimus Sheridan had largely lost his faith, he had never lost his respect, even love, for the institutions which enshrined that faith. Hence his return to Durham and a life of undisturbed scholarship. He was glad to be allowed to live in Julia Howlett’s house under almost any terms, and he understood how much he owed to her. Understood how foolish he had been to reject her as a wife when they were both comparatively young and she had come up to the north searching for him – a typically independent action on her part.

He could hardly recall the reasons for his rejection of her now. He was sorry for it almost at once. He had moved away from the city and spent years in obscure parishes in grimy suburbs or even bleaker countryside until that terrible day, the worst day of his life, when he had written to his bishop explaining that he could no longer remain in the church with a clear conscience.

Ever since going to live at Colt House he had grown fonder than ever of Miss Howlett. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like if they were sitting round the breakfast table not as householder and lodger but as man and wife. If he were able to call her not ‘Miss Howlett’ but ‘Julia’. How would the intervening years have been different if they had married? Septimus Sheridan could not know, but different – and better – they would have been.

He was fiercely protective of Miss Howlett while realizing that she was well able to protect herself. She had resources and good sense. Except when it came to spiritualism and to Eustace Flask in particular. Septimus had not trusted Flask from the start, and the distrust had deepened to an instinctive rejection of everything that Flask said or did.

Septimus would have done almost anything to wrest Miss Howlett away from the medium. But what could he do? Perhaps it was because he was so helpless that these feelings of contempt and loathing surfaced so abruptly in the hushed surroundings of the cathedral library.