‘Do you still have Edna Wagstaff’s cat?’ asked May, looking around for the Abyssinian.
‘I use it as a doorstop,’ Maggie admitted. ‘I fear its days as a source of spiritual succour ended when it got the moth. Of course I can’t throw it out, because I have nothing else to remember Edna by, and she doesn’t answer the Call’—Maggie pointed at the cracked Tibetan bell that hung above the fireplace—’because she’s a lost soul. Either that or she’s gone deaf. You’ve lost a bit of weight. Are you dying?’
‘God, I hope not.’
‘God’s not got much to do with it any more. You’re not coping well without Arthur, are you?’
‘I’ll manage,’ May replied wearily. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’
‘I just made tea. You can have a shot of whisky in it.’
‘What brand?’
‘PG Tips.’ She made her way to the kitchenette and rinsed a mug. ‘I suppose you want “closure”. That’s the buzzword these days, isn’t it? When will people learn that there’s no such thing? Life and death are open-ended. Everything begins and ends in the middle.’
‘Not this time,’ said May, accepting the mug. ‘I know who killed Arthur. I just don’t know where he is.’
‘Perhaps I can help you there. Hang on a minute.’ Maggie crossed to the window and shut the curtains. ‘Did you remember what I asked for?’
‘Here.’ May withdrew a plastic bag from his overcoat pocket and emptied the contents onto the coffee table before him. ‘You said bring something that belonged to him.’
‘What is it?’
‘A souvenir of our first case together. It belonged to a tortoise called Nijinsky.’
Maggie picked up the tortoise shell and peered through its leg holes. ‘What did you do with the body?’
‘I guess it just, you know, decomposed or something. Bryant was given the tortoise because it wouldn’t hibernate in the theatre. It lived right through the war, although its nerves went towards the end.’
‘It’s a bit Steptoe-ish, but it’ll have to do.’ She lit a pair of candles and set them at either end of the tortoise’s earthly remains. ‘Rest your fingertips on one end of the shell.’
‘Which end?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She seated herself opposite and extended her fingers to touch the tortoise, then began breathing deeply through her nose.
‘You think you can really contact him?’ May could hardly believe that he was doing this, after all the times he had given his partner grief about believing in the afterlife.
‘As long as it’s an object he touched many times in the past.’
‘Oh, he had many happy years with Nijinsky.’
‘Good. Now shut up and let me concentrate.’
May watched in the half-light of the front room as Maggie rolled back her head and fell into a light trance. After a few minutes, she started snoring. May wondered whether he should wake her. He leaned forward and reached out his hand, but just as he was about to touch her, she spoke. ‘Do you remember the first time we met, John? What a sceptic you were in those days?’
‘I still am,’ he whispered.
‘I can’t be right all the time.’ Her eyes remained closed. ‘But you—I was right about you. You always did have a very powerful aura.’
‘That’s what Edna Wagstaff once told me.’
‘So you do, and it’s that which enables the sensitively gifted to read from you. You’re a bit of a tuning fork.’
The wind breathed around the sashed windows, pulsing them in their casements. The sound faded from the street, and time was gently suspended. He remembered his first visit to the flat in 1942, when Maggie had just passed her nineteenth birthday. The surroundings were more elegant; she had fallen on hard times since then. But the flickering candles were the same, and so were the oddly shadowed corners of the room. He remembered the settling silence of the street outside, the suspiration of the wind, and the strange visions she had described to him.
‘Oh, we’re like hypnotists,’ said Maggie, her slack mouth barely moving. ‘Nobody believes in our effectiveness until some time later. You and I have known each other for over sixty years, and you still don’t really have faith in me.’
‘I wouldn’t say—’
‘There’s no point in pretending, John. We’re both far too old for that.’ She drew a long breath, her trance state deepening. ‘I am speaking now to the owner of this shell.’ She tightened her eyelids, focusing her thoughts. ‘He is dead, but present,’ she explained casually, ‘here in the room with us, right now. He is standing between us, silently watching.’