The enormous station was laid out according to some plan that made absolutely no sense to me—unless it were designed to hold a Minotaur. We stopped and asked directions at least three times before finding the right platform for our train, and in the end we barely made it aboard in time. To add to the anxiety, as we pushed through the crowd toward the platform where our train was loading, we were jostled every two or three steps. “Keep a hand on your wallet,” said Mr. Clemens, at my elbow. “A crowd like this is a pickpocket’s delight, and London is the closest thing you’ll find to a Yale College for the dip artists.”
“Dip artists?” I said, instinctively reaching down to pat the pocket where my wallet resided. “I never heard of such a thing.”
“It’s what the other criminals call pickpockets,” my employer explained. “Well, at least that’s what they called ’em in America, last time I talked to somebody that knew. They may call ’em something different here—but that don’t mean there’s any shortage of ’em.” He pushed ahead, I followed, and finally we found ourselves at the track where the train to Kent would be leaving. There, the crowds thinned out somewhat. As we stood waiting, a nearby newsboy began his chant, enticing the crowd to buy his papers. His Cockney accent was so thick that it took me several moments to understand what he was saying; but suddenly it became crystal clear: “Murder by a ghost! Read all about the murder by a ghost!”
Mr. Clemens recognized its significance at the same time I did. “Go get one of those papers, Wentworth,” he said. I fished the change out of my pocket, handed it to the newsboy, and brought the paper (not the Times) back to Mr. Clemens. He scanned the front page rapidly, then sputtered, “I should have known better than to get involved with those scalawags! Look at this hogwash!” He shoved the paper at me, and I dutifully examined the front page.
The headline read, SPIRITUALISTS VOW TO INVESTIGATE MURDER AT SÉANCE; ACCUSE GHOST OF KILLING DOCTOR. Underneath was a drawing of several men and ladies sitting at a table. Above them was a hand emerging from a dark cloud, firing a pistol at one of the number. One of the sitters bore a distinct resemblance to Mr. Clemens—a bit taller and thinner than my employer, but not in the least unflattering. “Actually, it’s not a bad likeness,” I said, hoping to calm him down.
“To hell with the likeness, look at the story!” he said, his voice indignant.
I looked back at the paper. The pertinent sections of the story read:
Sir Ellington Tichbourne, secretary of the London Spiritualist Society, told our reporter that the Spiritualist Society believe the murder weapon to have been an ectoplasmic pistol extruded by an evil spirit. He further revealed that the Spiritualist Society have plans to convene another sitting to call up the same spirits and confirm this finding . . . Asked whether the spirits had actually fired the deadly shot, Sir Ellington said, “That is what we mean to discover. Scotland Yard are welcome to send representatives to interview the spirits.” He added that a sufficiently powerful medium should be able to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy . . . The American writer Mark Twain, who witnessed the murder, and Inspector G. Lestrade of Scotland Yard, who is leading the police investigation, were not available for comment . . .
“This is preposterous,” I said, looking back at Mr. Clemens.
“You have a remarkable gift for understatement, Wentworth,” said my employer, shaking his head. “The damned newspaper never even tried to get my comment, or I’d have told ’em the whole thing was a pack of moonshine.”
I opened my mouth to reply to this, only to be interrupted by a station attendant announcing the arrival of our train. We joined the rest of the passengers pressing to the front of the platform, and boarded one of the carriages in plenty of time for our departure.
I had not previously been on an English train, and I was surprised to find that the train was divided into a number of separate compartments, each seating four to six passengers. If an American train car was modeled on an omnibus or streetcar, this arrangement had more in common with a stagecoach. Mr. Clemens and I found an empty compartment, and as luck would have it, when the train left the station shortly after, we two were still the only ones in it. This unexpected privacy was a pleasant change from an open train car, where one could hear and be overheard by passengers several seats away—not to mention having to smell their tobacco or perfume, or other less pleasant aromas. I suppose a bawling infant would have made its voice heard even through the partitions, but we were fortunate enough not to have that supposition put to the test.
It seemed a good opportunity for me to ask my employer’s opinion on a subject that had been on my mind since our first discovery that Martha McPhee had set up as a medium. Now the newspaper story had brought it back to my attention. Mr. Clemens might not be the ultimate authority on questions of spiritualism, but he unquestionably had strong opinions, and hearing them might help me make up my own mind on this puzzling subject.
“It’s amazing to think that all this affair came of my chance meeting with Martha McPhee,” I said. “Was that the first séance you had been to?”
Mr. Clemens turned to peer at me—he had been looking out the train window at the backs of buildings we were passing—and snorted. “Not the first,” he said. “Not the first by a long margin, though it’s probably the first one where anything the least bit interesting happened. And that was the murder, which I don’t think
