the flowers. No ear for his soundless screaming: ‘It’s all going to begin again …’
Ringing up the police—Miss Delphine Grey. ‘Mr Joseph Hawke to speak to Superintendent Tomm.’
The weary voice. ‘Yes, Mr Hawke?’
He was half hysterical, gibbering with excitement. ‘You know, Superintendent, Joseph Hawke, famed clairvoyant. I sent you that article I published after the last time. The man is a lunatic—’
The murderer killed apparently at random, anyone, any time, any place. The swift incapacitating stab in the back, the body turned over and stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again. A plastic sheet would be throw down, which had protected the killer from the spurting blood; and for the rest, no sign left, ever, no clue for a police force stretched to its limit, on the edge of desperation. And every crank in the country ringing up, writing in, with their crack-pot theories. ‘Well, so, Mr Hawke—’
‘—helpless, a psychotic, I showed that in my articles. Some childhood experience? Witnessed a killing? A stabbing? No face!—he told you that he had no face …’ (The ghastly, gobbling, whispering ’phone calls to the police, taunting them, daring them, and yet perhaps with an inherent cry for help. ‘You’ll never catch me. How would you know me?’ And the terrible choking cry, ‘I have no face.’) ‘Now, a man who says he has no face, Superintendent, he’s a psychopath, he looks in the mirror and he dares not see himself. A man who has no face—’
‘—is a man who wears a stocking-mask. Now, Mr Hawke—’
‘Yes, but one moment! This time I have something positive to tell you. I’ve seen him. In the crystal—scrying, we call it. A small man, five foot six or less, clerk type, regulation suit, knee-length mackintosh—’
‘Strikingly different from half the male population of this town. Including for example, yourself. Now, I’m frantically busy—’
‘But there’s more—’
‘—so goodbye and thank you.’ He could not forbear from adding: ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’
He fell into one of his terrible rages, hunched like a monkey in the big séance room armchair, and for a moment lost consciousness, blacked out as of late he so often did, sometimes for hours at a time, coming to spent and exhausted, deeply troubled by forgotten dreams. But Delphine was with him now, gently dabbing with a damp cloth at the haggard, narrow white face. ‘What does it matter, Mr Hawke? A dumb policeman!’
‘I could have told them—the man has red hair. But they’ll never believe in me, in my Gift—’
‘I believe in you,’ she said. ‘I know.’
Coming up to her in the crowded store, a total stranger. ‘Don’t be afraid, I only want to help you.’ But she had been afraid. Other shoppers had gathered protectively about her: was there not a mass murderer abroad? He introduced himself to them. ‘Joseph Hawke—famed clairvoyant, you’ll have heard of me. And I’ve had this vision, you see, in the crystal, I know that she’s in deep trouble.’ She had cried out—how could he possibly have known?—gone with him and confided, ashen-faced, ‘I’ve had a telephone call from him. From No Face, slopping and gobbling. It was terrifying. He said—he said, “You’re next!”’ But she was incredulous. ‘How could you know?’
He knew because he had watched her an hour ago, praying in the church before the statue of St Jude, Refuge of the Despairing. He learned a good deal from watching in churches—the widow in her mourning dress at the foot of the crucifix, the woman before the altar of St Antony of Padua who would help you to find lost things.
Horn-rimmed spectacles, mac turned inside out, a nylon wig, perhaps—he was adept at disguises, simple or elaborate: follow the victim to some busy spot where your revelations will attract potential clients for future séances. His current assistant would follow up the clues in old newspapers, parish registers, graveyards, even; and they would be duly astounded at how much he could tell them of themselves.
Delphine, frightened, without family or friends, had fallen a natural prey and in time replaced the latest helper to have departed, faith eroded by so much of fraudulence; grateful and trusting, Delphine had accepted sensibly the need of any practitioner to pad out for the credulous, trivialities unworthy of the true psychic gift. Pretty, sweet and blessedly naïve Delphine!—he might have come to love her if he could ever have felt love for anyone, poor squinny little orphanage boy, looking only inward, unto himself; but he felt only that she was caring and kind. He had never known that either.
Now she suggested: ‘Never mind the police. Tell the media.’
The media seized with joy, as ever, upon anything hinting of the occult. And here was Joseph Hawke, famed clairvoyant, describing a vision of a small man, white-collar type, and with red hair …
Two mornings later, the police issued a statement; the victim of last night’s murder had clutched, as though torn out in the struggle, a curl of black nylon: and mixed in with the nylon, two short red hairs.
Mr Joseph Hawke was a famed clairvoyant indeed.
The public were ripe for exploitation. Terror stalked in their midst. The authorities seemed helpless. But now—a Saviour! Queues formed to attend his scrying séances. He saw what they wanted him to see—the chances, he said to Delphine, were high against any of them falling victim to No Face. And of course very often, it was a genuine vision.
‘You never see me in the crystal?’ she asked, wistfully.
‘I’d have told you, wouldn’t I?’ He knew that she longed to stay with him in safety, but with this upsurge of fame he must be circumspect and she was nightly packed off to creep back to her lonely flat at the other end of town. ‘Use different exits from here, keep him guessing. You’ll be all right.’ He was impatient to get on with the affairs of Joseph Hawke. His correspondence was growing enormously. ‘If only we dared bring in some secretarial help!’
‘There’s so much stuff in the flat.’ The wired-up séance room, the rolls of fine plastic for the ectoplasm during mediumistic trance; the disguises for the follow-ups, the painted gas balloons looking down from the ceiling with dear Father’s fine features or mother’s sweet smile—it was incredible what people would believe when, in grief and anxiety, they wanted to believe. He agreed: ‘No, it’s too dangerous. We’ll have to make do with tricks, the slates and all that, and meanwhile I’ll train you in the scrying.’ He said sharply: ‘Did you hear what I said? You seem very distrait today.’
‘Yes, well … I’ve been trying to pluck up courage to tell you. The police have been questioning me. They asked how you could have known that the man has red hair. If I thought you had ever dyed your hair.’
‘Oh, my God!’ It had never occurred to him. ‘They think I know, because I’m No Face myself!’ His voice grew shrill, hysteria rose up in him like a scream. ‘They’d kill me—if such a rumour got around, the people would lynch me!’ And he began casting about, his head moving this way and that as though he might literally see a way out. ‘I’ll have to somehow prove … What proof can I show them …?’ And the darkness grew, and the swimminess, the build-up to unconsciousness; and sharply into the darkness and swimminess, a bell pealed. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he cried out. ‘They’ve come for me!’
‘It’s the people for the séance,’ she said.
By the time she had
