Fodor put the finch in a makeshift cage, which he set on a table in the conservatory adjoining the upstairs studio. Alma sat down at the table with Mrs Hall, and imitated the sounds that she had heard before the bird arrived. ‘She can chirp extremely well,’ observed Fodor.
Helen Russell Scott, who was standing near the conservatory door, noticed a ridge beneath the fabric on Alma’s thigh. She walked over and, on the pretext of leaning down to look at the finch, rested her hand on Alma’s knee. Alma remarked: ‘I twisted my ankle this morning and jerked my knee as well.’ She had mentioned these injuries to Dr Wills when he collected her from Victoria. She lifted her dress, saying, ‘I put a cold-water bandage on it and tied this handkerchief round. I may as well take it off now. I don’t think it’s much good.’ She undid a large handkerchief that was knotted above her knee, folded it up and handed it to Miss Scott. As Miss Scott took the handkerchief, she saw something flutter to the ground. She stooped as if to look into the cage, and while doing so fumbled on the floor with her right hand. She found the object. It was a tiny feather.
Surreptitiously, Miss Scott passed Fodor the feather. He gave it to Elyne Tufnell, his secretary, to keep safe. Miss Tufnell put it in an envelope and labelled it: ‘The feather that fell from Mrs Fielding’s skirt after the arrival of the Javanese sparrow.’
Fodor knew that he would now have to step up his research into Alma’s phenomena. There was no avoiding the fact that she had come to Walton House that afternoon with a bird tied to her thigh. His mission was confusing: he must be a dogged sleuth, working to expose Alma as an out-and-out fraud, while hoping desperately that his efforts would fail. He believed that she had strayed into trickery only to please her friends at the Institute.
Fodor began by asking the Victoria & Albert Museum whether it had lost a terracotta oil lamp or a silver coin necklace – it had not – and then took both items to the British Museum in Bloomsbury. The curator of British Antiquities told him that the lamp was an early Christian item from North Africa, and referred him to the Greek and Roman curator, who on examining the lamp said that it dated from fifth- or sixth-century Egypt or Syria. A numismatist said that the Turkish coins on the necklace were minted in about 1830, the reign of Sultan Mahmud II, and the rest was modern work; the whole was worth no more than its weight in silver.
Fodor sent Dr Wills to scour Croydon for places in which Alma might have purchased the bird or the mouse. The doctor tried three pet shops, but none of the proprietors had sold a waxbill finch that week, nor did they recognise Alma in the photograph that he showed them. He visited an antique shop, outside which Florence Hall had spotted Alma, in case it had sold her the clay lamp, the necklace or any of the stones and jewels. The owner did not recognise Alma either, but he took Dr Wills’s card and promised to telephone if she paid a visit in the future.
At the Institute, Fodor, Wilfred Becker and Shaw Desmond conducted saucer-breaking experiments, and found that they were unable to crack the plates as cleanly as Alma’s poltergeist.
Fodor planted the brass-bound brush outside the door of the seance room and watched Alma’s reaction when she emerged from the Countess’s sitting. She seemed surprised to see the brush, but almost instantly everyone was distracted by an apport that had just fallen behind a radiator, a brooch encrusted with turquoise chips.
Fodor recorded his failed attempts to rumble Alma as if they implied her honesty. The file on the case grew bulkier – with witness statements, letters, photographs – but he still did not know whether it was a catalogue of marvels, of mental breakdown, or of pranks and petty crimes.
Fodor had put a selection of Alma’s apports in a glass cabinet in Walton House, the prize exhibits in his nascent psychic museum: a silver powder compact, embossed and engraved; a T-shaped wind-up Meccano key; an art deco brooch inset with tiny paste diamonds; a miniature perfume bottle with a Bakelite stopper; the clothes brush, its stiff bristles rising from a rectangle of gleaming brass. Like the objets trouveĢs displayed as sculpture by British surrealists, these ordinary things had been endowed with uncertain meaning.
In the Countess’s development circle early in April, a spirit spoke through Alma when she went into trance. ‘Bremba,’ Alma said, very faintly, and then, in a low voice, ‘I am Bremba.’ Just the day before, the medium Mrs Sharplin had told Alma that she had a spirit control, a Persian artist, who was struggling to get through to the earthly plane.
‘Are you going to look after Mrs Fielding?’ asked Dr Wills.
‘I always look after her,’ Bremba replied, through Alma.
The Countess thanked Bremba for the charming little bird he had sent. Dr Wills asked him to help Alma project herself to the library upstairs, where Fodor was working. The spirit guide refused to participate in such stunts, and advised the investigators not to do so either – ‘Not unless you want to kill her.’ He chided them all for the demands that they were making of Alma: ‘You are children still.’ They promised him that they would stop pushing her so hard.
‘Her body is so weak,’ Bremba told them. Alma had lost more than a stone in the course of the investigation. ‘She must eat. You must make her.’
The sitters said that they would do their best.
‘I am sending a present for a brave little woman,’ Bremba announced. ‘Will you give it to her?’ The investigators looked around but could not see anything.
‘It is not visible to us yet,’ said the Countess.
‘It is at the back of Mrs Fielding,’ said Bremba. Dr Wills, who had been holding one of Alma’s hands, got up and felt behind her. He couldn’t find anything in the chair.
‘Be careful,’ said Bremba.
‘Of what?’ asked Dr Wills.
‘Her heart. No sudden movement.’ The Countess reached over and felt Alma’s heart banging in her chest. Dr Wills could feel the pulse racing at her wrist. Bremba said that he would go.
‘Leave her gently, Bremba,’ said Miss Scott.
‘Yes,’ said the spirit guide. ‘Goodbye, friends.’
Alma seemed to come round. She looked dazed, so Dr Wills brought her some brandy and water.
‘Where have you been?’ asked the Countess.
Alma said that she could not remember anything. Dr Wills searched her chair again and behind the left-hand cushion found a silver locket on a heavy chain.
After the sitting the Countess was delighted to tell Fodor that an articulate spirit had emerged to supervise Alma’s development and to communicate with her circle. Fodor was excited. He did not believe that Bremba was the spirit of a dead Persian, but he hoped that he was a new element of Alma’s unconscious self. Perhaps he would prove a civilised, protective personality, the superego to Jimmy’s id, and might even collaborate in the quest to untangle Alma’s inner life.
Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, had proposed in the 1880s that a medium’s trance voices issued not from the spirit world but from a shifting, multiple, subliminal layer of the mind. Similarly, the Swiss philosopher Théodore Flournoy argued in 1899 that the trance personalities of the French medium Hélène Smith – which included a Hindu, a Martian and the French queen Marie Antoinette – were dissociated impersonations. Fodor loved Flournoy’s book about Madame Smith and longed to develop a muse-medium with selves as rich and various. He had already studied Eileen Garrett’s secondary personalities, Uvani and Abdul Latif, and he remained fascinated by the alter egos of Lajos Pap even after he discovered that his apports were fake. Lajos’s two selves were Isaac, a fourteenth-century rabbi, and Saol, who at one seance had punched Fodor in the mouth.