Fodor said he hoped Alma would continue to visit Walton House, but under the circumstances the Institute could not pay her for the sittings. The contract was for psychic experiments, not for the ‘curative treatment’ that was now required. Fodor was telling Alma that she was not wonderful in the eyes of the researchers any more, but sick. He had continued to pay her after the X-ray, so that she did not realise that she had been caught, but he could no longer justify spending the Institute’s funds on her.
Alma left in a state of anxiety and distress.
The next morning Alma called Fodor to say that Les would not let her return to the Institute. He considered ‘a contract a contract’, she claimed, and refused to allow her visits if she were not paid. But Fodor was having none of it. He said that it was up to her, of course, but the situation was serious. If she broke off now, she would be left to her own devices, and he took no responsibility for what might happen to her. It would look very bad, he added, for her to call a halt to the sittings: everyone would assume that she had been found out as a cheat. So far, he said, no one else knew about the X-rays. This was a tacit threat: if Alma did not comply with his wishes, Fodor could make the evidence public.
Alma said that she would come to Walton House on Friday without Les’s knowledge.
Just as the incubus in Alma’s bed had been replaced with a vampire, so the investigation had changed character. At first, Fodor had been as enchanted as a lover, feeding Alma with ideas and suggestions, rewarding her for her daring and invention, coaxing and grooming her. Now he was probing and aggressive, unpicking her with X-rays of her chest and pelvis, sniffs at her apports, visits sprung on her at home, threats of exposure. The more worried he became about Alma’s mental state, the more roughly he treated her. In his anger and frustration, he had even imagined that the searchers might grab her genitals in search of secret objects – in effect, he had considered staging a sexual assault. It was little wonder that Alma’s body no longer felt her own.
René Magritte was photographed at the London Gallery in Mayfair that spring with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and his arm draped round L’Évidence éternelle, five framed oil paintings mounted one above another on a Plexiglass stand. Each painting showed a segment of a woman’s naked body, cropped almost as tightly as Fodor’s X-rays of Alma’s torso: the head, the breasts, the pelvis, the knees, the feet. Magritte had scrutinised, dismantled and reassembled his nude, and in doing so created a cut-up woman, somewhere between image and object, possessed but also broken.
The High Court wrote to Fodor that week asking him to submit evidence for his suit against Psychic News. He and the defendants had two weeks to supply documents, the court informed him, and the trial would be held a few weeks later. Fodor feared the worst. Everything about his investigation of Alma – his use of X-rays, her fraud, her distress – would give his enemies more ammunition.
When Alma visited the Institute for a therapeutic session on Friday 27 May, she had put on two pounds in weight. Fodor hypnotised her (‘Your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier… They are heavy as lead and you are going to sleep… sleep… sleep…’) and when she was in trance he encouraged her to gain even more (‘Repeat after me… I will add two more pounds to my weight’). While she was having tea in the conservatory after the seance, her belly began to swell again, as if in enthusiastic response to his instructions. Her skirt had to be undone and her waist when measured was found to be thirty-four inches round, even bigger than last time. Her stomach was hard. She wished there were an X-ray machine handy to scan her abdomen, she said, in case there was a ‘psychic baby’ inside.
Alma offered no explanation for the damning shapes on the scan that had been made of her chest. Instead, she told Fodor a ghost story from her childhood. When she was seven, she said, she lived in a big old house in Bensham Manor Road, Thornton Heath, in which the windows and mirrors used to mysteriously clean themselves at night. Alma’s mother suggested one day that they smear the panes with ashes. The family came down the next morning to find the glass clear and shining again.
The following Tuesday, the researchers discovered that Alma had lost half a pound. As she lay on the buttoned leather couch beneath the window in the small seance room, Fodor took her hands and talked her into a trance. Then he reprimanded her.
‘Mrs Fielding, you have not carried out, regarding your weight, my suggestion. You have not added two pounds to your weight. Can you account for this disobedience? Why have you not increased your weight? Will you answer me? Speak! Can you hear me speaking? Speak! Speak! Speak! Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice? Can you hear me speaking, Mrs Fielding? Answer me! Answer me! You must answer me! Can you hear me speaking to you? I give you two minutes to answer. In two minutes’ time you must speak. You must speak in two minutes.’
His voice became louder and sterner with each command but Alma remained silent. Her brow was knitted and her head moved from side to side.
‘Will you speak?’ asked Fodor. ‘Do you prefer to write?’
A pencil and paper had been placed on a box at the side of the sofa. Fodor put the pencil in Alma’s right hand.
She moved the pencil across the paper. ‘Be warned,’ her hand wrote.
‘Of what, Mrs Fielding?’ said Fodor. ‘Will you speak to me? You cannot possibly disobey. Will you answer me? Can you hear my voice? Answer me. Can you hear me?’ Fodor was losing his composure, and in the absence of the Countess, now on holiday on the Continent, there was no one to protect Alma.
Afterwards, Alma said that she had felt ‘buried alive’ while in trance, as if she were down a deep well, and when she tried to shout could not be heard. She felt herself being pushed, but could not tell by what or whom.
Fodor was coming to feel trapped in this investigation himself, unable to let Alma go until he had rid her of the disturbing manifestations that he might himself have induced.
Fodor hypnotised Alma again that afternoon.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Alma, her forehead furrowed and her face flushed.
‘Who are you?’ asked Fodor.
‘I am Bremba.’
Bremba admonished Fodor for the way that he had treated Alma: ‘You found the medium could not answer, so you shouted and shouted. That is wrong. You should let her rest.’
Fodor asked Bremba about the incriminating square of linen. Bremba replied with the observation that there was ‘more than one lady in the room’ when the linen was found: ‘I leave you to draw your own conclusions.’ Fodor was shocked by the insinuation that one of the other sitters had dropped the cloth.
Bremba was behaving like ‘a cornered criminal’, wrote Fodor, ‘whose last defence is to claim a frame-up’. Alma should have shown better sense. ‘The accusation was not only a complete give-away but it also alienated the sympathies of the ladies who so far were the medium’s best friends and were ready to make any allowance for her.’
Alma was drinking a cup of tea during the break when Laurie heard something fall; behind her chair he found an eighteen-carat gold ring inset with a cluster of seed pearls and a ruby. This was an unusually valuable apport, worth £3 or more. Even now Alma was trying to appease the investigators with gifts.
Alma cried out that she had been scratched. Fodor and Laurie took her to the small seance room, where she pulled off her sweater to reveal three six-inch streaks from her clavicle all the way round to the small of her back. Laurie pressed his thumb into her flesh and watched the skin redden.