The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  The photo of Gloria most often printed was a studio portrait that looked to be recently done: Gloria in a bold-print wrap dress that accentuated her flawless narrow frame, her black hair bobbed and marcelled, curling almost sensuously over one ear. Her chin was tilted, her dark-painted lips set in a mischievous smile, her big dark eyes rendered black in cheap ink. She looked like the hoyden she was, rebellious and full of glamour. I found myself mildly surprised she’d sat for a studio portrait at all; Gloria did not like to sit still, even for short periods.

  Still, I bought three papers and read them as I sat on the train. The stories were full of the usual misinformation and shaded truths that always cropped up in stories about Gloria: lovers she’d never actually had, parties never attended, rumors of everyone from the Church to royalty on her client list. All Gloria had to do was appear in public, innocently standing next to this person or that, and suddenly she was written into legend as either the man’s lover or his pet psychic. “My God,” she’d said to me once, when I’d shown her an article linking her to the Earl of Craven. “I think not. His breath was positively rotten.”

  As for the murder, the papers knew precious little. She’d been working for a “private party” at an “undisclosed home” in the Kent countryside when she’d been killed. One paper called the session a ghost hunt; another called it a séance. Scotland Yard had questioned all of the parties involved but had made no arrests. The other people in attendance that night were not named.

  Two of the three articles mentioned the now notorious report by the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research, uncovered by the Mail two months earlier, concluding that Gloria was the only true spirit medium they had ever investigated. The articles aimed derision at both the report and the Society itself, “an unusual group of so-called scientists and untrustworthy researchers, mixed in with wealthy eccentrics and curious artistic types, claiming to be on a quest for the truth about the supernatural.” I felt my jaw harden. I had my own reasons for disliking the New Society, but the press’s—and the public’s—attitude toward it was not new. It was easier for the average factory foreman or bank clerk to dismiss the New Society as fools than to face the possible alternative.

  Not one article wondered what ghost Gloria had been seeking, or whether she had found it, or what it had said to her if she had. No one questioned why she was at a private home in the first place, something she had never done before.

  Reporters, I thought, only ever wrote about the inconsequential details and never about the important things.

  I threw down the newspapers in frustration as the train came to my stop, leaving them there for someone else to read.

  In Trafalgar Square, I found a bench and sat with my hands in my lap, waiting. It was a crisp, warm September morning, the dome of St. Paul’s looming bright against the cloudless blue sky, Nelson atop his column peering over all our heads into the distance. On the pedestal at the base could still be seen the marks of the victory bonfire that had burned there during the Armistice celebrations—several days of wild madness in the streets, or so I had read. I had stayed home on my mother’s orders, staring at the walls and wondering madly what was going on.

  I had deliberately dressed in deadly navy blue today, a suit of wool serge trimmed with silk braid, the hem just long enough, my heels just high enough. I had topped it with a felt cloche hat sporting a satin flower. I was a shopgirl, or a secretary who came to the City every morning and made awful tea in an electric kettle as she typed letters all day. Only my bright blond hair—natural, as it happened, though most people assumed I dosed it with platinum—gave away that I wasn’t exactly a normal girl, but there was nothing I could do about it except bob it short and tuck it under my hat.

  “Miss Winter.”

  I turned on my bench to address the voice behind me. “Mr. Sutter. You are almost late.”

  He gave me a look that said lateness was not in his repertoire. “It is ten o’clock exactly.” He took a seat on the bench next to me, though he kept a respectable distance. He wore a dark three-piece suit much like the one he’d worn the night before. I pictured an entire wardrobe of similar suits, all kept cleaned and pressed by the mother of his children. “I take it you’ve thought further about our conversation last night?” he said to me now.

  I looked away and idly watched a street performer, a man with a windup organ that played an out-of-key tune as the man made a marionette dance on its strings. “I don’t understand exactly what it is you want me to do.”

  “Perhaps,” George Sutter said, “I wasn’t being clear.”

  The street performer put down his marionette and wound his music player again. “I read the papers,” I said. “It seems that Scotland Yard is on the case.”

  I heard him sigh. “Miss Winter, what I am about to tell you is in confidence.”

  I turned and looked at him. His expression gave nothing away, as usual. He seemed to have regained his balance after the night before; here, in daylight in London’s center of power, he was back in control. “Go on,” I said. “I deal in confidences for a living.”

  “I have seen the coroner’s report,” he said. “It was released to the Yard this morning. It states that Gloria was hit in the face. Once, very hard, while she was still alive. Then a knife was inserted into her chest. She was stabbed, yes, but that word isn’t quite accurate. What was done to Gloria was done slowly, precisely, and without passion. She had no defensive wounds on her hands. There is no bruising around the wound, as of a man punching the blade with force. The knife was inserted between her ribs and into the cavity of the heart, causing the heart to cease almost immediately. Death, the coroner states, would have come in seconds.”

  I looked down at my lap.

  “So he hit her first,” George said. “Once, hard enough to stun her. Then he put a knife into her and stopped her heart. Then he carried her body to the pond and dumped her in. She had told the others she wanted some air, and she was not immediately missed. Because the body was hidden in the pond, it was some time before she was discovered and anyone knew a murder had occurred.”

  I frowned. How could he know all of this?

  He continued talking. “Scotland Yard has interviewed all of the people present that night, of course. You may have noticed that none of them are named in the papers. Most of the people in attendance were inconsequential; however, one of them was from a good family who wishes to keep things quiet. Suspicion falls on all of them, but the house was not exactly isolated. There are neighboring homes twenty minutes’ walk in two directions, and the property backs onto woods in which there are well-trodden paths. The pond itself is in easy reach of at least two of those paths. A stranger or neighbor could have done this just as easily as one of the inner group—more easily, in fact, as the people inside the house are now alibis for one another.”

  “They could be covering for someone,” I said, my words almost automatic. I had a suspicion about who the person “from a good family” was.

  “I thought so as well,” George replied, “but the Scotland Yard reports indicate that this was not a group of loyal friends. Far from it, in fact. They seem to have been a random group of pleasure seekers.”

  “The Scotland Yard reports?” I asked. “Gloria was murdered just over a day ago, and the papers say nothing. How have you seen the reports?”

  “That’s none of your concern,” he said, turning away and looking out over the traffic passing in the square.

  I tried to follow his gaze, taking a closer look around me. The spires of the Houses of Parliament were visible not very far away; Scotland Yard itself, though it couldn’t be seen, was not far, either. Any number of government buildings, including Buckingham Palace, was within easy distance. My companion had approached me from behind, and I hadn’t seen which direction he’d come from.

  “Mr. Sutter, what exactly do you do for a living?”

  He sho
ok his head. “That is also not your concern, Miss Winter. Be assured my sources of information are valid. What I’m telling you is the truth. May I continue?”

  I trained my gaze on a man sitting on another bench in the square, reading a newspaper propped in front of his face. MURDER! the headline shouted. NOTORIOUS PSYCHIC STABBED TO DEATH AT SÉANCE. And underneath it: WHO KILLED GLORIA SUTTER?

  “Continue,” I said.

  “I’ll put it bluntly. We may have been estranged, Miss Winter, but someone brutally killed my sister and dumped her body. I have no faith that Scotland Yard can solve this crime. There are too many possibilities.”

  “They’ve barely begun investigating,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I have no faith, Miss Winter. None at all. This is not unusual for me. Even in the smallest things, I never have faith that anything competent can be done unless I’m in charge. And this is, to me, very far from a small thing. They have not even found a murder weapon. I will not go home and wait for the official investigators to bungle this up. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. I did. To my left, I vaguely heard the marionette man playing his music again. The man reading the newspaper turned a page.

  “I considered hiring an investigator, but the note Gloria left me made it simple. I came to see you instead, and you impressed me. You are not a con artist as I suspected. You are honest. You are, in fact, the ideal candidate. You knew Gloria. You can talk to her friends, her associates without suspicion. You can move in her world in a way that no one else can—especially me. And you specialize in finding lost things.”

  “I don’t talk to the dead,” I said, panic in my throat.

  “Perhaps you don’t, though I’m well aware that your mother did.” He caught the look I gave him. “It’s hardly private record, and I told you I researched you. Perhaps you’re correct and Gloria’s note was wrong. But you have a talent, a sensitivity. I may not understand it, but I don’t have to in order to make use of it. You are my investigator, Miss Winter. You will find who killed her for me.”

  I leaned my head back, looked up at the sky. The usual London gloom had vanished, and I looked into a vista of cerulean blue punctuated by far-off clouds. The usual protests bubbled up in me: I wasn’t trained as an investigator; it wasn’t my profession; I would have no idea what I was doing; I already had a job. “I don’t work for you,” I told him, still staring up at the sky. “I have no access to coroner’s reports or papers from Scotland Yard.”

  “You’ll have what you need,” he said.

  Of course. I rubbed my nose, unladylike. “Did your research tell you that we were enemies, Gloria and I? Did it tell you what she did to my family? That I hadn’t spoken to her in three years?”

  “If that mattered, Miss Winter, you wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

  I hated her. Or I had, at one point. But I thought about that knife, the cold dispassion of it. Someone had slipped it between her ribs and stopped her heart as easily as if they’d put a key in a lock. Someone who hadn’t even cared enough to hate her.

  Still I kept my head tilted back and I stared at the sky. It was beautiful, and endless, and uncaringly cold. Mysterious in its way. All the mysteries of the universe were just above us, if only we would look up. And yet we never did.

  “Miss Winter?” George said. If he thought it strange that I sat on a bench in Trafalgar Square staring at the sky, he made no comment.

  “The papers,” I said at last. “Scotland Yard. No one is asking the right questions. No one.”

  He sounded almost relieved. “How many of your appointments did you cancel today?”

  I finally lowered my gaze, righted my head, and looked at him. “All of them.”

  He nodded, and his eyes gleamed, whether from satisfaction or excitement I could not tell. “Exactly,” he said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My mother had been a spirit medium since before I was born. She’d been orphaned by age twenty, her parents of artistic vagabond stock, and she’d set up shop doing séances and performing spirit writing. It had been a better way to earn money than char work, she told me, as long as you were careful about it. And she had been good. Very, very good.

  My father, a young postal clerk from a good family, had met her in a pastry shop and fallen in love with her. He didn’t care what she did for a living. It was only after they’d married and settled in the house in St. John’s Wood that my mother bought the beaded dress, had the sign painted for the window, and began business as The Fantastique. She stopped doing group séances, which had a taste of seediness to them, and replaced them with discreet one-on-one consultations. It was her stab at respectability, at trying to appease the neighborhood for my father’s sake without giving up her work. I learned from my earliest years to be quiet when Mama was working.

  And she did keep it respectable, remarkably so. Her client list was discreet and carefully chosen; as a child I watched well-dressed men and women of obvious class and money come and go from our little house. We got appointment requests from well-trained assistants and underlings. I became accustomed to the sight of a sleek carriage—or, increasingly, a motorcar—pulling up our lane, steered by a uniformed driver, stopping just long enough for a beautiful woman or gray-haired gentleman to alight before it pulled away again, reappearing only after the appointed hour.

  It was all very civilized, if you didn’t think about the things I witnessed in our little sitting room. The things I saw.

  My own talent became evident by school age. I’d thought it would please her; I didn’t know that having the powers I had made one a freak, a pariah. But my mother knew. She must have known, from very early on, what kind of life I would have. And so she gave me an education of a different sort.

  I watched the birds alight on Nelson’s statue, flitter off, and land again.

  You have a talent, a sensitivity.

  I smoothed my hand over my handbag, where I’d placed the envelope George Sutter had given me. It contained a small stack of banknotes—a retainer, he’d called it, to replace the business I’d lose during the investigation. I had just curled my fingers around it, preparing to rise, when the man on the bench across from me lowered his newspaper with its lurid headline and stood. He tossed the paper on the seat behind him, adjusted the brim of his hat, and came sauntering toward me, his hands in the pockets of his coat. My mouth went dry and everything stopped.

  He paused in front of me, looking down at me, his knees almost touching mine. “Ellie Winter,” he said.

  For a second I was speechless. I could do nothing but stare. He was as strong as I remembered, his shoulders bulky under the fabric of his jacket. His dark suit fit him perfectly, the shirt beneath it crisp white. I knew that his hair beneath the hat was dark blond and kept shorter than the current fashion. When he put his hands in his pockets—an ungentlemanly pose—his arms flexed and curled, and he looked almost menacing, looming over me with a lazy grace. His blue-gray eyes flickered down over me and up again, disintegrating my respectable blue suit as if it were a wisp of cloth.

  I stared back at him, trying not to let my cheeks flame. “An unusual group of so-called scientists and untrustworthy researchers,” the papers had said about the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research. I was looking at one of those untrustworthy researchers now. Its top researcher, in fact. The one who had, three years before, investigated both my mother and me.

  “James Hawley,” I managed, my throat tight. “What the hell do you want?”

  He shook his head, not bothering to tut at my language. His voice was deep and smooth. “He’s a ghost,” he said, “that friend of yours. Sutter. Did you know that?”

  “Pardon me?”

  He lifted his gaze away from seeing through my clothes and looked around the square, taking in the surrounding buildings. “I can’t find out who he works for,” he said. “I’ve tried. No
one is talking. I thought Scotland Yard at first, but now I’m not so certain. Now I think he may be MI5.”

  That was curious; I imagined that when James questioned people, they usually talked—women because he was so handsome, men because of the size of his arms. “Why are you here?” I asked him, suspicious. “Are you following me?”

  “Actually, I was following Sutter. Or I was trying to. He’s as slippery as a fish.”

  “Then why aren’t you following him now?”

  “Because you’re more interesting than he is.”

  “Very funny.” My cheeks flushed this time, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want James Hawley’s attention. I patted my handbag, looking fruitlessly for a cigarette. “I take it you’re still working for the New Society.”

  “I am,” he said, watching my hands. “And you’re still in St. John’s Wood, taking clients and staying respectable.” He motioned at my handbag. “I don’t think you have any cigs in that thing, though you do have the money Sutter gave you.”

  My gaze shot up to his. He was watching me carefully, his eyes shaded under the brim of his hat. “My money is my business, James,” I said. “Though I know you don’t agree.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets again and let that one go. “It’s just interesting,” he said. “Gloria is dead. I follow her brother, and I find The Fantastique, of all people. The two of you have a little tête-à-tête and he gives you money. Now I’m curious.” His blue-gray gaze caught mine, held it. “You know how I get when I’m curious.”

  My face burned. “I know very well,” I said to him. “The results were in that paper you wrote for everyone to read. The one the Daily Mail resurrected two months ago.” I dropped my hands from my handbag. “It was a three-year-old report, James. What was it doing in the newspaper?”