The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  The woman who picked up the line was nasal, businesslike, obviously a secretary of some kind. She did not speak a greeting. “To whom am I speaking?” she said in my ear.

  “My name is Ellie Winter,” I replied, my voice croaking. I had not spoken for hours. “I have a message for George Sutter.”

  The woman made no comment. “What is your message?”

  “Where is he?” I asked her, knowing I would get no answer.

  “What is your message?” the woman asked again.

  I closed my eyes. I smelled the cigarette smoke, the damp, close air of the telephone box. I listened to water patter on the roof. I was speaking to a stranger I couldn’t see, sending my message down the lines to a woman who did not know me, did not care if I lived or died. No, I was no longer afraid. I was angry.

  “‘You missed him,’” I said, each word lifting off me like a weight. “‘Ramona is dead.’” I thought it over, and added, “‘I resign.’ That is the message.” Then I hung up.

  There was a hard rap on the glass door, and I jumped. I turned to see a fortyish man in a heavy mackintosh holding an umbrella over his head, knocking on the door and gesturing impatiently for me to get on with it. I blew out a breath, then gestured back at him.

  “Go away,” I called through the glass, and picked up the receiver to make my next telephone call.

  * * *

  It was raining fully by the time James found me at the Saratoga Hotel. I had taken a seat on one of the plush chairs at the back of the lobby, next to a luxurious fern placed in the corner. My shoes were slowly drying by then, and I’d taken off my dripping hat. A drink sat untouched on the table before me.

  James wore a coat of dark gray, his umbrella folded under his arm. He dropped into the seat across from me without a word. I watched his strong, easy movements, smelled the cool, rain-scented air he brought with him, ran my gaze along the shadow of blond stubble on his jaw. He looked at me for a long time as people flowed past behind him and laughter came from a group exiting the elevator and heading out into the night.

  “All right,” he said finally. “It’s done. I went past there myself. They’ve taken away the body, and the crowd of neighbors is starting to disperse.”

  I licked my lip. “Thank you.”

  He sighed and took off his damp hat, tossing it onto the seat next to him. “Of all the telephone calls, that one was the least expected.” He nodded toward the drink in front of me. “Are you going to drink that?”

  “I couldn’t leave her there,” I said. “Just leave her—like that. You know I couldn’t. I had to know that someone had found her.”

  “Well, it looks like Sutter got your message and called the police. Or, more likely, had a lackey do it.” He picked up my drink and took a swallow, the strong muscles of his throat working. He caught my glance and the smile he gave me was bitter. “Don’t worry. I’m not a drunk anymore. I’ve just had a hell of a day.”

  “What about Davies?” I said. I’d asked him to check on her, to see whether she had ever come home. Then I had sat here, waiting for him as the centuries ticked by, knowing deep down what the answer would be.

  James leaned his sleek bulk back in his chair and shook his head. “She hasn’t come home. I even checked with that fake skimmer who rents the shop on the ground floor. She hasn’t heard anyone come or go, and she’s been taking clients since four o’clock.”

  “There was time,” I said, the words tumbling out of me, though I didn’t move. My body felt frozen in place, my legs stiff. “I’ve been thinking about it while I’ve been sitting here, waiting for you. There was just time for the same man to have taken Davies and killed Ramona. If he was—if he was quick with Davies . . . If he disposed of her somewhere . . .”

  “Stop it,” he said, his voice hard.

  “I failed them.” The words seemed to crack me open. “I failed them both. I could have been half an hour earlier. Twenty minutes. When I stood on Ramona’s front step, I could have turned around and waited for him and screamed.”

  “You’d have had a knife in the ribs for your trouble,” James said. “Quick and quiet. This man is no amateur, Ellie. He’s no madman running around the streets speaking in tongues. He’s some sort of professional. Your best action was to run.”

  “I keep coming back to the rope.” I leaned forward now, put my elbows on my knees. A man in an evening jacket passed us, looked me up and down, and carried on. “The rope and the sign that said the stairs were out of order. He’d set it up. He knew the layout of Ramona’s building. He knew when she’d be home, how to get her to let him into her flat. He knew how much time he needed. He knew the lift made a lot of noise. He took the time to bring supplies with him. What kind of man does that?”

  “Jesus, Ellie.” James leaned forward, took my hands in his. He gripped me hard, his fingertips pressing into my wrists past the edges of my gloves, and in the middle of everything I reveled almost painfully in that touch, enjoyed the fire it set in my veins with a fierceness I did not recognize. “Shut up, will you? It’s driving me insane, just thinking of how close you came.”

  “George Sutter has been having me followed,” I told him. “But I’d lost him by then. So I have no other witnesses, no one who saw.”

  James’s grip grew even harder on my wrists. “What did you say?”

  So I told him about the man in the houndstooth jacket, how he had followed me to James’s flat that morning—it felt like decades ago—and to Piccadilly Circus, and how I’d lost him. James stared at me for a long minute when I finished, his gaze on me. His mood was as wild as mine, I realized, and the thought made my heart thump and my blood sing crazily.

  “That conniving bastard.” James dropped my wrists and leaned back in his chair. “Bloody hell. He’s been manipulating you. Manipulating us.”

  “I’ve been going over and over it,” I said. “Why would he contact me, hire me, if he’s already two steps ahead of me?”

  “Don’t you know why?”

  He waited for me to answer. I wished I could swear like a man, like a sailor, but my mother’s training was too ingrained. “It’s one thing to know who the murderer is,” I said, “but it’s another thing to know where he is, isn’t it? I was bait.” I rubbed my hands roughly over my temples. “James, the killer knows who I am. He knows. He wasn’t in a hurry, didn’t need to rush. How does he know everything?”

  “Ellie,” James said, “the Dubbses have left England.”

  I dropped my hands. “What?”

  “I tried to set up an interview today. I couldn’t reach anyone, and I finally found their occasional housekeeper. They packed up and left for the continent. They’ve gone.”

  “So they were in on it,” I said.

  “Or they’ve been threatened, and they’re afraid.”

  “How easy for them,” I said. I grabbed my coat and stood. “I have to go.”

  As I crossed the lobby, my heels ringing hollowly on the marble tile, I knew he was following me. I felt his presence like a solid mass behind me, watching me, not letting me go. The hotel doormen were assisting well-dressed couples into taxis waiting on the street outside, men in evening coats and tails, women in silk gowns and jewels. Through the glass doors to my right I could see the hotel bar, could hear laughter and the clink of glasses and the soft tinkle of a piano. A Friday evening in London. The man who killed Gloria was out there somewhere. I pushed past a doorman and out into the rain.

  The water was icy on my neck. Water splashed through my shoes and up the backs of my stockings. I pushed through the crowds of people headed for Charing Cross. Behind me, Waterloo Bridge loomed low over the Thames, the river hurling angrily at the base of its arches.

  An arm came around my shoulders and I was pulled against a hard, familiar body. An umbrella snapped open overhead. “This way,” he said, his voice rough.

  He steered me down a
side street, his arm heavy around me. I smelled wet pavement and damp wool and James. My skin sang, even through the layers of clothing, and there was water on my cheeks. He swung me into the notch of a church doorway, out of the rain, my back against the brick. He closed and dropped the umbrella and his face was stark in the light from a far-off streetlamp.

  “Come here,” he said, and kissed me.

  It was harsh and gentle at the same time. He was warm against my cold lips, and his big hands came up and cradled my head, his thumbs against my cheeks. He tasted like salt and gin and rain. There was a rushing in my ears, darkness before my eyes, and in a prickling explosion of sensation nothing existed but James. He pressed my shoulders hard into the cold brick and his stubble scraped my skin.

  My reaction was instantaneous. I grasped the lapels of his coat and pulled him closer, kissing him harder. He pushed back, gripping my shoulders, and I moaned, biting his lip. He used the opportunity to open my mouth and slide his tongue along the inside of my upper lip, tasting me, raw with anger and emotion and his own bottomless need, and as lights seemed to go off in my brain I fell harder in that moment than I had ever thought possible for any man.

  My hands hurt from my desperate grip on his coat. Part of me knew that I was cold and damp and that the bricks behind me were rough, but none of it mattered. He lowered his hands and I slid my arms around his neck, feeling the strength of his shoulders under the coat. He put his hands on my hips and kissed his way down my neck, behind my ear, his skin prickling mine. He bit my earlobe, and when I gasped at the sensation, he kissed me again. I couldn’t breathe; I didn’t want to breathe. I only wanted it never, ever to stop.

  When he finally broke the kiss, his hands still on my hips, I let my head tilt back against the wall, the rainy air vivid against my flushed skin. “Why did you wait so long?” I asked, catching my breath.

  He leaned in and I felt his breath against my ear. “You hated me until three days ago,” he said. “I was biding my time.”

  “I’ve forgiven you for that,” I said.

  “Good.” He took his hands from my hips and placed them against the wall on either side of me, blocking me in, his unbuttoned coat falling open. His gaze held mine, dark and possessive. He seemed to be searching for something in my face, his breath coming hard. I felt his heat. I dropped my hands.

  “I want to go to your flat,” I told him. “I have something to show you.”

  He smiled a little, raw need overlaid with humor. “Interesting,” he replied. “I think that’s my line.”

  “What— Oh!” My cheeks flushed. It was ridiculous that I would feel embarrassed in front of a man I’d just kissed like that, but there it was. I wished fiercely that I was more sophisticated with men, but there was nothing to be done about it now. “I don’t mean that. I mean—”

  “I know.” He slid a finger just under the collar of my dress, traced it along the skin of my neck and my collarbone almost wistfully before dropping his hand. “I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer. I’ll get us a taxi.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “No, no, no,” James said. “None of this works. Let’s try again.”

  He put his elbows on his knees and thrust his hands through his hair. We were at his flat, where we’d been for hours, going over the codes in Gloria’s handwritten schedule. He was in his shirtsleeves, the button at the throat of his shirt undone. Outside the rain had not abated; it had only grown heavier, and rolls of thunder weighed heavily over the rooftops.

  I dropped into the other chair and looked again at the sheet of paper we’d used for our latest attempt at a cipher. “My daily woman says she can keep Pickwick for the night,” I said. I’d gone down the hall to use the boardinghouse’s only telephone.

  James shook his head, staring down at the paper. “God knows how you picked up a dog.”

  “It doesn’t matter how,” I said, not wanting to think about Mr. Bagwell. “But I’ve been a dog owner for less than a day, and already I’ve fallen down on the job.” I motioned to the paper, which was on the table next to the three telegrams and the three photographs, which I’d also shared with James. “I thought that last one would work.”

  “Bloody hell. It doesn’t.”

  I was quiet for a moment, rubbing my stockinged feet. Despite everything—the fear, the uncertainty, Ramona’s murder, the fact that it had almost been my murder, too—part of me was humming with excitement at being here, alone with James in his little flat. I liked watching him work. I liked what the rainy light did to his handsome, intelligent face. After that scorching kiss in the doorway, I wasn’t certain I’d be able to concentrate. But we had quickly become immersed in the puzzle of Gloria’s final week, working together as easily as if we’d done it for years, the seriousness of it doing nothing to diminish the quiet pulse of excitement in my veins.

  James gazed down at the desktop, unseeing, his head still in his hands. “It’s the three-digit sequence that makes no sense,” I said. “Except for ‘44,’ which is two digits.”

  We’d tried everything to figure out what the numbers meant, marrying numbers to letters in a code. We knew which client the Dubbses were—277—and we had tried to work backward, cracking the other names from there. We’d tried master code words—guessed, of course—used as a key, numeric patterns, mathematical algorithms, everything we could think of. It made sense that a combination of either two or three letters would represent a set of initials: first name, last name, and a third letter for the middle name inserted whenever there was a possibility of duplicates. But it seemed that what made sense was obviously not the case.

  What mattered most to us, of course, was not the week’s schedule, but the number Gloria herself had written in—321B—on the day before she died. If we could crack her code, we could figure out where she’d gone that day, the appointment so secret that even Davies hadn’t known about it.

  “It can’t possibly be a simple list, can it?” James asked. “A simple list of names in order, with every new client given a number?”

  “The highest number on that list is 321,” I replied. “Even if that entry isn’t part of the same code, the second highest number is 277. That means that Gloria knew some three hundred names, associated with their random numbers, in her head.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Tell me, did you meet Gloria?”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “It doesn’t seem likely. And if she had a written codebook marrying the names to the numbers, then there would have been no reason to have a code at all in the first place.” He lifted his head and leaned back in his chair again. “There’s nothing for it. I’m going to have to ask Merriken at Scotland Yard.”

  I bit my lip. Davies had supposedly given the inspector Gloria’s schedule, so if we got the information in turn, we could use it to map the code for the missing name. “He’s going to want to know why. That means we have to show him this paper with the unknown name.”

  “So we show it to him,” James said. “He’s the police, after all. What do we have to lose?”

  If Inspector Merriken saw the paper with Gloria’s unknown appointment on it, he’d write it up in his files. And that meant George Sutter would see it. And George Sutter would get no more information from me. “I don’t want to.”

  “Ellie, this could be the key. Gloria went somewhere the day before she died, and she didn’t tell anyone. Then she left a note for her brother saying, ‘Tell Ellie Winter to find me.’ There must be a connection. There simply must be.”

  “The number sign,” I said, changing the subject. “Before the mystery number. None of the others has a number sign, but the mystery number says ‘#321B.’ That looks like an address to me. Maybe it isn’t part of the other code at all.”

  James ran a hand over his jaw. I could hear the rasp of his stubble. It was a light shadow, blond mixed with caramel brown, and the sound of his hand traveling over it reminded m
e of its rough feel on my skin. “That is a possibility, yes.”

  “Then there’s no point telling the inspector about it, because the information Davies gave him can’t help us.”

  He sighed. He picked up the near-empty bottle of wine, filled my glass, slid it toward me on the desk. He’d had very little wine, I noticed—barely half a glass. Since there was no one else here, I supposed I must have drunk the rest of it. Against the wall, the sacks of mail—the deathbed visions, the accounts of fairies and pixies and poltergeists—hulked in the shadows. “All right, Ellie. You win. Keep your secrets.”

  I opened my mouth to deny it, then shut it again. There was no point in lying to him.

  “It isn’t because I don’t trust you,” I said finally.

  He shrugged. He’d folded back the sleeves of his white shirt, and I watched the strong, fine bones of his wrist, the faint trace of blue veins through the warm skin. “Of course not. It’s just that you want me to help you without giving me all of your information.”

  “James, I simply don’t know,” I said, pushing back my chair and standing. I picked up my wineglass and took it with me as I started to pace again. All I had were theories about who George Sutter worked for; if I talked to James about George, was I putting him in danger? “I haven’t put all of it together myself. Besides, I don’t think you’ve told me everything, either.”

  “Ellie, I’ve told you everything. I’m an open book.”

  “You haven’t told me why you’re so dedicated to investigating this.” I sipped the wine; it was rather good. James kept good wine for a bachelor who never had company, and my head was pleasantly spinning, my thoughts loose and full of possibilities. “You knew her and you feel badly that she was killed, yes. But there’s more to it than that. Do you want to know what I think?”