Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase

by Jonathan Stroud

  ‘The Wailing Tree affair? Of course. They got an award for it.’

  ‘Yes, and masses of publicity. And the reason for that was they figured out who the Visitors were, didn’t they? They found a diamond tiepin on one of the skeletons and traced it back to the jeweller who made it, and that told them that the owner—’

  ‘– was young Lord Ardley,’ I said, ‘who’d gone missing back in the nineteenth century. Everyone thought he’d run off overseas. But there he was, buried in the family garden, where his younger brother must’ve put him, in order to inherit the estate.’ There was a pause; I looked at them. ‘Why so surprised? I read issues of True Hauntings too.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Lockwood said. ‘And you’re spot on. The point is, it was a great story, and by solving that old mystery Tendy’s did very well. They became a much more prominent agency off the back of it; they’re fourth biggest in London now. So I’m just wondering . . .’ He trailed off, gazing at the locket in his hand.

  ‘Whether Annabel Ward might do the same for us?’ George said. ‘Lockwood, you know how many Visitors there are in London? Across the country? It’s a plague. People don’t care about the stories behind them. They just want them gone.’

  ‘You say that, but good cases make big headlines,’ Lockwood said. ‘And this one could be good. Think about it. A glamorous girl, brutally slain and lost for decades, two tragic lovers, a small but enterprising agency uncovering the truth behind the killing . . .’ He grinned at us. ‘Yes . . . if we play it right, we might make a splash with this. We could turn our fortunes round after all. But we’ll need to get moving. George – that Latin dictionary is on the first-floor landing, I think. Fancy fetching it down? Thanks! And Lucy,’ he continued, as George padded away, ‘maybe there’s something you can help with too.’

  I gazed at him. His transformation from the grumpy, woebegone figure of a few minutes previously was utterly complete. His movements were quick and light, his injuries forgotten; his dark eyes sparkled as he looked into mine. In that instant it was as if nothing in the world fascinated him as much as me.

  ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘I almost don’t want to ask this, given our experiences these last two days, but when you held the locket just now, I don’t suppose you . . . felt anything, did you?’

  I nodded slowly. ‘If you mean a psychic residue, yes I did. Voices, laughter . . . Not much. I wasn’t trying.’

  ‘And do you think,’ Lockwood said, smiling, ‘if you did try . . .?’

  ‘You want me to see what sensations I can get?’

  ‘Yes! Isn’t it a great idea? You might pick up something vital; a clue that we can use.’

  I looked away, embarrassed by the intensity of his gaze. ‘Sure, maybe . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘If anyone can do it, you can, Luce. You’re brilliant at this. Give it a go.’

  Moments before, he’d been promising to incinerate the locket. Now it was the key to all our troubles. Moments before, he’d been giving me a rollocking; now I was the apple of his eye. This was the way it was with Lockwood. His shifts were sometimes so sudden that they took your breath away, but his energy and enthusiasm were always impossible to resist. I could hear George thumping eagerly around upstairs; and I too felt a sudden unbidden thrill – excitement at the prospect of uncovering the ghost-girl’s story; hope at the thought of maybe helping save the agency somehow.

  Despite myself, of course, I also couldn’t help being flattered by Lockwood’s words of praise.

  I sighed heavily. ‘I could try,’ I said, ‘but I can’t promise anything. You know that with Touch it’s normally just emotions and sounds you get, not concrete facts. So if—’

  ‘Great! Well done.’ He pushed the pendant along the table towards me. ‘Can I help in any way? Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘No. Just shut up and let me concentrate.’

  I didn’t pick it up at first. This wasn’t, after all, something to do lightly. I’d already had ample evidence of the ghost-girl’s wrath and hatred. I knew her fate had not been a pleasant one. So I took my time. I sat looking at the pendant and the coil of chain, and tried to rid my mind of thoughts as best I could. I set aside all the rushing, garbled feelings of the day-to-day.

  At last I took it in my hand. The cool of the metal sank through me.

  I waited for any echoes that might come.

  And very soon they did come, same as before. First a man and woman talking; the woman’s high-pitched laughter, the man’s voice joining her as one. Then a sensation of fierce joy, of passion shared; I felt the elation of the girl, her feverish delight. A great bulb of happiness spread out to fill my world . . . The laughter changed, became hysterical in tone. The man’s voice grew harsher, the sound twisted. I felt a cold, sharp jolt of fear . . . And then at once the joy was back, and all was well, well, well . . . Until the next reversal, until contentment curdled, and the voices rose once more in anger, and I was sick with jealousy and rage . . . And so it went on, back and forth, back and forth, the mood-swings flashing past, like I was on that merry-go-round in Hexham as a kid, the one time my mother let me go, and I was full of joy and terror mixed together, and knew I couldn’t get off no matter how I tried. And all at once came sudden silence, and a cold voice talking in my ear, and a final blaze of fury that ascended to a desperate shriek of pain – a shriek I realized was my own.

  I opened my eyes. Lockwood was supporting me in the chair. The door burst open; George pelted into the room.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he cried. ‘Can’t I leave you two alone for a minute?’

  ‘Lucy,’ Lockwood said. His face was white. ‘I’m so sorry. I should never have asked you to do that. What happened? Are you OK?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ I pushed him away and, in the same motion, dropped the pendant on the kitchen table. It rocked there briefly, glittering. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ I said. ‘It’s too strong. It’s completely bound up with her spirit and her memories. I felt I was her for a moment, and that wasn’t nice at all. Her anger is terrible.’

  I sat quiet for a moment in the sunny kitchen, letting the sensations peel away from me like fading fragments of a dream. The others waited.

  ‘There’s one thing I can tell you,’ I went on at last. ‘Maybe it’s what you were after, Lockwood, and maybe it isn’t, but it’s something I do now know for certain. It came through in the emotions loud and clear.’ I took a deep breath, looked up at them.

  ‘Yes?’ Lockwood said.

  ‘The man who gave her this necklace? He’s the one who killed her too.’

  13

  Early that afternoon we took the short walk to Baker Street Underground station. It was good to be outdoors again, and in pleasant sunlight too. Each of us felt the change; our mood had lifted. We put on casual clothes. Lockwood wore a long brown leather coat that emphasized his slimness and easy stride. George wore a hideous puffy jacket with high elasticated waistband that emphasized his bottom. I had my usual gear: coat, rollneck jumper, short dark skirt and leggings. We all wore our rapiers (in my case a spare one from the hall). These – and the cuts and bruises on our faces – were the marks of our profession and our status: people moved aside for us as we went by.

  The Jubilee Line train was busy and heavy with the sweet protective smell of lavender. Men wore sprigs of it in their buttonholes; women had them in their hats. All across the carriage, silver brooches and tiepins winked and glittered beneath the neon lights. We stood silent and serious as the train rattled through the tunnels on the five-minute journey to Green Park. No one spoke. The eyes of the crowd followed us as we alighted and set off along the platform.

  During the trip George had been flicking through the Latin dictionary. As we went up the escalator, he took his pencil out of his mouth and made a last notation on a scrap of paper.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve done the best I can. It’s Tormentum meum, laetitia mea, right? Well, tormentum means “torment” or �
��torture”. Laetitia equals “joy” or “bliss”. Meum and mea are both “my”. So I translate the inscription in our locket as “My torment, my bliss”.’ He snapped the dictionary shut. ‘Not the healthiest of love messages, is it?’

  ‘Fits exactly with what I sensed,’ I said shortly. ‘It wasn’t a healthy relationship. It veered between extremes. Half the time it was sort of happy, half the time eaten up by jealousy and hate. And that’s what triumphed in the end.’

  ‘Don’t think about it any more, Lucy,’ Lockwood said. ‘You’ve done your bit. Now George and I will do ours. How long do you think it’ll take us at the Archives, George?’

  ‘Not long,’ George said. ‘We’ll go back to the local newspapers, starting at the date where I left off. If there’s any more about Annabel Ward – whether they ever arrested anyone, for instance – we should find it straight away. Then we can check the gossip magazines too – it said she was a society girl.’

  We left the station and started up Piccadilly. Afternoon light lanced steeply between tall buildings; we walked from bright sun to blue shadow and back again. It being late autumn, preparations for evening were already under way. A salt-spreader pushed his cart along the roadside, scattering fresh grains left and right like snow. Outside the big hotels, attendants filled braziers with bunches of dried lavender ready for burning; others polished the ghost-lamps hanging above the doors.

  I let my bruised muscles stretch out as I walked; it was nice to feel my strength returning. Lockwood was limping slightly, but otherwise full of zest. He’d removed the bandages from his ghost-touched arm to let the sunshine bathe his skin. ‘If we can solve this old case,’ he said; ‘if we can uncover the murderer and get justice for the girl, it’ll be brilliant publicity. It’ll totally offset the fact that we burned that woman’s house down.’

  ‘And help us save Lockwood and Co. into the bargain,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the hope . . .’ He steered past a man offering tourist maps of the ‘safe zones’ of the city and ignored the entreaties of an iron-seller. ‘But only if we get good cases, and get them soon.’

  ‘You realize DEPRAC will be working on this too,’ George pointed out. ‘It’s never their priority, but they do investigate old murders, if they happened within living memory.’

  ‘All the more reason to act fast,’ Lockwood said. ‘OK, let’s cross here.’

  We ducked out across the road, stepping over the open drain, or ‘runnel’, of running water that separated the pavement from the tarmac. The wandering dead were known to dislike moving water; consequently narrow runnels crisscrossed many of the great shopping streets in the West End, allowing people to walk in safety well into the evening. Earlier governments had hoped to extend this system across the city, but it had proved prohibitively expensive. Aside from ghost-lamps, the suburbs fended for themselves.

  Up a side-road, under a great stone arch and out onto the sweeping curve of Regent Street. Not far ahead, a stand had been set up on the pavement. Flags fluttered above a cheery blood-red canopy. On each flag reared a gold heraldic lion, and an ornate letter ‘R’.

  ‘Ooh, look,’ George said. ‘Hot chestnuts! Who wants some?’

  A group of boys and girls in dark red jackets were ranged around the stand, giving out free sprigs of lavender, salt bombs and sweets to passers-by. Roasting chestnuts popped and crackled on an open brazier; an acned youth with a giant scoop stood by to tip them into paper cones. The agents’ hair was carefully brushed, their swords polished, their faces scrubbed and smiling; all seemed to have been pressed out of the same anaemic mould. They were representatives of Rotwell’s, the second oldest psychical agency in London and, thanks to its publicity campaigns, by some distance the most popular. Behind the stand, set back a little from the road, the central Rotwell office rose – a vast, smooth-fronted edifice of glass and marble. Snarling lions, holding rapiers in their forepaws, had been inscribed into the glass of its sliding double doors. I knew the interior of that office; I’d failed an interview there.

  A smiling boy, no more than ten years old, held out a little cone of chestnuts as we approached. ‘Gift courtesy of Rotwell’s,’ he said. ‘Go safe tonight.’

  ‘We’re not having any,’ Lockwood growled. ‘George, I want you just to walk on by.’

  ‘But I’m hungry.’

  ‘Tough. You’re not walking down the street with one of those cones in your hand. It would be a crime to advertise a competitor.’

  He ignored the boy and stalked on past. George hesitated, then took the cone and popped it in his pocket. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Nicely out of sight. I say it’s a crime to refuse free food.’

  We pushed on through the pressing crowd and came out the other side. A few minutes later we had reached a quiet, leafy square a block behind Regent Street. It was dominated by an ugly, brick-fronted building of colossal size. An iron plaque on the door read:

  NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES

  George’s spectacles gleamed. This was his territory; he had the nearest I’d seen to a smile on his chestnut-stained face. ‘Here we go. Keep your voices down. The librarians are picky here.’ He ushered us over the iron line and through the revolving doors.

  I’d never been a big one for reading as a kid. My family rarely had a book in the house, and I’d been apprenticed out to Jacobs almost before starting school. Of course, I had to read in order to complete my studies – you can’t get any of your certificates without a simple written exam – and I’d memorized the Fittes Manual for Ghost-hunters by the time I was twelve. But after that? To be honest I was too busy working to spend much time with books. True, Jacobs had occasionally sent me to the local library to look up historical details on hangings (the region around Gibbet Hill, half a mile from our little town, being a notorious spot for Visitors), so I wasn’t entirely unused to buildings full of printed paper. But the National Newspaper Archives was on a bigger scale than anything I’d seen before.

  The complex had six enormous floors piled about a central concrete atrium. When you stood at the bottom, among palms and other indoor trees, the ascending levels of shelves and racks and reading tables seemed to reach to the sky. A large iron sculpture hung from the domed roof high above, part decoration, part defence. On every level, hunched figures flipped through yellowed newspapers and magazines. Some, perhaps, researched the Problem, looking for clues to the plague that beset us. Others were agents: I saw blue Tamworth jackets dotted about, the lilac tones of Grimble, and here and there the sombre dark-grey hues of Fittes. Not for the first time I wondered why Lockwood hadn’t chosen to clothe us in a coordinated uniform of our own.

  Like me, Lockwood seemed somewhat overawed, but George bustled us along in a confident manner. Within a few minutes he had taken us by lift to the fourth floor, sat us down at an empty desk and, after disappearing for a moment, plonked down the first great grey files before us.

  ‘Here’re the local papers from the Richmond district, forty-nine years ago,’ he said. ‘Annabel Ward disappeared late June. The article I found came out a week or so later. Lockwood, why don’t you start with the July editions? They’re the most likely to be helpful. Lucy, you check the autumn file. I’ll go and get some issues of London Society.’

  Lockwood and I took off our coats and immersed ourselves obediently in the thrill-a-minute pages of the Richmond Examiner. I soon found it contained more local fetes, lost cats and best-kept allotment competitions than I could have believed existed in the universe. There was quite a bit about the Problem too, the nature of which was beginning to be discussed. I found early calls for ghost-lamps to be erected (they eventually were) and for graveyards to be bulldozed and salt-sown (they weren’t: it was far too expensive and controversial; instead they were simply ringed with iron). But I discovered nothing more about the hunt for the missing girl.

  Lockwood and George – who was flipping through the glossy black-and-white photos of the society magazine – were having a similar lack of luck. Lockwood grew restless;
he looked sighingly at his watch.

  Shadows fell over my page. Looking up, I discovered three people standing by the table, watching us with ill-concealed amusement. Two were teenagers, a boy and a girl; the other was a very young man. All three wore the soft grey jackets and crisp black trousers of the oldest, most prestigious company of ghost-hunters in London, the Old Grey Lady of the Strand – the celebrated Fittes Agency. Their rapiers had complex, Italian-style hilts, much more old-fashioned and expensive than ours. They carried neat grey briefcases emblazoned (like their jackets) with the Fittes symbol, the rearing silver unicorn.

  Lockwood and George got to their feet. The young man smiled at them.

  ‘Hello, Tony,’ he said. ‘This is novel. Haven’t seen you here before.’

  Tony. No one, in the six long months I’d known him, had so much as dared to call him Anthony. For a split second I assumed there was great friendship between this Fittes supervisor and Lockwood; then I realized it was the other thing.

  Lockwood was smiling too, but not in a way I’d ever seen before. It was somehow wolf-like. Deep creases hid his eyes. ‘Quill Kipps,’ he said. ‘How’s life treating you?’

  ‘Busy. Very busy. What about you, Tony? You look rough, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing serious. Just a few knocks. Can’t complain.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine you haven’t got time for that,’ the young man said, ‘what with all the other people complaining about you . . .’ He was very slightly built, almost bird-like in his delicacy of form. He probably weighed less than I did. He had a small, rather upturned nose, a narrow freckled face, and auburn hair cropped severely short. He had four or five medals pinned to the breast of his jacket, and in the pommel of his rapier was a glittering green stone. Not that he could use the sword much these days. I guessed he was about twenty, so his days of active service were behind him. His Talent had mostly shrivelled up and gone. Like my old leader, Jacobs, and all the other useless supervisors choking the industry, all he could do now was boss the kids around.