We haven’t got the final piece of proof . . . But maybe, of course, we had.
I took the little case from around my neck and held it so that it caught the dying light. Behind the glass the locket’s sliver of gold hung distorted, like an eel in shallow water. Tormentum meum, laetitia mea . . . I could just about read the words. And inside: what was it? A ‡ W; H.II.2.115 . . . Somehow, those letters and numbers concealed the final clue. That’s what Blake was after. That’s why he was so desperate to get it back. Perhaps, when we gave the piece to Barnes, he’d figure out the problem.
Or perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps the murderer would continue to get away with it, as he had for fifty years.
Cold, hard anger rose within me. If we didn’t crack the code, it would be the last chance gone. Blake would never admit what had happened, and there was no one else who knew.
No one else, except . . .
I stared down at the glass case in my hand.
The idea that had suddenly occurred to me was so forbidden that for a little while I could only stand there, listening to the uneasy pounding of my heart. It would certainly put my life at risk, though I thought I could easily get round that; worse, it would risk the wrath of Lockwood, who had already warned me against doing anything dangerous without permission. If I had any sense at all I should wait for his return, but I knew quite well that he’d forbid me to carry out the experiment I planned. And then I really would have spent a useless day, while the vile Blake waited expectantly for his release.
I wandered through the house, following an aimless course, turning my plan over in my mind. The light faded; I found myself in the kitchen. Slowly I took the iron steps down to the basement below. On the back wall, the artefact shelves were a grid of black. Tonight the pirate hand glowed faintly lilac, while the other trophies remained dark.
It was worth the risk. If I succeeded, we could bypass the locket’s weird number code altogether. I could get the final confirmation of Blake’s guilt. If I failed, what did it matter? Lockwood need never know.
The iron chains were laid out on the floor, oiled and tested, ready to be packed. I took one of the longest and thickest, a stout two-incher, and hauled it into the practice room, where the ragged straw-filled forms of Joe and Esmeralda hung in melancholy silence. I laid it out to form a loop of double thickness, about four feet in diameter, with the ends folded over each other. Just to be sure they couldn’t be forced open, I clipped the two end links together with a bicycle lock. This was a heavy-duty defence, guaranteed against Type Twos. It was probably made by Fairfax Iron. Ordinarily the agents would stand inside, safe against any roaming ghosts.
Today, I’d change the rules.
There were no windows in the practice room, so it was already very dark. My watch told me it was only five p.m., which is ordinarily too soon for full manifestations. But I didn’t have the option of waiting. Lockwood and George might be back at any time. Besides, when a ghost is eager, who knows how early it might come?
I stepped over the chains into the circle and took the silver-glass case from my pocket. Kneeling on the floor, I pushed open the bolt, flipped the lid and let the locket drop out into my palm. It was painfully cold, like something taken from the back of the freezer. I placed it carefully on the floor. Then I stood up and stepped back across the iron.
Easy enough so far. I didn’t expect results straight away, so I went to the office area to get a couple of things. I was only out for two minutes, but when I got back, the air in the practice room had chilled. Joe and Esmeralda were swinging gently from their chains.
‘Annie Ward?’ I said.
Nothing – no response, but I felt a tightness against my temples, a faint force gathering in the room. I stood a little distance from the chains, with a bag of salt in my pocket and a paper in my hand.
‘Annie Ward?’ I said again. ‘I know it’s you.’
A shimmer of silver light inside the circle of iron chain. A faint outline of a girl in two dimensions, folding, bending; now here, now gone.
‘Who killed you, Annie?’ I said.
The outline warped and flickered as before. I listened, heard no voice. The tightness in my head was painful now.
‘Was it Hugo Blake?’
No change – at least not visually. For a fleeting second I thought I picked up the slightest murmur, as if someone were talking quietly in a distant room. I strained hard, listened; my forehead throbbing with the effort . . . No. Gone. If it had ever been there.
Well, it was too much to hope I’d pick up anything. If interrogating the dead were as simple as that, all the great Talents would have mastered the art. As it was, only Marissa Fittes had ever done it, in her legendary conversations with Type Threes. No, who was I kidding? In a moment I’d get the salt grains out, get this mess cleared up.
Still, I had one last thing to try.
I already had George’s photocopy in my hand, held hidden behind my back. Now I brought it round, unfolded it and stepped close to the chains. I flipped the paper so that the photographs of Blake faced the circle. There he was twice over – in that main mug-shot, grinning away in black tie, hat and gloves, and ditto in the group pic beside the fountain, standing close by Annie Ward.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Was it him? Was it H—’
A piercing psychic scream, a howl of grief and fury, knocked me off my feet. Air blasted out across the room, forcing the iron chains outwards into a perfect circle, blowing brick dust from the basement walls. The straw dummies swung up so far they struck the ceiling; I skidded on my back almost to the door, crying out as I did so, for the pressure in my head was so great I thought my skull would split. I looked up, saw the ghost careering back and forth inside the chains, colliding with the boundary, spurts of plasm fizzing off whenever it touched the rim. Its shape was grotesquely distorted, the head long, misshapen, the body spindly, cracked like a broken bone. All semblance of a girl had gone. And still the psychic wail rolled out, so that I was stunned and deafened.
I’d dropped the paper when I fell, but the salt bomb was still in my pocket. I scrambled into a sitting position and lobbed it hard into the circle.
Plastic burst, salt scattered; the thrashing, mewling thing vanished. Instantly, the noise in my head snapped off.
I sat sprawling on the floor, mouth open, eyes blinking, hair in my eyes. Opposite me, the two straw dummies swung madly back and forth; they swiftly slowed, hung still.
‘Ow,’ I said. ‘That hurt.’
‘I should just about think it did.’
Lockwood and George stood in the archway, faces blank with astonishment, staring down at me.
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Stop talking, George! Wait! I’ll show you!’
Two minutes had passed, and I hadn’t got a word in edgeways. OK, I’d been busy: my first job, once my head had stopped ringing, had been to retrieve the locket from the circle – which was easier said than done, since it was covered in frozen salt flakes that almost blistered my skin. Then I had to get it back in the case – again not easy, when you’ve got George Cubbins shouting in your ear. But I needed to speak, and do it fast. Lockwood hadn’t said a thing to me. There were spots of colour on his cheeks, and his mouth was tight and hard.
‘Look,’ I said, picking up the paper from the floor. ‘I did what we should have done originally. I showed Annie Ward these pictures. What are they of? Hugo Blake. What did she do? She went ballistic. I’ve never heard such a scream.’
‘You deliberately let her free?’ Lockwood said. ‘That was a stupid thing to do.’
When I looked at his face, my heart quailed. ‘Not free,’ I said desperately. ‘Just . . . freer. And it got results, which nothing else has done so far.’
George snorted. ‘What results? Did she actually speak with you? No. Did she sign a legal document that would stand up in court? No.’
‘The reaction was clear, George. Cause and effect. You can’t deny the connection.’
Lockwood nodded. ‘Even so, you
shouldn’t have done it. Give me the paper.’
I handed it over wordlessly, my eyes pricking. I was for it now. I’d made the wrong decision yet again, and this time I knew Lockwood would not forgive me. I could see it in his face. This was the end of my emploment at the company. All at once I understood the preciousness of what I’d thrown away.
Lockwood stepped aside, his boots crunching across the salt, to stand and study the paper beneath the light. No such luck with George; he came in close, eyes behind his spectacles bulging so much they almost pressed against the glass.
‘I can’t believe you did that, Lucy. You’re crazy! Purposefully freeing a ghost!’
‘It was an experiment,’ I said. ‘Why are you complaining? You’re always messing about with that stupid jar of yours.’
‘There’s no comparison. I keep that ghost in the jar. Anyway, it’s scientific research. I do it under carefully controlled conditions.’
‘Carefully controlled? I found it in the bath the other day!’
‘That’s right. I was testing the ghost’s reaction to heat.’
‘And to bubble bath? There were bubbles all over the jar. You put some nice soapy fragrance in that water, and . . .’ I stared at him. ‘Do you get in the tub with it, George?’
His face flushed. ‘No, I do not. Not as a rule. I – I was saving time. I was just getting in myself when it occurred to me I could do a useful experiment about the resistance of ectoplasm to warmth. I wanted to see if it would contract—’ He waved his hands wildly in the air. ‘Wait! Why am I explaining myself to you? You just unleashed a ghost in our house!’
‘Lucy . . .’ Lockwood said.
‘I didn’t unleash it!’ I cried. ‘Take a look at all the salt. I was in total control.’
‘Yeah,’ George said, ‘which is why we found you spread-eagled on the floor. If you kept the ghost constrained, it was more by dumb luck than skill. That bloody thing nearly had our heads off the other night, and now—’
‘Oh, quit complaining. You got naked with a ghost—’
‘Lucy!’ We broke off. Lockwood was still in exactly the same pose as when we started bickering, under the ceiling light, holding the paper before him. His face was pale and his voice was strange. ‘You showed the Visitor this paper?’
‘Well, yes. I—’
‘How did you hold it? Like that? Or like that?’ He adjusted his hand grip rapidly.
‘Er, the last one, I suppose.’
‘It definitely saw the whole paper?’
‘Well, yes, but only for a second. Then it went crazy, as you saw.’
‘Yeah,’ George said grimly. ‘We saw. Lockwood, you’ve been pretty quiet so far. Can you tell Lucy that she is never to do anything like this again? This is twice now we’ve been put at risk. We need to say—’
‘We need to say well done,’ Lockwood interrupted. ‘Lucy, you’re a genius. I think you’ve made a key connection. This is a crucial clue.’
I was almost as surprised as George, whose lower jaw now resembled a gently moving swing. ‘Oh. Thanks . . .’ I said. ‘You think . . . you think this will help the case?’
‘Very much so.’
‘So shall we take it to the police? Shall we show the locket to Barnes?’
‘Not yet. George is right: the ghost’s reaction can’t strictly count as evidence. But don’t worry – thanks to you, I’m confident we can bring the Annie Ward story to a satisfactory conclusion very soon.’
‘I hope so . . .’ Baffled as I was, I was also mightily relieved. ‘But there’s something you should know. Hugo Blake’s going to be released.’ I told them about the call.
Lockwood smiled; he seemed suddenly relaxed, cheerful even. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ve made the house secure. They won’t burgle us again. All the same, I don’t think we should leave the locket here when we go down to Combe Carey. Bring it with you, Lucy – keep it around your neck. I promise we’ll deal with the matter soon. But first’ – he grinned – ‘there’s the Fairfax job. George has got some news on that.’
‘Yeah,’ George said. ‘I uncovered a bit about the haunting.’
I stared at him. ‘And is it as bad as Fairfax said?’
‘Nope.’ George took off his glasses and wearily rubbed his eyes. ‘From what I’ve seen, it’s almost certainly a whole lot worse.’
18
To get from the London offices of Lockwood & Co. to the village of Combe Carey is a fairly simple business. All it takes is a quick taxi up the road to Marylebone Station, a leisurely wait at platform six, and finally a gentle forty-minute train ride – through rolling, grey-brown suburbs, then the wintry Berkshire fields – before you arrive below the mossy flanks of St Wilfred’s Church in old Combe Carey station. An hour and a half’s journey, tops. Easy, quick, straightforward, and as pleasant as a trip can be.
Yeah, right. That’s the theory. But it isn’t so much fun when you’re helping carry six super-massive duffel bags weighed down with metal, plus a rapier bag with four old ones stuffed inside as spares, and you have a brand-new rapier at your belt getting in your way. It also doesn’t help if your leader and his deputy both conveniently mislay their wallets, so it’s you who have to fork out for the train tickets, and pay supplements for the heavy luggage. Or that you spend so much time haggling you end up missing the first train. Yes, all that really improves your mood.
Then there’s the small matter of heading towards one of the most haunted houses in England, and hoping you aren’t going to die.
This last factor wasn’t improved en route by George giving us a full briefing on the things he’d discovered over the previous two days. He had a ring-binder filled with neatly written notes and, as the train pootled cheerily past the spires and ghost-lamps of villages hidden in the wooded folds of gentle hills, he regaled us with nasty details from them.
‘Basically, it seems what Fairfax told us was right,’ he said. ‘The Hall’s had a bad rep for centuries. You remember it started off as a priory? I found a medieval document about that. It was built by an outfit known as the Heretic Monks of St John. Apparently they “turned awaye from the laweful worshippe of God to the adoration of darke things”, whatever that means. Before long a group of barons got wind of this and burned the place down. They took over the priory’s land and divided it amongst themselves.’
‘Possibly a set-up?’ I said. ‘They framed the monks in order to nick the land?’
George nodded. ‘Maybe. Since then it’s been owned by a succession of rich families – the Careys, the Fitz-Percys, the Throckmortons – all of whom benefited from the wealth of the estate. But the Hall itself is nothing but trouble. I couldn’t find too many details, but one owner abandoned it in the fifteenth century because of a “malign presence”. It’s almost burned down two or three times, and – get this – in 1666 an outbreak of plague killed off its inhabitants. Seems a guest turned up at the door and found everyone inside lying dead, except for one little baby, left crying in a cradle in a bedroom.’
Lockwood whistled. ‘Grisly. That could be your cluster of Visitors, right there.’
‘Did they save the baby?’ I said.
George consulted his notes. ‘Yeah. He was adopted by a cousin and became a school teacher. Which is a tough break, but he was lucky to get out. Anyway, the bad vibes in that house continue right up until this century. There’ve been a succession of accidents, and the last owner before Fairfax – a distant relative – shot himself.’
‘No shortage of potential Visitors for us, then,’ Lockwood mused. ‘Any mention of this Screaming Staircase, or the dreaded Red Room?’
‘One fragment, from Corbett’s Berkshire Legends.’ George turned a page. ‘It claims two children from Combe Carey were found unconscious at the bottom of the “old steps” in the Hall. One died right away, but the other recovered sufficiently to report being beset by a “foul and devilish ululation, a cruel and unholy outcry”.’ He snapped the folder shut. ‘Then she died too.’
> ‘What’s a ululation?’ I said.
‘That would be the screaming.’ Lockwood stared out at the passing landscape. ‘Stories, stories . . . What we badly need is facts.’
George adjusted his glasses in a complacent manner. ‘Aha. Maybe I can help you there too.’ From inside the folder he brought out two pieces of paper, which he unfolded and set on the little table beneath the window of our compartment. The first was a hand-drawn floor-plan of a large building, showing two extensive levels, each with walls, windows and stairs carefully rendered in ink. Here and there were annotations, written in blue: Main Lobby, Library, Duke’s Chamber, Long Gallery . . . At the top, in George’s neat little handwriting, was written West Wing: Combe Carey Hall.
‘This is superb work, George,’ Lockwood said. ‘Where did you find it?’
George scratched his pudgy nose. ‘The Royal Architectural Society on Pall Mall. They’ve got all sorts of plans and surveys there. This one was done in the nineteenth century. Look at the great staircase: it’s an absolute monster. Must dominate the hall. The other plan’ – he swapped the papers over – ‘is much older; might even be medieval. It’s a very rough sketch, but it shows the place when it was still basically the ruins of the priory. It’s much smaller, and there are lots of rooms that must have been knocked down when they rebuilt it as a house, because they’re not on the later map. But look, you can see that the massive staircase is already there, and also the areas that became the lobby and Long Gallery. The Long Gallery was the monks’ refectory, where they ate. Some upstairs rooms correspond to the nineteenth-century plan too. So between them,’ George said, ‘these plans tell us where the oldest regions of the West Wing are.’
Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase Page 19