The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

by Marie O'Regan

  “Our fellows will come to take him away; he’ll have to remain with us until this is resolved, of course. Have his family been informed?”

  “I don’t think he has any. My father took him out of the workhouse, and he wasn’t married. This way, Inspector.”

  Reese’s office bore some resemblance to a gentlemen’s club that Gairden had had occasion to visit during an investigation the year before. It was, like Rheese, plumply furnished, the lights rosy-shaded and fringed, the desk topped with rich red leather. Designs for intricate machinery were scattered on the surface; thick black lines ran through one of them. He wasn’t as tidy as his assistant; papers lay all about the place, as did drinking glasses, an apple-core, a pot of boot-black, a picture of a young woman and a small boy . . . Rheese motioned Gairden to sit in one of the deep leather chairs and shuffled the papers into a drawer, leaving black smudges on some of the designs.

  “So little time these days,” he said. “Since the old man retired, I’ve barely had a moment to work on my own designs.” He looked at his hands, frowned, and wiped them on a cloth. “Damn muck gets everywhere.” He poured himself a brandy from one of a set of rather fine decanters of heavy cut crystal. He motioned the stopper in Gairden’s direction. “For yourself?”

  “Very kind of you, sir, but no.”

  Rheese sat himself in the chair behind the desk. “Wouldn’t want you to think I’m the sort of fellow who always has his nose in the bottle, but a thing like this, well, I have to confess, my nerves are twisted up like clock springs.”

  “Was it you who found him, sir?”

  “No, it was Lassiter. He came pounding on my door, yelling about blood and murder. And when I saw . . . well, sent for you chaps, obviously.”

  A clock suddenly chimed, a loud discordant run of notes. Rheese jolted so badly half the brandy he’d just poured spilled down his wrist.

  “Sir? Is everything all right, sir?” Gairden said, getting to his feet.

  Rheese waved him back down, gulped brandy and tugged at his collar. “Yes, yes.”

  Gairden glanced at his watch. “It seems your clock is out of time, sir.”

  Rheese glared at the clock. “So it is. What’s the use of a clock that doesn’t tell the right time, I ask you?” he said. “Or any machine that refuses to work. Not a bit of use. That’s what.”

  “Sir?”

  “Sorry, Inspector. It’s been a trying day.”

  The clock sat on a small ornate table draped with a fringed, green velvet cloth, and something lay just beyond it, glimmering softly.

  “Oh,” Rheese said, “she’s not working either. But I shall have her going, see if I don’t.”

  Gairden peered. His eyes, bemused, sorted through the soft gleam of metal. The long sliver of shine, a leg; the rounded arch, a foot. Some sort of automaton, in polished brass, tumbled in the corner like a drunk. Or a corpse.

  “Do you like automata, Inspector?” Rheese said, topping up his brandy.

  “Not really my style of thing, sir.”

  “People are wild for them; the more elaborate, the better. There’s a mechanical chamber orchestra that’s been all over the papers.”

  “Oh, I may have seen something, yes.”

  “That’s what people like. But they’re clumsy, you know, the mannequins. The way they move . . . everyone’s trying for something more human. It’s not easy.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it is. Now, Mr Rheese, do you have any idea who might have attacked Mr Wishart?”

  “Well—”

  “Sir?

  “We make frivols, Inspector. Amusements. Toys. Toys are all innocence, you’d think, but there’s no harder business than this. Espionage goes on all the time. We take precautions, but someone could have got in, especially during the shift change, with a couple of hundred people going in and out.”

  “You think Mr Wishart might have disturbed someone in the act of stealing his designs?”

  Rheese swallowed the last of the brandy. “We’ve been doing very well. People notice.”

  “Yes,” Inspector Gairden said. “And I understand that Mr Wishart was an exceptionally talented young man.”

  “Hah. He was well enough, I suppose, but really, Inspector, he was a boy from the workhouse when all’s said and done. I was giving him what education I could, of course. Trying to make him useful, for m’ father’s sake.”

  “Oh, I understood he was something like a genius,” Gairden said.

  “If he’d been that, Inspector, don’t you think someone would have tried to bribe him away, rather than murder him?”

  Gairden felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He turned his head, convinced someone had come into the room. But the door remained firmly shut. A death-rattle sound came from the clock, and a thick final clunk. He glanced at it; its stilled and silent face was somehow reminiscent of a cadaver. He turned back to Rheese, who shuddered and tipped more brandy down his throat.

  “There is that, of course, sir,” Gairden said. “If they’d known about him. Did he have many friends?”

  “I don’t know, Inspector. Well, he would hardly have brought them here; this is a manufactory, not a club, what?”

  “What about enemies?”

  Rheese shrugged. “There’s the Children of Lud, of course. Wretched fellows.”

  “The machine-breakers? Have you had trouble with them?”

  “Not for some time, but they’re still about; well, you’d know, Inspector, wasn’t some fella arrested for it just the other week?”

  “Not in my jurisdiction, sir. And I hadn’t heard of them going as far as murder.”

  “It’s not a great leap, though, is it, Inspector, between attacking a man’s property and attacking his person, don’t you think?”

  Gairden, who rather thought it was, chose not to answer. “Do you know if Mr Wishart had any problems with the other workers, sir?”

  Rheese rubbed at his whiskers. “Not that I know of, but they will have their rows and jealousies, you know. My father gave him his own workshop, and so forth. I suppose not everyone likes to see a boy from the workhouse do well, eh? But Lassiter’d know better than I.”

  “I’ll need to talk to them.”

  A whistle blew, long and loud, cutting over the thud-thud-thud of the machines.

  “Well, then, you’d be just in time to catch them coming off shift, if we go now. I’ll get Lassiter to gather them up.” He picked up the speaking tube that dangled from the wall by his desk, and removed the stopper. “Hello? Amabelle? Tell Lassiter to hold the workers back; the inspector needs to speak to them.” He stoppered the tube and got to his feet.

  “So you kept them to their work, sir, once Mr Wishart was discovered?” Gairden asked.

  “Couldn’t stop the machines, not for something like this.”

  “No. Under what circumstances would the machines be stopped?”

  “If there’s an accident, obviously, then. Oh, and when Her Majesty, bless her, passed on. All the manufactories stopped for an hour for the funeral.”

  “Yes, I remember. Well, I needn’t keep you from your work, sir, if you’re happy to let me talk to them.”

  “By all means. Yes, I must get on. I’ll be doing the boy’s work as well as my own, now.” For a moment his heavy face quivered with genuine emotion, though what precisely that emotion was, the Inspector couldn’t tell.

  The workers, taken all together, were a pallid, weary collection, like nothing so much as dolls that had been left out in the rain by a careless child. There were a hundred and fifty of them; Gairden did what he could to narrow it down. Most, simply enough, had come in, gone to their machines and had not looked up except when they took their meal break; most ate in the refectory, where they now huddled. Several seemed upset; four or five women were sniffing and lending handkerchiefs, some of the men had their heads together, muttering. A few glanced longingly at the windows or gazed sullenly at the floor, showing nothing but a dull resentment at being kept past their time. The
new shift were already at the benches; the machines thudded relentlessly on.

  Gairden stood in front of them and coughed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I won’t keep you a moment. I’m sure you’ve all heard that Mr Wishart was killed this evening. We hope to find whoever did it as soon as possible. If any of you have seen anything, or noticed anything at all out of the way, however small, please come and tell me. I’ll be in the wages office for as long as I’m needed.” He’d dealt with factory workers, and factory owners, before, so he added; “If you’d rather not do it here, you may find me at the Thrall Street station. Just ask for Inspector Gairden.”

  A low murmur rippled through them; a few looked at each other. No one stood.

  Gairden made his way to the wages office; a solemn box of a place, its mahogany cupboards sternly locked. It rather put him in mind of an expensive coffin. Though a coffin, he thought, would probably be quieter.

  There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Gairden said.

  It was Lassiter. “You said you’d like to speak to me again, sir?”

  “Ah, yes. Do sit down, Mr Lassiter.”

  A machine stood on a table in the corner. Gairden could not make it out: it was gleaming black, painted with floral bouquets, and had a series of small white buttons attached to steel arms that disappeared inside the machine. Each of the buttons bore a letter or a number.

  “That’s one of the new caligraphs, sir.”

  “And what does that do?”

  “It makes letters on paper; very even, just like printed type. You press the keys.”

  Gairden looked at the machine with distaste. The lettering of a human hand, be it hasty scrawl or copperplate or the awkward, childlike printing of the barely literate, connected one to the writer. Handwriting had, on occasion, helped him solve a case. What could one tell from the printing of a machine, every letter identical, no matter who pressed the keys? He turned his back on it, and sat down.

  The noise of the machines was slightly muffled here, but still reverberated through the very walls, calling soft answering clicks from somewhere inside the caligraph.

  “Well, Mr Lassiter? Can you tell me about how you found Mr Wishart?”

  “I was on the way up to discuss a plan he had, for a new safety device. He’d been promising it for a while . . .” Lassiter looked down, and tugged at a loose thread on his sleeve.

  “There were difficulties?”

  “He’d get distracted. He had a wonderful mind, sir, no doubt of it. But he did get distracted.”

  “I see. So, on this particular evening?”

  “I just went up to give him a bit of a nudge, as it were. And when I got there, there he was, poor fellow.”

  “Did you hear or see anything? Did anyone pass you on the stairs?”

  “I took the lift, sir. It was working fine then. The corridor was empty when I got out.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “There was some shouting, I took it to be outside in the street. And then I did hear something. But it wasn’t a sound a person would make, it was like a long note on a fiddle, drawn out; a sort of a wailing, but not anything from a mouth, or a throat.”

  “And then?”

  “And then . . . well, have you ever dropped a copper pot, Inspector? There was that sort of sound. Like lots of copper pots, falling. It struck me something was up, that there’d been an accident, so I hurried, but when I got around the corner . . .” he shrugged. “The door was open, and I went in, and there was poor Jamie.”

  “And whatever you heard falling?”

  “No idea about that, sir. There was nothing there when I got to the room.”

  “Did you touch anything . . . move anything?”

  “I went close, to see if there was anything to be done. Foolish, I suppose. I could see straight away that his poor head was quite stoved in. I hope I didn’t do wrong?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “There was something else, sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’ll sound odd, sir, but I could have sworn I heard music, just before. Only it could just be the machines.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you?”

  “It’s the noise, see, sir. Sometimes when I leave I can still hear them, even in my sleep. They put odd noises in one’s head. But normally it’s ringing, or a sort of buzz; what I heard, it sounded like proper music, like you’d hear down at the concert halls, only . . . well, like all the instruments were made of silver.” Lassiter gave him a sidelong glance, looking a little flushed. “Sounds fanciful, I’m sure.”

  To Gairden, it sounded as though the man had heard fey music, though the fey had a notorious dislike of the manufactories, and rarely ventured into the cities at all. And though they could be dangerous, they tended to be subtle; simply breaking a man’s head open like an egg was hardly their style. Or perhaps the machines had had an unfortunate effect on Lassiter, had driven him a little mad. It would hardly be surprising.

  “Music, and then shouting. Well, thank you. I shall keep it in mind. Oh, Mr Lassiter?”

  “Sir?”

  “Have there been problems with the Children of Lud? Anything Mr Rheese might not know of?”

  Lassiter stiffened a little; his face became wooden. “Not had any of that manner of thing, sir, no. I don’t believe there’s many of ’em still about. And of course if we had, I’d be obliged to report it to Mr Rheese.”

  “Of course. Tell me, do you drink gin at all?

  “Wouldn’t touch it, sir. We’ve lost some good workers to gin; I won’t have them in if they smell of it. It’s sneaky, wretched stuff and makes for accidents.”

  “Hmm. Thank you, Mr Lassiter. I think that will be all.”

  The next person to knock at the door was a young woman with strong dark curls escaping from beneath her headscarf. The glow of outdoor work had not quite faded from her skin, and she lacked the grey starveling look so many of the workers had; her arms were solid with muscle, her shoulders broad and strong. Her eyelids were swollen.

  “Good evening, miss. Did you have something you wished to speak to me about?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could I take your name?”

  “Mattie Drewrey, sir.”

  “Thank you. And what was it you wanted to tell me?”

  “There was someone with him.” She was biting her lip, her eyes brimming. “Oh, if I could get my hands on her …”

  Gairden took a clean handkerchief from his pocket; he always kept several about him. “Now, don’t fret yourself. Whoever did this was a dangerous person; it’s just as well you didn’t meet them, eh? Her, you say?” He handed Mattie the handkerchief.

  She took it, and blew her nose. “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did she look like?”

  “I didn’t see much, sir. I’d gone out, for a breath, see. We don’t take our food at the machines, so we get a little time, a few minutes to eat, and I like to go outside.”

  “Even when it’s raining?”

  “I was brought up on a farm, sir; you don’t hide from a bit of rain when there’s stock to be tended. Anyway, I happened to look up at Jamie . . . at Mr Wishart’s window.”

  “Was that something you did often?”

  She flushed, and lifted her chin. “So what if I did? He needed someone to look after him, did Jamie.”

  “I’m sure. And what did you see?”

  “They were dancing. He’d barely look at you, sir, he was that shy; took me six months before he’d so much as bid me good morning, and there she was, bold as you please, with his arms about her, dancing!” Her fingers clenched in her lap.

  “Could you make her out?”

  She shook her head. “With the rain, and all; the window was wet, and there was smoke from the street. But I saw the shape of them, whirling about. Shameless, it was. Some opera-house floozy, you mark my words.”

  “You think this woman was involved in Mr Wishart’s death?”

  She shrugged. “All I know is she
was there. And they’re strong, those dancers, you ever seen them? Muscles like my uncle Jed, some of them. Maybe she wanted money, and he wouldn’t give her any.”

  Rattattarattattarattatta! Gairden knocked his chair over as he leaped to his feet. Mattie shrieked.

  The caligraph’s keys were moving, the letters blurring up and down, faster and faster, until, with a clunk, they stopped. Several of the metal arms had become entwined, forcing some of the keys into a tight bunch, g and h and y and t and b. The machine quivered like a dog, and was still.

  Mattie was on her feet, her hands clamped to her face. “Oh, sir, it’s Jamie!”

  “Or,” said Gairden, “the vibrations of the machines set the thing to rattling, and now it’s tangled itself up. Well, I shan’t touch it; I’ll leave it to someone who knows how.”

  “There’s no paper,” Mattie said. “If there’d been paper in it, he might have written a name.”

  “Well, there wasn’t,” Gairden said. “It’s just a machine. Now, Mattie, did you hear anything? After you saw this woman?”

  “No, sir.” She glanced anxiously at the jammed caligraph. “But I was back at the bench by then, so I wouldn’t have heard much.”

  “And you didn’t see her go in or out?”

  “No. If I had, I’d have had something to say to her!”

  “Thank you. You get on home, miss. And if you think of anything more, you come and tell me, just as I said.”

  Mattie left, still glancing at the caligraph. Gairden glowered at it. “Well,” he said, “is that you, Mr Wishart? Still messing about with machines? You’d be better giving me a clue, you know, rather than frightening that girl half out of her wits.”

  He glanced around, feeling a little foolish, but nothing answered him.

  As he left he saw a live goblin hunched over the corpse in the gutter, tugging at the wet fur, and whimpering. “Too late, old fellow,” Gairden muttered. Even love could not animate the dead. Though he’d heard things, about the fey …

  He returned to his lodgings tired and chilled through, but restless. Once he had hung up his greatcoat by the fire, to steam itself dry, he paced his rooms, straightening a picture here, sliding a book even with its fellows there. He thought about Jamie Wishart; his mechanisms and his narrow bachelor bed. He thought about Lassiter, and Rheese, and Mattie Drewrey. About machines and goblins. About steam and blood. The portrait of a young woman, hair that looked almost too heavy to bear piled upon her fragile head and descending in thick curls about her delicate neck, watched him with a solemn stare. At one point he turned to it. “Well, Esther? What do you think? All this business with music and dancing, that’s more your area than mine. You always liked to dance, while you had the strength for it.” But tonight Esther had no answers for him.