by Sophie Green
‘Fine, leave all the investigating to me and Nedly. We’ll let you know.’
From below the table they heard a low growling noise. Then, with a sound that only Lil could hear, like a zip being pulled, a flickering of the overhead lamp and a slight feeling of dread, Nedly materialised beside her. Lil scooted away from him, towards the window, her heartbeat racing a little.
‘Sorry!’ Nedly was taken aback at her unusually wan face. ‘Are you OK? Did I scare you?’
‘Yes. No.’ She paused to take a sip of water and shook her head. ‘It’s not you.’
Abe got the measure of the conversation, glanced around and then with one hand over his mouth he explained, ‘She’s had a shock,’ to the space beside Lil.
‘Can you stop telling everyone that?’ Lil snapped. ‘I’m fine now. Even a tough nut can crack up.’
‘Right,’ Nedly agreed uncertainly.
Lil stuck her fists in her eye sockets and gave them a rub. ‘It was Delilah. She’s dead!’
She looked up, blinking, and saw Nedly’s face as it fell.
‘Dead?’
Lil nodded. ‘And she’s not the only one … You should have seen her …’ She went green around the gills as the memory flooded back. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Nedly looked relieved. ‘I don’t want you to talk about it.’
‘It was horrible,’ Lil continued. ‘She was lying there, her face –’
‘Please don’t talk about it.’
Lil stared into the glass and her own disturbingly rippled face looked back at her. ‘I can’t help it; it’s all I can think about.’
Abe tapped the table with his rubber hand. ‘You can fill Nedly in on the morgue later, when you’ve got your shine back. Now, how about we change the subject?’ He fixed his gaze more or less on where Lil had been looking, and cupped his other hand over his mouth again. ‘Nedly, how did you get on?’
Lil tucked her hair behind her ears and took a deep breath. ‘Right. Of course. The Paranormal Society, sorry, Nedly.’ She grabbed her notebook and pencil from her rucksack and settled down to business. ‘OK, ready when you are.’
Nedly leant across the table, conspiratorially; Lil leant forward too while Abe tried to casually retreat, away from the incoming creeps. Margaret took the opportunity to nip the edge of Abe’s mac between her little teeth and pull it onto the floor where she made a nest in it.
‘So,’ Nedly began slowly, ‘I followed him to this club called the Masonic Rooms, down on the west side, by that old swimming pool. They had only just opened up and the man behind the bar was wiping down the tables and shining up the glasses.’
Lil echoed his every word, relaying the story to Abe but with a lot less expression because she was busy writing too.
‘The barman seemed to know Starkey and gave him a sympathetic nod when he walked in. He took a pew at the table beside the juke box. It was playing a kind of …’ He lost confidence in this line when he saw Abe’s gaze drift down to the apple Danish. ‘So, anyway, he pulled out a paper plate and a packet of biscuits –’
Lil cut in. ‘What kind of biscuits?’
‘Is that important?’ Abe frowned at her.
‘It might be.’
‘They were custard creams, I think.’
‘Custard creams.’ Lil raised the Cryptic Eyebrow. ‘Value pack?’
‘No, one of the small ones. And before he laid them on the table he opened the top.’
‘But didn’t shake them out onto the plate?’
‘No, he just left them on the table like that.’
Abe knocked back the last of his coffee. ‘I appreciate the detail, kid, but get to the point.’
Nedly sat back awkwardly. ‘Sorry.’
‘He’s just setting the scene,’ Lil said defensively. ‘It’s his first real report; who knows what kind of information will be important at this stage?’
She glanced over her notes. ‘So far, from the intel that Nedly has collected we know that Starkey doesn’t have much money: custard creams are the cheapest of the fancy biscuits, and you don’t get many in a packet so he wasn’t expecting lots of people, but maybe he was expecting at least one, and he wanted to make them welcome. Although he wasn’t entirely sure they were definitely going to show, because he didn’t shake them out of the packet.’
Nedly was staring at Lil with a look of amazement.
‘Don’t you think?’ She raised her eyebrows.
For a moment he didn’t say anything at all but then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Yep, exactly that.’
Lil smiled encouragingly. ‘Go on, then what happened?’
Nedly leant in again. ‘Well, nothing for thirty minutes. Every time the door opened he looked up hopefully, but otherwise he just sat there nursing a glass of ginger ale, which the barman gave him, on the house – I think he felt sorry for him and he said something like, “No show again, Irving?” and Starkey offered him a biscuit. But the barman didn’t take one. I think I might have accidentally given him the creeps.’
Lil nodded. Abe sighed.
‘But maybe he just didn’t like custard creams. Anyway,’ Nedly added quickly, trying to speed up, ‘so nothing happened again for a bit.’
‘So it was a waste of time then?’ Abe suggested.
‘No, one thing did happen. At ten to eleven, when Starkey had been sitting there for almost an hour, guess who walked in?’
Lil’s eyes widened. ‘Cornelius Gallows?’
‘What!’ Abe sat up suddenly.
‘Sorry, no, that was my guess. He said, “Guess who walked in?”’
Abe huffed with impatience.
‘Gordian?’ Lil tried again.
Abe’s fuse was growing shorter by the minute. ‘Was that another guess?’
‘Yes,’ Lil replied to Abe.
‘No,’ Nedly told Lil.
Abe clenched and unclenched his jaw again. ‘Can’t he just say who it is without you guessing?’
‘It was Craig Weasel!’ Nedly blurted out. ‘Mayor Dean’s old bodyguard!’
Lil let her jaw drop then she shook her head in a scandalised way and wrote it down.
‘Who was it?’ Abe asked eagerly, trying to decipher Lil’s scribble upside down.
She let him stew for a minute and then put down her pencil and told him. Abe trawled back through his memories. ‘The pea-head with the red hair and the silk pyjamas?’
Nedly nodded. ‘The very same – only now his hair is snowy white.’
Lil thought for a moment. ‘Weasel must be Starkey’s source; he was there that night when we apprehended LeTeef. He must have known that the house was haunted. I bet he got spooked and that’s why he ran, and lived to tell the tale. So, what did they talk about?’
Nedly looked uncomfortable. ‘That I don’t exactly know. The thing was, Starkey isn’t sensitive to me at all so I could sit with him, no problem, but Weasel was a different story. He had the creeps straight away; he got really twitchy and he wouldn’t sit down. Starkey tried to reassure him, even offered to lend him his glasses, but Weasel wasn’t having any of it – so I had to move away a bit and watch them from afar.’
‘And?’
‘Well, they talked for a while, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’ Lil gave Nedly a disapproving look. ‘I couldn’t help it! But I did see one more thing – Weasel gave Starkey a folder.’
‘What kind of folder?’
Nedly shrugged. ‘Cardboard, I think.’ Lil let her head drop back and sighed. ‘But when Starkey opened it his eyes went really wide and he started sweating. I know that because I saw him mop his head with the serviette from his drink. He nodded at Weasel and then he grabbed the folder really tightly in his fist, so his knuckles were almost white – like he’d really got hold of something.’
‘What was in the folder?’
‘Paper of some kind, I think. I wish I knew what was written on it. Something important, I’ll bet,’ he added earnestly.
Lil gritted her teeth in
an effort not to say ‘obviously’. ‘So, once Starkey had the information in the folder, whatever it was, where did he go next?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nedly said, ‘because I came straight here to tell you about Weasel and the folder.’
Lil took a deep breath and then relayed the information to Abe in her most neutral voice. Abe squeezed the apple Danish he was about to take a bite out of so tightly that some of the filling oozed out and hit the table with a plop. In a flash of fur Margaret leapt, sucked it up and then disappeared again.
‘OK, well,’ Lil said. ‘Good work – for the most part. We’ll just have to see how this plays out now.’
Abe rubbed his jaw pensively. ‘We better keep an eye on this Starkey character. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’
Nedly frowned. ‘I feel sorry for him. He wants so badly to know that ghosts are real.’
He stared out of the window, at the large flakes of snow that were falling past.
Lil looked too, though hers was the only reflection she saw in the glass.
Chapter 12
Jailbreak
The reading room of the Peligan City Library was empty as usual but Lil still made a furtive survey of the space as she crossed the great wheel of book shelves to the librarian’s desk and gathered up a stack of index-card boxes.
‘I think I’ll take all of these down with us,’ she told Nedly. ‘We don’t know what the best search will be and we can’t waste time going up and down.’ She took off her mac and covered the boxes with it.
Nedly cast an anxious glance at the closed door of the librarian’s office. ‘You’re not supposed to take those out of the reading room. What if someone else needs them?’
Lil high-tailed it to the service lift with Nedly jogging in her wake. ‘I know, but I think this is some kind of emergency, and there’s no one around to ask so …’ She shrugged, yanked the grille across and punched the ‘down’ button to take them to the basement.
When they reached the bottom Lil turned the override key to ‘off’ to prevent anyone coming down after them. ‘No interruptions. We need the skinny on these spooks ASAP, if that’s what they are.’
Unlike the library, the basement – a large windowless vault with a concrete floor – had always been closed to the public. The stacks that furnished it were dusty and dark and their shelves groaned with newspapers: Peligan’s recorded history in decades of newsprint, all the back copies of the Herald and the Chronicle there had ever been. If the Klaxon was down there too, Lil had never found it, but then the Klaxon was contraband: if there was an archive, it would have to be a secret one. Lil’s mind went fleetingly to the office upstairs.
The dim lighting, consisting of old yellowed tubes running along the ceiling, was only brightened in the reading area, where a pendant lamp with its own pull cord dangled over an unvarnished ply table and a couple of metal chairs. Lil switched on an electric fire, which radiated nothing but the smell of burning dust, placed the index boxes on the table and flexed her knuckles.
She felt a peculiar thrill; it was the beginning of something, the first free strand in the untangling of a web. She took a deep breath of air that smelt of mothballs and old newsprint, coughed a few times and then rolled up her sleeves.
‘OK.’ She looked at Nedly. ‘Let’s get to it. I’ll retrieve the papers, you find the articles.’ The key to their story was down there somewhere, hidden amongst the shelves in boxes and piles, and with the index file to guide her, Lil was going to shake the secrets from the dusty Archives and make a case so watertight that not even the Herald could spin it.
‘We know at least two names, Morris and Carrick – we’ll work from there.’ Lil rifled through the index until she found the ticket for Morris, Hoxon. There were just three mentions: his arrest, his trial and then, only a few weeks ago, his death.
The newspapers were kept in archive boxes, one for each month. The boxes were lined up on rolling stacks: bays of shelving on a wheeled traction system. At the end of each bay was a turning handle, like a go-cart steering wheel, which propelled the bays along the tracks, opening and closing the stacks wherever access to the shelves was needed.
For a few minutes there was silence but for the soft whirr of revolving wheels followed by the sound of Lil rifling through boxes. She laid each paper in front of Nedly with the index card and he applied himself to trying to flip the pages until he found the story.
Morris Hoxton looked like a cartoon. He had a huge upper body balanced on thin hips and small delicate feet. A massive jaw, ox-like shoulders, barely any neck, fists like sledgehammers. He was known to have crushed bones with his bare hands, but could his ghost really have been behind Minos’s death?
Blackheath Carrick was next: a former Peligan City chemist and its most infamous poisoner. He had remained undetected for years; it wasn’t established how many deaths he had been responsible for before he was caught. There was a shot of him that looked like it had been taken at a portrait studio. A slight man, grey thinning hair combed back from his forehead in oily lines, large front teeth and a weak chin. He had been jailed for life, and had served almost fifty years before he died.
Lil jotted down the dates with a frown. ‘According to the Herald, Carrick died only a few days ago. If he did kill Ping he must have literally gone out and committed a signature murder straight after. You know what that means?’ She gave Nedly a grave look. ‘Gallows is speeding up; it took him nearly a year to train Mr Glimmer, now he’s turning them out almost overnight. Mass production.’
Nedly nodded. ‘Yes, but Leonard Owl was no killer, whereas Carrick and Morris … He’s just asking them to do what they’ve done before.’
‘Hmmm,’ Lil mused. ‘You know what I’m wondering?’ She propped her head on her hand and turned it to face Nedly. ‘I’m wondering if there even is an epidemic. I mean, it’s all very convenient, Gallows somehow getting to them just at the point of death and weaponising their ghosts. How does he even know when to show up? Unless he’s the one who decides who gets sick in the first place.
‘I think the epidemic is a smoke screen – Gallows has found a way to execute the ones he wants, and a way to cover it up.’ She sighed through her nose. ‘We’ve just got to figure out how he’s doing it.’
She thought it over for a moment and then shook her attention back to the task in hand and tapped the index box. ‘Right, let’s see who else. Monbatsu only recognised the M.O. in two of the cases. There might be more.’
She found the card for the prison and scanned down to where it was cross-referenced with the word ‘death’. There were lots of entries but in the last few months only six.
Sawney Argo had been imprisoned for blackmail and extortion ten years earlier. They hadn’t been able to prove it in court but he was also implicated in the suicides of the victims he was blackmailing. It had never been ascertained whether his victims had killed themselves because they were being blackmailed or he had killed them when they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay up.
Lil stopped chewing her pencil and tapped the article with it. ‘I’d be willing to bet that he took out Silverman.’
Grima Cadiz, aka the Grey Hood, was a former stenographer at the Peligan City courthouse who started dealing out her own justice to those who had escaped confinement. She was known for drugging and drowning people in the river. There was no picture of her but there was a drawing from a witness I.D. that showed a woman in a hood.
‘Urgh!’ Lil shuddered. ‘She’s the creepiest of them all. And her M.O. is death by drowning. I wonder how many people have been fished out of the Kowpye lately. If she was behind any of them, there wouldn’t be any way of knowing now.’
That made two possibles and two certainties, but Lil knew that people died in prison all the time; they wouldn’t have made the papers unless they were infamous.
Nevertheless there was one other candidate, a notable death that had been recorded weeks before the epidemic was given that name.
It should hav
e made big news, because the prisoner was the most notorious killer that Peligan City had ever known, but he was old and his death was not unexpected. It had been buried in the back pages, amongst the notices. It was a credit to the eagle eyes of the librarian that it had been caught and indexed at all, so that Lil found it in her search: four months earlier, while Mr Glimmer, the ghost of Leonard Owl, had been setting light to Gallows’ old enemies, a prisoner had died. His name was Loid Grainne and he was known as the Peligan City Strangler.
Lil shivered. ‘Nedly,’ she murmured quietly. ‘I think I’ve found the first one.’
Nedly shivered and a ripple of unease spread through the basement. The naked bulb overhead swayed slightly, pulling and squashing Lil’s shadow across the table while around them the air grew cold. Lil slipped her mac back on.
The article had been published six months earlier, just as a notice in the ads near the back:
Peligan City Strangler Dies in Prison
Grainne was seventy years old. His reign of terror lasted three years. He was incarcerated for twelve consecutive life sentences and had served forty-four years at the time of his death.
Lil frowned at Nedly and reached for the card index. She found a reference from around the time of the trial, and then several more using the search term ‘Peligan City Strangler’. He was obviously big news back in the day.
Lil thumbed her way to the pages on Loid Grainne’s arrest. There was a picture, an artist’s impression that the police had used for his ‘wanted’ poster.
Grainne had large round glassy eyes, so dark they appeared black in the greyscale portrait and a thin slash mouth. Plastered-down hair, sharp black eyebrows and a flat white face. There was something terrifying about his expression. He looked like a grave-faced Pierrot. The sight of him made Lil’s skin crawl.
‘Mr Grip,’ Nedly whispered.
Lil closed the paper carefully and folded it and then put it in the nearest box and squashed down the lid with both hands. ‘I wish I hadn’t seen him.’
‘Me too.’ Nedly blanched queasily.