None of us liked those tiles, which looked very clean and scrubbed. It was there that the night-watch boy’s body had been found.
Aside from the skylight high above, the landings and stairwell had no access to natural light. The effect was of an inward-looking space, heavy and silent and turned toward the past, with little connection to the outside world. Though it was only mid-afternoon, the electric lanterns, set in floral sconces at intervals along the walls, were already on. They emitted a cold and greasy glare.
The first thing we did, while it was still light, was give the house the once-over. We went through it systematically, in silence, listening as our footsteps rang on the varnished floorboards. We made readings, noted temperatures, took turns using our psychic senses. It was too early to get anything spectacular, but it was worth checking just in case.
Then we focused our attention on the stairwell.
We started in the basement, at the entrance to the kitchen, and worked our way slowly up. From the outset it was clear that the stairs, and the landings close to the banister, were colder than the rest of the house—not by much, but consistently down by five or ten degrees. That was all we found. Lockwood didn’t see anything. I listened, but heard nothing sinister whatsoever, unless you counted George’s stomach rumbling.
On the staircase’s final curl, where it rose from third floor to attic level beneath the pale eye of the skylight, Lockwood bent to the baseboard. He placed his finger on it, then put it to his lips. “Salt,” he said. “They’ve cleaned up, but there’s been salt spilled here.”
“The night-watch girl?” George was making notes with a stubby pencil; he had a spare one tucked behind his ear. “Some kind of last defense?”
“So she must have been found here,” I said. Yes, found crouched against the wall, mute and mindless….I looked at the bland plaster, the nondescript emptiness of the space, searching out the horror that had happened here. Other than the salt, there was no trace of it. Perhaps that was the worst thing of all.
An hour had passed; the skylight had grown dim. On the attic landing, the last shaft of daylight shrank into shadow. Grayness swelled out around the curl of the staircase. We went back downstairs.
It was time for food, and George’s story. None of us wanted to use the kitchen in the basement where the boy had died. We set up camp instead on the ground floor, in the room of paintings, dragging in a table and some chairs, and laying out our water bottles, biscuits, sandwiches, and reviving packets of chips. We lit the gas lanterns and set one at either end of the table. I found a socket, filled the electric kettle, and switched it on. George got out some papers from his investigations at the library. We made tea and settled ourselves down.
“One day we should do this somewhere nice,” George said. “You know, have a picnic where nothing’s going to want to kill us. It would be quite fun.”
“What would we find to talk about, though?” Lockwood asked. He took a swig of tea. “Come to think of it, what did kids do with themselves in the days before the Problem? Most of them didn’t even have to work, did they? What was it—school or something? Life must have been so dull.”
“And safe,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”
“Not so safe if you lived in this house,” George said darkly. “Not if you were a servant lad known as ‘Little Tom.’” He consulted his notes for a moment, leaning forward like a short, roundish general assessing battle plans, then took a bite of biscuit. “It was the summer of 1883 when the killing took place. According to the Pall Mall Gazette, the house was owned by a fellow named Henry Cooke, an old soldier and merchant, who’d served out in India. It was his son, a certain Robert Cooke, who was arrested one hot July night for the murder of a servant, Thomas Webber, also known as ‘Little Tom.’ He was put on trial at once, and found guilty.”
“How did he kill him?” I asked. “And why?”
“Why, I don’t know. I don’t have many details. How, yes. He stabbed him with one of his father’s hunting knives. The article says that the argument began down in the kitchen, late one evening. Little Tom was first attacked there, and badly wounded. Then a terrible chase took place, under the horrified gaze of many witnesses—guests, servants, and other family members—before the final fatal blow was struck. There was blood everywhere. The Gazette calls it ‘the house of horror.’ Another one! London has so many. I should make a list sometime.”
I was looking at the ceiling of the room. It was decorated with swirls and spirals formed of plaster molding, as tight and intricately fibrous as bone marrow. “That pretty much fits in with the bloody footprints,” I said.
Lockwood nodded. “And with what the kid told Wintergarden. The chase begins down in the kitchen and spirals up through the house. Maybe poor Little Tom was cornered in the attic and killed there.”
“What happened to the murderer?” I asked. “Hanged?”
“No. He was sent to Bethlem psychiatric hospital. They realized he was crazy, you see. Anyway, he died soon after. While walking on the grounds, he evaded his captors, ran out into the road, and threw himself beneath the wheels of an undertaker’s carriage.”
Lockwood made a face. “A cheery tale.”
“Aren’t they all?”
Outside, over the square, the sun was fast descending. Black clouds had piled around it, seeking to smother its dying light. A great flock of birds wheeled over the elm trees, spiraling and twirling like a living twist of smoke. We finished our tea.
“Good stuff, George….” Lockwood had taken off his rapier and leaned it against his chair. He had his coat collar up, and his face was mostly in darkness. His long fingers tapped on the table, beating the rhythm of his thoughts. “Now,” he said, after a pause, “we need to get to work. But we don’t treat this as a normal case. I want you both to listen carefully. The haunting, as reported, is a complicated one. We’ve got the bloody footprints climbing the stairs from bottom to top. We’ve got these two mysterious shapes, locked into their chase. We’ve got feelings of extreme terror that affected the night-watch kids. And we’ve got the fact that something—either all or part of this—did something terrible to those children. One witness is dead, the other driven mad.” He crumpled a chip bag and put it in his pocket. “It’s confusing, and we can’t leave anything to chance.”
“It’s definitely unusual to have two apparitions manifesting in the same haunting,” George said. “That raises big questions. Are they both active spirits, or is one just a visual echo of the original event, conjured up by the other? I’ve seen that happen. There was that nasty case in Deptford with the sailor and the Burmese python, where—”
Lockwood held up his hand. “We all know that story, George. Stick to tonight.”
I’d been shifting impatiently in my seat. “It’s probably not as confusing as you make out. It’s Cooke’s wicked spirit driving this. We need to find the Source and destroy it.”
“Sure,” Lockwood said, “but not tonight. Tonight it’s observation only. We don’t engage. The ghosts have a specific trajectory. They appear at the bottom, shoot straight up the stairs, and vanish somewhere at the top. It all happens really fast. Here’s what we do: we rig up three separate iron circles. George is in the basement, Lucy’s on the second floor, I’m stationed at the top. We wait, we watch what happens. Afterward we compare notes. No, don’t argue.” (I’d opened my mouth in a querying sort of way.) “This is a two-night mission. Holly tells me it’s standard practice in Rotwell’s.”