“One thing,” Lockwood said, as we were filing out. “You say you have no dangerous Visitors here, yet you give your people silver brooches. Does that mean—?”
“Oh yes, the place is haunted. ’Course it is. Where isn’t, these days?” The folded handkerchief at Mr. Aickmere’s breast lolled forward as if waving us toward the door. “But my staff are quite safe. If you wear your silver, keep your eyes open, and lock up during daylight, there’s nothing to trouble you here.”
But the chairman’s view was not entirely backed up elsewhere in the building.
“Mornings are all right,” the attendant in Men’s Wear said. “And late afternoons, funnily enough, when you get the sunlight streaming through the windows. It’s noon I don’t like, when the streets outside are bright, and in here it’s full of shadow. The air goes thick. Not hot, exactly. Just stuffy. You smell all the cardboard and plastic wraps piled in the basement, the ones we’ve taken off the new clothes.”
“Is it a bad smell?” Lockwood asked.
“No…Gets a bit much, that’s all.”
“I don’t mind it when it’s busy,” the young woman in Cosmetics said. “When there’s people coming through the doors. Quiet times, I have to pop out. Talk to the doorman, get a breath of air.”
“Why?” I asked her. “What makes you go outside?”
“The air’s so still. Oppressive. I think the air conditioning units aren’t up to snuff.”
Four other staff members, working on separate floors, also had comments to make about the general atmosphere and the apparent deficiencies of the air conditioning. But in Handbags, Belts, and Leather Goods, Miss Deidre Perkins, 55, a tall, thin-lipped person dressed in somber black, was more concerned with something else.
“If there is a Visitor,” she said at once, “you’ll find it on the third floor.”
I looked up from my notebook. Holly Munro, interviewing staff nearby, also drew near. “Really? Why?”
“Karen Dobson saw it there. She came down from Lingerie with a face like all horrors. Just before closing one afternoon in September, it was. Said she saw it at the far end of the passage.” Miss Perkins sniffed disapprovingly. “She may have been lying. Karen did have a tendency to exaggerate. I never saw anything.”
“I see. So this was an actual apparition? And before dark?”
“It was a Visitor, yes.” Miss Perkins was one of those people who avoided using ghostly terminology if at all possible. “Night hadn’t fallen, but it was a stormy day. Already very dark outside. We had the lamps on.”
“Perhaps I could speak to Karen. Which department does she work in?”
“She doesn’t, anymore. She died.”
“Died?”
“Sudden-like, at home.” Miss Perkins spoke with gloomy satisfaction. “She smoked. Expect it was her heart.” She adjusted a rack of hanging belts, smoothing them between her hands. “I suppose she’ll be a Visitor now, and all.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.
“How do you know?” Miss Perkins’s facade cracked; all at once there was anger in her voice. “How do any of you know how or why our friends or family choose to come back? Do you ask the Returned their motivation?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t,” Holly Munro said. “It’s not considered wise.”
Holly glanced at me, then, as I knew she would. In the Wintergarden house, I’d done precisely that. And much good it had done me. I pressed my lips together.
“And this figure that Karen Dobson saw?” I prompted. “Did she describe it?”
Miss Perkins had moved on to a tray of purses and wallets. “Thin thing on all fours. Crawling down the corridor toward her.”
“Nothing more about its appearance?”
Her bony fingers moved across the tray, adjusting, adjusting, adjusting. “Little girl, I don’t think she hung around long enough to find out.”
A couple of hours we took, wandering around that store. I spent a good deal of it on my own. I interviewed the staff, but I also took stock of the building itself, tried to make a connection, suss out its personality. I found it surprisingly hard to do.
The layout was clear enough. It was a typical old-style department store, with each floor divided into formal sections. We had Bargains in the Basement; and Cosmetics and Visitor Defenses on the Ground floor. Visitor Defenses—consisting of more cut-price iron than you could shake a nightstick at—occupied, rather forlornly, the old Arabian Hall, looking almost comically insignificant beneath the golden pillars and winged griffins. Ladies’ Fashions, Kitchenware, and Children’s were on One; Men’s Wear was on Two, together with Habadashery and Home Furnishings. Three was mostly taken up with Furniture, while Four was Office Supplies and a few meeting rooms. To my eyes, the quality of goods seemed a little tired, though Holly Munro claimed that some of the ladies’ fashions were okay. There were four elevators—two centrally placed ones for customers (on the Ground floor, these were accessed behind the escalators) and two for staff at the north and south ends of the building—and also four staircases. Most people used the central staircase, which was next to the escalators and was impressively fashioned from coffee-colored marble, but there were narrow flights of stairs at the north and south ends too, extending the height of the building.
At the back of Aickmere’s, each floor had a long, echoing storeroom, accessible only by staff, where goods were piled in rows of cardboard boxes before being made ready for display. George spent his time prowling around these rooms, particularly the one at basement level, but I couldn’t feel any particular psychic difference in them. In fact, the sensations I got from the whole place were fairly muted—perhaps odd, given our theory that it was the focus for the whole Chelsea thing.
That’s not to say there was nothing. Underlying it all, fading in and out as you passed Visitor Defenses or the wall racks of lavender beside each interconnecting door, was a faint yet palpable unease. It was like a tingle on the skin, a prickling in the stomach; familiar to me, but not the usual malaise, chill, or creeping fear. As the afternoon drew on and the flow of customers ebbed away, the sensation grew stronger. Around me, silent staff members, pale and preoccupied, locked up registers, and tidied up displays. I went to a quiet corner, opened my backpack, and twisted the tap at the top of the ghost-jar.
“Ah,” it said at once, “stand aside! Let me use my enormous talent to solve your difficulties! Ooh, yes…I feel that disturbance too. Yes, that’s very odd. That’s interesting….”
“What do you reckon it is?”
“How do I know? What am I, a miracle worker? Give me a chance here. I need to think.”
Outside the windows, the sky was almost black. A buzzer sounded; down in the foyer, the staff gathered, muffled in their coats, eager to be gone. They filed out silently through the revolving doors. We watched from the fringes of the foyer: Lockwood and George beneath the artificial tree; Holly and Flo at the entrance to Cosmetics; Kipps and his crew up on the first-floor balcony, just across from me.
Mr. Aickmere was the last to leave. He spoke a few terse words to Lockwood, pressed buttons on the wall. The escalators stopped dead; the speakers gave a sudden crackle, a final, dying whine. Silence. Now the lights across the departments were one after the other shut off, leaving only a dim yellow nightlight humming in the foyer. Aickmere drew back, retreated through the door. We heard the key turn in the lock, his footsteps hurrying off along the King’s Road.