I passed it on.
Lockwood started. ‘Charming! Hold on – was that from you or the ghost?’
‘The ghost, of course.’
George whistled. ‘I’m not sure I should write that down.’
‘There’s no use being polite,’ I said. ‘Trust me. It’s a foul thing and there’s no point pretending otherwise. So you knew Bickerstaff, did you?’ I said to the jar. ‘Why should we believe you?’
‘Yes,’ the whisper came. ‘I knew him.’
‘He says he knew him. How? You were his friend?’
‘He was my master.’
‘He was his master.’
‘Like Lockwood is yours.’
‘Like . . .’ I halted. ‘Well, that’s not worth reporting, either.’
‘Come on, Luce,’ Lockwood said. ‘Spit it out.’
George’s pencil was hovering. ‘Yeah, got to record it all.’
‘Like Lockwood is my master. Happy now? I mean, this skull’s an idiot.’ I scowled over at them; Lockwood was scratching his nose as if he hadn’t heard, but George was grinning as he wrote. ‘George,’ I said tartly, ‘just remind me. What were the names of Bickerstaff’s companions? Simon Wilberforce and . . .’
‘Dulac. Mary Dulac.’
‘Spirit! Are you Mary Dulac? Or Simon Wilberforce? What is your name?’
A sudden burst of psychic energy made me jerk back in my chair. The plasm frothed; green light coursed around the room. The mouth contorted.
‘You think I might be a girl?’ the voice spat. ‘What a cheek. No! I’m neither of those fools.’
‘Neither of those fools, apparently,’ I said. ‘Then who?’
I waited. The voice was silent. In the jar, the apparition had become less distinct, the outlines of the face fainter; they merged with the swirling plasm.
George took a handful of crisps. ‘If it’s gone shy all of a sudden, ask it about the bone glass, about what Bickerstaff was doing. That’s the important thing.’
‘Yes. For instance, was he actually a grave-robber?’ Lockwood said. ‘If so, why? And how exactly did he die?’
I rubbed my face with my hands. ‘Give me a chance. I can’t ask all that. Let’s take it one step at a—’
‘No!’ The voice was urgent, intimate, as if whispering directly into my ear. ‘Bickerstaff was no grave-robber! He was a great man. A visionary! He came to a sad end.’
‘What end? The rats?’
‘Hold it, Lucy . . .’ Lockwood touched my arm. ‘We didn’t hear what it said.’
‘Oh, sorry. He was a great man who came to a sad end.’
‘I said he was a visionary too. You forgot that bit.’
‘Oh yeah. And a visionary. Sorry.’ I blinked in annoyance, then glared at the skull. ‘Why am I apologizing to you? You’re making some pretty big claims about a man who kept sacks of human bones in his basement.’
‘Not in his basement. In a workroom behind a secret wall.’
‘It wasn’t his basement. It was a workroom behind a secret wall . . .’ I looked at the others. ‘Did we know that?’
‘Yes,’ Lockwood said. ‘We did. It overheard George telling us that earlier this evening. It’s giving us nothing new or original, in other words. It’s making all this up.’
‘You know that the door on Lockwood’s landing is lined with iron strips,’ the voice said suddenly. ‘On the inside. Why do you think that is, Lucy? What do you think he’s got in there?’
There was a silence, in which I felt a rush of blood to my ears, and the room seemed to tilt. I noticed Lockwood and George watching me expectantly.
‘Nothing,’ I said hastily. ‘It didn’t say anything then.’
‘Ooh, you little liar. Go on, tell them what I said.’
I kept silent. The ghost’s laughter rang in my ears.
‘Seems we’re all at it now, aren’t we?’ the whispering voice said. ‘Well, believe me or not as you please, but yes, I saw the bone glass, though I never saw it used. The master wouldn’t show me. It wasn’t for my eyes, he said. I wept, for it was a wonderful thing.’
I repeated this to the others as best I could; it was hard, for the voice had grown soft and wistful, and was difficult to hear.
‘All very well,’ Lockwood said, ‘but what does the bone glass do?’
‘It gives knowledge,’ the voice said. ‘It gives enlightenment. Ah, but I could have spied on him. I knew where he kept his precious notes, hidden under the floorboards of his study. See how I held the key to his secrets in my hand? I could have learned them all. But he was a great man. He trusted me. I was tempted but I never looked.’ The eyes glinted at me from the depths of the jar. ‘You know all about that too – don’t you, Lucy?’
I didn’t repeat that last bit; it was all I could do to remember the rest without getting distracted by unnecessary details.
‘He was a great man,’ the ghost said softly. ‘And his legacy is with you today, though you’re too blind to see it. All of you, too blind . . .’
‘Ask him his name again,’ Lockwood said, when I’d reported this. ‘All this counts for nothing unless we get some concrete details.’
I asked the question. No answer came, and the pressure in my mind felt suddenly less acute. The face in the jar was scarcely detectable. The plasm moved more sluggishly, and the spectral light was fading.
‘It’s going,’ I said.
‘Its name,’ Lockwood said again.
‘No,’ George said. ‘Ask him about the Other Side! Quick, Luce—’
‘Too blind . . .’
The whisper faded. The glass was clear, the ghost had gone.
An old brown skull sat clamped to the bottom of the jar.
George swore softly, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Lockwood clapped his hands on his knees and rolled his neck as if it hurt him. I realized that my back ached too, all over – it was a solid knot of tension. We sat staring at the jar.
‘Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost,’ George said. ‘Now that’s what I call a busy evening.’
Lockwood nodded. ‘To think some people just watch television.’
Our encounter with the skull made it an all-nighter, of course. We couldn’t go straight to bed after that. Despite our frustrations with its lack of co-operation, we were all too excited to rest, too pepped by the rarity of the event. According to George, this was indeed the first confirmed Type Three since Marissa Fittes had died. There’d been reports of others down the years; but the agents involved had all either died soon afterwards or been certified insane, and sometimes both. Certainly no one had been able to provide a proper witness, as he and Lockwood had just done. I was unique, my gift was something to be prized, and it would make all our fortunes if we played our cards right. Lockwood was no less thrilled; he made us all a round of bacon sandwiches (an event almost as rare as chatting with Type Threes) and, while we ate them, talked about how we might proceed. The question was whether to go public straight away, or try to get the skull to speak again, perhaps in front of other independent witnesses. He was sure many of our rivals would be reluctant to believe our story.
I didn’t play too much part in the debate. I was pleased – of course – with my success, and with all the praise I was getting, but I felt exhausted too. The effort of listening to the skull had quite worn me out. All I wanted to do was sleep. So I let the others talk, and when Lockwood moved on to discuss the one possible hard bit of information he felt we’d got from the ghost, I didn’t join in that conversation either. But Lockwood and George read and re-read George’s scribbled notes, and the more they read, the more energized and talkative they became.