Lockwood & Co: The Whispering Skull

15

As always, Lockwood was fastest to react. ‘Lucy, take the rapier.’ He tossed it over. ‘Go to the door. Just a quick look, then barricade us in.’

Cool night air swirled around me as I stepped between the body and the key table. I crossed the threshold and looked out into the street. Our tiled path was empty, the gate at the end hung open. The streetlight outside number 35 cast its bland apricot-pink radiance in a cone across the pavement. One porch was illuminated in a house opposite; another had an upstairs bathroom light on. Otherwise the houses were dark. From down the end of the road I could hear the ghost-lamp’s rumbling hum. It was off right now. Within the next two minutes it would come on again. I saw no one. Nothing moved.

Keeping the rapier in a guard position, I walked out a little further, across the line of iron tiles. I peered down into the basement yard. Empty. I listened. Silence across the city. London slept. And while it slept, ghosts and murderers walked free. I stepped back into the house and closed the door, flipped the locks and pulled the chain across.

Lockwood and George were crouching by the fallen body, George shuffling sideways to avoid the spreading pool of blood. Lockwood had his fingers on the man’s neck.

‘He’s alive,’ he said. ‘Lucy – call a night ambulance. DEPRAC too. George, help me roll him over.’

George frowned. ‘Shouldn’t we leave him? If we move—’

‘Look at him; he doesn’t have long. Get him on his side.’

While they did the business, I went into the library and made the calls.

When I got back they had him facing the shelves; he lay with his arm outstretched beneath his head, and his eyes half open. The pool of blood hadn’t got any smaller. Lockwood, crouching low, bent close beside his face; George, pencil and paper in hand, knelt at his back. I hovered close, near George.

‘He’s been trying to say something,’ George said. ‘But it’s hellish faint. Something about bogeys.’

‘Shhh!’ Lockwood hissed. ‘You misheard, I keep telling you. It was “bone glass”, clear as day. He means the thing he stole. Jack, Jack, can you hear me?’

‘Bone glass?’ I had a sudden flash of the little mirrored object, clasped across the corpse’s breast. Its rim had been uneven, smooth and brown – I’d assumed it had been made of wood. Was it bone, then? And if so – what kind of bone? Or whose?

George leaned close. ‘Sounded very much like “bogeys” to me.’

‘Shut up, George!’ Lockwood growled. ‘Jack – who did this? Can you tell me?’

The dying man just lay there. Strange to see him now, after all our searching. The fearsome, ruthless relic-man, Jack Carver. Flo had said that he wore the threat of violence round him like a cloak. That he was a killer. Perhaps so, but now that violence had been done to him, he wasn’t at all how I’d imagined. Younger, to begin with, and scrawnier too, with a gaunt, tight look about the cheekbones. There was something indefinably ill-fed about him, a look of constant desperation. His jacket hung loose about the thin white neck, which had a patch of shaving rash under the jaw. His T-shirt was dirty; his jacket smelled bad, as if the leather hadn’t been successfully cured.

‘Who did this to you?’ Lockwood said again.

A spasm of movement, shocking in its unexpectedness. The head reared up, the mouth opened and closed; milky eyes stared blindly out at nothing. George and I jerked back; George dropped his pencil. Noises came from the mouth, a string of sound.

‘What was that?’ I gasped. ‘What did he say?’

‘I got it.’ Lockwood made an urgent gesture. ‘Write it down.’

George was scrabbling on the floor. ‘The pencil . . . Oh God, it’s rolled under him.’

‘What he said was: “Seven from it. Seven, not one.” Got that? Wait, there’s more.’

‘I’m not sticking my hand under there.’

‘Next bit: “You see such things. Such terrible things . . .”’

‘Could you fetch the pencil, Luce?’

‘Will someone write it down?!’ Lockwood yelled.

In a frenzy of panic, George retrieved the pencil and scribbled down the words. We all bent close. The man was very still, his breathing wren-like: tiny, frail and fast.

‘Where’s the bone glass, Jack?’ Lockwood said to him. ‘Has someone got it?’

The parched lips mumbled again.

George sat back with a cry. ‘Juice! He wants juice! Can we give him that? Are we allowed to give him juice?’ He hesitated, frowning. ‘Have we actually got any?’

‘Julius!’ Lockwood growled. ‘He said Julius, George. As in Julius Winkman. Honestly, your ears.’ He bent in close again. ‘Winkman’s got the bone glass, Jack?’

The faintest nod.

‘Did Winkman do this to you?’

For unknown seconds we waited. The man spoke again.

‘Write it down, George,’ I said.

George looked at me. Lockwood glanced up, frowning. ‘Write down what, Luce?’

‘What he just said.’

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘He said: “Please come with me.” Clear as day.’

Lockwood hesitated. ‘Didn’t hear that. Write it anyway, George. And move back a bit. I’m watching his lips and you’re blocking the light.’

We shuffled aside and waited. We waited a long time.

‘Lockwood,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I think that might have been it.’

None of us said anything. None of us moved.

Death is fugitive: even when you’re watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don’t get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you’ve missed it. Time to move along now, nothing to see. Nothing to see there, ever again.

We knelt beside the relic-man, as motionless as he was, holding our breaths, sharing the moment of transition. It was as if we were trying to stay with him, those first few seconds, wherever he was, wherever he was going.

It was the only thing we could do.

When it was obvious that he really had gone, life reclaimed us. We all sat back, one after the other, breathed deeply, coughed, rubbed our faces, scratched ourselves, did trivial stuff to prove that we were still capable and alive.

Between us was an object, just an empty, hollow thing.

‘Will you look at this rug?’ George said. ‘I’ve only just cleaned out the stain from the cocoa we spilled the other night.’

‘What did the ambulance people say, Lucy?’ Lockwood asked.

‘The usual. They’re waiting for protection. Barnes is arranging that.’

‘OK. We’ve got ten, fifteen minutes. Time enough for what George has got to do.’

George blinked. ‘What’s that?’

‘Search his pockets.’

‘Me? Why me?’

‘You’re the most light-fingered of us.’

‘Lucy’s got smaller hands.’

‘She’s also the best at drawing. Lucy, take the notebook. I want a sketch of the murder weapon, accurate as you can.’

While George, white-faced, busied himself with the dead man’s jacket, Lockwood and I moved along to the dagger sticking out of his back. My hands shook a little as I drew the rough shape of the hilt; I had to concentrate to keep the pencil firm. Funny how an actual death always hits you so hard. Visitors are scarier, sure, but they don’t have quite that power to shock. Lockwood seemed as cool and in control as ever, though. Perhaps deaths didn’t have the same effect on him.

‘It’s a Mughal dagger,’ he was saying. ‘From India, maybe sixteenth century. The curved hilt’s inlaid with ivory and gold. Grip’s made of black cord, tightly wound around the metal. Lots of decorative pieces fixed to the pommel and at the end of the hand-guard. Milky white stones – not sure what they are. Opals, you think, Lucy?’

‘Not a clue. How on earth do you know this is a Mughal dagger?’

‘My parents studied oriental traditions. Got whole books on this stuff. Ceremonial piece, I think. Is the blade thin and curved?’

‘Can’t see, mostly. It’s in him.’

‘Odd thing to kill someone with,’ Lockwood mused. ‘Who has one of these, outside a museum?’

‘An antiques dealer might,’ I said. ‘Like Winkman.’

He nodded. ‘How very true. Finish the sketch. What have you found there, George?’

‘A lot of money, mainly. Look at this.’

He held out a narrow brown envelope, stuffed almost to bursting with the quantity of banknotes inside. Lockwood riffled through it swiftly.

‘All used twenties,’ he said. ‘Must be close to a thousand quid. Find anything else?’

‘Coins, cigarette paper and tobacco, a lighter, and a crumpled note in your handwriting addressed to the Graveyard Fellowship. Also some tattoos, which have given me a lot to think about.’

‘The note in the café worked better than I expected,’ Lockwood said. ‘I’ll take that. You can put the rest back. Yes, the money too. Then we’ll put him on his front again. Barnes will soon be here. By the way: we don’t let slip anything we’ve uncovered so far. I don’t want Kipps getting hold of it.’

George gave a sudden curse. ‘Barnes! The ghost-jar! I told Barnes I’d got rid of that.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. Go shut the oven door, then – quickly. We haven’t got much time.’

Lockwood was right. We were just lowering Carver back down when we heard the ambulance crew arriving at the door.

It’s never a massive pleasure to have Inspector Barnes and his DEPRAC forensic squad barging about the house, particularly when they’re dealing with a dead man in your hall. For hours they stomped about in their hobnail boots, taking photographs of body, knife and blood-stain from every angle; emptying the corpse’s pockets, photographing the contents and taking them away in little bags; and all this while we were confined to the living room to keep us out of the way.

What made it especially irritating was that Kipps had turned up too, together with several of his team. Barnes didn’t seem to mind them interfering. Tall, shaggy-haired Ned Shaw stalked the ground floor, interrogating the medics, arguing with the clean-up crew and generally being objectionable. Tiny Bobby Vernon loitered with his clipboard by the body, sketching the dagger just as we had. He watched the pocket-emptying closely, shaking his head and giving us hard looks through the living-room door. Meanwhile humourless Kat Godwin tried listening for psychic traces that might have been left by the murdered man. She stood so long in a corner of the hall, eyes shut and frowning in sharp-chinned concentration, that I was tempted to creep up with one of George’s jackets and use her as a coat-rack.

The body was eventually zipped up in a bag and taken to the van outside. The rug was rolled up and removed. The forensic team used salt guns to cleanse the hall. One of the operatives, chewing methodically on his gum, stuck his head round the living-room door. ‘That’s all done,’ he said. ‘You want us to scatter iron?’

‘No, thanks,’ Lockwood said. ‘We can do it.’

The man made a face. ‘Murder victim. With murder victims, you’ve got a sixty-five-per-cent chance of them coming back in the first year. Thirty-five per cent after that. Fact.’

‘Yes, we know. It’s OK. We can seal the ground. We’re agents.’

‘First agent I’ve ever seen wearing shorts like that,’ the man said. He left.

‘Me too,’ Barnes said. ‘And I’ve been in the business thirty years.’ He tapped his fingers on the sofa-arm and glared at us for the umpteenth time. For half an hour now he’d been sitting there, giving us the third degree. Time and again he’d made us go over what had happened that evening, from the knock on the door to the ambulance crew’s arrival. We’d been moderately truthful, as far as it went, though we hadn’t mentioned what we’d heard Carver saying. The way we told it, he’d staggered in and dropped straight down dead, no whispered words on offer. Nor did we mention Lockwood’s note.

Quill Kipps stood leaning on a sideboard behind him, arms folded, watching us through narrowed eyes. Godwin and Vernon sat on spare chairs. Ned Shaw skulked in the shadows like a hyena that had just learned to stand on its hind legs, glowering at Lockwood the while. It wasn’t one of our usual merry living-room gatherings. We didn’t offer them tea.

‘What I still fail to understand,’ Barnes said, ‘is why Carver came here to you.’ His moustache rippled as he spoke; his face was heavy with suspicion.

Lockwood, sitting in his chair, pulled negligently at his sleeve. It was hard to look elegant in his current outfit, but he was doing his best. ‘I assume he somehow heard we were investigating the theft. Perhaps he wanted to speak with someone competent, intelligent and resourceful, in which case we were clearly the only option.’

Kipps rolled his eyes. Barnes made an impatient exclamation. ‘But why should he come at all? Why break cover? He was a wanted man!’

‘I can only think it was something to do with the Bickerstaff mirror,’ Lockwood said. ‘I think its powers appalled him. Don’t forget it killed his colleague Neddles before they left the cemetery. Who knows what else it did. He may have wanted to come clean about it, and tell us what it could do.’

Barnes’s scowl travelled the room. ‘This mirror has been gone less than forty-eight hours, and already the two men who stole it are dead! Think about it – it would probably have killed Cubbins here too if you hadn’t covered it with the net.’

‘That’s assuming his face wouldn’t have cracked the glass first,’ Kipps said.

‘It must be found!’ Barnes clapped a fist into his palm. ‘Or this won’t be the end. It’s deadly! It kills wherever it goes!’

‘The mirror didn’t kill Carver,’ Lockwood said quietly.

‘Ah, but it did. Because people are willing to commit murder to get it.’

Lockwood shook his head. ‘Maybe, but whoever stabbed Carver doesn’t have the mirror.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘From the money he was carrying. He’d already sold it.’

‘That doesn’t prove anything. They might have killed him to keep him quiet.’

‘If I’d given Carver a thousand pounds for the mirror, and then murdered him, I might be inclined to take the money back,’ Lockwood said. ‘No, this was done by someone else. Someone with access to weird daggers. If I were you, Inspector, that’s where I’d start.’

Barnes grunted. ‘Whoever did it, my point still stands,’ he said. ‘This mirror is a menace. No one can consider himself safe until it’s found. And so far I don’t think much of either of your investigations. Kipps’s ham-fisted arrests have filled every cell in London and achieved precisely nothing. Meanwhile the best lead we have turns up dead on Lockwood’s carpet!’ His voice rose several notches; the moustache jutted out like a windsock in a gale. ‘It’s not good enough! I need action! I need results!’

From the chair where he perched like an eager schoolboy, Bobby Vernon spoke for the first time. ‘I’m making excellent progress at the Archives, sir,’ he trilled. ‘I feel sure I’ll have a breakthrough for you very soon.’

George sat slumped in the depths of the sofa. ‘Yeah, we’re working on it too.’

Kat Godwin had been staring at us in mounting irritation. ‘Inspector,’ she said suddenly, ‘Lockwood clearly hasn’t told us the whole truth about tonight. Look how shifty Cubbins is; see the guilt in that girl’s eyes!’

‘I thought they always looked like that,’ Barnes said. He glanced up as a thin-faced DEPRAC agent appeared from the hall. ‘Well?’

‘Just had word from Portland Mews, sir, round the corner. Number seven there heard an altercation on the street around half past eleven. Raised male voices, very angry. Some kind of argument. Sure enough, there’s blood on the cobbles outside. It’s where it happened.’

‘Many thanks, Dobbs. All right, we’re moving out.’ Barnes rose stiffly. ‘I should warn all of you that it’s an offence not to share information with other investigating agents. I expect co-operation between your teams. I expect results. Lockwood, Cubbins – don’t forget to scatter iron in your hall.’

The party broke up. Barnes and his men left first, then Kipps’s team; I showed them out. Quill Kipps was the last to go.

He paused at the door. ‘Ms Carlyle,’ he said. ‘A word with you . . .’

‘So you do know my name,’ I said.

Kipps gave a small smile, showing his neat white teeth. ‘Joking aside,’ he said softly, ‘I’d like to be serious for a moment. Don’t worry, I don’t want to know whatever little secret Lockwood’s keeping from us. Fair’s fair – this is a contest, after all. Although, incidentally’ – he leaned slightly closer, so that I caught a lungful of some strong, flowery scent – ‘do you think it was exactly sporting of Lockwood to knock down poor Ned Shaw the other day? Wasn’t that slightly against the rules?’

‘Shaw started it,’ I said. ‘And Lockwood didn’t really knock him down. He—’

Kipps made a dismissive gesture. ‘Be that as it may. Ms Carlyle, you’re clearly the most intelligent of your team. And you’ve some little Talent too, if everything I’ve heard is true. Surely you don’t want to hang around with these losers any longer. You’ve got a career to think of. I know you had an interview with Fittes a while ago; I know they failed you, but in my opinion’ – he smiled again – ‘they made a bad mistake. Now, I have a little influence within the organization. I can pull strings, get you a position within the company. Just think: instead of eking out a living here, you could be at Fittes House, with all its power at your disposal.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm. I couldn’t remember when I’d been so angry. ‘I’m quite happy where I am.’

‘Well, think about it,’ Kipps said. ‘The offer’s open.’

‘And I’ll have you know we’re not without influence at your organization already,’ I added, while closing the door. ‘Penelope Fittes has invited us to your Anniversary Party in a couple of days. Perhaps we’ll see you there – if you’ve been invited. Good evening.’

I shut the door in his face and stood against it, breathing deeply, trying to calm down. I walked up the hall, boots crunching through salt, to the kitchen. Lockwood and George were surveying the forgotten debris from our supper. It seemed a long while ago.

‘All right, Luce?’ George said.

‘Yeah. I just remembered that Fittes party we were invited to. We still going to that?’

Lockwood nodded. ‘Of course. We’ll have this case done by then, I hope. We’ve been discussing Barnes. He wants this mirror so badly. He knows what it does, or something important about it, mark my words.’

‘Well, we know a bit too, now,’ George said. ‘What did Carver say? “You see such things, such terrible things.” He was talking about looking in the mirror. Take it from me.’

Lockwood picked up a dried sandwich, inspected it, and returned it to the plate. ‘If it is a mirror,’ he said. ‘Carver called it a “bone glass”. If it’s made from bones Bickerstaff pinched from the graveyards, then it presumably contains a Visitor – that’s what gives it psychic power. Maybe that’s what you see when you look deeply into it? The ghost, somehow.’

‘Or ghosts,’ I said. ‘Seven from it, not one.’

‘Well, I saw something in it,’ George said softly. ‘It was terrible, but I wanted to see more . . .’ He stared towards the window.

‘Whatever it is,’ I said, ‘it’s so bad you die of fright if you see it properly. Like that relic-man Neddles did. I reckon Bickerstaff looked into it too. Maybe what he saw sent him mad and made him shoot himself.’

Lockwood shrugged. ‘Could be.’

‘No. That wasn’t the way it happened.’

Lockwood stretched. ‘We should get on and seal the hallway. It’ll be dawn soon.’ He stared at me. I’d jerked suddenly upright. My heart was pounding, my skin felt like ice. I was looking all around. ‘Lucy?’

‘I thought I heard something. A voice . . .’

‘Not Carver, surely. They doused the place well.’

I glanced towards the hallway. ‘Don’t know. It’s possible . . .’

‘So we’ve got a ghost free in our house now?’ George said. ‘Fantastic. What a terrific night.’

‘Well, we’ll fix him.’ Lockwood went to the shelf behind the door; he found a pack of iron filings and tore it open. George did the same. But I stood quite still, frozen in disbelief. A whispering voice had just spoken in my ear.

‘Bickerstaff? No. That wasn’t the way it happened at all.’

I ran my tongue over dry lips. ‘How can you possibly know that?’ I said.

Moving like a sleepwalker, I pushed between Lockwood and George, rounded the kitchen table and crossed over to the oven. I put my hand on its door.

Lockwood spoke to me, his voice sharp and questioning. I didn’t answer, just flung the oven door open. A green glow spilled out into the room. The ghost-jar gleamed in the shadows, the face a hazy, malevolent mask deep within the murk. It was motionless, watching me. The eyes were narrow slits.

‘How can you say that?’ I said again. ‘How can you know?’

I heard its spectral laughter bubbling in my mind.

‘Very simple. I was there.’