Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase (19 page)

I let my bruised muscles stretch out as I walked; it was nice to feel my strength returning. Lockwood was limping slightly, but otherwise full of zest. He’d removed the bandages from his ghost-touched arm to let the sunshine bathe his skin. ‘If we can solve this old case,’ he said; ‘if we can uncover the murderer and get justice for the girl, it’ll be
brilliant
publicity. It’ll totally offset the fact that we burned that woman’s house down.’

‘And help us save Lockwood and Co. into the bargain,’ I said.

‘That’s the hope . . .’ He steered past a man offering tourist maps of the ‘safe zones’ of the city and ignored the entreaties of an iron-seller. ‘But only if we get good cases, and get them soon.’

‘You realize DEPRAC will be working on this too,’ George pointed out. ‘It’s never their priority, but they do investigate old murders, if they happened within living memory.’

‘All the more reason to act fast,’ Lockwood said. ‘OK, let’s cross here.’

We ducked out across the road, stepping over the open drain, or ‘runnel’, of running water that separated the pavement from the tarmac. The wandering dead were known to dislike moving water; consequently narrow runnels crisscrossed many of the great shopping streets in the West End, allowing people to walk in safety well into the evening. Earlier governments had hoped to extend this system across the city, but it had proved prohibitively expensive. Aside from ghost-lamps, the suburbs fended for themselves.

Up a side-road, under a great stone arch and out onto the sweeping curve of Regent Street. Not far ahead, a stand had been set up on the pavement. Flags fluttered above a cheery blood-red canopy. On each flag reared a gold heraldic lion, and an ornate letter ‘R’.

‘Ooh, look,’ George said. ‘Hot chestnuts! Who wants some?’

A group of boys and girls in dark red jackets were ranged around the stand, giving out free sprigs of lavender, salt bombs and sweets to passers-by. Roasting chestnuts popped and crackled on an open brazier; an acned youth with a giant scoop stood by to tip them into paper cones. The agents’ hair was carefully brushed, their swords polished, their faces scrubbed and smiling; all seemed to have been pressed out of the same anaemic mould. They were representatives of Rotwell’s, the second oldest psychical agency in London and, thanks to its publicity campaigns, by some distance the most popular. Behind the stand, set back a little from the road, the central Rotwell office rose – a vast, smooth-fronted edifice of glass and marble. Snarling lions, holding rapiers in their forepaws, had been inscribed into the glass of its sliding double doors. I knew the interior of that office; I’d failed an interview there.

A smiling boy, no more than ten years old, held out a little cone of chestnuts as we approached. ‘Gift courtesy of Rotwell’s,’ he said. ‘Go safe tonight.’

‘We’re
not
having any,’ Lockwood growled. ‘George, I want you just to walk on by.’

‘But I’m hungry.’

‘Tough. You’re not walking down the street with one of those cones in your hand. It would be a crime to advertise a competitor.’

He ignored the boy and stalked on past. George
hesitated, then took the cone and popped it in his pocket. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Nicely out of sight.
I
say it’s a crime to refuse free food.’

We pushed on through the pressing crowd and came out the other side. A few minutes later we had reached a quiet, leafy square a block behind Regent Street. It was dominated by an ugly, brick-fronted building of colossal size. An iron plaque on the door read:

NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES

George’s spectacles gleamed. This was his territory; he had the nearest I’d seen to a smile on his chestnut-stained face. ‘Here we go. Keep your voices down. The librarians are picky here.’ He ushered us over the iron line and through the revolving doors.

I’d never been a big one for reading as a kid. My family rarely had a book in the house, and I’d been apprenticed out to Jacobs almost before starting school. Of course, I had to read in order to complete my studies – you can’t get any of your certificates without a simple written exam – and I’d memorized the
Fittes Manual for Ghost-hunters
by the time I was twelve. But after that? To be honest I was too busy working to spend much time with books. True, Jacobs had occasionally sent me to the local library to look up historical
details on hangings (the region around Gibbet Hill, half a mile from our little town, being a notorious spot for Visitors), so I wasn’t entirely unused to buildings full of printed paper. But the National Newspaper Archives was on a bigger scale than anything I’d seen before.

The complex had six enormous floors piled about a central concrete atrium. When you stood at the bottom, among palms and other indoor trees, the ascending levels of shelves and racks and reading tables seemed to reach to the sky. A large iron sculpture hung from the domed roof high above, part decoration, part defence. On every level, hunched figures flipped through yellowed newspapers and magazines. Some, perhaps, researched the Problem, looking for clues to the plague that beset us. Others were agents: I saw blue Tamworth jackets dotted about, the lilac tones of Grimble, and here and there the sombre dark-grey hues of Fittes. Not for the first time I wondered why Lockwood hadn’t chosen to clothe us in a coordinated uniform of our own.

Like me, Lockwood seemed somewhat overawed, but George bustled us along in a confident manner. Within a few minutes he had taken us by lift to the fourth floor, sat us down at an empty desk and, after disappearing for a moment, plonked down the first great grey files before us.

‘Here’re the local papers from the Richmond district, forty-nine years ago,’ he said. ‘Annabel Ward disappeared late June. The article I found came out a week or so later.
Lockwood, why don’t you start with the July editions? They’re the most likely to be helpful. Lucy, you check the autumn file. I’ll go and get some issues of
London Society
.’

Lockwood and I took off our coats and immersed ourselves obediently in the thrill-a-minute pages of the
Richmond Examiner
. I soon found it contained more local fetes, lost cats and best-kept allotment competitions than I could have believed existed in the universe. There was quite a bit about the Problem too, the nature of which was beginning to be discussed. I found early calls for ghost-lamps to be erected (they eventually were) and for graveyards to be bulldozed and salt-sown (they weren’t: it was far too expensive and controversial; instead they were simply ringed with iron). But I discovered nothing more about the hunt for the missing girl.

Lockwood and George – who was flipping through the glossy black-and-white photos of the society magazine – were having a similar lack of luck. Lockwood grew restless; he looked sighingly at his watch.

Shadows fell over my page. Looking up, I discovered three people standing by the table, watching us with ill-concealed amusement. Two were teenagers, a boy and a girl; the other was a very young man. All three wore the soft grey jackets and crisp black trousers of the oldest, most prestigious company of ghost-hunters in London, the Old Grey Lady of the Strand – the celebrated Fittes Agency. Their rapiers had
complex, Italian-style hilts, much more old-fashioned and expensive than ours. They carried neat grey briefcases emblazoned (like their jackets) with the Fittes symbol, the rearing silver unicorn.

Lockwood and George got to their feet. The young man smiled at them.

‘Hello, Tony,’ he said. ‘This is novel. Haven’t seen you here before.’

Tony
. No one, in the six long months I’d known him, had so much as dared to call him Anthony. For a split second I assumed there was great friendship between this Fittes supervisor and Lockwood; then I realized it was the other thing.

Lockwood was smiling too, but not in a way I’d ever seen before. It was somehow wolf-like. Deep creases hid his eyes. ‘Quill Kipps,’ he said. ‘How’s life treating you?’

‘Busy. Very busy. What about you, Tony? You look rough, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing serious. Just a few knocks. Can’t complain.’

‘Yes, I imagine you haven’t got time for that,’ the young man said, ‘what with all the other people complaining about
you
. . .’ He was very slightly built, almost bird-like in his delicacy of form. He probably weighed less than I did. He had a small, rather upturned nose, a narrow freckled face, and auburn hair cropped severely short. He had four or five
medals pinned to the breast of his jacket, and in the pommel of his rapier was a glittering green stone. Not that he could use the sword much these days. I guessed he was about twenty, so his days of active service were behind him. His Talent had mostly shrivelled up and gone. Like my old leader, Jacobs, and all the other useless supervisors choking the industry, all he could do now was boss the kids around.

Lockwood didn’t seem overly perturbed by the jibe. ‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘these things happen. So . . . what are you researching?’

‘Cluster of ghosts in a road tunnel near Moorgate. Trying to figure out what they are.’ He eyed our open files. ‘I see you’re looking into something too.’

‘Yes.’

‘
Richmond Examiner
. . . Oh,
I
see. The notorious Sheen Road case. Of course, here at Fittes, we tend to do our research
before
we take on a Visitor. We’re not completely stupid, you know.’

The boy at his side, a tall and gangling youth with a large, big-boned head and a thatch of mousy hair, laughed dutifully. The girl didn’t respond. Humour – even the snide and easy sort that she was meant to side with – didn’t seem her thing. Her chin was small and slightly pointy. Her blonde hair had been cut short at the back, but she had a sharp flick angled across her forehead; its tip almost reached her eye. I thought her striking, in a hard and plastic sort of way.

She gazed at me. ‘Who’s this?’

‘New assistant,’ Lockwood said. ‘Well, newish.’

I held out a hand to the girl. ‘Lucy Carlyle. And you are . . .?’

The girl gave a little laugh and looked away up the aisle as if there were a crisp packet or something lying there that she found more interesting than me.

‘You ought to watch out being with Tony, sweetheart,’ Quill Kipps said. ‘His last assistant came to a nasty end.’

I smiled blandly. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.’

‘Yeah, but bad things happen to people he’s close to. It’s always been that way. Since he was
ever
so young.’

He tried to make it sound casual, but his tone betrayed him. There was a catch in his voice that I didn’t understand. I glanced across at Lockwood. The way he stood was different. His studious unconcern had stiffened, become something harder and less pliable. I knew he was about to say something, but before he could speak, George stirred.

‘I’ve been hearing things about
you
too, Quill,’ he said. ‘That young lad you sent into the Southwark catacombs alone, while you “waited for reinforcements” at the door. What became of that kid, Quill? Or haven’t they found him yet?’

Kipps frowned. ‘Who told you that? That wasn’t the way it happened—’

‘And that client who got ghost-touched because your agents left an arm-bone in his bin.’

The man flushed. ‘That was a mistake! They threw away the wrong bag—’

‘Plus you have the highest mortality rate of any Fittes team leader, so I’m told.’

‘Well—’

‘It’s not a
great
record, is it?’

There was a silence.

‘Oh, and your fly’s undone,’ George said.

Kipps looked down and discovered the unhappy truth of the statement. His face went bright red. His fingers strayed to his sword hilt; he took a half-step forward. George didn’t move, but unblinkingly pointed to a
QUIET
sign hanging on the wall.

Quill Kipps took a deep breath. He smoothed his hair back, smiled. ‘Pity I can’t close that fat mouth of yours here, Cubbins,’ he said. ‘But there’ll come a time when I will.’

‘OK,’ George said. ‘Meanwhile, why not pick a fight with someone your own size? I suggest a gerbil or a mole.’

Kipps made a small sound with his lips. He moved; the blade was in his hand—

A blur of movement at my side; a tang of steel on steel. Lockwood scarcely seemed to have changed position, but the line of his rapier now stretched out diagonally across
the table, intersecting Kipps’s blade, pressing it firmly down.

‘If you’re going to mess about with swords, Quill,’ Lockwood said, ‘you’d better be able to use them.’

Kipps said nothing. A vein pulsed halfway up his neck; under the smart material of his soft grey sleeve, his arm exerted pressure. I could see that he was trying to shift his rapier, first one way, then the other, but Lockwood, without appearing to expend any effort whatsoever, forestalled him. The blades remained still, their owners almost motionless; George and I, and the two Fittes agents, were likewise frozen, as if by some magical extension. All around us, the library’s quiet hum went on.

‘You can’t keep this up for ever,’ Kipps said.

‘True.’ Lockwood’s arm twisted; he flicked his wrist. Quill Kipps’s rapier was snatched from his hand. It flew straight up and embedded itself, point-first, in the ceiling.

‘Nice,’ I said.

Smiling, Lockwood returned his sword to his belt and sat back down, leaving Kipps breathing loudly through his nose. After a moment he gave a little jump, hoping to reach the hilt of his hanging sword, but missed by several inches. He jumped again.

‘Little bit higher, Quill,’ George said encouragingly. ‘You almost got it then.’

At length Kipps had to scramble onto the table in order
to wrestle his rapier free. His agents watched in silence, the boy smirking, the blonde girl as stony-faced as ever.

‘I’ll pay you out for that, Lockwood,’ Kipps said, when he’d returned to the ground. ‘I swear I’ll make you pay. Everyone knows DEPRAC’s going to close you down, but that won’t be enough for me. I’ll find a way of making you
really
suffer, you and these idiot friends of yours. Bill, Kate, come on.’

He spun round. His lackeys did so too. Like a small, poorly trained dance ensemble, they flounced away in unison towards the lift.