I set down my tea. He was infuriating and I didn’t quite trust him, but I reminded myself that he wanted the same thing I did: to find Gloria’s killer. Still, I took a bite of my scone and made him wait before I answered. “There isn’t much yet,” I admitted. “I’ve talked to Gloria’s assistant, Davies. The séance was the idea of Fitzroy Todd, who talked Gloria into it.”
Sutter nodded, sipping his coffee. “Go on.”
“Fitzroy says the idea was the clients’—that is, Mr. and Mrs. Dubbs. They offered him money to get Gloria to agree to the séance. Fitzroy always needs money, so he took it.”
“That isn’t in Scotland Yard’s reports,” Sutter said. “The money, that is.”
“No, it wouldn’t be. Fitzroy didn’t tell them. He probably thinks it paints him as a suspect, and he’s out to save his own skin.”
“And is he, in your opinion?” Sutter asked. “Is he a suspect?”
“I don’t know. Fitzroy is without use, but he isn’t violent. He could have done it, however. He was there, and I believe he’s strong enough.”
Sutter thought this over. “Go on,” he said again.
“I spent last night with Ramona, the spirit medium.” I didn’t bother mentioning what exactly had happened at the séance. “She’s a fraud, and she was an opportunist trying to latch onto Gloria, but I think she knows more than she’s telling me.”
Sutter evinced no emotion, but his gaze fixed on me and did not waver. “What exactly do you think she knows?”
I shook my head. It was a feeling I had—she had been so strange, so angry, and she had known so much about Gloria and me. But mostly it was the look in her eyes when she’d stopped me at her door. “She was afraid,” I said. “Terrified.”
“The police questioned her,” Sutter said. “She had nothing useful to say. It seems a great many people are lying to the police in this investigation. Which is why I need you.”
“I’ll try talking to her again,” I said. “Perhaps she’ll be more reasonable in daylight.” And after she’d had her fix for the day.
“If she was jealous of Gloria, don’t you think that would be a motive for murder?”
I looked at Sutter. He was watching me carefully, as always, his features humorless and still. “Perhaps,” I said. “But Ramona isn’t stupid, only desperate. She would be better served to use the occasion to steal Gloria’s clients, rather than risking murder.” I crumbled a piece of scone in my fingers, thinking. “Besides, Ramona is a drug addict. Her brain is addled most of the time, and she isn’t particularly healthy. I’m not sure she’s strong enough to subdue Gloria and carry her to the water. And I think a drug addict would commit a crime of opportunity, not something carefully planned.”
Sutter’s eyes gleamed. “You’re saying this was planned?”
I nodded, relieved to speak the thoughts that had gone around in my mind all night. “I’m starting to think it. I don’t have proof. But the more I look at this, the more it seems to me that Gloria was lured and set up. Someone didn’t just happen by and kill her. Someone quite deliberately, I think, wanted her dead.”
Sutter looked out the window at the busy street for a long moment, his coffee cooling in its cup. “Well,” he said finally. “That is very well-done, Miss Winter. You did almost as well as Scotland Yard.”
I leaned toward him. “What have they found?”
“I’ll admit they’ve surprised me.” Sutter uncrossed and recrossed his legs, frowning. “The inspector there, Merriken, is smarter than I gave the Yard credit for. I have the impression that nothing much gets past him.”
“He’s asked to see me,” I said.
Sutter nodded. “He has noted that he wants to question you.”
I swallowed, my throat dry. “Am I a suspect?” I asked him. “Your information must say something.”
“The problem with Gloria’s murder is that there are too many suspects to choose from, not too few. Her life was full of shady characters, rivals, former lovers, and frauds. And those are only the people we know about.”
“You forgot clients,” I said. “Gloria’s client list was supposedly powerful. It was certainly top secret. Any one of those people could have had her killed.”
“Inspector Merriken has already covered that ground,” Sutter said. “He’s interviewed a number of Gloria’s clients—with admirable discretion, I might add.”
I stared at him, amazed. “Are you saying Davies actually gave him a list of Gloria’s clients?”
“It seems she was rather reluctant. The note in the file includes the word ‘unpleasant.’ However, Inspector Merriken can be persuasive, and he tracked down some of the names himself. He’s also spoken to your friend from the New Society.”
“James Hawley?”
Sutter sat back in his chair. “Don’t look so surprised, Miss Winter. I presume you’re on your way to the offices of the New Society to see him right now.”
He was right, of course, although I did not admit it. “Is James a suspect?”
“As I’ve mentioned, there are too many suspects at the moment. However, except for the fact that this James Hawley wrote an article about Gloria that gained him some ridicule in his profession, there isn’t much motive for murder.”
“That article was years ago. They haven’t seen each other since.”
“And yet it was revived by a journalist rather recently, it seems. He may have been subjected to a new round of disbelief in the scientific community.”
“You don’t know him,” I said. “He doesn’t give a fig about that. James is no murderer.”
Sutter raised his brows at my avid defense. “I’m only trying to assist you. The article mentions you as well and is hardly a ringing endorsement of your powers. You mustn’t trust too easily, Miss Winter. You don’t know who is involved in this.”
I gave him a pointed look. “I don’t trust anyone—believe me.” When he did not quaver in the least, I admitted, “I may contact the Dubbses next, ask them some questions.”
“That would be covering ground already covered by Scotland Yard,” Sutter countered. “Do you truly think that would be the best use of your time? I need you to talk to the people who won’t tell the truth to the police. It’s why I hired you. People like this Ramona.” The disgust with which her name rolled off his tongue was audible. “If you feel there is more than what she’s said already, it’s best if you interview her again.”
“And my powers, of course,” I said. “You also hired me because of my powers.”
He looked out the window again, as if the mention of my powers made him uneasy, though his face gave nothing away. “I admit your powers are of interest to me,” he said. “Substantial interest, in fact. But you have as much as told me that you will not use them to contact my sister.” He looked back at me. “Are you saying you’ve changed your mind?”
I thought of how my powers had slipped away from me the night before, how I’d seen that horrible woman and her baby. I shook my head. “That offer is not on the table, Mr. Sutter.” I said the words with conviction, but they felt strangely dry in my mouth. I did not take the time to ponder why.
“Then I’m afraid I have a great many things to attend to.” Sutter pushed back his chair and stood, placing several coins on the table. He bowed briefly, a formal gesture I watched with surprise. “Good day, Miss Winter.” He paused in the doorway. “Be careful,” he said to me, and then he was gone, vanishing into the London crowds as if he’d never been.
* * *
The New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research occupied a small set of offices in a building off the Strand, up a musty set of stairs and past doors advertising various low-rent solicitors, accountants, and even a small poetry magazine. I hadn’t been here since the day they’d tested the powers of my mother and me, and yet I remembered it perfectly, as if I’d seen it yesterday.
&n
bsp; My knock on the office door was answered by a huge bear of a man, bearded, wearing an ill-fitting suit and carrying an umbrella, apparently on his way out.
His eyebrows shot upward when he saw me. “My goodness!” he said. “Miss Ellie Winter.” He turned and shouted at someone in the office behind him. “Sadie, do we have an appointment with Miss Winter?”
“No,” came a voice at the same time I said to him, “No.”
The man turned back and looked at me. He was pale, his light brown hair and beard threaded with gray. He had one of those faces that is impossible to age accurately, and he could have been anywhere from forty to sixty-five. He exuded intelligent vitality, and his eyes glinted at me from behind his glasses. This was Paul Golding, the president of the New Society. “A lovely surprise, then,” he said, backing away from the doorway. “Do come in.”
The main office contained three mismatched scarred desks, at one of which sat a stick-thin woman of fifty who was giving me a suspicious look. A door led to a second office, this one darkened, and a second passage led to a larger back room where, I knew, the Society conducted its tests on psychics. The wall behind the woman was lined with wooden filing cabinets, their tops stacked with files, papers, and books, and more papers sat piled on the floor in front of the cabinets. A single window looked out onto the street and gave a view of the graying sky, the dimmed light making the entire office rather gloomy.
“I hope you remember me?” Golding said, his eyebrows rising again.
“Yes, of course,” I said softly. I hadn’t expected a strange wash of emotion to come over me at the sight of these offices. I had been there only once before, and at the time I had been so hurt, so angry, it had seemed like the end of the world. Now I realized it had been nothing close.
“I surmised it,” Golding said, “but one must be polite. Would you like a seat?” He turned to the stick-thin woman. “Sadie, fetch us some tea.”
“I’m not staying long,” I said as the woman, unmoving, sent me a deadly glare. “Please don’t bother.”
Still, Golding ushered me to the darkened office, obviously his, where he removed his hat and set down his umbrella. I followed, mostly to get away from the glare of the unaccountably hostile Sadie. “I’ve interrupted you,” I said in apology. “You were on your way somewhere.”
“Somewhere!” Golding said, as if I was joking. He pulled out the chair behind his desk and lowered his large bulk into it with a creak. “Just to the doctor’s, where he’ll lecture me yet again about my heart. He worries about that organ more than I do. No—” He sat back and laced his hands across his rather sizable stomach. “An unexpected visit from The Fantastique trumps all.”
I quickly ran my mind over what I knew about Paul Golding. It wasn’t much. He’d been president of the New Society since the war ended; before that, according to what James had told me, he’d served as an officer in the war. The papers, when they mentioned him at all, dismissed him as an eccentric or a fraud, an attitude I was well familiar with. And he had run the tests that labeled my mother a fake and my own powers “inconclusive and unproven.”
“I hope this isn’t about the newspaper article,” Golding said to me. “We had nothing to do with that.”
“I understand,” I said. “I’m here about—” I hadn’t realized what I was there for, really, until I’d already arrived. “I’m here about Gloria Sutter.”
Paul Golding’s features lost their joviality, and it was no act. “That girl,” he said. “That poor, wonderful, irreplaceable girl.” He swallowed. “I thought you two were not on speaking terms.”
I shook my head, not willing to explain it to a stranger. “You must have spent a lot of time with her,” I said. “You knew her well.”
“I was well acquainted with her, but James is my researcher. He had more contact with her than I did.” A hint of humor crossed his expression again. “He isn’t here, by the way. In fact, he hasn’t reported to work in several days. I believe he’s been spending most of that time with you.”
I frowned at him. “Not exactly.”
“That’s not what he says.” Golding shrugged. “I’d reprimand him if not for the fact that I don’t pay him much, and his job comes with an utter lack of respect and heaps of abuse. And I know better than to try to rein him in. Gloria’s death seems to have awakened his Galahad instincts.”
I had questions to ask about Gloria, but I couldn’t help myself. “What do you mean, you know better than to rein him in?”
“James is independent,” Golding replied. “We gave him his own desk at first, but we soon discovered he didn’t much like to use it. He likes to work alone, in his own flat or out on investigation. He’s the best investigator I’ve ever seen—quite simply splendid. He’s investigated hundreds of supernatural claims firsthand, and his skill in ferreting out frauds is unmatched in this country or any other.” He smiled a little, unashamed of the effusive praise. “Frankly, he should be doing something that brings him renown, not ridicule, but I can’t convince him of that. And until I do, I get the benefit of his investigative brain.”
James had been wrong about me, of course, and about my mother. I’ve thought a lot about that day, he’d said. Something was not quite right.
“As for you,” Golding said, “I see you’re still in business.”
I was no longer angry, but it galled me still that these people thought me a liar. I recalled what my mother had taught me about attempting greater and greater feats for a disbelieving audience. She was right: There was no peace in it. “When was the last time you saw Gloria?” I asked him.
“Last year,” Golding replied. “I went to one of her séances, in fact. I had seen her in our testing environment any number of times, but I felt the need to see her work in her own space. She knew who I was and why I was there. I made no attempt to keep it secret.”
“But the article James wrote was already years old by then,” I said.
“Yes, I know. I was going through a—well, you could call it a crisis of faith, I suppose, though not of the religious kind. We had launched a large project asking the public to write us their experiences with the supernormal—a psychical census, of sorts. We’d been inundated with letters, but it seemed they were all frauds, misconceptions, delusions, dreams, or outright lies.” The corners of his eyes relaxed, and his expression grew distant and a little tired. “Humanity is sometimes terrible, desperate, and sad. I felt a need to see Gloria Sutter in action again, to be reminded of what it is like to be in the presence of a true spirit medium.”
“You still believe she was a real medium?” I asked.
“Yes. Gloria Sutter was the most incredibly talented medium I’ve ever seen. She was a phenomenon of nature, and her loss is a permanent tragedy to the future of scientific study of the supernormal.”
And to me. The words almost tripped out of my mouth before I could stop them. It is a permanent tragedy to me. But I only looked at him in silence as the pieces clicked in my head and I came to a realization. This man had admired Gloria, and he had appreciated her worth to science, but he hadn’t loved her. I was starting to think that except for me and possibly Davies, no one had.
Paul Golding raised his eyebrows politely, taking in my silence. “Miss Winter?”
“I’m going to find her murderer,” I said to him.
He took this in with barely a blink. “Indeed. And this is what James has been helping you with?”
“Yes.”
“I knew he was looking into it, but I thought it was for his own satisfaction. He feels he owes her a debt.” Golding took a piece of paper from his desk and uncapped a pen. “I have no faith in the police, Miss Winter, and you and I have something of a checkered past. However”—now he was writing quickly, with a flourish—“I do have faith in James Hawley.” He handed me the paper, on which was written an address. “Please make good use of him and return him to me in one p
iece. You’ll find him at his flat, I believe.”
I took the paper and put it in my handbag. To hell with it, I thought, and held out my hand. “Thank you for your help.”
He looked surprised, but he shook my hand. His grip was huge and strong. “Good day.”
I stood. It had been easy this time, even with gloves on. “It’s at the back of your drawer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your watch. You don’t wear it every day because it’s expensive and it was your father’s and you’re afraid of losing it. After the last time you wore it, you put it in the back of your drawer, thinking it was a good hiding place. But then you forgot your own hiding place when you decided you wanted to wear the watch this morning.”
There was a brief silence. Then Paul Golding tilted his head, his gaze on me changing in a way I could not read. His voice was very careful. “Miss Winter, you surprise me.”
I shook my head. It had been a stupid impulse, petty and vain, wanting to prove something to this man. Still, I couldn’t quite be sorry I’d done it. I turned to go.
“As it happens,” Golding called after me, “you are correct.”
With my hand on the knob of the office door, I turned to face him again. “Sorry?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out an antique watch on a chain. “I found it this morning, after nearly an hour’s search,” he said. “Perhaps we underestimated you, Miss Winter.”
I stared at the watch, hiding the waves of shock that were breaking over me like a fever. I swallowed and forced myself to shrug. “That’s up to you,” I said, my voice cracking. “Good day.” I walked breathlessly through the outer office, past the eternal glare of Sadie, and hurried down the stairs, nearly running by the time I got out the front door and onto the street.
He’d found it. He’d found the bloody watch already. I made my way through the crowds on the Strand, looking at no one, seeing nothing. The vision had been quick, and so very clear.
The Other Side of Midnight Page 14
