by Jerico Lenk
“What was that about?” Cain grumbled as he closed the door behind me.
“Nothing.” My mother. My mother. “He was just … you know how he is.”
“Yes, and I hate him.” Cain sighed, plopping down on a lavender divan. His eyes roamed the files we’d abandoned stacked on a desk. “Will, I appreciate your help, but if this is too tedious, I can handle the rest myself. Really.”
“Oh, no, it’s all right, Cain. Thank you for the tea.”
“How many cases have we gone through?” he asked a second time.
“Thirty-seven,” I reminded him.
“Splendid. Only over a hundred more to go, then. Hand me the next?”
***
It was the last inspection before holiday leave, and also the last case of the year, gifted to the Cross by the SPR after its receipt of a letter pleading for assistance.
Miss Violette Ogden, one of the Cross’s few mediums, waited outside during the interview of the Burke-Adams house maid and gardener. Miss Ogden was entirely opposite Miss Jessica in character, placid and looking as elegant as she moved and spoke. Deep blue gown with lace collar and lace overlay beneath fine winter wraps, her cheeks rosied from the brisk, slushy eve, raven hair soft and smooth and held up off her slender neck by a raven-shaped clasp. I knew her almost immediately not just from All Hallows’, from the great gallery with Clement and the others, but from the soup kitchen that night after reconnaissance.
The research inspectors’ pre-work found no great mystery at the Burke-Adams house in its history; Sir Dalton Burke was wealthy, he’d bought the townhouse from an even wealthier American friend, and he’d lost his two sons at sea and his daughter just a year ago, after Boxing Day. That was when he’d abandoned the house, and rumours of ghosts sprang up not long after it was sold.
What happened to the daughter was simple and tragic. Earlier in the year, Lady Diana Burke’s fiancé broke off their engagement. Fraught with so much grief, she locked herself in an upstairs room and took her own life with her father’s straight razor.
In the Burke-Adams house, objects were moved, sometimes thrown to the floor. Music boxes sounded off on their own, and phantom voices drifted about the empty halls. Passersby and the new residents swore they saw a woman in white here, there, in the windows. The gardener’s little mustached terrier often waked in the middle of the night to growl into the dark for no perceived reason, and the gardener said the maid was just a mad old woman who didn’t understand the worst parts of ageing.
The servants wanted the spirit gone, and Sir Dalton Burke refused comment when the Cross had reached out to him during the preliminary research.
“I suppose, as we’ve got you tonight, Miss Ogden, they didn’t think we’d need anything but the compass,” Clement complained, crouched over the equipment trunk. Thankfully the house was warm; the current residents possessed the luxury of keeping their fires lit around the clock. Comfortable without our cold weather wraps, we’d ended our invalidation tour of the fine house in the back stairwell, a beautiful room small in length but which vaulted up to the second story, moonlight falling in along the sectioned stairs through high windows.
Miss Ogden smiled magnanimously. “My apologies, Clement.”
“Well … ” He sighed, running his hands through his hair in a distracted way, as if his inspector’s focus demanded his usual restlessness be channeled elsewhere. He raised his brows and gave Miss Ogden an especially pleasant smile. “Shall we start with a medium’s tour?”
Miss Ogden tipped her head gently one way and then the other, then nodded idly and retrieved a sketchbook and stub of pencil from the small carrycase she’d brought along.
Without a word, she stood in the center of the room with pencil poised above the open sketchpad. The silence rang faintly about us as she closed her eyes and took a slow breath through her nose. Quiet, so quiet—not a whisper from us and not a sound elsewhere in the settled house.
Just when the quiet began to press in, drawing us into its stillness, Miss Ogden stirred and moved towards the stairs without opening her eyes. Expertly, she lifted her foot at just the last moment to climb the first short section slow and blind. As she turned for the second set of enameled stairs, her eyes fluttered open. She stood profile before a large portrait of the new residents. And then she drifted on again.
Slowly, Clement followed her. Quinn took the ambience compass from O’Brien and gestured for him to take notes, then passed the compass to me as we all moved after Miss Ogden in silence.
“She’s crying.” She stopped short as she stepped off the stairs into the second-floor hall. “Was there some sort of loss? Not death, but … ”
O’Brien tapped my shoulder. He whispered, “We do not give official mediums case information, nor have them present during interviews.”
She moved through the house with a special sort of blindness, I realised in mute wonder. Yet she saw more clearly than we did at the moment.
“I hear … ” She sighed. “I don’t know, but they’re speaking.”
“They?” Clement prompted.
“They.” Dreamily, Miss Ogden wandered on down the hall, her long, lily-white fingers tight on the sketchbook. “Oh, I can’t see him clearly, but he’s much older than she. And she loves him.”
She halted again, whipping her head around to watch something move down the hall. But there was nothing there; it was within her vision, and her vision alone. She smiled, a deep and sentimental smile that just unraveled itself slowly across her mouth. “I wish to move on. I’m drawn to be upstairs.”
The whole house was quite sturdy compared to other places we’d inspected; hardly a creak sounded on our way up to the third story. I trailed my fingers along the smooth, thickly-carved banister as we went up, and in the periphery of my flickering glance, there stood a woman in the far corner of the hall. Half engulfed by peaceful shadows, just a flash of white dress that, when I looked up quickly, had already gone again.
“Will.” Clement peered down from the top of the steps. “Come on, then.”
Miss Ogden stood in a room with yellow-papered walls and a long, wide rug.
“Oh,” she uttered, uncomfortable, from deep in her throat. Her face twisted. She shifted, running one palm up her forearm, and then the other, as if she’d caught a chill. “That burns,” she said bitterly. “What happened here? Dreadfully grave in this room. But she’s joyous, I don’t understand.”
“This is the room,” Clement whispered to Quinn, watching Miss Ogden with a measure of subdued excitement. “Where the girl … ” He dragged a finger up one arm and then the other, making a slick sound with his tongue and teeth.
“Don’t be profane,” Quinn muttered back.
Miss Ogden sagged down to a chair and sat with her back to us, hunching low over her sketchbook. The lines of tension in her body were obvious; the light for her to see was poor, but she scrawled away with fervour, hand moving furiously on the paper, the scratch of the pencil rustling through the quiet.
“Yes,” Miss Ogden edged out through gritted teeth, her voice raw, raspy. “She is happy. I hear her humming. She dances with him, this man. I still cannot see him … does no one else in the house know him? ‘But I love you,’ she says. ‘Embrace me.’ ‘Gladly, kitten.’ How long has this secret affair gone on—?”
Miss Ogden stood, spun on her heel and strode purposefully out of the room. We all parted for her, startled.
In the hall, she came to a sweeping stop and cast Clement a dark glance over her shoulder.
“Do you know that someone died in that room?” she demanded.
We were all very quiet, waiting for Clement. Miss Ogden tucked her sketchbook under her arm with pinched fingers.
“Yes,” he finally conceded.
“And do you know how this individual died?”
Clement stood with his arms crossed, gaze locked with hers, unwavering and serene. “Yes, Miss Ogden. She killed herself.”
I squinted through the dark at the sketch
book at her side, very curious as to what psychic image she’d recorded. Dark scribbles, an oval shape, pencil lead dug hard into the page. Traced and retraced and traced again so that the outline of it was a bold, writhing mass of repeated lines.
Miss Ogden narrowed her eyes. “No,” she said, voice thick and unfriendly. “She was killed.”
On her drawing pad, the profile of a woman in the center—sketchy curves of hair, fast angles of her face, but no features, filled in by pencil so that it was a silhouette—
Like a cameo worn as a brooch. A hair pin. Or even a ring.
***
The candlestick at the corner of Mr. Zayne’s makeshift desk rattled as he dropped down onto it a large file box labeled 1889, stuffed with wax-sealed documents, crumpled newsprint. I reached out to steady the candle before it fell and set the whole place ablaze, papers and chemicals and cluttered junk galore.
“There wouldn’t be a mistake in the case file,” Mr. Zayne griped, rolling up his sleeves before assailing the box of papers, “as there isn’t a mistake in my books, as I do not make mistakes filling out my books!”
“Well, someone made a mistake.” Clement practically hovered over his shoulder—which was something, as Mr. Zayne was certainly not smaller than him. But then he seemed to feel bad for the way we’d blown so madly into the shop, scaring away a few burial club members come to pay their weekly dues, so he withdrew with a sullen look a bit too volatile to be a pout.
“You’re lucky I keep my receipts,” Mr. Zayne remarked when he finally located Lady Diana’s death certificate. “See that? ‘Suicide with a razor; probably insane at the moment of death.’”
Clement took the wrinkled certificate and stared at it as if it had done him some injustice. Preemptively, Mr. Zayne removed the box and hoisted his most up-to-date death ledger in its place. His boorish friend Jasper came in, tapping grey snow off his knit cap.
“What’s the fuss about?” he grumbled, nearly shutting the door on O’Brien, who’d moved out of his way.
“Highgate East.” Mr. Zayne pointed in his book. “Her plot’s north side of Egyptian Avenue. You might require a jimmy bar for the mausoleum door.”
I stared at him, mildly disturbed but captivated by his masterful knowledge of cemeteries.
Clement snapped a glance to Quinn, who, next to Jasper, seemed an utter aristocrat. “Take O’Brien and burn the bones. If she’s been cremated, we shall have to reassess.”
“Me?” O’Brien sputtered, all bugged eyes and red face between his big ears.
“Take them, Jasper,” Mr. Zayne said.
Quinn frowned at Clement, hard, suspicious, but Clement ignored it. I waited in the corner, still in a daze. Seeing repeatedly in my mind Miss Ogden’s psychic drawing. Fierce, bold lines, circling and circling—a fashionable cameo, undeniably.
Quinn helped Jasper gather their tools and, with O’Brien flighty and clearly shocked to have been delegated such a pressing task, they set out, the door closing behind them on an echo of laughter somewhere out on slushy Fleet Street.
“Zayne,” Clement husked. “Do you have the other name?”
Mr. Zayne gave him a funny look, then suddenly lit up. “Oh! Yes, right.” He swung away from his desk and reached for a landslide of papers on the floor next to it, which seemed to have overflowed from his box of records. “That poor girl from Waterloo.” He plucked up a fresh obituary. “Miss Lerna Weiss. ‘Shooting, willful murder.’” He straightened up again with a wary shadow softening his face, gently sweeping that cracked, hare-headed marionette out of the way where he’d moved it to hang there in the corner above his papers.
“Is this about your secret murderer?” he murmured.
“Do you have this one’s place of interment yet?” Clement was in a manic sort of focus, flipping through the big death ledger.
“Clement, you can’t just go burn the girl’s bones without a case. Westwood will be furious with the lot of you! Furious with me—”
Clement snatched his coat up and shoved into it, eyes flashing over Mr. Zayne. “We will not be going to the cemetery.”
“Then where?” For the first time, I saw a temper broil within Mr. Zayne, but somehow, he kept it respectfully restrained.
Clement was already opening the door; he cast a glance over his shoulder, looking straight at me though he spoke to his resurrectionist partner.
“Waterloo,” he said.
Waterloo Bridge was a lonesome, dismal thing, all lumps of muddy ice and snow. The lights of surrounding streets and lamps along the road could scarce break through the winter haze, their halos just hovering in the dark as the pale fog softened the noise of street traffic shuffling through it.
Clement moved fast and with fierce purpose, off the junction of Wellington Street and down the Embankment to the pier. As I caught up, breathless with urgency and my face tingling from the bracing cold, he spun to me and demanded, “Reach out to her!”
It was as if the night stirred to the wildness inside us. The wind tossed hair in and out of Clement’s face, set his popped collar dancing about his throat. I looked to him in a helpless sort of impatience, knowing exactly what he desired—a mild possession with another appearance of the pink cameo ring.
“I can’t just order she show herself,” I argued. “Do you really think she’s another victim?”
His hazel eyes were ablaze.
“Listen,” I said, at once intimidated and relieved by his frenzy. Why did I protest against his believing in our mystery? “The murder was not framed as a suicide. Perhaps it was by a simple street gang. It’s possible! We can build a case. It’s Waterloo, Clement. Surely, they’ll open another file. Then we shall come back and … ”
Farther down, by the water, she stood watching.
A dark figure, smudged over by the fog. No muff, no cloak—just soaked dark hair and a buttoned autumn gown blackened by murky water. Bone-white hands dangling at her sides. She watched us. She …
Recognised me.
The metal taste of instinct rose on my teeth and I stepped around Clement, striking out towards the figure with a power in my stride that I did not expect. “Miss Weiss!” I called.
She was there—and then she was gone. I quickened my pace, searching the riverside mist for her. It was no use. Fogs like this made it nearly impossible to see one’s own hand stretched out before them.
“I came back!” I called for her. “I came back to hear from you!”
“He killed me.”
I turned sharply towards the voice, heart aflutter. “Yes!” I choked out. “Yes … who was he?”
There—in the corner of my eye. She gawked at me as if baffled I spoke with her. There was a soft glow about her, just enough to remind me she was far from as corporeal as she appeared. Pasty white face, wide and endless eyes. She was intelligent. She was like Charlie and Colette, Mary Ann …
“I don’t know,” she hissed.
“What did he look like? I might be able to see what you saw, feel what you felt, if … ”
She faded away into the fog only for her voice to burst again just behind me, that hateful lament:
“He shot me!”
“Yes, he’s a monster.” I turned in a slow circle, following her voice as it moved around me. She, always just out of sight, her words bouncing in the eerie dark. Someone alive walked by not too far away, coughing. I jumped. I waited a moment. I said, “Lerna, did you see a ring on his hand?”
“How do you know my name?”
“A ring, Lerna.”
“I don’t know. I tried to run!”
Becoming dizzy, I stopped and closed my eyes.
“Pistol—or a revolver—I don’t know the difference, only that my girlfriend Iris says I should get a pocket derringer, but—”
“Please, Lerna, concentrate. Did he wear a ring? I must know, in order that we may … ”
My chest clenched tight. So that we may what?
I let out a slow, shuddering breath and forced myself to look into the
fog again. “So we may avenge you, Miss,” I said.
“I believe he wore a ring, yes.”
Her voice, on the back of my neck. “What colour was it?” I gasped, shoulders bunched up.
No answer. The city muffled like a ringing in the ears. I waited, frozen in place, begging she had not worn herself out and petered away into the night. Tears burned my eyes, helpless and cold; my throat ached.
“Rosy pink!” Lerna whispered, right up against my ear.
I spun about, calling desperately, “Clem—!”
But Clement was already there, and caught me through the fog by the elbow. I gasped again, fairly choked on his name. A few tears shook loose of my lashes and stole down my face of their own accord despite my hollow astonishment.
I hadn’t lied to the Missing woman. Perhaps not immediately, and not without some difficulty, we would find the owner of this cameo ring.
I met Clement’s eyes, the stray tears going ice cold before they even reached my chin. “Did you bring the oil and matches?” I husked. “Or must we stop by Mr. Zayne’s on our way to the cemetery?”
His hand firm on my arm, Clement peered at me almost shyly, surprised and … His eyes sharpened as if he realised the warmth with which he gawked. A few strangers passed by, skirting wide around us, as all strangers were wont to do at this hour of night when no one could be trusted.
Quietly, Clement said, “The ring appeared, didn’t it?”
***
Crunch!
Mr. Zayne heaved the small hand axe off the splintered latch of a still shining coffin, and with hands red and raw from the cold hoisted the thing open.
Miss Lerna Weiss, beautiful even in her stinking decay somehow, dark hair folded loosely about a grey, blistered and shrunken face. Black lace, black taffeta. Withered flowers against the stained satin. Nails, purple like what was left of her lips. Like the rotting skin around the puckered wound in her temple, which had been cleaned, and stitched tight as possible with a thick thread.
