Lockwood (25 page)

‘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.

The skull had mentioned something no one else knew, you see. Bickerstaff hiding papers under the floorboards of his study. Secret papers.

Papers that might hold the key to the riddle of the bone glass.

Papers that might, conceivably, still be lying there, in the deserted house on the edge of Hampstead Heath.

Now that
was
interesting.

As Lockwood said, the ghost was almost certainly fibbing. The chances of it truly having a close connection to Bickerstaff and the bone glass were not high. Even if it
was
telling the truth, those secret papers might well have disintegrated or even been eaten (how we laughed at this) by rats. But there
was
a chance. They
might
be there. He wondered if it was worth checking. George felt it was, and I was too tired to disagree. Before we went to bed (it was already dawn), we had our plans in place. The following day, assuming there were no other developments, we would mount an expedition.

The birds were singing outside the windows when I finally left the kitchen; it was going to be another lovely morning.

As I closed the door, I glanced back into the room. The ghost-jar still sat where we’d left it on the table – quiet and peaceful, the plasm almost translucent . . .

The skull was grinning at me, as skulls do.

When visiting a property with such a chequered history as the Bickerstaff ruin, you might think it was safest to stick to daylight hours. This (the sensible option) was sadly impractical for us, for a number of reasons. The first was that, after a night like we’d just had, we didn’t get out of bed till noon, and it took much of the afternoon to prepare our supplies and ring the appropriate authorities to get access to the deserted house. The second was George’s insistence on nipping down to the Chertsey Records Office in search of ‘The Confessions of Mary Dulac’, that old document by one of Bickerstaff’s associates. George wanted to do this as soon as possible; he hoped it might give us some insight into the horror that had taken place at Bickerstaff’s place all those years ago. Also, he figured it was only a matter of time before Bobby Vernon read the same old newspapers he’d found, and made precisely the same connections.

The final (and most important) reason why we didn’t get there until after sundown was me – or rather the question of my peculiar Talents. After our chat with the skull, Lockwood’s faith in these was now sky-high. He told me as much as we worked in the office together, collecting equipment for the operation.

‘There’s no question about it, Luce,’ he said, setting out a neat row of salt bombs along the floor. ‘Your Sensitivity is phenomenal, and we’ve got to give you every chance to use it. Who knows what you might pick up in the Bickerstaff house after dark? And I don’t just mean by Listening – you could use your sense of Touch as well.’

‘Yeah,’ I said heavily. ‘Maybe.’ You might detect that I didn’t speak with wild enthusiasm. It’s true that I can sometimes pick up impressions of the past by touching objects that possess a psychic residue, but that doesn’t mean it’s always a pleasant thing to do. It was pretty clear that the Bickerstaff residence was unlikely to provide me with many jolly experiences, no matter how chirpy Lockwood might be right now.

I couldn’t share much of his good humour that afternoon, anyway. Once again the daylight had had the effect of lessening the thrill of the whispering skull’s words, and I found myself increasingly uncomfortable that we were following a trail it had set for us. The first things I did when I came downstairs were to close the valve in the bung, and cover the jar with a cloth. I didn’t want the ghost to hear or see us unless we willed it. Even so, I couldn’t help feeling that the damage had already been done.

I finished emptying our work-belts onto my desk, and began sorting through the thermometers and torches, the candles and matchboxes, the vials of lavender water and all the rest, making sure everything was in working order. Lockwood was humming peaceably to himself as he set about restocking our supplies of iron. That was the other thing about the skull: almost in the same breath as mentioning Bickerstaff’s secret papers, it had made new insinuations about Lockwood’s room upstairs.

I turned to look out of the office window into the basement yard. Iron bands across the inside of the door? There was only one reason anyone might do that . . . No, clearly the claim was ridiculous. Yet how could I take one of the ghost’s comments on trust and disbelieve the other?

‘Lucy,’ Lockwood said – it was almost as if he’d been reading my thoughts – ‘I’ve been thinking about our friend the skull. You’re the one who talks to it. You’ve got a sense of its personality. Why do
you
think it’s suddenly started speaking?’

I paused a moment before answering. ‘I really don’t know. To be honest, I don’t trust anything it says, but I
do
think there must be something about the Bickerstaff case that attracts it. You remember when it spoke, the first night – after we’d got back from the cemetery? I think we’d been talking about Bickerstaff, just as we were last night. It’s overheard us talk about dozens of other cases these last few months, and it’s never got involved before. Now it has twice in three days. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.’

Lockwood was filling up a canister of iron filings. He nodded slowly. ‘You’re right. We’ve got to tread carefully until we understand what it wants. And there was one other thing it said. It claimed that Bickerstaff’s mirror – this bone glass – gives you knowledge and enlightenment. What do you think
that
means?’

‘Not a clue.’

‘It’s just that George
has
looked in the glass. Only briefly, of course, but still . . .’ He glanced up at me. ‘How does he seem to you, Lucy? Do you think he’s OK?’

‘He seems a little distracted sometimes, but that’s hardly new.’