The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (70 page)

Gairden stood in the middle of the floor, avoiding the stain, turning slowly; letting his gaze travel.

Something glittered; something seemed to fall through the air. He glanced up, thinking there was a leak in the roof, but the ceiling was unmarked. He looked down, and there, by the door, was another of those tiny cogwheels – this one of a silvery-blue metal. He moved, and picked it up.

Out in the corridor another faint glittering fall, almost too fine to see; in the glow of the wall lamps it fell like a tiny burning star, landing outside the door of Rheese’s office.

It was locked; he was sure it was locked, but under the touch of his fingers the lock snicked back and the door swung open.

Gairden walked in. He would have some explaining to do if Rheese turned up. He stood with his head cocked, waiting, but it seemed that whatever had led him here had run out of steam.

There were papers on the desk again. One quick glance, and he would be gone.

Designs. Toys. A doll, a metal bird. Drawings in a swift, meticulous hand; another hand, heavier with the pencil. Thick lines scored through notes. Half-legible scrawls in the margins.
Nonsensical. How can this work?

A brown, crinkled stain on the edge of the paper. Gairden sniffed. Brandy.

And beneath the desk were a pair of shoes. Waiting for the bootboy to pick them up for cleaning? They looked very clean already. Polished to a gleam.

Gairden glanced behind him, then picked up the shoes and turned them over.

The soles were smooth, grimed with the dust of the factory floor. If they had trodden in blood, it was no longer there. But something glimmered where the sole met the shoe. Something small and bright. With the tip of his pencil, he levered it out from the seam.

A tiny golden arrow, the weapon of a miniature Cupid. Gairden bounced it on his palm, put the shoe back where he had found it, and left.

The patent office was a great, brown, shuffling, rustling wasp’s nest of a place; off the central hallway with its noble domed ceiling and tall imperious counters were dozens of tiny rooms, crammed and choked with paper. Inspector Gairden, after a number of increasingly wearisome enquiries, misdirections, and misunderstandings, found himself in one of these, confronted by a small, tweedy, harassed man with thinning hair and a sore-looking nose. “You wish to examine a patent?” The man rubbed his nose and sneezed. “Excuse me, sir. It’s the dust. Which one would you wish to see?”

“I wouldn’t,” Inspector Gairden said. “I merely wish to be informed about any
new
patent applications. Should they arise.”

“Oh, I see. Well, if you’ve the authority …”

“I have, yes.” He pointed to his authorization papers which were, in fact lying on the man’s desk; Gairden was tempted to snatch them back up before they disappeared in the great forest of paper that lay all about them. He found himself wondering how many trees had died, to provide these birth certificates of yet more machines.

“The thing is, Inspector, we can get more than a hundred a week. You want to know about all of them?”

“As many as that?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Anything from a new type of propelling pencil to a flying machine.”

“Ah.” Gairden tapped his chin. “Mannequins, then. Dolls, automata, things of that nature. And anything with the name Lalika.”

“Lalika?” The patent officer shook his head. “Fanciful.”

“Oh, and while I’m here, I’d like to see any recent applications in the name of Wishart. J. Wishart.”

“That would be with the Ws,” the patent officer said. He sighed, and got up from his chair with the air of a man much put upon, and disappeared among towering stacks of paper, muttering: “Doubleyou, doubleyou . . . How recent, Inspector?”

“The last six months, say.”

“Hmm. No . . . no, there’s nothing. Oh, that’s odd …”

“What’s odd?”

The patent officer reappeared, clutching a brown manila file. “Well, there’s one application, at least five years old. Nothing after that. Looks like old Frobisher’s handwriting – he retired last month. Came into some money, unexpected, and moved abroad.”

“Did he indeed? Then I’d like to see all the applications he worked on before he had such an unusual stroke of good fortune.”

“But …”

Gairden looked around at the tottering piles of paper. “I’m sure you don’t throw anything away, do you? Find them. I’ll wait.”

The sound of the machines thrummed through Rheese’s office, like a heartbeat. The level of brandy in the decanter had fallen; the levels in all the others stayed the same. They gleamed like great flaunting jewels. Gairden stood by the table; Rheese sat, as usual, behind his desk.

“I’m glad to hear you have some information,” he said. “Do feel free . . . and pour me one while you’re about it.”

“Do you have gin, Mr Rheese?”

Rheese paused for a moment. “Wouldn’t have put you down for that type, Inspector.”

“You do keep it, though?”

“Well, yes, for the staff, you know, or traders. Can’t stand the stuff meself. Did you want—”

“No, thank you, sir. I think the decanter may be chipped, in any case.”

There was a silence. “Really?” Rheese said. “Why would you think that?”

“Because I think it may have been used as a murder weapon, Mr Rheese.”

There was a faint clinking noise, then an odd, crystalline buzzing. The tray on which the decanters stood had begun to vibrate, a rhythmic resonance, silvery and strange.

Rheese rubbed his hands together, with a dry rasping sound. “A murder weapon? Really?”

“I don’t like machines, Mr Rheese. I don’t like the world’s obsession with them. But Jamie Wishart did. He loved them. And he put that love into what he made.” Gairden moved to the window, and looked out into the rain. A tiny persistent ringing made him glance down, and he realized that the latch of the window, too, was resonating, beating against the frame like the clapper of a bell. “You applied for a number of patents, did you not, Mr Rheese?”

“I . . . what? Yes. Of course I did. Where is that damned noise coming from?”

“Your father applied for a number, too. A man of great talent, Mr Matthew Rheese. He invented several mechanisms of some significance, I understand.”

“Yes . . . yes, he did. What is this to do with the matter at hand?”

“He was fond of Jamie, wasn’t he?”

“Really, Inspector …”

“He gave him the job, and the workshop. He even gave him a watch, for his twenty-first birthday. That must have jarred on you.”

“Father had a soft spot for lame dogs, Inspector.”

“But Jamie Wishart wasn’t a lame dog, was he? Your father recognized that. I wonder if the boy had a touch of the other, a strain of the fey to him; I suppose we’ll never know. Either way, Jamie Wishart was a genius. You aren’t, Mr Rheese.”

“How dare you?” Rheese exclaimed. “What do you know about it?”

Gairden pinned him with his gaze.

“Until Jamie came along, you hadn’t applied for a single patent. The patents you applied for after that weren’t yours. The inventions weren’t yours. They were all Jamie Wishart’s. He was too busy making what he loved to realize that you were stealing from him.”

“Now look, Inspector, that’s complete—” Rheese pushed himself out of the chair, his cheeks flushed, his teeth bared.

“Sit down, Mr Rheese.” Gairden’s voice was cold as metal.

Rheese slid back into his chair. “Nonsense! No one will ever believe a word of it.”

“They’ll believe the patent applications, Mr Rheese. You got careless towards the end, once your father was out of the way. You didn’t bother copying the original designs; they’re still in Jamie’s hand, though the applications are in yours.”

“I was doing it as a favour to him! The boy had no business sense …”

“It’s enough for people to start looking very carefully. Looking at why the patent officer, Aloysius Frobisher, suddenly became very comfortably off, just before he retired abroad.”

“You can’t prove anything.”

“Oh, I can,” Gairden said. “Boot polish, in your office? I wondered why a man such as you was polishing his own shoes. I realized the stains on your fingers had left smudges – those on Lassiter’s are ingrained. He didn’t smear the door when he touched it – you did. His fingers are dark with dye – yours were stained with boot-blacking. But you polished the surface, Mr Rheese, and forgot the sole. Not a bad metaphor, is it? You stamped on Jamie’s watch. A childish gesture; the poor man was already dead. I found the minute-hand in the stitching of your shoe. She led me to it, I believe.”

“Who?”

“Yes, I can prove one murder. Proving the second …”

“But there wasn’t . . . I mean—” Rheese’s voice was getting ever louder, as though trying to drown out the soft uncanny music that now seemed to shiver in the very walls.

“You took the gin with you,” Gairden said. “Did you think you might have trouble, getting him to give up this particular patent? Did you plan to get him drunk? He never touched the stuff, but you didn’t know that. You didn’t know him at all. I wonder if anyone did.”

Gairden moved away from the window, towards the table where the clock stood, humming with resonance, even though it was broken, shivering with a kind of life.

“You found them together, dancing. He’d created something you never could. Something extraordinary; something that would make you a rich man. But this time, he wouldn’t let you take out a patent, would he? What he’d created was more than just a mechanism to him. It was a true labour of love.

“You argued. And the gin was in your hand. A little must have leaked from around the stopper when you swung it at his head, again, and again, and again. I knew it wasn’t a regular burglary, you see. Someone there merely to steal his designs, they wouldn’t have been angry enough to hit him so many times, poor fellow. But you, Mr Rheese, you hated the mind in his skull, that genius mind you could never match. You had to destroy it. His refusal to give her up was just the excuse you needed.

“When Jamie fell, she fell, too; Lassiter heard her, though he didn’t know what he’d heard. Something in her broke when Jamie died. She wailed, like a long note on a violin, and then she fell.” Gairden leaned over, keeping one careful eye on Rheese, and took hold of what lay behind the clock, and pulled it upright.

The automaton drooped against his shoulder like a tired child. She was beautiful in her cool inhuman way. Her face was a smooth shining oval, her eyes elongated teardrops of blue glass. “He called her Lalika,” Gairden said. “I thought it was his ghost that was trying to speak to me; it was the girl, Mattie, who put that into my head. But it wasn’t Jamie’s ghost. It was hers.

“She was the one who stopped your machines, not Jamie – he wouldn’t have stopped them for himself. She made them stop for an hour, because that’s what you do when someone dies. And because she knew you would never show him that much respect.”

“You’re insane.”

“He’d made better than he knew – better than you or I understood. I can’t see you hang for her murder, Mr Rheese, but I’ll do my best to see you hang for Jamie Wishart’s. Please don’t try to leave, I have officers downstairs.”

The decanters stilled on the tray. The window latch ceased to ring. The clock gave one last ghost chime, and fell silent. Out of the air a handful of tiny, glimmering cogwheels fell about the two men, frail as butterflies, landing without a sound. Then there was nothing but the relentless, hammering pulse of the great machines.

It was well attended, for the funeral of a boy from the workhouse. At least half the factory workers were there, the place having been closed for the day; and there was an old man with a look of Tobias Rheese about him, who stood, grim and silent, leaning on his cane, watching as the six sweating bearers laboured to carry the coffin with dignity to the waiting grave.

Inspector Gairden, who had also attended, braced himself when the old man approached him. “You’ll be the inspector.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m Matthew Rheese. A dreadful business.” He glanced at the grave, where the diggers were now scooping earth on to the coffin with wet thuds. “One wonders where one went wrong.”

Gairden said nothing. What was there to be said?

Rheese nodded, as though he had replied. “A heavy coffin,” he said. “Jamie was slight.”

“Sir.”

“You did the right thing, Inspector. Jamie was the only one she’d dance for, after all.” He turned and walked away, with slow, painful dignity.

Gairden followed, turning his collar up against the rain.

A velocipede stood at the gates. “Cab, sir?”

“No, thank you,” Gairden said, but laid his hand briefly on the side of the velocipede. The gleaming metal was as warm as flesh.

He turned away towards the station, and as he did so he thought he heard a run of notes, a sound like music played on instruments of silver, music to dance to, fading into the rain.

Kim Lakin-Smith
is the author of
Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City
(Immanion Press, 2007) and
Cyber Circus
(Newcon Press, 2011). Her fantasy and science-fiction short stories have appeared in
Black Static
,
Interzone
,
Celebration
,
Myth-Understandings
,
Further Conflicts
,
Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse
, and other magazines and anthologies. Kim is a regular guest speaker at writing workshops and conventions.