The Other Side of Midnight (16 page)

You’ll never find a man to take you unless you lie to him—do you know that?
said Gloria’s voice in my head. “I was drunk,” I told James, “and rather pathetic. I wanted you to like me.”

“It always bothered me, what happened,” he said softly. “I told you that. But I tried not to think about it. And then Gloria died, and there you were in Trafalgar Square, and I was reminded . . .” His fingers traveled to my hair, touched the blond ends where they curled over my ear. “I spotted you right away. I told you it was a lucky guess that I found you at Ramona’s, but I lied. I followed you. I didn’t even know why, not really—it was just instinct. I knew that whatever was
going to happen, I only had to wait. And then you had that vision.” He looked into my eyes and his gaze cleared. He was so close I could feel his breath on my cheek, see the warm shadows in the hollow of his throat. I could smell his familiar shaving soap. “What did you come here for, Ellie?” he asked me.

Words tumbled through my disordered mind, but I couldn’t speak them. I could only look at him for a long moment. He was right—I was a terrible liar, and all the longing I felt must have shown in my face. I curled my fingers over his wrist, pressed my fingers into the warm pad at the base of his thumb.

“I want to meet the Dubbses,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows a little and waited, not moving away.

I took a step back, though reluctantly. “I want to interview them,” I said, my voice admirably calm, I thought. “And I want to see where they had the séance. Where Gloria died.”

James dropped his hand, his wrist leaving my grip, but the gesture was leisurely. “It’s an interesting idea.”

“They’ve been strangely quiet, don’t you think?” I said. “There’s barely a line about them in the papers. You’d think a reporter would have gotten to them by now, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

“Then you should probably talk to Scotland Yard.”

“George Sutter says you already did.”

James shrugged. He sat on the edge of the radiator next to the window and began to pull on his shoes and socks. “They interviewed me yesterday afternoon,” he admitted. He seemed to be recovering from his dark mood, training his thoughts back to the case. “An inspector called Merriken. He didn’t think much of either me or my profession, and he didn’t bother being polite about it. Not that it mattered to me.” He looked up at me. “There’s nothing to tell, Ellie.”

“If you were the Dubbses,” I said to him, “who would you be more likely to talk to? The police, or the New Society, who can help you contact your dead son?”

He pushed himself off the radiator and thought it over. “Fine. I’ll see what I can dig up, and we’ll bypass the Yard for now. And what are you going to do?”

I thought about the coded schedule I’d found in Gloria’s flask bag, and I sighed. “There’s nothing else for it,” I said. “I’ll have to talk to Davies again.”

W
hen I heard a dog barking, I opened my eyes. It took a frantic moment of disorientation before I remembered where I was.

I was home in St. John’s Wood. I’d called on Davies after leaving James, but she hadn’t been home at her flat. I’d waited for nearly half an hour, beset by a strangely frantic feeling—if Davies ever had social engagements, I was unaware of them—but she hadn’t returned. By then I had a roaring headache that made the darkened streets seem as bright as the Sahara and nearly made the world buckle before my eyes. I had gone home, the sound of the tube enormous in my head, and sent my daily woman away. If I was being followed by the man in the houndstooth jacket, I was in too much pain to notice. I’d made a cup of tea and sat in a chair in the sitting room, as shaky as an old woman, absorbing the silence like a sponge. The clock ticked on the mantel, sullen rain spattered the window, and I drifted off.

Now I sat up groggy and confused, my eyes heavy, my head
spinning. The headache had drained away. I rubbed my neck and looked at my watch. Three o’clock in the afternoon.

The dog barked again, and again. I realized the sound was high pitched and frantic.

I stood and went to the front window, pulling back the curtain. My neighbor’s collie, Pickwick, was standing in the street. His leash lay forgotten on the ground.

I frowned and went to the front door, opening it. “Pickwick!” I called into the damp, brisk air; the rain had moved off, but left its breath behind. “Where is Mr. Bagwell?”

Pickwick spared me only the quickest glance before returning his gaze to something down the street. His tail was low, his ears back. He barked again and again, the sound high and unhappy.

The street was deserted. I took a step outside and stopped, awareness trickling up my spine. Pickwick’s long coat was soft and vivid in the afternoon light, orange and russet brown, short and dark over his sleek, intelligent head. His tail was set so low that its long brush of fur touched the ground, and I thought incongruously that Mr. Bagwell, who adored Pickwick and kept him meticulously, would likely tut over the dirt when he saw it.

I took another step toward the street. The wind touched my sleep-heated cheeks, cleared my head. Pickwick crouched lower, still barking, his back legs digging into the ground. I had approached him and bent to take up his leash before I realized I felt a telltale tickle at the back of my neck.

“Pickwick,” I said. I picked up the loop of his leash and straightened again. I followed his gaze down the street.

Mr. Bagwell stood down the lane, almost at the corner. He was wearing his usual brown trousers and matching jacket, a cloth cap on his bald head. He stood facing us, his hands at his sides.
Oh, dear,
I thought at first.
I’ve interrupted a training exercise of some kind.
I had the urge to rub the skin at the back of my neck, scratch under my
hair. If Mr. Bagwell was training Pickwick to stay, it was strange that he’d do it in the middle of the road. We had motorcars come through here every day.

Pickwick made a whine deep in his throat and lowered his haunches farther, his toenails scrabbling against the cobbles. He was trembling, and he wasn’t pulling on the leash I held. His gaze was locked on his master, his look almost desperate. A faintly putrid smell wafted to my nose through the rain-fresh air.

“No,” I said, my voice low and thick. “Please, no.”

Under the lip of his cloth cap I could see Mr. Bagwell’s eyes, their gaze fixed on the dog. He did not seem to have noticed me. I felt Pickwick’s body shake.

“Please, no,” I said again, but my voice was flat, hopeless.

Mr. Bagwell lifted one hand and held it palm out. Pickwick raised himself up, as if he would lunge; then he lowered himself again and whined. Mr. Bagwell’s hand stayed level, the gesture unmistakable. It was the dog master’s universal gesture of
Stay.

Pickwick stayed. But a sound came from his throat, low and awful, unlike any sound I’d heard from a dog—mournful and angry and confused. A howl, but the dog swallowed it, tamped it down to please his master. His ears were back, flattened to his silky head. Dog and man locked gazes, and their look was so despairing, so intimate, that I moaned softly myself.
Don’t go,
I thought.
Wait, please, please—

A hand grabbed my arm, turned me roughly. It was Mrs. Campbell, my neighbor of two doors down, her hair askew and her face flushed with anger.

“What is the matter with you?” she cried, furious.

I stared at her in shock. The itching drained away, the throbbing in my head, and for the first time I noticed a knot of people gathered in the street behind her. “What?”

“Are you blind, or just stupid?” she nearly shouted. “Can’t you see what’s happened? Don’t you even care?”

Inside the knot of people, a man was bent over something on the road. A van turned the corner and stopped, two men in uniforms jumping out. The man bent over moved aside and I glimpsed the familiar brown suit, the legs of Mr. Bagwell prone on the road, unmoving.

I turned and looked back at the corner, my mind clear. The spot where Mr. Bagwell had stood was empty.

“I didn’t know,” I said to Mrs. Campbell as Pickwick put his nose to the ground. He did not look at the body of his master. “I didn’t—”

“Some neighbor you are,” she spat at me. “Turn your back on a man while he dies on the road.”

I didn’t turn my back on him,
I opened my mouth to say, but she had already moved away and was helping the ambulance men with the body. “His heart stopped,” came the murmurs from the crowd. “Just like that, sudden-like. No one saw it coming.”

More people drifted from their homes and up the street to watch the spectacle. A policeman in uniform approached me as they put the body in the back of the van and asked if this was Mr. Bagwell’s dog.

“Yes,” I said, my grip on the leash tightening instinctively. “This is Pickwick. I’ll take him home with me.”

He took down my information, told me someone would contact me with instructions for the dog once the relatives had been informed. Mr. Bagwell was a widower, and his grown children had long since moved away; even I knew that. I moved closer to Pickwick, leaning my shins against his trembling rib cage. When I had finished with the policeman, I tugged gently on the lead and the dog followed me back into the house. He had stopped shaking, and he did not look at me. He curled up obediently at my feet as I sat at the table in the kitchen. I watched him lay his nose on the linoleum and sigh.

“I’m sorry,” I said aloud to him, my voice ringing in the quiet kitchen. “That was awful. I’m so sorry for you, sweetheart.”

Pickwick made no move.

My chest felt tight. I kicked off my shoes and slid from the chair,
going to my knees in my stockings on the kitchen floor. I bent over Pickwick, running my hands over the short fur of his forehead, the luxurious ruff of his neck. He didn’t respond, but I sat there anyway, stroking him for a long time. He seemed to need no words; the action consoled me as much as it consoled him, I was sure. I lifted his chin and looked into his eyes, so sweet and soulful, eyes that had seen what I had seen. Eyes that understood.

Deathbed visions, James had called them, though it seemed cruel to call it that when a man had died so far from his bed before he’d even grown old. Yet I also thought that hadn’t been exactly what it was. That
had
been
Mr. Bagwell, not just an echo or a shadow of him. It had really been the man, telling his beloved dog to stay as he went where his companion couldn’t follow. It had been just like all of the visions I’d called for my mother, only this time, like the previous night, I hadn’t called it at all. My grip on my powers was loosening, and the dead could come whether I willed it or not.

I dug my hands into the dog’s warm fur and waited for the terror to subside.

*   *   *

“
D
avies,” I said into the telephone that sat in my front hall. “It’s Ellie.”

“What now?” she said. “I thought I was free of you, Mary Pickford.”

I sighed. Mary Pickford, the name of the ringleted, golden-haired movie star, was Davies’s epithet for me, her attempt at the kind of wit Gloria had wielded so easily. “I came to see you earlier.”

“I was out.”

Doing what? “Yes, I know. I need to talk to you.”

She snorted. “Did you have fun with Octavia Murtry, that little fortune-petter, the other day?”

“Not really, no.”

“Useless, isn’t she? The only reason Gloria put up with her was because of Harry, though God knows what Harry saw in her. I was
glad to see you have to put up with her for once. My guess is you’ll have a hard time getting rid of her.”

I was starting to feel steady, the nightmarish event with Mr. Bagwell fading from my mind. Pickwick was asleep on the kitchen floor. “She wants to contact Gloria’s brothers,” I said.

“She never had half a chance,” Davies replied. “Gloria would never do it. She always said she could bear to look at other people’s dead, but she had no desire to contact her own. Those boys dying ripped her to pieces.”

She seemed talkative, so I pushed her further. “Did you know Gloria’s brothers?”

“No, but Gloria had photographs. I only saw them once, because she never showed them around.”

“She carried them with her. All three of them. Along with their notification telegrams.”

There was a pause, and I realized I’d thrown Davies for a loop. “How the hell did you know that?”

She hadn’t known, then. I rubbed my hand on my forehead. She’d be resentful now that I knew something about Gloria that she didn’t; it would be an insult in her book. “I took her flask bag,” I said, trying to sound apologetic. “When I was at her flat. It was all in there.”

“You took her flask bag from under my nose? When I let you in and everything?”

“I didn’t plan it.” I tried to sound remorseful. “An impulse, that’s all. I’m sorry, Davies.”

“Some people have no manners,” she said.

“Look, the letters and photographs weren’t the only things tucked in there. She’d written out her schedule as well.”

“
I
kept her schedule.”

God, Davies was a monster of ego. “Yes, I know. This is in her handwriting—she jotted it down and carried it with her so she wouldn’t forget. A reminder note, that sort of thing. I assume you gave a copy of her last week’s schedule to Scotland Yard?”

“I didn’t have any bloody choice, did I? One of those toffs could be the one who killed her.”

“Yes, I know. I agree. The thing is—Davies, in Gloria’s own schedule, she’s crossed out one of the appointments and written something else in. Something I can’t decode.”

The line went very quiet.

“Davies?” I said.

Her voice was low, almost hurt. “She wouldn’t have done that. Gloria wouldn’t have.”

“Maybe something important came up,” I said.

“If it was important, it would have gone through me.”

For a second I felt for her; Gloria’s schedule had been Davies’s entire life, her reason for existence. But this was Davies, after all, and my sympathy was short-lived. “Maybe you know what this means. It says—”

“Stop! Don’t say it.” Davies’s voice lowered. “I won’t discuss it over the telephone. It could be secret. You never know who is listening in on these things.”

“Oh, please. That’s ridiculous.”

“No. It was Gloria’s own policy—never discuss business on the telephone. Meet me at Marlatt’s Café at six o’clock, and I’ll look at this code, whatever it is.”

“Davies, I don’t have time for this. It’s really a very simple question.”

“Are you thick? That’s my offer, Goldilocks.”

I gritted my teeth. “Fine. I’ll be there.”

“Make sure of it,” she said, and hung up.