The Other Side of Midnight (25 page)

“Thank you for the card,” I managed at last.

She crooked a penciled eyebrow at me and searched her pocket again.

I sighed. “Do you want me to stay angry at you or not?”

Gloria found the cigarette case and straightened. “She wanted to quit, Ellie. I only provided the excuse.”

“Ah, so that’s why you arranged it, then? From the goodness of your heart?”

“No, of course not. I told you from the first that I don’t like competition.”

“You’ve taken care of it very nicely, then.”

“Not exactly.” She placed an unlit cigarette between her lips and watched me, her eyes hooded. She dropped the case back into her pocket and pulled out her matches. I had the urge, as I often did with Gloria, to put my hand on her. To feel the energy that came from her like heat. “The Fantastique is still in business, after all. But she doesn’t do séances anymore.”

“No.”

“Finding lost things, is it? Interesting, I suppose.” She shrugged. She knew what I was doing—of course she knew. She always made it her business. “I wondered what you would do once you were free of her.”

“
Free
of her?” My skin stung as if I’d been slapped. My own guilt rushed over me. I
was
free of her—free of having to please her, free of having to do the séances. Free of caring for her in those last months. “I didn’t want to be free of her.”

Something flashed across Gloria’s eyes. “For God’s sake, Ellie. You still think that what I did was all about your mother, don’t you? That she was the target.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I did it because it needed to end,” she said bluntly. “The lies, the foolishness. You living half an existence, sitting behind a curtain, helping her. You with a power you’ve been made to feel ashamed of, living nothing of a life.” She pushed herself off the fence and took a drag off her cigarette. “Have you ever thought, Ellie, that we’ve been given the greatest insight into life and death in the history of mankind? The answers weren’t given to a philosopher, or a religious leader, or a great scholar, or even a man. It was given to two
girls
,
flappers who everyone sees as silly nuisances, cartoons, figures of fun. Girls who can’t even vote.” She tapped one finger against her temple through the cloth of her hat with a ruby-polished nail. “All of the secrets of the universe, of life and death, are sitting right here. A hundred people have walked past us on the street, and not a single one of them knows it.”

I shook my head. “You’re the one who enjoys the power, Gloria. It was never me.”

“I don’t enjoy it,” she corrected me. She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stepped on it. “I simply refuse to feel ashamed of it, to feel ashamed of anything. I’m supposed to feel ashamed of how I look, how I dress, the language I use, the makeup I wear. For staying out late, for dancing, for making money, for thinking things and being angry and asking questions. For letting a man go to bed with me, when he can just button up his pants and never feel a lick of shame for the rest of his life. And I say all of it can go to hell.”

My blood was pounding in my head, my cheeks flushing. I was powerfully angry, I realized, and it wasn’t at her. “Stop it.”

“Most of all, I’m supposed to be ashamed of my power,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “For being born with something the
world has never seen. And I was ashamed of it—I never told you that, but I was. Until my brothers died, and George disowned me. That broke me, Ellie, in a way that you cannot imagine, but it also freed me. Because I suddenly realized: What is the point? Why waste your life being ashamed when you’re going to be dead anyway? So I make money and I drink too much gin and I fall in with worthless men and my family hates me. I have headaches and nightmares that would ice the skin off you. But I’m living my life, Ellie, and I make no apologies for it. Can you say the same?”

Overhead, two birds called to each other, back and forth, a quick trill of notes. A couple strolled by, oblivious of us, her hand on his arm, his shoulder leaning into hers as he spoke something in her ear. I sighed, willing my heartbeat back to normal. “Give me a cigarette,” I said.

She did, and lit it for me. “Well?”

I took a drag, my anger still simmering alongside my guilt. “My mother left me the house and a little bit of money,” I said, “but not enough that I don’t have to earn. I don’t know how to type, and I’m too freakish for any man to marry me. And even though I can’t stomach the thought of doing séances again, I really only have one talent.” I looked at her and shrugged. “So here I am. The Fantastique finds lost things, but she doesn’t talk to the dead anymore—I managed that much. I’ll live in the house, take clients, and live a quiet life. I won’t pretend I’m normal, but I also won’t hide behind the curtain.”

“And that’s what you want?” she said.

“Yes, it is.” It
was
what I wanted, in that moment. Just peace and quiet, a daily routine, a life where I knew what was expected of me. I’d had to build it myself, but now I had built it and I would live it. I had never had her courage, after all.

She crossed her arms and looked at me. Gloria Sutter, long legged and radiant even in a tweed suit on a cloudy November day, her eyes knowing and her lips dark. “Very well,” she said at last. “I’ll say this
much. We had some good times, and now we’re quits, as they say. But you know where I am, and you know how to find me.”

She’d turned and walked away without another word, back toward Piccadilly. “I’ll think about it,” I’d called to her retreating back, but she gave no indication that she’d heard me. I could think things over, I thought. Perhaps something would change, something I couldn’t foresee. Perhaps someday I’d want to talk to the only other person in the world who was made the same way I was. There would be time. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that there was an endless supply of time.

But there hadn’t been.

I rounded a turn in the lane on my bicycle. I was truly sweating now and my legs were hurting, but according to the map in my mind I had just under two miles to go. I was a different woman than I had been that day in Green Park. I was alive. I was ready. I was no longer ashamed. How right Gloria had been, about everything. I was who I was, and I would no longer make any apologies.

Pickwick barked, once, sharply. His ears flattened, and he disappeared beneath a hedgerow.

“Pickwick?” I said.

And then a sharp crack sounded through the trees, and something hit my bicycle. The handlebars shook under my hands, the wheels veered of their own accord, and in the next second I hit the ground, the blackness coming up to meet me.

I
landed on my shoulder, a jolt of pain traveling up my neck and into the back of my head. My legs tangled in the bicycle pedals, and the entire thing came down on top of me, scraping my legs and pushing me out of balance. I slid on the side of the dirt road and into the ditch by the roadside, breaking my fall with the palms of my hands as I scraped the dirt and the thin layer of rotted leaves.

I lay in the damp mulch in the bottom of the ditch, trying to push the twisted bicycle off me. Overhead, a rook cried from a treetop somewhere, and Pickwick barked again. I had just enough time to wonder whether there would be a second shot when I heard his toenails scrabble on the road above me.

The sound filled me with panic. “No, Pickwick!” I cried, pulling my legs beneath me—my stockings were shredded, one knee wet with blood—and crawling to the edge of the ditch. The dog was watching me, waiting for me to get up. “Go back!” I begged him, gesturing toward the hedgerow. “Now! Go!” My brain seemed to have detached,
and all I could think in that moment was,
Please, don’t let my dog get shot.
From somewhere ahead of me, through the trees, I heard a man’s shout, and then another, but no second shot came.

Pickwick curled his tail to his haunches and crouched, not sure of what I was asking him to do. I held my breath and hesitated, on my hands and knees on the edge of the ditch, listening for a moment that likely lasted seconds but felt like a year. My hat had fallen off, the palms of my gloves had shredded, and my chest ached. I could not stay where I was. Whoever had shot at me—and I knew by instinct who it was, of course—could either shoot at me again or come closer to finish the job. I had to run.

I crawled out of the ditch, my hands and knees stinging, keeping low to the ground. I had just gotten my feet under me, ready to run in a crouch, when I saw the figure in the trees.

It was a man, tall and thin, far back in the green shadows. He was looking at me, but as I raised my gaze he turned away, and I saw only the brim of his hat, the sleeve of his jacket. Pickwick had gone still, his ears pricked, watching. He did not growl.

I wondered wildly, at first, whether it was a policeman. But the figure moved off through the shadows, smooth and uncanny, making no sound. From the trees came a whiff of an awful smell.

“
Oh, God,
” I whispered.

I forced my feet into motion. I half ran into the cover of the trees, out of the sunlight, into the cool shadows. A breeze cheerfully ruffled the leaves overhead, the scent of early autumn mixing with the blatant smell of death. An ache began in my head. Someone was dead. That much I knew: Someone was dead, and I’d seen his ghost.

From far off, a motor sounded, receding, but there was no sign of anyone on the road. If I was being pursued, if anyone nearby had heard the shot, they gave no indication. If James had heard, he did not come.

James.

It hadn’t been him; it hadn’t. The figure had been too tall, too unfamiliar. I would have known if it had been James; I would have recognized him even in death. Still, the possibility felt like a punch in the stomach, and I fought to regain control of myself.
You are alone, Ellie, and there is no one to help you. What will you do?

Pickwick made my decision. He brushed past me, loping on quiet feet in the direction of the dead figure. His tail was up, his body alert. In seconds he had vanished into the bushes.

I followed, limping because of my bad knee. I had somehow kept my messenger bag strapped across my body, and I now tucked the bag behind me as I walked. The trees weren’t thick here; they grew in small belts between properties and stretches of unused road and farmland. I followed the dog and the unseen figure, vanished now, across the soft ground, through the dappled light. Soon we climbed a rise and the trees thinned abruptly, and I stood on a bright hill of emerald green looking over the landscape of hills and valleys, changing to the warm colors of autumn between the dotted homes and barns below.

Sprawled on the hillside was the body of a man.

He lay facedown, angled down the hill, as if he’d been struck while descending. He wore a suit of chocolate brown, the back of the jacket flung upward over his back, left where it had folded when he fell. His arms were pinned beneath him, his legs sprawled. His hat had fallen off. Far below, at the bottom of the hill, parked at the side of the dirt road and partly under the cover of a thick stand of bushes at the edge of the trees, was a motorcar. Probably his.

I stopped, panting, and made a strangled noise. There was no movement, no sound; the man’s body lay still, an unnatural part of the scenery. No one passed on the road below. It was as if the Kent countryside, in that moment, was deserted except for me, my dog, and the dead man. I gathered my courage and stepped closer.

His head was slightly turned, his eyes half open and glazed in death. The pretty grass beneath his neck was soaked in blood, the
ground dark with it, droplets clinging to the blades of greenery. He showed no other mark; something very sharp had gone very deep into his neck, killing him quickly and effectively before his body had been left to fall. I recognized his thin build—I had seen it disappear into a doorway in Piccadilly Circus, and I had also glimpsed his face in the underground. It was the man in the houndstooth jacket.

I blinked hard, taking in the coppery scent of damp blood, and ran a hand over my face. I realized I was still wearing my torn gloves, the palms reduced to threads. I absently pulled them off and threw them to the ground, as if that would accomplish something. There had been a man’s cry shortly after I’d been shot off my bicycle. Two of them, one after the other, quick. The sound of the man in the houndstooth jacket, dying.

Five minutes ago? Ten?

The grass where I stood at the top of the hill had been flattened, as if by feet. I stepped onto the flattened portion, peering for footprints I had no idea how to identify. Pickwick remained near the tree line a few feet away, sitting quietly, his tongue lolling as he panted. I saw nothing until I raised my eyes, looked back the way I had come. And then I understood.

From there I could see curling before me the road I had cycled down. I could see the bend I had taken, the ditch I had fallen into. I could even glimpse the wreckage of my bicycle beneath the leaves. This was where the killer had stood, aiming his rifle as I had come down the road.

I closed my eyes. A familiar feeling tickled the back of my neck, the base of my skull. He was still here, then, the man in the houndstooth jacket. I had seen his deathbed vision, and part of me called him even now.

I turned to find him standing six feet away, looking at me.

I took a breath. For the first time in a long while, I did not tell the dead to go away, to return where he had come from. I did not flinch at the smell, or at the sight of him, and I did not recoil in fear.
I did not try to harness my power. Not this time. Instead, I looked straight into his ghastly, uncanny face.

“Speak to me,” I said.

*   *   *

W
hen I told James that the dead do not speak in sentences, I had spoken the truth. I had also spoken the truth when I said it felt like plunging a hand into a bucket of worms in the dark. I plunged my hand now with the man in the houndstooth jacket, the chill of it freezing my spine and roiling in my stomach.

He was sadness and anger, frustration and overarching grief. I closed my eyes and saw things that had been left undone: a wife who had left him, to whom he had never apologized; a friend he had betrayed long before, though I could not see how; a brother he had not spoken to in years. I saw flashes of things I should not have seen—private memories, sensations: a woman sliding the straps of her brassiere off her shoulders and reaching for him; his mother weeping in unremitting pain in the last days of her life. Usually these were memories I pushed away, because they were unbearable, but now I let them wash through me, let their raw emotion fill me. I smelled late-autumn leaves burning and rich coffee, felt the sting as a long-ago teacher slapped his cheek, and then I saw the hillside, the last moments of the man’s life.

He had parked the car and come up the hill, his gaze on the slender figure, its back to him as it aimed the rifle. The images were jumbled. The man with the rifle had been smoking a cigarette, its smell pungent in the autumn air. He wore a cloth cap and a simple farmer’s jacket and trousers, but he was no simple farmer. The rifle was held rigid on his shoulder, its aim precise, and as he pulled the trigger the
crack
of it barely shifted his body, the recoil entirely controlled. The man in the houndstooth jacket had shouted, pulling a handgun from his pocket, thinking,
Black dog, black dog,
as the other man slid the bolt back on the rifle, ready to fire again, and the man had turned and lowered the rifle and—

I groaned, pressing my bare hands to my face. The sensations
were furious now, too fast, and I had to stop them. Everything was out of order; I could make no sense of it. I pushed back, shutting the images out one by one, forcing down a rigid control. I opened my eyes and told him to leave, that it was over, that he should go and rest. The images slowed, trickled, stopped. I staggered, nauseated. The smell was gone, and so was the man in the houndstooth jacket.

With careful deliberation, I fell to my knees in the grass. That was it, then: He had saved my life, and he had died. If he hadn’t come up the hill, shouting and drawing his gun, the man with the rifle would have taken another shot at me as I’d lain in the ditch, and he would not have missed. I remembered hearing the shouts, and I also remembered hearing the sound of a motor as I’d gone through the woods. The killer had taken care of his witness, then, and driven off in his own vehicle, even as I’d followed the dead man here. I glanced at the body again, unmoving in its bloody spot in the grass. The gun he had drawn, I guessed, was in one of his hands, pinned under his body; he’d had no chance to fire it, so quick had his killer been.
Black dog,
the man had thought, but there had been no black dog in the images I’d seen, and Pickwick did not seem alarmed.

I went back and forth through the pictures in my mind, shuffling through them like a stack of grisly photographs, trying to make sense of them. Coming up the hill; the man with the rifle . . . He had turned, and I’d seen the shadow of a face, but that did not matter. Something else mattered—something important. I was light-headed and terrified, but I had gone too far to stop now. The man who had saved my life had left me something I was meant to see.

I took a breath, calming myself, and went through the images again. That last moment before death. The man with the rifle had turned and—

I laughed aloud, my legs folding under me until I was sitting in the grass and staring at nothing, looking at the pictures in my mind. It was just possible—only just.

The man with the rifle had been smoking a cigarette, and when he’d turned in surprise, it had fallen into the grass.

I shifted on my bleeding knee, began sorting through the flattened vegetation with my scraped hands. The pain in my head was like a living thing, red and sodden in my skull, and the pulse of sunlight overhead felt as if it was scraping my brain, but still I continued. “Psychometry,” I said to Pickwick. I was babbling, but the sound of my own voice seemed to calm the agony in my head. “It isn’t my specialty, Pickwick, but I can do it. At least, I may be able to. I don’t really know anymore, do I?” I kept searching, my face close to the ground, beyond caring how mad I looked. “If he even dropped it, it may give me nothing. I may see that he enjoys cottage pie, or that he wore brown socks instead of black this morning. I may learn something that isn’t true, or nothing at all. If he even dropped it.”

He had. I found the burned end of an abandoned cigarette alone in the grass, gone out now, not even a smell of ash coming from it. I looked at it for a long moment, thinking of how carefully Gloria’s killer had put out his cigarette after he’d murdered Ramona and possibly Davies, too, how neatly he’d tamped it out and slid it in his pocket. I was looking at one mistake, one single mistake, the only one he’d ever made as he’d gone about killing people.

Maybe it wouldn’t work. I was just a girl, after all, and he was an assassin of some kind, a professional killer. He was one step ahead of everyone—the police, George Sutter, MI5, and the man in the houndstooth jacket—calmly taking lives and walking away like a man who didn’t exist. I was just a flapper who found lost dogs for money. There was no reason it would work.

Then Gloria’s words came back to me, from the last time I had ever seen her, when I hadn’t told her I was sorry or that I loved her no matter what. When I’d let her walk away.

“I was born with something the world has never seen,” I said, and I picked up the cigarette.