The Other Side of Midnight (4 page)

M
y mother had been a spirit medium since before I was born. She’d been orphaned by age twenty, her parents of artistic vagabond stock, and she’d set up shop doing séances and performing spirit writing. It had been a better way to earn money than char work, she told me, as long as you were careful about it. And she had been good. Very, very good.

My father, a young postal clerk from a good family, had met her in a pastry shop and fallen in love with her. He didn’t care what she did for a living. It was only after they’d married and settled in the house in St. John’s Wood that my mother bought the beaded dress, had the sign painted for the window, and began business as The Fantastique. She stopped doing group séances, which had a taste of seediness to them, and replaced them with discreet one-on-one consultations. It was her stab at respectability, at trying to appease the neighborhood for my father’s sake without giving up her work. I learned from my earliest years to be quiet when Mama was working.

And she did keep it respectable, remarkably so. Her client list was discreet and carefully chosen; as a child I watched well-dressed men and women of obvious class and money come and go from our little house. We got appointment requests from well-trained assistants and underlings. I became accustomed to the sight of a sleek carriage—or, increasingly, a motorcar—pulling up our lane, steered by a uniformed driver, stopping just long enough for a beautiful woman or gray-haired gentleman to alight before it pulled away again, reappearing only after the appointed hour.

It was all very civilized, if you didn’t think about the things I witnessed in our little sitting room. The things I
saw.

My own talent became evident by school age. I’d thought it would please her; I didn’t know that having the powers I had made one a freak, a pariah. But my mother knew. She must have known, from very early on, what kind of life I would have. And so she gave me an education of a different sort.

I watched the birds alight on Nelson’s statue, flitter off, and land again.

You have a talent, a sensitivity.

I smoothed my hand over my handbag, where I’d placed the envelope George Sutter had given me. It contained a small stack of banknotes—a retainer, he’d called it, to replace the business I’d lose during the investigation. I had just curled my fingers around it, preparing to rise, when the man on the bench across from me lowered his newspaper with its lurid headline and stood. He tossed the paper on the seat behind him, adjusted the brim of his hat, and came sauntering toward me, his hands in the pockets of his coat. My mouth went dry and everything stopped.

He paused in front of me, looking down at me, his knees almost touching mine. “Ellie Winter,” he said.

For a second I was speechless. I could do nothing but stare. He was as strong as I remembered, his shoulders bulky under the fabric
of his jacket. His dark suit fit him perfectly, the shirt beneath it crisp white. I knew that his hair beneath the hat was dark blond and kept shorter than the current fashion. When he put his hands in his pockets—an ungentlemanly pose—his arms flexed and curled, and he looked almost menacing, looming over me with a lazy grace. His blue-gray eyes flickered down over me and up again, disintegrating my respectable blue suit as if it were a wisp of cloth.

I stared back at him, trying not to let my cheeks flame. “An unusual group of so-called scientists and untrustworthy researchers,” the papers had said about the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research. I was looking at one of those untrustworthy researchers now. Its top researcher, in fact. The one who had, three years before, investigated both my mother and me.

“James Hawley,” I managed, my throat tight. “What the hell do you want?”

He shook his head, not bothering to tut at my language. His voice was deep and smooth. “He’s a ghost,” he said, “that friend of yours. Sutter. Did you know that?”

“Pardon me?”

He lifted his gaze away from seeing through my clothes and looked around the square, taking in the surrounding buildings. “I can’t find out who he works for,” he said. “I’ve tried. No one is talking. I thought Scotland Yard at first, but now I’m not so certain. Now I think he may be MI5.”

That was curious; I imagined that when James questioned people, they usually talked—women because he was so handsome, men because of the size of his arms. “Why are you here?” I asked him, suspicious. “Are you following me?”

“Actually, I was following Sutter. Or I was trying to. He’s as slippery as a fish.”

“Then why aren’t you following him now?”

“Because you’re more interesting than he is.”

“Very funny.” My cheeks flushed this time, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want James Hawley’s attention. I patted my handbag, looking fruitlessly for a cigarette. “I take it you’re still working for the New Society.”

“I am,” he said, watching my hands. “And you’re still in St. John’s Wood, taking clients and staying respectable.” He motioned at my handbag. “I don’t think you have any cigs in that thing, though you do have the money Sutter gave you.”

My gaze shot up to his. He was watching me carefully, his eyes shaded under the brim of his hat. “My money is my business, James,” I said. “Though I know you don’t agree.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets again and let that one go. “It’s just interesting,” he said. “Gloria is dead. I follow her brother, and I find The Fantastique, of all people. The two of you have a little tête-à-tête and he gives you money. Now I’m curious.” His blue-gray gaze caught mine, held it. “You know how I get when I’m curious.”

My face burned. “I know very well,” I said to him. “The results were in that paper you wrote for everyone to read. The one the
Daily Mail
resurrected two months ago.” I dropped my hands from my handbag. “It was a three-year-old report, James. What was it doing in the newspaper?”

He caught my meaning. “It wasn’t my doing,” he replied. “I knew nothing about it. It was just some enterprising reporter looking to fill column inches. I’m surprised he dug up that old paper at all—I thought everyone had forgotten about it.” He shrugged. The ridicule of being a psychical researcher didn’t concern him; it never had. “But that doesn’t answer my question. What were you doing with George Sutter?”

I took the easy answer, the bitter answer. “I’m conning him, of course. Taking his money for a lie.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, suddenly tired of parrying him. Just looking at James, trying to read the expression behind his
flawless, clean-shaven jaw and dark blond eyelashes, was sometimes exhausting. “And what do you think?”

“Whoever George Sutter works for, he’s very powerful,” James replied. “He’s intelligent, educated. He wouldn’t be an easy mark. He disowned Gloria years ago, so he doesn’t believe in the supernatural. If George Sutter is meeting with The Fantastique, it’s probably because he’s making use of her.”

“His sister was murdered,” I conceded. “He’s concerned.”

“So am I,” James said. “I can read behind the headlines, Ellie, just like you can. Something is rotten about this.”

“Of course,” I said, trying not to let the bite of jealousy enter my voice. “You and Gloria were close.”

“I studied her for nearly ten months. I wrote a scientific paper on her. You can call that close if you want, but I certainly never wanted to see her killed.”

He was still standing at my knees, and when I abruptly stood, my nose was nearly in the knot of his tie. I caught the brief scent of him before he took a step back. “If you want to trade places, I’ll gladly take it,” I said, trying not to let on that that brief second marked the closest I’d been to a real, physical man in years. “I didn’t go to Sutter—he came to me. I’m certainly no investigator. But I’m going to do the best I can, and you would do well to stay out of my way.”

I thought it sounded rather tough, but all he did was give me a smile that was almost reluctant, as if he knew it would make me angry. “In my line of work, I don’t frighten very easily.”

“Good-bye, James.”

“I meant what I said about Sutter,” he said as I made to leave. “I have no idea what he’s up to or who he really is. Don’t trust anything he tells you to do.”

“I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “Especially not the man who ruined my mother’s career and made Gloria Sutter his prize exhibit.”

When I saw him flinch, I turned and walked away.

G
loria had lived in Soho, in a studio on the attic floor of a run-down house nearly a hundred years old. The street was lined with dim poverty-stricken artists’ studios and ramshackle galleries, pawnshops, and booths of cheaply made crafts. A Home for Fallen Women had established itself on the corner sometime in the last century, and it still kept its polished double doors open to girls unwed and pregnant or just down on their luck. I was quite certain the middle-aged spirit medium on the ground floor of Gloria’s house—who had a Liverpool accent when she wasn’t working and only appeared during the intermittent times she could pay her back rent—had no idea that two floors above her was the great Gloria Sutter, who quietly let everyone from priests to politicians up the winding back stairs to her garret.

Gloria could have afforded better, of course. Her clientele was of the highest level, and her fees reflected it. But she liked the eccentricity of Soho, the strange collection of fringe people who never asked
questions and took most things in stride. And she found the discreet back stairs of the building too useful to give up.

I had no key to Gloria’s apartment. I did not need one. I climbed the front stairs, passed the shuttered rooms belonging to the Liverpool medium, and knocked on the door to the first-floor flat.

I knew the occupant wouldn’t answer, so I didn’t bother waiting. “Davies, it’s me. Ellie Winter.”

A shuffle, and a sullen thump. Then silence.

I knocked again. “Davies, please.”

The lock clicked and the door opened just wide enough to reveal the homely face of a woman. She was twenty-five, and her reddish bobbed and marcelled hair stood up in an unkempt mess. Her eyes were red from weeping.

“Oh, God,” she drawled. “It’s you.”

This was Davies—her first name was Violetta, but no one ever called her anything but Davies. She had been Gloria’s personal secretary, living in the flat beneath hers, managing her mail, scheduling her appointments, and, most important, screening her clients. Anyone who wanted to see Gloria went through Davies first. She was homely, intelligent, rootless, and mostly without feeling except for her fierce dedication to her job and to Gloria Sutter.

“I need to come in,” I said to her.

Even though she looked a mess, she was admirably managing to sound bored and superior. “I’ve talked to the police about everything already,” she said. “Go away.”

“I’m not the police.”

Davies rolled her eyes. “Do tell.”

“Davies, please. Just—please.”

“I said go away.” She made to close the door.

“A ghost hunt, for God’s sake?” I said. “In an outside location? You let her go alone? And how in the world did you let Fitzroy Todd get involved?”

She blinked at me, then tossed the door open and turned her back, walking into the room. She was wearing a housedress of hideous plaid and a pair of heeled mules with bows on the tops. The mules clacked hollowly on the floor.

“I told her not to go,” she said.

“That’s not good enough.” I shut the door behind me. “There should have been no séance in the first place. She should never have even heard about it, never been given the choice. You should have stopped it.”

She flopped heavily on a sofa, her feet in their mules jutting out onto the scratched wood floor. Misery flinched across her face.

Anyone who had been in the spirit medium profession for any length of time had a set of rules. First, never agree to a séance with a group of unknown people; the dynamics were too risky, and the medium never knew whether a reporter or a skeptic was hiding undercover. Second, never do a session—of any kind—on client property. Every psychic needed to work within her own controlled environment.

And third, never go into such a situation alone, because most men saw us as easy women. Psychics and palm readers were everyday targets for robberies, passes, and worse. The setup in which Gloria died had been one only the most desperate amateur would agree to.

“I don’t know why you care,” Davies said sullenly. “How long has it been? Three years since you decided you were too good to associate with the likes of us?”

“I’d think it was the other way around,” I replied. I walked into the messy sitting room and looked down at her. “I wasn’t good enough, and neither was my mother. I think Gloria proved that rather conclusively, didn’t she?”

Davies rolled her eyes. “You always did take things too seriously. It was just one of Gloria’s whims. She’d forgotten about it in a week.”

I bit back a retort. My mother died six months after the incident that ended my friendship with Gloria, but Davies wouldn’t care about that. “Tell me about this séance,” I said.

“I couldn’t have stopped it,” Davies answered me. She wound a lock of greasy hair around one finger and tucked it ineffectually under one of her haphazard hairpins. “It didn’t go through me. It was Fitzroy’s idea. He went directly to Gloria, and before I knew it, it was done.”

I’d figured Fitzroy Todd would be involved, but still it sunk home to hear it confirmed. Fitzroy was an on-again, off-again lover of Gloria’s, a rich do-nothing who found it amusing to slum with those of us in the lower classes. He’d been the first person I thought of when George Sutter had spoken of a “good family who wishes to keep things quiet.” The Todds had kept more than one of Fitzroy’s drunken exploits quiet over the years. He had a few nice clothes and a droll way of speaking, but I’d never understood what compelled Gloria’s attraction to him.

“I thought she was finished with him,” I said.

“She was,” said Davies gloomily. “I was under strict instructions to put his letters in the trash. But he talked to her somehow, and the next thing I knew she told me she was going.”

“He was certainly there? At the session?”

“Yes, and I hope the police have made him good and uncomfortable. I hear they questioned everyone. If he killed her, I’ll wring his neck and save us all the trouble.”

I took a seat in the lumpy, mismatched chair opposite her, trying to picture fatally lazy Fitzroy murdering someone, and failing. “Who else was there?”

“Besides Fitzroy and Gloria, the clients. A couple of rich how’d-you-dos named Dubbs, if you can believe it. I never met them myself.” Davies opened a tin of tobacco and shook some out onto a paper, preparing to roll one of her awful cigarettes. She seemed primed to talk now. “They also brought in another psychic, a lightweight who calls herself Ramona. Strictly a skimmer, from what I hear, and a showgirl, too.”

I nodded. This was the language, the inner slang that was as familiar to me as the alphabet, though I never spoke it anymore. A skimmer
was a psychic with no real powers who went for the easy money: the elderly, the naive who would be taken in by crystal balls and outdated spirit cabinet tricks. A showgirl was a psychic who did stage shows for profit. A psychic with any class never did a stage show. Never.

“That’s odd,” I said. “The second psychic.”

Davies lit her cigarette. “I know. I can’t think of why Gloria agreed to it. It certainly wasn’t the money. And I can’t think of why Fitz was so keen.”

“What did they want?” I asked, trying not to inhale the putrid smell of Davies’s homemade cigarette. I didn’t know where she got the habit—it wasn’t from her employer, who had smoked only the finest. “The clients. What was their story?”

“Grieving parents,” Davies said, waving dismissively. “Their only son died in the war. Felt a ghostly presence in the house and believed their son was returned to speak to them. Et cetera.”

I propped an elbow on my chair and rubbed my bottom lip, thinking. It was a simple setup I’d heard myself a hundred times since the war; Gloria, who specialized in communicating with soldiers, would have heard it almost every day. She could have had the grieving couple come to her flat and make contact there, as she had with every other client. Nothing about this enlightened me.

“Look,” Davies said. “I’m as torn up about this as anyone. Probably more. I loved her.” The cigarette drooped, the pain flitted across her face again, and for a second the angry facade dropped and she looked lonely. “I’m not one of those girls, you know, but I
loved
her. And aside from that, what am I going to do now? Where am I supposed to go?” She gestured briefly down to the housedress, the mules. “I’m hardly a candidate for finishing school, and Valentino isn’t going to sweep me away to the desert. I would do anything to go back in time. I mean it. But there was no stopping her when she set her mind to something.” Her voice cracked. “She told me everything would be fine.”

I looked down at my lap. She’d told Davies everything would be fine. And then she’d left George a note saying,
Tell Ellie Winter to find me.

“Have you heard from Gloria’s brother?” I asked her.

Davies snorted, her grief receding for the moment. “That tweed? No, and why should I?”

“He came to see me.”

“To see you?” She shook her head. “It’s more than Gloria ever got from him. From any of them. Not that she cared.”

“What about James Hawley?”

Now her gaze sharpened. “Don’t tell me he came to see you, too.”

“Something like that. He seems to be investigating Gloria’s death.”

“Well, aren’t you popular?” Davies took a drag of her cigarette, thinking. “I wonder what he’s up to. I thought he only investigated psychics, not murders. I hear he drinks too much, or he used to. He’s still doing his little experiments on psychics as far as I know, trying to disprove them.”

“When did Gloria last see him?”

“Months. Years, perhaps. They didn’t have much to do with each other after that paper he wrote about her.” She shook her head. “They didn’t even speak when that reporter dug it up again. Gloria laughed at that—some reporter digging up the ‘only proven psychic’ angle. Though she said that paper was better off buried.” Her eyes shuttered, and she looked uneasily away.

So she did feel something about the incident with my mother. Perhaps even Davies had a conscience. “So, they weren’t friends.”

“God, no. They weren’t even lovers, at least from what Gloria told me. He’s handsome enough, but Gloria was hands-off for some reason. They were all business. Though if he’s sniffing around now, in my opinion we should be asking where
he
was that night.”

I frowned. If James had murdered Gloria, would he have resurfaced, claiming to be looking for her killer? He had never seemed the
violent type to me, but I didn’t trust him. I had learned that from bitter experience.

“Look,” Davies said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’d love to chat with you all day, even though I never liked you and you haven’t been here in years. But why don’t we get down to business? I assume you came to see Gloria’s flat.”

I hesitated. It was why I had come, of course, along with questioning Davies, but now I wasn’t so certain. The idea of pawing through Gloria’s personal things seemed suddenly distasteful. “It’s rather soon. It needn’t be today.”

“I disagree.” Davies raised her gaze to mine. She’d ditched her maudlin emotion, practically the only emotion I’d ever seen her evince, and now her look was steely. “I think it most definitely should be today.”

This was why I avoided Davies. She wasn’t a psychic, but she knew all of our secrets. She knew everything. What she was unmistakably telling me now was that I should go to Gloria’s flat and use my abilities to pick up information. I was capable of it, and she knew it perfectly well.

I hadn’t planned to use my abilities. I didn’t want to. I was used to using my powers in my sitting room during appointments with approved clients, just as our rules dictated. Working within one’s own place not only controlled the physical aspects of a session—the objects touched, the people present, the smells, the level of light—it controlled the supernatural ones as well. Controlling my abilities—so I wouldn’t see the dead on every bus and street corner—was one of the first things my mother had taught me.

“Objects aren’t my trick,” I said. “I do my sessions by touching hands. You know that, Davies.”

“You could do it if you tried,” she said.

“Perhaps not.” I gave her a look. “Perhaps I’m a skimmer.”

Davies only shrugged. “I suppose you could be. I don’t really
know, do I? You have a pedigree, but we all know what happened to that. Perhaps your mother simply passed down her bag of tricks.”

I felt a flash of unbidden anger at that, and she saw it. She smiled.

“You could be a skimmer,” she continued, “but Gloria never paid attention to skimmers. She knew a skimmer—like that old fraud downstairs—the moment she saw one. And she thought you were the real thing. Though I don’t suppose she liked you much, did she?”

“The feeling was mutual,” I snapped. Davies always could provoke me. “What she did was dangerous. Talking to the dead isn’t a game.”

“Certainly not one you ever wanted to play,” Davies said, rising from her couch and shuffling for the door, dropping the stub of her cigarette in an ashtray. “God, talent is wasted on some people. Come upstairs, Mary Pickford. I want to see if you’ll play it now.”

I watched her, my nerves tight and my temples beginning to throb, but she’d already opened the door and started up the stairs to Gloria’s, her mules clacking softly on the worn, thin stair runner. There was nothing for it. I got up and followed.