Marie O'Regan - The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

“The idea of someone actually—” Lassiter wiped his mouth. “Well, it’s not the same, you see.”

“No, you’re right, it isn’t. You knew the young man, then?”

“Oh, everyone knew young Jamie, sir. Not to speak to, so much; he kept himself to himself, you know. But he was a nice lad when you could get him to notice you existed.”

“Preoccupied, was he?”

“You could say that, sir, yes. A bear for his work, he was.”

“An asset to the firm, then.”

“Oh, I don’t think it would be too much to call him a genius, Inspector. We shall be very sorry to lose him.” There was, the inspector thought, the slightest possible emphasis on the we .

The iron stairway shuddered to the regular thudding; bright curls of shaved metal and fragments of dirt jumped about their feet as they climbed. Smells of hot metal and steam surrounded them. Glittering dust hung in the air.

“What was his position here?” Inspector Gairden said.

“Assistant Deviser, sir.”

“And who was he assistant to?”

“That’d be Mr Rheese, sir. The owner.”

“I see.”

The noise lessened slightly as they moved higher. They stepped into a corridor; heavy wooden doors, gas lamps hissing in their lily-petal shades. Lassiter hurried his steps; Gairden speeded up to stay with him.

Lassiter glanced up and down the corridor; pushed open a door. “In here, sir. It’s pretty bad, but I suppose you’ve seen worse, in your line of work.”

Tiny limbs, their sizes carefully graded, hung on the walls. Jars of eyes stared in all directions. A music box stood with gaping lid, the dancer on top poised forever en pointe . Neatly arrayed in trays, on hooks, in boxes, were levers, wheels, cogs. Brass and copper, glass and steel. A vice gripped the edge of a workbench like a parrot waiting for a snack; against one wall was a bed, narrow as a coffin, the sheets and one rough blanket tucked in with an almost military precision.

If it had been a burglary, it was an exceptionally neat one. There was nothing out of place, except the body. It – James Wishart , Gairden reminded himself, not just the body , never just the body – lay face down on the floor.

There wasn’t much left of his head.

He was dressed much like the foreman. One hand was outflung, as though reaching for something; the other hand lay at his side, with the palm turned up; it had the same staining as he had noticed on Lassiter’s hands. There was something particularly pathetic about it, that strong young hand, darkened and callused with work, lying curled like a sleeping child’s. A watch had slipped from his waistcoat pocket and lay flattened, a ruined mess of cogs and metal and glass.

Gairden kneeled down. From the mash of brutally shattered bone and the overlapping sprays of red, it seemed he had been hit not just once, but several times. This close, Gairden was enclosed in the raw stench of blood, the sleek smell of machine oil . . . and a faint, junipery trail of gin.

Something lay in the mess, glittering. Inspector Gairden picked up the tiny brass cog, delicate as a snowflake. Perhaps it was from the watch. “Did he drink?”

“Jamie? Never saw him with anything stronger than a cup of tea, sir.”

“Hmm. Is anything missing?”

“Not that I can see, sir.”

It was cold; the fire in the grate had long died to ash and cinders. All the fire-irons were in place. It seemed the murderer had both provided his weapon, and taken it away again.

“Lassiter!”

Inspector Gairden looked up. A man was standing in the doorway, regarding the scene with his mouth twisted in distaste.

“Is this the inspector? I thought I told you to bring him to my office?”

Lassiter straightened his shoulders and stared at the opposite wall. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “Forgot.”

The man hurried forward. “My dear sir, I do apologize. I’d hoped to have a chance to prepare you.” He was a burly fellow, what Gairden thought of as a beefsteak man; flushed face girdled with expansive mutton-chop whiskers; smelling of tobacco and pomade. He too had black smudges on his fingers. “Ghastly, quite ghastly.”

Gairden got to his feet. “Yes. This is his workshop?”

“Indeed. It’s a dreadful business. Lassiter, do get back to the floor; they’re bad enough at the moment. They need your eye on them.”

“Sir.”

“I may need to speak to you again,” Gairden said quietly.

“Of course, sir.” Lassiter disappeared.

Even as he did so, there was a pause in the thudding, a shiver of silence, then a long metallic screech, and shouting. “Oh, no,” mutton-chop whiskers moaned. “As though things weren’t bad enough.”

“Problem, sir?” Gairden said.

“Goblins in the damn machinery, I swear. I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. Tobias Rheese. I’m the owner, for my sins. I say, could we go elsewhere? It’s just that—”

“Well, sir, I do need to look around a little.”

“Oh, I suppose you do.” Rheese glanced at the body, then away, swallowing. “When can we get things decently dealt with?”

“As soon as I’m done.”

Gairden worked his way along the battered, deep-drawered oak table that stood against the back wall; he took a pencil from his pocket and used it to lift the edges of papers and charts. He brushed his gloved fingers over the teeth of cogwheels stacked in a box; looked at the tools hanging on their hooks, clean and orderly. He opened a drawer to find it full of papers – technical drawings by the look of them – labelled in a neat, small hand. A new method for the construction of a speaking tube. Improvements to the ratchet key. Clockwork mechanism for use in an instructive and educational child’s toy .

“Do be careful, there’s a good chap. Those papers . . . well, of course, I haven’t had time to go through them, but there may be important things in there,” Rheese said.

“Of course, sir. Can you tell if anything’s been taken?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

The second drawer refused to open easily; something was jammed in the slide. Gairden worked at it with his fingers until it came free. A scrap of paper. A word, Lalika , in that same neat hand. A smooth curve, disappearing off the edge of the paper, with an elongated oval within it. That was all. Gairden looked at it, then laid it on the desk.

Above his head, the mantle of one of the gas lamps suddenly flared up with painful brilliance. Gairden blinked. There was a pop , and the lamp went out.

He heard Rheese swear under his breath. When he turned, the man seemed to have lost more colour than the dimmer light could account for, and his broad forehead gleamed beneath his pomade-glossed curls. “Could we get out of here? Please?”

“Just one more moment, sir.”

Gairden looked around, letting his eyes lose focus. Sometimes, concentrating on the detail hid the story the place had to tell you. Though here, he felt at a distinct disadvantage; it was a place built for machines, not people. Machines did not have stories, or motive, or a past.

Gairden was a man out of his time, and knew it. He had grown up in a world that still went hand in hand with the mystical, but the cities expanded, the woods diminished, and the grind and roar of machines ate into everything. When Gairden was a child, goblins had stolen eggs from his parents’ hens and shouted rude remarks when he’d chased them from the garden; now, if he saw one, it had died a poisoned death in the gutter or sat sickly and moaning in a cage in some private menagerie. Naiads abandoned the polluted rivers; the fey retreated deep into the heart of the green. Gairden was a man whose job consisted of shining a light on darkness, yet he loathed the idea of a world of mindless mechanism, where there was only glaring light and stark black; where nothing danced and glimmered in the shadows.