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

He looked at the gleaming tools of polished wood and brass, the drawers with their shining handles, the neat stacks of books and papers; that narrow, empty bed.

“Well, sir,” he said, “I think that’s it for the moment. I’ll need to ask you a few questions, if it’s quite convenient.”

“By all means, come with me.” Rheese closed and locked the door as Lassiter watched.

“What do I do about—” Rheese gestured to where Jamie Wishart lay, hidden now.

“Our fellows will come to take him away; he’ll have to remain with us until this is resolved, of course. Have his family been informed?”

“I don’t think he has any. My father took him out of the workhouse, and he wasn’t married. This way, Inspector.”

Reese’s office bore some resemblance to a gentlemen’s club that Gairden had had occasion to visit during an investigation the year before. It was, like Rheese, plumply furnished, the lights rosy-shaded and fringed, the desk topped with rich red leather. Designs for intricate machinery were scattered on the surface; thick black lines ran through one of them. He wasn’t as tidy as his assistant; papers lay all about the place, as did drinking glasses, an apple-core, a pot of boot-black, a picture of a young woman and a small boy . . . Rheese motioned Gairden to sit in one of the deep leather chairs and shuffled the papers into a drawer, leaving black smudges on some of the designs.

“So little time these days,” he said. “Since the old man retired, I’ve barely had a moment to work on my own designs.” He looked at his hands, frowned, and wiped them on a cloth. “Damn muck gets everywhere.” He poured himself a brandy from one of a set of rather fine decanters of heavy cut crystal. He motioned the stopper in Gairden’s direction. “For yourself?”

“Very kind of you, sir, but no.”

Rheese sat himself in the chair behind the desk. “Wouldn’t want you to think I’m the sort of fellow who always has his nose in the bottle, but a thing like this, well, I have to confess, my nerves are twisted up like clock springs.”

“Was it you who found him, sir?”

“No, it was Lassiter. He came pounding on my door, yelling about blood and murder. And when I saw . . . well, sent for you chaps, obviously.”

A clock suddenly chimed, a loud discordant run of notes. Rheese jolted so badly half the brandy he’d just poured spilled down his wrist.

“Sir? Is everything all right, sir?” Gairden said, getting to his feet.

Rheese waved him back down, gulped brandy and tugged at his collar. “Yes, yes.”

Gairden glanced at his watch. “It seems your clock is out of time, sir.”

Rheese glared at the clock. “So it is. What’s the use of a clock that doesn’t tell the right time, I ask you?” he said. “Or any machine that refuses to work. Not a bit of use. That’s what.”

“Sir?”

“Sorry, Inspector. It’s been a trying day.”

The clock sat on a small ornate table draped with a fringed, green velvet cloth, and something lay just beyond it, glimmering softly.

“Oh,” Rheese said, “she’s not working either. But I shall have her going, see if I don’t.”

Gairden peered. His eyes, bemused, sorted through the soft gleam of metal. The long sliver of shine, a leg; the rounded arch, a foot. Some sort of automaton, in polished brass, tumbled in the corner like a drunk. Or a corpse.

“Do you like automata, Inspector?” Rheese said, topping up his brandy.

“Not really my style of thing, sir.”

“People are wild for them; the more elaborate, the better. There’s a mechanical chamber orchestra that’s been all over the papers.”

“Oh, I may have seen something, yes.”

“That’s what people like. But they’re clumsy, you know, the mannequins. The way they move . . . everyone’s trying for something more human. It’s not easy.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is. Now, Mr Rheese, do you have any idea who might have attacked Mr Wishart?”

“Well—”

“Sir?

“We make frivols, Inspector. Amusements. Toys. Toys are all innocence, you’d think, but there’s no harder business than this. Espionage goes on all the time. We take precautions, but someone could have got in, especially during the shift change, with a couple of hundred people going in and out.”

“You think Mr Wishart might have disturbed someone in the act of stealing his designs?”

Rheese swallowed the last of the brandy. “We’ve been doing very well. People notice.”

“Yes,” Inspector Gairden said. “And I understand that Mr Wishart was an exceptionally talented young man.”

“Hah. He was well enough, I suppose, but really, Inspector, he was a boy from the workhouse when all’s said and done. I was giving him what education I could, of course. Trying to make him useful, for m’ father’s sake.”

“Oh, I understood he was something like a genius,” Gairden said.

“If he’d been that, Inspector, don’t you think someone would have tried to bribe him away, rather than murder him?”

Gairden felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He turned his head, convinced someone had come into the room. But the door remained firmly shut. A death-rattle sound came from the clock, and a thick final clunk . He glanced at it; its stilled and silent face was somehow reminiscent of a cadaver. He turned back to Rheese, who shuddered and tipped more brandy down his throat.

“There is that, of course, sir,” Gairden said. “If they’d known about him. Did he have many friends?”

“I don’t know, Inspector. Well, he would hardly have brought them here; this is a manufactory, not a club, what?”

“What about enemies?”

Rheese shrugged. “There’s the Children of Lud, of course. Wretched fellows.”

“The machine-breakers? Have you had trouble with them?”

“Not for some time, but they’re still about; well, you’d know, Inspector, wasn’t some fella arrested for it just the other week?”

“Not in my jurisdiction, sir. And I hadn’t heard of them going as far as murder.”

“It’s not a great leap, though, is it, Inspector, between attacking a man’s property and attacking his person, don’t you think?”

Gairden, who rather thought it was, chose not to answer. “Do you know if Mr Wishart had any problems with the other workers, sir?”

Rheese rubbed at his whiskers. “Not that I know of, but they will have their rows and jealousies, you know. My father gave him his own workshop, and so forth. I suppose not everyone likes to see a boy from the workhouse do well, eh? But Lassiter’d know better than I.”

“I’ll need to talk to them.”

A whistle blew, long and loud, cutting over the thud-thud-thud of the machines.

“Well, then, you’d be just in time to catch them coming off shift, if we go now. I’ll get Lassiter to gather them up.” He picked up the speaking tube that dangled from the wall by his desk, and removed the stopper. “Hello? Amabelle? Tell Lassiter to hold the workers back; the inspector needs to speak to them.” He stoppered the tube and got to his feet.

“So you kept them to their work, sir, once Mr Wishart was discovered?” Gairden asked.

“Couldn’t stop the machines, not for something like this.”

“No. Under what circumstances would the machines be stopped?”

“If there’s an accident, obviously, then. Oh, and when Her Majesty, bless her, passed on. All the manufactories stopped for an hour for the funeral.”

“Yes, I remember. Well, I needn’t keep you from your work, sir, if you’re happy to let me talk to them.”

“By all means. Yes, I must get on. I’ll be doing the boy’s work as well as my own, now.” For a moment his heavy face quivered with genuine emotion, though what precisely that emotion was, the Inspector couldn’t tell.