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

“Was that something you did often?”

She flushed, and lifted her chin. “So what if I did? He needed someone to look after him, did Jamie.”

“I’m sure. And what did you see?”

“They were dancing. He’d barely look at you, sir, he was that shy; took me six months before he’d so much as bid me good morning, and there she was, bold as you please, with his arms about her, dancing !” Her fingers clenched in her lap.

“Could you make her out?”

She shook her head. “With the rain, and all; the window was wet, and there was smoke from the street. But I saw the shape of them, whirling about. Shameless, it was. Some opera-house floozy, you mark my words.”

“You think this woman was involved in Mr Wishart’s death?”

She shrugged. “All I know is she was there. And they’re strong, those dancers, you ever seen them? Muscles like my uncle Jed, some of them. Maybe she wanted money, and he wouldn’t give her any.”

Rattattarattattarattatta! Gairden knocked his chair over as he leaped to his feet. Mattie shrieked.

The caligraph’s keys were moving, the letters blurring up and down, faster and faster, until, with a clunk , they stopped. Several of the metal arms had become entwined, forcing some of the keys into a tight bunch, g and h and y and t and b . The machine quivered like a dog, and was still.

Mattie was on her feet, her hands clamped to her face. “Oh, sir, it’s Jamie!”

“Or,” said Gairden, “the vibrations of the machines set the thing to rattling, and now it’s tangled itself up. Well, I shan’t touch it; I’ll leave it to someone who knows how.”

“There’s no paper,” Mattie said. “If there’d been paper in it, he might have written a name.”

“Well, there wasn’t,” Gairden said. “It’s just a machine. Now, Mattie, did you hear anything? After you saw this woman?”

“No, sir.” She glanced anxiously at the jammed caligraph. “But I was back at the bench by then, so I wouldn’t have heard much.”

“And you didn’t see her go in or out?”

“No. If I had, I’d have had something to say to her!”

“Thank you. You get on home, miss. And if you think of anything more, you come and tell me, just as I said.”

Mattie left, still glancing at the caligraph. Gairden glowered at it. “Well,” he said, “is that you, Mr Wishart? Still messing about with machines? You’d be better giving me a clue, you know, rather than frightening that girl half out of her wits.”

He glanced around, feeling a little foolish, but nothing answered him.

As he left he saw a live goblin hunched over the corpse in the gutter, tugging at the wet fur, and whimpering. “Too late, old fellow,” Gairden muttered. Even love could not animate the dead. Though he’d heard things, about the fey …

He returned to his lodgings tired and chilled through, but restless. Once he had hung up his greatcoat by the fire, to steam itself dry, he paced his rooms, straightening a picture here, sliding a book even with its fellows there. He thought about Jamie Wishart; his mechanisms and his narrow bachelor bed. He thought about Lassiter, and Rheese, and Mattie Drewrey. About machines and goblins. About steam and blood. The portrait of a young woman, hair that looked almost too heavy to bear piled upon her fragile head and descending in thick curls about her delicate neck, watched him with a solemn stare. At one point he turned to it. “Well, Esther? What do you think? All this business with music and dancing, that’s more your area than mine. You always liked to dance, while you had the strength for it.” But tonight Esther had no answers for him.

He went to turn his coat, and felt in the pockets; a scrap of paper, and a tiny cog. The paper with the word Lalika on it. He frowned; he was sure he had left it on the table. How had it come to be in his pocket? He looked at it again, crumpled and torn where it had been caught in the drawer slide. Now he thought back, there hadn’t been any other papers in that drawer that seemed to have their corners missing.

So whatever this had been part of, it was no longer there. Someone had taken it out, perhaps in a hurry, wrenching at it. Leaving behind this fragment. And now the fragment had come home with him, along with one tiny cog; tiny yet slightly too big to have been part of the broken watch. Everything else in the office was so neat, so carefully tidied away; a place for everything, and everything, except this little glittering snowflake of metal, in its place. Well, anyone could lose or discard something so tiny. And yet, there it had been, close to the body. Stained, in fact, with the young man’s blood. Gairden rubbed his thumb over it; brown flakes came away.

“Stains . . .” he said. “I wonder what stains their hands. Dyes, perhaps. I must remember to ask Lassiter.”

Perhaps Wishart had been working on something; a project of his own, Lassiter had said. Perhaps whoever came in had grabbed not only the papers, but Wishart’s latest mechanism.

Possibly Rheese had been right about espionage; tomorrow, he would go to the patent office. And to the theatre, too; he felt a sting of pleasure at the thought. Maybe he would even buy a ticket; it was a long time since he had done such a thing.

Wishart hadn’t done such things at all, according to Lassiter. Wishart had spent his life among machines, without family, seemingly without friends. Gairden looked out into the rainy night, and shook his head.

The next day other things intervened: a kidnapping (that might, in fact, be a running-away), a suicide, and the thousand mundanities of the working day; by the time Gairden could have got to the patent office, it was shut. He did make time to have the broken watch looked at by a watchmaker of his acquaintance: Adelle Brigley, a cosy-looking woman of middle years. Her workshop, unlike Jamie Wishart’s, was an Aladdin’s cave of glittering confusion in which she never, to Gairden’s continuing astonishment, seemed to have the slightest trouble finding what she wanted. She poked at the ruined mechanism and held fragments up to the lamplight. “It was a nice piece. A Lockwood and Greene. Engraved inside the lid.”

“Is the engraving visible?”

“Some of it . . .” She screwed a jeweller’s glass into her eye and peered. “To Jamie . . . something . . . occ . . . probably occasion . . . and two numbers, a two and a one, I think. An ‘m’. Then two ‘e’s. I can’t make out the rest.”

“A birthday gift,” Gairden said. “On the occasion of his twenty-first, I imagine.”

“Perhaps.”

“An expensive one?”

“Depending on one’s means, Inspector. Not an extravagant purchase for a well-off man, but a tidy enough price.”

“And is it all there?”

She prodded. “The hands are missing, maybe some other pieces. It’d take a deal of mending.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Not at all. Will you take a cup with me, Inspector Gairden? You look chilled.”

“No, thank you. More to do yet.”

“You work yourself very hard,” said Adelle, shaking her head at him.

He smiled, and paid her her usual honorarium, then made his way to the theatre nearest to the Rheese manufactory. It seemed a sensible place to start; murder often had a small circumference.

Among smells of powder and greasepaint and dust and sweat-stained satin and weary feet, he questioned dancers and doormen. None had heard of Jamie Wishart, though plenty had heard of Rheese. None knew of anyone who might have visited the manufactory.

Of course, the fact of someone dancing did not necessarily indicate a professional dancer; his own dead Esther, a postmistress, had loved to dance. When she could no longer dance herself, she liked to sit and watch, and encouraged him to dance with other women. I like to see you , she’d said. One in a million, Esther. Not a jealous bone in her.