The Other Side of Midnight (19 page)

One day, after our last appointment had left, I found her sitting in the kitchen, still wearing her dress and scarf. She held a letter in her hand.

“I’ve made an appointment,” she said. “For a test.”

I stared at her. She couldn’t be sick—she couldn’t possibly be. “A medical test?”

“No.” She put the letter on the kitchen table. “A test for the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research.”

I blinked at her. It was early spring, the air raw and damp, and I pulled my oversize cardigan closer over my chest. “What are you talking about? Are you mad?”

Her lips thinned and she didn’t answer me.

I pulled back a kitchen chair, the legs scraping loud in the silence, and dropped into it. “Gloria has done tests for them for a year,” I said, trying not to think of James Hawley. “She laughs about it. It’s a lark to her. The tests she describes are horrible—demeaning and useless.”

My mother raised her gaze to mine. Outside, the sky darkened as
the supper hour approached, the faint, dismal gray that had lingered over the day finally fading. “It was Gloria who asked me to participate.”

“What?”

“She wrote me.” My mother traced one long, beautiful finger along the edge of the letter on the table. “She told me the work was important, that the New Society was fighting for recognition for people like us. She said it would mean a lot to her if I’d submit.”

“And you believed her?”

“Of course not. I may not know her as you do, Ellie, but I know enough. She wants something, or she thinks she does. I think she believes that by convincing me to do this, she’s winning some sort of game.”

It isn’t personal,
Gloria had said the first day she met me,
but I’m afraid I’m rather competitive.
In all those drunken evenings, I’d never confessed to her that it was I who managed all of my mother’s séances. Part of me had always known better. I’d had no idea she was planning something like this, and I couldn’t fathom why; I was only glad, for the moment, that I wasn’t the one in her sights. “You shouldn’t go,” I told my mother, panic in my voice. “Say no.”

“I could,” she said, “but I won’t.”

“Mother, you
can’t.
”

She leaned toward me, her eyes tired as they always were now. “My sweet girl,” she said so softly that tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. “My sweetling, my precious one. What do I have to prove to anyone anymore?”

“Fine.” I swiped the tears from my eyes, letting them soak into the sleeve of my cardigan. “Suit yourself. Go ahead—I don’t care.”

“But, darling, you’re coming with me.”

I stared at her, her face breaking into stars through the tears on my lashes. “What?”

“They want both of us,” my mother said. “Gloria requested specifically that you be part of the test.”

She knew. That was the only thing it could mean. She
knew.

“Mother, we can’t,” I protested.

But The Fantastique smiled at me, the jet beads on her dress clicking softly. “Oh, yes,” she said, her voice low. “We can.”

*   *   *

W
e did the tests, and it went worse than I could have imagined.

We were taken to the back room of the offices of the New Society. There were three chairs in the middle of the room and three more chairs lined along the wall. “Our simplest experiment,” Paul Golding told us. “No gadgets, no tricks. You need do nothing except answer our questions. However,” he continued as two men came into the room, “it is sometimes customary for a psychic to have an accomplice giving her signals and signs. For the experiment to be pure, we have to ensure there is no chance of it. Please take a seat, Mrs. Winter, Miss Winter. This is Mr. James Hawley, my assistant.”

He was even more handsome than I remembered, now that I saw him in plain light, not in the dimness of a bar or the darkness of Gloria’s flat. He wore no hat and his short, dark blond hair was neatly groomed. He moved with the grace I recalled, even in a jacket and tie, and he nodded formally at me as if he’d never met me, his blue-gray eyes shuttered. I realized, with a shock, that he was carrying ropes and a blindfold in his hands.

Mother and I sat in two of the chairs in the center of the room placed back-to-back. I watched in dismayed silence as James Hawley knelt before me—without a word to me—and tied my ankles to the legs of my chair, the motion pushing my knees apart. His hands were warm and competent. I flushed, watching the strong column of the back of his neck as he bent to his work between my knees, the neat line where his hair ended against the skin. I felt shame and dread and a creeping, self-loathing outrage as his fingers brushed the backs of my calves, just as they had on that night that now seemed a million years ago.

“What is this?” I finally choked.

He moved upward, gently taking my hands and tying them together at the wrists. Behind me, I could hear the other man tying my mother in a similar fashion. “No foot taps,” James said softly, his voice low and familiar from my many heated daydreams. “No hand signals. No body signals at all. We have to make certain.”

“Then just send me from the room,” I pleaded, my blood pumping, to my horror, as his fingers grasped my wrists.

He shook his head. “This is part of the experiment.”

My throat closed in panic. I was part of the experiment. They thought it was
me
summoning the dead. The only person who could have told them was Gloria.

“Did you pay her?” I asked him, my voice a vindictive hiss. “Don’t tell me she did this for you for free.”

But he only shook his head again, rising and sliding the blindfold through his large, supple hands. The sound of the cloth against his palms made me shake in fear.

He paused for only a moment. “This won’t take long,” he said. I searched for the sound of apology in his voice, and found none. “Just hold still.” And he slipped the blindfold over my eyes.

He lied; it did take long. It took hours and hours, Mother and I tied to our chairs, blindfolded, while Paul Golding sat in the third chair and James and two others observed from the side of the room. The tests themselves, I learned, were the most basic ones they gave to people with supposed psychic powers.
What is printed on the card I’m holding? What word have I just written on this piece of paper? What name am I thinking of right now? Can you move an object in this room? Take your time, Mrs. Winter.

She failed, of course. Sometimes she guessed wrongly; other times she sat wordless, or whispered, “
I don’t know
.” I seethed with silent anger in the darkness in my chair. She had made me promise. On the journey here, she had made me swear, to the bottom of my love and loyalty to her, not to help her with the tests. She had told
me, quiet and confident, that she wanted to do them on her own. If I helped her, she said, she would never forgive me. There was nothing I could do; she was all I had. And so I sat there, in an agony of humiliation suffused by a red wave of anger, and listened to her fail.

Inevitably, they asked me the same questions, but by then it was obvious that The Fantastique, who had been in business for decades, could not perform even the simplest psychic task. To use my powers and answer correctly—the ones I could answer, since it was absurd to think a psychic could tell you what card you were holding—would only expose her further. And so, when they asked me their questions, I had no choice but to grit my teeth, follow her lead, and say I didn’t know.

My fury burned itself out sometime in the second hour, and by the time they took the blindfold off, it was wet with tears. I could have shouted at all of them, shouted that The Fantastique was not a liar, the tests were unfair, and my mother was tired. But I said nothing. She wanted no defense; she wanted only to do the tests on her own terms, pass or fail them as she would, though I did not know why. When James untied my hands and feet at last, I jumped from my chair and faced all of them, the tears smearing my cheeks.

“This is finished,” I said, taking my mother’s hand in mine. She was unresisting, her skin cool and clammy. “You’ve bullied and humiliated two women for an afternoon, and you’ve done enough. We’re going home. Do not contact my mother again.”

In the taxi, I looked at her exhausted face and said only,
“Why?”

To my amazement, she smiled. “It’s over,” she said. “It’s over. After all these years—all of my life—it’s finally over.”

“They’ll write about it,” I said, my voice still tight with anger. “They’ll write that we’re liars, frauds. And then where will we be?”

I felt her stroke the back of my hand with her beautiful fingers. “I’d have you live a different life if I could. Do you understand? This isn’t a good life—the right life—for a girl. Sometimes I think I should have done it years ago.”

“But this is our livelihood,” I replied, fighting panic. “This is what keeps us independent. That’s what you’ve always taught me.”

She shook her head, and I thought she would say something else, but instead she closed her eyes. “I’m so tired,” she said. After a moment she leaned into me, her head on my shoulder like a child. I put my arm around her and held her tight for the rest of the ride home, my anger forgotten, my mind spinning. I had never known, never suspected, that my mother wanted to be free.

She never worked again. She grew sicker and sicker—cancer, the doctors finally admitted. By the time the New Society’s report came out, neither of us cared about losing clients. She was too sick to work, and I was too busy caring for her, and too grief-stricken, to take over. The months went by and the money dwindled. A numbness came over me, growing around me like a shell. The world disappeared.

Five months after the tests, she was dead. I held her hand in those last moments, all of our arguments forgotten. And when she was gone, and I sat hollow and empty and helpless, I had no luxury to take up another life as she’d wished. I salvaged what clients I could and I found new ones—there are always people looking for answers who have never read obscure reports—and I started up business as The Fantastique. I stopped doing séances and I consoled myself with the fact that, despite how badly Gloria had wanted it, she’d never proven that I had been the power behind my mother’s curtain. My mother and I had won that much dignity, at least.

It isn’t personal,
Gloria had told me.

But it was. It was.

D
avies’s disappearance had left me at loose ends, unsure of what to do. It had also left me, I soon realized, in the company of George Sutter’s agent, the man in the houndstooth jacket.

I glimpsed him briefly in the reflection on a shop window as I wandered the crowds of Piccadilly Circus. He vanished into a doorway across the street, but before he disappeared I noticed his jacket and almost got a good look at him. He was tall, narrow shouldered, built very thin, wearing a hat that was the worse for wear. He did not have a mustache, which eliminated him from being the man I’d seen at the Gild Theatre.

If he was an MI5 agent, he wasn’t overly discreet, especially in his distinctive choice of jacket pattern. If MI5 had employed women, I would have dressed more blandly and done a much better job. However, it was likely that he saw me, a blithely unaware girl, as the easiest—and possibly most demeaning—of assignments, and my futile attempt at escape that morning had done nothing to alter his
impression. It had been obvious that I’d been carted away from my home by a Scotland Yard detective, for example, and it would have been a simple matter to linger outside the Yard and wait for me to leave. And now here I was, oblivious again.

It chafed me. Men underestimated me at every turn—Paul Golding, Inspector Merriken, even James Hawley, though at least he had apologized. Certainly George Sutter seemed to think me nothing but a pawn for some mysterious end of his. All right, then—he could find me.

I continued to stare into the shop window like a dunce. I adjusted the set of my hat in the reflection in the glass. Then I looked in the next shop window, and the next, for all the world like a silly girl going shopping, a girl who has forgotten that she is in the middle of a murder investigation because she’s spotted a nice pair of shoes.

At the entrance to the Piccadilly Circus tube station, I ducked inside, bought a ticket, and hurried down the stairs. It took him exactly sixty seconds to follow me; I knew because I watched him from behind a set of scaffolding, covered by a canvas tarp, that was set up near the entrances to the platforms. The station was under construction, thank God. This time, from my vantage point, I got a clear look at his face. I watched Mr. Houndstooth look this way and that, then move through the gates, his eyes scanning the crowds. I turned to find two construction workers staring at me, one of them with a cigarette in hand. The other one waggled his eyebrows at me.

“Old boyfriend,” I said to them, making my tone brassy. “He’s the last bloke I want to see!”

Their laughter followed me up the stairs and out into the street.

Perhaps it would work, I thought as I quickly boarded a passing omnibus. Or perhaps it wouldn’t. At the very least, it would buy me some time. At least I knew now where to go next. George Sutter had suggested I interview Ramona again, and despite myself, I agreed. I would get off this bus after several more stops and use George’s money to take a taxi to Streatham.

*   *   *

D
usk was falling when I arrived, the light fading from the bruised sky. I paid the taxi driver and hesitated in front of Ramona’s building. As before, there was no sign of life. I glanced across the street at the soon to be shuttered wig shop, thinking of how I had stood under its awning in the rain waiting for Ramona’s séance. I didn’t want to think about the séance, and I certainly didn’t want to go back into Ramona’s awful block of flats. But there was nothing for it, so I plunged ahead.

The vestibule and the hall were as dark as I remembered, and the grimy smell was the same. Since the previous night, however, a thin rope had been strung across the entrance to the stairwell, a simple handwritten paper sign over it:
OUT OF ORDER
.

I approached the rope and peered up the dark stairwell. How could a flight of stairs be out of order? I waited and listened, but heard no sounds of ongoing work. Perhaps some of the stairs had caved in, or a section of ceiling had fallen. If so, any workers that had been hired to fix it must have left for the day.

That meant only the horrible old elevator could get me to the fourth floor. I gritted my teeth and slid open the diamond grille, pulling at the door and stepping into the yawning black space inside. Only a small eye-level window in the door lit the interior of the elevator, letting in the fading gloom. There had been a light in here last time I’d used it, but it must have broken. I fumbled in the dark for a long moment, looking for the lever. Outside the window, nothing moved and no one came or went.

There was a distinct smell in there, as of someone who hadn’t washed in weeks, underlaid with a more sinister odor. I breathed shallowly and slid my gloved hands over the controls, no sound but my own breathing in my ears. I was about to give up and try the hazardous stairs when I finally pressed the lever the right way and the elevator began its shuddering ascent.

It seemed, if possible, even slower than the last time. Something creaked high overhead as we passed the second story, and the floor juddered under my feet; I grasped the wall with one hand, wondering whether I would have to burn my gloves. I wasn’t certain I wanted to look at them in the light once I was out of here.

The third story passed by slowly out the window. I slid into the bored stupor of the elevator captive, staring out the window and waiting for my floor. Then the fourth floor came into view and I froze, the hairs on the back of my neck on end.

On the other side of the tiny window, Ramona stood in the hallway.

She was in front of the door to her flat, barefoot, facing me. She watched as the elevator finished its climb and my face appeared in the window. She was wearing only a brightly patterned dressing gown in the Chinese style, its pink and blue muddy in the dim light of the hallway, the belt tied loosely around her waist, the top gaping open to reveal the bony center of her small chest. Her dark hair was untidy, her makeup smeared.

The elevator stopped with a lurch. Silence fell, complete and stifling. Ramona stared at me.

The back of my neck roared into life, an itching crawling from the base of my skull, and a nauseating smell overpowered me.

“No,” I said softly.

I reached one gloved hand to the handle of the elevator door. Ramona shook her head, the motion slow and eerie, the dim light from the high window glowing pale on the high skin of her forehead.

“No,” I said again.

She raised one white hand, palm out. Her arm shimmered in the air, and the movement was uncanny, like the imperfect imagination of how a human might move. I had seen too many dead in my life to misunderstand, yet part of me refused to believe it. I had just left her the night before.

She held her hand out to me, and I recognized Mr. Bagwell’s
gesture.
Stay.
Only this time it was directed at me. I remembered the first time I had come here and knocked on her door, how I’d seen a vision of her lying dead on the floor of her flat. She shook her head again.

My heart flipped in my chest and I backed mindlessly away until I hit the wall of the elevator chamber. A strangled sob came from my throat.
Someone has murdered her,
I thought,
and he is still in there.

And he must have heard the elevator move.

I fumbled in the dim darkness for the lever again, my hands slick inside my gloves. The elevator started with a sound so loud to my ears that I gasped out a whispered scream.
She can’t be dead,
I thought in high-pitched disbelief.
First Davies gone, now Ramona dead. Is Davies dead, too? Am I too late for everyone?
Pulleys creaked, the cab juddered again, and I began to lower. I backed against the wall as I watched Ramona disappear through the window, first her head, then her wasted body in its awful dressing gown. When her feet vanished past the top of the window, she still had not moved.

He would hear me. He would have to—everyone in the building would have been able to hear this execrable elevator. Had he heard my ascent? Had he—whoever he was—stood just inside the door of Ramona’s flat, waiting for me to exit the elevator and come to the door?

I pounded the wall with the heel of one hand, the strangled sob emerging from my throat again.
Move!
The killer, if he heard me, had no need to wait for the ancient elevator to come back. He only needed to step past the rope closing off the stairs to beat me to the hall and meet me there.

The car creaked patiently to the ground floor, and I peered out the window. The front hall was empty. When the elevator had stopped and silence fell again, I hesitated for only a moment, weighing the possibility that the murderer was waiting in a spot I couldn’t see against the possibility that he had not yet come down the stairs. In either case, it was impossible to stand in this stinking car any longer, waiting to be killed. I gripped the door handle and pulled it back, sliding the metal grate with my other hand.

The door creaked with a sound like a scream. I slid out into the hall before it was all the way open and ran to the building’s front entrance, my heels clicking on the tile. From upstairs came the sound of unhurried footsteps descending the stairs.

I burst out onto the front walk, gasping. The street was empty, darkness falling in pillowy folds. A thin, misty rain was beginning. I looked left to right and for a horrifying second my body froze in the most paralyzing, utter indecision I had ever experienced.
I should run from the murderer behind me. I have nowhere to hide from him. I should turn and identify him
. I gasped another breath, wasting time, before self-preservation asserted itself and won out. I darted around the side of the building, ducking into the narrow alley that separated it from its neighbor.

I moved as quietly as I could, the walls of the two houses nearly brushing my shoulders in the dim, narrow space. At the end of the alley, I braced myself against the corner and glanced behind me. There was no sign of movement, but the hairs standing upright on the back of my neck prompted me to keep running.

The alley emptied into a ragged back garden, its few paving stones overgrown with weeds, a pot of dying flowers in one corner. I crossed the space quickly, thought about exiting by the open back gate, then changed direction and ducked around the other side of the building. In the alley on this side, just as narrow as the other, stood two large dustbins smelling of old rot. I slid behind one of them, crouched low to the ground, and waited.

It didn’t take long. Footsteps came from the alley into the back garden. They stepped forward once, twice, and stopped.

I closed my eyes. I could hear my own breathing inside my rib cage. I pressed my back to the brick wall, trying not to move.

Another footstep came from the garden, unhurried.

I pressed a hand over my mouth. For the first time, it fully bloomed in my mind what a deadly game I was playing. The rope on the stairs with the sign—why had I not seen it before? It had been a
sham, a ruse calmly set up by a murderer going about his business. Put up a rope and a sign, and anyone who approaches during your deadly work would have to take the noisy lift. Just as I had.

And when he had heard the clatter of the lift, indicating he had an intruder, he had calmly finished his killing and started down the stairs after me. Even now he was in no hurry, his footsteps measured in the back garden.

Passionless and planned—just as Gloria’s murder had been. What had I thought of when George Sutter first told me of it?
Someone who hadn’t even cared enough to hate her.

Two more steps sounded; they seemed to aim for the back garden gate, which I remembered stood open. A careless neighbor, perhaps, or one of the residents leaving by the back way and not bothering to close the gate. Outside the gate was a lane that ran between the backs of the two sets of buildings, a convenient path to quickly get from building to building or out to the street. It would have been a logical assumption that I’d fled that way—in fact, it would have been the smartest route if I’d been thinking properly, instead of hiding behind dustbins six feet away. If I’d had the presence of mind to flee out the back gate, I’d be hidden in the crowds on the Streatham High Road by now.

Decided, the steps now fully approached the gate. My hand still pressed to my mouth, my breath still heavy in my chest, I shifted carefully on my numbed, squatting haunches and leaned forward. One inch, two. I looked past the edge of the dustbin.

The man stood at the garden gate, his back to me. He was not tall, though taller than me; not bulky, though of average size for a man; not fat, nor thin. Something about his very blankness frightened me. He wore a black overcoat that fell without a flaw from his shoulders to the middle of his calves, beneath which I glimpsed black trousers and expensive shoes. His hat was also black, as if he were dressed for a funeral, its shadows smeared in the rainy, darkening light of early
evening. As I watched, he put one black-gloved hand on the open gate and looked out into the lane, one way and then the other.

I pressed my hand tighter to my mouth and did not breathe.