The Other Side of Midnight (22 page)

“He’s moving fast, James,” I said, meaning the killer. “If he’s going to get rid of me, he’ll move as quickly as he can. He’s proven he can kill with impunity when he can fade into the city crowds. In the country, he’ll be more visible, less able to hide.”

“He did a good job of killing with impunity in Kent, it seems to me.”

“Because the police didn’t expect him.” I put down my glass and walked toward him, my voice softening. “I’ll be fine. The inspector is going to call on the local police for extra men. All I have to do is take the train to Kent, then hire a motorcar. Inspector Merriken and his men will already be there, watching the roads—there are only so many roads one can take in that part of the country. The killer has evaded everyone so far, but he’s just a man. He has to transport himself somehow.”

He raised his gaze to me, still unconvinced. “And George Sutter. You think he won’t hear about this plan?”

“If he wants to send men from MI5, so much the better. I’m sure the inspector could use the help.”

I watched him wrestle with himself. He wanted nothing more than to accompany me to Kent, to guard me, to keep me safe. But his presence would be the ruin of the entire plan. “I’m coming with you,” he said finally. “I’ll go to Merriken first thing in the morning. I won’t get underfoot with his men, but I’m going to be there.” He sighed. “It doesn’t matter how safe you think you are. You’re going to be in danger, Ellie.”

“I know.” I stepped close, unable to stop myself. “I don’t care. I want to stop him. I have to. I’ve done nothing with my life for the past three years, and now I want to do what’s right, no matter the cost. I don’t care if he puts his hands around my neck and—”

“Stop it.”

I had reached the sofa, and I lightly hiked up the hem of my skirt and straddled him, sitting on his long, hard thighs. He smelled clean and pleasantly pungent, a man who had put in a long day. He did not move beneath me, but his gaze darkened and his expression went blank with careful control.

“But you won’t let that happen to me,” I said, my voice a whisper. “I know it. You won’t.”

His shoulders were tense under the palms of my hands, his skin hot through his shirt. He took a harsh breath and gripped my hips, his hands strong and surprising, and then he slowly let his palms slide upward to my waist, pulling at the fabric of my dress.

I leaned toward him and rubbed my cheek against the rasp of his, the sensation setting fire to everything inside me. I was wild in a way that had nothing to do with the wine and everything to do with being on a sofa with James Hawley, with the rain outside and the two of us the only people in the world. “I saw the way you looked at me,”
I said to him. “The first night you met me. And when you saw me in Trafalgar Square.”

His hands twitched a little on my waist, then gripped me tighter. “I’ve been very patient.”

“I know.” I rubbed my cheek against him again.

His breath seemed to grow heavier. “What changed?”

“I grew up,” I said, knowing as I spoke the words that they were true.

His hands slid up my rib cage, his thumbs running along my torso and the undersides of my breasts, and I nearly gasped.

“You’re agreeable?” he said, his breath harsh in my ear.

“Yes.”

He put his hands to my face, as he had earlier that night, and looked into my eyes. The shadows played with his brows and his cheekbones, the fine line of his mouth, the column of his neck. He was staring at me with the intensity I recognized. “Do you see anything?” he asked, seeming to push the words from his throat. “When I touch you like this?”

It took a pathetic second for me to understand what he meant, and I shook my head. “No. Nothing.”

His gaze flickered, his thoughts dark behind his eyes. His thumbs moved across my cheekbones. “Whatever it is about you,” he said, “I’m damned if I know.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I breathed, and he pulled me in and kissed me.

In the bedroom, he unbuttoned my dress and let it slide to the floor. He knelt before me as I sat on the edge of the bed and unfastened my garters from my stockings. I looked down at his dark blond head and the bunched line of his shoulders, feeling his fingers moving between the fabric and my skin. I had never done this before, and he probably knew it. I was supposed to be afraid, and I was supposed to be ashamed, but somehow I couldn’t make myself feel either. All I knew was that I could have died that day without ever having felt this
kind of pleasure, pure and so intense it was nearly painful. When he rolled down my stocking and pressed a kiss to the inside of my thigh, I couldn’t breathe.

He rose and pulled off his shirt, his skin supple in the watery light.

As night moved through its darkest hours, I learned several things. That I liked being touched extensively, and in a certain way. That James Hawley had a length of scarred skin on the side and back of one thigh. And that when he twined his fingers with mine and pinned my arms over my head, both of us gripping the headboard—and when his body came over mine, musky and heavy—I no longer cared about what I was supposed to do and who I was supposed to be, and everything else was washed away.

*   *   *

“
I
want to tell you something,” I said to him in the dark, hours later. I rolled over, tucked my chin into the crook of his neck. “The answer to a riddle.”

He moved sleepily, crooked a hand behind his head as he lay on his back. “Go ahead.”

I sighed a breath and closed my eyes, letting the secret lift from me like a burden. “My mother was a true psychic,” I said. “There is no doubt of it. If you’d tested her when I was a child, you would have been amazed.”

He was quiet, awake now and listening.

“When I was sixteen, my mother told me she no longer wanted to do spirit sittings. I had developed my own powers by then, and she had trained me to use them. My father was gone, and there was no reason for us to pretend anymore. She told me that she got no pleasure from the sittings and she wanted to stop. She didn’t tell me the truth, which was that she couldn’t do it anymore.”

“Ellie, are you saying—?”

“Yes. It took me a long time to figure it out, I suppose. I didn’t question it, and I just wanted to help. She didn’t want to do the
sessions anymore, but she was The Fantastique and I was just a girl. She was the one the clients came to see. So she did the sessions, and I sat behind a curtain and summoned the messages from the dead.” I traced a finger idly on his chest as I spoke, touching the springy hair there and feeling his heartbeat. “But she didn’t stop because she chose to. Do you see? She stopped because she had to. Because her power disappeared.”

“Of course,” he said softly. “It explains why we heard so many accounts of her powers. It could have been a natural function of age.”

“That day you did the tests on us.” I rolled over on my back, looked at the dark ceiling. “I always asked myself why she agreed. Gloria asked her to do it, fed her a line about how important it was to her that the New Society complete their research.”

Far from offended, James made a derisive sound. “Gloria didn’t care about the New Society. She liked the attention our tests gave her, and she liked to show off. But mostly she did it because we paid her for every test we did. Rather handsomely, too, by the end.”

“I know. My mother knew it, too. Gloria suspected from the first that it was me doing the sessions, and she wanted proof of it. She wanted to win; it was just her way. So I couldn’t understand, at first, why my mother would agree at all to a session that was set up expressly to humiliate her.”

“That wasn’t the intent on my part,” James said.

“That’s because you didn’t know what the outcome would be. But we all knew it, my mother most of all.”

He seemed to think this over. He rolled to his side, propped himself on one elbow, and looked down at me. “So why did she do it?”

“She was tired,” I said. “She was sick by then, although she hadn’t seen a doctor yet. She didn’t want to lie anymore. I think that, instead of admitting that her powers were gone and she’d been lying, it was just easier to let herself be officially exposed.”

“And it kept you out of it.”

I shrugged against the pillows. I hadn’t thought of that. “Perhaps.”

He ran one finger along my collarbone. I tried not to shiver. “You’ve left out one part of the riddle. What about you, that day of the tests? We saw no trace of your powers, either. And yet yours are strong.”

I thought back on that day, sitting tied to the chair, helpless and angry. “I could have tried,” I admitted slowly, “if I had calmed myself down, made myself focus. It wouldn’t have been easy in that situation, but I could have done
something.
But—” He traced my collarbone again, and I lost my train of thought. “She asked me not to. She made me promise. She told me that if I helped her that day, she would never forgive me.”

“Jesus, Ellie. I had no idea.”

“I know,” I said. “I know you didn’t. You couldn’t have. I was angry at you for so long, even though I wished you’d noticed me at the same time.”

“I did notice you.”

I blushed in the dark. “It was embarrassing, yes. But you didn’t force my mother to agree to it—no one did. You didn’t know what else was going on. You didn’t know that my mother was using you, using the Society, to get what she’d wanted for a long time. But there’s something else.”

“What is it?”

I swallowed. “When I went to the New Society office to look for you, I spoke to Paul Golding. I wanted to prove something to him—childish, I know, but there it was. I told him where he’d left his favorite watch, which he’d thought he’d lost. And he pulled it out of his pocket and told me he’d already found it.” I turned and looked up at James’s face in the dark. “That has never happened to me before, James. Never. In all the sessions I’ve done, finding lost items for clients, I’ve never once found an item that had already been found.”

He took a soft breath. “You think—”

“Yes. I’ve been having headaches, getting tired. Sometimes my
powers go out of control, like at Ramona’s séance. Other times they don’t work. I could fool myself, I suppose, since much of the time they work as they always have.” I thought of the messages I’d received when Inspector Merriken had brushed my hand, coming as easy as water. “But the truth is that things are changing. Perhaps my powers won’t be gone next year, or the next. But I think they’re leaving me.”

“My God,” he said, putting the pieces together. “Gloria.”

“That schedule of hers is too light; it was never like that when I knew her. Gloria could handle three or four appointments a day, and she usually did. Four appointments in a week? Five? It didn’t hit me at first, but it isn’t the kind of schedule she used to handle. And, James, she needed money.”

He ran a hand through his hair, rumpling it. “It explains why she took the job with the Dubbses. If she was having problems with her powers, she was funding her own retirement.”

My heart was racing in my chest. I had never put the thought into words before, that my powers could leave me. It was terrifying, unfamiliar—and yet part of it was so exciting I could barely begin to fathom it. What would I be if I was not The Fantastique? What would I do if I couldn’t see the dead? I couldn’t be normal—I could never be normal. And yet . . .

“I suppose,” I said slowly, “you’re going to miss your chance. To do tests on me. If you want to do tests on me, that is.”

“Is that an offer?” he asked. But then he shook his head. “Don’t answer that. I’m not going to test you, Ellie. I don’t think I’m going to do that work ever again.” He leaned over me and his scent came to me like a drug, clean male sweat and faint laundry soap from the sheets we’d rumpled. “I suppose I should spend the rest of the night trying to convince you to abandon this plan, that you shouldn’t put yourself in danger, that you’re a defenseless female and you should let us manly types take care of this sort of business.”

I took in a luxurious breath of him. “And I should spend the rest
of the night asking how many girls you’ve brought here and whether they were pretty, and wondering if I’m special.”

He made a sound and the bed shook for a second; I realized it was the quiet vibration of laughter. James Hawley was laughing. “You’re not really going to ask that, are you?”

I thought it over. “No.”

“How brave and modern of you.” He leaned over me further and kissed me just behind the ear, slow and soft, his breath warm on my skin. It was gentle, and it sent a shock straight down my body. “The answers are none, no, and yes, you are. Fine, then. We’ll do it your way. I’m coming with you tomorrow,” he said.

“I know,” I replied, sliding an arm around his neck. “Now hush.” And we did not talk for a long, long time.

M
y street in St. John’s Wood was quiet when I arrived home the next morning. The rain had moved off at dawn, leaving the pavements soaked and empty, the clouds breaking up in ragged pieces. The husbands on my street had gone off to work in the city, and the wives were home behind their curtains, doubtlessly staring in disapproving curiosity at the guest who waited on my doorstep.

Fitzroy Todd wore an impeccably tailored evening jacket, now rumpled and damp. His tie was undone, the top buttons of his shirt open. Dark stubble shadowed his jaw. He lounged on my front doorstep as if he owned the street, his dark-clad legs sprawled over the cobblestones of my front walk, his feet in their once shined shoes crossed negligently at the ankles. His hair was messy and he looked as if he’d spent the night in a sewer. And yet when he saw me, he laughed.

“Well, good morning!” he said.

I came up my front walk and stood by his feet. “What do you want?”

He laughed at me again, and he didn’t move. “Ellie Winter,” he said. “I do believe you’ve been out
all night.
”

“God, are you still drunk? It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

“And I was drinking until six. It will wear off soon, darling.” He looked me up and down, assessing, a half grin on his face. “You’ve done a good job of cleaning up, I must admit, but unless I’m very much mistaken you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes. I can always tell when a girl is wearing yesterday’s clothes.”

I tilted my head, surprised to find I wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. A night as good as the one I’d had seemed to have its benefits. “I didn’t take you for a prude.”

“God, I couldn’t be happier. You’ll get no judgment from me.”

I looked down the street. Three doors down, a curtain twitched in a window. “Come inside,” I told him. “My neighbors hate me already.”

He followed me into the house. “This is very nice, in a bourgeois sort of way.”

“Shut it, you snob,” I said. “You can sit in the kitchen, but if you think I’m making you coffee, you can think again.”

“Ellie!” he cried, pleased. “That’s the girl I remember. That sharp tongue, and always a lot of jazz in her. We missed you, you know.”

“I was always the wet blanket, and you know it perfectly,” I replied. Pickwick was in the kitchen; my daily woman must have dropped him off early. He looked rested and well fed, but I opened the door and let him out into the back garden just in case. “Now sit on that chair there and stop trying to flatter me. What do you want?”

Fitz made no comment about the dog—he was too caught up in his own problems, as usual. He sat at the table, and I had to admit that in the harsh morning light his years of dissolution didn’t sit on him very well. His face looked lined and pale from too many dark nightclubs, and, even more surprisingly, there seemed to be a smell about him, as if he’d passed out in something awful. The Fitz I knew may have been somewhat—all right, terribly—flawed, but he had always been impeccably groomed.

He put his hands on the table, his jocular manner draining away. “Well, Ellie, I suppose I’ll get to it.” He rubbed a hand up and down his face. “I seem to be in a small spot of trouble.”

I looked through my cupboards, trying to find something to put out in case Pickwick was hungry. “What is it?”

“I suppose you may have heard—Ramona died. She was murdered.”

Some of the good feeling from the night before evaporated. I took a tin of meat from the cupboard with numb fingers. “Yes. I heard.”

“Someone choked her. I heard it was a—a
garrote
, you know, some sort of wire.”

I turned and looked at him. James hadn’t told me exactly how Ramona had died, and I hadn’t asked.
He’s some sort of professional,
James had said. I pictured the body on the floor, the way I’d seen it in my mind when I’d knocked on her door that day, so still, the arms reaching.

I looked more closely at Fitz. Sweat was beading on his brow. He and Ramona had both been in attendance at the séance when Gloria died, so they had at least been acquainted. But he looked torn now, and strangely guilty, and some of the missing pieces fell into place. “You knew her,” I said. “You were the one who invited her to Gloria’s séance.”

“I didn’t invite her,” he protested. “I swear it. But when I told her about it, she was adamant. She wanted to go. She wanted to see Gloria in action, she said, and she wanted a chance at such a rich client.” He breathed out, rubbed his face again, that strange smell wafting from him as he moved. “She needed the chance, she said, and she was going to take it whether I allowed it or not.”

“You were lovers.” It all made sense now—how Ramona knew so much about Gloria, about me. How she’d known what Gloria did in her séances. Why she’d hated Gloria so bitterly.
I was sick of hearing about the great Gloria Sutter, the irreplaceable Gloria Sutter.
“You were trying to replace Gloria with her.”

He shrugged, and then he laughed mirthlessly. “Gloria wouldn’t take me back.”

Ramona with her glossy black bob, her kohl-rimmed eyes. She’d looked nothing like Gloria, but she’d done her best to try. Ramona with her savage will for survival, her pinpointed pupils. “And the drugs?” I asked him. “What about the drugs?”

A flicker of surprise crossed his face that he didn’t bother to hide. He’d had no idea I knew. “I tried to get her off them, but she wouldn’t listen.”

I stared at him. “That’s a lie,” I said, suddenly certain. “You gave them to her. You supplied them. You’re the only one who had the money.”

Are you asking if I’m for sale? Name a price, handsome, and I’ll consider it.
She’d practically told us everything that night, if only I’d opened my eyes to see it. How could I have been so stupid?

“Ellie, you don’t understand.” Fitz was nearly pleading with me. “The drugs had a hold on her. I wanted to get her clean. I did. What was I supposed to do?”

“Why are you here, Fitz?” I said to him. “Why have you come to my house for the first time? What do you want from me?”

He was silent for a moment, and I heard a polite scratching at the back door. I let Pickwick in, then worked on putting down some food and water for him. Even if my daily woman had already fed him, I still wanted to do it myself, as an offering. He gave me a placid look and a single thump of his tail in thanks.

“All right,” Fitz said, as if we’d had some sort of argument that had exhausted him. “You’re right—there’s no point in going over everything. What’s past is past. The fact is, Ellie, I’m in a spot and I need a loaner of a little bit of money.”

“What?” The request was so outrageous that if I hadn’t had a creeping feeling of wrongness climbing my spine and the back of my neck, I would have laughed. “You want
money
?
What for?”

“Just to get out of London for a little while. Take a little trip, you know.”

“And you don’t have your own money for this?” His dinner jacket alone, which he seemed to have rubbed in garbage, cost more than a month’s earnings for me.

“I’m a little out of pocket right now.”

“Then go to your parents.”

He looked away. “They won’t give me anything. My allowance is gone, and Father says he’s finished handing me money.”

I pulled out a kitchen chair. “What about the fee you got from the Dubbses?”

Still he looked away. He really did look awful, his skin pouching under his eyes. I’d never seen him look like this before, even after he’d been on a multiday bender. “It’s gone,” he replied finally, seeming to grit the words out. He turned back to me. “Ellie, I have to get out of London, and quickly. Ramona is dead. Do you understand?”

“And you think you could be next,” I said. “Why?”

He didn’t answer me. I looked into his bloodshot eyes, and suddenly I felt a strange, slow jolt of panic, a pulse of it injecting itself heartbeat by heartbeat into my veins. It felt as if something was crawling up my back on invisible insect legs, and a telltale itch was beginning at the base of my skull. And the smell . . . the smell . . .

“Fitz,” I said, trying to keep my voice under control, trying not to scream. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Ellie, I swear I didn’t.”

Someone is here,
I thought, the words a certainty in my mind. I glanced at Pickwick and saw him sitting next to his bowl, his food half eaten, his ears pricked up. “Fitz,
what did you do?
”

“Nothing!” His shout was hoarse. “A few weeks ago a fellow came to me. He said he knew about Ramona, about the drugs. He knew I was selling them to supplement my allowance. I don’t know
how he knew, but he did. He told me the only way I could stay out of prison was to do as he asked.”

“And what was that?”

“To go to Gloria and ask her to do this one job. This one séance, for these clients, the Dubbses. To convince her to do it.”

“So the Dubbses weren’t friends of yours,” I said. “You didn’t meet them at a party. They didn’t wear you down with requests to meet with Gloria. All of that was a lie.”

“It was the cover he gave me,” Fitz said. “The man. He made me memorize it. It’s the story I gave the police, the story I gave you when you visited me, and the story I gave Davies. Davies said no—that part was true. But I couldn’t leave it, or my parents would find out and I’d go to jail. So I followed Gloria around for a few days, you know, and I got her alone.”

“And what did she say?”

“She laughed at me.” Even in his extreme state, Fitz managed a flash of hurt outrage. “She told me to go to hell. She was in one of her wild moods. But she came to me two days later to ask how much money was in it, and I knew I had her.”

I pressed my hands to my forehead. “Oh, my God, Gloria,” I said softly. “You walked into a trap.”

“I didn’t think anyone would hurt her!” Fitz nearly shouted. “I swear, if I’d known, I wouldn’t have—”

“Wouldn’t you?” I said, and he drew back, silent. “So Ramona was telling the truth when she said the Dubbses didn’t want either of you there. When she said they wanted both of you to turn back and go home when they saw you at the train station. You were never invited along at all. They wanted Gloria
alone.
”

“I wanted to be there,” he protested. “In case she needed protection.”

“No, you wanted to be there because you saw a potential mark with money, just like Gloria did.” I leaned back in my chair. “This man—the one who came to you. Who was he?”

Fitz shook his head. “I don’t know. He didn’t give his name.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like a fellow—any fellow. Brownish hair, not too tall. Tony accent, but not too upper, if you know what I mean. His suit was decent, but I didn’t recognize it.” He leaned forward. “He knew everything about what I was . . . into, Ellie. Everything. I thought maybe he was from the Yard at first, but what would they want with Gloria?”

The man who had abducted Davies had been dark haired and nondescript. The man who had killed Ramona had looked the same. I felt suddenly overwhelmed by the number of nondescript men in England. “You’re saying you think he was higher up,” I said to Fitz.

“What else could it be?” he said.

I looked around the room. I was still chilled, and Pickwick still sat quiet, his ears pricked.
Go away,
I thought at whoever it was.
Don’t show yourself.

“What is it?” Fitz was following my gaze around the room. “Do you think someone is listening?”

“Why Ramona?” I said to him. “If whoever it was got what they wanted, if you led them to Gloria and he killed her, then why kill Ramona after the fact?” I searched his face. “Tell me.”

“She saw something,” he said. “At least, I think she did. It was an accident. The séance was going nowhere, and Gloria had walked out, saying she needed air. Ramona needed a hit, so we went out into the trees.” He looked at my face, hardened his jaw. “She saw something—over my shoulder. I could tell. She got very quiet, said only that she wanted to go back into the house. I thought about it when we discovered Gloria had been killed, but there was so much chaos that I didn’t ask her about it, and of course I didn’t tell the police. I didn’t think about it again until she was killed. I swear to you I didn’t. But that’s why she was killed—it must be. And what if the man who did it doesn’t believe I know nothing?”

“Fitz, you have to go to the police. You have to. The Yard is
working under all the wrong information. If they knew about the setup—”

He laughed. “And tell them exactly what I’ve been up to? What I was doing outside in the trees? Do you think I’m out of my mind? My father would disown me. I won’t do it.”

“You’d rather be killed?”

“I won’t be killed if you loan me the money to get out of London. Just for a little while, until all of this cools down.”

I opened my mouth to reply to him, to reason with him, and then I stopped.

Ramona stood behind Fitz’s shoulder, her face a white smear in the shadows of the kitchen. Her dark-rimmed eyes were fixed on him, and she did not look at me. I could see through the shadows that she wore the dressing gown she’d had on when she’d warned me away from the door of her flat.