The Other Side of Midnight (15 page)

“I’m not staying long,” I said as the woman, unmoving, sent me a deadly glare. “Please don’t bother.”

Still, Golding ushered me to the darkened office, obviously his, where he removed his hat and set down his umbrella. I followed, mostly to get away from the glare of the unaccountably hostile Sadie. “I’ve interrupted you,” I said in apology. “You were on your way somewhere.”

“Somewhere!” Golding said, as if I was joking. He pulled out the chair behind his desk and lowered his large bulk into it with a creak. “Just to the doctor’s, where he’ll lecture me yet again about my heart. He worries about that organ more than I do. No—” He sat back and laced his hands across his rather sizable stomach. “An unexpected visit from The Fantastique trumps all.”

I quickly ran my mind over what I knew about Paul Golding. It wasn’t much. He’d been president of the New Society since the war ended; before that, according to what James had told me, he’d served as an officer in the war. The papers, when they mentioned him at all,
dismissed him as an eccentric or a fraud, an attitude I was well familiar with. And he had run the tests that labeled my mother a fake and my own powers “inconclusive and unproven
.
”

“I hope this isn’t about the newspaper article,” Golding said to me. “We had nothing to do with that.”

“I understand,” I said. “I’m here about—” I hadn’t realized what I was there for, really, until I’d already arrived. “I’m here about Gloria Sutter.”

Paul Golding’s features lost their joviality, and it was no act. “That girl,” he said. “That poor, wonderful, irreplaceable girl.” He swallowed. “I thought you two were not on speaking terms.”

I shook my head, not willing to explain it to a stranger. “You must have spent a lot of time with her,” I said. “You knew her well.”

“I was well acquainted with her, but James is my researcher. He had more contact with her than I did.” A hint of humor crossed his expression again. “He isn’t here, by the way. In fact, he hasn’t reported to work in several days. I believe he’s been spending most of that time with you.”

I frowned at him. “Not exactly.”

“That’s not what he says.” Golding shrugged. “I’d reprimand him if not for the fact that I don’t pay him much, and his job comes with an utter lack of respect and heaps of abuse. And I know better than to try to rein him in. Gloria’s death seems to have awakened his Galahad instincts.”

I had questions to ask about Gloria, but I couldn’t help myself. “What do you mean, you know better than to rein him in?”

“James is independent,” Golding replied. “We gave him his own desk at first, but we soon discovered he didn’t much like to use it. He likes to work alone, in his own flat or out on investigation. He’s the best investigator I’ve ever seen—quite simply splendid. He’s investigated hundreds of supernatural claims firsthand, and his skill in ferreting out frauds is unmatched in this country or any other.” He
smiled a little, unashamed of the effusive praise. “Frankly, he should be doing something that brings him renown, not ridicule, but I can’t convince him of that. And until I do, I get the benefit of his investigative brain.”

James had been wrong about me, of course, and about my mother.
I’ve thought a lot about that day,
he’d said
. Something was not quite right.

“As for you,” Golding said, “I see you’re still in business.”

I was no longer angry, but it galled me still that these people thought me a liar. I recalled what my mother had taught me about attempting greater and greater feats for a disbelieving audience. She was right: There was no peace in it. “When was the last time you saw Gloria?” I asked him.

“Last year,” Golding replied. “I went to one of her séances, in fact. I had seen her in our testing environment any number of times, but I felt the need to see her work in her own space. She knew who I was and why I was there. I made no attempt to keep it secret.”

“But the article James wrote was already years old by then,” I said.

“Yes, I know. I was going through a—well, you could call it a crisis of faith, I suppose, though not of the religious kind. We had launched a large project asking the public to write us their experiences with the supernormal—a psychical census, of sorts. We’d been inundated with letters, but it seemed they were all frauds, misconceptions, delusions, dreams, or outright lies.” The corners of his eyes relaxed, and his expression grew distant and a little tired. “Humanity is sometimes terrible, desperate, and sad. I felt a need to see Gloria Sutter in action again, to be reminded of what it is like to be in the presence of a true spirit medium.”

“You still believe she was a real medium?” I asked.

“Yes. Gloria Sutter was the most incredibly talented medium I’ve ever seen. She was a phenomenon of nature, and her loss is a permanent tragedy to the future of scientific study of the supernormal.”

And to me.
The words almost tripped out of my mouth before I could stop them.
It is a permanent tragedy to me.
But I only looked at him in silence as the pieces clicked in my head and I came to a realization. This man had admired Gloria, and he had appreciated her worth to science, but he hadn’t loved her. I was starting to think that except for me and possibly Davies, no one had.

Paul Golding raised his eyebrows politely, taking in my silence. “Miss Winter?”

“I’m going to find her murderer,” I said to him.

He took this in with barely a blink. “Indeed. And this is what James has been helping you with?”

“Yes.”

“I knew he was looking into it, but I thought it was for his own satisfaction. He feels he owes her a debt.” Golding took a piece of paper from his desk and uncapped a pen. “I have no faith in the police, Miss Winter, and you and I have something of a checkered past. However”—now he was writing quickly, with a flourish—“I do have faith in James Hawley.” He handed me the paper, on which was written an address. “Please make good use of him and return him to me in one piece. You’ll find him at his flat, I believe.”

I took the paper and put it in my handbag.
To hell with it,
I thought, and held out my hand. “Thank you for your help.”

He looked surprised, but he shook my hand. His grip was huge and strong. “Good day.”

I stood. It had been easy this time, even with gloves on. “It’s at the back of your drawer.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your watch. You don’t wear it every day because it’s expensive and it was your father’s and you’re afraid of losing it. After the last time you wore it, you put it in the back of your drawer, thinking it was a good hiding place. But then you forgot your own hiding place when you decided you wanted to wear the watch this morning.”

There was a brief silence. Then Paul Golding tilted his head, his gaze on me changing in a way I could not read. His voice was very careful. “Miss Winter, you surprise me.”

I shook my head. It had been a stupid impulse, petty and vain, wanting to prove something to this man. Still, I couldn’t quite be sorry I’d done it. I turned to go.

“As it happens,” Golding called after me, “you are correct.”

With my hand on the knob of the office door, I turned to face him again. “Sorry?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out an antique watch on a chain. “I found it this morning, after nearly an hour’s search,” he said. “Perhaps we underestimated you, Miss Winter.”

I stared at the watch, hiding the waves of shock that were breaking over me like a fever. I swallowed and forced myself to shrug. “That’s up to you,” I said, my voice cracking. “Good day.” I walked breathlessly through the outer office, past the eternal glare of Sadie, and hurried down the stairs, nearly running by the time I got out the front door and onto the street.

He’d
found
it. He’d found the bloody watch already. I made my way through the crowds on the Strand, looking at no one, seeing nothing. The vision had been quick, and so very clear.

And yet he’d already found it. This had never happened to me before. I’d never been wrong. Or nearly wrong. For a second, panic gripped me so hard I nearly stopped breathing. I tried to calm myself. It was a simple slip, purely human to be wrong from time to time. But my powers had never failed me—not ever. And if they could be wrong this time, could they be wrong again? Had they been wrong before? How many times? What else had I seen that wasn’t true?

If my powers could be wrong, then who was I?

Someone bumped my shoulder, and a woman with a pram nearly nicked my shin. Raucous laughter came from a window somewhere. I took a breath, and then another.

I wouldn’t think about it now; I had other things to worry about. It must have been a random mistake, wires crossed over what Paul Golding had been thinking about at the moment I touched him. It was just one of those things.

In the meantime, Gloria’s killer was still free, and I needed help. I knew where to find it.

I fished the address from my handbag and headed for the nearest stop to catch an omnibus.

A
ccording to Paul Golding’s paper, James lived in Brixton. I boarded a bus going east, then got off and boarded another going north. I sat with my gloved hands folded in my lap, my eyes trained ahead as I tried to note everyone around me. What did George Sutter’s man look like? Was he the fiftyish gentleman trying to relight his dampened pipe? The man in the houndstooth jacket reading a copy of the
Daily Mail
? The stout man wiping his forehead with a handkerchief? Had I seen any of these men before? I didn’t remember.

I entered my third bus and sat on the second deck, looking down at the streets below. What if it was a woman following me? I had no idea whether MI5 even employed women, other than as secretaries or typists. George Sutter knew who James was, and could presumably find his address, but the thought of being followed bothered me in a way I couldn’t explain. I remembered the hard-eyed, mustached man I’d seen at Ramona’s disastrous stage show. I’d assumed he was Ramona’s plant, but now I wondered.

I circled for a while, until I was tired of buses and certain I hadn’t seen anyone twice, and then I went to Brixton. After disembarking, I turned up one street, then ducked through a likely alley and came out on another. I zigzagged the best I could, past washing lines and through tiny back lots with bedraggled kitchen gardens and bemused cats watching me from the damp tops of garden walls.

I finally arrived at James’s street address. It was a three-story brick home that had long ago been turned into flats, like much of Brixton. The front stoop was sooty and the walk hadn’t been swept in ages, but a single pot of geraniums stood well tended by the door, vainly hoping for sunlight. I approached the door, raising my hand to knock, and the corner of my gaze caught something familiar. A houndstooth pattern. I turned to see a man in a familiar jacket cross the street a block away and turn a corner. He did not hurry, and he did not look at me.

So much for losing my pursuer.

A woman of at least eighty greeted my knock, her knobbed hands almost silvery pale in the cloudy light.

“Third floor. The door is right off the landing,” she said when I asked for James. She eyed me swiftly up and down, but made no comment. I wondered how often girls came here asking for James Hawley.

I climbed the windowless staircase—it smelled vaguely of gravy—and knocked on the door.

The door swung open and James stared at me. He wore trousers and a white shirt open at the throat, his braces hanging loose. His hair was mussed, and when I dropped my gaze I couldn’t help but notice his feet were bare. My first thought was that I was happy to see him. My second thought, as I looked into his face, was that the feeling was not mutual.

“Oh, good God,” he said.

I swallowed. “I went to the New Society,” I managed. “They sent me here.”

Wild surmise crossed his expression, and a flicker of panicked dread. “Paul sent you?” he said. “Paul sent you
here
?”

“This is a bad time, isn’t it?” I babbled. “I’m sorry. I—”

“Wait, wait.” I took a step back, but James reached out and grasped my elbow. His features looked harsh in the dim light. I wondered in horror whether there was a woman in the flat with him, a woman who had woken up with him. The thought stung, and I tugged on my arm, wanting to get away.

We stood in silence for a moment, his hand on my elbow, I pulling back from his grip, ready to run. I could hear him breathing.

“It’s all right,” he said at last. “Come in.”

He pulled gently, and I followed the pull, my body slackening. I smelled shaving soap as I passed him in the doorway. I could not look in his eyes as I passed him.

It was a sizable flat for the top floor of such a small house. Two mullioned windows looked over the back garden with its high wall and the houses behind, and the cloudy light they let in illuminated all corners of the room. It was a simple bachelor’s flat, unfurnished except for the barest of necessities, with a tiny kitchen in one corner and a doorway that led, presumably, to the bedroom. A desk sat before the windows, placed advantageously to catch the light, its surface covered thickly with books and papers. More books and papers stood in wobbling stacks around the foot of the desk, the papers sliding off one another and onto the floor, and against the wall stood three hefty cloth sacks with folded envelopes spilling from their tops.

“Don’t say it,” James said to me as he disappeared through the door to the bedroom. “There’s a method to it, I swear. Just give me a moment and I’ll make you some tea.”

“You don’t—,” I started, but he was already gone. I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, smelling the strange, intimate scent of a man’s bachelor quarters—burnt coffee, dusty papers, laundry soap, male skin. A flush heated my cheeks. I pulled off my hat
and my gloves, determined not to look at the doorway as he moved about in the next room.

I set down my hat and my gloves and wandered restlessly to the desk. I picked up the top letter from one of the mail sacks and slid it open.

Dear Sirs.

In response to your request in the
Times
of 24 July. I do apologize for the tardiness of this response as my wife sometimes does keep the newspapers in her sewing basket and neglects to give them to me in a timely manner. However I had an experience I do not often speak of.

In the early part of 1916, that is 22 February to be exact, at five twenty in the morning I awoke for a reason I could not determine. At this time it was still dark. I descended the stairs and as I approached the kitchen door I saw the figure of my son, Alan. He stood next to the table where he’d always sat for supper before he left for war. It sounds strange but I do swear I saw him as clear as if he’d been in the brightest daylight, though the room was dark. He was in uniform, and he stood looking at me as if he could see me, though he did not speak.

I called his name. I thought that by some wild chance he had come home on leave without telling us, but something about his appearance told me it was not so. When I spoke his name, he disappeared.

I did not speak of this even to my wife, for she had been depressed in spirits since our son went to war and I did not wish to upset her. I thought I may have imagined Alan’s appearance, the thought of which distressed me not a little as I have always been a logical man. As
it happened, we received a telegram three days later stating that my son, Alan, had been hit in the head with shrapnel and had died of wounds in a field hospital on the morning of 22 February.

I do not claim to explain this. I do not speak of it to anyone. I do not know whether it was a communication from Alan or the product of my own distressed brain, and I do not ask that question. If you ask these questions, dear sirs, then you are braver than I, and as of this moment I pass this letter to you and from this day will think on this incident no more.

Regards,

Samuel W. Eustace

“A deathbed vision,” James said.

I turned to find him standing at my shoulder. I inhaled in surprise; I hadn’t felt him approach.

He’d combed his hair and put on his braces, but the top buttons of his white shirt were still undone.
He looks rather stunning when he takes his jacket off
, Gloria had said. She was right. He made the flat seem smaller. He put his hands in his pockets and nodded toward the letter. “A sighting of the dead at the moment of passing. They’re called deathbed visions. You’d be surprised how common they are.”

“Paul Golding mentioned something about this,” I said. “Asking people to write letters.”

“The Society put an ad in the
Times
,” James replied. “Paul has a vision of some kind of countrywide census of the supernatural, I think. My job is to sift through the responses and weed out the mad ones.”

I looked at the bags of mail. “Are these all deathbed visions?”

“No. People write us about all sorts of things—hauntings, boggarts, even garden pixies. But deathbed visions are especially numerous since the war.”

“My God,” I said. There were hundreds of letters here, thousands. “This seems insurmountable.”

“You should be used to it,” James said, taking the letter from my hand. “Bereaved parents, bereaved widows, fatherless children. England is full of them, it seems. An endless parade.”

His voice was harsh, and he turned away from me. There was no sign this morning of the James who had confided in me the night before—or, for that matter, the James who had disintegrated my clothing with a single look in Trafalgar Square. This James was angry, exhausted, and I didn’t know why. It seemed he would ever be a cipher to me.
Moody, like a tangle of thorns.

“I’ve come at a bad time,” I said. “I should leave.”

“It isn’t that.” James dropped the letter back onto the desk and paced away, moving like a cat. He did not glance at me again. “Paul shouldn’t have sent you here, to see this—to see how I live. I never have women here. You can see why.” He pulled a kettle from the cupboard and turned on the water in the tiny sink.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.

He made a noise that was not quite a laugh. “There’s plenty wrong with me, Ellie.”

“Fine, then,” I said, suddenly angry. “There’s plenty wrong with me, too. There’s plenty wrong with everyone since the war ended. Everyone who’s still alive, that is.”

He put the kettle on the stove, unlit, and paused, his back to me. He put his hands on the counter, his shoulders hunched, his head down, and there was a long moment of silence. When he spoke, his voice was calm again, but the pain in it had not abated. “Do you ever feel like you’re living someone else’s life?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes,” I answered, thinking of living in my mother’s house, wearing my mother’s dress.

Still he did not move, did not turn. “Some days I wonder if I’m going to wake from a dream and find myself in the trenches again. If
everything that has happened since the war has happened to a stranger, a man I don’t know.” He seemed to be forcing the words out, and I watched him, entranced. “The war,” he said slowly, “is my most vivid memory. Do you know that? More vivid than my childhood, more vivid than law school, more vivid than any woman. How is that fair? I tried to blot it out with drink for the first few years, until Paul found me, though it never worked. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my men in those woods.” His knuckles went white on the edge of the counter, his arms flexed, his head bowed. Every line of his body spoke of pain.

“Tell me,” I said softly.

“I was an officer,” he said, though I thought perhaps he would have spoken even if I hadn’t asked. “I was in charge of those men. We were ordered to take the woods, to clear them out—it was tactical. So we advanced. But no one knew there was a machine gunner.” He lifted one hand and rubbed it over his face. “My men were mowed down. All of them. It took maybe ten seconds. I saw it happen, and I will never unsee it.”

“Fenton,” I said.

James shook his head. “There was nothing special about Fenton, not before that day. He was just one of my men. He was the only one besides me who made it alive past the tree line, that’s all. We didn’t make it far into the woods before we fell. I was only shot behind the knee, while the rest of them were dead in the grass. Except Fenton, who died on the ground next to me. He’d been ripped open, nearly split in half. It was a miracle that he ran as far as he did.”

And then the German had come for his souvenir. I was chilled, shocked—but not as chilled and shocked as I should have been. Part of me had seen it, smelled it. Part of me had lain on the ground, listening to the screaming. I
knew.

James straightened, ran a hand through his hair. Finally he turned and looked at me, his features etched in the cloudy light from
the window. “When Paul found me, I realized, what did it matter? All the drink in the world couldn’t make the war go away. Why not face it head-on, then? Talk to the grieving, the mad, the deluded. Why not look for the answers to life and death? It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I threw myself into it. I exposed the liars, the ones who prey on the families of the men who were butchered just like my men were. It was satisfying, a little like I was avenging my men in the only way I knew.”

“And then Gloria came along,” I said.

James shook his head. “No. Gloria’s power was amazing, it’s true, but finding her was a little like an astronomer claiming to discover the North Star. It was incredibly obvious to me, as experienced as I was, that I was dealing with the real thing, almost from the first moment. The one who bothered me—the one who still bothers me—is you.”

“We’ve been over this, James.”

He pushed away from the counter and came toward me. “It wasn’t just that I was fooled, that there was a true medium under my nose and I didn’t see it. It was that it had to be you.” He came close and brushed his fingertips over my cheek, his gaze taking me in. I held my breath. “I knew perfectly well that you were awake that night, you know, when I put you to bed on the sofa. I knew it all along.” When I sighed, he smiled. “I’ve told you, you’re a terrible liar.”