The Other Side of Midnight (6 page)

O
ctavia had dropped me on a winding street off of Streatham High Road. It featured a seedy café, its windows dirty, and a theatrical costume shop, the front window filled with faded wigs on the blank heads of mannequins. Before me, past a half-broken stoop, was a ramshackle building of inexpensive flats, one of a line of unappealing square buildings built sometime in the past fifty years to accommodate the single, unattached London worker. The flats weren’t big enough for families, but on the stoop of a building next door a young woman with a tired face watched me as she rocked a sleeping baby in its pram, a second child playing quietly with a marble at her feet.

I ascended the uneven front steps and stood under the cornice, now dusky from the London smut, peering at the curling notices pinned next to the door.
SMITHERS, IMPORTE
R OF CURIOSITIES, 3-B.
NEEDLEMAN, FILMIC CAS
TING AGENCY & SEEKERS
OF TALENT, 2-A.
And, near the bottom,
RAMONA,
FORTUNES TOLD (NO SAT
URDAYS),
4-A.
Perhaps this had been a working-class neighborhood when it was built, but now its inhabitants made money any way they could.

I pushed open the front door, crossed through an airless vestibule, and found myself in a front hall that admitted no light at all. I took a moment to adjust my eyes to the gloom. Ahead of me was a staircase with a thin rail leading to the upper floors. To my left was a lift, silent and empty. There was a strong musty smell, as of a disused library, underlaid with sour neglect. There was no sound. I wondered whether all the tenants were eerily quiet, or out, or whether the curious setup of this building muffled their furtive movements.

I pulled off my cloche hat and lifted my hair from my forehead. The headache was moving in now, pulsing from the base of my skull at the back of my neck, rolling gently over me like far-off thunder. It was becoming common for me to get these low-grade headaches when I exerted my powers too heavily or too quickly in succession, as I had just done in Gloria’s flat and with Octavia Murtry.

I sighed and tugged my hat back on, wishing for a cigarette or a swig from the flask in my handbag. Something about this building was tiring and oppressive, like a funeral home, and for a moment I was painfully aware that I was alone, foolishly embarking on a quest that was doomed to fail. How could I hope to find Gloria’s murderer on my own? I thought wistfully of what it would be like to have a companion, someone to talk to, someone who could help me pin down the frantic thoughts spinning through my mind. I saw James Hawley’s gray-blue eyes. He hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring. I pushed the thought away, disgusted that I’d even noticed.

On impulse, I decided to take the lift instead of the stairs to the fourth floor, though I regretted it the moment the diamond-grille door slid closed and I stood in the semidarkness, my hand on the lever. The lift shuddered reluctantly to life. The smell was even mustier in here, and the floor of the lift shook under my feet. I could have walked twenty stories in the time it took to rise four, or so it felt, and
when the lift finally groaned to a stop, I flung back the sliding door and came gasping out into the corridor.

Only three doors opened from this hall. All were closed and silent. A single mullioned window shed the only light that came through, the sunlight far off and diluted by the clouds moving overhead, sending the light into eerie fragments that made me feel as if I was underwater.

I approached the door of 4-A and raised my hand to knock. Something stopped me for a moment—the absolute silence, perhaps, or a faint unidentifiable smell. But I shook off my misgivings and rapped on the door, once, twice, the sound muffled by the stale air.

There was no answer, and unlike at Davies’s flat I heard no shuffled movements inside. I rapped again.
She’s not here,
I thought, and then, unbidden:
She’s dead. Someone killed her, and she’s lying dead in there.

The thought stopped me. Suddenly I could picture it, not through my powers, but through my overactive imagination. I could see a body splayed on the floor, arms sprawled, the bare feet strangely helpless, the back arched by the body’s last desperate attempt to grab something, to rise. And the stillness, the clock ticking unheeded, the slow seeping of blood onto the floor.

My headache throbbed. I took one step back, and then another, and then I was descending the stairs, my heels clicking crisply on the risers. My pace quickened as I passed landing after landing. I saw and heard no one. The dust floated undisturbed in the beams of sunlight coming through the windows on the landings.

Finally I stepped out the front door onto the stoop, gulping the fresh September air. I was a superstitious fool. The woman had been out, that was all, shopping or visiting a friend. A practicing psychic might have been home seeing clients, but not if business was bad. I’d never had the power to see through closed doors; what I’d seen was imagination, nothing more.

A man stood on the front path waiting for me. I froze, taking in the familiar figure in dark suit and hat. James.

He reached up to the brim of his hat, tilting it back to get a better look at me. As always, he was in no hurry, as if he’d been standing there all day. His muscled shoulders were incongruous under the lines of his jacket.

“Trying to have your fortune told?” he said.

“Yes, of course,” I managed. “That’s very clever.”

He glanced past my shoulder. “I take it Ramona wasn’t home.”

There was no point in lying. “No, she wasn’t.”

“What do you know about her?”

“Nothing,” I replied. “Apparently she was there the night Gloria died.” I took a step down, coming closer to him. “What do you know about her? Why are you here?”

“A lucky guess.” He looked at me, curious. “Is something wrong?”

“No, of course not.” I would rather die than admit how relieved I was to see him, to see anyone. “Everything is fine.”

James pulled himself up a step. Level with me now, he looked down at me. He was close enough that I could smell shaving soap. He was almost ridiculously attractive, his features even, his eyes calm and intelligent, his lips a firm line. I’d seen that handsome face up close once before, smelled that familiar shaving soap, under circumstances that were rather humiliating. I didn’t like to recall it, and I wondered whether he remembered it at all. With the luck I had with men—with James—he most likely remembered it perfectly.
Chin up, Ellie. He’s just a man.

James nodded toward the building behind me, the movement emphasizing the line of his jaw. “Do you know where she is?”

“How would I?” I replied.

He gave me half a smile at that. He was different from the man he’d been three years before, though I couldn’t put my finger on how. A little sadder, perhaps. “Her real name is Joyce Gowther,” he said.
“She’s from Norfolk, twenty-nine years old. Her father owns a small brewery, though she hasn’t seen him in years, since she came to London to take up acting.”

I stared at him, openmouthed. He kept the smile, watching me, and didn’t move away.

“Acting must not have worked out for her,” he continued, “because a few years later she surfaced as Ramona, spirit medium and fortune-teller. She’s never been married, doesn’t seem to have many clients. She was at the séance with Gloria, as you heard, though I don’t know why. The police questioned her until about eleven o’clock yesterday morning.”

I bit my lip. “All right, that’s useful. Thank you.”

He leaned closer and I tried not to jump away. “Admit it,” he said, his voice quiet. “We want the same thing, Ellie, and you could use a partner.”

I hear he drinks too much, or he used to,
Davies had said. Perhaps he did. I’d never seen any evidence of it, and since I’d first met him in a bar on Gerrard Street in which all of us were drunk except him, I had reason to know. James Hawley, the mystery. I raised my eyes to his.

“Why?” I asked him. “Gloria is gone. She’s been nothing to you for years, and I never was anything to you at all. Why are you here?”

A frown crossed his forehead, but his expression gave nothing away. “Have luncheon with me,” he said.

“Luncheon?”

He shrugged. “It’s lunchtime. You’re hungry.”

I glanced behind me at Ramona’s ramshackle building, its dirty stoop and blank windows. I
was
hungry; I hadn’t eaten since I’d left the house that morning. I could practically hear Gloria’s voice in my head.
Who gives a damn what happened three years ago? You can have luncheon with a man who melts your insides, or you can go off alone. Darling, sometimes you’re an idiot.

“Very well,” I said finally. “Luncheon. You lead the way.”

J
ames found us a place on the Streatham High Road, a restaurant smelling of freshly baked bread and coffee and populated with small tables and booths. It was half empty, and we took a seat at a booth by the front windows, looking out onto the street, the cracked leather of the seat threatening to snag the backs of my stockings as I adjusted my skirt.

“Be honest,” I said to him as the waiter brought tea. “Do you know where Ramona is?”

“No,” said James. He took off his hat and dropped it onto the seat next to him, briefly running a hand through his hair. It was dark blond, just as I remembered, and he’d kept the length shorter than most men did. It sat soft and sleek against his head, the temples pressed from his hat, and if he wore any hair cream, I couldn’t detect it. “Though I’ll have an answer of some kind tomorrow night at nine o’clock.”

“What happens tomorrow at nine o’clock?”

He pulled a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his jacket
and unfolded it. As he smoothed it over the table between us, he replied, “She either appears, or she doesn’t, for this.”

It was a playbill.
CLAIRVOYANT
EXTRAVAGANZA
, it declared.
COMMUNICATION
WITH
T
HE
DEAD
!
FORTUNES
TOL
D
FROM
THE
AUDIENCE
!
AMAZING
PSYCHIC
FEAT
S
!
And across the bottom:
CONTACT
YOUR
LOST
LOVED
ONES
!
SEE
THE
TRUTH
FOR
YOURSELF
!

On the bill for the evening were Ramona and another psychic. Next to Ramona’s name was an ink drawing of a dark-eyed woman with black hair slicked down into a bob. The venue was the Gild Theatre, Streatham.

“I’ve never heard of this theater,” I said.

“It’s not far from here.” James stirred his tea. “I’ve used some of my contacts to request an invitation to the private sitting she’ll do after the show. If she hasn’t fled the country and she actually appears, we’ll get a chance to interview her.”

“We?”

“You’re solving this for George Sutter, are you not? Besides, you’re an expert.”

I gulped my tea, which was hot, thinking. For showgirls like Ramona, the theater performance was an opportunity to show off in front of an audience, but it wasn’t particularly profitable. The theater would take the lion’s share of the sales. The real money would come from the private sitting offered afterward, for which she would hopefully get takers impressed by what they had seen. This was the showgirl way of working, used when you didn’t have a repeat client list. “I thought you were the expert,” I said. “Is she one of your subjects?”

“If you mean did we test her, the answer is no,” James said. “I think it’s rather obvious she’s a fraud, as is the other psychic on this bill.”

The waiter came, and we ordered our luncheon. I managed to speak my order past the bitterness that had risen in my throat. When he had gone, I said, “That’s still what you do, then, is it? Expose frauds like my mother and me?”

He went very still, and for a moment even the quiet noise of the café seemed to disappear.

“I don’t suppose I ever apologized to you for that day?” he said softly.

I gaped at him, my bitterness stealing my speech. “No,” I managed. “Never.”

“Of course not.” He ran a hand through his cropped hair again, his eyes dark and serious. “I always meant to. I certainly felt sorry enough. I suppose I just never got up the courage to do it.” He looked at me, taking in the incredulous expression that must have been on my face. “I realize it’s hard for you to believe, Ellie, but I do try to have some semblance of honor. And something about that day felt dishonorable, at least to me.”

“It’s very simple,” I said. “The New Society did tests on my mother, and on me. To assess our psychic ability. We failed.”

“No,” said James. “I don’t believe it was that simple. Not anymore. Though I’m damned if I know why.”

Our luncheons came, and for a moment he cut his steak while I stirred my soup. Outside the window, the busy London crowd moved by—shoppers, nannies with children, workingmen, newsboys. I saw none of it. I could feel the disappointment of that day like a fresh wound—disappointment that we had failed the tests, yes, but also the piercing sense of failure that James Hawley thought me a skimmer, a fraud. Just like all the others. That particular sense of failure had dogged me for more long, sleepless nights alone than I wanted to admit.

I raised my gaze from my soup to see him looking at me again. “You know,” he said, as if he’d read my mind, “I’ve thought about you quite a lot since that day.”

My throat went dry. He was looking at me steadily, his face perfectly half lit in the light from the window, his eyes on mine. We’d never spoken since the day of the tests. He’d never contacted me; he had no reason to. I’d told myself a thousand times that it didn’t matter to me how James Hawley had looked at me the first night we met, or that he now had the lowest opinion of me. But now something
shifted in my chest, squeezed my blood in my veins. I looked at the firm, well-shaped line of his mouth. He had thought about me?

“What—what do you mean?” I managed.

He leaned forward over his plate, and for a second I thought he was bringing his face closer to mine, that he would bring up the night at the bar. “The tests we did,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “The results we got. It doesn’t feel right to me. It never has.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She shouldn’t have failed,” said James, still leaning forward. “Your mother. Every client we interviewed called her real. They told us stories that couldn’t be faked. And you, Ellie.” Still he stared at me, and I couldn’t look away. “Your clients don’t lie to me when they tell me what they’ve seen you do.”

I sat up, my spoon clattering in my soup bowl. “My
clients
?”

“Yes, of course.” He returned to his steak, cutting it gently. “They aren’t very hard to find, you know.”

“My client list is—”

“Private, I know. All I had to do was stand in a secluded spot across the street for three days, maybe four, and watch who came out the door. Those ones gave me the names of the rest. They refer each other. I don’t think you’re a candidate for MI5.”

“You—you watched my house?”

“Place of business,” James corrected, briefly holding up his fork. “There’s a sign on the door, after all.”

“But why?”

“I told you, I’ve been thinking about you since the day we did the tests on your mother. But when that journalist recently dragged up my old paper and put it in the newspaper, it brought all of it back. I have very good instincts. And I was curious.”

You know how I get when I’m curious.
Everything spun. I reached for my handbag and patted it, looking for cigarettes so I’d have an excuse not to look at him. He’d been investigating me. “It was a shock,” I said, “that newspaper article. I thought it was over, that no
one would ever read that paper again after my mother died. But there it was in the newspaper, all about how Gloria supposedly had proven psychic powers, and my mother did not. As for me, I escaped the reporter’s notice, but I believe the term used in the original report was ‘inconclusive and unproven.’”

“We thought we were being objective, Paul and I,” James said. He was referring to Paul Golding, the head of the New Society.

“Objective,” I said.

“Yes.” He took a bite of steak. “That’s the scientific method—pure objectivity. That has always been Paul’s goal, to have the supernatural examined with the same objectivity brought to biology and chemistry and other forms of scientific study. We were certain, at the time, that we were being objective when we published those results. But now I’m not so sure.”

“What in the world does that mean?”

His gaze traveled over me as it had in Trafalgar Square, frank and assessing and almost rude, except for the fact that it made me blush like a schoolgirl. “The results Paul and I had from Gloria were unprecedented, and we were rather excited about it. It was heady. I think now that we got carried away, allowed ourselves to be influenced by her opinions. We looked for the results we expected, which is a scientific sin.” The half smile surfaced again, this time apologetic. “In short, Ellie, I think we underestimated you.”

I stared at him. A rush of feeling came over me, gushing from some long-buried recess, and I struggled with it, suddenly blinking back tears.

James’s smile faltered. “Is something wrong?”

I swallowed and bit back the feeling, regaining control. “No one has ever said that to me,” I managed. “But at least you admit it. That you believed Gloria and not me.”

He put his fork down. “I believed Gloria was a true psychic, yes. I still believe it. But Gloria never told the truth. Not completely. She hid what she didn’t feel like revealing, or she fudged around essential
facts. But you, Ellie—” His voice lowered, grew almost quiet. “You don’t lie as easily. You don’t like to lie at all. You hedge, or you deflect the conversation. When you’re pushed into it, you just go silent rather than lie. It’s really quite fascinating.”

My hand rested on my handbag. I could feel Gloria’s flask inside, and I wondered what it contained. Gin, perhaps. Whatever it was, I was looking forward to it.

“I have a theory,” James said softly, “that you lied to us that day we did the tests. I don’t know why, but you did. You’ve been at it quietly for years, haven’t you? Taking clients, finding what they seek. No fanfare, no shows. No newspapers. I’ve investigated over two hundred claims of spiritualist powers since I came home from the war, but I now believe I’m sitting across from the second true psychic I’ve ever met.”

A psychic, if she is to have a career, must deal with both skeptics and believers. They both bring their own set of problems—skeptics with their endless needling questions, believers with their suffocating faith. My mother taught me that, in the middle of the storm, the medium herself must have only one philosophy:
Believe, or don’t believe. It is up to you.

Most mediums hoped to convince their marks of their veracity, of course. But the true medium—the one who possesses powers, whether they are recognized or not—must walk away. Otherwise, my mother taught me, we are nothing better than circus acts, trying to create greater and greater feats in front of a disbelieving audience. And where is the peace in that?

Gloria herself never cared who believed in her; she was always right, and she always knew it. In my own way, I was the same. Until now.

This was James. Disappointing him, failing those tests, and having him see me as a liar had nearly crippled me three years earlier. I couldn’t have said why. We don’t always choose whose opinion matters to us. Sometimes there is no logic to it. Sometimes there is only faith.

I let go of my handbag and put my hands on the table, my palms up, my fingers cool. I looked him in the eye.

“James,” I said. “Give me your hands.”