Private Investigation (6 page)

This must be Mrs Gaffney, the mother of the boy who had been killed. Lilly shuddered. The boy’s words were not the usual message of reassurance that mediums peddled. I’m happy here… All is peace and light… I want you to go on with your life, and to be happy. The child sounded lost, and terrified.

And yet, as he continued to speak, and as his mother asked him—beseeched him—to tell her that he was at peace, the skin on Lilly’s back began to crawl. The spirit—the child—knew what Arthur’s favourite toys had been. He asked his mother for news of his puppy. And he sounded lonely…and dreadfully convincing.

The ghostly form above the mechanism flickered and blurred, almost taking on solid form, then scattering again into a wispy, hollow-eyed miasma.

Lilly glanced across at Mrs Langley and saw that she was frowning. This was not what she was used to, and not what she had expected. But, as Mrs Gaffney’s husband led her weeping from the room, and the next spirit emerged, a broad smile split her face. It was Mr Langley.

He, too, was a hovering, insubstantial spirit, though perhaps a little more defined than the boy had been. Lilly thought she could see the shadowed hint of a moustache.

She wanted to be pleased for her landlady, but she felt uneasy. There was something wrong here—something desperately wrong.

And when Mr Langley began to speak, the smile dropped from Mrs Langley’s face and she clutched convulsively at Lilly’s hand.

“For goodness’ sake, Martha, stop bothering me. I’m dead. You always were a nag, but you have a good head on your shoulders. Why not do something useful with your life? You’ll be with me soon enough, wittering at me about smoking my pipe. In the meantime, use the brains God gave you.”

Lilly stared across at Mrs Langley, and saw that her face had gone the colour of parchment. Her eyes were wide, her lips trembling, and she looked as though she might be sick. “That’s my husband,” she whispered. “That’s Mr Langley, my Eric. He’s got him in that box.”

And Lilly realised the awful truth. Dr Cain was the murderer. And he wasn’t killing for financial gain—that much Lucien had already established. He was killing so that he could trap the souls of his victims in the monstrous contraption that sat on the table in front of them. He hadn’t stolen from the victims, because he had a plan that would bring him much more money that the paltry few pounds he could have taken from their poor, still-cooling corpses.

She was on her feet before she had thought it through. “Dr Cain,” she said, and she was surprised by how steady her voice sounded. “I am making a citizen’s arrest. You are guilty of the murders of Arthur Gaffney, Henry Watson and Mary Allan. I don’t know how you got hold of the soul of the late Eric Langley, but I will find out.”

If she’d thought about it at all, she might have expected some support from the other people in the room when she made this revelation, but instead she was met with goggle-eyed astonishment and, in a few cases, muted laughter.

She was shocked—but it was nothing to her surprise when Mrs Langley got to her feet and said, in the strident tones Lilly knew so well from the single time she had trodden dirt into the stair carpet, “Don’t you dare laugh. I might be a silly woman, at times, but I am not stupid. That was my husband, as he was in life. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but Dr Moriarty Cain has done something dreadful. It must be stopped.”

The others there had no reason to listen to Lilly, but they had seen Mrs Langley every week, spoken to her over the tea and fruitcake afterwards, exchanged stories of their messages from the dearly departed, and at her words a hubbub set up across the room.

A small man with a pencil moustache and rather frayed cuffs got to his feet and cast a lingering look at Mrs Langley, speaking, Lilly thought, of a secret tendresse. Then he said, “What do you have to say to these accusations, Cain?”

A matronly woman in a ruffled gown in a shocking shade of puce joined him. “I can’t truly believe that you would so abuse the souls of our lost loved ones.” She frowned. “But we must have an explanation for this, Dr Cain.”

More and more people got to their feet, exclaiming, accusing, questioning.

Dr Caine seemed panicked. He glanced to his young assistant for support, but caught the view only of the hem of her skirt as she whisked from the room and made good her escape. One or two of the burlier men in the audience were now approaching him with the clear intention of restraining him, and his eyes darted from side to side as he sought a route of escape.

Where they had been seated, in the front row, Lilly was close enough for him to grab. As she turned to flee, he caught her with one arm beneath her ribs and pulled her back against his body, knocking all the air from her lungs. Dr Cain flipped a switch on the bizarre, box-like apparatus on the séance table and, even as Lilly began to struggle, pressed something cold and hard to her temple. She froze as she realised the frigid circle of metal could only be the muzzle of a pistol.

She rolled her eyes desperately and saw at least four men approaching, intent on rescuing her and disarming her captor. But even as she noticed them, they froze, terrified and spellbound by the tortured spirits emanating from Dr Cain’s ghost machine.

They rose up, dozens upon dozens of them, pale and shimmering, and swarmed into the room. Poor, pathetic things, Lilly thought—but the audience panicked, and bolted. Suddenly they were stampeding for the door—even the big, brave men who had apparently thought nothing of a gun but were terrified by the sad spirits of murdered souls. Lilly was going to have to save herself.

She raised her hands, slowly, looking Dr Cain in the eye, trying to look as meek and submissive as she could. Then she snatched a hat pin from her head and jammed it into the hand that held the gun.

Dr Cain howled with pain and dropped the gun on the floor. And to Lilly’s amazement, she found that she had not quite been abandoned.

Mrs Langley seized the pistol and held it trained on Dr Cain, in a hand that was utterly steady, and with an aim that seemed utterly straight. “Release my husband,” she said.

Lilly was too frightened to be astonished—or too astonished to be frightened. Frankly, she didn’t know which. Nevertheless, she hooked her arm around Dr Cain’s neck and held the wicked point of her hatpin to his throat.

“What did you do?” she demanded. Did you trap that poor little boy? And Mrs Langley’s Eric?”

Dr Cain managed a gurgle of laughter, even with a gun trained on him and a steel needle at his throat. “People are so gullible. If I could make so much money and gain such a reputation with stupid, shallow trickery, how much more could I do if I could truly harness the souls of the dead?” He gestured to his machine, which was still spitting out tiny, formless wisps. Lilly could only hope and pray that they weren’t souls that had waned and faded away within the confines of Dr Cain’s beastly device. “The police are too stupid to make the connection.” He hesitated. “How did you, a mere girl…?”

“Because she’s a good, intelligent, hard-working girl,” snapped Mrs Langley.

Lilly would never, in her wildest dreams, have expected to be defended by her spiky landlady in that manner. But she smiled. And she pressed the point of her hatpin a little harder against the artery in Dr Cain’s throat.

“And,” came a voice from the open door at the back of the room through which the audience had fled, “we aren’t all that stupid, sir, if you don’t mind.”

Inspector Ladd, flanked on either side by Lucien and John, entered the room.

John pulled Lilly into his arms while Inspector Ladd and Lucien restrained Dr Cain. If he’d chosen to, John certainly could have argued that he was checking her for injuries, but his hands seemed to linger overlong on her breasts, her waist, and the curves of her bottom.

When Dr Cain struggled like a madman—and a madman he was, Lilly supposed—she and John went to their aid. And so it was that, with all hands occupied, Mrs Langley was left flailing at the box on the séance table with her capacious handbag. Lord only knew what she kept in there, but clearly it was heavy, because the thing began to come to pieces, and the whirling, shrieking phantoms that had been circling the room began to fade away.

As the men bundled Dr Cain from the room, with Lucien assuring him in no uncertain terms that he could place him at the scene of each murder (a matter of tobacco ash and mud on trouser cuffs), Lilly heard one last, haunting voice.

“I do love you, my dear. I always did. But don’t follow me into death before your time.”

And that was the end of it. The box that had trapped the murdered souls was smashed. Dr Cain was locked away, awaiting the hangman’s noose. And Lilly was the assistant to Lucien Doyle, detective, and John Dermott, inventor.

Epilogue

Lilly, John and Lucien lay sprawled on the bed together. John had ventured out to scrounge together breakfast, which had consisted of toast and lime marmalade. For some reason, Lilly didn’t mind anymore.

The breakfast tray was discarded on one side of the bed, covered in toast crumbs and smears of butter. Lucien leaned over John, kissing him thoroughly, darting his tongue into the inventor’s mouth with quick, clever flickers as John tenderly stroked the nape of the detective’s neck. Propped on one elbow and lazily watching them, Lilly smiled to herself, then inhaled sharply as her cunt gave a sudden, greedy clutch and she felt a trickle of moisture run down her inner thigh. Lucien shifted slightly, pulling the covers taut, and Lilly couldn’t quite suppress a little groan of wanting as she saw the thick outline of John’s sturdy cock outlined beneath the bedsheets.

Lucien and John both turned towards her, John with an intense expression that spoke of lust and Lucien with those strange, wolf-like eyes half-lidded with desire.

“Still hungry, Lilly?” Lucien murmured in a satiny voice that made her pussy clench and her toes curl.

“Ravenous,” she replied.

Arranging three people in a bed wasn’t the easiest of operations, nor the most dignified, but since it involved an awful lot of stroking and squeezing, rubbing and sliding, Lilly found that she didn’t mind in the slightest.

She lay back, her thighs spread, and sighed with pleasure as Lucien played his tongue between her downy outer lips and the slick ruffled ridges of her inner lips. Her cunt clenched and she twisted the bedclothes between her fingers, overwhelmed by the sensation yet knowing that there was more—much more—still to come.

John claimed her lips in a brief, fierce kiss and she moaned into his mouth, bucking against Lucien’s mouth as John flickered his tongue against her palate.

Then he withdrew, but she had no breath to complain, because Lucien was lapping at her clitoris, tickling the aching bundle of nerves with his tongue before gently drawing it between his lips and suckling on it. She panted as the sensation between her thighs began to build, driven almost wild by the wet sounds of Lucien’s mouth against her slick flesh.

Then he hesitated in his ministrations, and when she glanced down the length of the bed, Lilly realised why. John had taken Lucien’s cock into his mouth and was bobbing his head rapidly, rhythmically, allowing the detective’s cock to slip, shining with spit, between his lips. The sight made her squeeze her thighs together over Lucien’s ears and he took his cue and started licking her again as she watched John take Lucien’s cock in his fist and lick the head like it was a lollipop. He gathered a bead of cum onto his tongue and closed his eyes, savouring the taste.

Lilly jolted when Lucien thrust his tongue into her cunt. She spasmed around him, gasping and writhing as he brought his fingers into play, rubbing her as he worked his tongue in and out of her sopping channel. She played her hands through his curly hair, running the wild strands through her fingers, scratching gently at his scalp with her fingernails. Then she brought her hands up to her breasts, massaging the mounds before pinching the nipples between her fingers. The action seemed to tug on a nerve that ran directly between her nipple and her clitoris in a shining line of sensation, and she did it again, pinching and twisting almost viciously at the pebbled tips.

“Wait a moment,” she gasped, and the men rolled away. All three of them were panting for breath and Lucien’s face was sticky and shiny from his nose to his chin with her juices.

After a few more minutes of awkward reorganisation, Lilly had them rearranged into a rough triangle. Lucien buried his face back in her cunt while John tugged on his lover’s cock, varying between long, slow caresses and vigorous tugging that made Lucien pause and catch his breath before returning to licking Lilly’s pussy.

Lilly stuck out her tongue and ran it into the sticky slit at the head of his cock, relishing the musky flavour. He twitched beneath her tongue and she realised that he would soon come. The idea excited her.

She played her fingers up his length, then licked her way down towards his balls before returning to the tip to suck on it. John groaned around Lucien’s dick and she took him fully into her mouth, struggling for breath as she felt his crown hit the back of her throat. Then she began to move her mouth up and down his length, smiling around his shaft for a moment as she felt him tense and writhe.

Then he spasmed in her mouth, filling her senses with his taste. She savoured the flavour, licking the last drops from her lips, then looked down to see John’s throat contracting hard, over and over again, as he swallowed Lucien’s cum. The detective turned his head against her inner thigh and gave a long, low groan that made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Both men lay panting for long moments.

Lilly wriggled a little, pleased that both men had come but with a tingling sensation between her thighs that left her feeling restless and unsatisfied. She wriggled to the head of the bed as the two men crawled over one another and lay on either side of her, looking at her with lazy contentment.

Then John, with a wicked gleam in his eyes, brought a finger to her breast, running it around her nipple, and she jerked a little as she felt a cool, sticky substance being spread on her skin.