The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

said.”

Mattie left, still glancing at the caligraph. Gairden glowered at it. “Well,” he said, “is that you, Mr Wishart? Still messing about with machines? You’d be better giving me a clue, you know, rather than frightening that girl half out of her wits.”

He glanced around, feeling a little foolish, but nothing answered him.

As he left he saw a live goblin hunched over the corpse in the gutter, tugging at the wet fur, and whimpering. “Too late, old fellow,” Gairden muttered. Even love could not animate the dead. Though he’d heard things, about the fey …

He returned to his lodgings tired and chilled through, but restless. Once he had hung up his greatcoat by the fire, to steam itself dry, he paced his rooms, straightening a picture here, sliding a book even with its fellows there. He thought about Jamie Wishart; his mechanisms and his narrow bachelor bed. He thought about Lassiter, and Rheese, and Mattie Drewrey. About machines and goblins. About steam and blood. The portrait of a young woman, hair that looked almost too heavy to bear piled upon her fragile head and descending in thick curls about her delicate neck, watched him with a solemn stare. At one point he turned to it. “Well, Esther? What do you think? All this business with music and dancing, that’s more your area than mine. You always liked to dance, while you had the strength for it.” But tonight Esther had no answers for him.

He went to turn his coat, and felt in the pockets; a scrap of paper, and a tiny cog. The paper with the word Lalika on it. He frowned; he was sure he had left it on the table. How had it come to be in his pocket? He looked at it again, crumpled and torn where it had been caught in the drawer slide. Now he thought back, there hadn’t been any other papers in that drawer that seemed to have their corners missing.

So whatever this had been part of, it was no longer there. Someone had taken it out, perhaps in a hurry, wrenching at it. Leaving behind this fragment. And now the fragment had come home with him, along with one tiny cog; tiny yet slightly too big to have been part of the broken watch. Everything else in the office was so neat, so carefully tidied away; a place for everything, and everything, except this little glittering snowflake of metal, in its place. Well, anyone could lose or discard something so tiny. And yet, there it had been, close to the body. Stained, in fact, with the young man’s blood. Gairden rubbed his thumb over it; brown flakes came away.

“Stains . . .” he said. “I wonder what stains their hands. Dyes, perhaps. I must remember to ask Lassiter.”

Perhaps Wishart had been working on something; a project of his own, Lassiter had said. Perhaps whoever came in had grabbed not only the papers, but Wishart’s latest mechanism.

Possibly Rheese had been right about espionage; tomorrow, he would go to the patent office. And to the theatre, too; he felt a sting of pleasure at the thought. Maybe he would even buy a ticket; it was a long time since he had done such a thing.

Wishart hadn’t done such things at all, according to Lassiter. Wishart had spent his life among machines, without family, seemingly without friends. Gairden looked out into the rainy night, and shook his head.

The next day other things intervened: a kidnapping (that might, in fact, be a running-away), a suicide, and the thousand mundanities of the working day; by the time Gairden could have got to the patent office, it was shut. He did make time to have the broken watch looked at by a watchmaker of his acquaintance: Adelle Brigley, a cosy- looking woman of middle years. Her workshop, unlike Jamie Wishart’s, was an Aladdin’s cave of glittering confusion in which she never, to Gairden’s continuing astonishment, seemed to have the slightest trouble finding what she wanted. She poked at the ruined mechanism and held fragments up to the lamplight. “It was a nice piece. A Lockwood and Greene. Engraved inside the lid.”

“Is the engraving visible?”

“Some of it . . .” She screwed a jeweller’s glass into her eye and peered. “To Jamie . . . something . . . occ . . . probably occasion . . . and two numbers, a two and a one, I think. An ‘m’. Then two ‘e’s. I can’t make out the rest.”

“A birthday gift,” Gairden said. “On the occasion of his twenty-first, I imagine.”

“Perhaps.”

“An expensive one?”

“Depending on one’s means, Inspector. Not an extravagant purchase for a well-off man, but a tidy enough price.”

“And is it all there?”

She prodded. “The hands are missing, maybe some other pieces. It’d take a deal of mending.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Not at all. Will you take a cup with me, Inspector Gairden? You look chilled.”

“No, thank you. More to do yet.”

“You work yourself very hard,” said Adelle, shaking her head at him.

He smiled, and paid her her usual honorarium, then made his way to the theatre nearest to the Rheese manufactory. It seemed a sensible place to start; murder often had a small circumference.

Among smells of powder and greasepaint and dust and sweat-stained satin and weary feet, he questioned dancers and doormen. None had heard of Jamie Wishart, though plenty had heard of Rheese. None knew of anyone who might have visited the manufactory.

Of course, the fact of someone dancing did not necessarily indicate a professional dancer; his own dead Esther, a postmistress, had loved to dance. When she could no longer dance herself, she liked to sit and watch, and encouraged him to dance with other women. I like to see you, she’d said. One in a million, Esther. Not a jealous bone in her.

“The girl, Mattie,” Gairden said, to Esther’s portrait that night, “had a soft spot for young Mr Wishart. Now, a bludgeoning . . . that’s not a woman’s murder, as a rule. But she’s a strong lass. And got a temper, too, you could see it. Enough of one to stove his head in, though? For love? Is that love, Esther?

“And what about Lassiter? There’s something going on there; the way he pokered up. I think I shall be looking at some old reports tomorrow. And the watch . . . I’ve a thought about the watch, Esther. We shall see. That poor boy . . . what a lonely life, and a dreadful end. If he was dancing with someone, I hope he enjoyed it.”

After another day of fruitless enquiries at theatres, and the reading of dusty crime reports in faded handwriting, and damp feet, and frustration, Gairden was wrapping his scarf about his throat prior to leaving the station, the rain having given way to fog thick and chilly as ectoplasm. There was a commotion at the door, and Mattie Drewrey, the curls that escaped her scarf dewed with droplets, her cheeks flushed, was waving at him over the head of the duty sergeant.

“Miss Drewrey?”

“Oh, Inspector, you’ve got to come! There’s been such things going on!”

“Now, Miss Drewrey, why don’t you come into my office and tell me what you mean?”

“I can’t, sir, it might have stopped by the time we got back – soon as I realized it was something out of the way, I ran straight out to tell you!”

“To tell me what?”

“It’s Jamie . . . Mr Wishart . . . He’s been making ever such a fuss.”

Weariness retreating, Gairden followed Mattie Drewrey through the fog-drifted streets.

The gates were open; the workers coming off shift milling and chattering with those coming on. Outside the entrance doors to the building, the crowd swirled, paused, like water caught in an eddy. Lassiter, the foreman, was standing by the doors; his voice carried clearly over the chatter. “Now, come on, just be patient, it’ll be sorted out. Those of you about to start your shift, you might as well come in and wait in the warm.”

Gairden realized, finally, what was different; though until now it had seemed of a piece with the weather.

It was quiet. The churn and rumble of a passing velocipede underlined the silence; the paving stones lay quiet beneath his feet. No wonder he could hear Lassiter so easily: the machines were not running.

He excused himself and pushed through the crowd, conscious of eyes on him as he worked his way to the front. “Trouble, Mr Lassiter?”

“Oh, Inspector.” Lassiter ran his hands through his hair. “Sorry, sir, I don’t know if anyone’ll be able to speak with you just at the moment, we’ve a bit of a problem.”

“So I see. Can you tell me what exactly has happened?”