Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase

25

Whatever it was that Lockwood had scribbled in his note to Inspector Barnes, it certainly had the desired effect. The taxi driver had delivered the message to Scotland Yard late the previous evening; by midnight Barnes had gathered two van-loads of DEPRAC officers and agency personnel, and was on his way to Berkshire. They reached the village of Combe Carey shortly after three, and the estate itself by four. Only their difficulty in opening the park gates (Bert Starkins, thinking they were phantoms risen from his cabbage patch, had shot at them from his window with a blunderbuss-load of iron filings) prevented them from arriving at the hall prior to five a.m. Even so, they were two full hours earlier than Lockwood had requested, and just in time to block Percy Grebe’s escape.

They didn’t turn up a moment too soon for me.

It wasn’t ghost-touch or anything, but my close exposure to Annie Ward’s final manifestation had left me badly dazed. The chill had cut to my bones, and my right hand – where I’d held the locket – was frost-burned on the palm. Coming on top of everything else we’d experienced in the house through the long hours of the night, it was all I could do to stay upright. Those first chaotic minutes after DEPRAC’s arrival I remember only as a blur.

Things soon started getting better, though. A Fittes medic gave me an adrenalin shot to pep me up. Another bandaged my injured hand. A kindly DEPRAC officer did the best thing of all and made me a decent cup of tea. Even Barnes, passing by my sofa in the midst of barking orders all around, patted me on the shoulder and asked if I was well. I was fine, thanks for asking, but quite content to let someone else take charge.

Of course, events didn’t stop just because I was side-lined. There was still plenty going on. The first thing that happened was that the chauffeur, Percy Grebe, was taken into custody. He’d not seen the gruesome details of Fairfax’s fate, but he’d sensed enough to be left in a state of abject terror. That terror made him talkative. Almost before he was hustled to his feet, he’d begun to spill the beans.

The next thing was that a crowd of agents, armed to the teeth with rapiers, flares and salt bombs, and swivelling supersized torches zealously all around, advanced slowly out across the Hall. The key word here is slowly. They were mostly Fittes operatives, with some from Tendy and a few from Grimble, and all went with extreme caution, taking psychic readings every step of the way. The dark reputation of Combe Carey hung heavy over them, as it did their adult supervisors dawdling at the door. Lockwood and George stood cheerily by as they began to secure the area, painstakingly passing orders back and forth, and jumping at every scrape and shadow.

Their first stop, naturally, was the library, and here, by whirling torchlight, Fairfax’s body was located. He lay face-down on the rug in the centre of the room, with his eyes wide open and his arms outstretched as if in supplication. The medics had the adrenalin needles ready, but they didn’t try to use them. It was already much too late. Fairfax had suffered first-degree ghost-touch, and it had left him swollen, blue and dead. Immediate readings were carried out in the vicinity of the locket and all around the room, but everything came up negative. The spirit of Annie Ward – having been reunited with her killer – was nowhere to be found.

After this, at Barnes’s command, the operatives spread out across the Hall, routing out Fairfax’s servants in the East Wing, and checking the substance of our story in the West. Lockwood and George oversaw their progress to the door of the Red Room, which was discovered to be locked. The key, at Lockwood’s suggestion, was found in Fairfax’s pocket; the room itself, when a crack team tiptoed in, was empty, quiet and cold.

Much to George’s delight, among the Fittes agents commandeered by Barnes that night was none other than our old friend Quill Kipps, together with his sidekicks, the blonde-flick girl and the boy with the tousled thatch. George took great pleasure in standing close as Barnes issued them with orders, occasionally chipping in with suggestions of his own.

‘Just through that secret passage you’ll find the famous staircase,’ he said. ‘I think we cleared it of screaming shadows, but perhaps Kipps should go ahead and check. At the bottom is the well room where the massacre of the monks took place. Maybe his team should take a peek there too. No? They seem reluctant. Well, if that’s too scary, there’s a Grey Haze in the downstairs toilet they might be able to cope with.’

In fact, any remaining danger was soon past. The first dawn rays broke through the windows of the Long Gallery and stretched warm and golden across the floor.

In keeping with tradition, Inspector Barnes managed to remain deeply annoyed with us even while grudgingly congratulating us on a job well done. His moustache hung at an aggrieved angle as he stood in the library half-light, lambasting Lockwood for keeping the locket secret for so long.

‘By rights I should charge you for withholding information,’ he growled. ‘Or stealing evidence from a crime scene. Or recklessly endangering yourself and these two idiots who follow you around. By coming here alone you knowingly put yourselves at the mercy of a murderer!’

‘A suspected murderer,’ Lockwood said. ‘I didn’t fully understand the locket inscription at the time.’

Barnes rolled his eyes. The fringes of his moustache shot out horizontally with the power of his snort. ‘A suspected murderer, then! That’s hardly any more sensible! And I notice you didn’t see fit to include Cubbins or Miss Carlyle in making that decision!’

This, it had to be said, was a decent point, which was also on my mind.

Lockwood took a deep breath; perhaps he realized he had to explain himself to George and me, as well as to Barnes. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘I had to accept Fairfax’s invitation. That was the only way I could get the money to pay my debts. And as to the danger we were in, I had full confidence in the ability of my team. Lucy and George are the best operatives in London, as you can see from our results. We’ve neutralized a major cluster of Visitors and overcome a determined and ruthless foe. And all without a single adult supervisor in sight, Mr Barnes.’ He switched on his fullest, most radiant smile.

Barnes winced. ‘Put those teeth away. It’s too early in the morning and I haven’t had my breakfast . . . Oi, Kipps!’ Quill Kipps was struggling by, labouring under the weight of three giant see-through plastic crates. Two were filled with Fairfax’s theatrical scrapbooks, being removed as evidence; the third contained a chain-mail tunic, neatly folded, and the two strange iron helmets. ‘Where’s the second tunic?’ Barnes asked.

‘Still on the corpse,’ Kipps said.

‘Well, we need to prise it off him, before he gets too swollen. See to it now, will you?’

‘No dawdling,’ George called. ‘Chop-chop!’

‘That reminds me,’ Barnes went on, as Kipps departed, scowling. ‘Those helmets. They were Fairfax’s, I assume?’

‘Yes, Mr Barnes,’ Lockwood said innocently. ‘We wondered what they were.’

‘Well, you can go on wondering, because I’m impounding them. They’re DEPRAC business now.’ The inspector hesitated, twisting a corner of his moustache. ‘Fairfax didn’t . . . talk to you about any of this weird get-up, did he?’ he said suddenly. ‘About what he liked doing in this place?’

Lockwood shook his head. ‘I think he was too busy trying to kill us, Mr Barnes.’

‘And who can blame him.’ Barnes appraised us sourly. ‘By the way, one of the helmets seems to lack its eye-piece. Any idea where it might be?’

‘No, sir. Perhaps it didn’t have one.’

‘Perhaps not . . .’ Rewarding us with a final searching glare, Barnes went to organize our departure from the Hall. We stayed where we were, slumped together on the library chairs. We didn’t talk. Someone brought us another cup of tea. We watched the daylight spread across the fields.

When clear-up specialists re-entered Combe Carey some weeks later, they found its supernatural activity much diminished in strength. Their first job, acting on our report, was to dredge the well. There, at a considerable depth, they found the ancient bones of seven adult males, previously bound together, but now much mangled and mixed with fragments of silver and iron. The remains were retrieved and destroyed, and after that, as Lockwood had predicted, the rest of the house soon fell in line. A number of secondary Sources were discovered beneath the flagstones of the lobby and in old chests in one of the bedrooms, but with the monks’ bones gone, most of the peripheral Type Ones also faded clean away.

Lockwood had lobbied hard for us to be involved in the final cleansing of the Hall, but our bid was turned down flat by the estate’s new owners – a nephew and a niece of Fairfax, who had taken control of his company. They disliked the house, and sold it soon after it had been made safe. The following year it became a prep school.

Fairfax himself had no direct heirs. It turned out that he had never married, and had no children of his own. So perhaps Annabel Ward had been the love of his life, after all.

The remains of the locket were swept up and removed by Barnes’s men in a special silver-glass canister. Whether the ghost-girl’s spirit remained tied to it, or whether (as I myself believe) she had permanently departed, I don’t know, because I never saw it again.

The body of the missing Fittes agent was recovered from the well room that same night and taken away by his modern equivalents. Some time later, Lockwood received a letter from Penelope Fittes herself, head of the agency and a direct descendant of its founder, the legendary Marissa Fittes. She congratulated us on our success, and thanked us for locating the body of her childhood friend and colleague. His name was Sam McCarthy. For the record, he’d been twelve years old.