The Other Side of Midnight (21 page)

“I know.” He slid a finger just under the collar of my dress, traced it along the skin of my neck and my collarbone almost wistfully before dropping his hand. “I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer. I’ll get us a taxi.”

“
N
o, no, no,” James said. “None of this works. Let’s try again.”

He put his elbows on his knees and thrust his hands through his hair. We were at his flat, where we’d been for hours, going over the codes in Gloria’s handwritten schedule. He was in his shirtsleeves, the button at the throat of his shirt undone. Outside the rain had not abated; it had only grown heavier, and rolls of thunder weighed heavily over the rooftops.

I dropped into the other chair and looked again at the sheet of paper we’d used for our latest attempt at a cipher. “My daily woman says she can keep Pickwick for the night,” I said. I’d gone down the hall to use the boardinghouse’s only telephone.

James shook his head, staring down at the paper. “God knows how you picked up a dog.”

“It doesn’t matter how,” I said, not wanting to think about Mr. Bagwell. “But I’ve been a dog owner for less than a day, and already I’ve fallen down on the job.” I motioned to the paper, which was on
the table next to the three telegrams and the three photographs, which I’d also shared with James. “I thought that last one would work.”

“Bloody hell. It doesn’t.”

I was quiet for a moment, rubbing my stockinged feet. Despite everything—the fear, the uncertainty, Ramona’s murder, the fact that it had almost been my murder, too—part of me was humming with excitement at being here, alone with James in his little flat. I liked watching him work. I liked what the rainy light did to his handsome, intelligent face. After that scorching kiss in the doorway, I wasn’t certain I’d be able to concentrate. But we had quickly become immersed in the puzzle of Gloria’s final week, working together as easily as if we’d done it for years, the seriousness of it doing nothing to diminish the quiet pulse of excitement in my veins.

James gazed down at the desktop, unseeing, his head still in his hands. “It’s the three-digit sequence that makes no sense,” I said. “Except for ‘44,’ which is two digits.”

We’d tried everything to figure out what the numbers meant, marrying numbers to letters in a code. We knew which client the Dubbses were—277—and we had tried to work backward, cracking the other names from there. We’d tried master code words—guessed, of course—used as a key, numeric patterns, mathematical algorithms, everything we could think of. It made sense that a combination of either two or three letters would represent a set of initials: first name, last name, and a third letter for the middle name inserted whenever there was a possibility of duplicates. But it seemed that what made sense was obviously not the case.

What mattered most to us, of course, was not the week’s schedule, but the number Gloria herself had written in—321B—on the day before she died. If we could crack her code, we could figure out where she’d gone that day, the appointment so secret that even Davies hadn’t known about it.

“It can’t possibly be a simple list, can it?” James asked. “A simple list of names in order, with every new client given a number?”

“The highest number on that list is 321,” I replied. “Even if that entry isn’t part of the same code, the second highest number is 277. That means that Gloria knew some three hundred names, associated with their random numbers, in her head.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Tell me, did you
meet
Gloria?”

“I know, I know,” he said. “It doesn’t seem likely. And if she had a written codebook marrying the names to the numbers, then there would have been no reason to have a code at all in the first place.” He lifted his head and leaned back in his chair again. “There’s nothing for it. I’m going to have to ask Merriken at Scotland Yard.”

I bit my lip. Davies had supposedly given the inspector Gloria’s schedule, so if we got the information in turn, we could use it to map the code for the missing name. “He’s going to want to know why. That means we have to show him this paper with the unknown name.”

“So we show it to him,” James said. “He’s the police, after all. What do we have to lose?”

If Inspector Merriken saw the paper with Gloria’s unknown appointment on it, he’d write it up in his files. And that meant George Sutter would see it. And George Sutter would get no more information from me. “I don’t want to.”

“Ellie, this could be the key. Gloria went somewhere the day before she died, and she didn’t tell anyone. Then she left a note for her brother saying, ‘Tell Ellie Winter to find me.’ There must be a connection. There simply must be.”

“The number sign,” I said, changing the subject. “Before the mystery number. None of the others has a number sign, but the mystery number says ‘#321B.’ That looks like an address to me. Maybe it isn’t part of the other code at all.”

James ran a hand over his jaw. I could hear the rasp of his stubble. It was a light shadow, blond mixed with caramel brown, and the
sound of his hand traveling over it reminded me of its rough feel on my skin. “That is a possibility, yes.”

“Then there’s no point telling the inspector about it, because the information Davies gave him can’t help us.”

He sighed. He picked up the near-empty bottle of wine, filled my glass, slid it toward me on the desk. He’d had very little wine, I noticed—barely half a glass. Since there was no one else here, I supposed I must have drunk the rest of it. Against the wall, the sacks of mail—the deathbed visions, the accounts of fairies and pixies and poltergeists—hulked in the shadows. “All right, Ellie. You win. Keep your secrets.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, then shut it again. There was no point in lying to him.

“It isn’t because I don’t trust
you
,” I said finally.

He shrugged. He’d folded back the sleeves of his white shirt, and I watched the strong, fine bones of his wrist, the faint trace of blue veins through the warm skin. “Of course not. It’s just that you want me to help you without giving me all of your information.”

“James, I simply don’t
know
,” I said, pushing back my chair and standing. I picked up my wineglass and took it with me as I started to pace again. All I had were theories about who George Sutter worked for; if I talked to James about George, was I putting him in danger? “I haven’t put all of it together myself. Besides, I don’t think you’ve told me everything, either.”

“Ellie, I’ve told you everything. I’m an open book.”

“You haven’t told me why you’re so dedicated to investigating this.” I sipped the wine; it was rather good. James kept good wine for a bachelor who never had company, and my head was pleasantly spinning, my thoughts loose and full of possibilities. “You knew her and you feel badly that she was killed, yes. But there’s more to it than that. Do you want to know what I think?”

He watched me pace, his expression closed. “Go ahead.”

“You’re the one who wrote the article about her for the New Society,” I said. “I think that, deep down, you are wondering whether somehow that paper, the work you did with her, is the reason for her murder.”

He was silent.

I turned on my heel and looked at him. “Am I right?”

He dropped his gaze. “All right. I always felt a little sorry for Gloria. I think she was used by everyone she knew, myself included. Everyone except, possibly, you.” He raised his eyes to mine again. “But yes, part of me thinks it’s possible. Her death was so soon after the story in the newspapers. If I’m somehow responsible, I want to know.”

Our gazes locked for a long moment as a gust of wind blew up and threw rain at the windows. I lowered my glass to my side. “How could that be?” I asked softly.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what I wrote that would make someone want to murder her. I just feel . . .” He shrugged. “I can’t rest until I know for certain that I didn’t contribute to this.”

“Did your tests include spirit sessions?” I asked him.

“At least a dozen.”

“Perhaps it has to do with someone she found on the other side. Something she learned.” I thought it over. “My mother and I learned a lot of family secrets in the spirit medium business. Things people take to their graves.” We had spoken once to a woman who had died giving herself an abortion, though the fact was kept from her grieving husband. We had heard about infidelity, and babies given away for adoption, and money stashed in places where the heirs would never find it.

James looked thoughtful. “I don’t recall any shocking revelations offhand. It’s a possibility, I suppose, but it’s a distant one. If Gloria died because she uncovered secrets, then she could have uncovered those secrets during her regular business. That means hundreds of clients, hundreds of suspects. And Scotland Yard is already covering that.”

“It would be someone recent,” I said, thinking of Inspector
Merriken saying,
Murderers tend to be impulsive
. “Someone from the past few weeks. Perhaps someone on this schedule is a client because they read the article.”

“Or perhaps he’s just a madman who likes killing spirit mediums.”

A shiver of cold fear went down my spine. “In which case, James, your article is blameless.”

“Except that it gave her publicity in the news.”

“Gloria made her own publicity. And Ramona’s name was never in the papers, so why did she die?”

“It’s a gut feeling, Ellie. None of which tells me why you don’t want to pass information to Scotland Yard.”

I sighed. I was exhausted, but since my experience that afternoon, a part of me felt more awake than I could ever recall. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, but if you get carted away in a black van and interrogated in a windowless room somewhere, please don’t blame me.”

“Ellie, what in God’s name are you talking about?”

“George Sutter,” I said. “You told me in Trafalgar Square that you don’t know who he works for.”

“No, and I still don’t.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “But whoever it is, it’s an office that has full access to every report Inspector Merriken submits regarding this case.”

James blinked, then shoved back his chair and stood. “And you know this how?”

“Because he told me when he hired me. He said he’d give me everything I need from Scotland Yard’s reports. And he has.”

I told James everything I knew that hadn’t been in the papers, or anywhere else—that she’d been hit once in the face, very hard, to subdue her, and then she’d been stabbed calmly through the heart and dumped in the pond. I told him what George had said of the layout of the property, the possibility of neighbors, the paths the killer could have taken to and from the Dubbses’ house.

“The damned coroner’s report and everything,” James said when I finished. “You waited a hell of a long time to tell me, Ellie.” His voice was rough, and he was starting to use profanities, which meant he was tired.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He dropped onto his single narrow sofa, his body graceful even in exhaustion. “Did Sutter tell you the Dubbses had left town? Did you already know that?”

“No.”

“Perhaps he didn’t know. The Yard may not know, either—I got the information from my own channels.” He looked up at me, standing in the middle of the floor in my stockinged feet, holding my forgotten wineglass. “What is it?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean the look you’re giving me. What is it?”

I gathered my scattered nerves, took a breath. I felt jumpy, terrified and strangely free at the same time. “I’m going out there,” I said to him. “To the Dubbses’ property. I don’t care that they’re not there. I’m going myself.”

He watched me from his lazy pose on the sofa. “And what do you expect to find there?”

“Answers. Courage, perhaps.” I swallowed. “I’m going to do what Gloria asked of me, what George wants of me. I’m going to find her on the other side. I think that if I’m there, in the place where she died, I may have the backbone to do it. And I have to do it soon.”

James was quiet, his face in shadows. “All right,” he said at last.

“There’s more,” I said. “I’m going to travel in daylight. No hiding. Let whoever wishes to follow me follow me.”

“Ellie.”

“I can draw him out, James,” I said. “If he wants me, he’ll be able to find me. At least this time I’ll be ready.”

“For what? Are you going to tackle him to the ground, then? Arrest him?”

“No. But the police can, if we have Inspector Merriken on our side.”

James looked at me for a long moment, then shook his head. “He’ll never go for it. Never.”

“He already has.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I used the telephone in the hall to call my daily woman, I tracked down the inspector as well. I told him I had reason to believe the killer will come after me next. And that our best chance of success is to have me draw him out of London.”

“And he believed all of that? With no evidence?”

That had struck me as well. I hadn’t wanted to tell the inspector about my close brush with Ramona’s murderer, because he’d want to bring me into the Yard for questioning. “I think he has his own reasons for believing it. Certainly Ramona’s murder creates a pattern of dead spirit mediums, as you pointed out. He may know that Davies is missing as well.”

James’s expression had drawn tight; I could tell he didn’t like the plan. “So you’re to go to Kent tomorrow, and the police will follow you. That’s what the two of you cooked up?”