The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women Part 37

"You could say that, sir, yes. A bear for his work, he was."

"An a.s.set to the firm, then."

"Oh, I don't think it would be too much to call him a genius, Inspector. We shall be very sorry to lose him." There was, the inspector thought, the slightest possible emphasis on the we.

The iron stairway shuddered to the regular thudding; bright curls of shaved metal and fragments of dirt jumped about their feet as they climbed. Smells of hot metal and steam surrounded them. Glittering dust hung in the air.

"What was his position here?" Inspector Gairden said.

"a.s.sistant Deviser, sir."

"And who was he a.s.sistant to?"

"That'd be Mr Rheese, sir. The owner."

"I see."

The noise lessened slightly as they moved higher. They stepped into a corridor; heavy wooden doors, gas lamps hissing in their lily-petal shades. La.s.siter hurried his steps; Gairden speeded up to stay with him.

La.s.siter glanced up and down the corridor; pushed open a door. "In here, sir. It's pretty bad, but I suppose you've seen worse, in your line of work."

Tiny limbs, their sizes carefully graded, hung on the walls. Jars of eyes stared in all directions. A music box stood with gaping lid, the dancer on top poised forever en pointe. Neatly arrayed in trays, on hooks, in boxes, were levers, wheels, cogs. Bra.s.s and copper, gla.s.s and steel. A vice gripped the edge of a workbench like a parrot waiting for a snack; against one wall was a bed, narrow as a coffin, the sheets and one rough blanket tucked in with an almost military precision.

If it had been a burglary, it was an exceptionally neat one. There was nothing out of place, except the body. It James Wishart, Gairden reminded himself, not just the body, never just the body lay face down on the floor.

There wasn't much left of his head.

He was dressed much like the foreman. One hand was outflung, as though reaching for something; the other hand lay at his side, with the palm turned up; it had the same staining as he had noticed on La.s.siter's hands. There was something particularly pathetic about it, that strong young hand, darkened and callused with work, lying curled like a sleeping child's. A watch had slipped from his waistcoat pocket and lay flattened, a ruined mess of cogs and metal and gla.s.s.

Gairden kneeled down. From the mash of brutally shattered bone and the overlapping sprays of red, it seemed he had been hit not just once, but several times. This close, Gairden was enclosed in the raw stench of blood, the sleek smell of machine oil . . . and a faint, junipery trail of gin.

Something lay in the mess, glittering. Inspector Gairden picked up the tiny bra.s.s cog, delicate as a snowflake. Perhaps it was from the watch. "Did he drink?"

"Jamie? Never saw him with anything stronger than a cup of tea, sir."

"Hmm. Is anything missing?"

"Not that I can see, sir."

It was cold; the fire in the grate had long died to ash and cinders. All the fire-irons were in place. It seemed the murderer had both provided his weapon, and taken it away again.

"La.s.siter!"

Inspector Gairden looked up. A man was standing in the doorway, regarding the scene with his mouth twisted in distaste.

"Is this the inspector? I thought I told you to bring him to my office?"

La.s.siter straightened his shoulders and stared at the opposite wall. "Sorry, sir," he said. "Forgot."

The man hurried forward. "My dear sir, I do apologize. I'd hoped to have a chance to prepare you." He was a burly fellow, what Gairden thought of as a beefsteak man; flushed face girdled with expansive mutton-chop whiskers; smelling of tobacco and pomade. He too had black smudges on his fingers. "Ghastly, quite ghastly."

Gairden got to his feet. "Yes. This is his workshop?"

"Indeed. It's a dreadful business. La.s.siter, do get back to the floor; they're bad enough at the moment. They need your eye on them."

"Sir."

"I may need to speak to you again," Gairden said quietly.

"Of course, sir." La.s.siter disappeared.

Even as he did so, there was a pause in the thudding, a s.h.i.+ver of silence, then a long metallic screech, and shouting. "Oh, no," mutton-chop whiskers moaned. "As though things weren't bad enough."

"Problem, sir?" Gairden said.

"Goblins in the d.a.m.n machinery, I swear. I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. Tobias Rheese. I'm the owner, for my sins. I say, could we go elsewhere? It's just that-"

"Well, sir, I do need to look around a little."

"Oh, I suppose you do." Rheese glanced at the body, then away, swallowing. "When can we get things decently dealt with?"

"As soon as I'm done."

Gairden worked his way along the battered, deep-drawered oak table that stood against the back wall; he took a pencil from his pocket and used it to lift the edges of papers and charts. He brushed his gloved fingers over the teeth of cogwheels stacked in a box; looked at the tools hanging on their hooks, clean and orderly. He opened a drawer to find it full of papers technical drawings by the look of them labelled in a neat, small hand. A new method for the construction of a speaking tube. Improvements to the ratchet key. Clockwork mechanism for use in an instructive and educational child's toy.

"Do be careful, there's a good chap. Those papers . . . well, of course, I haven't had time to go through them, but there may be important things in there," Rheese said.

"Of course, sir. Can you tell if anything's been taken?"

"I don't know. It's possible."

The second drawer refused to open easily; something was jammed in the slide. Gairden worked at it with his fingers until it came free. A sc.r.a.p of paper. A word, Lalika, in that same neat hand. A smooth curve, disappearing off the edge of the paper, with an elongated oval within it. That was all. Gairden looked at it, then laid it on the desk.

Above his head, the mantle of one of the gas lamps suddenly flared up with painful brilliance. Gairden blinked. There was a pop, and the lamp went out.

He heard Rheese swear under his breath. When he turned, the man seemed to have lost more colour than the dimmer light could account for, and his broad forehead gleamed beneath his pomade-glossed curls. "Could we get out of here? Please?"

"Just one more moment, sir."

Gairden looked around, letting his eyes lose focus. Sometimes, concentrating on the detail hid the story the place had to tell you. Though here, he felt at a distinct disadvantage; it was a place built for machines, not people. Machines did not have stories, or motive, or a past.

Gairden was a man out of his time, and knew it. He had grown up in a world that still went hand in hand with the mystical, but the cities expanded, the woods diminished, and the grind and roar of machines ate into everything. When Gairden was a child, goblins had stolen eggs from his parents' hens and shouted rude remarks when he'd chased them from the garden; now, if he saw one, it had died a poisoned death in the gutter or sat sickly and moaning in a cage in some private menagerie. Naiads abandoned the polluted rivers; the fey retreated deep into the heart of the green. Gairden was a man whose job consisted of s.h.i.+ning a light on darkness, yet he loathed the idea of a world of mindless mechanism, where there was only glaring light and stark black; where nothing danced and glimmered in the shadows.

He looked at the gleaming tools of polished wood and bra.s.s, the drawers with their s.h.i.+ning handles, the neat stacks of books and papers; that narrow, empty bed.

"Well, sir," he said, "I think that's it for the moment. I'll need to ask you a few questions, if it's quite convenient."

"By all means, come with me." Rheese closed and locked the door as La.s.siter watched.

"What do I do about-" Rheese gestured to where Jamie Wishart lay, hidden now.

"Our fellows will come to take him away; he'll have to remain with us until this is resolved, of course. Have his family been informed?"

"I don't think he has any. My father took him out of the workhouse, and he wasn't married. This way, Inspector."

Reese's office bore some resemblance to a gentlemen's club that Gairden had had occasion to visit during an investigation the year before. It was, like Rheese, plumply furnished, the lights rosy-shaded and fringed, the desk topped with rich red leather. Designs for intricate machinery were scattered on the surface; thick black lines ran through one of them. He wasn't as tidy as his a.s.sistant; papers lay all about the place, as did drinking gla.s.ses, an apple-core, a pot of boot-black, a picture of a young woman and a small boy . . . Rheese motioned Gairden to sit in one of the deep leather chairs and shuffled the papers into a drawer, leaving black smudges on some of the designs.

"So little time these days," he said. "Since the old man retired, I've barely had a moment to work on my own designs." He looked at his hands, frowned, and wiped them on a cloth. "d.a.m.n muck gets everywhere." He poured himself a brandy from one of a set of rather fine decanters of heavy cut crystal. He motioned the stopper in Gairden's direction. "For yourself?"

"Very kind of you, sir, but no."

Rheese sat himself in the chair behind the desk. "Wouldn't want you to think I'm the sort of fellow who always has his nose in the bottle, but a thing like this, well, I have to confess, my nerves are twisted up like clock springs."

"Was it you who found him, sir?"

"No, it was La.s.siter. He came pounding on my door, yelling about blood and murder. And when I saw . . . well, sent for you chaps, obviously."

A clock suddenly chimed, a loud discordant run of notes. Rheese jolted so badly half the brandy he'd just poured spilled down his wrist.

"Sir? Is everything all right, sir?" Gairden said, getting to his feet.

Rheese waved him back down, gulped brandy and tugged at his collar. "Yes, yes."

Gairden glanced at his watch. "It seems your clock is out of time, sir."

Rheese glared at the clock. "So it is. What's the use of a clock that doesn't tell the right time, I ask you?" he said. "Or any machine that refuses to work. Not a bit of use. That's what."

"Sir?"

"Sorry, Inspector. It's been a trying day."

The clock sat on a small ornate table draped with a fringed, green velvet cloth, and something lay just beyond it, glimmering softly.

"Oh," Rheese said, "she's not working either. But I shall have her going, see if I don't."

Gairden peered. His eyes, bemused, sorted through the soft gleam of metal. The long sliver of s.h.i.+ne, a leg; the rounded arch, a foot. Some sort of automaton, in polished bra.s.s, tumbled in the corner like a drunk. Or a corpse.

"Do you like automata, Inspector?" Rheese said, topping up his brandy.

"Not really my style of thing, sir."

"People are wild for them; the more elaborate, the better. There's a mechanical chamber orchestra that's been all over the papers."

"Oh, I may have seen something, yes."

"That's what people like. But they're clumsy, you know, the mannequins. The way they move . . . everyone's trying for something more human. It's not easy."

"No, I don't suppose it is. Now, Mr Rheese, do you have any idea who might have attacked Mr Wishart?"

"Well-"

"Sir?

"We make frivols, Inspector. Amus.e.m.e.nts. Toys. Toys are all innocence, you'd think, but there's no harder business than this. Espionage goes on all the time. We take precautions, but someone could have got in, especially during the s.h.i.+ft change, with a couple of hundred people going in and out."

"You think Mr Wishart might have disturbed someone in the act of stealing his designs?"

Rheese swallowed the last of the brandy. "We've been doing very well. People notice."

"Yes," Inspector Gairden said. "And I understand that Mr Wishart was an exceptionally talented young man."

"Hah. He was well enough, I suppose, but really, Inspector, he was a boy from the workhouse when all's said and done. I was giving him what education I could, of course. Trying to make him useful, for m' father's sake."

"Oh, I understood he was something like a genius," Gairden said.

"If he'd been that, Inspector, don't you think someone would have tried to bribe him away, rather than murder him?"

Gairden felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He turned his head, convinced someone had come into the room. But the door remained firmly shut. A death-rattle sound came from the clock, and a thick final clunk. He glanced at it; its stilled and silent face was somehow reminiscent of a cadaver. He turned back to Rheese, who shuddered and tipped more brandy down his throat.

"There is that, of course, sir," Gairden said. "If they'd known about him. Did he have many friends?"

"I don't know, Inspector. Well, he would hardly have brought them here; this is a manufactory, not a club, what?"

"What about enemies?"

Rheese shrugged. "There's the Children of Lud, of course. Wretched fellows."

"The machine-breakers? Have you had trouble with them?"

"Not for some time, but they're still about; well, you'd know, Inspector, wasn't some fella arrested for it just the other week?"

"Not in my jurisdiction, sir. And I hadn't heard of them going as far as murder."

"It's not a great leap, though, is it, Inspector, between attacking a man's property and attacking his person, don't you think?"

Gairden, who rather thought it was, chose not to answer. "Do you know if Mr Wishart had any problems with the other workers, sir?"

Rheese rubbed at his whiskers. "Not that I know of, but they will have their rows and jealousies, you know. My father gave him his own workshop, and so forth. I suppose not everyone likes to see a boy from the workhouse do well, eh? But La.s.siter'd know better than I."

"I'll need to talk to them."

A whistle blew, long and loud, cutting over the thud-thud-thud of the machines.

"Well, then, you'd be just in time to catch them coming off s.h.i.+ft, if we go now. I'll get La.s.siter to gather them up." He picked up the speaking tube that dangled from the wall by his desk, and removed the stopper. "h.e.l.lo? Amabelle? Tell La.s.siter to hold the workers back; the inspector needs to speak to them." He stoppered the tube and got to his feet.

"So you kept them to their work, sir, once Mr Wishart was discovered?" Gairden asked.

"Couldn't stop the machines, not for something like this."