Lockwood & Co.: The Whispering Skull

During our discussions with Flo Bones the day before, I’d repeatedly found myself doubting that she’d show up at all. It wasn’t just that she was crazy; more that she was crazy in such a prickly and solitary way. Lockwood had promised her various generous pay-offs for her help – including money, liquorice, and her pick of the relic-trophies we kept down in the basement – but I still felt that joining us in this hazardous job would be the last thing she’d want to do. And yet here she was, in all her unwashed glory, leading us down the alley to a dark nook wedged between some bins, which, let’s face it, rather suited her.

‘Come in nice and tight,’ she whispered. ‘That’s it . . . We don’t want them to notice nothing.’

‘Everything on schedule, Flo?’ Lockwood asked. He checked his watch. ‘It’s just gone half past eleven.’

Her white teeth glinted in the shadows. ‘Yeah, Winkman arrived fifteen minutes back. Came in a van, and unloaded the merchandise. He’s left two men outside the main doors – you’d have run into them if you’d walked a few more yards. Now he’s gone inside with three other men, and a kid. They’ll be securing the ground floor.’

‘A kid?’ I whispered. ‘You mean his son?’

Flo nodded. ‘Yeah, it was that toad. They’ll all bring psychic kids with them tonight. They’re adults, ain’t they? For this, they need young eyes and ears.’ She straightened. ‘If you’re going ahead with it, Locky, you’ll need to start climbing.’

‘Show us the place, then, Flo.’

We followed as she flitted away along the side of the warehouse. Soon we heard the soft wash and sloop of the Thames, and the cobbles of the alley sloped steeply down to sand and shingle. Here, where the corner of the building rose from the river mud, a thick black iron drainpipe had been bolted to the mossy bricks. Flo pointed upwards. ‘There’s the pipe,’ she said. ‘See where it runs past that window? I reckon you could get in there.’

‘That window looks too small,’ I said.

‘You’re looking at the wrong one. I mean the one much further up, almost out of sight.’

‘Oh . . . right.’

‘It’s the way to get in if you don’t want ’em seeing you. They won’t be thinking of upstairs.’

I looked at the teetering drainpipe, zigzagging madly up the wall like a line drawn by an angry toddler. To be honest, I was trying not to think of upstairs, either.

‘Fine,’ Lockwood said. ‘We’ll manage. What about you, Flo? You’ve got the boat?’

In response she pointed out onto the river, where a long, low black shape listed half in and half out of the water. Waves sloshed gently over the stern.

George leaned close. ‘That’s her rowing boat?’ he breathed. ‘I thought it was a bit of rotten driftwood.’

‘It’s almost certainly both.’

I’d kept my voice down too, but Flo had sharp ears. ‘What’s that? This here’s little Matilda; I’ve sculled her safely from Brentford Sewage Works to Dagenham Tannery, and I won’t hear a word said against her.’

Lockwood patted her shoulder, then surreptitiously wiped his hand on the back of his coat. ‘Quite right. It’ll be an honour to sail in her. George, you understand the plan? You create the diversion, then wait with Flo in Matilda. If all goes well, we’ll join you, or at least get you the mirror. If things don’t work out so smoothly, it’s Plan H: we make our ways separately back home.’

George nodded. ‘Good luck. You too, Luce. Lockwood, here’s your stuff. You’ll need the masks and bag.’

Setting his rucksack down on the sand, he brought out a hempen bag, similar to but smaller than the one Flo used. A powerful odour of lavender came from it. Two black balaclavas emerged next; we tucked them in our belts.

‘Right,’ Lockwood said. ‘Set your watches. The auction starts in fifteen minutes, at twelve sharp. We’ll want the diversion at twenty past, before they have a chance to do any kind of deal.’ He gestured to the pipe. ‘Lucy, you want to go first, or shall I?’

‘This time,’ I said, ‘I’m definitely going after you.’

It would be nice to say that climbing the drainpipe brought back happy memories from a country childhood, of spending warm summers swarming up trees in the company of other nimble friends. Unfortunately, since I never had a head for heights, the tallest thing I’d ever scaled was a climbing frame in the village playground, and I once barked my shin tumbling off that. So the next few minutes, as I inched my way tortuously after Lockwood, were not the happiest of my career. The iron pipe was broad enough for me to lock my arms right round it, and the circular clasps that fixed it to the wall made decent hand- and footholds. In many ways it was like scaling a ladder. But it was rusty too, and its flaking paint was prone to stabbing my palms, or coming away altogether in sudden shards. A strong wind was blowing up the Thames, whipping my hair into my face, and making the pipe shudder. And it was very high. I once made the mistake of looking down, where I saw Flo wading out to her little floating wreck, and George still standing by his rucksack, staring up at me. They were as small as ants, and it made my hands sweat and my stomach feel as if it was already dropping; so I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes tight shut as I climbed, and didn’t open them again until the top of my head collided with the heels of Lockwood’s boots.

He was leaning out above the dreadful drop, prying and tapping with his penknife at a pane of glass in the window at our side. The lead was old and soft, and soon the pane fell inwards. Lockwood reached in; he fiddled with the metal clasp, cursing at its stiffness. With a final wrench, which made something in the pipe rattle alarmingly, the window swung open. A leap, a shimmy – and Lockwood was through; a moment later he was stretching out to help me inside.

We stood in the shadows for a moment, taking sips of water, and in my case waiting for my arms and legs to stop shaking. There was a dusty smell in the building; not derelict, like the Bickerstaff house, but mothbally and unused.

‘Time, Luce?’

‘Five minutes to twelve.’

‘I’d call that perfect, wouldn’t you? And George will be well on his way to his position now, so long as he hasn’t sunk.’

I switched on my pen-torch and trained it across the empty room. Once, perhaps, it had been a manager’s office. Old notice boards with charts and figures hung silent on the walls. ‘When this is over,’ I said, ‘I think you need to have a word with George.’

Lockwood was at the door, peering out into the passage. ‘What for? He’s fine.’

‘I think he’s feeling left out. It’s always us that does this kind of job, isn’t it, while he has to hang around outside.’

‘We’ve all got our talents,’ Lockwood said, ‘and George is simply less good at this stuff than you are. Can you imagine him climbing up here? That doesn’t mean he hasn’t got a vital role today. If he and Flo mess up their timing, if their boat capsizes, or they don’t find the right windows or something, you and I are quite possibly going to die.’ He paused. ‘You know, this conversation’s making me slightly nervous. Come on, we need to find our way downstairs.’

This floor of the warehouse was a maze of office rooms and connecting passages; it took us longer than expected to discover the brick stairwell in the corner of the building. Time was against us now, but still we went carefully, stopping and listening at every corner. I counted the floors as we went, so as to be able to retrace our steps back to our open window. We’d gone down six full flights before we saw a faint glow extending up the bricks, heard the murmur of voices, and knew we were drawing close to the site of Winkman’s auction.

‘First things first,’ Lockwood whispered. ‘Masks on.’

The balaclavas were essential to protect our identities from the future attentions of a vengeful Winkman. They were hot, itchy, and hard to see out of, plus the wool covered our mouths and made it difficult to speak. Aside from that, it was a joy to wear them.

Pushing open a glass door, we found ourselves on a fenced walkway overlooking an enormous space. It was the cavernous heart of the warehouse and probably stretched the entire length of the floor, though it was impossible to determine its dimensions. Only one small area was properly lit, and that was directly below us. Lockwood and I ducked low; we slunk forwards to the walkway edge to get a better view. From where we knelt, a steep row of metal steps led down to the warehouse floor. We were fairly safe for the moment, for no one within the light would easily be able to see out into the dark.

Winkman, it seemed, liked to keep things on schedule. We had arrived at precisely three minutes past midnight and the auction was already in progress.

Three tall lamps on metal stands had been set up at one end of the hall. They were positioned as if at the points of a triangle, and the area they lit functioned like a stage. Just on the edge was a row of six chairs facing the light. Three were occupied by adults, and three by children. Behind them, in the shadows, two largish, serious-looking men stood like ugly statues, staring out at nothing.

Two chairs had also been placed in the spot-lit space between the lamps, and one of these was occupied by the boy from the antiques shop. He wore a smart grey jacket, and his oiled hair shone softly in the lamplight. He swung his fat little legs back and forth beneath the chair in a bored sort of way as he listened to his father.

Julius Winkman stood in the centre of the stage.

Tonight, the black marketeer wore a wide-breasted grey suit and white shirt, open at the collar. Beside him was a long folding table, draped with a clean black cloth. With a hairy hand he made a delicate adjustment to the little golden pince-nez on his nose as he indicated the silver-glass display box beside him.

‘This first lot, friends,’ he said, ‘is a very pretty fancy. Gentleman’s cigarette case, platinum, early twentieth century. Carried by Brigadier Horace Snell in his breast pocket the night he was shot dead by his rival in matters of the heart, Sergeant Bill Carruthers. Date: October 1913. Blood traces still present. Still contains a psychic charge from the event, I believe. Leopold can tell us more.’

At once the son spoke up. ‘Strong psychic residue: gunshot echoes and screams upon Touching. No Visitor contained. Risk level: low.’ He slumped back in the chair; his legs resumed their swinging.

‘There you are, then,’ Winkman said. ‘Little sweetener before the main event. Do I hear any interest? Starting bids, three hundred pounds.’

From our position high above, it was impossible to see the contents of the little box, but there were two other cases on the table. The first, a tall rectangular glass cabinet, contained a rusted sword – and a ghost: even under the spotlights, I could see the eerie bluish glow, the soft tug and pull of moving plasm. The second, a much smaller case, held what looked like a pottery statue or icon, shaped like some four-legged beast. This too had a glimmer of other-light about it, faintly visible beneath the constraining glass.

Neither of these were what I was interested in, because to Winkman’s other side was a small table, standing separate and alone, where the light from the three lanterns intersected. It was very bright, the focus of the entire room. A heavy black cloth covered the glass case on the table. Piled on the floor below it were heaps of iron chains, and rings of salt and iron filings in ostentatious protective display.

To my ears came a familiar hateful sound: the whirring buzz of flies.

I nudged Lockwood and pointed. He gave the briefest of nods.

There had been progress in the auction. One of the customers, a neat, prim-looking man in a pinstriped suit, had consulted with the small girl sitting next to him, and put in a bid. A second member of the audience, a bearded man in a rather shapeless raincoat, had topped that instantly, and the bids were now seesawing between them. The third of Winkman’s three clients had remained entirely unmoved. He sat half turned away, negligently toying with the polished black walking cane he held. He was a young, slim man with a blond moustache and curly yellow hair. Sometimes he glanced at the glowing cases, and bent to ask questions of the boy at his side; but most often he stared at the black cloth on the table in the centre of the room.

Something about the young man was familiar. Lockwood had been gazing at him too. He leaned close and mumbled something.

I bent closer. ‘What?’ I breathed. ‘I can’t make out what you’re saying.’

He rolled up the bottom of his mask. ‘Where did George get these things? Surely he could afford one with a mouth hole . . . I said: that man nearest us – he was at the Fittes party. We saw him talking to Penelope Fittes, remember?’

Yes, I remembered him, glimpsed across the crowded room. The black tie at his neck could just be seen beneath his elegant brown coat.

‘Winkman’s clients must come from high society,’ Lockwood whispered. ‘Wonder who he is . . .’

The first lot of the auction had been completed. The cigarette case had gone to the pinstriped man. Beaming and nodding, Winkman moved to the cabinet with the rusted sword, but before he could speak, the young blond man had raised a hand. He wore light brown gloves, clearly made of lambskin, or the hide of something else small and cute and dead. ‘The main event, please, Mr Winkman. You know why we’ve come.’

‘So soon?’ Winkman seemed dismayed. ‘This is a genuine Crusader blade, a French estoc, which we believe contains an actual ancient Spectre or a Wraith, perhaps of one of the very Saracens it slew. Its rareness –’

‘– does not interest me this evening,’ the young man said. ‘I have several similar pieces. Show us the mirror we’ve heard so much about, and let us move things along – unless the other gentlemen disagree?’

He glanced across. The bearded man nodded; the man in the pinstripes gave a curt wave of approval.

‘You see, Winkman?’ the young man said. ‘Come! Show us the prize.’

The smile on Julius Winkman’s face did not alter, but it seemed to me that his eyes had narrowed behind the flashing pince-nez. ‘Certainly, certainly! Always you speak your mind openly and honestly, my lord, which is why we so value your custom. Here, then!’ He swung his bulk across to the separate table, took hold of the black cloth. ‘May I present that unparalleled item, that extreme rarity that has so exercised the men at DEPRAC these past few days – friends, the bone glass of Edmund Bickerstaff!’

He pulled the cloth away.

We had been so long in the pursuit of this object that it had acquired in my mind an almost mythic weight and dread. This was the thing that had slain poor Wilberforce, that had struck a relic-thief dead before he even left the cemetery, and killed one of Winkman’s men. This was the glass that everyone wanted – Barnes, Kipps, Joplin, Lockwood, George and I. People had murdered for it; people had died for it. It promised something strange and terrible. I had only caught a flash of it in Bickerstaff’s coffin, but that shiny, crawling blackness remained imprinted on my mind. And now, finally, here it was: and it seemed so very small.

Winkman had arranged it like an artefact in a museum, propped up against a slanting velvet display board. It was in the centre of a large, square silver-glass case. From where we crouched, far above, its exact size was hard to judge, but I guessed it to be no more than six inches across – about the size of a pudding bowl or side-plate. The glass in the centre seemed coarser than I’d expected, scuffed and uneven. Its rim was roughly circular, but brown and bumpy in outline. Many hard and narrow things had been tightly fused to make it. Many bones.

The buzzing sound rubbed at my ears. Two of the children in the audience made little whimpering noises. Everyone sat attentive and stiff, staring at the object in the case.

‘I should point out that you’re seeing it from the back,’ Julius Winkman said softly. ‘The glass on the reverse is highly polished; here it’s rough, more like rock crystal.’

‘We need to see the other side,’ the shabby, bearded man said. ‘How can we possibly bid without seeing that? You’re playing tricks with us here, Winkman.’

Winkman’s smile broadened. ‘Not so. As always, I have only the safety of my clients at heart. You know this object has a certain reputation. Otherwise, why would you be here? Why would you pay the minimum asking price, which I can tell you now is fifteen thousand pounds? Well, with that reputation come dangers. You know there are risks attached to looking in the glass. Perhaps there are wonders too – that is not for me to say – but this cannot be investigated until the item is sold.’

‘We can’t buy on these terms,’ the bearded man grumbled. ‘We need to look at the viewing glass!’

‘Look at the glass by all means’ – Winkman smiled – ‘but not before you’ve paid.’

‘What else can you tell us?’ the small man in pinstripes asked. ‘My backers require more solid information than you’ve given me so far.’

Winkman glanced at his son. ‘Leopold, if you wouldn’t mind . . .?’

Up bounced the boy. ‘The item needs to be treated with extreme care. Quite apart from the dangers of the mirror itself, the bone fragments appear to be a Source for more than one apparition. At times I have counted at least six, perhaps seven faint figures hovering near the object. They project very strong psychic disturbances: much anger and agitation. The mirror surface itself gives off intense chill, and an attraction similar to fatal ghost-lock. Those who look in it are mesmerized, and find it hard – if not impossible – to drag their gaze away. Permanent disorientation may result. Risk levels: very high.’

‘Well, gentlemen,’ Winkman said, after Leopold had plopped down, ‘that is our summary. Please – bring your assistants up and make a closer inspection.’

One by one the audience rose and approached the case, the adults curiously, the children in fear and doubt. They surrounded it, whispering to each other.

Lockwood pulled up his mask and leaned in close. ‘It’s twenty past. Get ready, and watch the windows.’

High along the opposite wall, a row of great rectangular windows faced the night. Somewhere beneath them George and Flo would now be standing, George readying the contents of his bag. They would see the position of the light; they’d know the location of the auction. I shifted from one foot to another, felt the cold firmness of my rapier hilt.

Any moment now . . .

Down below, the crowd pressed closer round the case. The bearded man spoke peevishly. ‘There are two holes drilled through the bone here, near the base. What are they for?’

Winkman shrugged. ‘We don’t know. We believe it may have been fixed to a stand. No one would have wanted to hold it, I feel sure.’

At my side Lockwood gave a sudden soft exclamation. ‘That’s it!’ he whispered. ‘Remember those sticks I saw in the photo of Bickerstaff’s coffin? I was right – they were some kind of stand: something to put the bone glass on.’

‘Winkman hasn’t got it, then,’ I said.

‘Of course he hasn’t. Jack Carver didn’t take the sticks, did he? No, someone else pinched them, after the photo was taken.’ He glanced at me sidelong. ‘I’d say it’s fairly obvious who.’

That’s how Lockwood was sometimes: he liked to throw out tantalizing titbits of information at the most inappropriate times. I would have questioned him right there (and thumped him if need be), but now Winkman was ushering his audience back to their seats. It seemed the bidding was about to start.

Lockwood looked at his watch. ‘Where is George? They ought to have started by now.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Winkman said. ‘Have you conferred with your psychics? If you have no questions, time is pressing, and we must get to the main point of business. As I said, the starting price for this very unique item is—’

But the young man with the blond moustache had raised his hand again. ‘Wait. I do have a question.’

Winkman cranked his smile wider. ‘Of course. Please.’

‘You have mentioned certain supernatural risks. What about the legal ones, rising from the murder of Jack Carver? Word is, Carver got you the glass, and a dagger in the back was what Carver got from you. We’re not too particular about your methods, but this seems a little too public for anyone’s good. DEPRAC is investigating this now, as are some of the agencies.’

The edges of Winkman’s mouth flicked downwards, as if a switch had been thrown. ‘I’d like all you gentlemen to recall the previous business we’ve done together. Haven’t I honoured our agreements? Haven’t you been satisfied with the items that I’ve sold? Let me tell you two things. First – I never commissioned Carver. He came out of the blue to see me. Second – I bought this item fair and square, and I left him in rare good health. I didn’t kill him.’ Julius Winkman put a great hand on his chest. ‘All this I swear on the head of my dear little son, Leopold, what you see as limber as a ferret here. As for DEPRAC or the agencies . . .’ He spat sidelong onto the warehouse floor. ‘That’s what I think of them. Still, anyone who’s fearful is welcome to leave now, before the bidding takes place.’ He stood in the centre of the stage with his arms spread wide. ‘Well?’

At that moment a white light bloomed beyond the window. None of the people on the warehouse floor noticed it, but we, in the shadows, saw it swell and grow, then fade into the dark again.

‘That’s our cue,’ Lockwood whispered. He pulled his mask down.

Down below, no one had answered Winkman. The young man had only shrugged; everyone remained seated.

Winkman nodded. ‘Right. Enough talking. Let’s have your starting bids.’

At once the man with the beard lifted an arm.

And the nearest window blew apart in an explosion of incandescent fire.