Chapter Text
My employment at Lockwood & Co had been off to a bit of a rough start. But when we weren’t locked up by murderous millionaires or chased down by sadistic antique dealers, I had settled in nicely. Our recent cases being much more mundane — as mundane as psychic investigations ever go — we had become a well-oiled and well-functioning machine.
On some nights, we just clicked, working together smoothly and seamlessly: Lockwood’s derring-do attitude and lightening-quick reflexes, George’s methodical research and overall brilliance, my powerful Listening skills. Sometimes, the skull also threw in useful advice, as soon as the ghost stopped threatening to disembowel us with a teaspoon. On those nights, Lockwood’s not-so-secret ambition to win the Times of London’s ‘Agency of the Month Award’ didn’t seem that far-fetched. The Dark Spectre in Epping Forest and the haunted lift at Canary Wharf had already earned us a bit of press coverage. We often returned pumped up and proud in the morning, ready to toast our success with fresh orange juice and to decorate the thinking cloth in honour of the occasion.
This morning was … not one of those. ‘A Type One Stone Knocker — bollocks!’ George snarled. For the umpteenth time, he failed to polish his smeared specs on his mess of a shirt, making them even dirtier. ‘That was a Screaming Spirit, if I’ve ever heard one. One haunting a bloody drainpipe.’
Normally, I’d have given his arm a reassuring squeeze. As things were, I gave him a wide berth. George had borne the brunt of the sewage explosion, years — if not decades — of oozing gunk blowing up in his face.
‘What a glorious sight that was,’ the skull cackled. ‘Serves Karim right for always poking and prodding and putting his pimply nose where it doesn’t belong. This memory will keep my poor old bones warm on many a cold winter’s night …’
Sighing, I massaged my throbbing temples. For Listeners, any Screaming Spirit was the worst. This specific one had been pretty angry and pretty vocal about it. It hadn’t helped that I’d left the iron circle to better understand what it was yowling. My body ached from the roots of my hair to the tip of my toes, and someone was trying to scrape out my innards with an ice-cream scoop. (The skull would have approved.)
Five more minutes to walk, maybe ten, to catch the first Tube home. No night cab had wanted to pick us up, on account of their leather seats, and so we were limping along a half-deserted Whitechapel street at dawn. With the grey light creeping up on the horizon, other people — normal people — dared to leave their homes and go about their business. Unfortunately, this meant I didn’t want to risk taking out the ghost-jar to shut the valves down and the skull up. The constant jabbering wasn’t improving either my mood or my headache. Nor was George’s constant grousing.
‘Why don’t you go and retrieve the Source from a clogged pipe next time, Lockwood? Why do I have to do your dirty work?’
‘My apologies for holding a hostile Type Two at bay, mate,’ Lockwood said with an uncharacteristic scowl. He wiped a sticky hand across his forehead, liberally smearing his hairline with half-caked blood. I hoped to God he’d kept up with his tetanus shots.
‘You know what? Next time, I’ll take the plumbing and the flying bits of shit, and you’ll take the rapier work and the flying bits of rusty metal. Nearly took out my eye.’
I sighed again. This was going to be a ‘three new creative swearwords’ case, insults being flung over breakfast with abandon. ‘Boys,’ I muttered under my breath, conveniently forgetting the f-bombs and graphic cartoons I’d contributed to the thinking cloth myself. At least, we would be home soon, clean and cosy and well fed, and the day could only get better, right? Wrong.
The steady drumbeat in my head turned into a wild percussion solo that made me want to throw up. Then, I realized I hadn’t had my fill of unpleasant surprises involving bodily fluids yet. The re-arranging of my innards had given way to a dull, familiar ache: I had started my period. Five days early, and on the same morning I’d tempted fate by putting on a pair of baby-blue leggings (now lightly sprinkled with brown) and a cropped jumper.
Gritting my teeth, I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist. Lockwood and George stared at me. Our breaths showed as puffy clouds in the air, and the greenish glow of the ghost-lamps threw my goose pimples into stark relief.
‘Everything all right, Luce?’ Lockwood said. ‘Bit nippy today, isn’t it?’
‘You’re going to catch your death. And with our caseload, we can’t afford that,’ George chimed in. ‘I know your jacket’s looking sort of gross, but honestly, I caught most of the crap for you. You can thank me later.’
‘Just drop it,’ I mumbled. Though I might have been grateful for their concern, I wasn’t in the mood for this discussion, for bleeding obvious reasons. Which meant, of course, that. They would not. Let it go.
‘I’m on my period, okay? You two work out the rest!’ I shouted when we finally reached Stepney Green station. I probably scared off the few commuters who hadn’t fled yet from the stench.
‘Gee, Lucy, yell a little louder, why don’t you? I don’t think they’ve heard you in Shoreditch,’ George said with the horrified expression of a teenage boy who’d grown up with three older brothers. Lockwood shrugged off his coat and wrapped it around my shoulders. It was very long and very warm, and it smelled of the smoke from our salt bombs, of his familiar body spray, and only slightly of sewage.
‘Look who’s freezing now,’ the skull said. ‘Bet the skinny twit’s shivering is all manly and chivalrous, though. Tons of people perished from pneumonia in my day and age — now there’s a thought …’
I dumped the silver jar on the side table in the hallway the moment we came home. It could keep the crystal skull lamp company, two peas in a pod. ‘Someone’s being tetchy today,’ the ghost snickered after me. ‘I wonder why.’
My attic room greeted me with a lukewarm shower, an unmade bed full of biscuit crumbs, and blessed silence. The Polaroids of Norrie stared down at me as I slipped into my comfiest pyjamas. ‘Miss you,’ I whispered. ‘Just be glad we didn’t have to share a house with the lads back at Jacobs’, ugh.’
Sometimes, I wished I wasn’t the only girl at 35, Portland Row. Today, for example. Or when I tripped over Lockwood’s smelly plimsolls in the middle of the rapier-training room. Or when George fished my one nice lacy bra out of the laundry basket like an entomologist inspecting an exotic bug in the jungles of Sumatra. Or when Lockwood shared his strange nuggets of wisdom. ‘That’s what girls are like.’ — ‘Girls do that sort of thing, you know.’
‘Where does he get his ideas from?’ I asked a grinning Norrie, who clearly found them as ridiculous as I did. Lockwood was such a workaholic. I hadn’t seen him go on a single date with a girl. Or anyone else, for that matter. (Swapping gossip and information with Flo Bones at the Hare and Horsewhip didn’t count.) Most of his social life consisted of the occasional board game night around our kitchen table. Or he hung out in our library, flicking through back issues of The Tatler and London Society, while I was working my way through Agatha Christie’s oeuvre.
Recently, it had occurred to me what Lockwood was trying to say with his musings on the female of the species. ‘That’s what my sister was like. Jessica used to do that sort of thing, you know.’ I thought about lost girls with freckles and flaming-red hair, about long-gone girls with dark braids and Lockwood’s smile. With my head still pounding, I fell into an uneasy sleep.
When I woke up to a sunny autumn afternoon and a faint echo of my headache, I mentally rescinded my complaints about my flatmates. There was a tray with a pot of tea, a hot water bottle, and a plate of Jaffa Cakes on the landing outside my room. ‘Dropping Source off at furnaces,’ a note in Lockwood’s neat handwriting read. ‘You two have day off. G says there’s leftover biryani in fridge.’
I could have hugged them, drainpipe stench notwithstanding, or kissed them, smelly plimsolls and all. Munching on two biscuits at once, I went in search of my latest whodunnit and my tape recorder. A whole day to myself was such a rare treat that I intended to do absolutely nothing productive. ‘Hey, Norrie,’ I said, settling back into bed. ‘We’ll find out at last who committed the murder on the Orient Express…’
In hindsight, I should have savoured every single second of this afternoon. It was one of the last beautiful days before the worst winter in living memory. One of the last good days for Lockwood & Co, before everything started going to shit.