Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

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 themorning 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 hehad never married, and had no