Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

platform.
    During the trip George had been flicking through the Latin dictionary. As we went up the escalator, he took his pencil out of his mouth and made a last notation on a scrap of paper.
    ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ve done the best I can. It’s Tormentum meum, laetitia mea , right? Well, tormentum means “torment” or “torture”. Laetitia equals “joy” or “bliss”. Meum and mea are both “my”. So I translate the inscription in our locket as “My torment, my bliss”.’ He snapped the dictionary shut. ‘Not the healthiest of love messages, is it?’
    ‘Fits exactly with what I sensed,’ I said shortly. ‘It wasn’t a healthy relationship. It veered between extremes. Half the time it was sort of happy, half the time eaten up by jealousy and hate. And that’s what triumphed in the end.’
    ‘Don’t think about it any more, Lucy,’ Lockwood said. ‘You’ve done your bit. Now George and I will do ours. How long do you think it’ll take us at the Archives, George?’
    ‘Not long,’ George said. ‘We’ll go back to the local newspapers, starting at the date where I left off. If there’s any more about Annabel Ward – whether they ever arrested anyone, for instance – we should find it straight away. Then we can check the gossip magazines too – it said she was a society girl.’
    We left the station and started up Piccadilly. Afternoon light lanced steeply between tall buildings; we walked from bright sun to blue shadow and back again. It being late autumn, preparations for evening were already under way. A salt-spreader pushed his cart along the roadside, scattering fresh grains left and right like snow. Outside the big hotels, attendants filled braziers with bunches of dried lavender ready for burning; others polished the ghost-lamps hanging above the doors.
    I let my bruised muscles stretch out as I walked; it was nice to feel my strength returning. Lockwood was limping slightly, but otherwise full of zest. He’d removed the bandages from his ghost-touched arm to let the sunshine bathe his skin. ‘If we can solve this old case,’ he said; ‘if we can uncover the murderer and get justice for the girl, it’ll be brilliant publicity. It’ll totally offset the fact that we burned that woman’s house down.’
    ‘And help us save Lockwood and Co. into the bargain,’ I said.
    ‘That’s the hope . . .’ He steered past a man offering tourist maps of the ‘safe zones’ of the city and ignored the entreaties of an iron-seller. ‘But only if we get good cases, and get them soon.’
    ‘You realize DEPRAC will be working on this too,’ George pointed out. ‘It’s never their priority, but they do investigate old murders, if they happened within living memory.’
    ‘All the more reason to act fast,’ Lockwood said. ‘OK, let’s cross here.’
    We ducked out across the road, stepping over the open drain, or ‘runnel’, of running water that separated the pavement from the tarmac. The wandering dead were known to dislike moving water; consequently narrow runnels crisscrossed many of the great shopping streets in the West End, allowing people to walk in safety well into the evening. Earlier governments had hoped to extend this system across the city, but it had proved prohibitively expensive. Aside from ghost-lamps, the suburbs fended for themselves.
    Up a side-road, under a great stone arch and out onto the sweeping curve of Regent Street. Not far ahead, a stand had been set up on the pavement. Flags fluttered above a cheery blood-red canopy. On each flag reared a gold heraldic lion, and an ornate letter ‘R’.
    ‘Ooh, look,’ George said. ‘Hot chestnuts! Who wants some?’
    A group of boys and girls in dark red jackets were ranged around the stand, giving out free sprigs of lavender, salt bombs and sweets to passers-by. Roasting chestnuts popped and crackled on an open brazier; an acned youth with a giant scoop stood by to tip them into paper cones. The agents’ hair was carefully brushed, their swords polished, their faces scrubbed and smiling; all seemed to have been pressed out of the same anaemic mould. They were representatives of Rotwell’s, the second oldest psychical agency in London and, thanks to its publicity campaigns, by some distance the most popular. Behind the stand, set back a little from the road, the central Rotwell office rose – a vast, smooth-fronted edifice of glass and marble. Snarling lions, holding rapiers in their forepaws, had been