Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

inscribed into the glass of its sliding double doors. I knew the interior of that office; I’d failed an interview there.
    A smiling boy, no more than ten years old, held out a little cone of chestnuts as we approached. ‘Gift courtesy of Rotwell’s,’ he said. ‘Go safe tonight.’
    ‘We’re not having any,’ Lockwood growled. ‘George, I want you just to walk on by.’
    ‘But I’m hungry.’
    ‘Tough. You’re not walking down the street with one of those cones in your hand. It would be a crime to advertise a competitor.’
    He ignored the boy and stalked on past. Georgehesitated, then took the cone and popped it in his pocket. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Nicely out of sight. I say it’s a crime to refuse free food.’
    We pushed on through the pressing crowd and came out the other side. A few minutes later we had reached a quiet, leafy square a block behind Regent Street. It was dominated by an ugly, brick-fronted building of colossal size. An iron plaque on the door read:
    NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES
    George’s spectacles gleamed. This was his territory; he had the nearest I’d seen to a smile on his chestnut-stained face. ‘Here we go. Keep your voices down. The librarians are picky here.’ He ushered us over the iron line and through the revolving doors.
    I’d never been a big one for reading as a kid. My family rarely had a book in the house, and I’d been apprenticed out to Jacobs almost before starting school. Of course, I had to read in order to complete my studies – you can’t get any of your certificates without a simple written exam – and I’d memorized the Fittes Manual for Ghost-hunters by the time I was twelve. But after that? To be honest I was too busy working to spend much time with books. True, Jacobs had occasionally sent me to the local library to look up historicaldetails on hangings (the region around Gibbet Hill, half a mile from our little town, being a notorious spot for Visitors), so I wasn’t entirely unused to buildings full of printed paper. But the National Newspaper Archives was on a bigger scale than anything I’d seen before.
    The complex had six enormous floors piled about a central concrete atrium. When you stood at the bottom, among palms and other indoor trees, the ascending levels of shelves and racks and reading tables seemed to reach to the sky. A large iron sculpture hung from the domed roof high above, part decoration, part defence. On every level, hunched figures flipped through yellowed newspapers and magazines. Some, perhaps, researched the Problem, looking for clues to the plague that beset us. Others were agents: I saw blue Tamworth jackets dotted about, the lilac tones of Grimble, and here and there the sombre dark-grey hues of Fittes. Not for the first time I wondered why Lockwood hadn’t chosen to clothe us in a coordinated uniform of our own.
    Like me, Lockwood seemed somewhat overawed, but George bustled us along in a confident manner. Within a few minutes he had taken us by lift to the fourth floor, sat us down at an empty desk and, after disappearing for a moment, plonked down the first great grey files before us.
    ‘Here’re the local papers from the Richmond district, forty-nine years ago,’ he said. ‘Annabel Ward disappeared late June. The article I found came out a week or so later.Lockwood, why don’t you start with the July editions? They’re the most likely to be helpful. Lucy, you check the autumn file. I’ll go and get some issues of London Society .’
    Lockwood and I took off our coats and immersed ourselves obediently in the thrill-a-minute pages of the Richmond Examiner . I soon found it contained more local fetes, lost cats and best-kept allotment competitions than I could have believed existed in the universe. There was quite a bit about the Problem too, the nature of which was beginning to be discussed. I found early calls for ghost-lamps to be erected (they eventually were) and for graveyards to be bulldozed and salt-sown (they weren’t: it was far too expensive and controversial; instead they were simply ringed with iron). But I discovered nothing more about the hunt for the missing girl.
    Lockwood and George – who was flipping through the glossy black-and-white photos of the society magazine – were having a similar lack of luck. Lockwood grew restless; he looked sighingly at his watch.
    Shadows fell over my page. Looking up, I discovered three people standing by the table, watching us with ill-concealed