The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(17)
In all this we sensed the hand of Penelope Fittes. She wanted to keep close tabs on us. Still, it was Lockwood & Co. she was dealing with. We weren’t easily cowed.
When the random DEPRAC visits happened, for instance, the scene they found at 35 Portland Row would be as follows: George would be at the sink in the basement trying to scrub ectoplasm out of his jeans. Lockwood would be in his dressing gown, hair ruffled, palely sipping a mug of tea and making notes on the Visitors disposed of the night before. Holly and I might be slowly sorting through a mess of kit, or stacking Sources ready for transport to the furnaces. In short, it was a picture of weariness and discipline; of a tiny agency functioning successfully, but at full stretch. The representatives would look at our casebook, take copies of our recent invoices, ghost records and client reviews and, after enjoying tea and biscuits and a boatload of Lockwood’s tousled charm, head on their way.
Once they’d gone, we’d shut the door, lock it, and get on with the things we were really doing. Outwardly we kept up a facade of ordinary, small-scale cases. Beyond that, we had an agenda of our own. This double life had its challenges, and each of my colleagues coped with it in their own way.
Holly met it as she did all obstacles: with brisk efficiency that looked a problem in the eye and didn’t blink. Whether it was breaking into the Fittes Mausoleum or standing up to interrogation in the street, she always maintained her trademark Munro cool. It was hard to imagine her ever losing this quality, and somehow, despite everything, that made me confident that nothing really dreadful could or would happen in this world. Her unflappable demeanour used to make me seethe, yet now I found it a source of reassurance. Come what may, I knew Holly’s hair would swish like gossamer as she walked; her clothes would flow effortlessly round her curves; her skin would glow with that same coffee-coloured lustre that spoke of close association with mineral water and green-bean salads, and contrasted, reprovingly, with my famous burger-and-biscuit complexion. No, Holly would always be the same, and that made me happy.
George’s steeliness was of a different sort. To strangers, it might have seemed that he had none. He was too soft, too scruffy, too dishevelled. If he’d ever knowingly shared a room with a hairbrush, there was precious little sign of it. His doughy, featureless face lacked signposts to a personality, let alone a strong opinion. Even those enemies who knew of his fame as a researcher saw this quality as something negative. They thought him a passive absorber of information, a shuffler of papers; someone better wedged safely in a study chair than facing supernatural terrors in the field.
In this, as in everything, they were entirely wrong. George’s researching prowess, his ability to tramp from library to library, spending endless dusty hours hunting for the smallest clue, was based on ferocious determination and an iron will. If he hunted for something, he found it; if he found something, he clung on like a terrier and shook it until all the relevant facts fell out. He was relentless. He took the mystery behind the epidemic of ghosts as a personal affront, and the more pressure the Fittes Agency exerted to stop us from investigating it, the deeper George dug in. He would not be denied.
And then there was Lockwood. Lockwood, most of all.
He was the centre around which we revolved – all of us, even Quill Kipps, our former rival and new associate; even Flo Bones, the terror of the tide-line, one of the most outstanding relic-women of the city, at least in terms of smell. Mostly unnoticed among the ghost-filled streets of London, Kipps and Flo both went about quiet errands on our behalf. They did so because Lockwood asked them to, and that was enough.
The secret to his pull, and of his resilience in the face of the Fittes Agency’s spying and intimidation, was his combination of enormous energy and otherworldly calm. Few things fazed him; he remained coolly detached, absorbing pressure with a tilted eyebrow and a small wry smile before translating it into swift, sure action. Ghosts had always felt the brunt of his forcefulness; now he brought the same qualities to bear on his living enemies. In so doing he galvanized his friends, even as he kept us all at one remove.
Or perhaps not everyone.
Of all of us, he confided most in me. We’d always been close, but since my return to the company five months earlier, we’d become closer still. We spent more time with each other than ever before. We worked together, we laughed a lot. I felt comfortable in his presence, and he in mine; it was clear to both of us, I think, that we found greater peace and pleasure in each other than in anyone else. That was the good news.
The bad news? I wasn’t quite sure why.
Our journey through the frozen land of the dead, shielded by a single spirit-cape, had marked us both for ever and separated us from our friends. No one else could properly imagine what we’d seen. Memories of it still disturbed our nightly dreams. It had taken weeks for our physical energy to return. My hair was flecked with white; there were grey twists in Lockwood’s fringe. In fact, so overwhelming had this journey been that it cast a shadow over everything that came afterwards. And it was sometimes hard to know, while standing in that shadow, whether the changes between us had been caused by this, or perhaps by other things.
So, the way Lockwood gazed at me, the flashes of vulnerability in his eyes, the looks we shared, quietly, when the others’ backs were turned – on what, exactly, was that intimacy based? On us, pure and simple? On who we truly were? Or on the aftershocks of one overwhelming event, on the experience we’d shared?