‘Are you trying to give me a heart attack?’ Abe collapsed against the wall, grey-faced in the weak moonlight and panting. He cast Lil a grim look.
‘I was scared! You scared me,’ hissed Lil, jabbing an accusing finger at him.
‘I scared you! What were you doing hiding here in the shadows?’ He punched himself in the chest. ‘I’m lucky the old ticker didn’t stop right there.’
‘I wasn’t hiding, I was just standing still, wondering where everyone was, because you didn’t answer,’ Lil fired back. ‘I was calling for you.’
‘Because, Wing Nut, I thought we were supposed to be sneaking around so I was trying to keep what we in the business call a “low profile”!’ He shook his head. ‘That’s the last time I let you carry the torch; you left me for dust back there.’
‘Take it,’ said Lil, shoving it into his hands. ‘It doesn’t work anyway.’
Abe twisted the end and the bulb flickered back to life.
Lil scowled. ‘Well, it didn’t work before.’
A quiet voice interrupted them. Nedly was standing at the end of the corridor. In the darkness he seemed to emit a pearly glow and his large eyes looked like hollows. Lil ran up to where he had been standing just in time to see him melt through a heavy wooden door.
She wiped the soot off the plaque and then snatched the torch out of Abe’s hand and shone it on the inscription.
‘“Dr Hans Carvel – Chief Consultant”. Abe! Look at this. The murdered prison doctor, Carvel, worked here at Rorschach! That’s how Owl knew him.’ She tried the door but it was locked fast. ‘Can we get in?’
Abe pulled out his skeleton key attachment and after a few moments of fiddling with the lock he gave up and shoved the door open with a shoulder barge.
It was like a room that had been asleep for a hundred years, and was coated with thick dust and strung with spider webs. Lil choked on the pungent mustiness. The thick door had protected the room from the worst of the fire and any draughts of fresh air that might have entered it. A green mummified apple sat on the furry grey surface of a once-polished desk. Lil gave it a poke and it disintegrated into powder.
She turned to a series of grey-metal filing cabinets leaning against one wall. The labels on the drawers indicated that they contained records for the patients and the staff that lived and worked at Rorschach. She stepped back while Abe jemmied the lock open with one of the pincers of his driving attachment and then held out his hand to get the torch back.
Lil pretended she hadn’t seen the gesture and tightened her grip. Angling the beam into the cabinet she rummaged in the staff files following her hunch.
‘Carvel worked here; maybe some of the others did too. Kreutz trained as a nurse. I’ll bet she’s in here.’ She pulled out a file. ‘There! So that just leaves you, the mayor and McConkey without a connection to the asylum.’ Lil flicked through the alphabetised files until she reached ‘M’ and pulled out the file triumphantly and began scanning it.
‘I’ll bet McConkey was a security guard here too, before the fire,’ Abe said quickly, before Lil had a chance to.
‘Wrong!’ said Lil. ‘He was an orderly.’ Abe ground his teeth and held up his hands as if to say what’s the difference? But Lil was on a roll. ‘So it looks like all three people who were killed last week were survivors of the original fire. So …’ She gesticulated frantically. ‘Maybe Owl was finishing the job he started when he torched the asylum all those years ago!’
Abe brought her back down to earth. ‘Nice theory, but where do I fit in?’ he said flatly. ‘I’ve never had anything much to do with the asylum or Leonard Owl. Anyway, as I recall, four members of staff survived the original fire, so how come he stopped at three?’
‘What makes you think he’s stopped …’ said Lil darkly. ‘Maybe they’re next on the list?’
‘Maybe it’s not Leonard Owl at all … maybe those fires were accidents and the victims having worked at Rorschach is a coincidence.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
Abe shrugged. ‘At the moment all we’re doing is hypothesising about the existence of spirits and poking around in an old building. I’m not sure what I believe any more.’
Lil pulled out Leonard Owl’s file. It was yellowed and mouldy with age. At the beginning was an admittance form, and attached to that was a photograph. She held it out to Nedly.
‘This was the one you saw, right? It’s Leonard Owl.’
Nedly craned his neck round, trying to get a look at it.
‘Sorry,’ said Lil. ‘I forgot.’
She turned the picture round again and held it up.
Owl’s hair was silver-blonde, his face pale except for the shiny pink scar tissue on his chin and neck, which made his jaw look separate from the rest of his face like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He looked no more than fifteen years old and his grey eyes were melancholy and apologetic.
‘That’s him, but he’s older now.’
‘Nedly has given us a positive I.D. on Owl,’ Lil told Abe.
‘Right.’ The detective looked ominously around trying to pinpoint the alleged ghost’s position in the room.
‘He’s right behind you.’
Abe jumped. He shot a furious glance over his shoulder as the hair on the back of his neck pricked up. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve.
‘Don’t be angry with him. He’s not trying to scare you.’
‘Who said anyone is scared?’
‘He can’t help giving people the creeps. It’s part of his – condition.’
‘Him being dead, is that what you mean?’ The torch bulb flickered and the air turned a few degrees colder.
‘It’s not a nice feeling,’ Lil said in a quiet voice, ‘when people don’t believe in you.’
Abe nodded to himself. ‘Don’t I know it.’ He sighed. ‘Look, let me get this straight. You’re saying that Leonard Owl, a ghost, has been starting fires and burning people to death all over the city. And you think that when Ned Stubbs, or Nedly, stumbled across him hiding out in this asylum, he killed him too?’
‘Correct!’ said Lil, thinking: At last!
‘So, what are we going to do about it?’
‘We stop him. We bring him in!’
Abe gave her a long, hard stare filled with meaning. Lil frowned back at him and then released her eyebrows. They rose sky-high as the gravity of the situation finally dawned on her. ‘We can’t stop him,’ she said in a small voice. ‘We don’t know how.’
‘Correct.’
‘There must be a way.’ She looked helplessly at Nedly but he wasn’t listening. Lil dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘There must be. He killed Nedly.’
‘No,’ said Nedly. ‘He didn’t.’ He was staring at one of the pictures that was hanging on the wall. Grey splotches of damp had sprouted in the corners of the frame and the glass was smudged and dusty. It was a group photograph of the staff sitting in rigid formation on the lawn area in front of the asylum. The lawn was clipped short and smooth like a bowling green and rambling roses grew on either side of the steps. All the staff were wearing white uniforms.
Lil moved closer to him.
Nedly’s face had grown pale, his skin so thin he was almost translucent.
‘He did it. That’s the man who murdered me.’
Nedly pointed at the photograph, past the neat line-up of doctors. Lil wiped away the dust and then shone the torch at the smeared glass. There, standing on the steps behind the staff, was another man. He was not part of the official group but he was looking into the camera anyway. ‘Him.’
He was pointing at a man with deep-set colourless eyes and a hairless brow, a man wearing the blue tunic of an inmate. His hands were held patiently together, and there was a thin covering of wispy hair on his head.
There was something familiar about him; Lil had seen his picture before: on a mug shot in Abe’s Lucan Road Mob file, and on the back of a book. His face might also have been stuck on the map at the Mingo, but the thick black cross marking him out as ‘deceased’ would have disguised him. ‘Cornelius Gallows!’ she exclaimed. ‘Abe, Nedly says that he’s the man who killed him!’
Abe shook his head at the photograph. ‘Gallows is long dead.’ His gaze pointlessly searched the empty space by the wall. ‘He died in the fire along with Leonard Owl and more than twenty other inmates.’
‘Gallows was alive when I saw him just a year ago,’ Nedly insisted. ‘He was alive when he killed me, and so was Owl. He can’t have died in that fire.’
‘Did they ever find Gallows’ body?’ Lil asked Abe.
‘He was burnt to a crisp. Maybe beyond recognition,’ he admitted.
Lil yanked open the drawer of patient files A–G and flicked through from the back. She pulled out a thick cardboard wallet and thumbed through the papers inside.
‘Here,’ she said eventually. ‘This is the last dated report in the file.’
PSYCHIATRIC REPORT BY
DR HANS CARVEL, RORSCHACH
ASYLYUM, PELIGAN CITY
on the case of CORNELIUS GALLOWS
The patient has been diagnosed as a psychopath with extreme narcissistic tendencies. Cornelius is generally quiet and distant but has been subject to sudden rages. In group sessions he has voiced paranoid delusions about myself and Dr Lankin stealing his research ideas. Undoubtedly he has a brilliant mind but absolutely no morals, no ethics, no compassion.
His record shows few disturbances since his committal and no disciplinary procedures have been initiated. However, Dr Lankin has asked me to record that Cornelius is beginning to exhibit a concerning degree of influence over a fellow patient, Leonard Owl. Leonard is impressionable and eager to please and has been regularly observed to be watching Cornelius attentively as if seeking approval.
‘You know what I think?’ said Lil. ‘I think they were in league together. Maybe the reason we can’t find a link is that you weren’t on Owl’s list, you were on Gallows’, along with the rest of the Lucan Road Mob. They betrayed him, you put him away and Carvel kept him locked up.’
Abe nodded.
‘So maybe Owl is doing this out of loyalty. Or because he thinks that’s what Gallows would have wanted.’
Abe rubbed at the stubble on his chin. ‘I could buy that. He was a fairly messed-up boy; I don’t expect being a ghost has made him any saner.’
‘Now, where exactly do you fit into all this?’ Lil pondered, looking at Nedly.
‘Come on,’ he said miserably. ‘There’s a room we haven’t been to yet.’
Lil and Abe followed the ghost of Ned Stubbs as he walked slowly down the corridor, as if he was re-enacting his part in a macabre play. When he reached the door that said ‘Treatment Room’ he put out his hand and it swung open before him.
In the centre of the room was an upright wooden contraption that looked like an electric chair, with a beaten metal head-cap and wires along the arm rests. Sitting on the chair was a horrible woollen toy.
‘Wool!’ breathed Lil.
‘It was here,’ said Nedly. ‘This is where I died.’
They entered the room in silence. The atmosphere was oppressively sad. Lil walked over to the chair and picked up the toy that rested there.
‘That’s what I was looking for,’ murmured Nedly.
‘Did you find him?’ asked Lil.
Nedly nodded slowly.
Wool, Babyface’s knitted humpty, was the most sinister toy Lil had ever seen. It had no mouth or nose, only round, staring white felt eyes, one of which had become partly unstuck and hung down like a wink. A tuft of black woollen hair sprouted from the apex of its head. It had thin knitted arms and legs, which were joined to the egg-shaped body like chipolatas on strings. At the end of each limb someone had sewn a little silver bell.
Lil picked it up by one leg, using the tip of her finger and thumb, and held it at arm’s length to examine it with her torch. Wool twirled like an aerial acrobat, a topsy-turvy pirouette, and as it spun the little bells tinkled. The sound travelled away from them to a very dark place in between the eaves and the scorched rafters.
Then they heard it. A small voice, muffled at first but growing louder. Someone was crying; it was a whimpering, sobbing noise that filled the empty corridors.
‘No!’ Nedly gasped in a voice too quiet for anyone to hear.
Lil snapped her head round to look at him. ‘Nedly?’
He was staring at the door with a look of pure dread. ‘Someone’s coming,’ he said.
‘We shouldn’t have come here …’ began Lil.
‘It’s too late,’ whispered Nedly.
Then the sound of crying stopped and the laughing began.