Lapsewood and Tanner made their way east across London on foot, searching buildings on the London Tenancy List for Doris McNally. Travelling as Ether Dust would have been quicker but would have made it hard to hang on to the spirit hounds. Slowly they worked their way down the list, each time sending a dog in first, awaiting its return then venturing in themselves to interview the Resident.
In an Aldwych residence they found a ghost by the name of Mrs Heber, who had died in childbirth and been forced to remain in the house and watch as the daughter who had unwittingly killed her grew up, got married and then died in the same way herself. Mrs Heber sobbed as she explained that her daughter had heard the Knocking upon the moment of her death and stepped straight through the Unseen Door but, imprisoned by the house, she was unable to follow. Lapsewood and Tanner listened patiently to her story, then asked about Doris. Mrs Heber hadn’t seen her in several months.
Lapsewood had been greatly affected by the story and was upset when Tanner revealed that he had pilfered a stick that Mrs Heber had clenched between her teeth during her last moments of life.
‘We’re gonna need a few things to throw,’ he said in his defence. ‘I mean, when we find an infected house, if the dog don’t come out nor will the stick. And it’s not always that easy to find ghost objects. They’ve got to be something the spirit was touching at the point of death.’
The next house they visited proved Tanner right. He threw the stick and sent in the Labrador as usual, but neither returned.
‘Perhaps it came the wrong way out,’ said Lapsewood.
‘I don’t think so. Look,’ said Tanner.
Upon closer inspection, around the edges of the brickwork was a very subtle discolouration.
‘Black Rot,’ said Lapsewood.
‘Certainly seems so. Must be a pretty bad case to be visible from the outside.’
Lapsewood made a note of it on the list, holding the nib of the pen on the paper for a moment, allowing the ink to spread a little before writing i for ‘infected’ next to it.
They continued on their way with the four dogs in tow. As they got further down the list, Lapsewood noticed how the three-legged Jack Russell always walked at the front, and that Tanner routinely pushed him to the back whenever he was choosing the next one to go inside a property.
They lost another dog to a house in a courtyard off Fleet Street that had no visible signs of Black Rot from the outside. In a nearby public house called the Boar’s Head they found the ghost of a former publican by the name of Paddy O’Twain, an extremely welcoming Irishman, as thin as a rake, who offered them both a drink as soon as they entered.
‘A very good evening to you, fine fellows,’ he said, spreading his arms wide as if they were old friends. ‘May I interest you in some fine strong, freshly brewed spirit ale? Finest in the city, so it is. Oh, that all ghosts should know the happiness of imprisonment in a pub.’
Lapsewood refused, but Tanner happily took a glass of the dubious-looking concoction from the man. When Lapsewood pointed out that Tanner was too young for liquor, he brushed off the suggestion, pointing out that since he had now been ten years alive and ten dead he was actually twenty years of age and therefore old enough to partake. However, the moment they left the establishment Lapsewood noticed a decline in Tanner’s ability to speak without giggling and how he took an extremely long time to untangle the three remaining dogs when it came to the next building. Paddy had seen Doris McNally a month ago, but had heard nothing of her since and did not know which direction she had been heading.
In an attic in Eastcheap, they met a poet who insisted they sit and appraise his latest poem before he answer their questions. Tanner had fully sobered up by the time the young man had read all thirty stanzas, but he was polite enough in his assessment of the poem. The poet said he had been visited by Doris a week ago.
‘We are getting closer,’ said Lapsewood, stepping back into the street. ‘Doris must have been heading in the same direction as us.’
‘I wouldn’t trust anything that poet said,’ said Tanner. ‘The man was a fool.’
‘He had some talent with words, though,’ said Lapsewood. ‘I thought his poem excellent.’
‘Really?’
‘You said so too.’
‘I was just being polite.’
‘You didn’t like it?’
‘It wasn’t that I didn’t like it so much as, having sat through him prattling on about the stars and the oceans and the colour of his true love’s eye, I think I’d still be hard pushed to tell you what it was about.’
‘Well, I suppose you had little exposure to such things in life,’ said Lapsewood.
‘OK, if you’re so poetic, then you tell me what it was about.’
‘It was a . . . well, it was a musing on the futility of life, I think, or perhaps on the endlessness of death . . .’
Tanner laughed triumphantly. ‘Just as I thought. Not a clue.’