The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(48)

George took a sip of tea. ‘See? Even then, right back at the beginning of her career, Marissa was interested in gaining control over life and death. I think that, somehow, she’s succeeded.’

‘Sounds like nonsense to me,’ Kipps said. ‘The transformative power of ectoplasm? What’s that when it’s at home?’

Lockwood was frowning. ‘There’s nothing about any of this in her published writings, is there? She doesn’t talk about plasm being “immortal stuff”, as far as I can remember.’

‘No,’ George said. ‘She goes all quiet about that. Which is why I’m particularly keen to track down this missing “monograph” of hers. It’s taken me months to get so much as a sniff of it. But today I think I cracked it.’ He gave us a look of triumph. ‘This morning, in a remote library, I found a reference to something called Occult Theories by Anonymous. It doesn’t have Marissa’s name attached to it, but it was privately printed in Kent at about the correct time, and I bet it’s the one. Only three copies are known to exist. One is in the Black Library at Fittes House; one was bought by our old friends at the Orpheus Society for their private reading library; and one went to the Spiritualist Museum in Greenwich. The first two are obviously inaccessible, but I reckon I could blag my way into the last. In fact, I intend to, later this afternoon. If I can find this paper, it might just help us piece a few mysteries together.’ George sat back in his chair. ‘I’ll try, anyway.’

There was a general buzz of congratulation at this news. The only exception was the skull in the jar, which yawned and blew its cheeks out in cruel mimicry of George, but no one paid any attention. We all took more biscuits.

Lockwood opened a fresh pack of digestives. ‘This is great,’ he said. ‘If we can complete our picture of what Marissa’s been up to, we can go back to Barnes – or the newspapers – and make everything public. All we need is concrete proof.’

George nodded. ‘And we also need to connect it to the wider Problem. I think I’ve cracked that too.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s a story of forbidden acts that takes us back more than fifty years.’

‘Pass me a pillow,’ Kipps said. ‘This is going to take hours. I can feel it.’

George pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Oh, well, if that’s the way it is, Kipps, I can certainly keep it short and sweet. Here’s my analysis: I think Marissa Fittes and Tom Rotwell are to blame for the Problem. There. That’s it. The end.’ He gathered up his papers and tapped them into a neat pile.

Lockwood grinned. ‘All right, George. I’m sure Quill didn’t mean to sound so wearily contemptuous of all your hard work. Did you, Quill?’

‘No. It was purely coincidental.’

‘There. See? Everyone’s happy. George, have another jammie dodger and fill us in.’

‘OK,’ George said. ‘Well, we all know that Fittes and Rotwell started out as two psychic researchers in Kent. I’ve been through all the local papers. They’re first mentioned sixty years back, doing investigations here and there. As we’ve seen, no one took them seriously. A few years later, that had changed.’

‘Because of the Problem,’ Holly said. ‘It had begun to spread.’

George nodded. ‘Yep, and here’s the critical detail. The way you read it in Marissa’s Memoirs, the Problem was suddenly on the march, and Marissa and Tom were the only ones fighting it. Gradually their methods became accepted. Salt, iron, rapiers … The whole range of agency techniques started with them.’

‘Some famous cases,’ I said. ‘The Mud Lane Phantom, the Highgate Terror …’

‘Precisely. The whole Fittes myth begins here.’ George sat back in his chair. ‘But there’s another way of reading the data – and to do this I had to map out all the places where Marissa and Tom were at work. What it shows is that those famous outbreaks – in other words, all the new ghosts that started cropping up – follow Marissa and Tom’s movements. If the two of them are active in a certain area, new hauntings tend to be reported soon afterwards. And that can’t be a coincidence.’

‘So you think they were doing things to stir the ghosts up?’ Holly said.

‘Yep.’ George regarded us. ‘And what do we know for sure really stirs ghosts up?’

I looked at Lockwood; a shadow had passed over his face. ‘Visiting the Other Side,’ I said softly. ‘You think Marissa and Tom were doing this, all those years ago?’

‘Yes, though maybe Marissa found it easier than Tom. I’ll tell you why later.’ George tapped one of the folders on the table. ‘As Lucy says, everyone knows the cases they investigated. They were a team for four or five years. But then – very suddenly and acrimoniously – they split up. No official word on why. Almost immediately, Marissa starts her own agency. A couple of months later, Tom Rotwell starts one too. And their companies have been rivals ever since.’

‘Until now,’ Lockwood said, ‘with Penelope in charge of both.’

‘We met Rotwell’s grandson a few months back,’ George said. ‘What was he doing? He was making a gate to the Other Side. Remember all the paraphernalia he used? The stolen Sources, the clumsy armour the Creeping Shadow wore … It must have been years in the planning. It was big-scale stuff – big, but awkward too. It smacks of someone who knew what he was about but was doing it the hard way. I think he was trying to copy something that his grandfather and Marissa had once done.’