Haunted: A Lockwood & Co Story

Chapter Seven: Flying Solo

It turned out the paper that Charlotte found was the ghost's confession - or at least, it was the confession of someone named Arabella Crowley, written in 1837, a date that roughly matched the Spectre's clothes. It seemed she'd smothered her husband in his sleep and got away with it. Her guilty conscience had kept her spirit from its rest: now that the document had been found and her crime revealed, the ghost was unlikely to return.

That was Charlotte's interpretation anyway. Lockwood took no chances. The following morning he had the fragments of the windowpane incinerated in Clerkenwell Furnaces, and he encouraged Mrs Peters to have the wardrobe broken up as well. Slightly to Charlotte's annoyance, he repeated his orders to the girl not to try communicating with Visitors that weren't safely constrained. Of course Charlotte understood why he was so cautious - his sisters fate loomed heavily over him - but to her mind he overstated the risks. Charlotte was increasingly confident that her Talent could bypass such anxieties.

Over the next few days, new cases for Lockwood & Co. continued to come in thick and fast. Lockwood, George and Charlotte continued tackling them separately.

This led to problems. For a start, their hectic schedule meant they had little time to research any job in advance, an omission which was always dangerous. One night Lockwood was nearly ghost-touched at a church near Old Street. He had cornered a Phantasm beside the altar, and almost missed a second one creeping up from behind. If he had read up on the history of the church beforehand, he would have known that it was haunted by murdered twins. That night he had to deal with a distraught Charlotte, who fell asleep on him, tears still in her eyes.

Fatigue was an issue too: George was ambushed by a Lurker he hadn't spotted near Whitechapel Lock, and only escaped by jumping headfirst into the canal. Charlotte fell asleep during a stakeout in a bakery, and totally missed a charred ghost emerging from the oven. The sudden smell of roasted meat woke her up just as it was reaching for her face with blackened fingers, much to the amusement of the whispering skull - which had been watching from its jar, but hadn't said anything.

The narrow escapes bothered Lockwood, who saw it as yet further proof that they were undermanned and overworked. No doubt he was right, but Charlotte was more interested in the freedom that her solitary expeditions gave her. She was waiting to make a proper psychic connection with a ghost - and it wasn't long before she got precisely that opportunity.

Her appointment was with a family in flat number 21 (south block), Bermuda Court, Whitechapel. It was the tower-block case, the one she'd been lumbered with because of the bagsie rule. It had been postponed twice due to client illness, and she nearly had to postpone it due to a trip that she was taking back to Brighton. Chrissy had contacted her about the death of her father and so Lockwood had given her a week to go back to Brighton and deal with the house and funeral.

She told the family that she could make it the night before she left. Lockwood and George were busy with other cases, so she took the skull along. It provided company, of a disagreeable, unsavoury sort. If nothing else, it's jabbering helped keep the silences at bay.

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Bermuda Court proved to be one of those big concrete estates they'd built after the war. It had four blocks arranged around a grassy yard, each with external stairs and walkways running round the sides. The walkways acted as protection against the weather, but also cast the doors and windows of the flats into perpetual shadow. The surface of the concrete was rough and ugly, dark with rain.

As Charlotte had predicted, the lifts were out. Flat 21 was only on the fifth floor, but she was out of breath when she arrived. The rucksack on her back, weighed down by a certain jar, was killing her.