𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞┃ Anthony Lockwood┃2┃

Chapter Twenty One - Working... Together?

"THE OUTBREAK! I'VE CRACKED IT! I KNOW WHERE IT BEGAN!"

The following morning, George had made quite the dramatic outburst, which echoed energetically throughout Number 35's walls. The group congregated in the kitchen; the heart of the house.

"It's amazing what you can get up to, if you lie awake in bed. It's such good thinking time. I've been working with the maps, and the documents Kipps gave me – you know, the ones that list all the Visitor encounters in Chelsea over the last few weeks. And I've been doing a lot of ferreting in the Archives. But it's only when you lie there, and let the information settle in your mind, that you start to see the pattern."

"'And you have?" Lockwood asked.

"Oh yes, I see a pattern now."

Breakfast time, and they were at the kitchen table. But the bowls and jam jars and sticky fragments of toast had been cleared away. They were suited and booted and ready for business, and there wasn't a dressing gown or rumpled T-shirt to be seen. Holly Munro, coming up from her early morning vacuuming of the office, had caught the expectant atmosphere. She produced newly baked honey biscuits from a tin and set them in the centre of the thinking cloth. They all had mugs, tea and, in George's case, a manilla folder stuffed with documents. Everything was set for him.

"Lockwood, can you just pass over tea towel?" Nola asked the boy who sat on the dining chair beside her. "I've just spilt a bit of tea."

Lockwood stretched a long arm over to the kitchen counter and plucked the checked towel between his fingers. He passed it to Nola. "There you go, love."

Nola smiled, blushing, as he adjusted to his previous position in the seat; coolly laid back, with one arm resting on the chair back, and his other hand upon her thigh underneath the table.

George was silently grinning at their interaction. Holly was, too.

George opened his file and selected the topmost paper. This he unfolded and pushed along the table to the others. "Here." He said. "What do you think of this?"

It was a map of the Chelsea district, very similar to the one behind Barnes's desk, only festooned with George's indecipherable pencil scrawls. There was the Thames, there was King's Road, and there were all the hauntings that had taken place over the last few weeks. Unlike the DEPRAC map, George hadn't colour-coded them. Each was marked with a neat red circle, dozens and dozens of them. In some areas, the streets were almost completely obscured by overlapping dots, which merged together like spreading stains.

They stared at it.

"Well..." Nola said at last. "It's spotty."

"Yes. I looked a bit like that once." Lockwood remarked. "When I had chicken-pox. George, I'm sorry. I can't make out anything there."

George adjusted his spectacles and grinned. "Of course you can't. Which is just one of the reasons why poor old Barnes has got things so wrong. So – this is a summary of every supernatural incident that's been recorded in Chelsea up until a couple of nights ago. Impossible to see a pattern, I agree. The only thing you can hope to do is pinpoint the geographical centre – that's Sydney Street – and hunt there. But we know that's been a red herring."

He paused to take one of Holly's biscuits. The fragrant assistant was listening to George with rapt attention. They all were. Despite his untucked state, his slouching posture, despite the apparently leisurely manner with which he dunked the biscuit in his tea, excitement crackled around him like forked lightning. The charge had built up in him over weeks of solitary work; now it sprang into all of Lockwood & Co unbidden. He pointed at the map with a stubby finger. The others leaned helplessly forward.