𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞┃ Anthony Lockwood┃2┃

Chapter Twenty Nine - Decisions

"And what about Inspector Barnes' quote?" George added. "What was it again? 'A group of talented young agents that I'm proud to oversee.' Can you believe his nerve?"

Lockwood crunched the cucumber. "As always, Barnes follows his own agenda."

"He's not the only one." George gave the paper a prod. "I'm not sure if I approve of Kipps getting equal billing with you here."

"Oh, that's just to keep him sweet. To be honest, we do owe him for supporting us, and it's paid off for him now. Did you hear he's been promoted? Section leader or something, wasn't it, James? You're the one who told me."

Nola nodded subtly. "Yeah, Fittes division leader." She said. She couldn't really bear to look at him, not when she knew what thoughts were swirling around in her head.

"That's it. Awarded by Penelope Fittes herself. Still, that didn't prevent Kipps from having a massive fight with me about the way we handled the Room of Bones at the end. He was furious that the Rotwell team got there before anyone from his agency."

"Well, you didn't tell them to go in, did you?" George said.

"No. I don't know who did, actually. I suppose it must have been Barnes..." All at once, Lockwood fixed Nola with his dark eyes. "Are you all right, James?" He asked.

"Yes! Yes..." He'd startled her. She'd been drifting. Just for a moment, the living Lockwood, sitting at the table, cutting himself a piece of Holly's trendy delicatessen cheese, had been lost, hidden beneath the gory, white-faced apparition of the underground room...

She blinked the mirage away. It was fake! She knew it was. She knew it was a lie. She had seen Lockwood himself slice the Fetch in two just as cleanly as he did that cheese.

But try as she might, Nola couldn't shake her mind clear.

I show you the future. This is your doing.

"Have a piece of Parma ham, James." Holly said. "Lockwood likes it. It'll really put the blood back in your cheeks."

"Er, yeah, sure – thanks."

Holly and Nola? They'd adopted a mutual policy of careful toleration. Over the last few days, for want of anything better, they had kind of muddled by. They still silently riled each other. Holly's new habit of sweeping up crumbs around Nola's plate while she was eating, for example, irritated Nola. Meanwhile, Holly was less than chuffed by Nola's (justifiable) habit of rolling her eyes and gasping aloud whenever she did something especially finicky, precious or controlling. But, things didn't threaten to ignite the way they once had. Perhaps it was because they'd already said everything there was to say, that awful night at Aickmere's. Or perhaps it was simply because they no longer had the energy to be furious any more.

"Speaking of the Room of Bones..." George said as he moved his plate of ciabatta crusts to one side. "I'd like to show you something, courtesy of the noble thinking cloth." In front of him was his diagram, multi-coloured and carefully inscribed. Imagine a square with a circle inside it, and inside that circle nine precisely arranged dots. Right in the middle of that, another small circle, cross-hatched in black, with several thin, spidery pencil lines radiating from opposite sides of it like broken bicycle spokes. On one side of the circle stretched a long red stain.

George smoothed out the cloth. "This is my plan of the room, taken from the measurements Flo and I noted down the other day. James and Lockwood were absolutely right. Someone else was here, and they were doing something very specific. Look how the skeletons were pushed back to form a kind of perfect circle around the edges. I know they weren't originally like that because I found bone fragments in the centre of the room. Someone carefully arranged them that way. They then rigged up nine candles in a ring: the wax marks show how these were positioned. After that, something happened in the middle of the room, right here." He pointed to the cross-hatched circle. "It's an ectoplasm burn. I studied it particularly closely. The stones there were still very cold. The burn reminds me of others we've seen, where something otherworldly came through."