Chapter Text
The first case was a Phantasm in early June, and the thing that made it special was the phone call.
The case itself was easy. The client, a Ms. Julie Patterson, called on a Wednesday. She was a neat woman, with brown hair carefully pulled up, her glasses balanced precisely on her nose, and her shoes worn but not muddy. Lockwood wasn’t sure if the faint lines around her eyes were from worry or laughing.
“Well, my nephew came over last week,” she said, fiddling with the edges of her skirt. “Not alone, I mean. My sister brought him. And he’s not yet one, but—he cried. The whole time. And especially in the back garden. He just sobbed and sobbed. My sister had never seen him like that.”
“Had anything happened in the garden recently?” Lockwood asked. “Anything of note? Any… signs of a manifestation?”
Ms Patterson fretted a little before she answered. “Oh, I’ve no sense for that sort of thing.” Lockwood pulled back, allowed George to take the spotlight.
“Any cold spots? Sense of dread in any one place?”
“No, none at all. Except…”
“Except?” Lockwood pressed.
“Except we had a tree pulled down two months ago,” she admitted. “And ever since, the wind’s been able to come up more. Less coverage, you know.”
And sure enough, George pulled two deaths from the archives for the property. They’d barely needed the research; Lockwood could see the deathglow by the time the sun was set, faint though it was. The hardest part of it was the digging.
Ms Patterson had watched from her kitchen window, and had served them tea and chocolate biscuits afterwards, ever so grateful. She’d protested when they’d had to leave, making worried mutters about the darkness and the state of the neighborhood. Before they left, she pressed an extra 20 pound note into Lockwood’s hand, her dark eyes blinking behind her glasses, and he’d swallowed, allowed it. The money had burnt a hole in his pocket the whole ride home, until he’d handed it over to Jake.
But the call that had come after—that was what mattered.
Lockwood had called dibs on first shower, given that he was covered in dirt. He laid on his bed in clean pyjamas, feeling both exhausted and jittery with energy—the case had ended early, but the case had ended. Across the hall, George clomped from his room to the bath, and the water started up again. Lockwood laid and listened. The apple tree tapped against his window as the wind brushed against its leaves. The pipes groaned a little as George’s water flowed. And somewhere in a house, the phone started ringing.
Lockwood stopped, listened—and yes, he was pretty sure it was the phone. Slowly, he sat and pivoted on his bed. Pulled his dressing gown off the hook, and stepped out onto the landing. The ringing was louder there. There was a drop in Lockwood’s stomach as he headed down the stairs, and he couldn’t tell if it was anxiety or adrenaline, if he was hoping for another case that night or not.
He picked up the line, and it was not a case at all.
“Lockwood and Co.”
“Hey,” she said. That was all.
For a second, he didn’t recognize her—and then it clicked. He leaned against the kitchen door frame, clinging to some sense of normality, and found he had almost nothing to say. “It’s past business hours,” he settled on eventually.
There was a little hitch of laughter in her voice, he was pretty sure. “What ‘prestigious agency’ closes doors before midnight?”
She had gotten their number from the newspaper advertisements, then, like she’d said she would. It wasn’t late enough in the night for Lockwood to puzzle that out. He’d probably be thinking about it four hours later. “Lucy Fittes,” he said, and clonked his head against the doorway. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“…You still have something of mine,” she said. “And—well. I heard something about the Streatham Common?” and Lockwood had to resist the groan that was bubbling up in his chest.
“Hm, this is news to me.”
“Is it? Because I heard that there was a Rotwell team, a beekeeper, and you—“
“Lies, all of it,” he said, and she laughed fully.
He tried not to feel too triumphant about it. But he’d never heard her laugh like that before.
Maybe it was the phone lines. Maybe it was that it wasn’t even a new day yet—she only had one laugh to give every day, and every other time Lockwood saw her, she’d already given it up. She still had one for the day when it was nearing 11, and she’d decided to grace him with it—the laugh of Lucy Fittes, worth its weight in social gold. Regardless, she’d laughed.
Lockwood knew exactly where he was. He knew the pattern of the wood that made the floorboard beneath his feet, knew where it became the edge of the carpet. He knew the street outside; he knew what it looked like in every season and every time of day. He could’ve built the walls of Portland Row himself, he knew them so well. But he’d gotten a phone call at 10:45 at night, and now it felt like the world was spinning out around him. He had lost all sense of direction.
“Why were you calling?” he asked now, and he pressed the back of his head harder against the door frame as if it would stabilize him. It didn’t. “Really.”
“…Who else would I have called?” asked Lucy, her voice barely above a whisper, and before Lockwood could find his feet again, there was the click of her phone hanging up.
He held the phone for a long time before he dropped it back in the cradle. Rubbed his thumb along the ridged edge, swallowed around the still minty taste of toothpaste in his mouth. It wasn’t yet 11. Lockwood should’ve been trying to sleep. A floor above, the water switched off, and he could hear George humming to himself as he got ready for bed. In the unlit hallway, Lockwood stayed gripping the handset until he could hear George no longer—until the laughter of Lucy Fittes no longer rang in his ears—and then he climbed the stairs to lie down in his parents’ old bed.
He didn’t fall asleep for a long while, but then again, he was never one for sleep.
There was a haunted cafe in Highgate, and it took Lockwood and George two nights to solve it.
It wasn’t that it was a particularly large cafe, or a particularly pernicious spirit. But the young customers at the cafe had reported hearing whispers in addition to the malaise and cold spots, and Lockwood and Co. had no Listener. In the end, they had to enlist the aid of Skivvy from the Night Watch, and after she’d tracked down the Source to a shrieking espresso grinder, they’d finished with it in half an hour. But Skivs had come at the end of her shift, as dawn was nearing, and it was almost 6 am before George and Lockwood had unlocked the door to Portland Row.
“Jesus Christ,” said George as they stood in the front hallway in the burgeoning light of the morning, and that about summed it up.
Lockwood waved him off to bed—he had a sinking suspicion that George would go straight there, and that his sheets would end up covered in a fine layer of ground coffee beans—and went downstairs to get started on the invoice. The first light was breaking through to the office just as it was in the front hallway. On mornings when Lockwood woke early, which were most mornings, he could see the first early risers passing by the ground windows as he practiced his footwork. It was still a little ways off from that, but the light was enough to see by. Lockwood leaned back in his chair and contemplated rest, and as he did, the phone rang.
There were any number of reasons why the phone could’ve been ringing. There were any number of clients, former or future, that could be on the line. Lockwood lifted it from the cradle, gave his name, and it was like the world settled into itself when he heard her voice.
It didn’t matter what she said, when it came down to it. He barely even registered the words. For the last week and a half, he had been thinking about her voice in his hallway. If it had been a dream, it was more trouble than it was worth. If it had been real, then Lockwood had questions to fill the Thames.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked with more exhaustion than charm, and he realized that she may have no desire to see his questions answered.
“Felt like calling.” She said it quietly before she cleared her throat, and busily she continued, “I wanted to schedule getting that thing back. You know the one.”
He had a headache, dull behind his eyelids. Probably he should’ve gone to drink water—probably he should have hung up then and there and gone to bed. He didn’t. He stood up from the desk, kept the phone pressed close to the shell of his ear. Crossed the practice floor to reach the rapiers and contemplated their silver handles in the slowly growing light. “I’ll be honest, it’s—” He resisted the urge to laugh, and then he stopped resisting and let it huff out anyway. “It’s a busy week.”
She hummed, and Lockwood abandoned the rapiers in their rack to wander back to his desk. “I know the type.”
“You’re calling early.”
“I, um—“ She was the one to laugh now, without humor but self-effacing. “Woke up. You couldn’t—?”
“Just got off a case,” Lockwood admitted, and sank back in his desk chair to the sound of her exhale.
“…You once asked me how many cases I go on, lately,” said Lucy, and for the life of him, Lockwood couldn’t remember it.
“Did I?”
“A while ago. Yeah.”
“I don’t…” He couldn’t find a good way to admit his ignorance. “How many is it?”
She laughed again without enjoyment. “Not many.”
“You miss it?”
The longing her voice could’ve been heard across much worse phone connections. It could’ve been heard across oceans. “Yeah.”
“You miss all of it?” he asked, and now when she laughed, there was a little joy to it.
“Alright. Not all of it.”
“Because personally, I am exhausted of having to make conversation with George. We don’t have anything new to talk about these days. We’ve said it all already.”
“You’ve made your point,” and she let out a single momentary giggle; it was undeniable.
And Lockwood had spent two nights sleepless in Highgate, and he had espresso powder deep in the crevices of the soles of his shoes, but dawn was breaking in Marylebone and Lucy Fittes was laughing as she called him. Lucy’s voice sounded different on the phone; not just staticky, but lower, smoother. The Northern flow in her voice was smoothing out—it had been fading, Lockwood realized, since he first met her. He could only hear the London in her over the telephone lines. She sounded, he thought, a little like Penelope Fittes.
But when she laughed, it was the same as that first night he’d met her.
“We should find another time to get that thing back to you,” he found himself saying. “You should—call again. Sometime not this week.”
“Yeah,” she said, and Lockwood wondered where she was calling him from. If she was looking out a window at the oncoming morning, if she was already dressed and prim and proper or if she was still ruffled with sleep. If she was still smiling, as she spoke to him. “Yeah. When I—get the chance.”
It was a big old house on a street of big old houses, and the owner was an absolute jackass. “We don’t have a ghost,” he’d told Holly when he’d first called about the case, and when Holly had told them about it, she’d managed to communicate the equal parts of disdain and flippancy in his voice. When Lockwood and George had arrived at the house, it hadn’t been much better. “My wife is paranoid. You’re going to spend two hours here before telling us we need a new plumber,” the owner said snidely, and Lockwood’s smile had frozen into tepid politeness as he’d guided him to the door.
The client had gotten their number from a referral of a referral, and Lockwood planned on billing him out of house and home. George had a day and a half to come up with something. He found about eight possible somethings of different origins, but it was enough for them to be prepared for anything, and Lockwood was prepared to leave the instant it got too much to handle.
They didn’t end up leaving. The ghost was a Poltergeist, and it locked the doors behind them. It was only through George’s quick thinking and Lockwood’s good aim that they made it out of the house alive. There were casualties—three vases and a nasty slice across Lockwood’s thigh, right through the fabric—but there were always casualties.
On the front step as they waited for the cab, George looked over at him with his hair falling across his face and his eyebags like smears of ash. “Well. We did it.”
Lockwood looked back at him and smiled despite the cut on his leg. “Another successful case.”
“I’m not sure I’d call that one successful.” And George had turned back around to face forward, and he didn’t say another word throughout the whole long cab ride home.
Lockwood was bandaging his leg by himself in the kitchen, in dress shirt and boxers with antiseptic in hand, when the phone rang. He didn’t greet her by name, but he knew who it was.
“Is this a good time?” was her opener, and Lockwood looked down at the bottle of iodine and then his bare legs.
“As good a time as any.”
She was quiet on the other end as he returned to his seat, and Lockwood was once more cleaning the skin around the cut when she said, “This thing next month. Are you going?”
As she asked, he misjudged the angle of the cotton bandage, and a little iodine hit the open wound directly. Through gritted teeth, he said, “You’ll have to be a little more specific about what thing. I’m simply drowning in invitations.”
“Are you sure this is a good time?” she asked instead of clarifying.
The wound was clean enough to slap a bandage on. “Fine. Just—we had a case.”
“If it was a good one, you’d probably be less…”
“Less?”
“…In pain? …I’m assuming.”
He closed the first aid kit and restored it in its place amidst the potato cupboard. “I’ve had worse.”
Lucy’s voice went momentarily distant, and the vowels got a little longer. “We used to get workers’ comp at my old job, when we got injuries.” Then it returned to its normal state. “Course, the cost of first aid got taken out of it.”
“My old boss…” Lockwood began, and cleared his throat. “He used to threaten me with the NHS, if I was complaining about any injuries. Always said he’d send me to sit in a hospital waiting room for six hours when I insulted his wound dressings.”
“I assume you pull the same move on Karim?”
“He’s a big boy. He fixes himself up.” Lockwood weighed the odds of George being asleep already—unlikely, if the last year and a half had taught him anything—and pulled out a pan from the bottom cupboard and bacon from the fridge. “How well-stocked is the Fittes’ first aid department? Stolen any lollipops?”
“It’s basically a tuckshop,” she agreed, and the laugh that came was unbidden and so sudden that he couldn’t tamp it down. It was the smile that lingered, really, even as he set the stove on and unwrapped the bacon, keeping the phone tucked between ear and shoulder.
“Are you—opening a package?” Lucy asked, and Lockwood set the first piece down in the pan.
“Making dinner.”
“It’s nearly 3 in the morning.”
“I’m getting the impression we keep very different schedules.”
“What are you making?”
“Dinner.” Again, he couldn’t stop the smile.
“What are you making for dinner?” she asked, and maybe there was a hint of a smile in her voice, too, as she asked it.
“You ever had a bacon butty?” he asked.
“Yes,” and she was smiling, she definitely was.
“Well, you’ve never had one of mine.” And then, because he thought it might make her laugh, “I just flipped the bacon up from the pan to the air and caught it again, for the record.” She did laugh. Immediately after, she called him a liar, but she did laugh. “Bet you believed it for a second, though.”
“Hardly.” There was a flippancy to it, like that old familiar Fittes disdain, but Lockwood couldn’t see the angle of her shoulders—couldn’t quantify any amount of disregard through the phone line without setting eyes on her. Three seconds ago, she’d been laughing like they were in on the joke together. He let the word pass without stinging and got out two plates.
“You called,” he said softly, “about something.”
“I did.”
“What was it?”
She let him change the topic. “…There’s a party. For True Hauntings’ 300th issue. If you were going, you could give me back that book.”
Like it was a paperback he’d borrowed; like she hadn’t caught him stealing it out of Fittes in the middle of the night. “I don’t know if I will.”
“Right.” That was all, until she cleared her throat. “Right, well, I didn’t have any other reason for calling.”
“Alright,” Lockwood said, and stared down at the pan of bacon in front of him.
“Good luck with all the—pain,” she told him, and her soft exhale was the last thing on the line before it ended.
“Thanks,” he said into the dead connection, and he was left to continue his sandwich making with the phone resting next to him on the counter.
Lockwood left George’s plate in front of his door with half a package of digestives and a knock. George didn’t say anything about it, but the next morning, the empty plate was sitting conspicuously in the sink and the biscuit wrapper in the bin. Lockwood let it slide and did the dishes.
In the very beginning of August, he put on his suit and he slicked back his hair and he went to a party.
Fittes’ book sat heavy in his breast pocket. It hadn’t been noticeable when he’d looked at himself in the mirror, hadn’t ruined the line of his suit at all. What had been noticeable was the lack of color in his cheeks, the narrow line of his shoulders, and the gaping size of his eyebags. Generally, Lockwood didn’t think much of his appearance. His hair did what he wanted it to most of the time, and he recognized his reflection when he smiled at the mirror. But today, he stared silently at himself through the glass and watched his reflection’s jaw clench before he left it behind.
In a change for the norm, the party was brightly lit—almost blindingly lit, as Lockwood and George stepped through the doors and into the wide lobby of the venue. The floodlights hanging from the second floor balcony left the lower lever exposed and the upper in shadow, and over it all blared music with too heavy a beat.
“This sucks,” said George in Lockwood’s ear, barely distinct over the noise of the crowd and the speakers, and Lockwood turned to see his barely-repressed grimace.
“You didn’t have to come,” Lockwood near-shouted back, and George pulled further away to yell,
“You’re not the only one with objectives to meet!”
And on that cryptic note, they got drinks. For maybe half an hour, George stayed at Lockwood’s shoulder as he did the rounds. He eventually disappeared for a few minutes, returning briefly to slip a napkin of finger food directly into Lockwood’s pocket before disappearing again.
It really was an awful party. In the corner, a man stood endlessly switching out records, but no one was dancing. The music would’ve been good if it was 20 decibels lower. As it was, it left Lockwood with an earache and a disappointment in synthesizers. With the stark lighting coming from every upwards angle, there were no shadows to be found except in the peaks and valleys of the faces of revelers.
Lockwood finished his first drink, started another—it lessened his headache but couldn’t quell the itch between his shoulder blades, the uncomfortability of his own skin. His dress shirt, one he’d worn countless times, felt too tight around his neck. He caught sight of George once in the crowd, talking with someone Lockwood was pretty sure was one of the magazine’s reporters. George’s expression was tense, but it’d been tense a lot recently.
The music blared. Lockwood couldn’t reach the end of his second drink—deposited it on one of the endless cocktail waiter’s trays as he slipped past, and then ten minutes later he got another one anyway. He retreated upstairs to the balcony, where the floodlights didn’t reach, and stared down at the crowd below. He could see George’s curls—could make out the bald spot of the cousin to a Clerkenwell Furnace magnate, and the pristine updo of a Times reporter, all in the blinding white glow. The partygoers’ clothes were garishly bright; a woman laughed and it carried up to where he stood leaning against the rail. Lockwood’s drink dangled between his palms, hanging over above the crowd. For a second, he considered the moment between it leaving his hands and reaching the floor—the instant of silence, despite the music, before it shattered.
“Bit of a different crowd than usual,” said Lucy Fittes from beside him, and Lockwood pulled his drink back behind the safety of the railing.
“Less geriatric,” Lockwood agreed.
“I was going to say louder,” Lucy said, but she was agreeing with him. Lockwood let himself look at her fully. She looked back at him, and in the darkness of the upper level she looked less like Lucy Fittes and more like a stranger. She considered him back, and then barely audible over the music, she said, “You wanna—?”
Lockwood inclined his head, and silently Lucy led him across the balcony to an alcove of doors—stairwell, storage closet, and a bathroom. The third one, she pushed open, and when Lockwood stepped through she locked the door behind him.
Unlike downstairs, the bathroom was dimly lit, but brighter than the space right outside the door. It wasn’t large—two stalls and three sinks—but at the entrance there was a miniscule sort of sitting room with a full-length mirror, three lit candles, and a chaise lounge in a shade of mossy green. Lockwood blinked at it, bewildered, and set his glass on the candle table as Lucy came around to face him.
Her dress was a deep red, nearly purple, and her shoes left her an inch or two taller than she usually was. Her eyeliner was black along the lower edge of her eyelashes, and that was what had made her look unfamiliar to Lockwood as they had stood along the balcony—he’d never seen her wear it like that before. The smudge of it clarified the hazel of her irises.
“I didn’t notice you coming in,” he said, because it had been itching at him.
Her expression did not waver. “Back door.”
“By yourself?”
“Kat and Ned are downstairs.” Of course they were—there was no possibility of Lucy Fittes being at an event without an entourage.
“I’ve got—“ Lockwood started and unbuttoned his suit to pull out the slim book he’d taken from Fittes months ago. Lockwood had had it sitting on his dresser gathering dust. They both looked down at it in his hands, and when Lucy looked back up at him there was the uplift to her mouth.
“Thanks,” she said, like she meant it, and carefully she took it from his hands and opened her purse to slide it in. Their fingers brushed when she did, and Lockwood wondered at the rapier calluses still evident on her skin.
“Yeah,” said Lockwood, and he found his voice hoarser than intended. He should’ve been thinking about the bright lights of the room on the other side of the door, soon to be returned to. He should’ve been returning to it already. What he shouldn’t have been doing was self-flagellating with thoughts about the unsmooth skin on Lucy Fittes’ hands, and yet he was.
“Lockwood,” Lucy said softly. She hadn’t moved in position, still standing between him and the chaise lounge—that stupid chaise lounge, and what was it even doing in a bathroom to begin with?
“Yeah?” he breathed.
And she stepped forward and placed one hand on the back of his neck, and her palm was a contrast of soft and rough. She kissed him so fast he didn’t have time to comprehend it—it was his head leaning down, her body curving up towards his, and he could hear distantly outside their door the thumping bass line of the song playing on the floor below. Lucy’s mouth was soft but the pressure of it was insistent, and Lockwood matched it beat for beat, reaching one hand around to pull her closer.
The last time he’d kissed her, it had been silent on a Soho Street—two seconds, no longer, and it had played on a loop in Lockwood’s head in the intervening months. Before that, it had been in his front hallway, brief and frantic. Now, she backed up and he pushed forward, and together they made a controlled fall onto the chair. The upholstery was velvet against Lockwood’s palm as he caught himself above her, and she broke away for a moment.
She looked—lovely. Gorgeous. Prettier than Lockwood had remembered, imagining her across London and through the phone lines, and there was a pleased curl to her mouth as she looked up at him. She touched her thumb to the side of his lips, and a smile flickered briefly.
Lockwood’s heart seized momentarily in his chest, and he dropped his head back down to kiss her once more.
It was heady, kissing her like this. There was no urgency to it—no party to notice her disappearance. The only people who’d care were Kat Godwin and Ned Shaw, and Lockwood didn’t give a damn about what they might think or what she might’ve told them. There was just her mouth moving against his, her arms wrapped around his neck. Her body, a careful distance below his. All night, Lockwood had felt outside of his skin. In this dimly lit bathroom with the world outside the door, it was like he’d settled. Like his body was returning to equilibrium.
And at that thought, he broke away. Lucy blinked at him, once. Her lipstick had smeared—he had smeared it, as he always did.
“Lockwood,” she said softly.
“It’s—George,” said Lockwood blindly, and lifted himself off the chair. “He’s downstairs.”
“Lockwood,” she said again, and he grabbed his drink off the table for lack of anything better to do with his hands. Her hair was ruffled—he’d ruffled it, at some point, had tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “You should—“ She gestured to his face.
He looked in the mirror. She got him a napkin from her purse, and slowly, he cleaned the color of her mouth off of his own.
“See you around,” she said quietly and pulled herself upright to sit against the wall. Her skirt fell against her thighs—her thighs, Lockwood thought, and took a sip of his drink. The alcohol was a bite in the back of his throat, and it washed the taste of her out of his mouth.
“See you, Fittes,” and when he pulled open the door to the bathroom, the music hit him like a slap to the face.