I looked down at my lap. She’d told Davies everything would be fine. And then she’d left George a note saying, Tell Ellie Winter to find me.
“Have you heard from Gloria’s brother?” I asked her.
Davies snorted, her grief receding for the moment. “That tweed? No, and why should I?”
“He came to see me.”
“To see you?” She shook her head. “It’s more than Gloria ever got from him. From any of them. Not that she cared.”
“What about James Hawley?”
Now her gaze sharpened. “Don’t tell me he came to see you, too.”
“Something like that. He seems to be investigating Gloria’s death.”
“Well, aren’t you popular?” Davies took a drag of her cigarette, thinking. “I wonder what he’s up to. I thought he only investigated psychics, not murders. I hear he drinks too much, or he used to. He’s still doing his little experiments on psychics as far as I know, trying to disprove them.”
“When did Gloria last see him?”
“Months. Years, perhaps. They didn’t have much to do with each other after that paper he wrote about her.” She shook her head. “They didn’t even speak when that reporter dug it up again. Gloria laughed at that—some reporter digging up the ‘only proven psychic’ angle. Though she said that paper was better off buried.” Her eyes shuttered, and she looked uneasily away.
So she did feel something about the incident with my mother. Perhaps even Davies had a conscience. “So, they weren’t friends.”
“God, no. They weren’t even lovers, at least from what Gloria told me. He’s handsome enough, but Gloria was hands-off for some reason. They were all business. Though if he’s sniffing around now, in my opinion we should be asking where he was that night.”
I frowned. If James had murdered Gloria, would he have resurfaced, claiming to be looking for her killer? He had never seemed the violent type to me, but I didn’t trust him. I had learned that from bitter experience.
“Look,” Davies said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’d love to chat with you all day, even though I never liked you and you haven’t been here in years. But why don’t we get down to business? I assume you came to see Gloria’s flat.”
I hesitated. It was why I had come, of course, along with questioning Davies, but now I wasn’t so certain. The idea of pawing through Gloria’s personal things seemed suddenly distasteful. “It’s rather soon. It needn’t be today.”
“I disagree.” Davies raised her gaze to mine. She’d ditched her maudlin emotion, practically the only emotion I’d ever seen her evince, and now her look was steely. “I think it most definitely should be today.”
This was why I avoided Davies. She wasn’t a psychic, but she knew all of our secrets. She knew everything. What she was unmistakably telling me now was that I should go to Gloria’s flat and use my abilities to pick up information. I was capable of it, and she knew it perfectly well.
I hadn’t planned to use my abilities. I didn’t want to. I was used to using my powers in my sitting room during appointments with approved clients, just as our rules dictated. Working within one’s own place not only controlled the physical aspects of a session—the objects touched, the people present, the smells, the level of light—it controlled the supernatural ones as well. Controlling my abilities—so I wouldn’t see the dead on every bus and street corner—was one of the first things my mother had taught me.
“Objects aren’t my trick,” I said. “I do my sessions by touching hands. You know that, Davies.”
“You could do it if you tried,” she said.
“Perhaps not.” I gave her a look. “Perhaps I’m a skimmer.”
Davies only shrugged. “I suppose you could be. I don’t really know, do I? You have a pedigree, but we all know what happened to that. Perhaps your mother simply passed down her bag of tricks.”
I felt a flash of unbidden anger at that, and she saw it. She smiled.
“You could be a skimmer,” she continued, “but Gloria never paid attention to skimmers. She knew a skimmer—like that old fraud downstairs—the moment she saw one. And she thought you were the real thing. Though I don’t suppose she liked you much, did she?”
“The feeling was mutual,” I snapped. Davies always could provoke me. “What she did was dangerous. Talking to the dead isn’t a game.”
“Certainly not one you ever wanted to play,” Davies said, rising from her couch and shuffling for the door, dropping the stub of her cigarette in an ashtray. “God, talent is wasted on some people. Come upstairs, Mary Pickford. I want to see if you’ll play it now.”
I watched her, my nerves tight and my temples beginning to throb, but she’d already opened the door and started up the stairs to Gloria’s, her mules clacking softly on the worn, thin stair runner. There was nothing for it. I got up and followed.
CHAPTER SIX