The Other Side of Midnight Read Online Free PDF

impressed me. You are not a con artist as I suspected. You are honest. You are, in fact, the ideal candidate. You knew Gloria. You can talk to her friends, her associates without suspicion. You can move in her world in a way that no one else can—especially me. And you specialize in finding lost things.”
    “I don’t talk to the dead,” I said, panic in my throat.
    “Perhaps you don’t, though I’m well aware that your mother did.” He caught the look I gave him. “It’s hardly private record, and I told you I researched you. Perhaps you’re correct and Gloria’s notewas wrong. But you have a talent, a sensitivity. I may not understand it, but I don’t have to in order to make use of it.
You
are my investigator, Miss Winter.
You
will find who killed her for me.”
    I leaned my head back, looked up at the sky. The usual London gloom had vanished, and I looked into a vista of cerulean blue punctuated by far-off clouds. The usual protests bubbled up in me: I wasn’t trained as an investigator; it wasn’t my profession; I would have no idea what I was doing; I already had a job. “I don’t work for you,” I told him, still staring up at the sky. “I have no access to coroner’s reports or papers from Scotland Yard.”
    “You’ll have what you need,” he said.
    Of course. I rubbed my nose, unladylike. “Did your research tell you that we were enemies, Gloria and I? Did it tell you what she did to my family? That I hadn’t spoken to her in three years?”
    “If that mattered, Miss Winter, you wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
    I hated her. Or I had, at one point. But I thought about that knife, the cold dispassion of it. Someone had slipped it between her ribs and stopped her heart as easily as if they’d put a key in a lock. Someone who hadn’t even cared enough to hate her.
    Still I kept my head tilted back and I stared at the sky. It was beautiful, and endless, and uncaringly cold. Mysterious in its way. All the mysteries of the universe were just above us, if only we would look up. And yet we never did.
    “Miss Winter?” George said. If he thought it strange that I sat on a bench in Trafalgar Square staring at the sky, he made no comment.
    “The papers,” I said at last. “Scotland Yard. No one is asking the right questions. No one.”
    He sounded almost relieved. “How many of your appointments did you cancel today?”
    I finally lowered my gaze, righted my head, and looked at him. “All of them.”
    He nodded, and his eyes gleamed, whether from satisfaction or excitement I could not tell. “Exactly,” he said.

CHAPTER FOUR

    M y mother had been a spirit medium since before I was born. She’d been orphaned by age twenty, her parents of artistic vagabond stock, and she’d set up shop doing séances and performing spirit writing. It had been a better way to earn money than char work, she told me, as long as you were careful about it. And she had been good. Very, very good.
    My father, a young postal clerk from a good family, had met her in a pastry shop and fallen in love with her. He didn’t care what she did for a living. It was only after they’d married and settled in the house in St. John’s Wood that my mother bought the beaded dress, had the sign painted for the window, and began business as The Fantastique. She stopped doing group séances, which had a taste of seediness to them, and replaced them with discreet one-on-one consultations. It was her stab at respectability, at trying to appease the neighborhood for my father’s sake without giving up her work. I learned from my earliest years to be quiet when Mama was working.
    And she did keep it respectable, remarkably so. Her client list was discreet and carefully chosen; as a child I watched well-dressed men and women of obvious class and money come and go from our little house. We got appointment requests from well-trained assistants and underlings. I became accustomed to the sight of a sleek carriage—or, increasingly, a