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Winter could help me, and you’re just a pleasant surprise.”
    Pete cocked an eyebrow, and crossed her legs primly at the ankle. “What seems to be your problem, Mr. Naughton?”
    “Please,” he said. “It’s Nicholas, or Nick.”
    “Nick, then,” Pete said, tapping her pen irritably against her chin. “The question stands.”
    Jack pinched out the end of his smoke and disappeared it back into a pocket. “Here’s how it works, Nicky boy,” he told Naughton. “You give us your story of old Gran knocking about up in the attic, waking the baby and frightening the missus, we take care of the problem, if you’re not just jerking us off, and you pay. If you
are
jerking us off, well . . .”
    “What Mr. Winter is trying to say,” Pete said, reaching over and whacking Jack on the knee with her notepad, “is that we take this seriously and we expect you to as well.”
    “My family owns a country home in the Dartmoor forest,” Nick said. “It’s always been a spooky, dank old place since my brother Danny and I would summer there as children, but lately . . .” He sighed. “It’s not right there, Miss Caldecott. I live in the city home, taking care of Mother, and Danny . . . well. Danny was in charge of the estate.”
    Jack watched Nick Naughton’s mask peel away in layers as he talked, the charm and the breeding and the manners stripping back to reveal something thin and desperate, the kind of deep fear that only people who had touched the Black and not understood it possessed. Naughton may be a ponce, but he wasn’t lying.
    Pete’s pen scratched away, ever the Detective Inspector. “And you and your brother each witnessed phenomena at your estate?”
    “Voices,” Nick said quietly, as if he were relaying bad news. “Cold spots, writing on the wall, sooty handprints that appear and disappear. Laughing. Danny’s always been the drinker, the odd party drug or two, so at first I thought he was getting worse. Then I saw and heard it—them—too.”
    “Right,” Pete said, scratching notes absently along the margins of the pad. “This is how we conduct an investigation, Nick: we’ll need access to your estate to do some research, and we discuss payment when we’ve determined what we’re dealing with. Should you want us to proceed with an exorcism, or if more investigation is needed, payment is half up front and half when the case is . . . resolved. Plus a retainer now.”
    “And you might want to let your brother know we’re coming,” Jack said, “in case he wants to set up the bleeding walls and rattling chains in advance.”
    Pete mimed stabbing him with her pen, but Naughton didn’t rise to the bait.
    “There’s no need of that,” he said. “Danny hanged himself two weeks ago from the crossbeams in the attic. He’s dead.”

Chapter Seven
    After Nick Naughton finally quit the flat, leaving behind a check for five hundred pounds and the key to his family’s Dartmoor estate, Jack watched a crow land on the wires outside the flat block and stare at him with one black, reflective eye.
Psychopomps
, his treacherous rote memory recited.
Harbingers of death and war. Ushers to the Land of the Dead.
The crow preened its feathers and tucked its head down against its breast. It could ferry souls to the Bleak Gates, but now it was content to merely stare a hole through Jack.
    It took Jack several seconds of glaring back at the crow to realize Pete was talking to him. “Sorry, luv. What’s that?”
    Pete took the check, folded it in precise quarters, and slipped it into her hip pocket. “I said, what do you think?”
    Jack shook his head. “Dodgy, at best. Ghosts don’t just cause a bloke to hang himself for no good reason. They don’t stir up like a mixed drink after a hundred years of silence, either. Personally, I’d give Sir Ponce his check back and tell him to sod off.”
    “Personally, would you happen to take exception to Naughton being a wealthy and attractive man?” Pete