The crime that Father Anthony had hoped would be lost amongst the mischief and mayhem of any major city was front page news the next day, and Sebastian Gloom sat up straight in his wheelchair as the headline caught his eye. “Quite a coincidence,” said Benson as he laid his master's breakfast on the table before him. “Two murders in that house in just a few days.”

     “No coincidence,” said Gloom, his fingers white as he clutched the newspaper with furious intensity. “I would wager everything I own that the unfortunate servant girl was Doris Kettle. The church, tidying up loose ends.” He looked up at his manservant. “You spoke to her. How would you characterise her?”

     “Quiet, scared, but basically innocent. Her only crime, I think, was to have had a villainous brother. Left to herself, I think her only desire would have been to live an honest life. Work for her living, meet and marry a good man. Raise a couple of children. I was rather shocked to find that it was she who was the weasel in the house. I would say that she was more a victim than a villain.”

     Gloom nodded. “This was murder, Benson. Murder most foul. I intend to bring the culprit to justice, whether it was the church or not.”

     “I wonder if our clerical friend dirtied his own hands this time,” said Benson as he poured Gloom’s tea. “Or whether they hired another man to do the job for them.”

     “If it was Doris who met her end that night, the motive would have been to ensure her silence. They would have feared that Gideon had told her that it was the church that had hired him. They wouldn’t have taken the chance that she might have spoken to her assassin before her death, passing on the dangerous information to someone much better equipped, as well as more criminally inclined, to use it against them. No, if I'm right about the victim and the motive, this was something the church would only have entrusted to one of their own people. A priest, a member of Exercitus Dei. Maybe none other than Father Anthony himself.” He looked at his manservant over the top of the newspaper, his eyes narrow with anger. “Cold blooded murder, Benson. Committed by a man of the church. A man able to clear his conscience of any immoral act simply by asking forgiveness from God.”

     “How do we find out?” asked the manservant. “If the police find out about our own involvement, we run the risk of becoming suspects ourselves.”

     “Yes, we cannot let them find out that we were hired to recover the bottle. However, I was a friend of Philip Cranston, before his death. I can use that to explain my interest in the case.”

     “So, we're going to pay a visit to Inspector Bailey?”

     “Yes, we are.”

   ☆☆☆

     Sebastian Gloom had collaborated with Inspector Bailey many times over the years, whenever a case came along that lay outside what the police normally felt comfortable dealing with. Gloom was happy to lend his expertise with the occult whenever necessary, and this had led to the two men becoming fast friends. Like Gloom, Bailey was a member of the Paternoster Club and so Gloom decided to spend the evening there, in the hope that the inspector would pop in, allowing the investigator to begin a casual conversation during which he could steer the topic of discussion towards the crime of the night before.

     The evening was a long time away, though, and the inspector, who had investigated the original break in and whose familiarity with the house and the family would surely result in his being given this new case, would need the day to do his own investigating. Gloom spent the day working on some of his other current cases, therefore, which mostly involved poring over information sent to him through the post and researching through the vast collection of occult books he had collected across the years. Gloom's handicap meant that he tried to avoid travelling whenever possible, and if he had to meet a client in person, they could often be persuaded to come to him.

     He made no great breakthroughs in any of his cases that day. He hadn't really expected to. Romantic folklore to the contrary, investigation, even occult investigation, usually meant days or weeks of grindingly boring research, with only the occasional moment of exhilaration as a collection of seemingly unrelated facts finally came together in a way he hadn't noticed before. Gloom made headway in several of his cases, in that he eliminated several possibilities and narrowed areas of future research, but it would take several days more like this one before he came close to actually solving any of them.

     Reading and taking several pages of notes was tiring, though, and Gloom took a nap in the middle of the afternoon. Benson helped him into a large, padded chair in the lounge and he slept for a couple of hours, watched over by the heads of stuffed and mounted animals from all four corners of the world. While he slept Benson busied himself with looking after the house with Alfred, the two men sweeping the carpets of what had been two of the museum's main display rooms. One of these rooms now served as the main dining room, for those occasions when Gloom entertained a large number of guests, while the other housed the investigator’s art collection. Gloom was fond of paintings above all, a form of art that he himself had dabbled in from time to time, although he was the first to admit that he had no real talent in that area. The room contained twenty of his current favourites, mounted on the walls, and as one or another went in or out of favour he would swap them with others that he kept stored in the basement.

     At four o-clock Gloom awoke for afternoon tea with cream scones that he ate in the kitchen with Benson, Albert, Doreen and Jake, who had just returned from school. He knew that it was considered unusual in modern day England for the head of the house to eat with the staff, but an unmarried man confined to a wheelchair was limited in the company he was able to enjoy and he fought a never-ending battle against loneliness. Fortunately, his retainers were good company. They had learned to be comfortable in his company and spoke their minds without fear of offending him, holding conversations that would be considered unthinkable between people of such different social classes in most other houses. Gloom told them about the cases he was working on (but not the affair with the Cranston household and the Catholic church) and they told him all the gossip they'd heard about working class life in the city, which Gloom absorbed with fascination.

     Finally, it was time to head for the club. Benson helped him change into his evening suit and then stoked up the steam wheelchair. At five o-clock they set out into the streets of Manchester, bustling with people of all classes going home from a hard day's work. Some of them tipped their hats at Gloom. Others stared curiously at this eccentric gentleman who featured so prominently in the local folklore.

     A small group of people caught Gloom's eye as they approached the first corner. They were sitting at an outdoor table in front of a small restaurant, apparently enjoying the last rays of the afternoon sun as they sipped their tea and munched biscuits, but Gloom noticed the way their eyes turned his way without quite looking directly at him. Watching him while trying to make it look as though they weren't. They spoke a few words to each other, and then one of them stood and walked in their direction. Again, he didn't look at Gloom and Benson. He watched the horse drawn carriages clattering along the street, nodded his head at the ladies and their gentlemen he passed and occasionally paused to look in a shop window. He gave every impression of merely enjoying a pleasant afternoon stroll through the streets of Manchester, but whenever Gloom looked in the small rear view mirror mounted on the arm of his chair the man was always there, twenty or thirty yards behind them. Gloom cursed under his breath. There was nothing in the world more ridiculously easy to follow than a steam driven wheelchair.

     He said nothing to Benson, knowing that his manservant would immediately turn to look behind, alerting their tail that they knew he was following him. He knew immediately what this meant, and he felt an enormous anger and regret. He'd investigated many important and powerful men over the years, put more than a few in prison or sent them to the gallows, and a couple of them or their close relatives had made attempts on his life in retribution, but this was different.

     This kind of surveillance operation had the smell of a large and wealthy organisation behind it. It could only be the church. Somehow they'd found out that it was he who'd found and recovered the Solomon Bottle and they now saw him as their best lead on Paul's organisation. The Resistance, as he thought of it. That meant he couldn’t join it after all. He couldn't learn any more about them when everything be knew could be taken from him. Either by the priesthood as he was kidnapped and tortured, as Gideon had been, or by God Himself when Gloom died and stood before Him for judgement.

     He was more determined that ever to hold them to account for the murder of Doris Kettle, though, and so he kept on course for the club, hoping for a meeting with inspector Bailey. When they arrived at the elegant, cream coloured sandstone building, therefore, he allowed his manservant to help him into an indoor wheelchair, then sent him away for a few hours. “Come back for me at about ten,” he said, knowing he usually spent the time in The Marble Arch, the nearest pub. “Try not to get too sozzled. We don't want to be stopped by the police on the way home.”

     He spent a moment of amusement at the dilemma he was posing for the man following them. Should he follow Benson, or wait outside the club in case the investigator emerged again? He guessed it was he the man had been told to follow, though, and he found himself hoping it would rain, hard, while he loitered in the street outside.

     Inside, the doorman helped him through into the lounge where he took his usual place at the table beneath the large portrait of the King that hung on the north wall. The opposite wall bore a huge crucifix with an emaciated, morose looking figure of Christ hanging on it. Seeing it there, Gloom mused once again that if Christ had been hung instead of crucified there would be a noose hanging on the wall, as well as around the necks of devout Christians all around the world.

     Two of his friends, Alexander Grand the business lawyer, currently working for the Imperial Airship Company, and Peter Mourne, an accountant for the Manchester Electric Company, were already at the table and greeted him warmly as he guided his wheelchair into a space between them. He beckoned for the smartly uniformed waiter to come over and ordered a drink from him.

     “So, Gloom! Caught any ghosts recently?” asked Peter Mourne cheerfully. He turned to Alexander Grand. “I heard he had to deal with an unruly poltergeist in the Cock and Bull the other day. It was protesting and causing a ruckus because the barman wouldn't serve spirits.” He roared with laughter at his own joke, and Gloom and Grand chuckled along with him.

     “Poltergeists are German spirits,” pointed out Gloom. “If one of them came over here causing trouble, the army would soon see him off. Perhaps our friend Cunningham would be called upon to deal with him.” At the next table, Captain Simon Cunningham of the Manchester Infantry Regiment, dressed in full uniform including medals, looked up from his newspaper at the mention of his name. He scowled at the sight of Gloom and returned to his reading. He had little patience with anyone not able to run twenty miles carrying a full kit bag, and had made no secret of his belief that Gloom was a waste of space who should have been mercifully put out of his misery when the polio took his legs. Gloom wasn't normally the type to make sniping comments, but that kind of attitude couldn’t be allowed to pass unchallenged or he would lose the respect of the entire club.

     Mourne laughed again, even more loudly than before. He was a big, loud man who filled any room he entered. He seemed a strange man to be an accountant, but Gloom had more than a suspicion that he did more for the electric company than just add numbers. There was a fair bit of conflict between the electric and the steam industries and Gloom suspected that this occupied more of the man's working day than keeping the books. He knew for a fact that the most vocal of the ‘Electricity is the Work of the Devil’ agitators worked for the steam companies and would have been astonished if the electricity company didn't have its own battle plans drawn up.

     “I would like to see the good Captain chasing a spectre with that sword of his!” said the ‘accountant’, chuckling and making his huge belly wobble under his straining waistcoat. He was referring to the Captain’s fondness for his pistol sword which, Gloom saw, he was wearing now, the fourteen inch blade hanging from his belt, although the single shot pistol which formed an integral part of the weapon was hidden by the hem of his jacket. The Captain shook his newspaper to show his disdain for such comments and became intensely interested in the next article.