Murder most foul: for your reading pleasure
In May 2023, The Writers Workshop supported the Murder in the Mayor’s Parlour Writing Contest. The contest was the brainchild of outgoing Lord Mayor of Sheffield Sioned Richards, a crime-fiction fan, and a select few writers were invited to Sheffield Town Hall for a day of murderous inspiration before submitting their entries. For posterity, the winning stories are published here.
Winner: TOUGH DAY AT WORK
The body lies face-down on the leafy green carpet. Hazy morning sunlight filters in through the dirty leaded windows, exposing the scene. Stillness. I’m glad I can’t see their face. I crawl over to check for a pulse. Nothing, just cold skin. What a mess.
Congealed blood has pooled around the head and seeped into the fibres of the aged carpet – like rich dark, sludgy brown lava. Maybe they were returning to nature. It’s the circle of life, isn’t it? But there’s nothing natural about this. Only death and decay.
I pause for a second. I just knew I shouldn’t have come into work today – should have called in sick or at least stayed in the office. Too many gins and beers after work last night are making my head thud. I can hear the blood whooshing around my brain, trying to escape from my ears with every heartbeat. This is going to be a tough day.
Scanning the scene, I can see short grey hair tangled and matted around a deep gash on the left side of the skull. I can only imagine their pain and fear, but still, glad I can’t see it on their face. It shouldn’t have happened, and it didn’t have to happen. They should have died years from now, tucked up warm in their bed, not like this, bludgeoned to death on the floor of the Lord Mayor’s Parlour.
First things first, document the evidence. I pull my phone out of my pocket and start taking pictures. It’s a grim scene. Their colour is changing. The lifeblood literally draining out of them in front of my eyes. Hands are white and translucent like melting wax and fingernails turning a chilly shade of blue. I notice that there’s bruising around the left wrist. They’ve been restrained.
A heavy hunk of dark metal mounted on a piece of wood lies beside the body. The murder weapon. It is hard to see the blood on it, but it’s there all right. What the hell is it? I take a closer look and see a description on a plaque. It reads, ‘Fragment of 11-inch shell fired by the German Battle Cruiser Scharnhorst on the 26th December 1943, which hit and lodged in H.M.S. Sheffield’.
Tragic for the Lord Mayor because it was nearly lodged in her head. Not quite though, but it certainly hit hard enough to stop her dead in her tracks. This was meant to be her place of work, not place of death.
A premeditated act of aggression? Or impulse? Definitely violent and spontaneous.
I lean over the body to take more photos. Try to get a little bit closer to see more detail. She smells of sweet floral perfume and clean soap. Her dark-rimmed glasses didn’t survive the blow. They lie by her right shoulder, one lens is missing.
The pictures are not great, but they’d have to do. Her right calf is swollen and has deep purple bruising like the blood might just burst through the skin at any moment. This was caused by a different weapon.
Looking around, the room is a mess. Items are out of place. The City Mace discarded by a grand table. Close by is the City of Sheffield Visitor Book: a huge and heavy book that contains signatures from the most important visitors to the Town Hall. It lays open on a popular page from June 2006: ‘To our favourite Mayor’, with a drawn smiley face and big ears. I can’t recognise any of the signatures, so it’s a good job they had written ‘Def Leppard’ on the page too.
The Lady Mayoress’ chain is tossed over the back of a chair and there is a sizable overturned blue vase laying near the fireplace.
I shuffle back on my bum and lean against an old wood-panelled wall to take a breath. Closing my eye for a moment, trying to feel some calm in all the madness. I run my fingers over the weathered grain of the wood, with its subtle grooves and knots: it feels warm, like a father’s hug – dependable and comforting. I open my eyes to force myself back to reality: more blood, this time a deep crimson red, smeared across the panelling.
Keep your hands off – don’t contaminate the scene.
A handsome grandfather clock stands guard by the door. I check the time: 1.27 p.m. I’m confused. How has it gotten so late?
My head feels fizzy. This is a bad hangover. Last time I felt like this was when I got slugged in the head by some 17-year-old kid trying to resist arrest. A wave of nausea breaks in the pit of my stomach. Last night’s gin or a gruesome crime scene? Crime scenes don’t usually bother me.
Sweat drips down my back. The overwhelming heat is making my skin itch, as remnants of last night’s alcohol tries to leave my body through any available pore.
Slow down and think.
Of course, witness statements. I turn on my Body Worn Camera. With the door still locked, it’s just me, the Lord Mayor and the judgemental eyes of Lady Brown from her portrait hung on the wall. Lady Brown, dressed head-to-toe in her finest garments, finished with a black lace shawl, a heavy gold and garnet bracelet and a pretty pink fan, looking like a quintessential English rose. I start to feel a pang of jealousy, and wished I had Lady Brown’s fan in this stifling heat. What did she know?
‘Have you got anything to say, Lady Brown?’ I ask, ‘Nothing? I thought so.’
Unreliable witness. Although maybe she was involved, I note forensic evidence on her clothing. The blood-spatter pattern on her skirt showed some level of involvement. Did she have an alibi? And if not, how had blood travelled that high? It didn’t make sense.
I have to think for a second. Think about what I need to say.
Keep it together and breathe.
‘This statement is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that, if it is tendered in evidence, I shall be liable to prosecution if I have willfully stated in it anything which I know to be false, or do not believe to be true.
‘I, Sophie Cocker of South Yorkshire Police, came to take a statement from Councillor Sioned-Mair Richards about a theft in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour in Sheffield Town Hall. Upon arrival, Councillor Richards showed me where the missing items had been. A painting by Joe Scarborough and a silver casket from Walker & Hall that was in a cabinet.
‘Having hosted a reception for Sheffield writers the day before, she hadn’t noticed the missing items until she arrived in the parlour the following morning.
‘I asked if Mayor Richards had a list of all the items in the parlour and suggested that we should go through and take an inventory to make sure nothing else had gone missing.
‘Mayor Richards opened the cabinets, and we went through all the items – which are noted in my pocketbook.’
My phone vibrates, interrupting my statement. I scan the screen, it’s my mother. I have to answer.
‘Hi, Mum, yes, I’m fine. Don’t worry, I’ve got it sorted. Listen, I’ll call you back later. I’m just at work at the moment. Yep, bye, love you.’
I always have to answer. Otherwise, she’ll keep calling. Mum worries about me a lot. Her anxiety about me, amongst other things, keeps her up into the early hours, and she often says that she wished I had a ‘normal’ job. Recently, she’s stopped doing housework and looking after herself and she’s got herself into some bother because of the bingo. Day and night, she’s playing bingo, even though she denies it. I want to help her out, but I’ve just re-mortgaged and the repayments are a lot higher than I thought they would be. This time, she’s promised to get help. And I believe her.
Back to my statement. I try to put my phone away, but it slips out of my hand. Must be sweaty palms. I have to carry on.
‘I took a description of the missing items. I also asked for all the attendee’s details from the reception, which were provided.
‘Mayor Richards was keen to show me some of the official chains and badges. We looked at the items and noticed two diamonds were missing from the Lady Mayoress’ chain.
‘Out of nowhere, the Mayor proceeded to accuse me of taking the diamonds. I’m unsure what she thought she’d seen, but she went for my belt. I gave her a warning, but she continued to show aggression and tried to assault me, so I had no option but to arrest her.’
She should have just complied.
‘She was resisting arrest, and I repeatedly warned her, so I had no choice but to restrain her. She broke free—’
Certainly stronger than she looked.
‘And then she hit me with the mace. We began to struggle and Mayor Richards grabbed a large dagger from the open cabinet and lunged at me. Fearing that my life was in imminent danger, I grabbed the nearest object to defend myself.’
What was I saying? It didn’t make sense. My head feels foggy, but this needs finishing. I’ll call it in when I’m done. I just need to get it straight in my head.
‘Mayor Richards lost her footing and fell over. In the process of falling, she hit her head and hasn’t regained consciousness. My attempted CPR has been unsuccessful, and she hasn’t responded.’
Anxiousness sweeps through my body. My breathing seems too rapid and my heart stumbles over a beat. I feel tingling and prickling in my feet. Panic starts to rise. Vision turns black. I rub my eyes and see glittery particles until the room gradually reappears. I need to get help. I need to call it in. I try to stand up, but my knees buckle and I fall back down. This is more than a hangover.
I turn my head. Something gurgles like the last bit of water going down the plughole. This isn’t right: the taste of blood. I try to breathe through my mouth but air isn’t going into my lungs. There’s a feeling of warmth flowing down my body, like slipping into a bubble bath. My hands are nosey, and they want to know what’s going on. Reaching up to my neck, my fingers feel something that’s not right: an opening. And it feels wet. I look at my hands covered in blood, my blood. Maybe Mayor Richards did more damage with that dagger than I initially thought. Turning my head back, I feel a rush of air going in through my neck.
In absolute panic, I wrench my whole body forward across the floor in an attempt to make it to a full-length mirror. I need to see what’s going on. Finally, I catch sight of my snowy white skin framed with fiery red locks and a slit throat. Blood soaks my black police shirt. It’s over now. I think about Mum. I hope she’ll be okay.
I can’t hear the tick-tock of the clock anymore. Lady Brown gives me the same disapproving look Mum always gave me.
Feeling in my pocket, I pull out two glistening white diamonds. The sight of the perfect gems in my blood-stained palms is gruesome but at the same time captivating. They glow in the muted light of the room, hypnotising me with their beauty. Such dazzling beauty, they would have solved everything for Mum, but they were never meant to be mine, anyway.
One last breath.
I really shouldn’t have come to work today.
Runner up: Delusions of Grandeur
Strange, that the first day of my new life begins the same as the day before. With rapping our secret knock on the wooden door – the opening to Vivaldi’s Spring, which translates as four slow thumps followed by three in quick succession – and slipping catlike over the threshold. Today, an additional movement. I lift my suitcase through the doorway, hoping to silence the inelegant clunk of its wheels.
As ever, I pause to take in the beauty of the parlour. Looking first to the intricate panels of the tall windows, up past the glowing clusters of chandeliers. Eyes tracing the elaborate pattern of the ceiling, then following the dense wallpaper back down to the carpet, a riot of gold leaves on navy. Allowing myself one delicious moment of reverence, to feel gratitude swell warm and nauseating in my gut. I work here. Worked here.
“You cut your hair.”
Richard’s voice is uncharacteristically raspy, and I turn finally to the meeting table – the table where we eat and work and meld our minds and bodies together in moments of private ecstasy – to find him splayed across its surface, blood glugging steadily from a knife lodged in his middle.
My first thought, bizarrely, is of his shirt. Mulberry silk, a perfect fit. I’d been with him when he bought it last week. Watched him turn in the changing room mirrors, his aesthete’s eye twinkling as the wine-red fabric rippled and draped, just right. Now a careless gash tears through its centre, and this fact makes me acutely sad until at last I process the blood, the gush of it, the seriousness of it.
Something slurs out of me, an “ohmygodwhathappened”, and without thought I stumble towards him, plunge my hands to his stomach. I have never seen this much blood – it pours between my knuckles and down my wrists like ink from the burst end of a pen. But it’s Richard’s expression that frightens me most. He watches me with distant serenity, as though I’m emerging from a haze of bright sunlight.
“Uh, yeah,” I stutter as I unwind my scarf from around my neck, “yeah, I did cut my hair.” What was before a bounty of honeyed curls reaching the small of my back now grazes my shoulders in a severe, utilitarian shape. Yesterday’s article referred to me as a ‘bargain bin Pam Anderson’ and there, I thought, was a connection I could sever. So I leaned over the bathroom sink and sliced, watching the strands unspool like slaughtered snakes on the porcelain. “I felt like a change.”
Richard places his elbows behind him and attempts to sit up, but groans with the effort and slumps back down. “Hey,” I whisper, “be still.” Trying to exude calm whilst adrenaline surges through my veins, making my heart vibrate and my hands loose and uncooperative as I scrunch the scarf and press it into the wound.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says. The voice I love – the mayoral boom that could shake the glassware in the cabinets – is diluted to a thin, faded tone. “It’s your day off.”
My scarf, it turns out, is woefully inadequate for stemming the flow. Already it slips soaked and useless between my fingers. I don’t know what I’m meant to do – take the knife out, leave the knife in, press harder, stop pressing – but knowing I need to do something, I lean forward and push down harder into his abdomen. He throws his head back. Emits a strangled, feral sound, whilst the blood continues to pulse through the fabric, down my front, onto my shoes. I am, I realise grimly, drenched in the evidence.
Until recently I would never have thought of blood as evidence. Would trust people to see what was obvious – that I would never hurt Richard. That I am not some kind of savage. But the autumn of 1998 has done many things and one of them is crushing my idealism, unceremoniously, under its shoe. I know now how the public perceives me. How they will perceive this.
I swallow the thick feeling collecting in my throat. “I um, I came to quit,” I admit, too shaken to lie. “I’m moving away.” Hearing the stupidity of this as I say it. “To live by the sea.”
“Good girl,” he says, and then, with a huff of exertion, “I can picture you there.” He closes his eyes, revealing the deep furrows of smile lines. “White dress. Bare feet in the ocean.” Seeing the version of me only he sees. Never mind the tidal wave of press coverage, the vile accusations, the names they’ve called me. He remains unswayable in his vision. “Like an angel,” he sighs.
Even when it went national, contextualised as a symbol of broader political degeneracy, Richard was unbothered. “They’ve been baying for something like this,” he said casually a few weeks ago, shooing a journalist from the corridor. “They just want their own Monica.” That’s all it was, he reassured me. I, or rather, some distillation of me, offered the right story at the right time. A punchline for a joke everyone was itching to make.
The press have been hard on Richard (referring to him as Handsy Handsworth after the infamous photograph) but harder, of course, on me. Behaving as an invasive species, consuming every detail of my life the way locusts pour over crops. They have even occupied my sleep. I dream now in a disorienting cloud of sounds – the whirr and snap of cameras, the layered buzz of whispering, the ominous beat of shoes ascending the stairs.
“Hey,” I bark, noticing the disturbing absence in Richard’s gaze as I push the full weight of my body into him, “stay with me.” If I can keep him conscious, I reason, and slow down the bleeding, maybe this will somehow be okay. But the blood just keeps coming. I don’t know how one body can hold so much of this. Lose so much of this. “Did you see the paper yesterday?” I ask, desperate to keep talking to him. “The headline was dreadful. Delusions of grandeur. How Nicola Fogarty climbed out of poverty and into the mayor’s bed.”
He manages a smirk. “Rhymes.”
I make a strange sound, somewhere between a giggle and a sob. “I suppose it does.” Hoping the fabric might be more absorbent, I pull up the corner of the velvet tablecloth and fold it over his body. Like I’m tucking him in. “It’s not even accurate, is it? I’ve never been in your bed. Not even inside your house.”
There are countless things the media doesn’t know, or chooses to ignore. There’s the fact that he and his wife are already separated, with plans to divorce as soon as his term is over. There’s my actual motivation for working as his secretary – because I want to be someone, to contribute something. And there’s the reason why Richard and I came together in the first place. Not because we were lust-addled simpletons falling into cliché, but because we were kindred spirits, bonding easily over our love of Italian coffee, French cinema, and Yorkshire humour. “That’s not a good story,” he shrugged when I last expressed my frustration. Assuming I’d find comfort in the brute simplicity of the truth.
“Anyway,” I shake my head, “it doesn’t matter. You-” the blood is blooming through the tablecloth now, an unstoppable force “you need to tell me what happened.”
Typical of Richard, he ignores the question, reaching out instead to place his hand on my waist. “It’s all rather Shakespearean,” he says, choking on something like a laugh. Even this – the warm skin of his palm on my side, the casual assurance that I am intelligent enough to understand his references – floods me with dizzy panic, my body threatening to keel over. As if there aren’t TV newsreaders implying I am illiterate, people on the street slinging insults and spitting in my direction. Only yesterday a woman accosted me as I walked into work. “He’ll never leave the wife,” she’d hissed. Called me a “silly cow”. I am, I realise, trying to save the last person on earth who sees any value in me. And I am failing.
Richard gestures shakily to my suitcase, abandoned on its side by the door. “I’m glad you’re leaving, Niks,” he wheezes. “Not glad to say goodbye. But glad.”
I think back to my first day, when he walked me through the labyrinth of the town hall. “Go on,” he’d say teasingly whenever we passed a marble bannister, an ornate statue, or a centuries-old antique, “touch it.” And I’d rest my hand on these previously forbidden objects, learning their foreign textures, leaving my fingerprints behind. He had lifted the rope for me, ushered me into an exclusive world cloaked in carmine red and shimmering gold. There was elegance even in the light, pouring rich and dusty through stained glass, suffusing the rooms with warmth.
That first day, I barely spoke. I was too stunned by the history, the opulence, the dignity of the building. And by the debonair man at its helm, the man with the energetic stride and luxuriant sweep of steel-coloured hair, the man who’d decided that I did, categorically, belong in a place like this.
I inhale again the oaky air of the parlour, tainted now by the metallic edge of blood. “You’ve shown me I can leave,” I say. “That I can want more for myself.” My voice is watery and I am surprised to notice I’m crying, the kind of formless streaming tears that soak the entirety of your cheeks.
This charade, I presume, is for his benefit. As if there is any world in which I can disappear now, without confirming people’s worst assumptions. How long would it take, I wonder, for police to drag me from the beach and click cold metal around my wrists. I might not even make it there. Might never see the white sun glaring on the water, blinded instead by the dazzling wall of flashes as cameras crowd and close in and explode. Never mind the wife. The political rivals. The estranged brother. The extremists who broke into the parlour just months ago. Like Richard said, I am the best story. The easiest one to tell.
My strength is waning now. Arms trembling from pushing, breath tight and overworked in my chest. The blood hasn’t slowed. “Richard,” I pant, “what am I supposed to do?”
He meets my eyes and I notice a newly faded quality to his irises, brown diluted to amber. “You’ll get through this,” he says calmly. This being his murder. The way he is talking about it, as something that has already happened, turns my dread electric, violent lurching currents of it tearing through my nervous system. “You’re a smart girl.”
He said the same thing to me on my second week as his secretary. I’d drafted a press statement for him, averted some burgeoning crisis. After his conference he’d cornered me in the empty chambers and kissed me worshipfully from my neck down to my navel, like I was some kind of deity, more valuable than any artifact in the building. Whispering it into my skin, “you smart, smart, smart, smart girl” until goosebumps shuddered and burst to the surface.
I am trying to articulate my feelings, to thank him, to save him, to grab my suitcase and bolt towards my new life, when I hear it. The singular click of heeled shoes on the tile, approaching.
Richard must hear it too, because he grabs my blood-soaked hands and pulls me with surprising force into him. Murmuring what are likely his last words to me, words I can’t hear because I am listening to the clicking as it gets closer and louder down the hall, constant and inevitable as a metronome, until finally there is an awful beat of silence. The twist of a handle. And the heavy keening sound of the doors, swinging open.
Runner up: “UNDYING MYSTERIES” - EPISODE 57
by Sarah Dobbs
“What we’re doing next is extremely dangerous. I want to be really clear about that before we go any further.” Kailynne looked directly into the camera, pausing for dramatic effect. The wings of her sharp black eyeliner were still unfairly perfect, considering it was nearly 3am and they’d been sitting in the warmth of the Lord Mayor’s Parlour since before 10. Ellie thought she’d like the girl more if her makeup had smudged, even a little.
“We made contact using the Flux Matrix Responder,” Kailynne said, gesturing towards a small pyramid-shaped device on the table in front of her. “So next, we want to get more information from the spirit we’ve got here in Sheffield Town Hall. Fans of my channel will know what that means: ghost writing! I’m going to offer myself as a vessel, and let the spirit use my hand to write.” With a swish of her skirt, she went to stand at the easel beside the Mayor’s desk. Edgar, the moustachioed cameraman, followed closely behind Kailynne, expertly manoeuvring his tricked-out vlogging rig.
“Now, guys, don’t try this at home. Remember, I’m a professional. I’ve also got backup: Ellie Jackson here is the UK’s most experienced spirit medium, and she’s ready to step in if anything goes wrong.” Kailynne shot Ellie a big smile, full of teeth. Edgar didn’t turn around, though, so Ellie sank back into her chair, grateful for the break from the camera’s watchful eye. The pressure to perform was stressful; far more intrusive than she’d expected when she’d agreed to appear on “Undying Mysteries”.
The whole production was throwing her off her game. When she’d arrived, she’d felt something in the Parlour, but it had since receded, as if it had been blocked. Automatic writing was the first technique the YouTubers had used tonight that she was familiar with. Everything else had involved expensive-looking gadgets she’d never seen before. Three decades of honing her gift – from giggly teenage séances in the ‘90s to a particularly harrowing exorcism last year – had proven she didn’t need props, so nowadays she only brought out a crystal pendulum or alphabet board if a client asked.
She had to admit, though, there was something appealing about the electronic gizmos. Earlier, Kailynne had demonstrated something called an EMF meter, and its cute array of tiny light bulbs had made Ellie think of Christmas lights.
She was reaching out to grab it for a closer look when Kailynne shrieked. Feeling like she’d been told off, Ellie yanked her hand back and leapt to her feet, ready to confront whatever threat might’ve shown itself.
But Kailynne didn’t need her. Almost an entire page of her oversized sketchpad was now covered with thick black Sharpie scribble; her scream merely signalled the end of the automatic writing session. Edgar was moving again, framing Kailynne against the bay windows, where the orange glow of the streetlamps outside threw spooky shadows across her face. “She’s gone,” Kailynne reported breathlessly, right down the lens. “That was intense. I hope we got something useful!”
Ellie squinted at the pad. Not much of it made sense, but she could make out the words “help”, “justice”, and “sorry”, plus a sketch that might’ve been a cabbage. Kailynne’s silver rings glinted as she traced her fingers over the tangle of interlocking shapes, picking out more letters. “K-I-L-L-E-D H-E-R? And is that … ‘S-O-R-R-Y’? And … ‘H-E-L-P M-E’? Oh. Oh, wow. You guys, I think I know who our ghost is.” She jabbed a long fingernail into the cabbage-y thing. “That’s a rose. I think we’re talking to Rose Perkins.”
An icy hand clasped the back of Ellie’s neck. Rose was a local legend, so she knew the story even before Kailynne recounted it. The daughter of a steelworks owner, Rose had been born into privilege in the 1880s, but a string of scandals had seen her disinherited in her late teens. More bad decisions and worse luck led to her being discovered sitting astride the mutilated body of one of her father’s footmen, her hands and dress smeared with blood. She’d refused to speak to anyone about what had happened, maintaining a silence that the court had interpreted as guilt throughout the gruelling six-day trial that saw her sentenced to death.
Sentenced right here, at the Town Hall, in the former Crown Court.
“If I’m right, we could put to rest a mystery that’s been unsolved for over a hundred years,” said Kailynne, smiling brightly. Ellie shivered. Rose had taken her secrets to her grave, and on her own terms. Defying her executioner, she’d died in her cell, forearms sliced open from wrist to elbow with a blade no-one had ever found.
“Tonight, we could help Rose Perkins finally speak her truth!”
~~~
Edgar had turned off his camera while he and the rest of Kailynne’s crew reset the Parlour. Ellie thought the other team members had gone home hours ago, but no, here they were: Vic, a small blonde in square black glasses, and Lukas, a set of walking cheekbones in a Monster Energy t-shirt. They’d spent the night shooting B-roll from the street, and were now chatting animatedly as they rearranged the room. Before she’d headed out in search of a late-night caffeine fix, Kailynne had left strict instructions about how she wanted the next scene to look, so the grandest armchair had been shifted in front of the hearth, tightly bracketed by the fireplace’s imposing marble.
Not wanting to get roped into helping them move furniture, Ellie had tucked herself away into a corner beside a display of Ukrainian ceramics. She shouldn’t have worried; no-one was paying her any attention.
“Mate, that stuff about the stabbing was sick,” Edgar enthused, as he and Lukas dragged a heavy coffee table into place. “As soon as I saw your notes, I knew this was gonna be a good episode.”
“I know, right? I found a couple of old police reports and couldn’t resist.”
“Kay loved it. We’ve never gone that far.”
Lukas snorted. “Well, ‘Undying Mysteries’ didn’t even have a researcher until a month ago, so that’s no shocker. She’s really not bothered about details, is she? This moving-on ritual was meant to have like five more steps, but I took ’em out so we could get home quicker.”
Ellie’s head snapped up, acid pooling in her stomach. Kailynne’s methods were overly theatrical, but Ellie had assumed it was all in good faith. If these kids were making it up as they went along, this really could get dangerous.
“You should’ve put in some comedy names,” Vic chipped in, setting up an incense burner on the table. “You know, like that old Most Haunted clip? ‘Mary loves Dick! Mary loves Dick!’”
Lukas shot her a wry grin. “Next time, for sure. Be good ammo for when I do my big ‘UNDYING KAILYNNE EXPOSED’ video, yeah? I also thought, like, when she starts giving it some during the exorcism, we could try and get—”
He cut himself off abruptly as the jingling of bracelets heralded Kailynne’s imminent return.
“That chair looks perfect, Eggers!” she said, full-beam influencer smile back in place. “Let’s fix the lights, though, they’re all going to be pointing up my nose.” Kailynne snatched up one of the bigger candlelight-effect lamps and aimed it towards the armchair. “Do you think we can move that cabinet?”
While Kailynne played director, Ellie slipped out of the Parlour and headed to the women’s toilets. Anxiety squirmed in her gut, but she tamped it down. She should never have said yes when the Mayor’s office reached out in the first place; she’d never liked showy ghost hunts, and the idea of filming it for the internet made her cringe. But the woman had sounded so sincere on the phone, almost pleading as she described the alleged haunting, and Ellie had never been able to ignore someone in genuine need. She knew how it felt not to be believed. Should’ve checked out those kids’ credentials, she thought. Should’ve made them do it my way.
She was washing her hands, thankful for the lack of unfriendly mirror to judge her tired face, when something shifted. Reality’s volume had been turned down; the water was still running, but she couldn’t hear it. A strange pressure began building inside her head, as though the altitude had changed. She looked down at hands that no longer seemed like her own, and then she was moving, being guided back down the hallway to the staircase, where the enormous electrolier cast strange, pointy shadows.
Her boots scuffed against the time-worn carpet as Ellie approached the Council Room. The oak panelling of its walls bulged obscenely towards her, distorting, as if something on the other side was pushing through, trying to grab her. She wanted to scream, but couldn’t find her voice. Velvety shadows wrapped themselves around her like a ceremonial cloak, warm and smothering. Her legs had gone numb and weightless, her feet unmoored, pushing against nothing.
A whisper out of the darkness coaxed her to give in, let go, drift away …
~~~
When she opened her eyes, she was lying on an uncomfortable floor. Watery light played across the crevices of an ornate ceiling, the distant rumble of a tram signalling the beginning of a new day. Wincing, Ellie sat up. Fragments of the previous night drifted back into place: the Town Hall, the summoning, and that crappy excuse for a rose. Kailynne really ought to practise drawing flowers if she ever wants to try that trick again, she thought.
“Lukas? Hello?” came a voice from above, echoing around the sweeping marble staircase. “Lukas? Ellie? Where are you?”
Her tongue was thick in her mouth, like she’d been chewing cotton wool, and a faint chemical flavour lingered at the back of her throat. She swallowed with difficulty. “In here! In the, um—” She looked around at the rows of black and white photographs of, judging by their robes and chains, past Lord Mayors of Sheffield. “In the little room by the Council Chamber!”
Footsteps jogged closer, then Vic stuck her head around the door. “Where were you? We had to do the ritual without you, Kay was devvo. And where’s …” She trailed off, eyes fixed on the door into the main chamber. “What is that? What is that?” Her voice rose to a shriek, and Ellie could hear the others coming, the atmosphere congealing.
Using a chair to pull herself upright, she hurried after Vic. The thing that had caught her attention was a glistening red-black streak that started at the edge of the doorway, waist-high, and continued across the door and along the wall of the Chamber. It might not be blood, Ellie assured herself, it might not be. She brushed past Vic, who’d frozen in place with a hand clapped across her mouth, and felt the pressure inside her skull building again.
Lukas lay in the centre of the Chamber. Ellie didn’t need to feel for a pulse to know he was dead; his throat had been torn open, messily, and his blood-covered hands were clenched at his collarbone. His face was grey, eyes staring at nothing, shirt ripped open.
With effort, Ellie stepped backwards. There was a dull ringing sound in her ears, a tingling in her fingertips, and for a hysterical moment she thought she might start laughing. As Kailynne and Edgar picked their way across the blood-spattered carpet towards her, Ellie realised that they were looking, not down at Lukas, but up towards the ceiling. She followed their gaze, realisation punching the air from her lungs.
Daubed across the wall, high above the ceremonial chair and dripping down onto the carved wooden panels below were the words, “THANKS FOR YOUR HELP. HERE IS MY JUSTICE. NOT SORRY.”
When Kailynne turned to her and started to scream, it sounded like the first unrehearsed reaction she’d had all night. Maybe, Ellie thought uncharitably, she wasn’t completely oblivious after all.
About the author – Sarah Dobbs
Sarah Dobbs is a freelance writer and social media consultant who has worked on plenty of murder mystery TV shows, but hasn’t written anything longer than a tweet for a long time.
She currently lives in a converted Victorian psychiatric hospital with her husband and two cats, to whom she attributes any unexplained noises or sudden chills.