"Right," George said, crunching a biscuit, "The good news is that there's no evidence that any bloody murder has occurred in this house, or really anything like it. In fact, it was pretty difficult to dig up anything on this place." He stopped crunching, took a slow gulp of tea.

"And the bad news?" I asked, a tad impatiently.

"Ah…well, that was the bad news. Sort of."

"What?"

He set the teacup down, made some small adjustment to his spectacles. "As I said, it was really hard to find anything on this house—"

An awful thought occurred to me. "Don't tell me you haven't found anything!"
"No!" He scowled at me. "Let me finish."

I sat back. "OK. Sorry. Jumpy, you know. Must be the lack of sleep."

George snorted. "I've had even less sleep than you! Anyway," he added hastily, "I didn't find any evidence of suspicious deaths that might have occurred on the property, so I changed my approach. And I found something very interesting."

From my right, Lockwood gave a muffled groan. "Don't tell me. We're not going to like this, are we?"

George didn't answer. He was busy rifling through his stack of papers. "OK," he said, pushing his glasses up, "First thing I found: about fifty years ago, the owner was a civil servant who was accused of leaking delicate information to the press. He was sentenced to house arrest for twenty years. He died within the first ten years of his sentence. Cardiac arrest was the official report. But see, about three years later, the Times published a story that the man was wrongly accused! He was innocent, there was a great big scandal—some bigwig who testified against him was the one actually responsible."

"Nothing very interesting about that, George," Lockwood said. "Rather common, actually. So, this government official is our Visitor."

"That's what I thought," George said, "but I decided to dig a bit deeper, and I'm glad I did. Here, look." He shook some papers from his stack and tossed them at us.

I peered at the papers closest to me, and realized they were copies of old obituaries: Mrs Eliza Dobbs, 41, died in her Mayfair home on Tuesday of a cardiac arrest. She was not previously known to suffer from a heart condition…Mr John Taylor, 32, died in his Mayfair home last Sunday of a cardiac arrest…physician shocked…no prior evidence of heart problems…Ms Rose Whiting, 57, of Mayfair, died Saturday of a cardiac arrest…These were all relatively recent; they were reported in newspapers published within the last seventy years. There was more, from the 1800s, even a few from the 1700s: Mr Trevor Travis died of an apparent ailment of the heart…Mrs John Smith…died Sunday…at her husband's home in Mayfair…Mr Edgar Cross of Mayfair…My head spun with names and dates.

I looked at George. "All of them? They all died of heart attacks?"

George shook a crumb-dusted finger. "Not heart attacks, but cardiac arrests. And no, not all the owners died of cardiac arrests. Some of them died of old age and other things, of course. But a lot of them have died of cardiac arrests. An oddly significant number of them, I'd say." He sat back, biscuit in hand, crunching smugly.

I looked down at the papers, and then across at Lockwood. He looked at me. I knew we were thinking the same thing. The familiar fire in his eyes, which had before been dimmed by exhaustion, was back and brightly burning.

"In the old days," he said slowly, "before the Problem, they didn't know about ghost-touch…it wasn't a condition. So they mistook it for something else…frostbite, maybe, or-or—"

"An ailment of the heart," I finished.

"Exactly," said George. He leaned forward, glasses glinting in the dim, dying sunlight. "You know what this means, don't you? This house has been haunted since before the Problem."

Lockwood was grinning. "This is excellent! If the Visitor's been active this long, it must be really strong." He practically glowed with excitement as he looked around at us. "This is our chance, you two. This could be big."

"Wait, hold on," I said. "One question: if people have been dying of ghost-touch here all along, why hasn't anyone reported anything recently?" I waved the stack of papers. "These people didn't know of the Problem, but surely there have been more recent incidents? The last death was," I glanced through the stack, "A Mrs Dobbs in 1952. That was ages ago. There has to have been something more recent."

George nodded. "I thought of that, too. And you're right, Lucy, there was something. It was quite a while ago, when it was still pretty early on in the Problem, so it might have been overlooked— misclassified as something more natural, you know—except it was a young couple. Two people! Much more suspicious." He paused, slurped some tea. "So they had Fittes agents go in—this was back when Fittes was still a fledgling agency. They did the whole bit: salted the grounds, laced the bricks with iron, carted away some questionable items, had DEPRAC put the house on their monitoring list."

"Then what?" Lockwood prodded.

George shrugged. "You'd think it would've solved the problem, wouldn't you? And yet here we are. The house was empty for a while after the Fittes investigation. The rest is as our client told us: about twenty years into the Problem, her client's father purchased it, fixed it up. But they didn't live here, they lived down in Pimlico. Then our client got the house when her father died. That was about two years ago."

"So…"

"So either Fittes messed up, DEPRAC's been lax on its monitoring, a combination of the two—which is always possible—or…something else." A sudden seriousness settled over his expression. "And that's the bad news. I've really no idea why this place is still haunted, or even why it was haunted in the first place. I couldn't find anything earlier than the 1800s about this house. So, no idea what we'll be up against tonight."

I shook my head. "Brilliant." I took a hearty bite of my biscuit and crunched. Sugar was fortifying.

Lockwood was more optimistic, possibly because he was still excited by the uniqueness of the case. "Oh, cheer up, Luce. It'll be just like old times."

I swallowed my biscuit, glanced across at him. "Old times? Like Annie Ward, you mean? Explain how that's supposed to cheer me up."

"Well, it was certainly…exciting."

I scoffed. "Nearly dying? Getting sued for property damage? Exciting? Personally, I'd classify it as something one hopes is once-in-a-lifetime. Plus, we were still more prepared for Annie Ward. If I recall, we were already sort of betting on a Type Two and, more importantly, we were wide awake."

"Oh, come off it, Luce. We've got all our supplies this time. It'll be fine. Right, George?"

A/N: Now things are getting sort of interesting. More action in the next chapter. Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you think!