Conjuring up a Killing! is the ninth Dreadful Crimes case, brought to you by Charles Dickens: the spiritualist Thaddeus the Amazing predicted he would die at his next seance, and then did when the lights went out. You question his regular clients across Westminster to unpick a web of swindles.
Part 9 of 10 in The Dreadful Crimes
Howard Roberts keeps returning in the hope of learning the number of a secret bank account, and was pushed to sign papers giving Thaddeus legal power. Janice Asquith wants her dead sister's advice on a proposal from Everett Boyd, while her father Colonel Asquith calls Thaddeus a charlatan. Douglas, Lady Ursula's butler, attends to help his ailing employer. A self-styled Dr Wilburn says he came about money matters. A street boy, Billy, was paid sixpence to report on the people in one house.
Douglas, Lady Ursula, Howard and Anne Roberts, Wilburn, Janice Asquith, Everett Boyd and Colonel Asquith.
Thaddeus took money from clients and from relatives who wanted them manipulated, then exposed those schemers and faked his own death. This time Anne Roberts saw the exposure coming and persuaded Douglas, who wanted Lady Ursula to leave him her fortune, to kill Thaddeus in the dark.
A timer and flash pot loaded with a harmless charge of gunpowder caused the blast when the lights went out, while a knife is what actually killed Thaddeus. Newspaper clippings from Boston and Sydney describe other psychics who foretold their own deaths, exposed their clients' relatives and were declared dead by a doctor sitting in the audience. A street boy, Billy, admits a man pays him sixpence for gossip about one of the households.
50 Berkeley Square
50 Berkeley Square is the fourth Charles Dickens memory: you ride with Dickens to a townhouse said to be the most haunted in London and search it for the cause of the hauntings. It is a short investigation that ends in a fight.
Charles Dickens's London Stories
Charles Dickens's London Stories are a set of side memories in which the novelist recruits Jacob and Evie Frye into the Ghost Club and sends them after rumours of demons, hauntings and spectral thieves around London. Most cases end with a human culprit behind the supposed ghost.
Dead Letters
Dead Letters is the fifth Charles Dickens memory: the Ghost Club looks at a gilded mail coach in a junkyard that is said to be haunted, and your tired twin dozes off beside it. What follows is a carriage rescue that may or may not be real.
Hell's Bells
Hell's Bells is the second Charles Dickens memory: a run of London thefts where every thief swears a demon made them do it. You question a prisoner, visit the robbed pawnbroker, chase a fresh thief and tail another to whoever is giving the orders.