Page 65 of The Midnight Carousel

Maisie sits on the patio bench, huddled in a blanket and sipping sweet tea.

There is a flurry of activity around her: Mrs Papadopoulos has taken Milo to her house; Hugo is near the lake, looking distraught, talking to the Crew, who heard the news from the Ride Jocks; the police have arrived.

The wooden horses and the canopy are completely destroyed, but three quarters of the metal structure is left and a group of officers are combing through the remains of the carousel with Laurent.

He looks older than before, and more serious.

There is silver in his hair, but this only adds a debonair edge to his appearance.

In truth, Maisie had forgotten quite how attractive he is.

Tall with long legs, and grey eyes that speak without words, Laurent still makes her senses tingle, despite everything.

Maisie watches as he becomes involved in a discussion with the officers, pointing at various areas of the carousel.

After a very long while, he leaves the police to their business, and returns to sit next to her.

They are side by side, exactly as they were on his last evening here, as though he had popped away for only a few minutes.

Her heart both sings and weeps because those days are long ago.

Maisie is a different person. Laurent is probably a different person.

When she first saw him appearing through the smoke, it felt like her heart was bursting open.

Daring to believe that he had crossed the ocean to see her again, her buried emotions had risen to the surface.

Now Maisie is terrified of the pain his leaving will cause.

He is here on business, as he explained. The carousel brought him to America.

She sips the tea, fighting to keep her feelings in check.

‘I did not wish you to see what you saw. It was a terrible sight,’ he consoles her.

Maisie realizes her hands are trembling and she sets down the cup.

‘I honestly…’ She can hardly speak. This is all so much. ‘I really did think there was something other-worldly going on because I saw something so peculiar when I rode it.’

Laurent regards Maisie.

‘It is understandable,’ he replies with a softness in his voice. ‘I have always remembered what you said about the carousel being cursed. It is that statement of yours that gave me a vital lead in the case. It simply took me all these years to realize it.’

But it wasn’t cursed , she admits to herself. There are no curses. And no time machines. And no need for good-luck pebbles.

‘You believed there were strange forces present because you were hallucinating,’ Laurent explains.

Sensing her confusion, he continues. ‘You are aware that this is a special carousel?’ She nods.

‘Your other rides are powered by steam and clockwork, as is normal. The carousel, however, is so advanced that gasoline is used as fuel. It gives a certain power to the mechanics.’ Laurent pauses, looks to the scene of devastation.

‘But it also brings risk because the substance is flammable, which alerted me to the fact that the carousel could explode. It is also how I discovered the method of death.’ He lets out a deep sigh as though he is as exhausted as she feels.

‘The by-product of gasoline is carbon monoxide, which is, of course, toxic.’

She tries to grasp his meaning. ‘They were poisoned?’ she asks after a pause.

‘As were you. In small doses, it can produce strange imaginings. I chanced upon an interesting journal article at my ophthalmologist’s office in which a number of supposed hauntings were chronicled; in reality, these visions were induced by faulty gas lights.

’ Laurent frowns. ‘I was not sure how it was administered and to only the person riding the one horse until I checked the carousel earlier.’

He waves his hand in the general direction of Silver Kingdom.

‘In addition to the main exhaust pipe that pokes out from the top of the control cylinder, there is a narrow pipe running from the engine into the pole of that particular horse, with a set of tiny holes at face height disguised by the engraving. The pipe is hidden within the jumble of other components, and the holes are noticeable only if one is looking for them,’ he continues.

‘This releases a spray of invisible fumes into the rider’s face.

’ He ponders a moment. ‘When you rode that horse, Maisie, you were exposed to just enough carbon monoxide to alter your perception of reality for a few seconds. It would not cause death, and the gas dissipates before reaching the riders of other horses.’

Maisie’s mind wasn’t unravelling. She thinks of Sir Malcolm’s deteriorating mental health towards the end. It all makes so much sense if he was regularly riding the horse.

‘So that’s not what killed the victims?’ she asks.

‘No, it is not. That level of exposure, outdoors and in a small quantity, simply makes the rider groggy, so they do not call out for help. There is also a second, larger pipe that I discovered only because the carousel is now blown open. This runs from the engine to the hollow area inside the platform. In an enclosed space, and with the volume of fumes such a large engine produces, the dose is lethal within a couple of minutes. Even with the exhaust pipe, enough toxic gas would have pooled in there.’

Maisie’s thoughts are spinning. She has a scramble of questions inside her head.

‘But how would they get inside the platform? And without anyone seeing?’

Laurent strokes his chin and hesitates as if he’s considering his next words.

‘This, Maisie, is where the centre of the mystery lies. How would the bodies reach the place where we found them? Unnoticed? So quickly? One minute they are here, and the next they are there. Like a magic trick. And, like any good magic trick, there needs to be a mechanism and a distraction.’

Maisie gasps. ‘The lightshow, and the rotating canopy–’ She can hardly get out the words. But it’s finally all so clear. Then she reflects for a moment. ‘But would no one really not have noticed?’

Laurent acknowledges her doubt with a small nod.

‘When the members of the court were shown a reconstruction of the last few minutes before the disappearance of one victim, they did not even notice a large man snatching someone out of the room,’ he states. ‘The actual mechanism used needed two or three seconds of distraction, at most.’

He waits for Maisie to ask the obvious question.

She isn’t sure she wants to know, however, and, after an overlong silence, Laurent continues.

‘There is a trapdoor that opens in the platform at the same time as the horse tilts on its pole, tipping the riders to their fate. The vibration you felt when you were close to the horse was you stepping on to the exact spot where one of the large springs was located, I believe.’

Maisie’s head hurts. This is why the horses needed placing on the carousel in a particular order.

It also explains the intricate etchings on the platform– the squiggles and hexagonal shapes camouflaging the outline of a door that she had failed to notice while she was cleaning up the carousel for Silver Kingdom’s opening.

Would she have spotted it– or the holes in the pole, for that matter– if she hadn’t been so engrossed in the task?

Possibly not, because no one else was ever any the wiser.

‘Then why didn’t everyone who rode that horse disappear? And who opens the trapdoor?’

Laurent shifts his position so he half faces Maisie with one arm slung on the back of the bench.

‘It is not a person, but a catch attached to a lever and spring that opens the trapdoor, automatically,’ he says.

‘It took a while to find, but behind the remains of the music box is a clockwork device – set at midday and midnight– that is wired to activate this lever. It means that these are the only two times it is possible to vanish.’ His face floods with embarrassment.

‘Perhaps if I had discovered the pattern, I might have considered that the carousel itself, rather than an abductor, was behind the disappearances. As it is, I was convinced there was an accomplice. The Bureau focused on Mr Armitage. And you…’ He pauses, and Maisie’s face flushes now, anticipating that his next words will be about her belief in the curse.

‘You were the only one to think that the fudge-coloured horse was directly responsible.’

Even so, she still never worked it out. It saddens Maisie to think of all the victims who could have been saved had this been discovered sooner. How many times did the police in two countries examine the carousel?

‘I’m struggling to grasp the fact that, in almost twenty-five years, no one found the bodies.’

She holds back from explicitly mentioning that Laurent was himself in charge of the French investigation, but he looks rueful anyway.

‘The platform is in one piece. The bodies would not have been obvious, even when the carousel was moved. In addition, the exhaust pipe directed away any smell of…’ He pauses. ‘Of decay.’

Thinking back to when the ride first arrived at Fairweather House, Maisie realizes that he is correct. She now remembers the rattling noise when the platform was lowered into place, and shudders.

‘And perhaps we all only look for evidence that confirms our own beliefs,’ he adds.

‘Especially if certain officers felt the pressure of solving a high-profile case and, at the same time, were persuaded by certain businessmen to look elsewhere.’ He coughs.

‘None of which is helped if the mechanics of the machine are so ground-breaking that not even the men building the carousel understand how it is put together. In my opinion, this complexity is why no one guessed the true purpose of the carbon monoxide pipes when the machine was being assembled or dismantled.’