Leaving Funt and Bosola to nurse their wounds, we hit the corridor. Luckily the Shank was still safely in his room, waiting, no doubt for his Inquisitors’ report. But as we went past, the Principal’s door suddenly opened, and Mr Vole appeared, as crumpled and disoriented as ever. He looked successively at the three Queens and me, and seemed to have a new level of mystified bafflement for each one.
“Er … ah … urm…” he managed, before Dorothy swept up to him, air-kissed him with a loud mwah mwah, added a quick, “Darling, adore the hair. Love to stay and chat but the last dress-rehearsal beckons” and then swept on, carrying us in her slipstream.
“I don’t mean to show a lack of gratitude,” I said as we strode along, “but, well, why?”
“Why help you? Isn’t it obvious? You were supposed to be tracking down whichever lowlife is putting our show at risk.”
“But I thought you suspected me?”
“Perhaps I did. But let’s just say you made a certain … impression at our last meeting.” She cast a sidelong glance at Sophie, who responded with a blush so deep you could sink a battleship in it. She looked down and twisted her hands together and screwed one toe into the floor.
“Sophie’s a little on the shy side,” Dorothy continued, arching one eyebrow in a way you’d have to say was pretty cool. “But she knows how to show a boy a good time. If you ever wanted some company…”
“I’ll take a rain check,” I said, a little too quickly, and then felt like a heel. So I gave Sophie a soft look and added, “I’ll buy you a coffee when this is all over.”
You’d have thought it impossible, but her blush took on an even greater intensity. Like on a U-boat hiding on the bottom from the patrolling destroyer, rivets were starting to pop.
Suddenly a thought struck me. Rat Zermatt, talking about “she” with that edge of terror in his voice… I’d always assumed that the “she” was Zofia, paying me back for hiding those guinea pigs.
“It was you, wasn’t it? The warning. About the hit…?”
Dorothy shrugged. “You were batting for us. I didn’t like the thought of that cute nose of yours getting all bent out of shape.” As she spoke, she reached out and touched my nose. It was my turn to blush.
“And besides,” she continued in a grimmer tone, devoid of all flirtation, “anything Paine and the Lardies were mixed up in had to be wrong.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I added.
So, I’d been wrong about Zofia. If I had a guardian angel, it was blowsy, loud-mouthed drama royalty, not my enigmatic emo. How many other things might I have been wrong about? Since I’d been born, we were probably up into the zillions. I was also thinking that since I’d stopped taking my pills things were getting clearer. I was seeing things that I missed before. Making connections.
“But,” I continued, “I don’t think the Lardies are at the bottom of this. Paine was on a commission. You got any idea who set it up? If we find that out, then we’ve got our guy.”
She shook her head.
“I had Hart here keep a look out for you. He heard nothing. But then a rumour came through the vine. I don’t know how it started… You got any leads?”
I thought again about the Dwarf and what he’d told me. Played it over in my head for the thousandth time.
“Just got a cryptic crossword clue, and I suck at crosswords.”
Emma West smiled. “Hart’s good at puzzles. Why not run it past him?”
I looked at Hart. He was looking at nothing.
“Well, it’s kinda goofy.”
“Look around you. It’s a goofy world we’re in.”
“OK.”
So I sort of chanted, trying to get a laugh: “The higher power, the smiling god, the benevolent devil. The lost queen. Paracelsus in his laboratory.”
I was watching Hart as I spoke. As I’ve said, he wasn’t so much a closed book, as a book with nothing but blank pages. But I thought I saw something written there now. Just an indistinct pencil line, there for a second, and then erased. What was it that got him – the queen? The laboratory?
He made a little rippling movement with his shoulders, like an armless man trying to scratch the back of his neck.
“This isn’t like a crossword clue,” he said, “where you have all you need, and there’s only one answer. It’s just vague … ideas, suggestions. But, I don’t know, the higher power sounds like the Shank. And Paracelsus, well, he was a doctor and alchemist and that could sort of be Mrs Maurice, who’s the nearest thing to a lab junky I know.”
He was hiding something. He hadn’t mentioned the queen. I looked at Emma West again. Certainly a Queen. Was she mixed up in this in ways I couldn’t fathom? Was it some political power play? Was she using me, just like the others? It made no sense.
My thoughts never got anywhere because at that moment we had a pleasantly distracting bit of comic theatre. We were on the stairs by now. Suddenly Hart, who was ahead of us, let out an extraordinary scream-cum-yelp and leapt into the accommodating arms of Sophie. Sophie was strong enough to carry three Harts, but the shock made her stagger, causing her to miss the step. She began to topple backwards, still holding Hart in her arms like a doll. I braced myself and caught her. Even then we’d probably all have ended up in a broken heap at the bottom of the stairs had Dorothy not added her surprising strength to the battle. Sophie regained her balance, but Hart still wouldn’t climb down. He had his head burrowed in Sophie’s ample bosom.
“Bug,” he whimpered, “bug.”
And then we saw it: an admittedly quite impressive cockroach was scuttling back and forth on one of the stairs. Dorothy tutted and kicked it into the stairwell. She looked at me in an exaggeratedly world-weary way. “He’s such a cry-baby when it comes to creepy-crawlies.”
The cockroach was big enough for me to hear a faint click as it landed a couple of floors down. A faint click that rang an even fainter bell somewhere in the back of my mind.
“Got to go,” I said. “Something to check out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TWO CLUES FOR COMFORT
THE link connected me back to the beginning of this whole mess, and the sound of chopsticks being dumped in the bin. But even as my brain made that connection, another thought hurtled in, and demanded, like a spoilt child, to be attended to first.
I ran out of the building and across the schoolyard. The chicken run stood empty and forlorn, like a memorial to some forgotten atrocity. I was praying that no one had been in there to clean up the mess yet, and for once my prayers were answered. The beak, open in silent accusation, was still there. The blood. The feathers.
I scanned the run. There were small, fluffy feathers everywhere, along with some of the longer, flight feathers from the chickens’ wings. Then I saw what I was looking for. I’d first seen it just before the mini-riot kicked off that morning, but didn’t take in its significance. It was a feather, but one that had never been attached to a chicken. I lay down on the ground and reached in through the hole cut in the wire. At full stretch my fingers found the feather. I slipped it into my wallet.
A few seconds later I heard the bell sound for the end of the day. I hadn’t realized the time. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, said the Dwarf. Today seemed to have both just begun and yet to have lasted a lifetime. I went to wait outside the school gates.
It wasn’t long before I saw her. She was with one friend, a girl called Jiao. Jiao was as plain as Ling Mei was beautiful, and she’d always thought I was a scumbag. Still, it could have been a lot worse. I really didn’t feel like fighting all of Chinatown right now.
Ling Mei gasped when I stepped out from the shadows.
“I just need a second.”
Jiao made a kind of screeching noise, and then began to curse me in Cantonese. I put my arms up in a soothing gesture, but it didn’t stop her from aiming a vicious kick at my shins. Then she ran off back towards the school. I reckoned I had two minutes before she came back with reinforcements.
“Plea
se, Ling Mei – the day you lost your chopsticks, you said anyone could have stolen them. But my guess is, it was someone sitting behind you. It’s the easiest way. It’s what I’d do if I wanted to take something from your bag. So who was sitting in the row behind you that morning in registration?”
Ling Mei shook her head sadly. But I could tell she was trying to remember.
“Why don’t you just leave this, John? In fact, why don’t you just leave full stop? You need to start fresh somewhere. Somewhere without a history. Some place where everyone doesn’t hate you. Where they don’t know about your past, about the time you were ill.”
I won’t pretend those blows didn’t hurt. They were low, and they detonated like mortar bombs in my guts. But I could take a blow, even a low one.
“Who, Ling Mei, who?”
A sigh. And then, “Right behind me there’s Steve Sutcliffe. Behind to the left, it’s Paul Ehrlich. Behind to the right, Julia Walsh. Happy?”
No, I wasn’t. I was expecting another name. It showed on my face.
“Did they have to be behind?” Ling Mei asked, showing a flicker of interest.
“Yes … well … I don’t know. Which side was your bag on?”
“You forgot already. Is there anything you remember about me?” For the first time in a long time, the ghost of a smile.
“You’re left-handed. So it would be on the left side. Who sits next to you there?”
“Nicholas.”
“Nicholas? I don’t know a—”
“Hart. Nicholas Hart.”
Something made me look back towards the school. They were coming. Jimmy was leading the pack. Ling Mei saw them too.
“Run,” she said.
I had no control over what came next. If I could have controlled it then it wouldn’t have happened, because I knew it was dangerous for her.
I leant over and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips parted and she kissed me back. I could have stayed like that for the rest of my life, and I had the feeling that she felt the same way. Which is why I had to stop.
I whispered into her ear. “Push me away and slap me. Make it look like I forced you.”
“No.”
Her tears were on my cheek.
“Now, or I’ll wait here until they kill me.”
A sob clawed its way out of some deep cavern within her.
“Ling Mei, please…”
And then she slapped me, and fell to the ground. I wanted more than anything on Earth to stoop to help her, to hold her, to be with her. But to help her would be to damn her, and so, with the jeers and threats of Jimmy and his gang ringing in my ears, I fled like a coward into the dusk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
OF LOVE AND DEMONS
SO, I had the killer. That alien feather in the chicken coop – it was ostrich, and it could only have come from a Drama Queen’s feather boa. I’d placed Hart right at the scene of the very first crime – the theft of Ling Mei’s chopsticks. It was him. It had to be him.
I reached home and wished my parents were back. I never thought I’d say this, but I missed them. Hey, I even missed my sister. And suddenly their absence seemed weird, sinister. I was suddenly convinced that it was linked to the killings. It was too big a coincidence. I began to construct a massive conspiracy theory in my head, involving the death of my aunt, my parents being lured away, a kidnapping.
And then I laughed at myself. Laughed so hard I felt light-headed and had to sit down.
I went and brushed my teeth, which sometimes helps to settle my nerves. It didn’t work this time. There was something wrong with the light in the bathroom. It picked up some weird colour in my eyes. A sickly sort of hue. It wasn’t healthy. It was barely human.
I’d had nothing to eat all day, but I wasn’t hungry. Out of habit, I went to the kitchen and opened a can of peaches. I stared at the virulent orange slices. They reminded me of something scooped out of a body during an autopsy. I poured them into the sink, mashing them down the plughole with a wooden spoon. Then I was sorry that I’d wasted the peaches. I should just have put them in a bowl and eaten them later, when I wasn’t thinking of death and evisceration and the absence of love.
I couldn’t understand why I felt so down. I should have been eight miles high. Hadn’t I cracked the case?
Maybe it was because I couldn’t work out the motive. I didn’t figure Hart for a sicko who just took pleasure in killing – he didn’t look like he took pleasure in anything. The best I could come up with was that he was working with the Shank to bring down the Queens or, more specifically, Emma West. Maybe he thought that the Shank would put him in her stilettos, acting as his puppet. It made a kind of sense, but not enough to give me the satisfaction of hearing the case click shut.
But I couldn’t resist a little smile at the thought of what Dorothy would do when she found out about the plot. The chances were that Hart would be singing like a Munchkin for the rest of his days.
My next step was to get the feather, and the story it told, to the Principal tomorrow morning. He was weak and he was old, but nobody denied that Mr Vole was a decent man. He would do the right thing, I was sure. He would rouse himself from his years of torpor and slap down the Shank.
Or was I just kidding myself? Did he have the nerve, the guts, the moral muscle? Well, tomorrow we’d find out. Either way, I’d done all that I could. My conscience was clean. My work was done.
But there was a grain of sand in the Vaseline. Zofia. I realized that I hadn’t seen her all day. I needed to talk to her. I wanted to explain … about things. What did I need to explain…? The important things. But now I couldn’t remember them… My head wasn’t working properly. But if I talked to her, it would be better, that much I knew.
I’d call her. We could meet again, like last night. I wouldn’t say anything dumb this time. I could tell that she liked me. We did that clicking thing. We would be together. She’d understand and help me. We could save each other.
First I had to call her. But how? I’d never taken down her number. Numbers started to whirr in my head like a slot machine. I knew that when they stopped I’d have hers. I tried to stop the spinning numerals, but I couldn’t even slow them.
I slapped my head to make the numbers stop. I was missing something. Yes, that was it: I hadn’t called her, but she’d called me. Our phone had a little LCD screen that showed the last ten calls received.
I scrolled through the list. I was looking for a number I didn’t recognize. Mum’s mobile. Dad’s mobile. Those two numbers repeated over and over again. And then I saw what I was looking for. I probably should have got my thoughts together before I hit redial, but my finger did the thinking.
Three rings.
“Hello,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. Then some more words that I didn’t catch. The voice was Eastern European and unfriendly.
“Pardon?” I said, bewildered.
“Manston Dry Cleaners. Can I help you?”
Dry cleaners…? Maybe she worked there.
“Zofia. Is Zofia there?”
“Zofia? No, no Zofia work here.”
I put the phone down. Were they lying? Was this part of it, part of the plot? The boring, obvious answer was that my mum had left some dry cleaning there, and they had just called to tell her that it was ready. But if we always settled for the obvious answer, we’d still think the sun went around the Earth and that it was OK to make margarine out of whales.
But I’d lost my link, and I felt Zofia fading, slipping away. I reached for her through time and space, like the astronomers looking for messages from alien civilizations.
And I heard something, and I knew where she was. I went up on the roof.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE WHITE, THE RED, THE BLUE
“YOU?” I said.
“Who else were you expecting?”
The cat came over and rubbed herself against my ankle. I noticed that my feet were bare and dirty, as if I’d been walking around all day without my shoes o
n.
“Oh … no one, I guess.”
“The girl?”
“The girl? No… Maybe.”
“You know, don’t you?” said the cat, climbing up onto my knees. That made me feel calmer. Maybe that was the point of cats, you know, why we invented them.
“Me,” I said. “I don’t know jack shit. So tell me, what should I know?”
The cat thought for a moment.
“That we’re all connected.”
“Just my luck – my cat’s a hippy. Bet you do yoga and drink fruit tea.”
“There,” she said, pointing her nose at the city. “What do you see?”
“Lights,” I said, looking at the pools and points of orange and yellow spilling from houses and cars and streetlamps.
“Not lights,” said the cat. “Light. You think they are each separate, but it’s an illusion. Imagine one great light, and a screen of black silk is set before it, and in the screen there are tiny holes. It looks to you as if they are all individual, and isolated, one from the other. But if you could take away the screen, you’d see that there was only one light.”
“Nice,” I said. “But I don’t get what you’re trying to say.”
“That what you think are separate things are really the same thing. The girl. The Dwarf. The…”
There was a pause into which I inserted the word: “Cat…?”
The cat looked at me, her lovely green eyes full of meaning and yet unreadable.
“It’s over with the girl, isn’t it,” I said. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew it.
“It was over before it started,” said the cat. “But you’ve still got me.”
The cat dug her claws into my thighs and coiled further into me.
“Your lap feels bony,” she purred. “You can’t live on canned peaches, you know.”
“Don’t give me the peach preach. I get enough of that from … the others.”
“It’s only because they care about you.”
“If they cared they’d be here.”
“But they are here … the voices.”
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