Lee Raven, Boy Thief

by Zizou Corder

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That’s kind. You might not be able to, you know…’

  ‘Well, you can’t look after yourself, can you?’

  At that, there was a scrabbling noise from the corner.

  ‘What’s that?’ he squawked. ‘Those bliddy rats again?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Only one ran over you while I was asleep,’ he said. ‘I don’t want some rodent nibbling on you…’ He was looking at me with a very kind expression on his face. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You are the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened. You are stupendous. I am just some London kid who can’t even read you, and I nicked you by mistake, but now I – Lee bliddy Raven – am responsible for you. You’d’ve been safe at Mr Maggs, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I believe so,’ I replied softly.

  ‘Well, I have to look after you then, don’t I? It’s an honour.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So carry on then. Where did Mr de Saloman get you?’

  ‘His great-grandfather bought me in an auction in California. I’d been sold in a box by a Japanese woman who’d had to leave after the Second World War. Mr de Saloman’s great-grandfather knew she was a relative of the ancestor who had gone to Japan from Russia, so he acquired her things…’

  ‘So, did Mr de Saloman give you to Nigella Lurch?’

  ‘He did not,’ I said. ‘He would never give me to anyone. He protected me. As best he could.’

  ‘Nigella Lurch said in the paper that Mr de Saloman gave you to her as a gift. She’s a writer,’ he said. ‘Is that why she’d want you? Does she know what you really are? How could she? Did Mr de Saloman know?’

  ‘Mr de Saloman did not know,’ I said. ‘Like most of his family, he was afraid to know. But there are people who know – people who know and don’t believe, people who both know and believe. They are the dangerous ones. If people know what I am, and believe it, they want me. If she has heard of me, and traced me, she wants me. To read my stories, or to use my powers, or to sell me.’

  I felt a little shiver run through my pages as I said it.

  ‘I want you,’ said Lee, and he sounded apologetic.

  I said nothing, but I was touched. He wanted me for the right reasons.

  Then he asked me, ‘Do you know why Mr de Saloman died?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do I know? Because it is part of the story and I know all the stories. Why did he die? I cannot tell you. You must find out. That is your story.’

  ‘Won’t you tell me my story?’

  ‘It hasn’t happened yet,’ I told him. ‘I can’t tell you the story before the story exists.’

  He leaned back and thought about that. He was happy.

  ‘Tell me a story,’ he said, after a while.

  So I did. I told him stories of heroes: James Bond, Achilles, Artemis Fowl, Alex Rider, Tom Sawyer. He soaked them up like a thirsty thirsty child, and at the end of the day he circled me in his arms again and he slept.

  CHAPTER 13

  Continuing the Story According

  to Nigella Lurch

  One afternoon when I was fifteen my mother sat me down on a little sofa and said to me, ‘Nigella, your father is no longer with us.’ I was looking at a small teapot on the shelf, with flowers on it, pink and green. I thought she meant he had divorced her and gone away to write properly, without me creeping round his door and spoiling his concentration.

  About a year after that she married some old colonel and moved to South Africa. Left me all alone in London. I was seventeen. About a year after that I realized that really he must be dead.

  He hadn’t published anything.

  I’d done some modelling. Some publicity work. Nobody ever paid me properly though – all the other girls had rich families and they seemed to think I had too.

  One man, Hughie, had a grandmother who’d died. She’d left him a chest of old rubbish which he felt obliged to go through, so I helped him just in case there were any emerald earrings in there. It was just old papers. Among them was a file full of stories. I sat there leafing through them while Hughie dutifully looked through all the things he had to look through, waiting for him to finish so we could go out to lunch.

  They weren’t bad, in quite a childish way.

  One of the publicity jobs I’d been sacked from was at a publishing house. I began to have an idea.

  I stole the stories and I typed them up – tapping away, just like my father used to. Then I sent them to the publishers I used to work for.

  Well, Hughie was livid, but because I had typed them all out and burned the originals he couldn’t prove anything.

  ‘She used to tell me those stories about Cotton MacGill the Detective Cat when was I was a kid!’ he shouted. ‘When I’d go to stay with her, she’d sit on the end of the bed and make them up for me!’ But Hughie was an only child, and the old girl was dead, so that was that.

  I was delighted by how easy it was for me to be published. Cotton MacGill was tremendously popular. I even promised the publishers more… silly of me really. But they were so keen and everyone was so nice to me. There was only one problem really about me being a famous successful writer – I couldn’t write. I’d never even tried.

  All the respect I had had for writing rather seeped away at that point. I came to think of my father as a poor fool, to have made himself – and my mother – and me! – so miserable over something so cheap.

  Once I had a bit of money, I knew just what to do with it. I invested – in all kinds of things. Abroad, mostly. Shops, stocks and shares, property. Casinos. A few little online businesses. Some things that were not so… legal. Weapons. Soldiers for hire. A little people-trafficking. I had a friend in the City who tipped me in advance what shares to buy. I became very rich. I really didn’t much care about how I made the money. I just wanted more. It became a game. Anything which other people wouldn’t get involved in, I’d go in there and make a killing. There was so much opportunity. I married a few times. I changed my name. I became a different woman.

  Then something peculiar happened. I used to get terribly bored, so one day I decided to go to see this woman – well, a friend of mine had said she was simply wonderful, quite unbelievable. She was a medium. I trotted into her rather vulgar fringed-curtain-and-chenille-type boudoir, assuming I was wasting my time but rather excited as well. She sat me down at her small table, took my hand and said, ‘Mrs Ardleish is extremely angry with you.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any Mrs Ardleish.’

  ‘You stole her cat,’ the medium said. She looked up at me and her eyes were bright green. This made me feel very odd.

  ‘I never stole any cat,’ I said, and my words faltered, and the green eyes drilled through me, and I remembered my dream in Egypt long ago.

  Her eyes dropped to the table. The chenille cloth felt squeaky under my bare elbow.

  ‘Your father doesn’t want to talk to you,’ she continued. ‘He says he can’t be bothered.’

  ‘Still!’ I shrieked. ‘Still! What do I have to do to please him? What more do I have to do!’ I was upset by this. My father still too busy to love me.

  She took no notice. She carried on talking, murmuring in her peculiar way.

  ‘The thing you doubt exists,’ she whispered. ‘You can have everything.’

  The phrase struck me like a blow to the belly.

  Why would she say that, just after talking about my father?

  She looked back at me.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not nonsense, the thing you have always wanted. You can have it. You can have everything.’

  I knew exactly what she was talking about.

  ‘How do I find it?’ I said, and I heard my voice coming out hoarse with excitement.

  ‘How would I know? That’ll be fifty dirhams.’

  So that was it, for me. My fixation on the book grew. A
ll this money was all very well but I wanted more. Now I had something to spend my money on. I went back to Egypt, to Alexandria, to Paris, to Rome and Washington, I searched every library and every archive and I learned more about this legendary book than anybody had ever known. I frequented auctioneers’ showrooms and dusty antiquarian bookshops. I pored and I pored and I pored over catalogues and histories. I let it be known, in select circles, that I was in the market. I was brought nonsense at silly prices, and I turned it away.

  If I found what I was looking for, I could be a writer again. If I could be a writer, I could…

  I didn’t find it.

  But I was going to.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Story Continues to Continue

  According to Lee

  My heart was full of the book when I fell asleep — full of the long long time he had existed. I was dreaming of peacocks in marble courtyards, the cries of rioters in the purple night, flames licking in the distance, coming closer, ships burning at sea, salt and smoke smell drifting across the water, and the threat of blood and the clash of swords…

  I was deep in my dreams.

  I tossed and fretted, and I didn’t sleep long.

  Something woke me. Someone – landing on me, squealing, and then swiftly scrabbling away. It was dark. I flailed about, reaching – something was missing.

  The book.

  Not in my arms.

  Not within reach.

  I found the torch and flicked it on. The book was gone.

  I howled and jumped up.

  The manhole lid was still clanging. I grabbed for my skello – gone too. But someone was still there.

  ‘Where’s my book?’ I yelled. ‘Give it me.’

  It was a girl. She was cowering in a corner, her knees pulled up, her eyes glowing like an animal. ‘I don’t have it,’ she gasped. ‘He’s got it.’

  ‘Who?’ I was still half asleep, but that didn’t stop me from racing up the ladder and banging and banging at the manhole cover till my fists hurt.

  ‘How on earth would I know?’ she said.

  I climbed down again. Whoever had done it wasn’t going to come back out of kindness and mercy, were they? And if somebody else heard, what good would that do? Less than none. I’d be saved, yeah, and handed over to the police.

  I turned the torch on her. She was staring at me. ‘You’re in such trouble,’ she said. ‘I know who you are. I know what you did. He’s going to get the police now and –’

  She was about my age, wrapped in a scarf, Asian-looking, nicely spoken.

  Who the crike was she?

  ‘Police?’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘Yeah, great,’ I said. ‘Thanks. You put the kettle on for them then, eh?’ I grabbed my stuff, pulling on my waders and my mask, and slid the lid off the route back into the Tyburn. The smell nearly knocked me backwards. I aimed my torch and I skedaddled.

  It’s one thing going down the shores at leisure. Bad enough, you’d think. Going down with some damn fool unprotected girl following you is another.

  Yeah, she came after me.

  What could I do? I yelled at her to go back. I could hear her, retching and stumbling, and I raced ahead so she’d be scared and turn back of her own accord. She could bang at the manhole cover, couldn’t she, until someone came? Why the crike was she following me?

  My head was in a muddle. One: deal with being below. Two: who was it who’d nicked the book? Three: what the heck was I going to do now?

  I followed the way I had come, easier now going downhill, till I came to the Air Street turn-off. No point coming out back at Piccadilly. And how was I going to get out anyway without my skello?

  I leaned back against the filthy wall, and shone the torch down at my feet.

  Air Street is narrower than the Tyburn. I had to hold my neck at a weird angle to make any kind of speed at all. It’s hard to judge distance in the dark, underground, but by pace-counting I reckoned I was approaching Piccadilly Circus. Yeah. Think, Lee. Use that useful memory of yours.

  The girl caught up with me. She stood close, just outside the circle of torchlight. She was almost in tears, coughing and swallowing.

  ‘Spit,’ I said. ‘Spit the taste out of your mouth, pull yer scarf across and breathe through yer mouth.’

  Her eyes caught a gleam of my torch, black in the blackness, and she did as I told her.

  ‘You going back?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘For crike sake,’ I muttered.

  I started off walking again, neck cricked, waders sloshing, face wrapped. Within minutes my torch’s beam reflected on the deeper channel and higher roof of the Shaftesbury Main. I hesitated a moment at the junction, where the Newport tunnel and the Air Street curved in to join the bigger one, their trickles of sludge speeding up a little on the bend and being taken up by the thicker, darker, deeper, more revolting sweep of the flow in the Shaftesbury.

  I knew where I was heading. I was going up the Shaftesbury to Frith’s Illicit, the cleanest sewer in London. There’s a legend about Frith’s Illicit, about gangsters and nightclubs and secret access. It was illegally built in the 1680s, and it never got incorporated into the main system, and it’s not been used since hundreds of years ago. Or so my granddad used to say. I’d never been there. But Granddad Fred knew what Frederick Bryden knew and now I just had to put my faith in them. And I had faith, all right. It’s all still there, under your feet. Back in the old days, you’d hide your lamp going under a grid so no one above would see you glittering in the gutter. Now no one thinks about it. But it’s all still there.

  The girl was still rattling along behind me. Shite. She’s pretty brave though. Brave as in totally ignorant. Probably she ain’t got a clue what the risks are.

  I slowed down. I wasn’t going to lose her anyway. Plus I needed to keep my wits about me. Can’t be far now. If it’s true. I stepped across to a place where the water looked shallower and landed with a crunching on something – things – that moved under my feet. A crackly wet wriggling feeling.

  Cockroaches. The big Chinese ones, at a guess.

  Behind me I heard a yelp. She’d trodden on them too.

  Didn’t slow her down though.

  In fact she was catching up with me. And still yelping. Behind me I could hear her sloshing and panting. She was calling out. ‘Joe!’ she yelled. ‘Joe!’ She sounded, to tell the truth, terrified.

  Really terrified.

  She was hurtling up on me. And behind her there was another noise – a snorting, groaning, grunting noise, a hungry, greedy, animal noise…

  Suddenly I was wide awake.

  I knew that noise. It was mixed with splashing and quick, heavy, rhythmic footsteps, and it was echoing in the filthy curve of the tunnel, but I knew it anyway. I’d heard it on a wildlife programme. It was –

  ‘They’re behind us!’ she yelled. ‘There’s loads of them. Get a move on – quick!’

  What I’d heard was wild boars. So this was – Mariani, it was the pigs. The famous legendary feral pigs of the Fleet.

  I pushed her ahead of me and cried, ‘Run! Next left. Move it!’

  No wonder she hadn’t noticed the cockroaches.

  We ran, shite flying from where our feet fell, the torch beam bouncing ahead of us on the filthy gleaming wall, and the pigs catching up with us behind. The noise was horrific – spooky and greedy at the same time, and the echoey tricks of the tunnel sent it up ahead of us too, so it seemed to be coming from all round us.

  ‘They’re up ahead as well!’ she shrieked.

  ‘No, they ain’t,’ I squawked. ‘It’s a trick of the sound. Just keep on.’

  Crike, how fast do they run? Better be true what they said about Frith’s Illicit, that’s all. Else we’re pigfood.

  ‘Left here!’ I yelled. Here we go – heading north. The air was still horrible. Should be along here, left again.

  I paused for a second, my breath coming in ragged gasps, an
d shone the torch up. If this was the Illicit, well, it’s been connected now, Granddad. It was filthy. I flicked the torch beam up and around. The tunnel widened out a bit. Brickwork wasn’t bad, if it was seventeenth century. Four hundred years of shite has a way of wrecking your tiling, but this looked all right.

  ‘Come on,’ I cried, and pushed her up the sewer. It got smaller quite quickly. I flashed the torch around as best I could.

  Ah.

  Yes!

  Iron bars in the wall. Steps.

  ‘Up!’ I yelled, and went to push her up the ladder – only she’d already scrabbled up it like a squirrel and had her hand reached down to help me up.

  I grabbed it and launched myself up.

  Just in time.

  ‘They’ll follow us!’ she shrieked.

  They didn’t. They flowed under our feet, a river of fearsome, stinky, grey shadows. The torch beam picked out a slavering wet snout here, a dirty hairy rump there, a pair of creased and greasy ears.

  Some of them had tusks.

  ‘They can’t tell our smell over the shite,’ I said. ‘They’re not the brightest.’

  I was breathless and my heart was going like crike. I was still holding on to her hand. I let go.

  ‘My days,’ she said, quietly.

  We stared after them. It was quite a mob.

  She had her cloth up over her face again.

  ‘Will they come back?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t matter if they do,’ I said, and it didn’t, because I had just spotted exactly the thing I had been looking for. I just said to her, ‘Here, hold this’, and shoved the torch at her. ‘Shine it up on this grating.’

  She was so surprised she did what I said, and I was able to climb up over her and check out our chances.

  Well, there it was. The legendary grating which the legendary gangsters used in the old days for whatever legendary nefarious purposes of their own. It probably had been opened in the last hundred years, but that’s not to say it was oiled and ready for me. I got out my knife and began to scrape at the years of filth and rust that was crusted on the hinges and lock.

  ‘Oi!’ she yelled. ‘That’s going on me!’

  ‘Well, shift over then,’ I said. ‘And keep yer voice down.’