by Zizou Corder
At that, he laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ And that was all I got out of him. But as we walked along, my brain was ticking over and over all I knew about this peculiar book, and I was deeply puzzled.
Soon enough we were home. I led Joe through the back entrance, took him upstairs to bathe and gave him a pair of my jeans and a shirt to wear. Couldn’t help with the shoes of course. The fuss he made about the shirt, you’d think he’d prefer to wear clothes covered in sewage.
Mr Maggs wasn’t up and Finn rang back within the hour. There was an address in Hampstead. I could see Joe thinking about going off without me. I had, however, taken the precaution of double-locking the doors. I mentioned it to him. Along with how good a likeness that picture of him in the paper had been. He got the message.
‘Come on,’ said Joe, as soon as he’d polished off three eggs, six rashers of bacon, two cups of tea with three sugars in and an extraordinarily large amount of orange juice. ‘No need to hang about.’
So we didn’t.
I left Mr Maggs a note, of course.
Joe rolled his eyes, but I felt sorry for him. Imagine having no one to leave a note for.
CHAPTER 25
The Story Continues According
to Finn Raven
I was really really narked at Lee. Really narked. First he’s telling me porkies, saying he hasn’t got this book and he don’t know nothing about it; then he’s bossing me about, telling me not to tell Dad this and not to tell Billy that, and then he’s ringing me in the middle of the night requiring information.
It wasn’t that I’d been asleep. Fat chance, round our house. It’s only little where we live, and Dad and Billy got no idea about night and day. I have to get up, because I have to go to school. They’re really tough on me about that, what with Lee and everything. Dad says he can’t afford the fines. Mum just goes wet-eyed. So usually I go.
Anyway, Dad had been out all night again. He and Billy only come in about a half-hour before Lee rang me. Dad was in a grand mood for a change.
‘Liza!’ he’s yelling. ‘Come and fix me my tea! Where’s tea for your best boys!’ He was shouting and bumping into stuff, but not in that bad way, so I just went back under the pillow. Mum had to get up and get them something to eat. He called it his tea but it was nearer breakfast.
I could hear him in the kitchen, slobbering his drink and stuffing his face.
‘What’s perked you up then?’ Mum asked.
Billy and him were laughing in a secretive way, like only they knew something really brilliant and they hadn’t made up their minds yet whether to share it. I know that laugh.
I snuck out of bed, managing not to wake Squidge, who was snoring through it all as usual. There’s a place by the kitchen door where I can stand to listen and not be seen. I didn’t want to be seen. Dad’s mood can turn so quickly sometimes, and then it’s all yelling and throwing stuff and Mum crying, and when that happens I don’t want to be there. Lee used to always try to get Dad to stop, trying to protect Mum, but it never made no difference. Just made Dad turn on Lee. And then Mum’d be cross with him too, saying he shouldn’t get involved.
Anyway, none of that tonight. It was all laughing and joshing, and Dad saying, ‘Young Billy’s in the money, Liza, that’s what. Our little layabout’s done good, is what. Go on, Billy, dash yer mum a bit of caio. Lay out the tosh.’
I peered through the crack of the door.
Billy, his face all red, was grinning away and laying out piles of cash on the table. Big piles. Hundreds of dirhams. Thousands. I could feel my eyes going big.
‘Billy,’ says Dad, ‘found a valuable item and traded it in. He got the reward, didn’t he? And that’s not all he found! Guess what, Liza!’
Mum was giving the smile she always gives him. The ‘please don’t start I’ll be really good just don’t start’ smile.
‘He found our Lee!’ said Dad. Something in his voice reminded me of a crocodile. ‘Guess where our Lee was, Liza?’
Mum was going water-eyed. She always did when Lee was mentioned – so we didn’t mention him. Except Dad, who didn’t care about people crying.
‘He was down the Tyburn at Stratford Place, Liza,’ grinned Dad. ‘And you know what?’
Suddenly I knew what was coming.
I was right.
‘HE HAD FULL KIT! HE HAD THE BOOTS AND THE MASK
AND THE TORCH AND THE WHOLE CRIKING LOT!
HE HAD FOOD!!! HE HAD EVERYTHING HE
COULD NEED FOR A COSY LIFE BELOW!
FINN!!! COME IN HERE AND
EXPLAIN TO YOUR MOTHER
WHERE HE GOT IT!!!!’
His hand snaked round the door, grabbed the collar of my T-shirt and dragged me into the kitchen.
‘Where’d he get it, Finn?’ he said, quietly now, with a deadly smile.
I was shaking. I know it’s pathetic but when my dad shouts I go to pieces. I’d say anything. I’d tell a million lies or anybody’s secrets. I know it’s pathetic. It’s just my dad. He’s like that.
He was staring at me now, his eyes all watery and blue, and the veiny cheeks. He was fat but he was strong.
‘I took ’em,’ I said. I felt I was going to wet myself.
‘And did yer tell us, Finn?’
‘No, Dad,’ I whispered.
‘Even though we’re out of pocket every day he’s off school, paying them fines, and it’s breaking your mother’s heart?’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I whispered. ‘No, Dad.’ I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, I didn’t understand what he was saying even. I’d just give him yes and no and hope I got it right. He panicked me.
‘And where is he now, Finn?’
‘Don’t know, Dad,’ I whispered.
‘Where was he when yer last saw him, Finn?’
Mum was washing up – one cup, over and over, with quick jerky movements. She had her back to us. Billy was leaning back on the two back legs of his chair.
I gave a weak sick broken sort of cowardly smile.
‘He went up the Tyburn, didn’t he, Finn? He got in at Bruton Lane, didn’t he, Finn? So what was he doing down Berkeley Square? Billy here tells me he was at Maggs the Booksellers. I might just go down there later and see what’s going on. Shall I do that, Finn?’
‘Good idea, Dad,’ said Billy. ‘We could all go.’
I was just grinning my stupid weak grin.
So Dad gave me a nasty clout over the head and told me to bog off back to bed.
Mum was still staring at the sink. Her shoulders looked all soft.
So when Lee called I was under the covers, feeling small.
I asked Julie’s mum later about Julie, and I was glad Lee was going to where she was because that meant he wouldn’t be at Maggs if Dad did decide to go there. I may be narked with Lee but I wouldn’t wish Dad on anybody. And Dad’s angriest of all with Lee, because Lee got away.
But anyway, Dad had fallen asleep, and when he falls asleep after a late night he doesn’t wake till dark usually. I’ll just have to be out.
CHAPTER 26
According to Lee
Julie, bless her, had told her mum where she was going to be staying, and told her not to tell anybody. Her mum, bless her, had always had a soft spot for Finn (loads of mums do, crike knows why) and she told him, and told him not to tell anybody. Julie, she told him, was doing a spot of work for a lady writer up in Hampstead and had to live in. She was staying with the lady writer and every day she had to go to a secret bit of the house up a fire escape in the back garden with all dead leaves and spiders.
So we just went up there. The house was on a corner, dark and tall; the windows shuttered. The gardens front and back were walled, and full of dark heavy trees with the kinds of leaves that never fall off, just get dirtier and dirtier over the years. The earth under the trees was dry and hard and grey. A few acid-coloured new leaves, curling and warping at the ends of grey branches, were the nearest to spring that sprouted in this dark den. Ja
naki and I staked the house out for a bit to see who came and went. Answer: not a bliddy soul.
Nobody came, and nobody went. And then after a while Julie came out of the front door and went down the side of the house by the street wall. A few minutes later there was a shaking and rustling in the thick creeper growing up the back of the house. I nipped along the street to get a better view.
In among the dirty leaves I thought I caught glimpses of human leg and of dark iron railing.
OK.
Along the street, on the next corner, was a first-floor cafe. I had clocked it earlier. From its back room, sitting at the window table, we could see the front door and garden wall of the house.
We sat quietly drinking tea, watching the door.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll go in later and if it’s there, I’ll have it back.’
‘I’m coming too,’ she said.
‘No, you’re not,’ I replied.
‘I am,’ she said.
‘You’re not,’ I replied.
We could have gone on all day but I thought I’d shut her up. ‘Burglar alarms,’ I said. ‘Do you know how to avoid them?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘That’s why you’re not coming.’
She stared at me with those big brown eyes.
‘If you steal that book back and then make off with it,’ she said seriously, ‘I will come after you and make you sorry.’
‘Course you will, darling,’ I said. ‘You and the entire SAS. Abseiling.’
‘Just watch me,’ she said, and batted her eyelashes at me and picked up a copy of the Beano that she’d been reading, and began to giggle at Dennis the Menace.
Yeah, well. I just sat and watched across the road.
It was a long day.
Around one o’clock Julie reappeared from the back of the house. She appeared on the side street – no doubt she had let herself out of a back garden door. I’d check that later. She came down the street in our direction, swinging her arms and hopping a bit from foot to foot. It was amazing how innocent she looked. She didn’t look old enough to have keys. Then she disappeared from view.
Until she appeared in the caff, up at the counter, ordering herself a sandwich. I grabbed Janaki’s Beano and held it up in front of my face. I was kind of scrunched down, head to the window. Janaki was squinting at me. She was just the type who, instead of recognizing a crisis, would say really loudly, ‘Why’ve you taken my Beano? Are you trying to hide from someone?’ So I kicked her under the table.
Julie didn’t look round. She was in a world of her own. So much the better. She took her sandwich and went downstairs and back to the house. She went down the side street again, and then there was the rustling in the greenery again. All right then. I knew the route. The only question was security. It might, I realized, be better to go in while Julie was there and the security was off. Which would be easier to handle – a girl or a millionaire’s security system? No question.
An hour or so later, a woman appeared at the front door and I nearly had a heart attack.
It was Romana Asteriosy. I’d know her anywhere. Dripping with fur coat, strutting little manner. She had enormous sunglasses on now, otherwise she looked just how she’d looked that night in Soho. She had the same handbag. She was taking keys out of it and double-locking the door behind her.
Why was Romana Asteriosy double-locking Nigella Lurch’s front door?
I thought furiously. What was the connection between those two?
Why did Nigella Lurch, who hadn’t had a book published in six years, live in a millionaire Munster mansion? And how come, actually, she had 25,000 dirhams to offer up as a reward?
Romana Asteriosy was coming out on to the street. She walked right under our window – I could have spat on her dyed blonde head. Pray god she’s not coming in the cafe too. I felt my scalp prickle beneath my dyed black hair.
On the main street she hailed an electrocab and climbed into it.
‘Is that her?’ said Janaki, gazing out of the window over my shoulder.
‘Yeah…’ I said slowly.
‘And?’ she continued.
‘And what?’
‘And why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?’
I leaned back in my seat, rolled my shoulders and smiled.
‘Because I think I have,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Tell you later,’ I said. ‘I’ve a house to break first. See you, sweetheart.’ I chucked Janaki annoyingly under the chin.
‘See you, darling,’ she said, even more annoyingly.
The back garden door was heavy with rivets and gleaming locks. It took me two seconds to scrabble up the dusty ivy and leap the wall instead. As I crouched briefly on the top, I noticed Janaki in the street behind me. I glanced down and she gave me a little wave.
‘I’ll be waiting,’ she cooed quietly.
I was too busy lowering myself invisibly into the garden to tick her off. Later.
I couldn’t see any sign of CCTV or detector beams, but you never know. Usually they wouldn’t be used in a London garden by daylight – every squirrel or feral hoglet would set them off. Even so I used the basic avoidance techniques I’d known all my life. (No, I can’t tell you what they are. Course I can’t.) I slipped along to the back wall of the house. The foot of the fire escape was well hidden in a big twisted lump of undergrowth, but I could see where Julie had trampled leaves to get there and I found it easily.
Up the rusty iron stairs, fighting hairy loops of tough old ivy and scratchy rose branches all the way. Keeping my movements small. Heart pounding. I was, by this stage, very curious. My blood was up. I was full of questions, but I just wanted to get hold of the book and keep it safe.
I wondered if the book knew I was coming. If he could sense me. ‘I’m coming,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll manage… I’m coming.’
At the top, a tiny balcony and a wooden door. An open wooden door. A low, whizzing, mechanical noise was going on inside: quite quiet, repetitive, regular.
That’s when I heard the squeaking.
The little blighters were right at my feet. Rodents. Well, I had enough of rodents down the shores. Don’t like rodents anyway, tell the truth. There were seven of them. In a row across the entrance.
A straight row.
Looking at me and going nowhere.
I stared at them.
They stared at me, as if judging me.
Then they ran, in their straight row, one after another, into the ivy and they were gone.
Most peculiar. What the crike that was about I didn’t know.
I returned to the door.
I stepped through it silently, looking around.
Julie was there at a desk. She turned and looked up.
Clearly I wasn’t as silent as I’d thought.
I smiled at her.
‘Julie,’ I said, ‘don’t say a word. You know who I am, don’t you?’
She nodded, dumb with fear.
‘Julie,’ I continued, ‘you say nothing and you do nothing. All right? Else Billy, and Squidge, and Finn, and Ciaran, and my dad, Julie – yeah, my dad – will come round and see you. And your mum, Julie.’
She was nodding desperately.
‘Understand?’
Nod nod nod.
Sometimes it is useful to belong to a notorious bad family.
All right then.
And then I turned to see what that noise was, from the other end of the little room, and what I saw made my blood feel as if it had turned into something else. Some cold liquid metal, lurching in my veins.
I don’t know what I’d expected.
I’d kind of worked out what Nigella might be up to. What would a writer want, after all, with a book that produced new stories all the time? It don’t take Einstein to work that out. Particularly when she wasn’t any good.
But I hadn’t expected this.
There stood a tall heavy glass box like a display cabinet, metal-framed, lit from above and b
elow. Inside it was the book. It was open. Too open. Its pages were flattened like it was being pinned back. The spine was crunched up behind… It looked painful.
It had been put on something that looked like a sharp metal spider. Some of the legs held it firmly and the others were flicking over its pages, fast like a deck of cards in the hands of a magician, flicking through the whole lot, then slamming the whole lot to the back again and starting over. It was as if somebody brutal and inhumanly quick was reading the book, over and over, incredibly fast.
It was clear to me how much this hurt him.
There was a kind of screen close up in front. Greyish, underwater-coloured, glowing, it stared at the pages as they flickered past and emitted low, pulsing flashes.
The light was cold and ghostly. The noise continued; the regular whirr and slap. I thought of racks for stretching heretics; of dungeons where prisoners were held in irons, hanging from the wall. Limp and broken. Like that guy the book had told me about who had given fire to mankind, and he had to lie stretched out and tied down on a mountaintop forever, and an eagle came every day to eat his liver.
It reminded me of something else too. Photobooths. Photocopiers. Scanners.
The book, it seemed quite clear, was in some kind of torture machine. He was being held prisoner, and he was being copied.
I crept up close and I looked at my friend, locked in the glass machine. The pages went at such speed that it was nothing but a blur.
‘Booko!’ I called out. ‘Booko, mate, I’m here! Can you hear me? I’m going to get you out! Hold on, all right!’ Could he hear me? Did he know I was here even?
I hadn’t noticed at first a computer screen attached to the back of the machine. I looked at it. Pressed the up button. Pages and pages of writing. Pages and pages and pages.
The stories were spewing out the back on paper. I picked up a page as it flew out. Black squiggles on white. Meant nothing to me.
I didn’t have to be able to read to know what was going on here. This machine was stripping stories out of the book. Harvesting them like fruit, ripping them out like diamonds from a mine, dragging them up like a huge trawl net.
