The girl shook her head, humming furiously.
“That’s an endorsement,” Charles commented. “Lead on, Davey.”
* * * *
x: “holes”
They descended into the ground. Brickwork tunnel walls gave way to shored earth and flagstones. Kate could not believe Regent’s Park was only a few feet above their heads.
She squirreled through, following Davey. Charles dragged Maeve after him. Inspector Mist held the rear.
The place smelled of muck.
They emerged in the dynamo chamber, site of the sacrifice that had kept the throngs away from the Gift so Maeve could make her private exchange. Roots thick as a man’s torso burst through, spilling bricks on the floor, entwining like angry prehistoric snakes. A canvas cover over the dynamos, stained with red mud, was partially lifted. Ivy grew like a plague, twining into ironwork, twisting around stilled pistons and bent valves. The weed grip had cracked one of the great wheels.
Green sparks nestled in nooks. Fairy lights, little burning pools which needed no dynamos.
Dickie sat in front of the machine, knees together, cap straight.
“There he is,” said Maeve. “No harm done. Satisfied?”
Charles shone his lantern. Emerald light-points danced in the boy’s eyes. He raised a hand to shield his face.
“Princess,” said the boy. “Is that you?”
They were here in time! Kate wanted to hug the errant special detective.
“Dickie,” said Charles, offhandedly. “Tell me, what clue enabled you to solve the Baffling Business of the Cheating Governess?”
Dickie lowered his hand. His eyes were hard.
Ice brushed the untidy hair at the nape of Kate’s neck.
“Who was the Bun Bandit?” she asked.
No answer. The lightpoints in his eyes were fixed. Seven in each. In the shape of the constellation Ursa Major.
“That’s not D-Dickie,” said Davey. “That’s...”
“I think we know who that is,” said Charles.
Kate’s insides plunged. She looked at the boy. He was like Maeve, but new-made. Clean and fresh and tidy, still slightly moist. He did not yet have the knack of passing among people.
Davey whirled about the chamber, tapping roots, tearing off covers.
Maeve and the boy exchanged gazes and kept quiet.
Kate knew that Sarah Riddle would not be happy with a boy who merely looked like her son.
“So, it’s another one,” said Inspector Mist, walking around the boy.
He looked up at the policeman, unblinking, head rotating like an owl’s.
“That’s a good trick,” Kate said.
The boy experimented with a smile of acknowledgement. It did not come off well.
Charles was with Davey, talking to him quietly, insistently.
“Think hard, Davey... this is that place, the place that was under Hill Wood...”
“Yes, I know. But this is London.”
“The place where you were taken is somewhere else, Davey. Somewhere that travels. Somewhere with holes that match up to holes here. I don’t know how the hole was made in Eye. Perhaps it was always there. But the hole here, in the Gift, you made.”
Davey nodded, to himself.
“I thought I’d got away, but I brought it with me, in my head. The drawing, the dreams. That was it, pressing on me. I cheated them, by their lights. I owed them.”
He felt his way around now, carefully. He began humming his rhyme— his long-lost sister’s rhyme—then caught himself, and was quiet, chewing his lip like a Harvill.
“A hole,” he said, at last. “There’s a hole. Something like a hole.”
Davey took out his penknife. He shook his head and threw it away.
“Would this be any use?” suggested Inspector Mist.
The policeman pulled a giant-sized spanner from the clutches of greenery and handed it over.
Davey took the length of iron, felt its heft, and nodded.
Charles stood back. Davey took a swing, as if with an axe. The spanner clanged against exposed root. The whole chamber rung with the blow. Kate’s teeth rattled. Old bark sloughed, exposing bone-yellow woodflesh. Davey struck again, and the wood parted.
There was an exhalation of foul air, and a vast inpouring of soft, insect-inhabited earth. Almost liquid, it slurried around their ankles, then grew to a tidal wave that threatened to fill the chamber. Some of the lights winked out. She found herself clinging to Charles, who held onto a dangling chain to steady his footing. Mist hopped nimbly out of the way.
The sham children paid no mind.
In the dirt, something moved. Charles deftly shifted Kate’s grip to the chain and weighed in, with Davey, shovelling earth with cupped hands.
A very dirty little boy was disclosed, spitting leaves.
Charles whispered in his ear.
“Jack of Hearts, with one corner bent off,” Dickie shouted.
Davey hugged his nephew, who was a bit embarrassed.
The dirty boy looked at his clean mirror image. Dickie had a spasm of fear, but got over it.
“You’d better leave,” Charles told the impostor.
The failed changeling stood, lifted his shoulders at the girl in a well-I-tried shrug, and stepped close to the fissure in the wall. The gap seemed too narrow. As the faux Dickie neared the hole, he seemed to fold thinner, and be sucked beyond, into deeper, frothing darkness. The stench settled, but remained fungoid and corpse-filthy.
Everyone looked at Maeve.
“So, Princess Cuckoo,” said Charles, hands on hips, “what’s to be done with you?”
She regarded him, blankly.
* * * *
xi: “you might not know what you get back”
The place was changing. The roots withdrew. The crack in the wall narrowed, as if healing. A machine-oil tang cut through the peaty smell.
“The holes are closing,” said Davey.
Charles considered the Princess. It had been important that there be two cuckoos, Prince and Princess. Davey’s escape from the realm beyond the holes had stalled some design. If Dickie had been successfully supplanted, it would have started again, rumbling inexorably towards its end. Charles did not even want to guess what had just been thwarted. Plans laid in a contingent world were now abandoned—which should be enough for the Ruling Cabal.
That unknown place rubbed against thinning, permeable walls. Davey’s drawings were not the first signs that barriers could be breached. Everywhere, he once said, has its stories. Many places also had their holes, natural or special-made. It was difficult, but travellers could pass through veils that separated there from here and here from there.
This girl-shaped person was one such.
“Princess, if I may call you that...”
She nodded. Her face was thinner now, cheekbones more apparent, pupils oval, skin a touch green in the lamplight.
“.. .outside the Gift are two men dressed in black.”
She knew the Undertaking.
“They would like me to hand you over to them. You are a specimen of great interest. As you once hadplans for us, they have plans for you. Which you might not care for.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“You say that now. You’re disappointed, of course. Your life for the past eight years—and I can imagine it has been utterly strange—was geared up to this moment. And it’s proven a bust.”
“No need to rub it in. Mr. Detective.”
“I am just trying to make you realise this might not be the worst moment of your sojourn here.”
The girl spat out a bitter little laugh.
She was like a child. Perhaps they all were. That childishness was evident in all the impressions that came through the holes, dressed up and painted in and cut about by Davey Harvill and Uncle Satt and Leslie Sackham and George MacDonald and Arthur Rackham and many, many others. They were the little people, small in their wonderments, prone to spasms of sunlit joy and long rainy
afternoon sulks.
“Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe might tire of asking questions. It can be boring, not getting answers. In the end, the Undertaking might just cut you up in the name of science. To find wings folded inside your shoulder-bones, then spread them on a board and pin you like a butterfly. There’s a secret museum for creatures like you. It’s possible you’d be under glass for a long time.”
A thrill passed through her. A horror.
That was something to be proud of. He had terrified the Medusa.
“What do you want?” she said, quietly.
“His sister,” he said, nodding at Davey.
She thought it over.
“There’s a balance. She can’t be here if I am. Not for long. You saw, with Dickie. Things bend.”
“You’re not going to let her go?” said Kate.
Charles sympathised with Kate’s outrage. Mist, as well. This girl was responsible for at least one murder. Sackham, obviously—to keep the Gift shut, so her business could proceed. Almost certainly, she had contrived the death of Violet Harvill, who could not be fooled forever. (Did Davey know that? How could he not?) Charles was certain the Princess would answer for her failure to the powers she served or represented.
“It is for the best,” he told Kate.
Mist gave him the nod. Good man.
“I should warn you,” said the Princess, “you might not know what you get back. Time passes differently.”
He understood. If thirty years fly past in a three days, what might not transpire in eight years?
The Princess stood by the fissure, which pulsed—almost like a mouth.
She looked at them all.
“Good-bye, Hawkshaw,” she said. “The Dickie who was almost is less fun.”
Dickie frowned. Kate had most of the dirt off his face.
“Auntie,” he said. “I know you didn’t mean it.”
The Princess seemed sad but said nothing. Suddenly boneless and flimsy, she slid into the slit as if it were a post-box and she a letter. Long seconds passed. The fissure bulged and creaked. An arm flopped out.
Davey took hold of the hand and pulled.
Charles grabbed Davey’s waist and hauled. Mist and Kate lent their strength. Even so, it was hard going. Davey’s grip slipped on oily skin. Charles’s forearm ached, as he felt the old bite.
A shoulder and head, coated with mud, emerged. Eyes opened in the mask of filth. Bright, alive eyes.
Then, in a long tangle, a whole body slithered out. She drew breath, as if just born, and gave vent to a cry. Noise filled the dynamo chamber.
“Let’s take the quickest way out,” Charles said.
Kate went ahead with the lanterns. The three men carried the limp, adult length of the rescued girl between them. Dickie, magnifying glass held up, followed.
When they banged out of the waterfall door, Mist ordered a constable to fetch water from the horse-trough in Regent’s Crescent. The newfound girl lay on the ground, head in Davey’s lap. A drapery wound around her, plastered to her body like a toga, but her bare, gnarled feet stuck out.
Kate held Dickie back.
Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe exchanged dark glances, unreadable. When Charles looked again, they were gone. A worry for another day.
Philip and Sarah Riddle got past the cordon and bustled around, too relieved at the return of Dickie to ask after the new arrival. They took their son, scolding and embracing him.
Mist had his men round up buckets of water, and had to stop PC. Willoughby from dashing one in the woman’s face.
“Looks like she’s been buried alive, sir,” said the constable.
“It’s not so bad,” said Dickie, bravely.
Charles requisitioned a flannel from a stray governess, soaked it, and cleaned the face of the woman who had come back.
A beautiful blank appeared with the first wash. She was exactly like the Princess. Then a few lines became apparent, and a white streak in her hair.
“Maeve,” said Davey.
The woman looked up, recognising her brother.
Charles would have taken her for a well-preserved forty or a hard-lived thirty. He stood back, and looked at the family reunion.
“How long’s it been?” she said.
“Not but a moment,” said Davey.
She closed her eyes and smiled, safe.
Charles found that Kate was holding his elbow, face against his sleeve. He suspected a manoeuvre to conceal tears. A pricking in his eyes suggested discreet dabbing might be in order to repair his own composure.
A crowd began to assemble. There was still interest in the Gift. It occurred to Charles that it might even be safe to open the place, though Mist would have to write up the Sackham case carefully for the BQC files.
Maeve rolled in Davey’s grasp and flung her arms around his neck.
Sarah Riddle noticed her sister, recognised her at once. She gasped, in wonder. Her husband, puzzled at first, caught on and began to dance a jig.
Charles slipped his own arm around Kate’s waist. Her hands were hooked into his coat. They had been through a great deal together. Again. Pamela had been right about Katharine Reed; she was an extraordinarily promising girl. No, that was then. Now, she was an extraordinarily delivering woman.
He lifted her face from his arm and set her spectacles straight.
“What should a fairy tale have?” he asked.
Kate sniffed. “A happy ending,” she ventured.
He kissed her nose, which set her crying again.
She arched up on tip-toes and kissed him on the lips, which should not have been the surprise it was.
Mist gave a nod to Willoughby.
The constable raised big hands to his belt, thumb tapping the handle of his truncheon.
“Move along, now,” he told the gathering crowds. “There’s nothing to see ‘ere.”
<
* * * *
Richard Riddle,
Boy Detective in
“The Case Of The French Spy”
I: “wmjhu-ojbhu dajjq jh qrs prbhufs”
“Gosh, Dick,” said Violet, “an ammonite!”
A chunk of rock, bigger than any of them could have lifted, had broken from the soft cliff and fallen on the shingle. Violet, on her knees, brushed grit and grime from the stone.
They were on the beach below Ware Cleeve, looking for clues.
This was not strictly a fossil hunting expedition, but Dick knew Violet was mad about terrible lizards—which was what “dinosaur” meant in Greek, she had explained. On a recent visit to London, Violet had been taken to the prehistoric monster exhibit in Crystal Palace Park. She could not have been more excited if the life-size statues turned out to be live specimens. Palaeontology was like being a detective, she enthused: working back from clues to the truth, examining a pile of bones and guessing what kind of body once wrapped around them.
Dick conceded her point. But the dinosaurs died a long, long time ago. No culprit’s collar would be felt. A pity. It would be a good mystery to solve. The Case of the Vanishing Lizards. No, The Mystery of the Disappearing Dinosaurs. No, The Adventure of the Absent Ammonites.
“Coo,” said Ernest. “Was this amonster?”
Ernest liked monsters. Anything with big teeth counted.
“Not really,” Violet admitted. “It was a cephalopod. That means ‘head-foot.’“
“It was a head with only a foot?” Ernest liked the idea. “Did it hop up behind enemies, and sink its fangs into their bleeding necks?”
“It was more like a big shrimp. Or a squid with a shell.”
“Squid are fairly monstrous, Ernest,” said Dick. “Some grow giant and crush ships with their tentacles.”
Ernest made experimental crushing motions with his hands, providing squelching noises with his mouth.
Violet ran her fingers over the ammonite’s segments.
“Ammon was the ram-headed God of Ancient Egypt.”
Dick saw Ernest imagining that—an evil God butting unb
elievers to death.
“These are called ‘ammonites’ because the many-chambered spiral looks like the horn of a ram. You know, like the big one in Mr. Crossan’s field.”
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 12
