The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

‘We’ll never find Greybags in all this,’ he breathed. ‘Where do we begin?’ He looked about him frantically, and saw . . .

  Hundreds of people. He’d never imagined there’d still be so many, so late at night. A porter banged into Thomas from behind, mumbled an apology and staggered on, dragging a great bundle of suitcases strapped to a gurney; another man, all moustache and important side whiskers, accidentally stepped on his foot. Down the side of the hall, vendors competed to sell oranges, hot chestnuts, pieces of suspicious-looking meat, mushy peas boiled in great steel cauldrons, and all the snacks and feasts that you could dream of. A stall near the entrance proclaimed that here was the enterprise of one W. H. Smith Esq., ready to sell them a range of newspapers and magazines, including the latest satirical offering from Punch. At this hour, though, Mr Smith Esq.’s newsagent’s was shutting up for the night, since most of the passengers thronging past had already reached their destination, and had no more use for his wares.

  ‘He’ll be looking to leave by the first train he can find,’ said Lin. ‘He’ll go back west, head to the old country, where he came from.’ Shoving their way through the crowd, they went towards a tall board where a man in the peaked cap and uniform jacket and trousers of the Great Western Railway was chalking up details of arrivals, along with those of the very last trains still due to leave.

  ‘There!’ Tess gestured towards the train mentioned at the top of the board, departing from platform nine for some remote junction called Didcot. Run, catch it while you can!

  They ran. Tess ducked around trousered shins and vast crinoline hems. Thomas elbowed his way through with a chant of, ‘Sorry, was that your foot? Sorry, sorry. Oh, I am dreadfully sorry, ma’am!’ Lin needed no elbows: the crowd parted spontaneously, in fear and revulsion before a woman so foreign and in such uncouth attire.

  Platform seven: empty, the last train long since departed. At platform eight the new service from Wales was depositing its hundreds of passengers, mingling the soot-specked common sort, conveyed here third class in grubby trucks, with the ranks of first-class travellers, who strode away from the train elegantly empty-handed while their servants attended to the luggage now being unloaded from the luggage car.

  Paddington

  ‘Coming through!’

  ‘What the devil is that woman wearing?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry! Oh, I say, sorry about that. Was that your foot?’

  ‘Come on, bigwig!’

  Platform nine. It lay at the gloomy far end of the station, against the lofty far wall. A ticket inspector stood at the near end, but Tess had ducked past him and was running for the train before he had a chance to go, ‘Oi!’ Then Lin was there, grabbing him by the collar and snarling, ‘A child! Have you seen a child, grey hair, grey skin, adult’s clothes, heading for this train?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘A child! Think!’

  Then Tess’s voice came down the platform. ‘Miss Lin!’

  Lin let go of the unfortunate inspector and ran down the platform. Thomas was there already, standing by Tess’s side, following her gaze.

  Standing squarely in the middle of the platform, hair dishevelled and thumb wedged in his mouth was Mr Marvellous, the mighty strong man of the circus.

  He wasn’t alone. Next to him, on a low wooden trolley, was a large box, high as a man and covered in purple silk. A rhythmical sound came from it, low and steady, and with the sound, the silk gently stirred.

  ‘You!’ snapped Lin, pointing at Mr Marvellous. ‘Out of my way!’

  He removed the thumb from his mouth with a faint pop and said, ‘I ain’t s’posed to listen to you, miss!’

  ‘You will do as I say!’

  He giggled, and brought out his other hand from behind his back. Held between his stubby fingers was a curved piece of metal. It looked like the handle from an ancient cauldron, yanked off its hinges.

  Lin’s face fell. ‘Oh.’

  ‘I gotta keep hold of the metal an’ then I get a prize!’ said Mr Marvellous.

  ‘Miss Lin!’ shrilled Tess. ‘Ensorcell him!’

  ‘It’s magnetic iron,’ murmured Thomas. ‘How . . .?’

  ‘Greybags said I’ll get a prize if I hold on to the iron!’ Mr Marvellous happily explained. ‘An’ if I kill you. He said that,’ he added, as an afterthought.

  ‘Thomas, Tess,’ breathed Lin, ‘get on the train.’

  They edged past her towards the nearest carriage door. ‘You ain’t allowed on the train!’ wailed Mr Marvellous. ‘It ain’t part of the rules!’

  ‘Rules are for children to break,’ replied Lin, stretching her arms to their full length and turning her head this way and that to loosen her neck muscles. ‘Now, seeing you didn’t choose to be intoxicated, and possessed with the spirit of an infant, I will try not to hurt you.’ Planting one foot before the other in a fighting stance never seen before on English soil, she added, ‘So long as you don’t hurt me.’

  The guard blew the whistle, just as Tess and Thomas made a run for the train. In the same moment, Mr Marvellous, with a little giggle, raised the thick iron handle and ran straight for Lin’s head.

  CHAPTER 21

  Lyle

  Thomas and Tess were still on the platform as the train started to pull out. With each distant ‘chumpf!’ from the engine, the boxy wooden carriages were yanked forwards, then paused in a noisily accelerating rhythm. Running alongside an open door in the last carriage, Thomas took a leap, which became a stumble, onto the train. He just managed to pull Tess up from the platform before the door slammed shut behind them by the train’s stuttering increase in speed.

  Inside, they met with the pale faces of a Presbyterian couple, who’d never seen anything more exciting than biblical tableaux at the chapel’s annual temperance supper, and for whom, therefore, this particular incident would be conversation at dinner for months.

  At the same moment, Mr Marvellous swung the iron bar down towards Lin’s head with all his marvelled-at strength . . . to where Lin wasn’t any more.

  The bar thudded into the planks of the platform, and Mr Marvellous blinked in surprise. He looked up, to see Lin standing a short step to the side of where she had been, fists raised, bouncing on her toes. He mumbled, ‘How’d you . . .?’ and realised that no, she was only bouncing on one set of toes. The toes attached to her other foot were shooting towards his throat on the end of more leg than he’d ever imagined. He stepped back, and the kick bounced off his shoulder, knocking him backwards nonetheless. He mumbled, ‘But yor a girl!’

  ‘Yep,’ replied Lin cheerfully. ‘Do you know, some people think I should let that stand in my way.’

  He swung the bar at her head again, and she dodged and swivelled so that she could grab his arm from behind as he turned. She turned with him, adding her momentum to his, to spin him round in an entire circle. He staggered as the bar slipped in his fingers. But he didn’t let go. Instead, with a determined grunt, he regained his foothold and tensed his whole body like a rock. As he caught his balance and his breath, so Lin’s fingers slipped from his arm.

  He half turned to face her again, mouth agape in anger. ‘Oh,’ murmured Lin, ‘it usually doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘You ain’t no good to play with!’ roared Mr Marvellous. With one hand he swung the metal handle, with the other, he aimed a punch.

  Lin sprang back, but slipped onto one knee. ‘Look,’ she bluffed, ‘I really don’t want to hurt you. It’s bad form to leave too many prostrate bodies when all I’m attempting to do is to maintain some civilised norms of behaviour.’

  He growled, lowered his head like a charging bull and ran straight at her. She rolled to one side, came up low and got a kick into the back of his knee. It was like punching a sandbag: it felt heavy, soft and utterly unresponsive. Mr Marvellous roared, ‘Yor not nice!’ and before Lin had time to move, his hand was round her throat. He lifted her up as if she was weightless, dangled her in the air and said, ‘You ain’t getting no prize!’

  Lin’s
green eyes stood out from her face, her hair flopped dishevelled over her face. She clawed at his fingers in vain. As her face began to turn red, then white, then purple-blue, she lunged with two fingers at Mr Marvellous’s throat, found the ridged hardness of his windpipe, pressed in and pressed down.

  Mr Marvellous would have preferred to give a yell of pain, but for that, enough air would have had to make it past the sudden stab of Lin’s hand. Instead he made a little, nnnckkk, nnnckkk noise, dropped Lin into an undignified heap, wheezed like a dying rattle snake and sagged to his knees.

  Lin picked herself up, and dusted herself off, her eyes fixed on the now distant train. ‘I wish I could inform you,’ she said as Mr Marvellous gagged and heaved for breath, ‘that that was a strike known as “lotus sings lullaby to crane” or some such pretentious nonsense. It’s not. It’s known as bloody nasty two fingers into the throat, and there’s a reason we don’t teach such things to children.’

  Her eyes moved to where Mr Marvellous was now trying to pull himself up beside the big silk-covered box.

  No . . .

  . . . wait . . .

  . . . not pull himself up. Release a catch on the side of the box itself.

  The purple silk fell away.

  The catch came free.

  Now that Lin’s mind had time to catch up with the rest of her, it occurred to her that she’d already recognised the sound coming from that box, as the thing inside slipped out onto the platform. It had been a purr. A lion’s purr.

  Lin looked at the lion.

  The lion looked at her.

  She felt the creature was likely to bring more to the encounter than she herself could muster, since her own reasoning wasn’t getting much beyond: Oh dear, it’s a lion. Whoops, it’s a lion. Um . . . it’s a lion. It looks quite hungry. Oh well, it’s a lion.

  Slowly, as slowly as she could, she eased a brass-bladed knife out of her sleeve. She said, ‘I didn’t realise Greybags poisoned animals too.’

  ‘He made the circus pretty,’ replied Mr Marvellous, staggering to his feet. He wore a broad grin - of satisfaction, Lin guessed - at the hopelessness of her situation. ‘Greybags made everything right. Everyone at the circus likes the stories what he tells.’

  ‘Of course.’ Lin sighed. ‘And in his stories, the lions at the circus always do what their tamers command. Lovely. Poignant. Nice lion,’ she added with a squeak, as its great triangular shoulder blades rose and fell above the long curve of its spine.

  ‘You mustn’t hurt the children.’ Mr Marvellous chuckled. ‘You mustn’t make them get old. It ain’t nice to make them get old.’

  The lion was still purring, but its jaws were ajar and she could see great spiked teeth and a soft pink tongue. She felt that to blink, to take her eyes for one second off that orange-yellow stare, was to die. Her fighting instructor had trained her in the art of causing damage to every form of human and its evolutionary neighbours, armed with any weapon from any corner of the earth. She’d never said anything about mystically possessed lions.

  As she watched it drop its chin, raise its hind legs and saw its tail flatten behind it, she turned the knife, thinking: Perhaps if I’m fast. Perhaps perhaps perhaps perhaps if it’s an arthritic intoxicated old lion with only one good eye and a cramp problem, then perhaps . . .

  And a voice said, very gently behind her, ‘Close your eyes.’

  The words were soft, warm, kind and, for the most part, unconcerned by the giggling, thumb-sucking strong man and a menacing pet lion. In the face of so much reassurance, of such familiarity, Lin felt she had no choice, not even a moment to think and doubt. Without a word she obeyed.

  She closed her eyes.

  There was a fizz, a pop, a hiss, then a sudden and loud snap-fuzz ! Even from behind her closed eyes she saw the flash of white light, bright and sharp enough to burn its image across her eyeballs, then seem to track back and forth to the edge of her vision as she moved her eyes in the darkness.

  Immediately there was a human cry of distress, together with an animal mewl of pain. She heard a footstep move by, a jingling of metal, then the strange animal sound quickly subsided into an indignant, fading mmmmmrrrrwwww.

  Lin half-opened one eye.

  A man was kneeling over the lion, an empty syringe in one hand. Already the great beast lay docile at his feet. He straightened up and reached into a pocket for another vial of stuff. Nearby, Mr Marvellous was on his knees with his hands over his eyes, sobbing like a child. ‘I can’t see!’ he wailed. ‘I can’t see nothin’!’

  The man was dressed in a long beige coat stained with all sorts of chemical and culinary accidents, hatless above his sandy-red hair, and accompanied by a dog composed mostly of a big brown nose and trailing ears. He stepped round the stupefied lion, knelt by Mr Marvellous and took the strong man’s hand in his own. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured. ‘I’m here now. You don’t have to be scared. I’ll see that you’re all right.’

  ‘Who’s there? I can’t see nothin’!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ repeated the other man, pulling out another syringe and uncorking the vial with his teeth. He spat the cork away, filled the syringe and touched it to the strong man’s arm. ‘I’m going to give you something to make you better. It’ll sting for a little and then it’ll all be all right.’

  He pushed the syringe under the skin, injected the contents, and waited for the big man’s breath to slow, for him to relax, and his hands to fall away from his face. At length, with a little sigh, Mr Marvellous fell asleep. The man with the syringe lowered Mr Marvellous’s head carefully to the ground, straightened up, and turned.

  ‘Lions?’ he said with a shrug. ‘Not to worry. I really feel I’ve understood the whole lion business and frankly, in retrospect, the whole situation was overblown.’ He saw her startled expression. ‘Um . . . Hello, Miss Lin,’ he added.

  ‘Hello, Mister Lyle,’ she mumbled.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Finally, they blurted together:

  ‘How are you—’

  ‘About the whole kissing business—’

  And they fell silent again.

  ‘If I find out that your not being dead was because you were merely pretending to be that ill,’ Lin exclaimed, wagging a disapproving finger at Lyle, ‘in order to win my sympathetic feminine favours, I will, so help me . . .’

  ‘Miss Lin, which would you rather?’ asked Lyle, grinning brightly. ‘My having faked what I can only describe as one of the most frightening and agonising experiences of my rather exciting detective career, or a blow-by-blow account of the likely chemical, biological, bio-chemical, medical, existential, philosophical, spiritual and metabolic reasons why I’m standing here right now talking to you and not, in fact, singing lullabies to Newton.’

  She thought about it a moment then said, ‘You frame a difficult question, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘Not as difficult as this one.’ He put his head on one side, and though he was grinning, she could see the exhaustion in his eyes and weariness in his sagging shoulders. ‘Where the bloody hell are the children?’

  Lin looked to the far end of the platform and beyond, to where a single red rear light on the back of the train was vanishing into darkness.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?’

  It was not the easiest thing in the world to explore the train.

  For a start, working up through the carriages was a difficulty none too easy to solve. Certainly, in the third-class compartments where grey faces stained with dirt were pressed in shoulder to shoulder along hard wooden benches, the only real obstruction to observation was the shove and bump of swaying bodies obscuring sight. But with no joins between carriages, Tess and Thomas were left with no better means to move between second and third class than by waiting until the train lumbered into each slow station, hopping out of the end of the third-class carriages and running round into second class, where each compartment door was slammed tight on its own lit
tle world. In this way they peered through every compartment window and, where the curtains were drawn across the wooden doors of the compartments, they slid the doors rudely back and, seeing no one of any consequence within, Tess would bob her polite courtesy and say, ‘Sorry, m’m, I were lookin’ for my lost uncle see?’ and so they would scurry on.

  For nearly an hour the train rumbled through London and, as it did, the commuters slowly began to leave until those left in the carriages were the sunk-eyed weary of the long-distance travellers, men clutching leather cases or woven sacks, women holding sleeping children to them, who were now too tired to cry. The slow train to Bristol, five hours and a half by moonlight and the dull yellow glow of the driver’s lamp. Tess had never left London before. Thomas had never left London in quite such an undignified way. As the city houses melted away, black countryside slipped by, real black, solid black, full of the chittering of cold insects after rain, the smell of mud and other things richer and less salubrious, and as far as the eye could see, stars. Ten thousand thousand thousand stars that only seemed to grow brighter the more you stared, looking down on the red bricks of slumbering stations, freshly built in a place where one day a town might spring up, candles going out in the station masters’ windows.