by Zizou Corder
To do her justice, she did as she was told.
I scraped. She breathed. As my eyes got used to the dimness beyond the grating I could start to make out shapes.
It took a long time. I had blisters on my fingers, the cut on my thumb opened up again, and I wasted Finn’s last roll by using the mayonnaise as lubrication on the hinges. But I got it open.
I pushed it up and another shower of rust and dust and grease fell over us both. Then I clambered through. Without being invited, the girl climbed up behind me.
‘Where are we?’ she asked very quietly.
‘In a cellar,’ I said shortly. The question was, what cellar? ‘Be quiet.’
I took the torch off her and shone it slowly around. The room was small and completely dark. The floor was stone, old, dirty. The walls were invisible behind stacks and stacks of boxes – old, old cobwebby, rotting boxes. Where the sides of the boxes were falling away, their faded writing peeling off, I could make out – what?
I rubbed one with my fingertip. Glass. It was stacks of bottles. Wine bottles.
There was a door on the far side. I glanced back at the grating behind us. For a moment the beam of the torch caught the water down below, sending back a flash of glistening reflection.
I shivered. The smell was of damp and mould and long long ago cold.
I thought of the book – of its years in the Egyptian tomb. The thought twisted the dagger in my heart. I’d said I’d look after him. I’d let him down. I was everything my dad ever said I was. Useless, useless, can’t do a single blind thing to save yer life, stupid bliddy useless…
Don’t go there, Lee. Not now. Don’t go into those thoughts. You’ve got work to do.
I crossed to the door and the girl was right behind me.
The handle came off in my hand – not that it mattered, because so did the door, when I pushed it.
What the door led into was the most curious thing I had ever seen in my life.
CHAPTER 15
And According to Janaki
How did it happen? I hardly know. I was just standing there, peering at the manhole down which ‘Richard Oliver’ had disappeared. Then there was a pale, pale face coming up at me out of the hole, and I was so shocked that for a moment I forgot to run. When I did it was too late: he grabbed me and I twisted but he had me and he shoved me down the hole, my hair and feet all over the place, my head banging, my elbows scraping and my glasses gone flying. Then he was gone, and I landed on something warm and angular and kicking – Joe English! And then he pushed me off and yelled at me and hurtled down a dark corner and for some reason I don’t quite understand even now, I followed him.
Oh, I do understand. I followed him because I was so scared of being left where I was – in an underground chamber with the clanging of the closing manhole lid still echoing above me. I thought, in my moment of panic, that he must know what he was doing. If I’d known he was going down into the sewers of London, I would never, never have gone down there. And once I followed him, and smelt that smell, and realized what I had let myself in for, it was too late. I didn’t know how to get out. I’d get lost. Even if I got back to the underground room I couldn’t get out of there – I’d seen him try. So I followed him. He must be going somewhere.
I realized, pretty quickly, how bad things really were for me. That smell. The feeling beneath your feet. He had these big boots on but I was just in my shoes. Never, never have I experienced anything so unpleasant. And scary. Ahead of me his torch beam lit up the walls for a moment here, a moment there, as he twisted and turned down the tunnel. I caught glimpses of brickwork, wet and cold and curving.
He was quick, too. I called out to him to wait but the echoing noise of my own voice just filled me with more horror. What if I fell? What if I landed in this…?
I concentrated on following and keeping up. Just keep up. Don’t look, don’t think. Don’t notice the odd crunch in the silty slime underfoot. Don’t think of your hair swinging against the slime. Don’t think.
And as for the pigs. I don’t even want to…
Eyurgh.
It was such a relief when they passed by us. I was almost happy, to hold his torch and have dirt and detritus shower down on to my face as he hacked away. I couldn’t clamber up after him quick enough. The filthy wine cellar felt like home after a long journey. I scrabbled my shoes in the dust on the floor, anything to dry them off. I was shaking all over, big jerking shakes.
I threw up, as well. Relief, I suppose.
He glanced at me and handed me a bottle of water from his pack. ‘Don’t use much,’ he said. I rinsed my mouth and spat it out back down the grating.
‘Thanks,’ I muttered, but he was busy pulling the door to pieces.
And then there we were. He held the torch up high to give maximum light, and we both gasped, and though I was almost in tears, I laughed, and he said, ‘Corpus Christi Mariani!’
I had seen places like this before – in the old films Mr Maggs liked to watch on a quiet evening. This was where Marlene Dietrich sat on a high stool on the little stage, while men with hats watched her and smoked, and ladies in smooth satin dresses and feathers drank Martinis. There would be a little orchestra, and people dancing in couples, and sooner or later the men would start to shoot each other. It was an old-fashioned nightclub.
Joe English moved the torch like a tiny spotlight. One by one the accoutrements of the club were lit up. There was the little stage. There was the bar, lined in a thousand mirror tiles, flashing back at us. There was the dance floor. There was the chandelier above it, dripping feathers of dust. There was even a piano.
I went over to it. White dust was thick on the lid. I lifted it and a cloud flew up. The piano was still white underneath.
‘I wouldn’t start playing yet,’ he said. I sat on the stool instead and pulled off my shoes and socks.
‘Mariani,’ he said again, looking around. ‘This is absolutely – it’s true! It’s only true, after all!’
‘What’s true?’ I asked.
‘Everything my granddad ever told me,’ he said, and that was all I could get out of him.
He went behind the bar and set the torch in the corner, where it reflected back off several mirrored walls. This arrangement gave us a gleaming, fractured, spooky light, but least we could now see the whole place. It wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t tiny either. Around the dance floor were about thirty circular tables, each with eight little chairs, except the ones round the edge, which had padded banquettes built into the wall. I patted one. The dust erupted and in its place was a handprint showing crimson velvet.
At the back of the stage was a drum kit; behind it on the wall in large curly letters I could read the words ‘The Mandrake Club’.
In the middle of each round table was a vase of dead flowers, drooping, stiffened. Set around them were slender, elegant glasses. There were metal buckets on stands, empty bottles. There were plates, the remains of long-ago food not only dried up but peeling off, and gone. There were ashtrays and napkins and mouse droppings, and at one table a fur coat lay draped like an animal killed while trying to escape. At my feet a handbag lay spilled: I reached down and saw a lipstick, paper money and an old-fashioned mobile phone.
Behind the cold and the damp there was a very very faint smell of whisky and cigarettes.
The chill was not just physical.
‘What do you suppose happened?’ I whispered.
His face was turned away from me and for a while he didn’t say anything.
‘They left in hurry, at a guess.’
‘Why? Why did they leave all their things? Why didn’t anyone come back?’
‘How would I know?’ he said quite rudely.
It wasn’t as scary as the sewer, but actually it was quite scary enough. I stood and went round to the back of the bar.
‘What you doing?’ he barked.
‘Thought I’d see if I could clean myself up,’ I said calmly. I didn’t want to upset him. He seemed quite wound
up already. I just wanted to – well, wash the smell of sewer off me. Then I’d think about the situation.
He swivelled round and beat me to the little sink. Nothing came from the tap but a few peculiar noises. But there was a mass of liquor bottles along the shelves and underneath in the cupboards I found row on row of minerals: waters of various kinds among them.
‘Could I use some of this?’ I asked him. Maybe if he felt respected he would calm down a bit.
He glanced at the supply. ‘Use half a bottle, max,’ he said.
I retreated to the privacy of a banquette to clean up my feet and legs. When I’d done, I came back and sat across from him at one of the tables. He’d cleared off the detritus and was resting his head on his arms in a position of utter despair.
He lifted it up and for the first time he looked me in the eye.
‘So who are you then?’ he said.
‘I’m Janaki.’
‘And what exactly are you doing here?’
I could feel that my face was trembling. I hoped he wouldn’t notice.
‘He pushed me down when he went out,’ I said finally. ‘I was at the top. Then I just followed you – I was scared not to.’
He pursed his mouth a bit.
‘What were you doing there anyway?’
I didn’t really have much to lose. If he’d wanted to hurt me he could have left me down the sewer, or let the pigs get me.
‘I was looking for you,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ve got the book.’
He stared at me a while.
‘So?’ he said.
‘You stole it from Mr Maggs.’
‘And? Mr Maggs your boyfriend then?’
‘He’s like my dad,’ I said.
For a moment I thought he was going to carry on sneering, but for some reason when I said that, he changed course. He stopped and looked like he was thinking about something else.
‘So who was it?’ he asked me. ‘Who jumped you?’
Well, clearly he could see that I was scared.
‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘What difference is it going to make now?’
‘He said he was your social worker,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a social worker. A very kind old bird called Edith, who weighs about eighteen stone and would not be exactly nippy in the getting in and out of sewers department. She ain’t seen me for about two years. I don’t think it was Edith. What d’he look like?’
I stared at him in the curious torch reflection. ‘Go in the light,’ I said, and he moved the angle of his face till it was lit up.
There was no mistaking it. The sticky-up pale hair, the wide eyes, bony cheeks, peculiar pallor.
‘He looked like you,’ I said.
CHAPTER 16
Nigella Lurch Continues Her Version
It was my thirty-ninth birthday. I was in Rome, celebrating. Some celebration! Nothing to show for my thirty-nine years but some stories published years before. No home, no husband, no child. I had a semi-criminal reputation and masses of money, that was all. My mother hadn’t even sent me a card. But then how could she? She didn’t know where I lived, or even what name I used.
I never used to think about children. Boring little things. But now – I don’t know. Everything seems a little superficial. All this pressure of work, and the little treats I give myself don’t work to cheer me up any more. I bought myself a little castle in Jamaica and I haven’t even been there. Yesterday I’d picked up a new fur coat for my birthday. There it was, flung over the back of the chair. Just a load of dead fur. I wanted things that were alive. I wanted new things. Living things. Clean things.
I wanted to be young again. That’s all. Young and clean.
Perhaps I want to be a better person.
With a husband. And children. And a vegetable garden.
But people don’t marry an empress of crime. And I can’t have children. I could buy some I suppose… Not while I’m an empress of crime though. It wouldn’t be fair on them. If I were a lady writer now, writing stories about Cotton MacGill the cat…
The image had become so clear of late. There I am, sitting at a desk, tapping away, with a child or two playing on the lawn beyond the French windows. Sunshine. No bodyguards, no urgent problems to deal with concerning hitmen in Bratislava. Just a beautiful bunch of flowers from my publishers and a note about a prize I have won. How clean and lovely; how innocent.
And with the book, I could do it.
I wanted it so much. I could no longer push it away. I wanted to be everything my father should have been.
In my stark modern hotel in Rome, my telephone began to ring. It was time for my daily round of calls with my managers around the world. Each of them called me every day at the allotted time. A girl has to keep tight control of an empire like mine.
First I spoke to Zakarias in Budapest. An operative had stolen some money from us.
‘Break his legs,’ I said.
He had also taken a contact list of my employees.
‘Kill him,’ I said.
Zakarias was a little reluctant. He suggested perhaps it would be enough just to break his legs.
‘Do you want your legs broken, Zakarias?’ I said. It no longer thrilled me to say things like that.
He agreed that he didn’t.
‘Call me when it’s done,’ I said. ‘I shall visit in the next few days to view the body.’ You have to keep on top of these things, or people take advantage. God, how boring it all was. I longed not to have to do it any more.
Then I talked to Wang in Beijing. Import/export was going very well, he was happy to report. Profits were up and our bill for bribery was up only 1.5 per cent on the last quarter. This was acceptable. When I hung up I told Maxim, my factotum, to send Wang a big string of pearls as a bonus.
Then I received an unexpected call. It was Adrian in Paris. It was not his turn to call. I shouted at him. He said, ‘Madame, I think you will want to hear this.’
I heard him out.
He told me about a girl. She had a brother. He was involved with one of our drug dealers. A rich girl, a desperate brother, an unscrupulous drug dealer. There was a shortage of cash. There was an offer of a book in payment. Adrian felt the book might interest me.
It is my firm belief that if you want something enough you will get it. Desire is a like a magnetic force. For years I had been sending out a call to this book. Recently the call had been getting stronger and stronger. Sooner or later, something will respond.
The sister would be meeting us that night at the Ritz in Paris. I flung my fur around my shoulders and called for my helicopter.
CHAPTER 17
Continuing According to Lee
After the book was stolen from me, after all I’d promised it, I was filled with a kind of pure and righteous anger. I had made promises to that book. I was going to keep those promises.
Like me. The raider looked like me.
Well, that narrows it down a bit.
All us Ravens look exactly the same.
‘How old?’ I asked her.
‘Older than you,’ she said.
‘But a kid?’
‘Eighteen maybe?’
The worst fear slid away. At least it wasn’t my dad.
So which one of them? Finn?
Finn knew where I was. He knew the story and the background. I’d told him I didn’t have the book, but he might not have believed me. He had a skello.
Well, any Raven can get a skello when he wants one.
And anyone could know the story. If they’d seen the paper, they could put two and two together and know Joe English was me.
But only Finn knew where I was.
Little graspole, I was starting to think… but I wasn’t convinced.
I just didn’t believe it was him.
Why not?
One, Finn is a bit wet. He’s not the bravest, and he ain’t got the best skills. I would have woken
up if he’d stuck his hand under my head.
Plus, he believes me when I tell him things, Finn and I was always on the same side. Ciaran, now, he’d do anything. No sense of loyalty at all. Not inside the family, anyway. If it’s family v. outsiders, obviously we’ll all stick together. But inside the family, it’s me and Finn, then Billy and Squidge – Squidge’d do anything for Billy, then Ciaran rocketing around doing whatever the crike he likes.
Or Squidge?
No. He wouldn’t have the enterprise. He’d talk about it, but he wouldn’t get round to it.
That leaves Billy.
Billy, the biggest tosher of the lot. He’d do anything for caio. Best skills too. Billy is an extremely accomplished thief. Fine dipper, top-class housebreaker.
Yeah, Billy.
So he’s after the reward. And he can’t even be bothered to talk to me about it, make me an offer. He wouldn’t know that I wouldn’t give that book up for love nor money. He should’ve suggested a split like Finn did.
He is a naughty boy, our Billy. And now he’s made it a straight and blatant competition. All right, Billy. You’re on.
The girl was still sitting there. There was a bruise coming up on her forehead, no doubt from where Billy had pushed her down the manhole.
But why had he done that?
I asked her.
She was weighing up her answer.
‘Just tell me,’ I said. ‘You’re stuck with me, so just tell me.’
‘I’ll do answer for answer,’ she said. ‘It’s my turn.’
‘All right,’ I said. She didn’t look like she’d be any trouble.
‘Why did you steal the book?’ she asked.
‘What do you know about the book?’ I shot back.
‘You first,’ she said.
I was about to answer, ‘Cos I’m a thief,’ but something stopped me. Her honest eyes, I should think. Instead I said, ‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘What d’you mean you didn’t mean to?’ she yelled. ‘People don’t nick things by mistake! That’s absurd…’
‘My turn,’ I said calmly. ‘How do you even know about the book? And don’t try and tell me you read it in the paper.’ I couldn’t ask her straight out if she knew what the book was. That would tell her it was something, and a girl like her wouldn’t shut up till she’d found out what.