The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  Frankie woke early to the sound of motor traffic spluttering along Talgarth Road on its way into the capital. A waterfall of bright gold light was pouring through the studio windows, heating the cashmere shawl lying over her. She was already warm in the heat from the coal fire’s residue. Careful of waking Milly, she crept out from under the covers, and reviewed the room in its dancing kaleidoscope of illuminated dust. What she wanted to do would be easier now, and she needed to do it in private.

  Avoiding the litter trail of last night’s crusty sherbet glasses she made her way over to the fireplace. She scraped the gramophone out of the way and saw what she was after wedged behind the coal scuttle, its beaten silver sails catching the sunlight: the cutlery ship.

  As she reached for it, a shatter pierced the daylight haze and the whole thing collapsed, spilling its metal cargo around the hearth. Panic struck Frankie as she scrabbled to collect the fallen spoons, knives and forks. A voice behind stopped her.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She hadn’t heard Milly enter. Hastily she hung back up some of the cutlery and righted the ship. Milly crossed to join her, answering her own question as she went. ‘Don’t let’s make coffee here. The stuff I have is horrid. Let’s get some from the man at Baron’s Court station. He doesn’t use chicory or anything.’

  She was wearing a fresh dress, another Paul Poiret creation, a blue silk tunic on top of harem pants, a crimson velvet cummerbund strapping her ribcage. The sleeves hung loose and smelled faintly of cinnamon as she flapped them about, re-assembling the ship.

  ‘Is that yours or Lilian’s?’

  Milly looked at it with a puzzled expression, staring for a few seconds at its curved solid sails. ‘Mine, I think. Yes, of course it’s mine. Horrid, isn’t it?’ She snapped a smile and stood up. ‘Listen, I don’t know what the plans are today, but I’ve remembered I have to do something at Jojo’s; would you mind awfully if we went there first?’

  Frankie wasn’t quite sure either but heading into Soho might just give her the opportunity she was after. With a last glance at the cutlery ship she said, ‘Suits me just fine. So long as I can have some coffee.’

  Milly groaned. ‘Oh I know, can’t function without it. And with that head.’ She rubbed her graze. ‘Brutal, horrible women, how dare they?’ She stopped herself, Frankie supposed, remembering that they weren’t the worst off.

  Frankie stood up and dusted off her trousers. Her body felt sticky underneath the cotton and she realised she hadn’t even loosened her collar to sleep. The pile of spare clothes lay crumpled at the foot of the sofa. ‘What is it you have to do at Jojo’s?’ she asked casually as Milly picked up her hat.

  ‘Oh,’ Milly raised a breezy hand and smiled wickedly. ‘Just feed my snake.’

  Frankie sat with her fingers wedged between the pages of her notebook as the Piccadilly Railway train slithered towards Covent Garden. She had no talent for braille and her writing wasn’t firm enough to emboss anyway, but somehow she felt as if it kept her mind on the problem. Why had she given so much of herself away last night? Milly had scrutinised her like a frog in science class, and now it felt as if she held bits of her, secrets, floating in little formaldehyde jars. She swallowed her nerves and kept hold of the notebook.

  At Covent Garden station she was horrified when Milly hopped down onto the tracks after the train, squatted like she was about to piddle and coaxed a rat from one of the sleeper holes with a lump of sugar. As they rose in the lift, she tried to keep as far as possible from Milly’s squirming pocket.

  ‘It has to be fresh,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  They found the door to Jojo’s unlocked and were greeted by the monkey in chattering hysterics. Milly hoisted him onto her shoulder until they reached the inner doors to the club, then picked him delicately by the scruff of the neck and deposited him into the ticket booth.

  ‘Strange that the door was open. Jojo’s not usually up at this time.’

  ‘Maybe the monkey unlocked it,’ Frankie murmured. As soon as they opened the double doors into the club however, it was clear all was not right.

  The tables and chairs were neatly arranged as they had been two days ago when Frankie had first ventured inside, the extra chairs stacked in heaps. The sticky floor smelled faintly chemical. Tables had been wiped and wax candles and salt pots placed side by side. Electric lights illuminated the ghoulish artefacts around the walls, and once again glared off the cracked and chipped cornicing. But the stage curtains were open, peeled back in threadbare folds.

  From the shadows by the door a familiar voice echoed through the space. ‘She’s been in.’

  Frankie spun to see Liam leaning against the flaking door jamb. He looked rested but there was an air of worry underneath his expression that he was trying to conceal by chewing on a toothpick.

  He walked towards Frankie and pointed at the stage. Frankie had already seen it. The trapeze was hanging down dead centre, rippling vaguely in a breeze. A shining hook had been attached to it in place of Ebony Diamond’s leather mouthstrap, a meat hook impaling a small piece of paper.

  Milly moved swiftly over to the stage.

  ‘Careful,’ Frankie shouted. ‘How do you know it’s not a warning like that stone?’

  ‘Look at it.’

  Frankie joined her, taking the three steps at once, feeling the strain in her knees. The stiff piece of dangling paper batted towards her and she saw that it was a playing card in a suit she didn’t recognise. The bottom edge had been skewered, pinning the image upside down; a queen on a throne with flowing black hair. In her right hand she carried aloft a pointed sword, with a tip sharpened to a diamond point. Her left was open-palmed.

  ‘It’s a threat.’ Milly touched the hook’s steel tip. ‘This is what they’ll do to her if she comes back.’

  Liam’s voice cut through the open space of the cabaret. ‘The door was unlocked. Ebony kept a key. It must have been her what left it.’

  Frankie flicked the card, making the trapeze swing lightly. ‘But what’s it supposed to show, then? What’s she doing?’

  ‘What makes you think it’s supposed to be her in the picture?’ Liam asked from below.

  ‘Look at it,’ Frankie traced a finger down the face of the card. ‘Long black hair, diamond point.’

  ‘You don’t know much about the Tarot, do you?’

  Biting a retort she looked back at the card and realised it wasn’t a playing card at all, but one of the Major Arcana, or was it Minor Arcana, she could never remember. She had come across a Tarot reader once at a fair but her mother wouldn’t let her go near her and made the sign of the cross as they passed. It was the kind of thing girls were put in the ‘box’ for at school.

  Milly was stroking the card’s edges, frowning, concentrating. Suddenly the rat in her pocket squeaked. Irritated, she let out a sigh. ‘I have to go and feed Hatshepsut. Won’t be a second.’

  Frankie shuddered as Milly disappeared into the wings of the stage. She turned back to Liam. ‘So what do you know about Tarot?’

  ‘Not much.’ He bit down on the toothpick. ‘But I know what elephant shit smells like.’ Frankie stared at him, waiting for him to elaborate. He spat on the ground instead, then nudged with his head. ‘Come on.’

  She knew she wasn’t going to prise anything out of him without dancing to his tune so reluctantly let herself be led back down the hallway towards the entrance. Just before they reached the doormat he pointed down. ‘That.’ There was a smudge of muddy footprint, not enough to even see what kind of shoe it had come off or whether it was a male or female one, just a small sticky clod, trodden into the shiny floorboard. Frankie could smell it now, a scent like horse dung but more pungent and earthier.

  ‘Right,’ she said, bringing her collar to cover her nose.

  Liam moved a couple of steps forward and opened the front door. Halfway down the gloss red paint was a blemish the size of a fingerprint. Frankie leaned closer. The light was bad
but she could see that a few black threads were clinging to something sticky.

  ‘Lick it,’ she heard Liam say.

  She recoiled. ‘No, you lick it.’

  ‘I already have.’ He kept staring at her. She stayed at the juncture between doing what he said and losing face for a few seconds, then finally leaned towards the door, poking the tip of her tongue out until it made contact with the fuzzy threads. At first all she could taste was bitter silk but after a second she got it.

  ‘Sweet,’ she straightened back up.

  ‘American Fluffy Stuff,’ said Liam, biting his toothpick. He raised both his scrawny eyebrows. ‘Told you she was at the circus.’

  Frankie straightened her jacket. ‘Smug little Sherlock, aren’t you? All right, but we still haven’t found her. And what’s she doing there?’

  ‘It’s safe,’ he said, pinning open the door back into the cabaret, blocking the path of the skitting monkey. ‘You stay outside,’ he told it with a stern finger. ‘At least we know she’s alive.’

  Frankie hopped back up onto the stage and pulled the trapeze towards her. ‘Well, we still don’t know what this means.’

  She heard Milly’s voice from the wings. After a few seconds Milly herself appeared, brushing down her hands. ‘Actually, I have a pretty good idea.’

  The dressing room was barely big enough to swing a cat, let alone for three of them to cram in alongside the aquarium that housed Miss Salome’s snake. Frankie made sure Liam was wedged between herself and the tank.

  Along the ring of naked bulbs that framed the mirror, postcards had been jammed. One of Ebony Diamond stood out, her arm draped casually around a tiger’s neck, her waist pinched in to the width of its paw. Milly saw her staring and gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘It’s an old one. Touched up. She was never that thin.’

  To the right of the mirror, next to a cluster of bottles, powders, brushes and unguents spilling their contents onto the counter, sat a small row of books. It was from here that Milly withdrew a slim volume, its shiny new cover painted in the Art Nouveau style with florals and maidens with unloosed hair. ‘The Key to the Tarot’ was written across the top in red. She flipped it open and began leafing through the pages. It was beautifully illustrated, small descriptions of each card beside pencil sketches. The sections were divided into suits. Wands, cups, swords and finally pentacles. Milly flicked a heap of pages over in a small thud and began scrambling through the chapter on swords. Frankie heard a tapping sound behind her and turned to see to her horror Liam flicking the glass of the snake tank, making the little serpent rear its head.

  ‘Stop that.’

  ‘What’s it going to do, crawl up your legs? It’s behind glass.’

  ‘The Queen,’ Milly was musing to herself. ‘In reverse. I thought so.’ She drew Frankie’s attention to the illustration on the page, the same picture as the card, only black and white. It looked like Boadicea or Joan of Arc, with an eerie resemblance to the suffragettes when they dressed up for parades. Milly pointed at the introduction. Frankie murmured aloud to herself. ‘Her right hand raises the weapon vertically . . . the left hand is extended . . . countenance severe but chastened; it suggests familiarity with sorrow. It does not represent mercy. Sounds like Ebony,’ she snorted. She read on to the section below. ‘In reverse the Queen of Swords can portend to deceit, malice, bigotry, artifice, prudery; a woman who has become bitter due to loss or sorrow. It is commonly used to illustrate a mask, someone hiding something, someone who is not who they say they are.’

  Frankie straightened up. ‘Someone who is not who they say they are.’ It chimed in her head. She knew she had heard that somewhere over the last two days but couldn’t for the life of her think where. Milly was looking grave.

  ‘You know who that is, don’t you?’

  Frankie shook her head. Then it hit her like a clod. The story Mrs Barclay-Evans had told. A woman who disguised herself as a seamstress to expose the double standards of the prison system. ‘Lady Constance Lytton,’ she blurted out. ‘She wasn’t who she said she was. She disguised herself as Jane Warton and . . .’ Frankie trailed off as the thought ran dry.

  Milly was staring at her with knitted brows. ‘What are you talking about? I heard that story and as far as I heard Lady Constance Lytton did nothing but good for the movement. She’s a suffragette anyway, she’s stayed a suffragette ever since. We’re looking for someone with malice.’

  ‘But . . .’ Frankie breathed out. ‘Then who?’

  Milly leant closer, her porcelain features hardening in the bright light. ‘That girl, Annie Evans. She was wearing Ebony’s jacket and hat the night she died. Maybe she stole them. Disguised herself as Ebony for some malicious reason. Some early editions of the morning papers even reported the name as Ebony Diamond.’ Milly held up a finger. ‘If Ebony’s been laying low at the circus, especially if she’s been following the newspaper reports, as far as she is concerned no one has made the connection between Olivier dying and Annie being murdered. His death was reported as an accident and hers was a Ripper-type random attack. She wants Jojo to know it starts with Annie.’

  Frankie followed Milly as she wedged her way out of the tiny dressing room, peeling aside a curtain of jangling costumes. ‘Well, why didn’t she write it down?’ Frankie asked.

  ‘She can’t write. Besides, too dangerous. She obviously thinks the killer, whoever they are, won’t be able to read Tarot.’ Milly pulled the trapeze towards them and picked off the speared card. Frankie could see the woman’s face now, side-on, impassive, warrior-like. ‘She wants to deliver a message that this is about mistaken identity. That girl, Annie. The corset, on Olivier.’

  ‘But we knew that anyway.’

  ‘She doesn’t know that.’

  Frankie pressed her hands back through her hair, feeling how unkempt and oily it had become over the past few days. Liam was lingering at the edge of the stage, mashing his toothpick to a pulp.

  Milly continued. ‘Annie either stole or borrowed her clothes that night. She must have had a reason.’

  ‘They were friends,’ Frankie countered.

  ‘But I don’t lend my friends my clothes willy-nilly.’

  ‘Wouldn’t want to borrow yours now I know what you’ve got stowed inside those pockets.’

  Milly ignored her. ‘She was outside the Rising Sun, by herself, dressed up in a fancy jacket and hat. Is that normal behaviour for a seamstress on a Thursday night?’

  Frankie cottoned on. ‘She was meeting someone.’

  Milly’s china-pale face lit up. ‘Someone special.’

  Frankie chewed on this for a minute. ‘And either they didn’t show, or they came and left. So they might have been the last person to see her alive.’

  ‘Or worse, they killed her.’ Milly looked sharp now, her eyes glimmering with the challenge. ‘Her family. She must have had sisters she talked to.’

  ‘But how to get her home address?’

  Milly puzzled for a while.

  Then Liam’s Irish accent cut through the silence from the wings, distorted slightly by the toothpick. ‘Thought yous two were suppose to be the clever ones.’

  Two faces glared at him sourly. He idled for a moment, savouring the knowledge, until Frankie looked like she might rip the toothpick from him and his brown teeth along with it. ‘There’s a very easy way I think you’ll find.’

  The woman in the treasury office at Lincoln’s Inn wouldn’t budge an inch. There were rules. There was privacy. What if they had been sent by the police? Didn’t she see what the police had done to the place?

  ‘Do I look like I’ve been sent by the police?’ Frankie leant across the desk, directing the woman’s gaze to her wrinkled shirt, her dishevelled tie, the grime on her collar and hair.

  The woman peered intently at her for a few seconds then pointed a finger. ‘I know you,’ she bobbed the finger up and down. ‘You’re the one that drew that cartoon.’

  ‘Oh, for the love of God.’

  Milly stepped in.
‘Could we please just give you our word that—’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  Frankie kicked the corner of the table. The sting ran up her leg.

  ‘I’m going to ask you kindly to leave.’

  ‘Yes, I did a bloody cartoon. And you know what? I wish I had a copy with me, I’d roll it up and stick it up your nose.’

  ‘Frankie!’ Milly’s hand went to her forehead.

  ‘Out. Both of you. Now.’

  Frankie whipped a finger of her own to the woman’s face. ‘I’m doing this because a girl who was one of yours was killed. And where are you? Sitting behind a desk like the queen in the counting house. How do you think the papers would like that? Lend credence to your cause, would it? Make you all look like the martyrs you want to be. You lot don’t give a donkey’s.’

  The woman paused for a moment, looking down the barrel of Frankie’s finger. Then she dropped her eyes to the ground. She made her way behind the desk and pulled out an address book from the top drawer. ‘Once only.’

  Milly glared at Frankie.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frankie. And tried to sound as if she meant it.

  Thirty-Three

  Down by the wharf at Bermondsey, the winkle-sellers were calling out ‘all alive-o’ and men were rolling barrels of creosote onto horses and carts. The murky tar smell hit Frankie as soon as she stepped off the tram; the scent of the Thames riverbed and an unpleasant tang coming from a tannery where pigeon shit was curing leather. It was already eleven and Liam had been instructed to meet them outside the corset shop at noon sharp.

  As they walked down the cobbles, children with bare feet came running up to them, their arms full of sticks, noticing Milly’s fine gown, regarding Frankie curiously as if they were an odd sort to be man and wife.

  ‘Penny for kindling.’

  ‘Piss off,’ Frankie said.

  Milly reached into her pocket and squeezed sixpence into the child’s warty hand. Her hollow eyes didn’t even light up. Frankie felt suddenly embarrassed as the little girl put her thumb to her nose and blew a raspberry at her.