by Sophie Green
Without looking at Lil, Abe added, ‘So, did you find anything interesting at the doll hospital?’
Lil shrugged. ‘Not really,’ and bobbed down to stroke Margaret. Then, realising her mistake, said, ‘What doll hospital?’
Abe snorted. A black van from Peligan City morgue turned up and he watched it from under his hat for a moment and then added, ‘If you want to know something just come out and ask me.’
Nedly turned an embarrassed shade of pewter and scowled at Lil.
A troop of scene-of-crime officers, dressed in white plastic jumpsuits with tight hoods and wellingtons, disappeared into the mouth of the car park like they were being drawn in by the beam of a UFO. From somewhere in the crowd a flashbulb blew and the cops scurried in to confiscate the camera.
A tall, suited man, with neat curls of silver hair and a duffle coat drifted over and stole Lil’s spot leaning against the pillar beside Abe. Both men kept their eyes on the scene.
‘Detective Mandrel,’ the man murmured. ‘You still working this town?’
Abe dropped his chin further into his collar. ‘She’s a tough client but I guess we’re stuck with each other.’
Lil tried to lean nonchalantly on the spare pillar on the other side of the doorway but it was too far away to hear their hushed voices, so she ambled back towards them and settled for a free-standing casual spectator pose, with her back to the two men.
Abe took off his trilby and knocked the snow out of the dent. ‘Lil,’ he said, ‘this is Dr Leon Monbatsu. He’s the city pathologist.’
Lil glanced over her shoulder, gave a nod of acknowledgement and whispered, ‘Lil Potkin.’ Then added with a skip to her heartbeat, ‘Reporter.’
Monbatsu made to walk away but Abe quickly added, ‘She’s OK; she’s with me.’ And he settled back down.
‘Potkin.’ Monbatsu murmured it like a question.
Abe cleared his throat. ‘So, anything unusual about this one?’
Monbatsu examined the top toggle of his duffle. ‘Oh, it’s unusual all right, but these days they usually are.’
Bystanders jostled to get a look-in as a tow truck appeared in the mouth of the car park dragging a pearl-grey Bentley behind it. Behind the smashed windshield, Lil could just make out a blurred shape at the steering wheel as they drove away past the police lines.
‘They’re going to have to cut him out of there,’ Monbatsu told them.
A wave of murmurs broke through the crowd, leaving a crushing silence in its wake as two of the white-suited figures steered a trolley down the ramp at the mouth of the car park. It was laden with a series of lumps strapped down under an orange plastic sheet.
‘That’s for me,’ Monbatsu said grimly. Without a backwards glance he stepped away from the pillar. ‘Good to see you again, detective. You should stop by for a drink sometime.’ He reached in his pocket for his official pass. ‘Perhaps 9 a.m. sharp tomorrow morning, if it suits you.’
As he drew level with Lil he whispered, ‘The only newspaper in this town is the Herald, and the Herald haven’t sent a reporter out to investigate a story since the day it was born. And if you don’t write for the Herald’ – he sharp-eyed her – ‘then someone might ask, who do you write for?’
Lil’s ears were glowing like beacons. She wanted to flatten her hair over them but she knew that would make her look even more suspect. She’d slipped up and she knew it, blown her cover just to look like the big ‘I am’. The Klaxon had been a fiercely guarded secret for years; no one knew who the reporters were who wrote for it.
As she floundered, the air was filled with the deafening rattle of a freight train passing on the overhead lines, taking goods from the docks across to the mail line. Monbatsu was still waiting for an answer. She glanced sideways and up at him expecting to see something accusing in his eyes, but instead she saw a warning.
‘No one,’ she admitted finally. ‘I was just joking around.’
‘You’re too young to be a reporter anyway,’ Abe added.
Monbatsu nodded, satisfied, and said more loudly, ‘I think we can safely assume there are no reporters here today.’
When he was out of earshot Lil shook her head and whispered to Nedly.
‘There are Klaxon reporters here. There must be. We heard them get the call, saw the legs leave the office.’ She gave him a quick glare. ‘If only you’d jumped out of the shaft sooner, you could have I.D.d them.’
‘I told you already, I can’t …’
‘Forget it,’ Lil snapped, and then more softly she added, ‘It’s just that might have been our best shot, maybe our only chance. We were so close …’ She let her gaze thread through the crowd, looking for likely undercover reporters. Would they be in disguise?
Her eye was met by a short man in a green waterproof poncho with an elasticated hood. He was wearing orange tinted aviator spectacles and had a small, neat goatee beard. He stood out like a sore thumb, but maybe it was a double bluff, maybe he was hiding in plain sight?
Lil’s field of vision was suddenly infiltrated by a small familiar figure making their way towards them, with a huge lilac scarf wound round their neck.
‘Mum?’ Naomi’s hair was fuzzed and strung with droplets of melted snow and her glasses were steamed up white; it was a miracle she could see at all. ‘What are you doing here?’
Naomi took off her glasses and wiped the lenses with the end of her scarf. ‘I was just cutting through on my way to somewhere else; how about you?
Lil tried to shrug casually. ‘The same. Only the police have closed the road so …’
Abe sidled up to them and tipped his hat. He was standing up very straight all of a sudden and his belly looked like it had been sucked up into his chest.
‘Hello, Abe.’ Naomi twinkled her eyes at him.
Abe, who had run out of puff almost instantly, managed to wheeze, ‘Good to see you, Naomi.’ He nodded at the car park. ‘What do you make of all this?’
The mortuary van doors were shut and the driver pulled away. Under her breath Naomi told them: ‘It’s Governor Minos. He’s been murdered.’
‘Minos? The guy who runs the prison?’ Lil gave her mum a disbelieving frown. Naomi shook it off. ‘I heard a couple of people talking as I walked by.’
‘High-profile,’ said Abe. ‘That explains all the cops.’
Naomi continued, ‘His driver was dead on arrival too, at the wheel of his car. They were found on the top floor. I heard someone say that the murder was likely to have taken place last night.’
Lil murmured to Nedly, ‘She heard all that just walking through the crowd? We’ve been standing in the wrong place.’
Abe forced a deep breath out through his nose. ‘Nasty business.’ He tapped the snow out of his hat again and took the opportunity to smooth down his hair.
‘Lil?’ Her mother touched her lightly on the arm. ‘I was thinking, tonight maybe we could get a takeaway, see if there’s anything good on the TV?’
Lil glanced across at her. She wondered if her mum would really be there when she got back. Maybe she would.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That would be nice.’ Her eye was caught again by a movement in the crowd. The man in the green poncho was looking their way, his hand raised in what looked like a wave, but then he was swallowed up in the rush as the police started clearing the streets, pushing the cordon back and sounding short bursts of their sirens.
Abe contemplated the multi-storey as the bystanders in front of it dispersed. ‘What I’d like to know is what was Minos doing here in the first place?’
Naomi rewrapped her scarf, rubbed the snow out of Lil’s hair and gave her a kiss on the cheek, then she started off towards the crowd, pausing just before she vanished to look over her shoulder and say, ‘Maybe he was meeting someone.’
Abe watched her go.
Nedly shuddered. ‘What kind of person do you meet in a deserted car park in the dead of night?
Lil let her gaze drift upwards until she was squinting into the falling s
now. ‘Someone you don’t want anyone else to know about.’
In the prison doctor’s office, deep in the Secure Wing for the Criminally Insane in the belly of the Needle, Hench pulled a strip of burnt vinyl wallpaper away and let it drop to the floor.
‘This place smells like death. I don’t know how you can stand it.’ He cursed as he saw the black sooty dust on his hand and tried to wipe it off on the back of the door, which was almost as dusty. His fingertips rippled over the series of long grooves in the wood, eight shallow nail marks where Dr Hans Carvel had, not so long ago, tried unsuccessfully to escape Mr Glimmer’s inferno. Hench shuddered and buried his dirty hand in his pocket.
‘Did it ever occur to you to redecorate?’
Gallows looked at the melted walls with their bubbling wallpaper as though he were seeing them for the first time and shrugged. ‘There’s something cosily familiar about this room. I will be sorry to leave it but Dr Lankin’s time is almost at an end too. Once the harvest is complete the brave doctor must mysteriously disappear.’
He stopped to think this over. ‘Or maybe his body will be found, burnt beyond recognition, just to tie up the loose ends. But of course I have used that method already for faking my own death. It’s so tempting to stick to the old tried-and-tested routines, knowing that people will fall for it, just as they always do. Ramon taught me that.’ He pricked up his ears to tune in to the quivering sobs that came from the last cell in the row where Ramon LeTeef, his treacherous old partner in crime, was incarcerated.
Gallows sighed. ‘But if all my great acts are to be recorded in history, which they surely will be, I should at least try to think of something more ingenious.’ He rested his chin in one cupped hand and let the elbow of his already filthy lab coat pick up more soot from the table.
‘Of course it really won’t matter. As soon as City Hall is mine, I, alone, will decide what is investigated and what isn’t.’
Hench cleared his throat and Gallows looked up sharply as though he had forgotten the other man was there. ‘What is it you want, Hench?’
‘I thought you should know: the death of Minos has attracted a lot of attention.’
Gallows’ cold eyes lit up. ‘Excellent. It was a brazen move on my part but it was time, time the people of Peligan City realised what they are up against. We handed it to them in black and white on those CCTV tapes of Silverman’s demise and those fools down at the Herald just sat on it! What’s wrong with the press in this city? How many more kingpins have to die before someone considers it newsworthy?’ He totted up the figures in his head and then sighed irritably. ‘It’s almost as though someone is attempting to cover my tracks.’ He stroked his hairless chin with a fingernail that had grown long and dirty. ‘I had to place several anonymous tip-offs myself. They may have covered up Silverman and the others but surely they can’t fail to raise the alarm now that Mr Bonce has snuffed out Governor Minos in his own inimitable style.’ He rapped his knuckles on the desk thoughtfully. ‘Yes, it’s high time indeed to initiate the end game.’
Hench looked bewildered and Gallows sighed. ‘Peligan City is still suffering under the illusion that things are under control. Let’s make sure everyone knows that they aren’t.
‘Activate the Weasel! Once the lily-livered general public realise are they are at the mercy of my bogeymen, those clowns at City Hall will be desperate to find someone to bring order to this chaos. That is when I shall appear. Terror is the mechanism by which I will bring Peligan to its knees!’
Gallows sank awkwardly to his own bony knees on the stone floor and triumphantly pounded the air above him with loosely formed fists. He stayed there for a moment basking painfully in his future glory and then pulled himself up by the outside seam of Hench’s trousers.
Once he was on his feet Gallows clicked his fingers. ‘Get me the hit list.’
Hench placed a grubby page covered in scrawl into Gallows’ hand. As his gaze travelled through the list he murmured a few names to himself and then his eyelid twitched. ‘Ping.’ He pushed the word out through his teeth. ‘She’s next.’
Hench gulped and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. ‘Who shall I send? Mr Dose?’
Gallows pondered this. ‘Or has Mr Grip been punished enough?’
‘Not Grip.’ Hench shook his head like he was trying to get free of something.
‘He frightens you.’ Gallows’ thin lips stretched gleefully.
‘You don’t have to be around him all the time; you don’t feel it like I do.’
Gallows sighed. ‘Our relationship is different. You keep their poppets but I gave them life, in a manner of speaking. I am their father. You are more like a blithering cousin from out of town who they tolerate because I have told them to.’
‘Grip is a troublemaker. He’s always watching, always waiting.’ Hench’s voice was trembling now.
‘Perhaps.’ Gallows’ eyes shone. ‘But there’s nothing quite like a murderer to give people the heebie-jeebies. No doubt he loathes you, Hench, but I will always have his gratitude. Before he met me he was trapped in an old man’s body, locked away. And now he’s free. Well, in a manner of speaking.’
Hench pushed a fat finger round the collar of his shirt, where his neck bulged over. ‘I don’t trust him.’
Gallows smirked. ‘How clever of you. Of course, you would be best advised not to trust any of them.’ He sighed impatiently. ‘If Grip is getting too big for his boots, keep him on the shelf for a couple more days; show him who’s in charge.’
Hench’s sapphire-blue eyes sparkled. ‘Yes, boss,’ he said, with an oily grin.
Chapter 8
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Play Ball
At eight thirty the next morning Abe answered the persistent knocking at his office door to find Lil standing on the other side of it.
‘How did you get up here?’
‘The catch on the front door is busted, so I just walked in.’ She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘I thought you’d be ready by now. What’s that on your face? Is it cream?’
‘It’s shaving foam, obviously.’ He eyed her suspiciously. ‘Ready for what?’
‘Our appointment at the morgue is for 9 a.m., isn’t it?
‘My appointment.’ He spread his bulk across the doorway, blocking Lil from entering, but inadvertently drawing attention to the hot-water bottle that he had fastened to his belly with his palm-tree-print tie. ‘You better find something else to do; a building full of stiffs is no place for a kid.’ He caught Lil staring at the hot-water bottle and folded his arms to cover it.
‘If Gallows is behind it, then it’s my case too,’ said Lil, slipping in past the gap that he’d left. Nedly followed, making Abe shudder.
‘What if it’s a lead to a different case?’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’ Lil helped herself to a Danish from a plate on the sideboard. ‘Rikes!’ she spluttered through a mouthful of greasy crumbs. ‘How old is this?’ She spat the elderly pastry into the bin and dusted the rest of it off her palms. ‘You probably heard all about Silverman?’ Abe nodded. ‘So this is the second mysterious death in Peligan in as many days and Monbatsu said there was something weird going on. I want to find out what. Just as much as you do,’ she added, giving him the Squint.
Abe sighed. ‘Fine.’ He took out a pocket comb and tried to decide if his hair had a parting.
‘Why are you getting all dolled up anyway?’
Abe blushed down to his roots. ‘I’m not getting dolled up; I’m just making myself presentable.’
‘For the morgue?’
‘I’ve got plans later.’
‘What plans?’ Lil gave him the Squint again.
Abe folded under it. ‘Nothing really, just Naomi and I … you know, your mother –’
‘I know who Naomi is.’
‘Right. Well, me, and Naomi, we’ll probably grab a coffee or something. Over at the Nite Jar. It’s no big deal. I’m not making big deal of it. Just two friends, catching up on old times. Noth
ing more to it than that.’
‘Like a date?’
‘No, not a date.’ Abe gave a desperate-sounding laugh and loosened his collar, and then his face became serious. ‘Why, did she tell you it was a date?’
‘She didn’t tell me anything about it.’
‘No, well, like I said. It’s no big deal.’ Abe tried an offhand shrug to cover the glow that was creeping over his cheeks. ‘We’ll just be chewing the fat. About you, probably – she’s worried. She’s heard you talking to Nedly and now she thinks you have an invisible friend.’
Lil and Nedly looked at each other.
‘I do have an invisible friend.’
Abe unhooked his mac from the coat stand and forced the arm with the prosthetic hand down a sleeve that was still pulled inside out from the last time he’d taken it off. ‘She means one that isn’t real – an imaginary person.’
‘But I’ve already told her that Nedly is real. I mean, I’ve told her that I’ve got a friend, and that his name is Nedly.’
‘Does she know he’s invisible?’
Lil sighed. ‘Not yet.’ She smiled sympathetically at Nedly and shivered. The only warm things in the office were the coffee maker on the side, oozing the smell of burning plastic, and a little electric fire ticking away in the corner by Margaret’s bed, but neither one did much to take the chill out of the air.
Lil turned to the coffee machine. ‘Can I have a cup of this to warm me up?’
Abe shrugged. ‘Knock yourself out.’
She peered into the jug of steaming java. ‘This looks like it’s been brewing since you bought that Danish. There’s sort of a skin on it, and it’s thick, like oil,’ she said. ‘Is that how it’s supposed to look?’
Abe pushed his lips out into a duckbill pout. ‘It’s my coffee and that’s how I like it.’ To prove his point he poured himself a shot and slung it back. He tried to gulp but his throat didn’t seem to want to let it in.