Cuckoo Song (32 page)

‘We’ll come up with something,’ she said at last. ‘But next time you start to feel hungry, let me know.’

They found Violet’s friend standing on a corner in Dressmaker’s Lane, a dingy thoroughfare not far from the river. There was something middle-aged about his stoop,
and the aimlessness of his stride. When they drew nearer, however, Trista realized that he was not much older than Violet. He wore a dark brown flat cap, and a dun-coloured jacket over his shirt
and grey wool waistcoat. His hair had been cut recently and badly.

Looking at him, Trista knew that something had gone wrong with him, though she could not tell what it was. He had a good sort of a face, broad-jawed with wide-spaced eyes, but something had been
knocked out of kilter. His gaze went everywhere. His mouth was tense and very slightly open, as if he was waiting for the right moment to say something important.

He gave Violet a nice smile. It came and went like a flash of winter sunshine. A moment later it was quite gone, and his face looked lost without it.

‘The Belle of the Ell,’ he said. His tone was odd. He didn’t sound as if he was flirting or being gallant. It was almost as if he was introducing her to somebody else.

‘Jack,’ she said. ‘It took me a while to find where they’d put you. New corner?’

‘Yes.’ Smile. Gone. ‘It’s the usual game. Everybody tells the police to cut down on gambling, so they
had
to “find” the old corner. Now they’ll
pretend they don’t know about this one for a few weeks. You’re not looking for a flutter though, are you?’

‘Not my sort of gamble.’ Violet didn’t smile at Jack; Trista noticed that. She talked more quietly than usual, however. Listening to them, Trista had a peculiar feeling. It was
like watching two people walking around a room full of fragile things, avoiding them without even looking at them. ‘Listen, Jack. Your corner can spare you for half an hour. Come and walk by
the river with us.’

Jack looked towards Trista and Pen, then back at Violet.

‘Sebastian’s sisters,’ she said, in answer to the silent question.

He dropped his gaze, then he nodded slowly.

The foursome strolled by the river along a short concrete promenade, watching the sunset turn the Ell to copper. Other families were abroad in the late light, mothers pushing perambulators, and
the occasional governess leading a bored string of children.

Jack said nothing. He waited. Trista started to get the feeling that he was always waiting, like a pebble beach braced for the next wave, and resigned to it.

When Violet finally spoke, her voice was unusually hesitant.

‘There are letters, Jack. Letters in his handwriting. They’ve been arriving for a while, and they always have that day’s date.’

‘Letters to you?’ Jack gave her a glance.

‘No,’ answered Violet. ‘His family.’

‘Tell them to call the police,’ Jack answered promptly. ‘It’s a hoax. I’ll wager the letters are asking for money?’

Violet sucked in her cheeks, then took the sentence at a run. ‘I suppose there’s no chance—’

‘No.’ Jack cut her short, with sad, quiet finality, like a coffin lid settling on its velvet rest. ‘No, Violet. I’m sorry. I was there.’ He glanced across at Trista
and Pen. ‘Do you really want to talk about this . . . now?’

It was only at this point that Trista realized what Violet and Jack were talking about, and what his last comment had meant.

‘You knew Sebastian in the War!’ exclaimed Pen, who had clearly come to the same conclusion. ‘Were you his friend?’

Jack looked as though he would have done anything to escape this conversation, even if it meant jumping out of an aeroplane hatch without a parachute.

‘Yes, Pen.’ Violet answered for him. ‘Jack was a good friend to Sebastian, when they were serving as soldiers together.’

‘He was brave, wasn’t he?’ Pen demanded, trying to catch Jack’s eye.

Jack did not seem able to look directly at either Trista or Pen.

‘Yes,’ he told their shoes, and tried to smile. ‘Like in the stories.’

‘Jack was the one who wrote to me,’ Violet added, cutting off Pen before she could ask more questions. ‘With the news about Sebastian. He wrote to your father too, and sent
home some of Sebastian’s things – his cigarette case and service watch.’

There it was again, the old bone of contention. Sebastian’s possessions, the ones that he had left to Violet, and which the Crescents had refused to hand over.

‘Jack.’ Violet’s voice hardened slightly. ‘What did his service watch look like? Could you describe it to the girls?’

‘It was a wristlet,’ answered Jack, and actually managed to look Pen and Trista in the face now that the conversation was on safer ground. ‘Worn on the wrist. You might be too
young to remember, but before the War, wearing watches on your wrist was . . . well . . . only women did it. Men had pocket watches – wearing a wristlet would be like . . . wearing earrings
or a bracelet.

‘But during the War the services started giving some of the officers and men wristwatches. It kept your hands free, you see. You didn’t have to fumble in your pocket. The air force
started using them first, then the army. But the ones we had still looked like pocket watches, only with a strap. Big, bulging things, about so wide and this thick, not like the sort you see
now.’

‘Does that sound like the watch you saw the Architect wearing?’ asked Violet.

Pen nodded, and Violet’s face darkened into a scowl.

‘I knew it!’ she said through her teeth. ‘I
knew
your father was stringing me along! That high-and-mighty talk about keeping Sebastian’s possessions . . . and
all the time he’d given that man Sebastian’s watch!’

Trista felt a building excitement. The Shrike had told them that Piers had given the Architect one of Sebastian’s possessions. If Violet was right, they now knew what it was.

‘Hold hard!’ Jack advised gently. ‘Maybe this Architect of yours served in Europe himself and came by the watch honestly.’

‘Do you want to give me odds on that, Jack?’ snapped Violet. ‘No, this all smells to high heaven. Jack – was there anything special about Sebastian’s watch, to tell
it apart from others?’

‘He replaced the strap,’ came the answer. ‘It wasn’t black – it was blue.’

‘Yes, that’s right!’ exclaimed Pen.

‘Oh, and the time on it was wrong! It must have stopped, and he hadn’t wound it up again.’

A strange, dark flower of an idea tried to bloom in Trista’s mind.

‘What time did it say?’ she asked.

Pen crinkled her brow as she thought.

‘Teatime,’ she said, after a moment. ‘It was just after lunch, but the watch said it was half past four.’

‘Half past four.’ Jack repeated Pen’s words in little more than a whisper. Then he dropped his gaze and cleared his throat. ‘Violet,’ he said quietly, ‘half
past four . . . That was the time when . . .’

The sentence slipped into silence, like a hearse turning a corner in the street. Everybody knew where it was heading, however.

That was the time when Sebastian died.

‘Was it . . . ?’ Violet stopped, wet her lips and continued. ‘Was the watch broken then, when . . . it happened?’

The question made Trista feel sick. It changed Sebastian’s death into something real and physical. It wasn’t slipping away beyond a grey curtain; it was a bullet or an explosion or
collapsing tunnels, something that could twist metal or shatter a clock’s innards.

But Jack was shaking his head.

‘No. When I sent it back it was still working.’

Trista remembered the way the Shrike had spoken of Sebastian.

He is not
gone
, but he is not alive either.

He is just . . . stopped.

At half-past four, somewhere in the bleak and distant neverland of War, Sebastian had ‘stopped’. On the Architect’s wrist, Pen had seen a watch that had also stopped, at
exactly the hour of Sebastian’s death. Trista did not believe this was a coincidence. She did not know how these two facts were connected, but she could sense the link between them swaying in
the darkness, like a submerged mooring chain.

Chapter 30

As hoped, Jack agreed to let the three fugitives stay at his place, a dark-bricked terrace building in a set of ‘back-to-backs’ within reach of the river’s
reek. As it turned out, ‘his’ house also contained his mother, his three sisters, his brother-in-law, his aunt and his older sister’s flock of children. His father was absent, and
this had apparently been the case for years. His sisters, aged about fourteen, sixteen and twenty-six, were dark-eyed and angular, with broad grins and voices that bounced around the faded walls,
bruising some life into them.

His mother did not seem particularly surprised to see him bringing home unannounced visitors.

‘I suppose they have something in their pockets?’ she asked. ‘Your sisters pay for their board – I told you, I won’t put up strangers for free.’ Violet placed
money into her hand, and she counted it carefully, then nodded. ‘The attic room. No noise after ten o’clock.’ She looked Violet up and down, her expression carefully veiled.
‘I hear you were betrothed to one of Jack’s comrades?’

‘Yes,’ Violet’s expression was similarly mask-like. ‘He didn’t come home.’

‘He’s not the only one,’ said Jack’s mother flatly. Her gaze passed over her son smoothly and coolly, like fingers stroking the marble of a sepulchre.

The house was in the throes of washday, steam and the smell of suds emanating from the kitchen. The yard and stairs were a maze of washing lines.

The attic was reached by a ladder. It was musty and cool, its sloping walls slathered in whitewash. There were three mattresses covered in blankets and old coats.

‘We can’t stay too long,’ Violet said, once she was alone with Pen and Trista in the attic, ‘but we should be safe here for a day or two.’ She tossed Trista a
much-patched dress in faded blue cotton. ‘I borrowed this from one of Jack’s nieces – it’s a family hand-me-down. If you wear it, you can keep Triss’s dress in a
bundle, just in case you need to eat something. But . . . try to ration it, if you can.’

She sat down on one of the mattresses, and let out a long breath. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, as though thinking aloud. ‘Why would your father give Sebastian’s
watch to the Architect? Where does that leave us? What do we do now?’

Trista and Pen exchanged glances.

‘We have a plan,’ said Trista. ‘And . . . I’m sorry, but we can’t tell you about it. We need to use a telephone.’

‘There’s one in the Eyelash Club,’ replied Violet doubtfully, ‘and the staff there know me well enough to let me use it. Who do you want to call?’

‘The Architect,’ answered Pen, with undue belligerence.

‘What?’

Violet’s brow wrinkled as she looked from one face to the other. ‘Is that safe? Can he . . .
do
anything to you through the telephone? Could he get his magic operator to
trace where you are?’

‘I don’t know,’ Trista confessed. ‘It might be dangerous. But if we can talk to him, we might persuade him to give back Triss – maybe the service watch as well. And
even if he won’t agree to that, we might find out
something
.’ As she spoke, Trista could not help wondering whether the Architect might also know some way to keep her alive.
She felt a little thrill of hope at the idea.

‘Is there any way I can make the call, instead of either of you?’ Violet was clearly still wrestling with the idea.

‘No,’ Trista told, with a pang of sad gratitude. ‘You can’t even be there, or the magic promise will stop us talking. I’m sorry, but you don’t know the same
secrets. It has to be us.’

A little before ten o’clock at night, three fugitives drew up in front of the Eyelash Club.

The club sounded and smelt as if it might be rather grand. Soft blue-tinted light seeped through its Venetian blinds into the darkness. The music from within was the polite, tamed jazz they had
heard before, or ‘supper jazz’ as Violet contemptuously termed it. There was a handsome young doorman with gold buttons who winked at Violet when she asked to use the phone and ushered
them in conspiratorially.

The telephone had its own little room, with a heavy wooden door to allow it privacy. The walls were covered in red baize, and the little table on which the phone stood was chrome and glass.

‘Don’t take too long,’ Violet said. ‘I’ll be outside. As soon as you’ve finished, run out and jump into the sidecar. If we drive away fast, then even if the
Architect can trace the call, he’ll only know where you’ve been, not where you are.’

The door closed behind Violet with a firm but polite ‘whump’, crushing the sound from outside to a thin ribbon. Pen and Trista were alone with the telephone.

‘Are you ready?’ asked Trista. She could not help whispering, as if there was already a danger the Architect might overhear.

Pen nodded.

‘. . . not afraid of anything . . .’ she muttered under her breath, and reached for the phone. It looked so large in her hands, the fingers of her left scarcely big enough to curl
around its black stem. As Pen held the conical earpiece to her ear, Trista realized that she was trembling.

‘Waste, wither, want.’ As Pen said the words, it seemed to Trista that the black phone in her small hands bristled briefly, like a dog cocking its head. There was a pause, and then
Trista could just make out a faint whispery sound seeping from the earpiece like smoke.

‘Penelope Crescent to talk to the Architect, please!’ Pen’s tone was too loud, too determined, and came out sounding shrill. Only then did Trista realize quite how terrified
the smaller girl was.

Pause. Pause. A faint buzz of a voice, too indistinct to make out.

‘That’s not fair!’ exploded Pen without warning. ‘
You
betrayed
me
! You
tricked
me into going near the cinema screen! You wanted to trap me,
just the way you trapped S—’

Trista gave Pen a nudge in the ribs, not a moment too soon.

‘. . . the way you trapped Triss,’ continued Pen without even a hiccup’s worth of a pause. ‘But . . . I . . . wanted to talk to you. I’m sorry I said I was going to
tell everybody about our bargain. I . . . didn’t mean it. I want to make a new bargain now.’ Her eye slid towards Trista.