She gave him an up-and-down look that could have stripped varnish, then jerked her head towards a doorway.“Upstairs, second door.”
Crispin downed a mouthful before following her directions.
Misfits and nervous types.It certainly wasn’t hard to appear nervous as he knocked on the grimy door in the ill-lit passage upstairs.
A voice grunted, which Crispin took for encouragement.He opened the door.As dark as it had been in the passage, it was darker in here.He blinked on the threshold.
“Are you afraid of the darkness?”said a voice.
It felt like a line in a play.Crispin groped about for his own, and happened upon the simplest.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Do youwantto be afraid?“ the voice asked.
Again, the simplest answer seemed the best.“No,” he said, “I don’t.”
“Then step into the darkness.”
Crispin shuffled across the floor.Stories with secret societies always had trapdoors in them as well.
Without warning, an electric light hummed on, pinning him in place.Crispin felt as exposed as the boxers in the ring.
“Sit down,” said the voice.Was it the same voice, or another?He could not see the person or persons behind the electric lamp at all.“How did you find us?”
“A man in a pub.He’d lost his job to cheap foreign labour.He told me to come here.”It amazed Crispin how smoothly the lies unfolded.Wheredidthey come from?Something that hadn’t existed a moment before felt disarmingly solid.
“And you?”
“Me?”It was like getting to the end of a line of typing—the machine juststopped.Crispin imagined giving it a jolly good whack to start a new line and found himself suddenly inspired.“I was a stenographer.A woman took my job.She’ll take less pay, you see.”He made his voice go a bit higher.“I wouldn’t mind so much if she was ugly.But she’s decent-looking, she could get a husband and have one of those nice little villas to keep tidy!Why did she have to go and take my job?I can’t do hers, can I?It’s notfair.”
Crispin tried not to think what his sister would do to him if she ever heard him make such a speech.
There was a scornful sound from behind the light, which hurt him a little, because he knew he’d been lyingbeautifully.
“Stop whingeing,” it scoffed.“You look as if you’re doing all right.”
Crispin cursed himself for dressing with such care.
“I had an interview for a job,” he said, shuffling his feet in a show of embarrassment.“I needed to come off well.Nobody wants you if you’re desperate.”
There was a long pause.Had he bungled it?Was someone about to club him over the head and dump him in the Thames?
He could sense the person on the other side of the light lean forward in his chair.“Would you say you’re lost?Between?Hungry?”
At the sound of these words, something inside Crispin stirred disconcertingly, like a mole burrowing under the smoothest lawn.
“Yes,” he said, and for the first time since coming into the room, he wasn’t lying.
He rather resented it.
Chapter thirty-three
Ormdale
Violettriedtomakebelieve the dinner wasn’t about her—the celebratory dinner with the best crystal, china, and serpentine silver, and the shining facing of her extended family around the table.
It might be for the American naturalist, she thought, who had turned up at the dinner, large as life.Larger—he was even taller than Simon.Mr Anderson was seated between their uncle and Edith.At present, he was leaning forward a little to answer Iggy’s questions about cowboys.Iggy and Dolly were seated on either side of Simon’s quiet father, MrForrester.
