Page 37 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Or I could sack them all,’ Vaulker said flatly.

‘It’s New Year. You wouldn’t be able to hire anyone else.’

‘A raise and an exorcist, that’s your official recommendation, is it?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m wiring to Whitehall now. Have you got a telegraph I can use?’

‘Of course, but no telegraphist, because he left after he said he saw a samurai ghost ride through the front lawn. You’ll have to go to the post office.’ He might as well have said, ‘check’.

‘No, it’s all right, I was a telegraphist for years,’ Thaniel said, having fun now.

Vaulker must nearly have been too, because he snorted rather than lose his temper. ‘Of course you were.’

SIXTEEN

Thaniel got back to Yokohama towards three, and by then the idea of collapsing in his room and talking to no one but the piano had regained its shine. Although it hadn’t been far, he was exhausted. The ordinary effort of getting to the right platform and the right train was four times magnified when it was all in another language on a shaky tannoy. The stations were laid out differently too. If you went along one local platform for long enough, you ended up at another one that was on its way to Shinjuku, a couple of miles away, and on the same platform five minutes later – to the second –there was a sleeper train going in the opposite direction. In the end he’d had to guess and hope he wasn’t going to Osaka.

At Yoruji, he sat at the piano and worked properly for the first time in months. He drew the music where he couldn’t be bothered to write out each note and it came out in chiaroscuro, like one of those old candlelight paintings. Lately he’d started to really notice that the more a piece of music looked like a painting or sculpture, the better it was. Symphonies had contours and angles, and where something sounded wrong, it was always because a movement or a phrase was sticking out in a funny way and you had to poke it back into shape. It was very refreshing to be able to see the shape. He hadn’t, not for months.

The weather had turned freezing, though, so he had to stop before long to hide under the kotatsu.

Kotatsu were the best thing anyone had invented on either side of the Pacific. Under the table was a pit in the floor, lined with velvet, and in its base was a grille. Below the grille was a fire in a tiny stove. The heat built up under the table, trapped by its thick cloth. You could sit with your heels resting on the grille without being burned, which meant that it was more than possible to keep warm even with the sliding doors wide open. The only downside was that if you sat completely under the tablecloth, like a cat or a child might, you would die of carbon monoxide poisoning, but when Thaniel had asked about that, Mori’s stance was that if children never faced any household hazards, they would only grow up useless and frightened of scissors.

Mori came around the sliding door. He was looking for something, and after a moment it was clear he hadn’t noticed there was anyone else in the room. Thaniel smiled. He was naturally unobtrusive, but he’d never been invisible. He waited to see how long it would last. He wasn’t hidden behind anything.

Mori climbed the ladder against the high bookcase. He leaned to make it roll and caught the edge of the next shelf along, and took down a book that looked like it might be ghost stories – the cover was black and the figure on the cover was chalky and strange – which Six liked when she wasn’t reading the generator manual. Once he had it, he stayed on the ladder without holding on, the book propped against a rung while he leafed through.

‘Tea?’ said Thaniel, because it had passed fun and become spying.

Mori dropped the book. His hands and shoulders flickered upward as if they’d been at one of those technology fairs and Thaniel had applied an electrode to the top of his spine.

‘Christ, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Thaniel said.

Mori smiled. He looked shaken. ‘You know when you think you’ve left a cup of tea on the desk, you can walk straight past it even if it’s doing a jig on the kitchen table?’

‘Where did you think you’d left me?’

Mori’s expression opened helplessly. Thaniel saw his mechanisms move as he tried to think of a reasonable lie.

‘I was in Tokyo until just now,’ Thaniel put in, puzzled. ‘At the legation.’

‘Right,’ Mori said gratefully. ‘How was it?’

‘Haunted. I think the staff are just being polite about finding an excuse to work at the Chinese legation because the British Secretary’s an idiot, but we’ve called an exorcist. People are – really superstitious here, aren’t they? I’ve heard three ghost stories already and two were from this house.’

‘Mm,’ said Mori, looking like he was trying to work up the will to say something else. He was watching Thaniel hard, studying him inch by inch. ‘It’s a strange house.’

‘Am I growing new bits I shouldn’t be?’ Thaniel asked.

‘What? No – no.’ Mori was chronologically out, because he added, ‘Yes please,’ before Thaniel could ask again if he wanted some tea.

Thaniel hesitated, not sure what was going on. ‘I’d go down for tea with everyone else but I’m not going anywhere else today. If I stand up again in the next hour I’ll die on Suzuki’s nightingale floor and you’ll not hear the end of it.’

‘Wouldn’t bother him. He’ll have it cleaned pretty recently.’ Mori knelt down across from him. He sounded all right, but he didn’t make mistakes like that unless his mind was elsewhere. Recent and soon looked the same to him, and Thaniel suspected he had to concentrate to get the right one. ‘How is it?’ he asked, motioning to Thaniel’s lungs with his eyelashes.

‘Much better here,’ Thaniel said honestly. ‘Maybe it’s the sea.’

Mori put his head a tiny fraction forward, just one inclination of one vertebra in his neck. ‘I’m sorry about last night, by the way. It was – like just now; you were unexpected.’