Page 72 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

She nodded and went downstairs, into the steamy damp of the kitchen. When the cook saw her, he pointed at her with his ladle. There was something wrong with him or, if not wrong, then at least irregular. His eyes were too small and his tongue was too big. She couldn’t always understand what he was saying, although she did now. No stealing. She said yes. He said no. She took the water anyway.

He grunted and put a tray into a dumb waiter, and pulled a lever. It went up geriatrically. She looked up at the ceiling and bent her mind round the angle of the stairs. The warden’s office was right above them. It was a piece of special laziness not to come down and fetch your own tray, but then, given the choice between having a dumb waiter and not, she would have wanted one.

She lingered as long as she could decently stretch a tea break with Tanizaki in the warm guards’ room, and then took the cleaning things upstairs.

‘Miss Tsuru,’ the warden said when she came in. ‘I don’t suppose you might make us some of your famous tea. We’re feeling rather envious of Mr Tanizaki downstairs.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said.

‘Might help with my headache.’

‘Headache, sir?’

‘Oh, don’t be sympathetic, I’ll collapse. Wretched things. I see starry lights when they’re on the way and you’re looking sparkly.’

‘No one here seems to be very well, sir.’

‘Well, it isn’t the most healthful place in the world,’ he said. He rubbed his temple while he watched her lift the little iron teapot from the fire. ‘Quite weak, please. Nakamura?’

The typing man said yes please. When she handed over his cup, he looked apologetic and turned away coughing. He did as he was told when she said that breathing the steam might help.

‘The fireplace is getting ashy,’ Takiko said. ‘It won’t be doing him any good. I meant to ask, sir, if I could have the key so I could come here early and clean it out while you’re not here. It would be a terrible disturbance if I were to do it now.’

The warden was quiet for a long moment, and she had a nasty certainty he knew exactly why she wanted to come in early. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. He took a key from his desk drawer. ‘I’m trusting you with this. You mustn’t touch anything but the hearth.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course. I would never look at any documents, or – I hardly know how to read,’ she said.

‘No, of course. You’re a good girl. The last girl was rather nosy. I know you’ll not be like that; you’re quite a different class of person altogether.’

She nodded once, almost before she remembered that the last girl had frozen to death in a ditch. ‘I hope so, sir. It would be unconscionable.’

She wondered what the last girl had seen.

He relented. ‘I don’t mean to frighten you, I’m just anticipating this headache. After you’ve done the window sill, that’s all I think.’

‘Shall I take the tray down too?’

He looked up. ‘Tray?’

It was instinct, not a decision, that stopped her mentioning how she had seen the cook put a whole meal into the dumb waiter twenty minutes ago. She had a powerful feeling that it would be very stupid indeed to say anything about it. She did look round, though. There was no hatch in the walls, not anywhere.

‘Forget my head next,’ she said. ‘I was so sure you were eating when I came up.’

He flapped his hand towards the window. ‘It’s this place; you lose track of things. Perhaps you were thinking of yesterday?’

‘Must have been. Sorry, sir.’

So someone was taking meals up there. She scrubbed at an old stain on Nakamura’s desk so that she wouldn’t just stand and stare into space, listening to the mechanical clicks inside the wall. Nakamura smiled briefly and moved some of the pattern-photographs from the radius of her brush. When he paused, so did the clicking in the wall.

She concentrated hard on the stain. The clicking sounded like clockwork. It was operating something; a lock, a door, something. It had been a passing thought when she first had it, but she was beginning to feel creepingly sure that Mori was either up there, or would be soon.

‘Oh, my head,’ the warden mumbled. He sank down on the desk, his head in his arms. Across from him, the typist coughed into his sleeve but kept on with his keys, his nose pink despite the waving heat of the fire. She could hear the wheeze when he breathed. As she went back down the stairs, the cold coiled up to greet her. Tanizaki was still huddled miserably at the table, holding his skittering hand flat to the wood while he talked to another man, newly arrived, with snow on the shoulders and sleeves of his greatcoat and a damp sheen on his riding boots.

‘… dropping like flies,’ the other guard was saying. ‘Two this morning. And there’s another blizzard coming this afternoon, you can see it on the mountain. I’m bringing them in for the day.’

She tapped on the door. ‘Afternoon all. Shall I see about some lunch?’ It was only half an hour since she had fetched the water for Tanizaki, but the cold was so dragging that she was starting to feel hungry all the time. Everyone seemed to need more fuel just to stay awake.

‘You’re spoiling us,’ Tanizaki said happily.