Page 8 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Great, great, and how are we going to make a clairvoyant stay in a room long enough for a bunch of scientists to ask him things? You know, if he doesn’t gracefully submit the second he arrives? He doesn’t sound like he means to.’

‘The scientists have some ideas,’ Kuroda promised.

When Kuroda got home, his steward was in a tizz. There was, apparently, a woman in his study and she wouldn’t go away. Puzzled, he went through. He did keep a geisha, but she was the real thing: an exquisite professional who had an ethereal way of not always turning up even when you were hoping she would. When he opened the door, though, the woman in his study wasn’t a geisha. She was little and plain and looking into his aquarium, where his octopus was prodding at her fingertip with one tentacle in what was definitely a handshake. He felt betrayed. He’d started keeping a pet octopus ever since he’d met Mori’s clockwork one. They were a lot more endearing than cats and, usually, a lot more loyal.

‘Mrs Pepperharrow,’ he said, honestly shocked. Like a fool, he found himself searching around for a reason to get away from her, and then felt angry with himself, and with her for making him feel that way. ‘I’m busy, what do you want?’ he said roughly.

‘The owls have come back,’ she said. She didn’t sound offended, or worried, or vengeful. ‘Mori is coming home.’

‘I – yes, I just got a telegram,’ Kuroda heard himself confessing.

‘Good stuff. Want some help?’

‘What? But – you hate me.’

She nodded. Her strange eyes were ticking over him, up and down. Rather than step towards him when he came in, she had stepped backward, well out of reach. ‘Yes. But we both know he’s far more dangerous than you.’

THREE

London, the same day

Thaniel and Fanshaw were still talking about ghosts when the electric lights hummed worse than ever, everything went green for a good five seconds, and then the power supply failed completely and plunged the office into a candlelit murk.

‘I vote,’ Fanshaw said firmly in the dark, ‘that we take the day off. You live near Kensington still, don’t you? Shall we share a cab?’

‘Ah, I’ve got an Underground ticket,’ said Thaniel, who could cope with brandy but not unexpected cab journeys. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it now. Foreign Office salaries were good. It was just that poverty was as much a state of mind as a fiscal reality, and sometimes he couldn’t smother the angry squawk of his father’s voice demanding to know why the buggery he was wasting his money.

Fanshaw smiled. ‘Is that your oblique northern way of asking me for a raise?’

‘No, it’s my oblique northern way of saying you’re too fancy for your own good with your unnecessary cabs,’ Thaniel said, but he was relieved to let his smile fade once Fanshaw turned away to find his coat. He still didn’t know how he was going to convince an angry little girl that they were going to move to Tokyo next week. And Mori; he couldn’t help thinking that if Mori had had anything particular to say about it all, he would have turned up by now.

By the tall front doors, the desk clerks were squashing candles into pools of melted wax so that people could navigate a way out without falling over the hat stands. Thaniel pulled his scarf up over his face and slipped outside into the gritty dark.

He could just make out that the street lamps were lit, but they didn’t illuminate anything. They were just disembodied glows. The people on the street were invisible until they passed a few feet in front of him. But he could hear them. People were whistling as they came to the corner to warn anyone coming the other way. The whistles made bright wisps in the pall.

He was almost at Westminster Underground station when he heard someone ringing a bell and shouting that the line was shut. He stopped and looked around, not sure what to do.

A flare went by, a real one, and then another hissed alight right in front of him with a sharp gunpowder tang.

‘Light the way for a shilling?’ the little boy behind it said.

‘Ah,’ said Thaniel, undecided. There might have been cabs in the road – he could hear horses – but the chances of flagging one down without being run over seemed small. An omnibus crawled past, top heavy with passengers, the big advert for Lipton’s tea on the side only just visible in ghost letters. The driver was leading the horses, a lantern hanging on his wrist.

‘Hit you with my cosh,’ the boy said experimentally.

Thaniel pulled the cigarette out of the boy’s mouth and dropped it into the flare, which sputtered. ‘Don’t smoke while you threaten people. But all right. What about two shillings if you take me across to Knightsbridge?’

‘Knightsbridge!’ the little boy said. It had startled him enough to drop the cockney bravado. ‘That’s far.’ He rallied. ‘Did you say two shillings and six?’

Thaniel laughed. ‘I did.’

They set off towards St James’s Park. All he saw of other people were other flares, mostly at waist height because they belonged to the link lighters. The brambles of telegraph wires overhead were just low enough to make twisting shadows.

By the time they came to the park gates, he had a tight headache and his lungs hurt. The little boy was coughing, though he had a neckerchief over his face. It sounded too bad to have come on today. It was cold, too; the sandy path was sparkling with frost under the boy’s flare, and so was the grass. It was just possible to make out the string of lamps that marked the lake. When they reached them, Thaniel touched the little boy’s shoulder. He didn’t think he could be older than eight, and it was another mile to the Knightsbridge gate.

‘I’ll go by myself from here. Two shillings and six, all right?’ The boy smelled of cigarette smoke and gin, and the sulphurous damp of the fog.

‘Right,’ the boy said seriously, and then coughed again. ‘Bye, mister.’