Page 81 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

She glanced back at the man at Nakamura’s desk. He was typing again, not looking at her.

‘Hello?’ she called up the shaft.

There was no answer. But after she had sat back on her heels, there was a crackle of paper, and then a paper crane fell down the chimney. It puffed into the ashes in the grate in front of her. She lifted it out slowly. There was writing on one of the wings. It was shaky.

Help me

Behind her, the door opened and the warden came through. ‘Morning, Miss Tsuru.’ He waved at the young man, who must have been here overnight, and motioned that he could go. The young man looked grateful and hurried to fetch his coat.

She crushed the crane and dropped it through the spaces of the grate into the dark ash pit below. ‘Morning, sir.’

‘Oemoto’s in a terrible fluster downstairs. He positively burbled that you’ve been asking questions. About the tower.’ The warden pointed upward, and lifted his eyebrows. ‘I told him that was unlikely, since you and I had such a clear agreement about minding your own business.’

She stood up carefully and brushed the ash off her knees. ‘He’s lying. He just hit me over the back of the head with that whip of his. I imagine he was afraid I’d tell you.’ She put her head down so he could see the blood, which had seeped stiffly into her collar.

‘Why did he hit you?’

‘I wouldn’t make the tea quickly enough.’

‘Is that really so? Because Mr Horikawa seems to think you took this work in order to garner … other kinds of business.’ She’d heard people say ‘whore’ with much less force. ‘And I know Mr Oemoto to be a very upright man.’

‘It is really so, sir, and Mr Horikawa is mistaken. All I do here is clean. And look at me, I’m old enough to have grandchildren.’

He watched her for a moment. ‘I respect Mr Oemoto’s opinion a great deal, you understand; his father was very highly thought of in the army in his time.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and didn’t ask what magnificently stupid thing Oemoto had done to end up posted to the arse end of the Arctic.

‘Another word from him and I shall have to dismiss you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He paused, awkward. Sternness didn’t come naturally to him. ‘If he did hit you for nothing but tea, that’s dreadful.’

‘All the guards are feeling very strained, I think.’

‘Well, I’ll … overlook this claim about your nosing around if you’ll forgive him.’

‘How kind of you, sir.’

‘Well; off you go.’

Takiko bowed her head and hauled the cleaning things downstairs again, even while the greater part of her howled to get up into that tower room. That trembling handwriting had stirred something slithering in her gut. Mori’s writing didn’t look like that – but no one’s did. It was how you wrote if you had to do it lying down, feeling sick. It was how dying people wrote.

Mori had said he might die. He deserved to be in a cage, but he didn’t deserve to die in it.

There had to be a way up, but she was never going to find it with Oemoto looking for an excuse to get her sacked.

Down on the misdemeanours’ wing, the first one she’d seen on her first day, she counted along the cells until she found the door of the two men who had spoken to her about the cold and the Marquis de Sade. She tapped gently on the bars.

‘Hello, miss,’ the bigger man said, wary.

‘You know you said you’d kill for cigarettes?’

She pushed her hand into her sleeve pocket and held up the new pack she’d brought from home today. It was a wrench, because she had wanted them a lot, but she’d live.

He gave them a longing look. ‘What’s the plan then, ma’am?’

‘Well, if you could grab me and we’ll both scream a bit. And then if you could put Mr Oemoto in the infirmary for me when he comes to break it up, these are all yours. He’s just sliced my head open with that poncing whip he carries around.’