The first picture was of a young woman with eyes slotted like a cat’s and ears that rose to a tufted point. The style was what they call in posh art circles hyperrealism – Foxglove had lovingly captured the luxurious fur that covered face, head and shoulders. She looked like really good cosplay but I didn’t think she was somebody having fun on the weekend. And Foxglove had captured a haunted look in her eyes.
I must have grunted something suitably encouraging, because Foxglove cheerfully flipped the pad to reveal another young woman drawn in the same hyperrealistic style. A pale, high-cheekboned face with a cascade of long black hair, and the disturbing turn of the mouth as if hiding too many teeth. Somebody I recognised, although I hadn’t known her long. And most of the time I had known her she’d been trying to kill me. It was the Pale Lady that I’d chased into the Trocadero Centre, who’d hit me so hard I thought I’d felt my ribs creak. Who I’d knocked over a balcony five storeys up and who’d fallen to her death in complete silence.
‘Very fine,’ I said. ‘Who is she?’
Foxglove touched the sketch with two fingers and then transferred them to her chest about where everyone thinks the heart is located. My own heart hurt. There’s no other word for it. And suddenly I felt sick.
‘Your friend,’ I said, and Foxglove nodded.
She flipped the pad to show me another familiar face. Also someone I’d met quite briefly while, coincidentally, they were trying to kill me. It was the nanny from Richard Williams’s house. Again Foxglove touched first the picture and then her heart.
When me and Lesley were doing our probation at Charing Cross nick our duty inspector was Francis Neblett. He was a proper old-fashioned copper, not like what the public thinks is old-fashioned, which is all TV bollocks, but so upright and steeped in the Peelian Principles that if you sliced him in half you’d have found BOBBY running all the way through him like a stick of rock.
He once told me that the problem was not that criminals were evil but that most of them were pathetic – in the proper sense of the word. Arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness. Recently I’d learnt the Greek root: pathetos – liable to suffer.
‘You’ve got to feel sorry for them,’ he said.
And you didn’t have to be in the job long to see what he meant. The addicts, the runaways, the men who were fine unless they had a couple of drinks. The ex-squaddies who’d seen too much. The sad fuckers who just didn’t have a clue how to make the world work for them, or had started so beaten down they barely learnt to walk upright. The people who shoplifted toilet paper or food or treats for their kids.
‘This is a trap,’ he’d said. ‘You’re not a social worker or a doctor. If people really wanted these problems solved there’d be more social workers and doctors.’
I’d asked what we were supposed to do.
‘You can’t fix their problems, Peter,’ he’d said. ‘Most of the time you can’t even steer them in the right direction. But you can do the job without making things worse.’
I looked at the sketches and back at Foxglove’s expectant face.
What would Lesley do? I wondered.
She’d lie, or at least mislead – imply that she knew exactly where Foxglove’s sisters were and if only Foxglove helped her escape they could be reunited.
You’re in a hole, Peter, Lesley would say, there’s nothing helpful you can do for anyone until you’re out of the hole, is there? Escape first. Then you’ll be able to be all compassionate and thoughtful.
But I’m not Lesley or Nightingale, or even Neblett, am I?
‘I know them,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid they’re both dead.’
It took a moment to register and then her eyes widened and her lips parted in dismay. She took an involuntary step backwards and clutched the sketchpad to her chest. I tentatively held out my hand but she flinched back, her face suddenly broken in its grief. She half turned and took a couple of steps towards her bed. I took a step to follow, but she threw up her hand to stop me.
I stayed where I was and watched as, bent over in pain, Foxglove stumbled back to her bed and lay down curled around her sketchpad, face towards the wall. Not knowing what else to do, I retreated to my bed and sat down to watch over her.
The light began to dim and I called out her name, but even to me my voice sounded flat, dull and unhelpful.
I became aware of a smell of dampness and mildew and old brick. The smell of cellars – the smell, I realised, that the oubliette should have had from the start. Once I thought to look, I sensed the bubble beginning to fray.
I called Foxglove’s name but she didn’t respond.
This was my chance, I realised. Quickly I pulled the sheet I’d nicked and stripped the second one off the mattress. Then I pulled off the duvet cover and ripped it apart at the seams so that I ended up with two separate sheets. You’re supposed to tear the sheets into strips and braid them to make a proper rope, but I didn’t think I had that much time. So I knotted them in the traditional cartoon fashion and hoped for the best.
I conjured a werelight and this time the forma stuck – a bit hesitantly, but I could feel the fairy bubble shivering and failing. It looked like magic was back on the options menu.
You can’t lift yourself with impello. Nobody knows why. You also can’t hold on to something or wear a harness attached to something and lift that with impello. Once, Nightingale had discovered me experimenting and he gave me a couple of notebooks which detailed the numerous ways the wizards of the Folly had tried to get round this limitation. Many of the contraptions in the notebook looked like something Dastardly and Muttley would pilot, and provided a good laugh, if not any actual hope that I was going to fly any time soon.
But I didn’t need to fly. I just needed to fix one end of my bedsheet rope to the lip of the hole firmly enough for me to climb it. And I had just the spell for that. All I needed was something separate and robust enough that I could use to pin the top of the rope to the brickwork. I picked up my copy of The Silmarillion – that would do nicely.
I took rope and book to the landing pad and tried another werelight – this time it burnt brightly – the bubble was almost gone. I extinguished the light and concentrated.
Then I threw my copy of The Silmarillion upwards and used impello to guide it and scindere to stick it upright on the edge of the hole. I’d fashioned a noose at one end of the rope and reckoned it should be a simple matter to throw it up and over the book as if it were a mooring bollard.
I looked back at Foxglove, who was a dim shape in the darkness.
‘I’m going to get help,’ I said.
I got the noose around The Silmarillion on the third try and put my whole weight on it as a test. Totally solid – which did surprise me a little bit.
I looked back again at Foxglove, who still hadn’t moved. Just to be on the safe side I went back to check.
She was completely still and I couldn’t hear any breathing. I cautiously touched her neck – the skin was cool and I couldn’t find a pulse.
I was CPR qualified but I’d never had to do it for real and even if I did, it’s a temporary measure to maintain oxygen supply to the brain until help arrived. But if I didn’t escape help wouldn’t arrive.
Common sense said I should scarper. But as anyone will tell you, me and common sense have always had an open relationship. And anyway I was remembering Simone and her sisters when I found them quiet and cool amongst the shadows of the Café de Paris.