‘So you think Marigold finally had enough.’
‘I think she had too good a chance to miss! She found out about the costume, somehow, and suddenly there was her opportunity — to get rid of her bastard of a husband and get all the money she could ever need, in one go!’
I frowned. ‘Angry told me he thought she was pregnant. Would she really kill her child’s father?’
Butterfly laughed.
‘Only a man would ask that!’
3
The shower did not last long. The sky was brightening already by the time Butterfly had finished speaking, and a few shafts of sunlight were falling on the cloth over the doorway, converting its darkness into a dirty mottled brown.
She got up and glanced through the doorway. ‘It’s stopping.’
I could still hear tapping and creaking sounds from above me. I wondered how well made the roof was, although a brief, anxious look up at it showed no suspicious cracks or bulges. I tried to remember whether any trees had spread their branches directly overhead, to take over shedding water when the clouds had finished.
‘You may as well go.’ She tried to sound regretful even as she reinforced her words by crossing the room to look out of the street entrance. ‘I doubt if Skinny will be back today at all. He was meant to be going to Tlatelolco market, but he said something about seeing some friends in Amantlan as well.’
I was tempted to argue, but there seemed little point. I had a lot of questions, some of whose answers, I thought, must lie in this house, but I could see I was not going to get them by pestering Skinny’s wife. I believed practically nothing she had told me. I was convinced that the key to everything — the whereabouts of the costume, the identity of Idle’s killer and whatever had become of my son — lay in the room across thecourtyard. If she was not going to show me what was in there then I would have to find out for myself.
All the same, I could not help admiring her, not just for the elegant silhouette she made as I watched her in the doorway but for her command of herself. There was no way I was going to get her to tell me anything she had not already decided I should know.
Besides, those curious, alarming sounds were still coming from the roof. They were not loud and the woman seemed too intent on ushering me quickly out of her house to notice them, but they were undeniably real. I wondered whether the moisture had got into the beams and swollen them, or whether there was some other explanation.
As I left the house, I looked around me quickly. Directly to my front, running alongside the path I stood on, ran a narrow canal. At its end I saw the labourers I had noticed when I had first come here, still toiling over the plot whose edges they were reinforcing. They had finished their joyful, rhythmic hurling of hammerheads against wooden piles and were were now silently engaged in the back-breaking work of heaving rocks and tumbling them into place to form the foundations of their artificial island.
Skinny’s house abutted straight on to the deserted property on its right-hand side, a poor-looking thatched hovel surrounded by tall, dripping weeds. Around the corner on the other side was a little open space. A stumpy-looking willow grew there, one or two of its polled branches ending just short of the edge of the roof, so that I could see they had not been dripping on it.
After a quick glance in both directions I decided to go for the willow.
Keeping my back pressed against the outside wall of the house, I edged towards it, slithering around the corner like asnake winding itself around a rock. I put myself between the house and the willow’s trunk and looked up.
A branch made a fork in the wood right over my head. It was perfectly placed, and so was I. When I heard the scraping noise from the roof I moved without even waiting for the foot to appear.
I leapt upward and had the ankle in my grasp before whoever was up there had got so much as a toehold on the branch. I did not need to pull. I just let my weight drag us both down, and with a shocked howl my victim tumbled from his perch and crashed in a heap at my feet.
He was up in an instant, snarling at me like a cornered ocelot, too furious for a moment even to think about running away. This was just as well as I could see straight away that he was a youngster and I would have had trouble catching him. I took the opportunity to lunge towards him, to seize him by the arm or the hair and get him on the ground and subdued, but two things made me stop with my arm hanging in midair.
The first was that the fight went out of him. As he stared at his assailant I saw his eyes widen and his jaw drop and his hands, which were raised and clawed for self-defence, fell limply to his side. An instant later he was on his knees in the mud with his head bowed, whimpering with fright. It took me a moment to realize what had happened and then I nearly ruined it by laughing. Probably for the last time, my pathetic disguise had worked, and the fake aura of a priest had overcome him.
The second thing that stayed my hand was that I recognized the lad.
I could not have said who I might have expected to find skulking around on Skinny’s roof, but one of the last names to occur to me would have been that of Angry the featherworker’s nephew, Crayfish.
‘You’d better tell me what you thought you were doing,’ I said sternly.
‘Please, sir,’ the boy snivelled, his face averted so that he seemed to be talking to my feet, ‘I didn’t mean any harm. I was just looking for … just looking for …’ He was a poor liar. In his place I would have worked out my story in advance.
I looked down at him speculatively. The temptation to carry on acting as a priest and bully the lad into confessing everything was strong, but I knew it was not going to work. Once the shock of being plucked from the roof had worn off he would have no more difficulty in recognizing me than Butterfly had. Besides, I was not anxious to draw a crowd, and the sight of him cowering on the floor might well do just that.
‘“You were just looking for”,’ I repeated. ‘Fine. Up you get. You can explain it all on the way back to Amantlan. And mind you do if you don’t want me telling your uncle where I found you!’
That made him stare. ‘My uncle? How do you know … Oh!’
I reached down and seized his arm, not roughly but firmly enough to get him on his feet. ‘Now each of us knows who he’s talking to, shall we go?’ I turned to leave, keeping hold of the boy with my arm outstretched in case he was tempted to fight me after all.
He hesitated, biting his lip, his head darting about as if looking for somewhere to run. ‘I don’t understand. You were at our house — why are you dressed like that? What are you doing here?’
‘Just move,’ I hissed, ‘unless you want us both to get caught!’
His eyes widened again at that. Then he seemed to relax, as though catching the sense that I might, after all, be a fellow conspirator.
‘You promise you won’t tell my uncle?’
I made a threatening noise and tugged his arm. He started walking.
‘Are you going to let go of me?’
I did. ‘Just remember where I’ll go if you try to run away. Now, are you going to tell me what you were up to? The truth, mind.’
‘I was looking for Marigold.’
He was still a growing boy. As we walked the top of his head came to the level of my chin, but he was watching the ground in front of him, so that he seemed shorter. As I looked down at him I wondered how old he was: eleven or twelve, perhaps. I had thought him older when I had met him before, in his uncle’s presence, when he had seemed to show the sort of care for the older man that I might have expected of a wife or an elder sister. Angry’s wife was dead, however. I wondered how great a void Crayfish’s cousin had left in her father’s household.