I found a working mobile phone on the kitchen table and used it to make two calls, then made inquiries amongst the neighbouring flats, explaining that I was a private investigator trying to trace Miranda on behalf of lawyers who were administering a small bequest due to her. A garrulous old woman in a bright red wig said that she felt sorry for the girl — her mother had disappeared, and her father was a nasty piece of work. A no-nonsense black woman who stood in her doorway with a small girl embracing her knees and a delicious smell of baking wafting around her, told me she thought that Miranda was living alone, confirmed that her father possessed the skull tattoo I had seen on the shoulder of the man on the bed, and said that she had not seen him for six months, good riddance as far as she was concerned. She leaned closer and whispered that I should be careful of his daughter, she was a duppy girl. “Spooky little creature. Give you a look like she want to try stop your heart, you know?”
I said that I did, and thanked her. As I descended the noisome stairs, I saw a familiar head of auburn hair climbing towards me: it was Liz, the girl Miranda had followed two nights ago. She fled when I called her name, unlocked the door of a flat and slid through it and slammed it in my face. I called through the letter box and told her that I wanted to ask her about Miranda; she said that if I didn’t go away she’d call the police. I reached out and combed away her fear. I told her that I knew now that I had been wrong about the other night, and wanted to make amends. I said, “I will make sure that she does not trouble you again.”
There was a long silence, and then Liz said, “She’s mad, she is. Someone should do something about her.”
“I intend to. Perhaps you can help me, young lady. Perhaps you can tell me about Miranda’s father.”
“Him? He’s a right devil. Used to beat up her mother something awful, until she had enough and ran back to Ireland. Then he started on Miranda. He’d hit her with the telephone book, or his belt. Police would come round sometimes, but they didn’t do anything. I used to feel sorry for her, but then her dad ran off too, and she went funny. She changed.”
Liz told me that Miranda had stopped going to school six months ago, that she had been hurting herself ever since her mother ran off.
“She said it was the only thing that made her feel real. But then she started trying to hurt other people.”
Liz was crying on the other side of the door, half-suppressed sobs like hiccups.
I said, “When did you last see her father?”
“About the same time. Miranda said he went to look for her mother. She’s been living on her own ever since. The social people came snooping around once, but they left her alone. Everyone leaves her alone now. She scares them. Who are you, mister? Are you with the social, or the police?”
“I am trying to find out how I can help Miranda,” I said. I was thinking of the man on the bed. I suspected that she had been punishing her father for something a good deal nastier than a few beatings.
“She follows people around,” Liz whispered through the letter box. “Like she followed me, the other night. She’s jealous, I reckon. Doesn’t like people who have ordinary lives. Someone should make her stop it, but everyone’s frightened of her.”
“Where does she spend her time, during the day?”
“I told you, she doesn’t go to school any more. Got suspended, didn’t she? She hangs around here, pops up when you don’t expect her…”
“If she said to you, ‘I’ll be at the usual place,’ where would that be?”
“You know the pub in the market where they sell the antiques and stuff? She nicks stuff, and she sells some of it there. Doesn’t care who knows it, either. Gets drunk on beer she pays this old wino to buy for her.”
“Thank you, Elizabeth. You have been most helpful.”
“She wants putting away somewhere. Somewhere where she can get better. Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I am going to try to help her,” I said.
As Rainer Sue drove me away in his Mini, an ambulance twinkled past in the other direction, towards the block of flats. One of the calls I had made had been to the emergency services; the other had been to Miranda’s mobile phone, in which I had cached an imp during my demonstration of my pickpocketing skills. It was a very small and very stupid imp, but after Miranda had spat a swear word into my silence and rung off, it had maintained the connection and recited the various conversations it had overheard. There had been several bits of business about the disposal of stolen property and the purchase of heroin, and there had been this:
UNKNOWN MAN: The trap has fired.
MIRANDA: I told you I’d get him to go there. So he’s out of the picture, right?
UNKNOWN MAN: Unfortunately, he has escaped from the house. However, I imagine that he is seriously weakened, and I will deal with him later, when we have concluded our business.
MIRANDA: It doesn’t change what we agreed about the book.
UNKNOWN MAN: It would be unwise to anger me, young woman.
MIRANDA: Well, don’t you piss me off, either, or I might find someone else interested in what I took. (A pause.) You still there?
UNKNOWN MAN: We will meet as agreed.
MIRANDA: The usual place I meet everyone, out in the open, no tricks. I’ll give you what you want, and you’ll pay me what you promised.
UNKNOWN MAN: As agreed, yes.
MIRANDA: And you’ll show me things.
UNKNOWN MAN: Of course. I am a man of honour.
I had Rainer Sue park a little way from Camden Passage, and told him that he was free to go.
“Can’t I stay? This is kind of exciting.” He wriggled in his seat and looked at me with shining eyes, like a puppy eager to play.
I wrote the name and address of a psychologist on a slip of paper, a good man with an open mind who had sought my help once or twice, and folded it into the hand of the former pop star. “This man will help you, if you let him. Go home, Mr Sue, and get on with the rest of your life. And if the man who calls himself Cagliostro comes back to your house, don’t let him in,” I said, and climbed out of the Mini and walked away, towards Camden Passage.
It was Thursday, the day that antique traders set up their stalls in the spaces amongst the small shops that line the lane. It was late in the afternoon and most of them were packing up now, wrapping unsold goods in newspaper, carrying laden cardboard boxes and plastic bakery trays to Volvos and people carriers double-parked on Essex Road. I saw Miranda on the wall of the terrace outside the public house in the middle of the market, swigging from a bottle of beer, idly kicking her legs while she talked with one of the blanket traders who make their pitches on the pavement outside. Her baseball cap was perched on her head. A briefcase was set on the wall beside her.
I waited and watched for more than an hour. At last, she went inside the public house to use its lavatory. I caught her in the corridor when she came out, and pushed her into a cupboard full of cleaning materials. At first she denied that she had anything to do with the theft of my book, but after I drew my blade and put it to her throat and convinced her that I meant business, she said that Donny Halliwell had made her do it.
“Mr Halliwell is merely a stooge for the man who wants my copy of the Stenographia. The man with whom you conversed on your mobile phone a few hours ago. The man who calls himself Cagliostro. Who is he, Miranda?”
The girl tried to twist away but stilled when I pricked her throat with the point of my blade. We were jammed together in the close dark of the cupboard. She smelt of fear and alcohol; fear oozed out of her in a discrete package that clung inside her hood, and she tried and failed to use this newborn imp against me.
“It will not obey you as long as I am here,” I said. “Did you really think you were more powerful than me?”
“I fooled you, didn’t I?”
“For a little while, but no longer. When did you start to work for Cagliostro?”
“I don’t work for anyone.”
“You made a compact with him. You told him that you had found out where I lived, and you agreed to steal my book for him.”
“I told you, I don’t work for anyone.”
Keeping the point of my blade at her throat, I pulled the briefcase from her grasp. “What would I find, Miranda, if I looked in here?”
She looked at me, sullen and defiant and scared.
“The man who wants the book you stole could not find my house, attempted to lure me into an insultingly obvious trap, and hides behind a foolish pseudonym. If you had the benefit of a proper education, Miranda, you would know that the Count of Cagliostro was a charlatan who died more than two hundred years ago, a peddler of quack remedies whose chief fame is that he was immortalized in the writings of Alexander Dumas. I doubt that I have anything to fear from the man who has taken his name, and I also doubt that he has anything to teach you.”
“He showed me how to break your wards, and he said he’d show me other stuff, too. He’s a powerful man,” Miranda said sullenly, “so you better watch out.”
“We will soon see how powerful he is — you arranged to meet him here, did you not, in your ‘usual place’? I warned you about the affinity of imps for telephones. One inhabits your mobile phone, and has been listening to your conversations. You arranged to meet Cagliostro. Very well. We will wait for him together.”
“He’ll hurt you.”
“No, he won’t. And I won’t let him hurt you, either.”
“I can look after myself.”
“I know that you can,” I said. “But the way you are going about it will only do you harm. I know about your father, Miranda. I know what he did to you, and I know what you did to him. I understand-”
She twisted in my grip again, started to shout bloody murder, the perennial cry of the London mob, and kicked at the door of the cupboard. I twisted the key and stood aside and let her run.
A large man in one of the green sweatshirts worn by the public house’s staff stood at the top of the stairs, wanting to know what all the noise was about. I plucked up an imp and flung it at him and left him there, whimpering some nonsense about rats, and followed Miranda. I knew that she would go straight to Cagliostro. It was time to meet him.