5

The Unusual Claudia Slymark

Claudia lounged on a bench a little way down the street from the burger bar, her beautiful face crumpled with displeasure. There had been nothing else to do while she waited for Hinchsniff to return, and curiosity had got the better of her, so she’d bought a portion of chips from a surprised Barry. Elegant and well-manicured, she was not his usual sort of customer. Claudia was not a usual sort of person by any measurement. She was accustomed to the finer things in life: dining in the most expensive restaurants and eating the best cuisine cooked by the most talented chefs. Not sitting in the street eating chips in curry sauce, cooked by a ketchup-splattered oaf from McGreasy’s. The paper parcel lay open in her lap, its contents spread out like the entrails of a dissected carcass.

‘Are they tasty, Miss Slymark?’ enquired Totherbligh, from the green bottle on her necklace. ‘Crispy, with just a light sprinkling of salt?’ Although her seekers – as she called them – didn’t eat, they seemed to enjoy seeing others experience food. The memory of it had stayed with them long after they had finished having a use for it.

‘No,’ said Claudia, between chews. ‘They’re cold and soggy and are so over-salted my lips are shrivelling up like a pair of slugs. I don’t know what people see in them.’ She hadn’t even attempted the curry sauce. It reminded her too much of a chalice of fermented corpse juice she had stolen from the Bucharest Museum of Antiquities. It had fetched a good price from the League of Necromancy, enough to buy her the apartment in New York, but it was not something she would choose to pour on her dinner.

‘Slugs!’ said Peggy Gums, enthusiastically, from the pink bottle. ‘Now, there’s a snack. Yummy!’

Totherbligh sniffed in disgust.

Claudia smiled. Her seekers were quite different from one another. It was what had made them so useful up until now. Hinchsniff, wild and unpredictable but cunning. Totherbligh, pompous and jolly but sneaky. And Peggy Gums, who was just plain barmy but also a little bit frightening.

However, Claudia was very much in charge. After all, she was the one who had ‘liberated’ them, as she put it, from their confinement in the high-security bank vault in Zurich. It had been an interesting moment in her career, a career that already had more than its fair share of interest.

She had started as an ordinary thief, a cat burglar. She could climb a wall quickly and silently, her limbs muscular and elastic and her grip strong and unyielding. She had become an expert at crowbarring, lock-picking and safe-cracking. And most importantly, not once had she left a trace of a clue and she had never been caught. Her escapades had baffled and dumbfounded police and detectives all over the world.

It was this reputation for discretion that had brought her to the attention of the shadowy supernatural underworld. Objects of magic were extremely valuable, and some people would go to any lengths to hide them away, and even greater lengths to obtain them. Warlocks and sorcerers, necromancers and witches – in short, the wrong sort of magical people – sought out her services. Enchanted artefacts were often protected by safes and keys and bars of iron, a metal that resisted any spells but not Claudia’s skills.

The existence of magic was a surprise to her, but she soon adjusted and even picked up some knowledge along the way. It was when she met the ghosts – as that’s what the seekers were – that her career really began to take off.

She had been after a cursed dagger worth millions of dollars, but the vault was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, magical and otherwise. In the brief time she had before the guards realised the safe door was open, it would have been impossible to find the dagger amongst the pile of scrolls and amulets and crystal orbs – were it not for the ghosts. They had whispered its location to her from their bottles, which sat in a row on a dusty shelf like the perfume counter of a forgotten shop.

‘Take us with you!’ they had called. They weren’t part of the plan, but Claudia had known instantly the ghosts could be helpful. She had made room for them in her bag, next to the dagger. One favour in return for another.

A spell, cast by their original owner, a warlock of sorts, bound each of the seekers to their glass prisons. They could wander a certain distance, under doors or through keyholes – places that a very much alive and solid thief like Claudia couldn’t go. If they went beyond the limits set by the spell, they would evaporate into nothingness. They acted as spies or scouts and were even capable of a little light-fingered work themselves – in fact, there were no fingers lighter. Claudia didn’t care about their long-finished life stories or why they had been imprisoned  – they were her tools, business employees at best. But they seemed quite happy. Claudia travelled the world and did all sorts of curious and not very legal things, and the ghosts enjoyed the ride. The Exploding Emerald of Rajpur, the Golden Komodo of Sumatra, the Gossiping Skull of Kiev, the Invisible Cat of the Pharaoh Semerkhet  – Claudia and the seekers had pinched them all and earned a lot of money (and a few scratches) in the process.

Their latest assignment was different. Claudia had received a letter.

FIND THE SMIDGENS, it read, in a strange, forced handwriting. FIND OUT WHAT THEY KNOW OF THE MIRROR OF TROKANIS. IF YOU DISCOVER ITS WHEREABOUTS, I WILL PROVIDE ANY RICHES YOU DESIRE.

Claudia was intrigued. Most letters begged for her assistance. This one demanded it. There was no name, just a post office box number for replies. Claudia liked a mystery. She accepted the job.

On her trips around the world, she took the opportunity to scour libraries and book collections and museums, sometimes bribing, sometimes stealing, searching for stories of Smidgens. Frustratingly, information was patchy, but Claudia did eventually discover two facts.

Firstly, the Smidgens were tiny people who kept out of the way of their huge human cousins. Secondly, they had been numerous once, particularly in this little town on the edge of a loch, nestled between a mountain and a forest. But there had been no sightings for years for some reason, and it was believed the little people might even be extinct. Claudia thought the town was worth investigating and couldn’t quite believe her good fortune in sniffing out not just one but two Smidgens shortly after her arrival! She was eager to know what her seeker had learned.

She didn’t have to wait too long. The ghost seeped out of McGreasy’s, carrying with him the stale smell of chip fat and vinegar, and sullenly coiled his smoky form into the amber-coloured bottle next to the others.

‘And?’ Claudia said, impatiently.

‘I lost them.’ Hinchsniff was sulking. ‘There’s a whole network of tunnels down there. I could have followed them further if it weren’t for the binding spell, Miss Slymark.’

‘Did you learn anything useful?’

‘They’ve got gumption. Any human would have crumpled under the effects of my fright-freeze. You’re going to have a fight on your hands getting anything from the Smidgens.’

Claudia wasn’t afraid of a challenge.

‘Is that all you found?’ she said.

A small stick-like object flew out of the bottle and landed on top of the uneaten chips. She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

‘A toothpick? And a used one by the look of it.’

‘It belonged to one of them,’ chuckled Hinchsniff. ‘He was using it as a spear but left it behind. Very careless.’

Behind her sunglasses, Claudia’s eyes glowed as she stoppered Hinchsniff’s bottle.

‘Very careless,’ she agreed. She put the stick into her bag. Then, with perfect aim, she threw the unfinished food parcel over her shoulder and into a bin behind her. ‘Time to check into our hotel room, I think. We have work to do …’