Rose took hold of the brass knob of the door marked ‘STAFF ONLY’, hearing the blood thump in her ears. Pushing, she was surprised at how easily the door gave, opening into a dimly lit space from which a flight of steps led up to another floor. Peeling off her flip-flops – hardly the footwear for spying and swiftness – she stepped inside and raced barefoot up the stairs. At the top stood a small landing and another door and for a moment she strained, listening hard, for any sound from inside. Nothing. Her nerves fizzling like sparklers, she opened the door.
The room was a sewing workshop. Dominated by a scarred wooden table, strewn with swatches of blue satin and scattered with dress patterns that fluttered like giant butterfly wings in the draught from the open door, the room was edged by bolts of cloth. Tall columns of fabric stood around the walls, unfurling pillars of satin and silk, voile and velvet, streaking the white-painted brickwork with colour.
The Scroll’s words floated back to her:
Seek there for next to bolts of cloth
Your answers will unfurl…
Rose felt her breath catch and looked around her. At the far end of the room stood a wardrobe and a low bank of cupboards, tucked behind a row of six tailors’ dummies draped with swatches of silver sequins and layers of dove-grey satin. For those non-tailors amongst you, tailors’ dummies aren’t like shop dummies. They’re headless, padded torsos fixed onto poles and bases, made for a tailor to fit the cut fabric around and tack quickly before sewing the seams up properly. Rose tiptoed past them and pulled open the doors of the wardrobe. It was empty, save for the musty smell of dust mixed with dry wood. Rose tapped against the wardrobe’s base to check for a false floor – she’d seen the odd spy film or two with her mother – and discovered it was disappointingly solid. Next she turned her attention to the cupboards, opening each in turn, crouching on her hands and knees to squint past pincushions and tangled tape measures to reach into the gloom for, well, for what she wasn’t sure. The Scroll had talked about answers. But there was no glint of fleece in here.
Sweat prickled her forehead as her fingers stretched to touch the cupboard’s back walls. Chunks of white tailors’ chalk and scattered sequins scratched her skin. A reel of ribbon clattered onto the floor.
“Hopeless,” she muttered.
She sat back, feeling hot and disappointed, and leaned against the nearest dummy.
It moved.
She jumped as it tilted backwards, but intrigued, turned and leaned back a second time, pushing her weight against it, feeling the dummy lean back with her, creaking on its slender wooden pole. A thin scraping sound filled the room and Rose blinked as the panel of floor beside her slid backwards to leave a square gap. Beneath it, metal rails clanked either side of the new hole, sliding down as a staircase into the darkness pooled inside, clicking into place. Then the room fell silent again.
Scrabbling on all fours Rose peered down into the gloom, jumping as a row of wall lights flicked on, click-click-click, one after the other, illuminating the stairs and the room below.
Excitement overcoming her fear, Rose stood up and clattered down the steps to find herself in a large room whose brightly lit walls were covered with framed photographs and pictures. In the centre of the room stood a carved stone table, surrounded by matching stone chairs scattered with gold velvet cushions. An orange-coloured Greek pot, painted with a gigantic black snake, stood on the table. It held a bottle of champagne beside a lone goblet.
Rose shuddered.
The place seemed ancient and more like an exhibition from a museum than something in modern London. Just right for an ancient sorceress, her mind prompted. The thought made her shiver. Turning, she saw a sprawling vine, dried and woody, stretching up from a bank of gravel set into the floor. Gnarled and craggy, the vine’s branches were brown with age and it looked, Rose decided, more like the sort of thing you’d see in a reptile house at the zoo, something for a lizard to hang off or snake to coil around.
Still, she realised, there was nowhere down here to hide a fleece. She turned back to the stairs and was about to climb back up to the sewing room when one of the photographs, of the many that lined the walls, caught her eye.
It showed a long, black open-topped limousine, with mini American flags flapping either side of its bonnet, rolling down a wide sunny street. Men on motorcycles were pictured, riding either side of the car in which four people sat. The camera was focused on the back seat at the man and woman sitting there, laughing and smiling, waving to the crowds. He was fair-haired, rugged and handsome, wearing a grey suit, whilst she smiled prettily in a pink suit and a matching pillbox hat over her dark bob. Beside the picture was a hand-drawn sketch of the man’s suit, pencilled jottings about its fabric and lining and numbers that must have been the man’s measurements. The customer’s name was scrawled at the bottom: John F Kennedy.
Rose had no idea who John F Kennedy was but with the happy crowds on either side of the motorcade she knew it must have been a special occasion.
Intrigued now, she looked at the next photograph. It, too, had a framed sketch of a dress beside it. The photograph was of glamorous woman, with a shock of blonde hair, standing in a white dress, the same one in the sketch, her long legs exposed and teetering in high white shoes over a grate in the street. The grate must have been blowing air because the woman’s skirt was fanned out around her, frothing up like a wave, billowing up at the back as the woman tried hopelessly to hold it down in the front. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back, her short blonde curls framing her face, her red mouth laughing. The name jotted at the bottom of the sketched dress was Marilyn Monroe.
Rose recognised the person in the next photograph, an old rock star. Dark-eyed with a mass of curly hair, Marc Bolan wore a silver shirt and a feather boa draped around his neck. She only knew who he was because her mum had liked his music. Even though he’d died years before Rose was born, when his car crashed into a tree, Rose had seen his picture enough times, staring out from her mother’s old record covers, to recognise him now.
As Rose walked past the pictures, the dresses became longer, the faces grainier, fainter in old photographs. But beside each one hung a sketch of the outfit the person in the picture was wearing.
Rose felt a chill ripple up her spine. These pictures were proof that Medea couldn’t possibly be twenty-six. Forensic proof, her mother would call it, although she’d usually be talking about dinosaurs and waving a prehistoric bone around her head at the time. Soon grainy newspaper cuttings gave way to pen and ink sketches on mottled paper and oil paintings, but still, each dress was drawn in the same confident style and the handwriting was identical.
Of course, had Rose been a little older and known a little more about the people in the pictures, and perhaps listened a bit harder to her history teacher, Mr Cartwright, instead of giggling about his trousers being too short, then she might have realised that these pictures were evidence of something else. Something far more sinister. However, Rose was only twelve years old and I suppose Mr Cartwright really did have the brightest socks in the school, and since you can’t know everything at that age, no matter how clever you are, she was none the wiser.
But she was going to find out, and unfortunately through a much more devious teacher.
However for now she simply wandered along the third wall, drifting back through the years: here was Nelson, she recognised him from his statue in Trafalgar Square. White-haired and unsmiling, he was painted dressed in a dark navy coat, with one gold-ringed sleeve pinned to his jacket; in the next picture Marie Antoinette giggled, decked out in a dress as frothy as a cream gateau; here was Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII, painted on the morning of her execution. Rose peered harder into the picture, feeling a twinge of something half-remembered. But, like an itch you can’t scratch, she couldn’t quite reach the thought. And besides, as her mind pointed out, neither looking at pictures nor racking her memory was helping her find the fleece.
Still, as she stepped back onto the bottom rung of the stairs, she couldn’t help feeling rather pleased with herself at just how much she had discovered. Aries and Alex would be so impressed. After all, while those two had been lolling around enjoying the sunshine, she’d searched the workroom, found a disguised lever and opened up an amazing secret room. And, hadn’t it all been easy? In fact she was just on the brink of wondering if it’d perhaps been just a teensy bit too easy when the panel above the stairwell slid shut and all the lights snapped off.
A few minutes after darkness engulfed Rose, Amelia Smythe, the manager of Seamed Desires, turned the corner into Bond Street. She heard an ice-cream van tinkling behind her but thought nothing of it. After all, as an ex-model, she was rarely tempted by an ice cream since a vanilla cone might put a millimetre on her flat tummy. Now as she clicked along the pavement she was more concerned about opening the shop because, having been called away on an urgent errand by Medea that morning, the shop had been closed all day.
That’s right.
Closed.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Oh, dear.
Eager to open the shop, Ms Smythe hardly noticed the man in the dark suit and hat approach her as she opened up the door, mostly because she was too busy looking at the fourth mannequin in the window, which was looking decidedly rumpled. Some of you might remember there being only three mannequins when Rose walked in and if so, I’m impressed. And grateful, since it makes it a little easier for me to break the news that this fourth mannequin was wearing a black dress with a blue belt and a blonde wig. She had a heart-shaped face and green eyes, tilted like a cat’s.
“Good afternoon!” the – ahem – man in the suit said to Ms Smythe whilst flashing a business card that she didn’t bother to read. “I’m here to collect the faulty roll of crêpe de Chine.”
“Crêpe de Chine?”
Ms Smythe frowned. She couldn’t remember any faulty material, crêpe de Chine or otherwise, but waved him into the shop. She didn’t have time to supervise him as he walked through the bead curtain into the back of the shop and down the stairs. Nor, since she was still fussing with the fourth mannequin, did she notice how bulky or indeed wriggly the roll he carried was as he left the shop.
A pity, really.