The thin grey terraces of Angel Lane backed onto the railway line that led far beyond Peligan, to other, better places. Every couple of hours the blare of a signal horn sounded, vibrations rattled the windows and doors, and a train shrieked past, trailing the shunting sound of the wheels, rhythmic as a heartbeat.
Lil lived at number ten. Once she was safely inside she gave her wet trainers a good wipe on the evening edition of the Herald, which was still lying on the doormat. Like every employee at City Hall, her mother got a free copy delivered every day, although it wasn’t actually free as the subscription was subtracted from her pay. City Hall owned controlling shares in the Herald – so it never ran any political stories, especially not ones that criticised Mayor Dean or any of his business associates.
Lil rescued the pizza delivery menu for the Black Pug Eatery from the day’s junk mail with a smile. Inside, crumpled and slightly damp, was her own copy of the Klaxon, in Lil’s opinion the only source of news in Peligan that was worth reading. The Klaxon did run political stories, the kind the politicians didn’t want anyone to read, and it was always delivered in secret, in menus for the Black Pug Eatery, although anyone who bothered to find out – as Lil had – knew that there was no such place.
Lil switched on all the lights and the TV and then went through to the kitchen to hunt for something to put into a sandwich. She settled for cheese, crisps and pickle and made two rounds, leaving one lot on a plate for her mum to eat when she got home. Then she picked up Waldo the hamster’s cage and placed it on the table beside the old sagging settee so she could read the Klaxon to him before bed.
Lil chewed her sandwiches down to the crusts as she scanned the lead story, ‘Nurse Blamed for Blaze’, which cast doubt on the accidental nature of the recent death of Shirley Kreutz, a psychiatric nurse who had allegedly ignited a store of nitrous oxide in the basement of the city hospital and killed herself in the explosion. Then Lil turned straight to the Rotten Barrel column for the latest instalment of a political corruption exposé the paper had been running for months now.
City Hall was leaking like a bucket full of holes, and Lil’s favourite columnist, Randall Collar (it was an alias, Lil had checked), was publishing information on dodgy deals and laundered funds on a weekly basis. It was clear the Klaxon was building a case, but the evidence so far was all circumstantial; somehow Collar had never managed to get his hands on the vital piece of information needed to bring the mayor to account.
Lil would have given anything to be in Randall Collar’s shoes: a daring undercover reporter, risking it all in the name of truth and justice.
She already had a link to City Hall: her mother, Naomi Potkin, was an archivist in charge of the Public Records Department in the Mayor’s Office, filing the right paperwork in the right folders and then placing them in the right drawers, but Lil wasn’t allowed to visit her at work. City Hall was locked down tighter than a drum these days and she couldn’t get past the lobby let alone to the twenty-fourth floor where the public records were kept – well out of the public’s grasp.
Lil cut out the Rotten Barrel and folded it carefully. ‘One day I’ll get the scoop on all this,’ she said as she stuffed the last of the crusts through the bars of Waldo’s cage. ‘You’ll see.’ The hamster’s eyes gleamed back at her.
An hour later in her tiny attic bedroom, Lil pulled the folded Klaxon article from her pocket and fixed it to the wall where she kept all the cuttings of the various stories she was following.
At the centre of the newsprint collage was a portrait: a silhouette of a man’s head with a white question mark over the face. Few people knew what the great investigative reporter A. J. McNair had really looked like, but a smaller version of this monochrome image was always placed at top of his newspaper column, and the Klaxon had used it for his obituary: McNair had been killed in a freak drowning accident a few months before Lil was born.
‘What do you think, McNair?’ Lil said to the head. ‘Do you think I’ll get a chance at a scoop soon?’ She fixed the corner of the picture where the sticky tack kept coming away from the wall. ‘Or maybe Randall Collar could take me on, kind of like an apprentice, or something?’ The black silhouette gazed eyelessly back.
Lil heard the familiar sound of a choked engine coupled with the whine of an exhausted fan belt, which signalled that her mum was home at last.
‘I better get some shut-eye,’ she whispered to herself, climbing into bed. She turned off the lamp on her bedside table, pushed the book she was reading under her pillow and curled up on her side.
A few minutes later the stairs creaked and the door opened a crack. Through the filter of her eyelashes Lil saw a shaft of light cut across the room and her mother step into it.
‘Lil? Are you asleep?’
No answer.
Naomi Potkin tucked the duvet round her daughter and brushed away the hair that had fallen across her forehead before planting a soft, light kiss there. ‘Goodnight, little love,’ she whispered, and then silently closed the door and crept back out and down the creaking attic stairs.
In the darkness that followed, Lil pondered the strange burnt-match smell that had accompanied her mother, but that was a mystery that could wait until the morning. As her eyelids started to droop she could just make out the outline of the portrait on the wall opposite. ‘Night, then,’ she said quietly, and fell instantly to sleep.
When she awoke it was still dark. The moon was high, lighting the room a ghostly grey, and she was cold – really cold. She pulled her duvet up under her chin, rolled over and nearly jumped out of her skin.
Someone was standing there, in front of the window. Their stooped outline divided the blind, a stick-man shadow against the moonlight. Lil sat bolt upright and slapped the light switch on. It was the boy from the bus station.
She fought the urge to scream. Leaping out of bed she grabbed her pen from the bedside table, the only weapon she’d thought she’d ever need, and brandished it. ‘Stay back!’ she warned. The small, thin Biro trembled in her grasp.
The boy peered at her uncertainly. ‘You can see me?’
Lil lowered the pen, only slightly. ‘Are you serious?’
He waited expectantly for an answer with the fingers of both hands tightly crossed.
Lil snorted derisively. ‘Obviously I can see you. You’re standing in the middle of the room.’
He sagged with relief.
‘How did you even get in here?’ Lil demanded.
‘Your – your m-mum let me in,’ the boy said.
Lil gave him what she liked to call her ‘Penetrating Squint’. It was a look she’d been working on.
‘I definitely think that my mum would not be OK about me having boys in my room. Especially boys she doesn’t know. Especially boys I don’t know.’
‘We met at the bus station earlier.’
‘I am not sure that qualifies you as someone-I-actually-know.’ Lil took a step towards him but he backed away. She felt a chill creep up her arms and reached for her dressing gown, while the boy took cover by her wall of newspaper clippings.
‘What are all these for?’
‘I’m a reporter.’
He looked at her doubtfully. ‘Really? You’re pretty young.’
Lil tucked her hair behind her ears and then untucked it again. ‘I’m older than you.’
‘Are any of these by you?’
Lil tried avoiding the question with another snort that she hoped would sound like ‘what do you think?’ But the boy just looked at her blankly so she straightened up and said, ‘Not yet … but one day you’ll see my name in print.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘I’m waiting for a big story.’ Lil felt as though things had got switched around somehow. It was time to turn the tables. She was sucking in a big mouthful of air to do just that when he spoke again.
‘I have a story for you. It’s a Missing Persons case.’
Lil let the breath escape. ‘Really? All right, I’ll bite. Who’s missing?’
The boy turned to face her, his gaunt face shaded with grey. ‘I am.’