The Hawks Memorial Orphanage was on the outskirts of town. As Lil pedalled her bike away from the smog towards the city limits the sky brightened from sardine-grey to oyster-white and the rain turned to a soft mizzle.
Her pockets were loaded with freshly purchased bribes: toffees and fruit chews mostly, from the shop on the corner. Nedly, who was thankfully entirely weightless, was perched on the handlebars so she had to crane her neck round him to see the road. She wore fingerless gloves, a heavy Mexican poncho and a balaclava against the creeping chill of being so close to him, but as the road out of Peligan was mostly uphill she was feeling pretty hot and bothered by the time they arrived.
At the top of Bun Hill they wobbled to a stop. Lil dumped her bike on an overgrown lawn and peeled off the balaclava.
The orphanage was a large square building, three stories high and eight windows across. There were bright curtains in the windows, but the front door was peeling paint and ivy had a strangle-hold on the drainpipes.
Lil caught sight of a small round face, as pale and bald as the moon, against the darkness of an upstairs window. The little boy was watching her intently but when she raised a hand to wave at him he backed away from the glass until he was out of sight.
‘Babyface,’ Nedly murmured and then he shuddered violently.
‘You knew him?’
Nedly nodded and his eyes clouded over until they were almost black.
‘OK,’ said Lil. ‘Let’s go rattle his cage a bit.’
‘Go easy on him. He’s only six.’ Nedly faltered. ‘No … he would be seven now, I suppose.’
‘Well, if he knows something he’s going to have to spill it.’ She squinted up at the now empty window. ‘We need a break if we’re going to crack this case.’ She started down the path but Nedly hung back. ‘Don’t be getting all sentimental on me,’ Lil told him. ‘We’ve got to squeeze this kid for answers. You need to act like a professional.’ She gave him a stern look. ‘You might have to put the frighteners on him.’
She knocked on the door and waited. After what seemed like almost too long the door opened and the orphanage caretaker, Mr Kolchak, stood on the threshold, wearing a blue denim apron plastered with flour and his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His eyes squinted out beneath white-tufted brows.
‘Hello,’ said Lil, giving him a trustworthy smile. ‘My name is Lil. I’m an associate of Abe Mandrel P.I., the detective who’s working your case. He sent me in to interrogate some of the orphans. I mean, talk to them – about Ned Stubbs.’
‘I haven’t seen Mandrel for a long time,’ Mr Kolchak mused. ‘He always maintained that young Ned ran away, of course,’ he added ruefully, ‘but I’m relieved to hear he’s still looking. I almost thought he’d given up on us.’ Lil winced inwardly. ‘Who do you want to talk to?’
Lil pulled out her reporter’s notebook in a let’s-get-down-to-business-like way and extracted the pencil. She pointed it at the top of the building. ‘Third floor, fourth window from the left. I want to talk to the one they call Babyface.’
‘That’s Clark’s room,’ Mr Kolchak told her with a frown. ‘Some of the kids do call him Babyface, but I happen to think that’s a bit unkind.’
Lil reddened and cast an annoyed look at Nedly.
‘Sorry,’ he shrugged. ‘The name just stuck.’
They cornered the boy in his tiny bedroom. The cheerful blue paint had bubbled where damp patches spread across the plaster, and the ceiling bowed in the corner where the roof was leaking. A small bed with a cloud-pattered coverlet stood in the corner with a toy box at the end of it. Sitting beside the toy box, reading a book about trains, was Babyface Kennedy, his bald head blooming out of his thick turtleneck jumper like a light bulb.
Mr Kolchak cleared his throat. ‘Ahem. Clark, I’ve got someone here to see you.’ Babyface turned and glanced up at him. ‘Her name is Lil and she’d like to ask you some questions about young Ned.’
Lil stepped out from behind the old man with a wolfish grin.
‘Pleased to meet you, Clark,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Mr Kolchak. I can take it from here.’
Nedly slipped in through the open door and the afternoon light turned grey. Babyface got the creeps straight away; his eyes darted fearfully between the dark corners of the room and he started trembling.
‘Don’t be nervous, Clark.’ Mr Kolchak nodded encouragingly at him. ‘I’ll just be downstairs if you need me.’ He gave Lil a melancholy smile and then shuffled out onto the landing and creaked down the wooden stairs and out of earshot.
Lil stared at the little boy. His huge brown eyes glistened above his chapped red cheeks and small chin, and his teeth were small and widely spaced, but most striking of all was his head; it was completely bald and looked bluish-white in the stark attic light.
‘So, that’s why they call you Babyface,’ she said.
‘Lil!’ Nedly hissed angrily at her as a red blush crept up from the little boy’s collar and over his neck. He touched a small hand to his hairless scalp and then unhooked a woollen hat from the bedpost and slipped it on.
‘How do you know they call me that?’ he asked.
‘There’s a lot that I know,’ Lil replied. She pulled out a roll of Cherry Drops from her mac pocket and offered him one. A smile broke over his face and he held out a pink-fingered paw to take it.
‘Not so fast,’ Lil warned, holding it out of reach. Babyface looked covetously at the sweets and then back at Lil.
Helping herself to a dusty-looking leather pouffe, Lil sat down opposite the little boy while Nedly stood in a corner behind him, half out of focus, a shadow amongst shadows.
Babyface shrank into his jumper.
‘I’m not looking for any trouble,’ Lil assured him. ‘I just need some answers. As soon as I saw you at that window, I thought, that kid knows something.’
Babyface employed the most effective response he could muster. He turned down his mouth, stuck out his bottom lip and said nothing.
‘Not talking, eh?’ Lil gave Nedly a barely perceptible nod that meant, OK, give him the creeps.
Nedly took a reluctant step forward. Babyface’s head whipped round; he searched the dark but seemingly empty corner behind him and ran a nervous finger round the collar of his turtleneck to loosen it.
Lil leant towards him with a not-so-friendly smile. ‘No reason to get twitchy, Babyface. It’s just you and me here.’
She fixed the little boy with her Penetrating Squint. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s hear it. I want to know what happened the night Ned Stubbs went missing.’
Lil helped herself to a couple of Babyface’s Jelly Tots from a wrinkled and yellowing bag by the toy box, throwing one up in the air and catching it in her mouth. It had been several months since she’d learned how to do that without choking and this was the first time she had been able to use it.
Babyface looked more disappointed than impressed. ‘I was saving those,’ he whined.
Lil pulled a face. ‘No kidding. That one tasted of earwax. How old are they?’
Babyface shrugged. ‘Mr Kolchak bought them for me after Ned … to cheer me up.’ His large eyes clouded over and started to rain fat tears that soaked his eyelashes and trickled down his cheeks.
Lil looked at her shoes. It was a dirty job all right, but someone had to do it.
‘Dry your eyes, kiddo,’ she told him. ‘Your tears won’t wash with me. Now, you tell me what happened the night Ned disappeared or I’ll eat the whole bag.’
Babyface hung his bald head down and stared at his feet. He wasn’t wearing any shoes and she could see a tiny pink toe poking out of a hole in his sock. ‘All right, I’ll talk.’ With a quivering intake of breath he began: ‘Ned went looking for Wool –’
Lil watched as Nedly’s face grew pale and haunted-looking. ‘Wool?’ he said. The faraway sound of his voice filled her with dread.
‘Wool?’ she queried Babyface. ‘What did he want wool for?’
Her eyes darted back to Nedly, but he wasn’t listening. The temperature in the room was turning Arctic and Lil could feel her pulse throbbing in her neck, while Nedly stood, staring into space and murmuring to himself as his mind tried to catch at the fragile wisps of memory. ‘That was his name, he whispered. Wool, of course. It was a toy.’ His head snapped up and he rushed towards Lil with an urgent and meaningful stare. ‘A missing toy.’
Lil gave Nedly a tiny shrug of confusion, and subtly dodged round him to continue questioning Babyface. ‘Can you describe it for me?’
Babyface shrugged. ‘It’s my woollen humpty.’
‘I’ve no idea what that means,’ Lil confessed. ‘Can you draw me a picture?’
‘You have a picture,’ Nedly insisted.
‘I really don’t,’ Lil mouthed back at him while the little boy fetched a crayon and a piece of paper from the toy box and, with his tongue curled out in concentration, began to draw a wobbly egg shape with chipolata arms and legs. He gave the figure round hollow eyes and a few strings of hair.
Lil stared at the picture for a moment, and then she rummaged in the pocket of her mac, drew out the crumpled Lost Toy poster from the bus station noticeboard and held it up alongside the one that Babyface had drawn.
‘Is this yours?’
Babyface nodded sadly. ‘Mr Kolchak put it up for me, but no one ever answered it.’
Lil raised an eyebrow at Nedly.
He nodded gravely in return. ‘Wool is the face I saw, in my dream. It was there, when it happened.’
Tears began rolling down Babyface’s still-blotchy cheeks again. ‘They kidnapped him,’ he sniffled. ‘The older boys. They hid him so I couldn’t find him.’
‘OK,’ Lil said, pulling her balaclava out of her pocket and handing it to him to wipe his eyes with. ‘And this “humpty” thing was what Ned was looking for the night he went missing?’
Babyface nodded.
‘And where exactly did he go to find this Wool character?’
Babyface looked closely at her like he was weighing up whether or not he should tell. He climbed to his feet, walked over to the window, pointed one finger out and spoke in a voice that was almost too quiet to hear. ‘In there.’
Lil charted the line of his little red digit over the lane and across the fields to where the murky skyline was broken by a building. The sight of it made her blood run cold.
‘The old asylum,’ she whispered. Beside her Nedly shivered, then she shivered, then Babyface shivered. ‘They say it’s haunted.’
‘It is.’ Babyface’s eyes quivered fearfully. ‘Now Wool is there and Ned is there and neither of them has ever come back.’
‘Has anyone checked it out?’
Babyface looked away, ashamed of himself. ‘I’m too scared to go in.’
Lil reached out to ruffle his hat in a friendly way but he evaded her hand. ‘I didn’t mean you, small fry. An adult, like Mr Kolchak.’
He shook his head miserably. ‘We’re not supposed to go in there. It’s off-limits. I didn’t want to get Ned into trouble.’ His lip started to quake and he hung his head, looking wretched.
‘It’s too late for that, kid,’ Lil muttered under her breath.
Nedly touched her lightly on the shoulder, sending a cold shudder through her bones. He gave her a look that meant, He knows that, give him a break, he’s only seven – or something to that effect.
Lil frowned and patted down her pockets. She pulled out the tube of Cherry Drops again, plus some fruit chews and a bag of toffees, and stacked them in Babyface’s outstretched hands. ‘There you go, pal. These are nearly new. You can dump the Jelly Tots now.’
The little boy took them shyly. ‘Toffees are my favourite,’ he said as he opened up the packet and offered her one.
‘Give mine to the old man,’ suggested Lil. ‘He looks like he could do with cheering up.’
Babyface nodded eagerly. ‘Maybe you could stay for a bit?’
Lil chewed her lip, ‘I’m sorry, Babyface. I’ve got things to do. I’ll come again another time.’
The little boy tried to smile. ‘OK,’ he said, but he didn’t sound too hopeful.
Lil watched him carefully sorting through the sweets, dividing them into two piles. ‘I miss him,’ he whispered, as though he was talking to himself.
Lil paused with her hand on the door knob. She glanced across at Nedly and caught the sad look on his face. ‘He misses you too, kid.’
The road to Rorschach Asylum twisted through an overgrown thicket of buckthorn and gorse. A rusted metal sign arced over the driveway, above a tall cast-iron gate that was chained, padlocked shut and festooned with dented warning notices. The soot-dusted brick shell rose behind it like a reanimated corpse-face, decayed but still breathing. Lil held its gaze for an uneasy moment while the sky darkened around them and the wind picked up.
She propped her bike up against the gate and they started examining the criss-cross wire fence, looking for a way in.
‘There!’ She pointed at a hole, a tear at the bottom of the nearest post where the fence had been ripped away, leaving a flap edged with sharp metal barbs. ‘There’s a gap in the fence. We could climb through.’
A look of recognition dawned on Nedly and he rubbed at the back of his hand where the thin red welt still looked like a fresh scratch. ‘That wire is sharp.’
‘So this really is the place.’ Lil glanced from the wound to Nedly with a serious expression. ‘We’ve found it then, the beginning of the end.’ They looked up and the burnt face of the asylum leered back down at them. ‘I don’t fancy going in there alone,’ she said, shivering.
They both stood in awkward silence for a minute, while Lil tucked and untucked her hair and Nedly examined the cut on the back of his hand.
‘Come on,’ said Lil. ‘We need backup. Let’s go get him.’