The wheels of the hospital trolley twisted and squealed as it was roughhoused out of the cell. Its cargo, an old grey-faced man with conspicuous front teeth, was bound loosely with leather straps round his sunken chest, but they weren’t necessary; he was too frail to escape, even if he wanted to.
Vassal Hench, the man pushing the trolley, wore his small pork-pie hat on the slant, like a garnish, over his thick oily hair. It was completely at odds with the orderly’s uniform that stretched uneasily over his hunched shoulders. As the trolley moved past the rows of metal cages, eyes watched from the darkness behind the bars, and the occasional whimper was stifled with trembling hands. Those taken on the shrieking trolley never returned and no one knew who would be next.
Well, almost no one.
At the end of a winding stone tunnel the trolley reached its grim destination in the deepest part of the building. The air was dank and black mildew bloomed along the walls, mirroring the sinister dark stains on the floor.
A metal machine, about the size of a shoebox, hummed menacingly in the background, sprouting a tangle of discs on wires like suckers. Hench wrangled the trolley towards it and then jumped as a thin man stepped out of the shadows before him.
‘Trouble, Hench?’ The speaker, Cornelius Gallows, wore a surgical mask and a long rubber apron over his doctor’s coat. His deep-set eyes watched coldly from under his hairless brow.
‘Quiet as a lamb, Dr Gallows,’ Hench replied, shakily mopping his forehead with a red-spotted handkerchief.
Gallows’ left eyelid twitched as he examined the man on the trolley. He fixed two adhesive discs on either side of the man’s bony temples, and two on his chest. Then he held out a hand impatiently, clicking his fingers.
Hench passed him a poppet made from white flour-sacking sewn with heavy black thread and stuffed with straw. A face had been stitched on – crosses for eyes, a straight-stitch mouth – and tacked to the topknot where the cloth was gathered and fastened with string, was a tiny bell. Gallows placed the poppet across the man’s chest, where it lay barely rising and falling with his shallow, wheezing breaths.
Gallows’ fingertips quivered as he turned a dial on the machine. Electricity surged through the wires; the adhesive discs crackled and sparked. The old man’s eyes snapped open, his body jerked and his mouth formed a scream that never sounded.
A sickly smell of burning fizzed in the air.
The old man lay there, no longer breathing. His eyes stared blankly. Gallows took out a stethoscope and held it against the corpse’s chest. He listened for a minute and then nodded to himself.
The air grew cold and clammy. The emergency lamps buzzed and dimmed. Gallows looked at the thermometer on the wall.
‘It’s here,’ he whispered. ‘The one we will call “Mr Dose”.’
Hench gave an involuntary shudder.
Gallows’ colourless eyes observed him. ‘I thought you would be used to this by now, Hench.’ Then he plucked the poppet from the dead man and gave it a shake. The little bell tinkled softly.
‘Here, boy,’ he murmured, watching the mercury in the thermometer fall. Tinkle tinkle.
‘Here, boy,’ Hench repeated, smirking but only half-heartedly, because although he couldn’t see Mr Dose, he knew he was there, a newly arrived presence full of brooding malice and dark thoughts, and it made his skin crawl.
By the time Lil and Nedly emerged from the Limelight Picture House the sky was blue and slightly luminous, but with the bruised look that the snow brought. They heard the metallic scrape of the grille being pulled down over the kiosk as soon as their feet hit the pavement. It wasn’t even that late but things didn’t seem to stay open like they used to.
A gust blew in and with a sudden rustling sound something pale flew out from the shadows. Lil stepped back out of its path but the discarded newspaper wrapped itself over her boot. She tried to kick it off but it clung on like a wet flannel. The cheap ink had already bled but she could just make out the headline from the previous day’s edition of the Herald: ‘Gordian Vows to Clean Up Peligan!’ before it vanished into a grey smudge.
She looked at the rubbish bagged up on the street corner, split and spilling its insides all over the pavement, and the tins and papers blowing with the wind. Maybe the streets were getting cleaner in the city centre; here in the old town they looked just the same as always. And alongside the grime and the disrepair an uneasy feeling had started to grow. It grated like a melody played off-key in a cheap piano bar. Things were out of tune. Lil could sense a story building, and if she was going to bag the scoop this time, she knew she had to get a clue before it broke.
They stopped at the corner to wait for a break in the slow procession of traffic. Taxi cabs with their headlights on cut streaks in the dark as they crawled by. Snow started to fall more heavily, the large flakes like feathers from exploded pillows.
Across the road a soft glow emanated from the Nite Jar Cafe; it was the sort of joint where the coffee was always hot and the juke box played nothing but jazz. Lil and Nedly headed towards it.
Inside, the coffee maker was blowing out steam that clung to the cold glass of the windows, and a few of the regulars were holed up in the red-leather booths, glad to be off the street for a few hours.
As soon as she stepped over the threshold all the snow that had landed on Lil began to melt and she raced to peel off her mac and unravel her scarf.
The waitress, in black slacks and a mint-green polo shirt with ‘Nite Jar Cafe’ embroidered on the pocket, took the mac and shook the snow out of it.
‘You’re early.’
‘Hi, Velma!’ Lil glanced admiringly at Velma’s backcombed and smoothed cone-shaped hair-do. ‘I was in town already so I thought maybe I’d just come straight over. Can I get my tea here again tonight?’
‘Yoshi?’ Velma called out to the short-order cook through the hatch. ‘Can I get a cheese on toast for our young pot-washer here, please?’
‘Coming up!’ the voice called back.
‘Yoshi?’ Lil called. ‘Can you make that with extra pickle?’ She paused and then added causally, ‘and why don’t you throw a couple of olives on there too?’
Yoshi stuck his head round the kitchen door and smiled. His dark hair was sweated into points along his forehead and his ‘Nite Jar Cafe’ polo shirt was customised with greasy handprints. ‘Olives on grilled cheese? You know, no one has asked for that since …’ He and Velma exchanged a look. ‘Well, a long time ago. Take a seat and I’ll bring it over.’
Nedly snorted a ‘Really?’ as they made their way to the booth at the far end of the cafe.
‘It’s no big deal.’ Lil sat down with her back to the counter.
‘Didn’t the intrepid reporter A. J. McNair used to have olives on his cheese on toast?’
Lil gave Nedly her trademark Penetrating Squint. ‘Have you been reading my book?’
Nedly grinned. ‘Just been practising turning the pages and happened to see that bit.’
‘Maybe McNair and I have similar taste. Who knows.’
Lil rubbed a porthole in the steamed-up window. On the other side of the road the newsagent was changing the sodden newspaper on the A-board. She watched him slide the evening edition of the Herald into place. Its headline was: ‘Fellgate Epidemic Killing Off Prisoners Saves Peligan City Thousands’.
‘That’s a pretty sour way to look at it.’
Lil could see Fellgate Prison, known to all as ‘the Needle’, from her house. It took the shape of a long, thin tower that broke the horizon, forever lit up by search beams that arced across the sky.
A few minutes later Yoshi came out with her food. ‘So, you hear the news?’
Lil raised her eyebrows. ‘Maybe, what gives?’
‘The latest news, just happened. About Silverman, financial adviser over at Peligan Savings and Loans. Very big mystery, lots of intrigue.’
‘What do you know?’ Lil picked an olive from the molten cheese and casually popped it into her mouth. Her face stiffened as she got a taste of the unexpectedly briny pellet.
‘Caretaker came in for a strong tea one hour ago; rumour is that Silverman fell off the roof of the building.’ Lil choked on the olive as she tried to swallow it. Yoshi gave her a restorative thump on the back. ‘He’s dead.’