The pavement under the viaduct was free from snow at least. Lil sat on the frozen ground, her prized copy of McNair and the Free Press was lying in the dirt at her feet and her ears were luminous and numb.
‘Say something,’ said Nedly, loitering anxiously in front of her.
Lil gave him an offhand snort. ‘What’s to say?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, are you OK?’
Lil shrugged it off, one-shouldered and half-hearted. ‘Fine – I mean, my mum is the only family I have and it turns out I don’t really know her at all, so …’
Nedly slunk down the brick wall to sit beside her. ‘Sounds like she was in a pretty sticky situation. Remember how Craig Weasel came after us when he caught Abe sneaking around at City Hall that time? Imagine what he would have done to your mum if they’d found out she was the mole.’
‘Obviously I wouldn’t have told anyone. Not even Abe.’ Lil pushed around an old crisp packet with the toe of her boot. Suddenly she looked up, eyes wide. ‘Do you think Abe knew already?’
Nedly winced. ‘Maybe. He did know your mum way back when she was on the Chronicle staff, and he was there in the Nite Jar that night, when that picture was taken, so he might have been in on the whole McNair thing. Maybe he knew the whole story.’
Lil let her head sink into her hands and rubbed her eyes. ‘He must have thought I was such a schmuck, playing the big reporter and not even realising that my own mother was the real deal.’
Nedly frowned disapprovingly at her. ‘You don’t really think that’s what Abe would have thought.’
Lil let her shoulders sink with a sigh. ‘Abe always said I was like Mum. I thought it was the ears.’ She rubbed her eyes again; they were getting sore. ‘What kind of investigator am I? I can’t even see the truth when it’s right in front of me.’
‘You do have the same ears.’ Nedly gave her a tentative grin.
This time Lil’s snort was almost a laugh. ‘I know.’
Behind the thick grey snow clouds the sun was sinking fast, already far below the high skyline of tower blocks. One by one the street lamps came on, glowing dimly at first.
Lil took a breath. ‘It’s just the idea that someone, Abe for instance –’ she looked carefully at Nedly when she said this – ‘knew a secret about my family that I didn’t know. And they kept it from me.’
Nedly nodded quickly but his eyes went to the snow and stayed there. ‘I suppose he didn’t know how to tell you.’
Lil’s grim smile resurfaced. ‘Maybe. Anyway, it’s done. No use in going over and over it.’
Nedly looked across at her. It was a look that carried a lot of meaning, enough to make Lil gulp and exchange the grim smile for the twitch of a real one. Then he said: ‘How about that guy Roland?’
She was relieved at the change of subject. ‘Yeah, that was pretty rough on him, getting rubbed out like that – especially as he wasn’t even really McNair …’
Nedly tried again. ‘No, but the way your mum talked about him, it sounded like he might have been –’
‘He was just one of the gang. He was no more McNair than mum was. McNair was just a made-up person.’ She swiped McNair and the Free Press off the ground, rolled it into a thick cylinder and squeezed it angrily. ‘I can’t believe I thought he was real; it’s so obvious now. No one is that good. I’ve been such a sap. He wasn’t a hero – he was a nobody. Literally.’ She threw the book away and it skidded across the icy paving slabs and lay face down, stuck against the snow and soaking it up.
Overhead, a train thundered by. Lil reluctantly clambered to her feet. A fine snow was falling, drifting like mist and making halos round the street lamps. ‘Come on,’ she said, pulling up her hood.
Nedly watched her stomp away, and then looked over to where the book was lying forlornly in the snow. ‘If you don’t want that book any more, can I have it?’
‘It’s just a story. It’s not real.’
‘I know.’
‘Fine.’ Lil stormed back, picked up the book and put it in her bag.
They crossed at the corner, walked onto Arcade Street and stopped. A single corner shop was still lit up and open and, as they watched, a flurry of people spilled out of it, their arms laden with emergency rations of tins and toilet rolls.
The shop owner followed them out, turned the sign to ‘closed’ and then bolted the door in a hurry and pulled down the blind.
Nedly gave Lil a confused look. ‘What’s going on?’
Two lights appeared through the snow at the far end of the road and crawled towards them. The shoppers lined the roadside and stared as it passed. As the van drew near, Lil and Nedly saw a nervous driver at the wheel, shooting glances left to right as he ploughed onwards. Two horn speakers were strapped to the luggage rack. It was one of the Mayor’s Office’s electioneering wagons. A beaky, amplified voice boomed from the speakers, a recorded message playing on a loop.
‘This is Acting Mayor Pam Gordian. Do not panic, City Hall has the situation under control. A curfew is in force; all citizens are instructed to stay inside after dark.’ It was capped off with a burst of upbeat election music that echoed eerily in the hushed silence of the streets.
The snow was accumulating on Lil’s shoulders as she and Nedly watched the van roll by, transfixed. ‘It’s the Haunted story,’ Lil murmured. ‘Now even City Hall is spooked.’
As soon as the van had turned the corner panic burst onto the scene as everyone tried to get off the streets as quickly as possible, which was hard in the thick and slippery snow.
A couple of stragglers hurried their way. They were padded out with layers of clothes, the collars of their jackets turned up and their woollen hats pulled down low. As they passed, the man stopped suddenly, his face turned ashen.
‘There’s something here!’ he yelped, making Lil and Nedly jump. ‘I felt it. A – a creepiness in the air – right there.’ He pointed towards Lil, and Nedly started backing away. People across the road were watching, their eyes wide and filled with panic.
The woman tugged urgently on the man’s sleeve. ‘There’s nothing there. Come on, you’re scaring that little girl.’ She put an arm through his and steered him along the pavement, but as she turned to go she cast a frightened glance over her shoulder and scanned the road for whatever it was that was making her heart pound.
‘We’d better stay out of their way.’ Lil nodded Nedly on to a side street, away from the people who were herding together, all trying to walk in the middle, no one wanting to be left behind.
Nedly looked miserably after them.
‘Don’t think for one minute that this is about you, because it’s not,’ Lil told him firmly. ‘The ghosts they’re scared of are the ones that have killed people, the ones who are frightening people to death. You couldn’t scare someone to death if you tried.’
Nedly’s mouth twisted into a small smile. It didn’t reach his eyes at first – they stayed frozen, and then, a thaw. ‘I did turn a patch of Abe’s hair white.’
‘Yeah, you scared him pretty well, but only to save his life. You would never harm anyone.’
‘Aren’t you scared? Of the other spooks, I mean?’
Lil shrugged. ‘You went up against Mr Grip, and you did it to save me and Abe. And now I’ve seen a picture of that creep, I know how terrifying that must have been, but you beat him and he was the worst of the bunch. So, no, I’m not scared, not with you here.’
Nedly stuffed his hands in his pockets and kept his eyes on the pavement.
They waited at the bus stop again but when it became obvious there would be no bus coming they began the long walk home. It didn’t matter. Lil was in no hurry to get back. As they passed beneath another railway bridge a train screamed by overhead, the brakes squealing as it cornered and then returned to the click clack click clack as it tore away, lit up like a phosphorescent eel, snaking its way through the deep sea of the early-evening sky.
Lil watched it go, wondering where it was heading and how much a ticket cost.
The street lights in Hen Road were on the blink. Yaroslava the toymaker stood on the pavement outside the old doll hospital, looking through the snow-dusted window. Every few minutes there was a buzzing, a clicking, a flickering of the lights and then the street was lost in fuzzy darkness and the snow a starlit dirty grey. A minute later they came on again, bleaching the snow and thickening the shadows, and so it went on. Yaroslava gulped back the jitters that were surging under all her layers of clothing and let her body sink down against the doorway until she was sitting in the porch, her head resting on the glass just below the ‘closed’ sign.
With a red-knuckled hand she cleared a window in the snowflakes that clung to the shop door and then wrapped her woollen undercoat closer.
The toymaker was able to pick out the familiar glint in the eyes of the toys lined up on the shelf, just as she had left them. Yaroslava’s own eyes smiled back, but then hardened as her gaze reached the cabinet where those strange toys had been placed. There was something about them that frightened her, something about the expressions on their faces. Their cold, dead eyes. She had seen something like them once before, long ago, back in the old country, and the memory of it sent a shudder through her frozen bones.
Almost as if they too had picked up on the unease in the air, the street lamps hummed and blinked off and then on again. Yaroslava stared up at the nearest one, willing it to stay on. It did. She turned back to the workshop and saw straight away that something had changed. The door to the cabinet was open. She could clearly see the little figures in it staring lifelessly out into the room, and then she saw another. It was lying on the floor; it had fallen from its shelf and its blank face was tilted up slightly as if it was looking right at her.
Dread swept over Yaroslava. She cranked up her old knees and half ran, half fell into the road, her footsteps muffled by the snow, her hand searching her apron pocket for something she had placed there for safekeeping. Her breathing was ragged in the silent streets. As she reached the telephone box on the corner, the detective’s card was already in her hand.
She shut herself in and picked up the receiver. Through the glass walls of the box the toymaker watched a flurry of snow change direction, leaving a dark gap in the blizzard. She peered at it, wiped the window and then looked again. The window of the phone box misted up suddenly as though someone had breathed on it from the other side and a doily of ice crystals formed on the glass.
Yaroslava’s voice trembled as she whispered, ‘Hello? Operator?’
‘Which number do you require?’ said the voice down the line.
The door to the box swung open. The toymaker stepped back away from it and looked out into the empty night beyond. She saw the street lamps go off one at a time as the darkness travelled towards her. Fear bolted her to the spot.
She grabbed the door of the box and pulled it shut again.
‘Do you require some help?’ the voice said. The lights in the box were the last to go out. ‘Is this a prank call? You know the emergency services have got enough on their plates without timewasters like you clogging up the lines …’
It was then that she felt it. Whatever had been outside was now inside. There in the dark it was standing right beside her. With the last of the fight that was left in her the old woman threw her weight through the door, and with a cry that stopped her heart, she fell to the icy ground outside.
The receiver was left hanging down, twisting on the cord, the voice still talking although the booth was empty, and then the line went dead.