LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Charlotte glanced around Damson Robinson’s pie shop to make sure that there were no customers left inside. Then she turned the sign hanging on the door to read ‘closed’ and locked it shut. On the other side of the sawdust-strewn floor, Mister Twist laid out an architect’s blueprint for the ground floor of the House of Guardians, all of Parliament’s lintels, lunettes, elevations and eaves laid out on the ageing parchment.

      ‘You have not explained the details of how you expect to obtain King Jude’s sceptre for us?’ said Twist. He looked over in annoyance at the old female proprietor of the pie shop hovering nearby. ‘It would be better if you weren’t here.’

      ‘I am sure it would, dearie,’ replied Damson Robinson. ‘But seeing as it is the Cat-gibbon who procured Charlotte’s services for you, the flash mob would like to make sure there’s no business between the two of you going on under the counter.’ She tapped her worktop and pushed a large chopping board out of the way.

      Twist shrugged and lifted up a battered red leather case, the kind clerks and civil servants used to lug paperwork across the city. Laying it on top of the counter, Twist undid the clasp and revealed a velvet-lined interior filled with neat cord-tied columns of gold sovereigns.

      Damson Robinson sighed in gentle satisfaction. ‘There’s a sight to warm an old bird’s heart.’

      Charlotte had to agree. The money always helped.

      Twist closed the case and placed it between his boots. ‘You’ll take your share of it when I have the sceptre.’ He tapped the plans, impatiently.

      ‘Only I ever know the details of my jobs,’ said Charlotte. ‘A girl has to keep her secrets.’

       And we wouldn’t want you copying my plan and deciding to execute it without me, would we?

      ‘Results are what count, Mister Twist,’ said the shop owner. ‘We don’t ask, you don’t ask. That way there’s no recriminations about who knew what, should any detectives from Ham Yard come calling at a later stage.’

      ‘Professional tradecraft,’ said Charlotte. ‘Just like I haven’t asked where your friend Mister Cloake is tonight.’

      ‘Mister Cloake and my associates will be waiting here to take possession of the sceptre when you get back,’ said Twist. ‘I have other business to attend to.’

      How many rebels are there swarming over the city? Well, I don’t need to know. Just so long as that case full of money is still here when I return.

      Damson Robinson came over to give Charlotte a little hug. ‘You be careful, dearie. I stepped out with a sergeant major from the house guards regiment when I wasn’t much older than you. They’re tough old buggers. You won’t find any of them sleeping at Parliament’s gate.’

      ‘You keep my share of that money safe,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ll keep my soul well enough out there.’

      Charlotte stepped out into the street, her mind preoccupied with all of the dangers of the night ahead of her, the floor plans she had memorized, the challenges she would face. So immersed in her own world that she didn’t notice the figure slinking back into the shadows of the alleyway on the opposite side of the road.

      This was just as well, for if she had, Parliament was the last place Charlotte Shades would have visited.

      Damson Robinson sighed, watching Charlotte depart with her housebreaking equipment. Then the old woman locked the door again and made them safe. All my pigeons have flown and left. But let this one come back, come back safe with a valuable little gee-jaw stuck between her talons.

      ‘Roll your plan of Parliament up from the counter, young man. It’s going to be a long evening and I have an order of eight pies to complete for morning’s opening.’

      ‘Disgusting,’ said Twist, concealing the map beneath his frock coat.

      ‘They’re meaty enough, if you bone the partridges properly before you boil them,’ said Damson Robinson.

      ‘The way you consume food, it disgusts me, eating like cattle. Crumbs and juices pouring out of your mouths, the disgusting slurping sound you make as you crunch away at the flesh and the baked seed flowers. The foul stench as you defecate your waste back out again.’

      ‘What are you—’ Damson Robinson turned to see Twist removing a tuning fork-shaped object from under his coat, the thing shaped out of glittering crystal ruby. ‘Is that a tuning fork? I don’t have a piano here, dearie. Not in my shop.’

      Then a strange thing happened, although the queerness of it was lost on the proprietor of the shop. The client who had commissioned tonight’s pilferage disappeared, replaced by a beau from her past, young George. She was so glad to see him; it had been so many years. They had set up the shop together before he died of a bowel abscess. Passed away from her far too young. She stretched her arms out to greet him.

      ‘Yes, a song,’ said Twist, upon the old lady in two long striding steps, plunging the crystal prongs into her neck. Damson Robinson stumbled back, blood fountaining out across the counter, her greeting for George muffled by Twist’s hand clamped over her face. ‘A song of blood and flesh! The Mass must feed.’

      Thankfully for the shop owner, the pain that should have accompanied the sight of the spinning room as her heart gave up was absent; the pressure of her rapidly vanishing blood more than her seventy-year-old body could stand. She didn’t hear even Twist’s last words as the blackness flowed over her. She was too busy kissing George.

      ‘No taste, you filthy old crone. Not like the girl, she’ll taste sweet for Mister Cloake, she’ll taste—’

      Jethro Daunt let go of the lion-shaped handle of the bell-pull, listening to the echo of the chimes inside. The ex-parson-turned-consulting-detective smiled at the sound. It put him in mind of the bells in his old parish, back in the small northern town of Hundred Locks. The locals who complained the church’s campanologists set to ringing their bells with too much gusto, whatever the occasion – be it funerals, weddings, or Circle Day services. Before I was defrocked, before …

      The door swung open and the bushy eyebrows of the bear-like man who’d answered rose in surprise. ‘Ah now, it seems to be my week for receiving old faces back into my life.’

      ‘I do trust I am not intruding?’

      ‘Far happier to see your face than the last fellow, and that is the truth of it,’ said the commodore, leaning forward conspiratorially. ‘A government officer, full of guile and treachery he was. Where is your old steamer, that great metal lug Boxiron? Is he not working

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