Early Riser Page 22

  ‘I don’t drink coffee yet,’ came a voice behind me, ‘and from what I’ve smelled and seen, I probably won’t start.’

  It was Laura Strowger, who had wandered over to say hello. She’d heard that I’d overslept and been forgotten, and her attitude was sympathetic, rather than mocking, which made a change. I hoped Toccata would be the same.

  ‘Has the Gronk made an appearance?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so far,’ she said, ‘but we still have ninety-one days to go. I’ve been laying out unfolded clothes at strategic places around the locality and will be watching them closely. What do you make of this?’

  She dug a Polaroid from her shoulder bag and showed it to me. All I could see was a lump in the snow next to a gas lamp. I stared at the photo for a moment.

  ‘Did it move much?’

  ‘Hardly at all,’ she replied, delighted that I was showing any interest. ‘Frostgoblins are known to wait for long hours in one place before they pounce.’

  ‘Pounce to do what, exactly?’

  ‘Nobody knows,’ she said, eyes wide open, ‘hence my research.’

  I handed back the photo.

  ‘It’s a fire hydrant, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, staring at the Polaroid in a crestfallen manner, ‘almost certainly. Treacle agreed that photographic evidence would be allowable,’ she went on. ‘Do you have a camera?’

  I said that I didn’t, so she fetched me a Consul-issue Kodak Instamatic fitted with a fresh flashcube, and two spares in a box. A crude device, but without batteries of any sort, they were more reliable in subzero than anything else on the market.

  ‘Take as many snaps as you want and then get the camera back to me; but wind it on with care; the cold makes the film brittle.’

  ‘Can the Gronk be photographed?’ I asked, shoving the camera in my bag.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she replied. ‘I’m beginning to think that Wintervolk might be something akin to an escalating night terror that gives physicality to the fears within the mind. It makes it a much harder sell to Treacle. Firstly whether an existential fear has the equivalency of a tangible one, and if it does and can kill you, does that count as proven existence?’

  ‘Are you sure you’re only sixteen?’ I asked. ‘You seem kind of . . . smart.’

  ‘That was really patronising,’ she said, ‘but I forgive you. I have a genetic disorder of the hypothalamus that prevents me hibernating. I sleep about eight hours in the twenty-four all year round. While my peers have been unproductively pumping out the zeds, I’ve been adding to my knowledge base and maturity. My mental age is closer to twenty-two. It doesn’t make me a sage, but I’m certainly not a teenager.’

  ‘Is this a rare condition? I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s rare,’ she sighed, ‘hence the wager.’

  ‘I know this is none of my business,’ I said, ‘but why agree to wager your firstborn on something as nebulous as the Gronk? It seems almost insanely reckless, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  She stared at me for a moment.

  ‘It’s not for my firstborn,’ she said slowly, ‘it’s for my secondborn.’

  ‘How does that make it any better?’

  ‘Here’s how: when I was two my parents sold the option on my firstborn to Partwood Associates to pay off their gambling debts. The option was resold several times before being packaged with other subprime child options and eventually on to Jim Treacle as part of a collateralised child obligation. My genetic sleep disorder means I possess a genome in which HiberTech have a great deal of interest. I’ve chosen not to license my genetic rights, and my unborn should have that right, too. I don’t want them to go to HiberTech to be some kind of – I don’t know – lab rat.’

  ‘How much is the firstborn child option worth?’

  ‘Treacle has told HiberTech he wants two million euros at my eighteenth.’

  ‘You’ll get half. That’s the deal.’

  ‘It’s not about the money, and they can’t force me to have children – but I think I want to, and if I do, well, I want them to be born unencumbered by legalities.’

  ‘Okay, but you’ve got a buy-back clause. Legally, there’s always a buy-back clause.’

  ‘Precisely, but it was pegged at fifty thousand by the courts and I barely have a grand.’

  ‘So if you lose the wager,’ I said slowly, ‘you lose the genetic rights to two children, Treacle and you make a fortune – but HiberTech obtain legal access to a couple of kids with a potentially valuable genome?’

  ‘Pretty much. But if I win the wager,’ she added, ‘I get no money but retain my children’s rights.’

  ‘You’re very brave.’

  ‘Nope,’ she said sadly, ‘I’m just a girl who’s all out of options – and who had rubbish parents.’

  ‘It could have been worse,’ I said, ‘they could have harvested and then sold all your eggs the day after your sixteenth birthday to pay for a, I don’t know – a new roof, kitchen extension and a minibus.’

  ‘I guess. But this is the only wager Treacle would take. The Gronk is out there. I just have to get some evidence. Keep that camera handy, won’t you?’

  She jumped down from the counter where she’d been sitting, gave me a cheery smile and returned to her work. She was technically a winsomniac, but was earning her tuck. There was a world of difference between the deserving and undeserving awake.

  My attention wandered back to the wall that was covered with the pictures of the missing. A sea of faces, all absent. Most ages, every gender, no pattern. As I scanned the posters a particular set of eyes caught my attention, sunk deep in the overlapping mass of lost souls. They were the same eyes I’d seen staring back at me from the Polaroid in my dream, the one that had been taken of me and Birgitta by the photographer on the Gower. Charles. Birgitta’s Charles. I reached out and plucked the picture from the board.

  The missing man used to work at HiberTech as an orderly, and his name, I read, was Charles Webster. He went missing three years before, just after starting a Winter season – pretty much as Birgitta had described her missing husband.

  And that wasn’t possible.

  I couldn’t have recognised him because I didn’t know what he looked like. Reality first, then dream. I felt myself grow woozy again, and oak-dappled sunlight began to filter through to the office floor. I steadied myself against a table and took long, slow breaths. Treacle hadn’t noticed my attack of the narcs, Laura was busy filing and Toccata was still ranting behind the glass partition. I calmed myself, and repeated Birgitta Birgitta Birgitta Birgitta to quell the sense of rising panic. It worked, and now calmer, I ran over the likely scenario: I’d clothed my dream with Charles Webster’s name and face retrospectively. That he had the same first name as mine was coincidence, nothing more.

  ‘What you got there?’

  I jumped, but it was only Treacle.

  ‘Some guy named Webster,’ I mumbled, passing him the flyer, ‘went missing three years ago.’

  Treacle stared at the picture and nodded.

  ‘First season I was here. We never found him. Actually,’ he added, ‘we never looked. HiberTech staff are HiberTech problems. Why the interest?’

  I had to think quickly.

  ‘We were at the same Pool, though ten years apart. I think he was popular with the sisterhood and they’d always wanted to know what happened to him.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Treacle, ‘keep it if you want.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and folded up the flyer and put it in my pocket.

  ‘Hullo, Treacle,’ said Jonesy, entering through the shock-gate and sitting down to pull off her boots. ‘Enter these in the Vermin Control book and tally up my record, will you?’

  She tossed an evidence bag containing two freshly severed thumbs on the desk.

  ‘Will do,’ said Treacle c
heerily. ‘That must be sixty-two, yes?’

  ‘Sixty-three.’

  There was another explosive level of muffled swearing from behind the frosted glass.

  Treacle and Jonesy smiled as though this sort of thing happened all the time, and we heard the phone slammed down, then a crash as something was either kicked or thrown across the room.

  ‘She’s a bit . . . sweary,’ I said.

  ‘You should hear her when she really gets pissed off.’

  I had a thought and pulled Birgitta’s severed thumb out of my pocket. It was still wrapped in a handkerchief, the blood now caked dark brown. I felt a sense of nausea rise up within me, and handed it to Jonesy.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘do you want to add this to your score?’

  ‘Oh, you darling!’ she said, eagerly accepting the prize and carefully placing it on the counter next to the other two. She beamed at me and went off to her desk. Treacle glared at me as though I’d just given her flowers, chocolates, a TOG-28 coat and a card.

  ‘I thought you said I’d have no problems from you?’ he said, once she was out of earshot.

  ‘It was only a thumb,’ I whispered back.

  ‘That’s how it started with Cotton,’ said Treacle in a grumbly sort of voice, ‘first a thumb, then a gift, sort-of-real coffee in the Wincarnis. Next thing you know you’ve been bumped up to number one on her bundling list. If you are, will you describe what it’s like for three hundred euros?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cotton did,’ he said in a whiny sort of voice.

  ‘I’m not Cotton.’

  Jonesy didn’t see or hear this exchange; she was busy pecking out a report on a typewriter that more closely resembled an antiquated pipe organ. Treacle held up Birgitta’s thumb.

  ‘Whose thumb is this anyway?’

  ‘Birgitta,’ I said, ‘from the Siddons.’

  ‘Baggy went walkies?’ he murmured. ‘That’s a shame – she was quite delightful in a perpetually pissed-off sort of way. Amazing eyes, and a terrific painter. We dated once.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, not meaning it to sound quite so incredulous. Treacle sighed.

  ‘If you must know,’ he said, ‘I bought a date with her at a charity auction in aid of the Sector Twelve Pool. She didn’t find any of my jokes or anecdotes remotely interesting, then threatened to bite me on the face if I tried to kiss her when we said goodnight. She didn’t elaborate, but I figured a second date was out of the question.’

  ‘Very astute of you.’

  He held up the two thumbs and stared at them.

  ‘The large thumb was from a travelling sire named Eddie Tangiers,’ I said, ‘the smaller from a female, also Siddons, mid-twenties, freshly married.’

  ‘I’ll call Lloyd,’ he muttered, ‘he’ll know.’

  He wrote down ‘Tangiers’ and ‘Manderlay’ and ‘Newlywed Siddons’ on a slip of paper and went off to confirm them.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Jonesy, who had finished her report and was hunting in vain for a stapler.

  ‘What do I think about what?’

  ‘About Treacle.’

  ‘Owning Laura’s child options makes him something of a heel.’

  ‘To a bondsman, that’s good business – and legal. They’ll both be millionaires when Laura hits eighteen; I can see her point, though. I meant aside from that.’

  ‘He’s very keen on you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, looking all crestfallen. ‘Do you think I should just kill him and make it look like a Gronk attack? It would help Laura out, too.’

  ‘You could pay back the dowry,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah, right – and who would I borrow the cash from? Treacle himself?’

  ‘No, you could—’

  I didn’t get to finish my sentence as the door to Toccata’s office had opened. I turned, expecting to see Winter Consul Toccata. But it wasn’t – it was Aurora. I opened my mouth to greet her but then stopped. Although she looked the same, her demeanour seemed utterly different. Aurora had been relaxed and friendly, whereas this woman seemed sharp, driven, and utterly without humour. She strode forward with a purposeful swagger and a clearly aggressive sense of purpose. The only other differences I could see were in her clothes, which were now Consular uniform, and her eyes. Unlike Aurora’s, her right was gazing absently off and looking blank, and her left fixed me with a steely glare.

  But they weren’t twins. Aurora and Toccata were the same person.

  Toccata

  ‘ . . . The barograph recorded atmospheric pressure as a trace of ink on a 12hr strip of paper and was not only useful for gauging the weather, but could detect a pulse weapon’s discharge at a kilometre, less in a snowstorm. A skilled reader could often tell not just the weapon’s power and vortex gradient from the bump or spike profile, but the range, too . . . ’

  – Handbook of Winterology, 1st edition, Hodder & Stoughton

  ‘Well, well,’ said Toccata, ‘the forgotten sleeper of the Sarah Siddons. Charlie Worthing, isn’t it?’

  Confused by the sudden turn of events, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

  ‘You know I am.’

  Toccata’s eye flashed dangerously.

  ‘I never ask questions I already know the answer to. Waste of my time, waste of yours. So, again: are you . . . ’

  Her voice trailed off. She narrowed her eye and looked at Treacle and Jonesy in turn.

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ she said, ‘a bunch of comedians. You didn’t tell Worthing Aurora and I looked vaguely similar, did you?’

  ‘Since Jonesy found Worthing,’ said Treacle, pointing an accusatory finger at her and demonstrating in the clearest manner why Jonesy wanted nothing to do with him. ‘She could have done so. In fact, I thought she had. Which is why I didn’t.’

  ‘I wanted to see the shocked look on Worthing’s face,’ said Jonesy after giving Treacle a withering look. ‘The Winters are long and we have to make our own entertainment.’

  ‘Make it some other way,’ growled Toccata, ‘whittling or ice sculpture or something.’

  She turned back to me.

  ‘But you are Charlie Worthing, I take it?’

  ‘I am, ma’am.’

  ‘Charlie prefers to be called Wonky,’ said Jonesy.

  ‘I doubt that so very much,’ said Toccata, ‘but Wonky it is. You were there when Jack Logan was . . . murdered?’

  She almost chose the word ‘died’ but then pulled back and substituted ‘murder’ instead. It was not hard to see either how she felt about it, nor who ultimately was to blame.

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘He was one of the best,’ she said. ‘How did she get the drop on him?’

  I knew now why he’d paused: he couldn’t kill Aurora because he’d be killing Toccata, too. Odd, I thought, that he could countenance farming a nightwalker – but would rather be dead than kill someone he was once in love with.

  ‘He could easily have thumped Aurora,’ I said in a quiet voice, ‘but he paused. And in that moment, she had him.’

  ‘Paused?’ said Toccata. ‘Why would he do that?’

  I looked at Jonesy for help but she just stared back at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve read Aurora’s misspelled and poorly worded report,’ said Toccata after staring at me for a few seconds. ‘It claims you were about to be executed and that Aurora thumped Logan “in order to save the life of a Novice Consul”. Why was he going to kill you? What had you done?’

  ‘I hadn’t done anything,’ I said, ‘but I’d given him the impression that I would have reported about how he and Foulnap were going to farm Mrs Tiffen.’

  ‘You knew that for a fact? Did he actually say he was going to kill you?’

  I thought hard.

  ‘On reflection,’
I said slowly, ‘perhaps they didn’t want me dead.’

  ‘Explain yourself.’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘The conversation began with Lopez saying: “Maybe we can trust the Novice, I didn’t sign up to all this in order to start killing Consuls”. Then Foulnap said that he was with Lopez on this, and Logan said: “We can’t risk any of us being discovered, besides, Aurora’s in town”.’

  Jonesy and Toccata looked at one another.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then Foulnap asked: “How did she get wind of us?” and Logan said: “We don’t know that she did. I’ll deal with Worthing, you deal with Mrs Tiffen”. He then gestured for me to leave the room and we did, and he then said: “You should have listened to me earlier and just let it all go”. And I then asked him if he could tell Sister Zygotia where she could find my body, and he told me not to be overdramatic. And that’s when the elevator doors opened to reveal Aurora. He was dead five seconds later.’

  I finished my account and fell silent. Toccata peered at me carefully, but when she next spoke it wasn’t about Logan.

  ‘Was that word for word?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You must have a very good memory, Worthing.’

  ‘Second prize in the Swansea Town Memory Bee. Six hundred and forty-eight random words memorised after only two readings.’

  ‘Did Logan know about this?’

  ‘I think it’s why he employed me.’

  Toccata and Jonesy looked at one another again. There was something going on, something I wasn’t aware of. Mind you, I could have guessed that from all the way back in Cardiff.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut as Logan asked?’

  ‘Because I’d sworn to uphold the law.’

  ‘No, you hadn’t: you’d sworn to uphold the sanctity of the sleepstate and ensure the most favourable outcome is enjoyed by the majority.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

  ‘Not the same thing at all. What if Logan was on to something bigger? Something so big and so righteous and so important that your death would have simply been side-issue collateral, a necessary yet barely regrettable loss on the road to the most favourable outcome?’