Beth looked around a little conspiratorially, and then yanked the collar of her hoodie out past her bra-strap. The fat, jagged wound in her shoulder was sealed over with new greyish skin. An ugly, rippling seam of tar ran through it like a scar.
Her father stared for a moment, swallowed hard, and then nodded.
Get used to it, Beth thought. Daddy’s little girl has the city in her skin. She glanced at the book in her father’s lap. The Iron Condor Mystery. She barked an abrupt laugh. ‘You brought that with you?’
He cradled it defensively. ‘It was your mother’s favourite.’
Beth sighed. ‘Yeah, I know it was, Dad.’
He drew himself up, seeming to steel himself. Then he held the book out to Beth. ‘I’m done with it.’
Beth looked at him, startled.
‘You should read it some time,’ he said.
Beth turned the pages, feeling the paper flake, ready to disintegrate with years of constant reading. She didn’t know what to say.
He held his arms out to her then, and she embraced him, pulling herself tight into his chest. Uncertain fingertips pattered over her neck for a moment, feeling the pavement-texture of her skin. Then his hug engulfed her. ‘Beth, I know I haven’t- I want to make it up to you- I mean, I know I owe you so much-’
He fell into a surprised silence as Beth reached back and put a hand over his mouth.
Deals are sacred. She thought of the symmetrical oil-soaked men. Our equations always balance. Fil’s body, lying in the rubble, his own spear bleeding him dry.
You saved my life twice. By my reckoning that means I owe you.
She’d already lost too much to the brutal mathematical economy of debt. ‘It’s not about owing, Dad. This can’t be about owing.’ She pulled back to look him in the face. ‘Let’s just try again.’
The old drunk in the corner started to make high-pitched yipping noises and they let each other go. Beth sniffed back what felt like a gallon of mucus and looked at the book her father had given her. A sheet of crisply folded white paper was set inside the back cover.
‘What’s this?’
He looked embarrassed. ‘I thought you might want to know a bit more about him.’
‘About who?’
He frowned as though it were obvious. ‘The boy you were following around.’
A shiver, like a pricking of insect feet, ran down Beth’s back. With numb fingers, she unfolded the sheet. It was a printout of a page from the Evening Standard ’s online archive. The photo showed a haggard-looking woman and man appealing to the camera with their eyes. The headline read:
Hunt For Williams Baby Called Off
Beth started to read the text to herself.
Two hundred and eighty-one days after eight-month-old Michael Williams disappeared from the home of his parents, police have admitted the active search has been wound down.
Detective Inspector Ian North, leading the case, said, ‘We are not closing the book on the search for baby Michael, but there has been no new evidence in nine months. Our hotline of course remains open…’
Beth stopped reading and her eyes returned to the photograph. The caption read: Genevieve and Stephen Williams in public appeal for news of missing son.
‘I recognised him when you carried his body out,’ her dad was saying. ‘It’s weird — I only printed this out because you went missing.’
A cold weight had settled in Beth’s gut. She rummaged frantically in her pocket for the sketch of Fil, unfolded it and held it next to the printout: the portrait of the prince beside the photo of the distraught parents.
Beth’s dad’s face crinkled in sympathy. ‘The poor kid looks just like his father- Beth, what’s wrong?’
Beth had sat down hard, missing the orange plastic chair and bruising her coccyx on the concrete floor. She wanted to protest; he was wrong — her own eyes were wrong. Filius Viae couldn’t be these people’s son; it was a mistake — he was the Son of the Streets, the son of Mater Viae. He had powers. He could outrun a Railwraith, tear scaffolding in two, scale the side of a skyscraper…
All things you can do too, since your dip in the synod’s pool, a quiet voice inside reminded her.
Questions and doubts bloomed in her mind, but withered again as logic provided the obvious answers. Questions like, Why did Reach try to kill Fil with a Railwraith anyway? Three quick steps carried her to the broom cupboard in the far wall. She reached in and jerked the railing-spear free from where she’d hidden it amongst the pile of plastic sheets. She crashed through the door to the fire-escape and whirled up the stairs, her dad huffing despairingly behind her.
‘Where are you going? Please, don’t go, Beth, not again. I’ve made up your room — I-’
Beth burst onto a fourth-floor corridor. Bleak fury sat in the pit of her stomach like an ember. She’d been lied to — and what was worse, so had Fil, lied to about everything. A rain-spattered window-pane revealed what she was looking for: a slim black telephone wire stretching out from the hospital’s outer wall. The window was one of those that only pivot open about six inches, but Beth had been remade; she undulated, and slid her way out with ease onto the sill, her own oily sweat smoothing her passage.
Her dad stood inside, hands pressed to the glass, eyes wide. She could see him mouthing, ‘ Come home.’
Beth hesitated, then she called back, ‘I will, I promise, but there’s something I have to do first.’ She sidled crabwise and settled easily as a pigeon on the insulated phone wire. After the rain, the moon was bright. A sharp wind cut the air, but Beth wasn’t cold.
‘Beth!’ Through the glass, her father sounded desperate. ‘I’ll see you soon, Dad,’ she promised, and then raced away, along the cable, into the night.
CHAPTER 55
Gutterglass swept the pathways between the rubbish dunes with her stiff-bristle broom, whistling as she went. Her mopstring hair was tied back and her binbag skirts blew in the breeze. She considered it a criminal waste of time to leave spring-cleaning until spring.
The dump was beautiful on clear winter mornings like this. Its scrap-metal peaks shone in the still-rising sun and chunks of broken glass twinkled like embedded jewels. The fragrance of rotblossom and forget-me-all-too-soon lingered headily in her nostrils. Somewhere in the distance garbage trucks groaned as they spilled further trash tributes, adding to the foundations of Gutterglass’ city.
A silhouette high on a ridge caught her eye, a scrawny figure with an iron railing over one shoulder. The pose was so familiar that Glas faltered, the tangled worms in her heart missing a beat.
Then she smiled. ‘I was hoping you’d come,’ she called.
The figure didn’t answer, but it drew back its free hand and threw. A dark speck drifted through the air. Glas stretched out her hand and the thing came to rest, docile as a pigeon, in her palm: an aeroplane, folded carefully from a photocopied sheet of newspaper.
As the skinny figure stalked down the hill towards her, Gutterglass unfolded the page and began to read.
‘The boy who thought his name was Filius Viae,’ Beth said quietly, ‘was no child of a Goddess.’ She was approaching Gutterglass carefully, a hunter’s walk.
The rubbish-sculpted woman gave no sign that she’d heard.
‘When you know that, you have to ask: who in all London would want to convince him that he was?’ She advanced until the spear was a moth’s-wing’s thickness from Gutterglass’ cardboard throat. Her voice was a dead monotone. ‘Maybe the same person who’d want to plant a rumour that that Goddess was coming back? Maybe someone who’d been on the scrapheap ever since her mistress toddled off, but who now was getting listened to again? Someone who was back in charge? Tell me, Glas, is it nice to be grand again?’
Gutterglass studied the article. Eventually the broken eggshells looked up. ‘Michael was his name, was it?’ she said. ‘Hmm. I never knew that.’ She knocked the spear aside with a deft flick of her broom handle. ‘Enough of the drama, Miss Bradley,’ she said briskly. She extended a hand in invitation. ‘Walk with me?’
