quaite impossible. This brooch came from the attic at mey country house — ai found it thereyah meyself. Mey mother believes that it may once have belonged to her own great-great-grandmother Ethel, you know… ’ But he could see that there was to be no bluffing and blustering his way out of this one. He could insist that it wasn’t a fake until he was blue in the face but that seemed quite pointless considering the jeweller knew full well that it was not a genuine antique.
‘I shall call for the police,’ the man said, ‘and report you for trying to defraud me.’
‘Ah, come on now,’ Lex said pleadingly, switching back to his ordinary voice. ‘It’s a fair cop — you haven’t given me any money so there’s no harm done. I promise I won’t ever do it again; cross my heart.’
But all of Lex’s feigned sincerity and reasonableness did nothing and soon he was racing from the town as fast as his legs would carry him — his top hat falling abandoned in the dust and the tails of his ridiculous frock coat flapping out behind him as he ran towards the church where he was to have his most fateful meeting with Lady Luck herself.
Aah — those were simpler days before Lex became so ambitious. Fobbing off fake brooches couldn’t possibly compare to the skills he had trained himself in since coming to the Wither City. Everyone knew that he spent hours and hours at a time in his rooms studying and this was true — in a manner of speaking. But he had not been studying the law. With his practically photographic memory, he only needed to flick through the textbooks to get a grasp of the basics anyway. The majority of the time spent in his room had been practising on the ropes.
No one ever came into Lex’s room for he insisted on doing all the cleaning himself, much to the landlady’s pleased surprise. But, if anyone had gone in, they would have seen a most strange arrangement of ropes hanging from the ceiling. They were of different thicknesses and different materials and had several different types of safety harness attached to them. Lex spent hours and hours and hours practising on what he called the Climbing Frame. If you’re going to fall, better to do so when you’re only hanging four feet above the floor over a carefully-positioned mattress. For whilst it was true that Lex may have been lucky, he was also careful, and he certainly had no intention of lowering himself through any holes in great, cavernous ceilings before he’d practised climbing, spinning, lowering and twisting on his own precisely-constructed spider web. He wasn’t doing anything for real until he could climb those ropes like a monkey. That sort of preparation was — he felt — what truly separated the men from the boys in this game. But he was vigilant that no one should ever suspect what really went on in his bedroom, to which end he had put about the story that he was a sap who studied all the time.
There had been one occasion, though, when he had been dangling from the middle of the ceiling in one of his safety harnesses when the landlady had started hammering on his door saying that she absolutely must speak to him about some triviality or other.
‘Can’t it wait, Mrs Humphrey?’ Lex called, praying that she wouldn’t notice that his voice was coming from nearer the ceiling than the floor.
‘I’m afraid not, dear. I’ve got to talk to you about the new locks.’
Lex sighed. There was no use arguing with her. She wouldn’t go away until he opened the door. He made to lower himself down to the ground on the rope. And that was when he found out that it wouldn’t move an inch and, no matter how he tugged, he didn’t seem to be able to go up or down. He was stuck — dangling there ridiculously like a fly caught in a web.
‘Are you all right in there, dear?’ the landlady called after a moment, pushing down on the door handle, which thankfully was securely locked.
‘Yes! Just a minute!’ Lex called, desperately unbuckling himself from the harness before doing a sort of half- leap through the air to catch the nearby rope and slither down to the floor by hand, landing lightly on the mattress.
He was a little out of breath by the time he opened the door, which instantly made Mrs Humphrey suspicious.
‘What have you been doing in there?’ she said, trying to see over his shoulder.
But Lex stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. ‘I was… ’ He quickly racked his brain for an excuse, then, once he’d found it, willed the colour to rush to his cheeks in a blush. ‘Exercising,’ he said. ‘Weight lifting, actually. There’s… this girl… and… ’ He trailed off pathetically and looked morose.
Mrs Humphrey eyed his scrawny frame and instantly looked understanding and sympathetic, fully believing that Lex had been in there bodybuilding to impress some girl.
‘There’re more important things than muscles, dear,’ she said kindly.
Of course, the truth of it was that Lex didn’t actually have any interest whatsoever in having a neck that was thicker than his head. He may have been slender, but all that time going up and down the ropes like a monkey had given him a wiry strength as well as a certain agility. But he didn’t mind Mrs Humphrey’s comments. In fact he liked it when people underestimated him. It was only ever a help and never a hindrance to have people think that he was less than what he truly was.
In actual fact, Lex had very few of the vices that most teenage boys had. He stayed well away from drink and drugs and, indeed, was rather horrified just at the very thought of using them. For Lex liked to be sharp and quick — sharper and quicker than everyone else where possible — and intentionally dimming his mind and his wits was not something he was ever likely to do. Nor had he ever had much time for girls. They were something nice to look at when Heetha’s sun was out and they were sunbathing, not wearing an awful lot; but he certainly didn’t want to date. Growing up without a mother and no women in the house, the fairer sex was a bit of an enigma to Lex. He had the feeling that a girlfriend would probably spend most of her time complaining at him, whining at him, demanding that he spend all his free time with her, asking if she looked good in this dress or that dress when the truth was that he simply didn’t care… But Mrs Humphrey wasn’t to know all that, so when Lex told her he was working out to impress some girl, she believed him completely.
Lex’s past experiences had taught him very well about playing a part and playing it faultlessly, even when no one was looking. He knew he hadn’t faltered the whole time he’d been working at Lucas, Jones and Schmidt. He had kept up the charade, he had worn the mask and played the role, so what had Mr Montgomery Schmidt seen in his performance that had given him away? What hairline crack in the otherwise perfect jewel had his gimlet eyes picked up that no one else had been bright enough to spot?
‘What was it?’ Lex said again.
‘Perhaps it was that time I caught you scamming the clients that tipped me off,’ the lawyer said. ‘Honest students do not skim a little off the top for their own usage, Mr Trent. So tell me, have you always been this way or did you fall in with a bad crowd, or have you just been consumed with greed all your life? What is it? What made you this way?’
Lex looked him right in the eye and said, ‘My parents died when I was five.’
This was, in fact, perfectly true, but it was not what had made Lex the way he was. He had been born like this. Born for adventure and excitement and misbehaving, and he would probably have been exactly the same even if he hadn’t been orphaned at a young age. Still, no sense in admitting that to the old lawyer. Lex could tell from the expression on Schmidt’s face that he was struggling with himself, trying to work out whether Lex was even telling the truth, and if he was, whether dead parents constituted a valid excuse for theft, lies and fraud.
‘You disliked me before that thing with the clients or you wouldn’t have bothered checking on me to begin with,’ Lex went on. ‘Tell me, Mr Schmidt, what did I ever do to deserve such hostility?’
‘Did you know about Mr Lucas’s wife?’ the lawyer said with sudden sharpness. ‘You who knows everything about everything; did you know about her, Lex?’
‘Of course. She’s ill,’ Lex replied promptly.
As an actor, he knew the value of playing to an audience. And he understood the importance of knowing that audience. It was crucial. So he always took in any information that any of his audience unwittingly gave out about themselves. Mr Lucas rarely said anything about his personal life, but Lex knew from what he’d heard other people saying that Mr Lucas’s wife was in a bad way and that he was increasingly withdrawing from the time-consuming responsibilities of the law firm to care for her himself.
‘Do you know what illness? Do you care?’ Mr Schmidt asked, in that same unnaturally calm voice.
Lex shrugged. What did it matter? All old people became ill, sooner or later. It was the natural way of things ‘She has the soulless wake.’
The caustic remark that Lex had been preparing died in his throat. The soulless wake. Old people became ill and died. It was nature; it was inevitable; it was something that everyone accepted. Sooner or later, everyone died. No arguments there. But to die before death.. that was surely cheating, wasn’t it? The soulless wake was no
