Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

and warning Miss Marlebourne was your idea?’

‘Yeah.’ Mosca swallowed hard. ‘But that was b’fore I met ’er.’

Clent stared at her. ‘Mosca, whenever I think I have the measure of your malice I chance upon some hidden pocket of ill temper I had not suspected. In this case it is frankly incomprehensible. If you must choose a target for your bile, why choose her? A girl who already has unseen enemies, who has treated you with nothing but kindness and civility, who is making the best of hard times. Who even let you share in her shrinking stock of elderberry wine.’

‘Yeah, she did,’ Mosca answered through her teeth. ‘And, Mr Clent? If I hear any more ’bout how wonderful she is, that elderberry wine’ll be back to see the light of day. I just want to be sure that once we’ve got that reward we leap out of Toll like fleas off a hot rock and don’t hang about investigatin’.’

Despite herself, Mosca’s voice faltered a little as she looked around the castle courtyard, which seemed to have become larger now that the shadows were longer. The busy market had been stripped away, leaving an ominous space where rutted grass was the only hint of barrows, stalls and hobnailed boots.

The disquieting atmosphere stung a new haste into the steps of Mosca and Clent, and they first strode, then jogged back to the main streets of Toll, only to find them largely empty.

Mosca remembered the words of the ‘Raspberry’.

There will be another bugle call at sunset – this will be a signal that you have no more than a quarter of an hour to get back to your appointed residence. You must – must – make sure that you do so.

It had been ten minutes since the bugle sounded, and suddenly these words did not seem quite so comical any more.

‘Mr Clent…’

‘I know, madam, I know…’ Clent’s voice had the levelness of ice-touched panic.

Door after barred door. Shuttered window after shuttered window. Wooden ladders pulled up on to boardwalks. Wells covered. Slate roofs dulling from jackdaw blue to rook black as the sun melted into the horizon…

In the silence the sudden bang of a shutter rang like a gunshot. Both Mosca and Clent reflexively broke into a run towards the sound. Turning the corner they found a small inn whose door was still ajar. Outside it a plump and perspiring woman was struggling to close a pair of stiff and rusty shutters, wide-eyed as a rabbit with a fox upwind.

‘Help me!’ she squeaked when she saw them, and they threw their weight against the shutters and forced them closed. Then the woman jerked upright and raised a hand for silence.

A few streets away chimed a faint, metallic sound. A rattling, musical jingle-jangle.

‘In!’ she snapped huskily, seizing Mosca’s collar and Clent’s arm. ‘What you waiting for? In! In!’

Her terror was contagious, and in an instant they gave up all thought of the inn where they had booked rooms. Instead, they let themselves be bundled in through the open door, which was immediately slammed to behind them. Looking around, Mosca could see that quite a mob had been hovering by the door waiting to throw the latches to. The same suppressed terror was obvious in every face, in the tone of the whispered exchanges.

‘It’s done? We’re closed in? We’re tight?’

‘’Tis done. But that was closer than skin. Listen – here they come!’

Everyone in the tiny, cramped room hushed, and again Mosca heard the frosted metallic jingle, now much closer, gliding down the street like a sleigh bell. Then there were more ringing jingles, as if a whole company of sleighs had found a way to float down the snowless cobbles. All along the street an orchestra of strange noises began to call and answer one another. Grinding thuds. Fat clicks and thin clicks. Skreeks of metal on metal. Whumps and whams.

In spite of her terror, or perhaps because of it, Mosca knelt and put her eye to the inn’s keyhole. She saw only a blurred impression of twilit cobbles, of a dark figure dragging something across the front of the house opposite… and then suddenly there was a slamming noise, and something impenetrably black cut out her view of the street.

The strange cacophony seemed to move on further up the street, and then to the next street. Still the company in the cramped little inn remained hushed. At last another set of sounds became audible, and this time Mosca recognized them instantly.

The rhythmic clash of iron shoes on stone. The echoing rattle of wheels on cobbles. The huffing of horsebreath. Somehow in this teeter-top town of ups and downs, someone had brought a horse-drawn coach and was riding it through the crooked lanes half an hour after the signal to clear the streets.

Mosca looked at the set, tense faces around her, and asked no questions. There would be no answers here.

There was a heavy silence, and then a dull booming note, the distant sound of a bugle being blown a second time.

‘All right,’ the plump landlady said at last, ‘you can talk now if you do it quiet. No shouting, no banging, no existing. Changeover’s done. Night-time, gentlemen.’

Goodman Parsley, Soother of Painful Mornings

There were no rooms spare for Clent and Mosca, of course, but the landlady let them lie on rugs by the hearth next to her scrawny, soppy-eyed dogs. A fire was a fire, and a roof was a roof, and a rug was closer to a bed than the bracken-and-hedgehog mattresses that Mosca had known of late, so she curled up and slept with Saracen on her chest.

When she was at last woken by a young ostler politely and carefully stepping on her head in his attempts to rake out the dead coals, she found that pale daylight was painting diamond shapes across the inn’s narrow, crowded room. Whatever night had brought, it had packed it up again and taken it away.

But night would be back, and as Mosca looked at her dark wood badge she felt the same chill she had experienced in the twilit streets the night before. She had been right all along. There was something wrong in Toll, something that nobody was willing to discuss, something more than the nervousness caused by an ordinary curfew. The landlady struggling to shut up her inn had been afraid of something more terrible than a fine or a night in the cells. And why should even the mayor be so afraid of his own curfew?

Hopefully she would never need to answer these questions. Perhaps at this very moment the mayor’s men were striding back from Lower Pambrick, dragging the Romantic Facilitator. Surely that would be enough proof for the mayor? She had to hope so.

It was half past eleven when Mosca and Clent once again found themselves outside the front door of the mayor’s house. They were shown into a dingy little side parlour instead of the main reception room, and immediately Mosca detected something sour in the situation, like a mouthful of bad milk.

They were left there in unexplained silence for fifteen minutes, and then the mayor strode in and subjected them to a dull, hot glare.

‘I am surprised,’ he growled, ‘that you had the impudence to return here this morning.’

This was not a promising start to any conversation. The fact that the greeting and the glare seemed to be reserved for Mosca alone did nothing to make her feel better.

‘My lord mayor-’ began Clent.

‘Cast her off, Mr Clent,’ the mayor interrupted without ceremony. ‘Wherever you found this…’ he waved a hand at Mosca, ‘this thistle-child, throw her aside before she stings you any more. She has taken advantage of your good humour and trust, sir, and wasted the time of honest fellows in my pay. Gravelip and his companions have just returned from Lower Pambrick, having encountered no sign of this so-called Romantic Facilitator.’

‘None at all?’ Clent looked surprised, crestfallen, then speculative. ‘My lord mayor… how exactly did your men lie in wait for the villain?’

‘There was precious little chance to lie in wait, for they only reached the marketplace at nine o’clock to the very second. I believe Gravelip stood before the stocks as described in the letter, while the others hid behind it. They waited for half an hour, and saw no sign of anybody with a Fainsnow lily.’