Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

A mottling of gasps. Self-congratulatory murmurs from the men who had ‘caught’ Clent at the doorway.

‘Hail and hellweather!’ Some of Clent’s colour had returned to his face. ‘My good and gracious lord mayor, do you imagine that if I had intended to kidnap that child I would have done so in such a preposterous way? There are a thousand easier ways to manage the business, without hazarding my own safety and good name in this fashion.’

‘Oh yes?’ The mayor folded his arms, his face a picture of incredulity. ‘Such as…?’

‘Well…’ Clent spread his plump fingers and frowned at them. ‘I could of course have used the clock trick on her, instead of your good self, and arranged some secret conference with her near the end of the day in another part of town. All I would need would be a well-muffled room in which she would not hear the bugle, and then I could have sent her on her way at dusk, not realizing that the first bugle had blown and that there was a gaggle of nightowls waiting outside to ambush her.

‘Or I could have drugged her food or drink, put her in a box and hoisted her up into one of the taller trees, high enough that the Jinglers would not be looking for hiders there, and my accomplices could claim her come night.

‘Or… well, quite simply, my good sir, I could have tried to negotiate a deal with the Locksmiths. A gamble, of course – but if it worked then all other perils would disappear.’

Clent shrugged very slightly as the mayor stared at him, his fist twitching.

‘Of course, these are merely the plans that instantaneously occurred to my mind,’ he continued. ‘There are many other ways I could have contrived it. Miss Marlebourne had given me her trust, and under those circumstances kidnapping her without trace would have been childishly easy. Coming up with a plan that we could sabotage to catch these foxes with their noses in the coop – that was the hard part.’

The mayor was still bristling, but thoughtfulness was doing battle with rage behind his eyes, and clearly Clent’s words had not been lost on him.

‘So what do you claim went wrong?’ he asked in a biting but more moderate tone.

‘Sir Feldroll, I believe, has the matter in a nutshell,’ Clent responded. ‘There was a worm in the peach, a thistle amongst the good grain, a weasel in the dovecote. In short, we were betrayed.’

‘A fly in the ointment?’ suggested the mayor, his eyes resting on Mosca with cold, hard meaning. Mosca flushed as she became aware that she was now the focus of nearly every gaze in the room.

‘Don’t be lookin’ at me that way! I never done it!’ Once again she had the feeling that she was standing in her own private patch of ice. Now she felt as if the ice beneath her feet was cracking, threatening to drop her into something infinitely worse.

‘She was the only nightling involved in this plan.’ The mayor’s tones were steely, and Mosca felt hot pins and needles flood her skin and stomach. ‘She was the one that started stories of this kidnap in the first place and brought all of this to pass. She could easily tip off her nightling accomplices when the need arose.’

Mosca could hardly breathe. Her badge was a leaden weight against her chest.

‘With the greatest of respect,’ Sir Feldroll broke in politely, ‘that makes absolutely no sense at all.’

‘What?’ The mayor turned on him, and once again drew himself up into a quivering tower of annoyance.

‘The girl certainly heard Mr Clent’s plan with the rest of us yesterday afternoon, but unlike most of us,’ Sir Feldroll went on, ‘she never left the house to fetch weapons. I have checked with the servants – she was here all the time. And overnight she was locked up with the rest of us. She did not have a chance to tip off anyone. The one thing she did have the chance to do though, is run away, while we were all blundering around in the early morn, and if she was guilty I cannot see a reason why she would not have done so.’

Bless your twitchy little features, Sir Feldroll, thought Mosca. You’re not as stupid as you look.

‘Sir Feldroll,’ simmered the mayor, ‘use your eyes. We are seeking a betrayer in our midst. Look at her.’

‘I am not vouching for the girl’s good character,’ answered Sir Feldroll, with the measured tones of one working hard to keep his own temper. ‘I very much doubt she has any. I am just saying that I do not think she can walk through walls.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ the mayor declared, in tones as humorous as a gibbet. ‘Because I intend to surround her with the thickest, tallest, coldest walls we have.’

Mosca had two sorts of flying dream. The best ones were flying-as-a-fly dreams, full of weaving and soaring and walking on ceilings, her wing-whirr deafening as a drum roll. The others were mote-on-the-wind dreams, where a fickle breeze swept her up and bore her hither and thither, in spite of all her attempts to swim back down to earth. Such nightmares left her sick with vertigo, rage and helplessness.

The blur of her departure from the mayor’s house was very much like the second sort of dream. For one thing her feet did not touch the ground, and no amount of kicking and flailing served to give her a foothold. The half-dozen hands gripping her arms and shoulders might as well have been iron. She had had no choice but to leave Saracen in Clent’s care, so fearful was she that he would fall foul of someone’s pistol if he tried to protect her.

The market girls setting up their stalls gawped as Mosca passed, but when their eyes settled on her badge their brows smoothed. Ah, that explains it. She wanted to spit in their bland, doughy faces. She wanted to pull loose for a second, long enough to frighten them. And she hated the tears that turned them into dark pillars of mist and reduced the courtyard green to a fuzzy gleam.

Unfair, unfair, unfair. They’d done for her; this rotten town had done for her; Skellow, who should have been dragged off in irons, had done for her after all.

‘Where do we take her? The Pyepowder Court? Isn’t that where they take visitors when they catch them breaking the law?’

Mosca wondered for a moment if daylight Toll even had a court to try its own citizens, or whether everyone just assumed that day crimes were only ever committed by night-folk passing through.

‘The Pyepowder Court? Are you mad?’ The voice of the mayor, a little behind Mosca. ‘This isn’t some dusty-foot vagrant, or a gypsy selling a cat as a piglet. Take her straight to the Clock Tower.’

The peculiar procession continued through the twisting streets, followed by curious gazes and a gustful of autumn leaves.

As she was carried to the Clock Tower, Mosca stopped struggling and let her feet droop limply. She was in a trap within a trap within a trap. There was nowhere to run. She let her head fall back and stared up at the china- blue autumn sky, speckled with birds, girded with the lean of buildings, striped by strands of her own loose hair. She filled her lungs with as much cold, searing air as she could, like a diver preparing, then she was pulled in through the heavy oak doors and the sky was taken away from her. This time, however, they did not take her through the side door into the Committee of the Hours building, but up a few stairs to a darkened antechamber.

‘What’s this?’ A man with a red leather patch over his eye looked up from oiling a set of branding irons. A bunch of heavy iron keys clustered at his belt. ‘One for the clink?’ His single grey eye took in Mosca in one guillotine flash.

‘Yes – for a conspiracy of the darkest dye.’ The mayor strode to the front, and the one-eyed man dropped a hasty bow. ‘The treacherous kidnapping of a young woman of birth and means. The kindest and most sweet- tempered girl in the whole…’ The mayor’s voice trembled and trailed off.

‘You don’t mean…?’ The single slate-coloured eye flashed back to Mosca’s face, and the seamed face in which it was set puckered with disbelief and outrage. ‘Not Miss Beamabeth?’ Skin tingling, Mosca realized that she was about to become the most hated person in Toll.

The mayor nodded, his face ashen. ‘I want this girl girded about with iron and stone,’ he said grimly. ‘And watch her – she’s a housefly, with a housefly’s swift and sneaking ways.’

The Keeper nodded, giving Mosca a thunderous look. ‘I’ll have her shackled and tossed in the Grovels, sir.’

‘My lord mayor!’ Terror restored Mosca’s powers of speech. ‘I’m no enemy to you or your daughter! Let me go, an’ I’ll find her for you, I swear it on Palpitattle’s wings!’ It was the worst oath she could have made; she sensed it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Everyone looked at her and shuddered, as though she had sprouted antennae, or cleaned her hands with a long, insectile tongue.