glow. “Watch your step here,” he said, “it goes down again.”
“Can you turn on a light?” she asked. Normally she would have carried her Pelican, but she hadn’t worked a night shift in almost a year and it seemed pointless to carry the extra weight on her belt. Now she wished she had it. “I can’t see a thing.”
“The switch at the door doesn’t work. You have to pull the string,” he said. “It’s just a few steps this way. Careful, though.”
She went through the door, her hand on her metal baton. He went to the right, and she couldn’t see him, although she heard what she thought was the flashlight rattling again, and suddenly she felt scared. Then she felt him beside her, his hand brushing near her, and then she knew something was wrong, he wasn’t standing where he should have been, he was getting himself into position. She braced herself for the blow and tried to step away, but then he was behind her, reaching around her head, and she instinctively tucked her chin down. The light from his flashlight slid along the floor at her feet. “Bellocque -” she began to say, and there was a blinding flash; she covered her eyes with a forearm, stumbling away and falling backwards over something. She cried out as she struck the ground, a flare of pain shooting down into her leg.
He was standing over her, blocking the light now, his huge face in darkness, his eyes shining darkly as marble, and she pushed back along the floor, striking objects with her elbows and legs. In her mind’s eye, she saw the little backflipping man and his head popping off. He loomed down and said, “You find what you’re looking for?” and the light played over the surface of his teeth like sparks were coming from inside his mouth. She flicked the baton out in the air beside her to extend it, but before she could swing it, he had that arm tightly in his grip and he was pulling her up.
“Hey -” she shouted.
He brushed the dust off her arm. “You okay?” he said. “I told you to watch your step.”
She had the baton cocked, but she held it still. The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling was almost as bright as a headlight. She could see his face now, as friendly as it had been at his front door. “I’m fine,” she said, “I landed on something soft.”
“It has its benefits, doesn’t it?”
She blinked at him, breathing heavily, still unable to chase the feeling that she was in danger. But she wasn’t: her imagination had run away with her, and Bellocque was just standing there, his hands in his pockets. They were in the midst of the rich vein of garbage from which Bellocque had mined the main floor’s disorder. Bike wheels, boxes of equipment, reels of wire, flattened cardboard boxes, and many piles of vaguely related things, such as a pile of metal pipe and ductwork arranged into something like a tower. Her lower back was throbbing, but there was no pain in her leg. She’d been lucky.
“If you can find a man down here, I suppose he’ll be grateful to be freed from this chaos. I could probably build you a robot if you’re desperate, but maybe you’d better conduct your search first.”
“That’s fine,” she said, pushing the end of the baton against her knee to collapse it.
“I’m guessing now there’s more on your mind than a drowned mannequin.”
“You could say that.”
“Well, you have my attention. If there’s anything I can do to help, any other details from our afternoon on the lake that might help…”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think Pat Barlow wanted one of you to find that mannequin?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” he said, and he pushed his glasses up his nose. “But if she did, that means she’s mixed up in whatever else this is, right? And what the hell would one thing have to do with the other?”
“It all has to do with something the
“About what?”
“A short story.”
“That Pat wrote?”
“No. A man named Colin Eldwin.”
He breathed out dramatically. “Look, you’ve really got my head spinning now,” he said. “I’m going to leave you down here and you can open any box or drawer you want to, okay? Move things around. And when you’re satisfied that there’s nothing of interest down here, I’ll have a fresh pot of coffee done. There’s even pie if you want it.”
“I don’t need to look around, Mr. Bellocque.”
He held his palms out to her. “Nope, you stay here and do whatever it is you folks do when you’re hot on the trail of something. I want you to be able to say, when you leave here, that the most remarkable thing about my house was the pie.”
She watched his face for a moment. Not a twitch. “What kind of pie?”
“Blueberry.”
“I’ll be up in five minutes.”
She did as she was invited to do. Rickety shelves against the back wall were piled high with boxes of miscellanies: index cards in one, bits of screen rolled up in another. Taxonomies of innards: rubber washers, small motors with the wires hanging off forlornly, discarded bits of leather. Some mysterious machine with an as yet undiscovered purpose could be made from all of this, some huge, marauding, clanking thing of metal, polished to a shine and puffing smoke. A mechanical Dean Bellocque. She grimaced at the thought.
She cleared one of the shelves to look at the bare wall behind. It was concrete, as in the video sequence, but a thick coat of anti-mould paint had been applied over its surface. She touched a fingertip to it: it was dry and even cracking in places. It had been applied years ago.
The floor itself was bare, which means, strictly speaking, a carpet could have been laid down here and removed, but the state of the wall argued against such a masking and unmasking, and anyway, the shape of the room was wrong: the room in the video sequence had been long enough to permit an uninterrupted pan from one extreme to the other; this basement was made of discontinuous shapes, one small square space opening into another. There was no wall long enough, without a passage into another room, for this basement to have been used for the purposes they’d witnessed.
She stood alone under the single bright light and noted, as well, that the light in the video had been dimmer. In all, she was satisfied that this was not the site of the captivity and attack they’d seen. She was grateful for Bellocque’s suggestion that she take her time. She’d made progress, the kind that limits possibilities, but progress just the same.
Upstairs, Bellocque was bent over the reel-to-reel, pulling a belt over a couple of rollers. He’d slipped the wing of the loupe with the magnifying glass in it behind his reading glasses, and closed one eye as he used a thick finger to thread the belt into place. He looked up at her and pulled the loupe out. “Pie is ready,” he said.
“Actually, I’ll pass. I’ve got some work I’d better get back to in Port Dundas.”
“Oh, that’s a pity,” he said, and he got up from his tabletop, wiping his hands. “Do you know, you never actually told me your name.”
“Ah, yes. I’m supposed to do that, aren’t I? Hazel Micallef. Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef.”
He held out his hand and she shook it. “What did you find down there?”
“Not much, I’m afraid.”
“Well, isn’t that a good outcome for us both?”
“It is for you, Mr. Bellocque,” she said, and she offered him a smile. “Look, thanks for the coffee, but I should be on my way.”
He held a finger up in the air, his eyebrows raised. “Hold on, hold on,” he said. He rushed behind the table and snapped a couple of levers on the old tape machine.
“I should be on my way,” she heard herself say. Clear as a bell, as good as any digital recorder. She was impressed.
“Saved from obsolescence,” she said. “That’s a good trick. I don’t suppose you can do it for people?”
Dean Bellocque smiled. “There’s a difference between skill and magic.”
